wow gold

Screenshot of Sims 3 Site

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:04:03 +0000

A new website has been launched.

The site provides TONS of screens of the upcoming game and lots of information for you to drool over.

There’s even a “Sign Up” section that promises to deliver “early, exclusive content” to your in-box.

Gotta love teaser websites.

Image: http://thesims3.ea.com

Tags: EA, exclusive content, maxis, screenshot, teaser website, The Sims 3

Sega Deals: Virtua Tennis 3 for $20 at Amazon

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:50:23 +0000

If you happened to miss out on the excellent Virtua Tennis 3 (for shame!), then now’s your chance to redeem yourself. Amazon has Sega’s latest in human-based virtual tennis entertainment in three different flavors: Xbox 360 ($20), PlayStation 3 ($26) and PlayStation Portable ($17).

What are you waiting for? Get cracking!

Tags: Sega Deals, Virtua Tennis

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Interview at Xboxpodcast.com!

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:36:52 +0000

The guys over at Xboxpodcast.com interviewed Squidpunch and myself about the announced merger with GamerDNA. It turned into a great conversation. I suggest you head over and give it a listen if you want to find out what some of the goals and ideas are. Wingman709 and Bjswick33 asked some good questions!

Episode 55
This week we talked about Pirates in GTA IV, Battlefield Bad Company
weapons clarification, and a few release dates in honor of the cow. Our
feature this week covers an unknown game called GTA IV and we have some
HUGE community news from one of our friends that you won't want to
miss. Then to close out this weeks show have answer a few viewer
questions. Enjoy!

Listen to the show! [mp3]

Our interview comes at the 27 minute mark if you want to jump to it.

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Arena Tournament First Qualification Round Concludes

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:24:32 +0000

After several weeks of fierce competition, the 2008 World of Warcraft Arena Tournament’s first qualification round has come to an end. Registration for the second qualification round is now open, and you can check out the
phase schedule for it. To register for the tournament or for more information, please visit our
Arena Tournament information page. Thank you to all of the participants and good luck to everyone in the second qualifier!

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Nyko Increases Products’ Prices, New Chinese Labour Laws & Rising Costs As Reasons

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 05:11:26 +0000

Our familiar Nyko (Nyko Technologies) has announced an price increase in most of Nyko’s products. New Chinese labour laws, rising costs of oil and raw materials were the main reasons behind the price increase. However we will not see a drop in quality of Nyko’s gaming peripherals as the company is dedicated on delivering quality products rather than cutting present standards.

“The cost of manufacturing continues to rise while the value of the U.S. dollar grows weaker, forcing us to adapt,” said Herschel Naghi, CEO of NYKO Technologies. “Experience has shown that maintaining quality at a higher price, instead of degrading our product in order to keep costs low, is a strategy that will prevail in the long run.”

So as to speak, gamers have to budget and making smart choices.

Image: Nyko

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RBI. Baseball returns to consoles?

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:55:27 +0000

It seems like Siliconera has been recently fixed on baseball with yesterday’s news about Major DS and today’s rumor about RBI Baseball coming onto an Xbox 360 console near you. The ESRB has the game rated with Six Degrees Games as the publisher. I haven’t heard of Six Degrees Games prior to this listing, but according to their site they are "creating the next big thing".

Perhaps, RBI Baseball is what they are referring to? Given the lack of press or announcements about RBI Baseball I’m guessing it’s going to be an Xbox Live Arcade game. Also it may only share a name with the series of RBI Baseball NES games (pictured) published by Tegen since some of those were localized versions of Namco’s Family Stadium.

On the other hand retro revivals are in season…

Images courtesy of Namco Bandai.

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Capcom sheds light on Resident Evil 5 release date

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:42:03 +0000

Remember the thrill you felt when you first heard about Resident Evil 5? At that time, GameCube owners were the only people enjoying Resident Evil 4, though the promise of a PlayStation 2 version was imminent. RE4 was critically acclaimed and with good reason; it was a reimagining of the franchise that had relied too long on annoying camera angles.

The announcement of RE5 intrigued gamers everywhere. RE4 was already a visual masterpiece of the then-current generation. What would the end-result be if Capcom were to place the same harrowing action in high-definition?

This question would be answered in March 2009.

According to GameSpot, Capcom has shed some light on RE5’s release in a business strategies presentation. During Capcom’s projections for its fiscal 2008 (which is up to March 31, 2009), the publisher said:

“(It) aims to sustain solid growth by introducing Resident Evil 5 and titles in other core franchises.”

Capcom’s sales projection for RE5 is at 2.3 million copies worldwide. The publisher also expects to sell 1.5 million units for Bionic Commando and 610,000 for Lost Planet: Colonies.

Image of Resident Evil 5 is courtesy of Capcom.

Tags: capcom, re4, re5, release_date, resident_evil, resident_evil_4, resident_evil_5

“Lupin Gear Solid” on MSPaint

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:28:27 +0000

Mischievous young crime fighter Lakupo has once again pointed out a fandom movie worth watching. Thankfully, it’s less unsettling than other fandom videos I’ve posted on this blog.

In fact, it’s a combination of Metal Gear Solid and the intro for Lupin III. Fitting combination, really.

I have a bad habit of pronouncing Lupin III’s name like his grandfathers’; that’s what comes of watching Les Exploits d’Arsene Lupin long before Lupin III.

Then again, US anime dubs have a charming habit of ignoring French accents altogether. Hence why we had to put up with “Chawd Blaze” instead of “Chaud” in the Mega Man: Battle Network anime.

Who’s right and who’s wrong in this topsy-turvy world?

Tags: Hideo Kojima, just for fun, lol, Lupin III, media, Mega Man: Battle Network, Metal Gear Solid

Dreamcast first-aid kit

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:13:40 +0000

For those times when you absolutely have to clean out your ears on the go.

[Image from IDIOT TOYS]

Tags: First-Aid

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Music Game Wars Heat Up — What Will Rock Band 2 Do?

wowgoldeu — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:00:32 +0000

Rock Band redefined the music-game genre. But how are the rock stars at Harmonix going to keep their edge when everybody else’s game has a drum set, too?

If you want to rock out with a full band, Rock Band is currently your only choice, as it features lead guitar, bass, drums and vocals. But later this year, the new Guitar Hero World Tour (above) will add those extra instruments, bringing the game up to speed with Harmonix’s innovative hit. Activision is also adding an in-game music creation tool to an upcoming version of Guitar Hero so players can compose and share their own songs.

And Konami, which originated the guitar-and-drums genre many years ago in Japan, is bringing out an American game this Christmas called Rock Revolution.

Full-band music games, with their absurdly large outfits of plastic instruments, are about to go from a novelty to a very crowded genre. Where consumers will ultimately put their money is anyone’s guess.

MTV Games’ Rock Band, developed by the team at Harmonix that originally created Guitar Hero, was released alongside Activision’s Guitar Hero III last Christmas.

While Guitar Hero III has outsold Rock Band, there’s no denying that MTV has made huge inroads, especially since it split up the $170 all-in-one package into separate parts. Month on month, Rock Band for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 rack up higher sales than Guitar Hero.

So it’s clear that Activision’s hand had been forced: No serious person doubted that the next iteration of Guitar Hero would contain drums and vocals. But with Thursday’s announcement of Guitar Hero World Tour, Activision is attempting to turn up the heat just a bit by adding an extra drum pad and raising the "cymbal" pads off the main body, to create what it says is a more realistic experience (right).

As more expensive, bulkier music peripherals hit the marketplace, the likelihood that players will want to add them to their collection goes down. Guitar Hero World Tour will not be compatible with Rock Band instruments: Activision has said time and again that only its official controllers will work with its games. So Rock Band owners would have to add another drum set to their living rooms if they wanted to play World Tour.

From what we’ve seen of Rock Revolution (above), neither Activision nor MTV has anything to fear from Konami. Rock Revolution does indeed sport the genre’s most complex drum controller (right): It’s got six pads on the top, plus a kick pedal.

Of the three drum sets, however, it’s likely to be the least enjoyable to play. The pads are tiny, the layout is confusing, and the whole thing feels cheap and toylike.

But it’s not just that. Konami’s game won’t feature vocals. The graphics are dated, and the on-screen presentation is plain. And as Guitar Hero and Rock Band move toward authenticity by using predominantly original master tracks, Rock Revolution’s song list is mostly covers.

It doesn’t much matter that Konami created Guitar Freaks and Drummania, the Japan-only arcade games that were directly responsible for Guitar Hero’s birth many years later. The company is clearly hoping to sell a cheaper game and coast off the popularity of music games — not climb to the top of the genre.

Ultimately, Harmonix’s strategy with Rock Band is to build a platform: It wants to sell users the hardware, then continually get more cash out of them for downloadable tracks and new discs. While it will release what I’ve heard insiders refer to as "version 2.0 instruments" with tweaks and new features for Rock Band 2 this holiday season, Harmonix is almost definitely not going to make any change that renders the current instruments incompatible with the new songs.

But that isn’t to say that the company doesn’t have the chance to come out on top of Activision. Although Guitar Hero World Tour will feature a music-creation mode that lets players come up with their own tracks and trade them online, who’s to say that Harmonix hasn’t been readying a similar feature for the next Rock Band?

In fact, we talked about just these kinds of possibilities when I visited Harmonix for Wired magazine last year. At the time, CEO Alex Rigopulos called music creation "really fertile territory for major areas of exploration in Rock Band 2."

"For the most part, what we focused on in (Guitar Hero and Rock Band) was the performance aspect, the reproduction aspect of a live performance," he said at the time. "It’s not a personally expressive element of music-making. That’s something we have always wanted to come back to. The moment that we gave up on it as a major feature of Rock Band 1, we didn’t want to give up on it completely.

"It’s sort of a no-brainer," he said. "Just free-form banging on the drums is something that people wanted to do."

Harmonix could also one-up Activision by letting players add vocals to their custom-made tracks, which Guitar Hero World Tour won’t allow them to do. Although Activision told Game Informer magazine that "copyright concerns" prevented it from doing this, Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins rightly pointed out this week that the same concerns would apply to the instrumental parts, so the excuse doesn’t quite wash. If Harmonix did let players create and share their own vocals, that would be significant.

Electronic Arts and MTV have yet to pull the veil off this year’s edition of Rock Band — indeed, it hasn’t even been officially announced yet. But all eyes will be on Harmonix at E3 to see if it can hold on to the business it helped create.

Images: Guitar Hero World Tour courtesy Activision, Rock Revolution courtesy Konami. Photo: Chris Kohler/Wired.com