General gaming

General gaming

The Darkness 2 Already Looks Like Digital Extremes' Best Game

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 04:45 PM PDT

Another random fact to file in the "things I never knew until I attend a video game demo": According to The Darkness 2, an especially scummy brothel will set itself up right in the middle of an abandoned mannequin factory. Because nothing gets you in the mood to pay for sexual congress than a giant bin of discarded mannequin legs!

Bizarre location aside, The Darkness 2 can be off-putting for several reasons. It uses that "graphic noir" art style, which ultimately means that there are really pronounced outlines on everyone, and the colors on the textures of character skins tend to have a bolder (but odder) look to them. Besides utilizing a cel-shaded-but-not-quite art style, the other off-putting aspect is how The Darkness 2 isn't from Starbreeze, but from Digital Extremes.

Leisure Suit Larry Makes a Comeback in HD

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 03:02 PM PDT


Leisure Suit Larry is largely regarded as a pretty poor franchise by those who have only played the more recent entries in the franchise. Years back, it had its unfunny moments but was an extremely popular point-and-click adventure series. Nowadays it might be difficult to track down its better iterations, so Replay Games is hoping to revive them all for modern platforms.

Back in June, Replay announced it was working with Larry creator Al Lowe to bring the original Leisure Suit Larry to tablets, netbooks, and mobile devices. According to EGM, it now has plans to bring remastered, HD versions to an even wider variety of platforms: Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, PC, Mac, iOS, Android, OnLive, and more.

The first game in the series, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, was originally released in 1987 and then got a remake in 1991. This took the original 16-color EGA graphics (featured in the video above, which shows off the game's first ten minutes) and upgraded them to 256 colors.

Why Quake Changed Games Forever

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 02:40 PM PDT

Feature

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Why Quake Changed Games Forever

By: Ryan Winterhalter October 10, 2011

Quake may be the most influential game of all time. Not the best game, not the most innovative, but the most influential. Without it, the industry would be a very different place today. It gave rise to many of aspects of modern gaming that we take for granted. Its developers, modders, and even the very code of the game itself are ubiquitous in the industry today. Id software's 1996 FPS gave rise to 3D gaming, client/server online play, the most prolific mod scene in history, multiplayer clans, server browsers, eSports, mouse-look as the PC control standard, Valve and dozens of other companies, and even 1UP's sister website, GameSpy. Without Quake, it's unlikely another game that featured the same suite of innovations would have come along. We would have had to wait for each of those things one at a time.

Quake came together almost by accident. There was no design document for the first half of its development, and the game that shipped was very different from what the creators first held in their minds in the beginning (if they had anything in mind). In 1994 id Software released Doom II. The company was riding high and seemed unstoppable. They announced that their next game would be Quake, a project they had started and abandoned years earlier, according to John Romero, id co-founder and the game's Tools Programmer and level designer, "When we finished our first Commander Keen series on December 14th, 1990, we immediately started working on Quake in January. It was a top-down RPG because it was like D&D." The entire game was based on a tabletop campaign played by id founders. "The character of Quake was in this group called the Silver Shadow Band. It was a very small elite group of super badass characters. [He was this] Thor-like guy, and he had this amazing hammer, and this thing called the Hellgate Cube -- which was a sentient inter-dimensional cube that would rotate around him and go do its own thing depending on what was going on." He continues "We worked on it for two weeks and it was like, 'you know what, there's no way that this thing is looking as awesome as Quake really is, so let's just stop making Quake right now. So we decided to just sort of shelve it and wait until we had really great technology to make this a reality."

New Wii Model Comes in Blue for Mario & Sonic Bundle

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 01:34 PM PDT

blue Wii Mario & Sonic Europe bundle

Not only does Europe get the new Wii model, it's getting it in a new blue color starting next month.

In addition to the standalone game, Mario & Sonic at London 2012 Olympic Games for Wii will be bundled with the new Wii announced during Gamescom. The system will come in the blue color seen on the box above, as will the accompanying Wii Remote Plus.

A new model of Wii might sound exciting, but really it's just stripping out a feature: the biggest change with this new version is its lack of GameCube support. The four controller inputs have been removed, resulting in the system being smaller. It's only been confirmed for Europe; Nintendo of America told 1UP in August it had no plans to release the new console -- or Europe's Family Edition bundle (consisting of the new system, Wii Sports, and Wii Party) -- in North America.

Modders Make Waluigi a Playable Super Smash Bros. Character

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:07 PM PDT


Super Smash Bros. Brawl has an impressively deep roster of characters, yet there are still quite a few first-party characters who are missing. More than three years after its release on Wii, modders are still hard at work on bringing new content to the game, with one recent noteworthy addition being a playable version of Waluigi.

Although he hasn't been around for as long as his bad-Mario counterpart Wario, Waluigi has been in a number of games since his Mario Tennis debut in 2000. He's playable in Mario Party 8 and Mario Kart Wii (where he's my go-to character), but he's not playable in Brawl -- though he does make an appearance. A group of modders took it upon themselves to change that, and they seem to have done an excellent job.

The video above demonstrates a variety of his moves, shows how Kirby can copy him to don the Waluigi hat, and features a fight against Pikachu. As you might guess based upon his placement on the character selection screen or his name on the HUD at one point, he replaces Pit. An alternate version can instead replace King Dedede.

Mass Effect 3 Online Multiplayer Confirmed

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 10:24 AM PDT

Mass Effect 3

Update 2: BioWare's Casey Hudson has chimed in on Twitter, adding that the multiplayer will be cooperative, not competitive. He wrote, "Yes, co-op MP missions for #ME3: they're real, and they're spectacular. Rest assured it's nothing of what you've feared. More soon..."

Update: If you're more interested in the take of a local publication, Official Xbox Magazine is also promoting an upcoming issue that features details about Mass Effect 3's online multiplayer. So after numerous indications that it's coming, it seems safe to classify this particular aspect of the game as "confirmed."

Original Story: Even before Mass Effect 3 was announced last December, there were rumors that it would feature multiplayer, or that a separate Mass Effect game was being developed which included multiplayer support. Talk of multiplayer has only continued over the past year, though BioWare has refused to confirm its presence.

1 Million iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Racked Up On Day One

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:11 AM PDT

iPhone 4S

As is often the case, the somewhat negative reaction around the Internet (this time to the iPhone 4S announcement last week) didn't have much of a correlation to sales of the device itself. Ahead of its release this Friday, October 14, pre-orders began through Apple, the individual carriers, and retail stores like Best Buy this past Friday, October 7, and they managed to set a new record.

In the first 24 hours alone, over one million phones were pre-ordered. This breaks the previous record of 600,000 held by the iPhone 4, which launched in June 2010.

Aesthetically, the 4S is identical to the iPhone 4. It's on the inside where the changes lie; the 4S sports the dual-core A5 processor seen in the iPad 2, an improved camera capable of 1080p video recording, a personal assistant called Siri, longer battery life, a dual antenna setup, and GSM and CDMA support in the same phone.

Netflix Drops Qwikster DVD Service, Game Rentals "to be Determined"

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 08:13 AM PDT

Netflix

Netflix angered many customers over the summer when it raised the price of a popular plan that provides access to online streaming and DVDs. This prompted a great deal of members to unsubscribe from Netflix altogether, and this was only made worse when the company announced last month that it was splitting off its DVD-by-mail business to a separate website with a different name: Qwikster. This would leave Netflix to be streaming-only. The company has now done a 180; with such a negative outcry over all this, it announced today it will not be splitting up the two businesses -- it will, however, be maintaining the price increase.

An email was sent out to members today informing them of the decision to not make the change. A brief blog post from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has also been published which makes the news official. It reiterates there will be no further price hikes and that killing the poorly-named Qwikster "means no change: one website, one account, one password... in other words, no Qwikster."

"Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that," said Hastings in a statement sent to the New York Times. "There is a difference between moving quickly -- which Netflix has done very well for years -- and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."

Posted by Shri Krishna

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