Atari 2600
Mar 10th
Oh Atari 2600, you look so lovely with your wood veneer.
The Atari 2600 is one of the earliest well known consoles. It was released on October 14, 1977 in North America. At release it was known as the Atari VCS (Video Computer System) but was later changed to Atari 2600 (the 2600 came from a part number) following the release of the Atari 5200. Atari’s masterpiece of a console popularized microprocessor based hardware. The system used a cartridge system which it would read the code and compile it to display and run a game.
At launch, the console was priced at $199.99 and included two joysticks and a cartridge of the game Combat. It was at one point rebadged as the Sears Video Arcade which was sold in Sears stores and it was manufactured by Dimerco Electronics.
Atari was competing with the Fairchild Channel F, which is an earlier Pong console. During the time of the Atari 2600’s release, it started killing off other Pong consoles due to the fact that people were just getting bored of them. Since that happened, Atari only sold 250,000 consoles in 1977.
Once everyone started to realize that it was possible to play games other than Pong, programmers started learning how to push out new possibilities. Space Invaders was developed then licensed by Atari. That caused sales to more than double to 2 million units in January of 1980.
There was two versions of the console that was never to see the light of day. They were known as the Atari 2700 and 2800. The 2700 was only a wireless version of the original 2600. It had been never been released due to a design flaw. The 2800 was a nice sleeker version of it that was meant to be sold in the Japanese market. Due to the release of the Nintendo Famicom, it did not sell well at all.
The Atari 2600 has always been in the hearts of gamers. It launched the revolution in gaming technology and is still played to this day. They are known to have the longest life span than any other console to date. As time goes on, younger generations will soon have no idea what an Atari, ColecoVision, or even an Intellivision was. It’s our job to make sure that the Atari legacy lives on. We must teach the young gamers of this system. To this day, I will sit in the dark, and just play a game on my Atari. Enjoying the simplicity and beauty, that is known as the Atari 2600.
Resident Evil 5: Desperate Escape (DLC)
Mar 8th
Cost – $4.99+tax/PSN; 400 MS Points/360
This DLC begins with a collapsed Jill Valentine, recently freed from mind control, awoken by Captain Josh Stone in the area you left her at the end of Chapter 5-3. Josh and Jill work together to escape the Tricell facility under the curtain of night, pushing forward to reach Chris and Sheva and aid in the fight against Albert Wesker.
Desperate Escape was created for mainly one sole purpose: to provide fans with a challenge. Thus, this DLC features multiple boss Majini, from the Chainsaw Majini to the Red Executioner Majini. Take into mind: Desperate Escape has been built to be extraordinarily challenging, especially on the “Professional” difficulty settings, as it’s almost impossible for even the developers to clear it. Throughout this brutal challenge, you’ll go through three “chapters.”
Through chapters one and two, you fight through Majini-infested areas, fighting horde after horde, wave after wave of the Majini pests. Boss Majinis make their appearance throughout, and these chapters feel much like the rest of the game, but to a more challenging level.
Chapter 3 is much like a “Mercenaries” level. You must stay alive, fighting off hordes of Majini on the roof of the communications tower, and wait out the timer for your helicopter. As more time passes, and you kill more enemies, harder enemies will appear. This chapter lasts at least 10 minutes.
Though Desperate Escape had some very tasteful action sequences, it didn’t have that same vibe as Lost In Nightmares. Jill and Josh aren’t the most dynamic duo, and banter and one-liners are kept to a minimum. Resident Evil 5 had a nice, loyal fanbase, and if you liked everything about RE5, this is a relatively short, but sweet extension.
Movies With Mano: Law Abiding Citizen
Mar 3rd
Imagine losing everything you love. Imagine watching your wife and kid killed before your very eyes. Imagine learning that one of the two men involved in the murder is going to walk free. Would you just accept the justice system’s decision, or would you want blood?
Gary Gray returns to the director’s chair after a 4 year vacation with Law Abiding Citizen, an emotional yet action packed flick that’s guaranteed to get your blood pumping. With an amazing cast of familiar faces such as Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Leslie Bib, Bruce McGill, and Regina Hall, Law Abiding Citizen appears on the surface as an amazing flick. But the surface seems to lie when it comes to Hollywood’s expensive flicks. The question is raised in the mind of most movie goers, “Will this movie be worth my money?”
Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a brilliant planner and inventor. One night two robbers invade his Philadelphia home and brutally kill his wife and daughter, and almost kill him. The killers are caught, and Assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) is assigned the case. Nick is ordered by the DA to make a deal with one of the killers to testify against his partner for a 10 year plea bargain prison sentence. Clyde doesn’t want Nick to make the deal, but Nick says it was too late and the deal is done. The other killer got the death penalty. After 10 years, the other killer is released from prison, and he soon ends up dead. Clyde is arrested and kind of admits to Nick that he did it. Clyde is put in jail, and he warns Nick that he must fix the broken justice system that failed him and his family or else anyone connected to his case will soon die. Even from jail, Clyde’s threats become a reality, and Nick must stop Clyde before his family is next. (imdb.com)
This movie is one that could have taken a wrong turn numerous times down its production road. The biggest flaw could have easily been the acting; however, Butler and Foxx make a perfect team of good guy bad guy in this flick. Foxx’s role as the determined assistant DA is perfect, he’s smart, witty, and will do anything to protect his family. Butler’s had the practice to play a murderer, and it really shows in his execution of Shelton in this movie. The acting is near flawless, and the only complaint that comes to mind is Butler’s constant sneer.
The plot is strong. On the surface it seems shoddy, but in execution, the work is brilliant. While Kurt Wimmer’s history in the movie business is nowhere near good, there’s a possibility that his role in writing the screenplay for Law Abiding Citizen may turn his career around. The characters were in depth and developed perfectly throughout the course of the movie, the action was tight and the story moved at a speed that kept the audience interested. This is one of those movies with a target audience of men who don’t like depth, and while the story lacked depth, it was thoroughly enjoyable.
Law Abiding Citizen is a perfect example of the modern day action flick. Filled with plenty of blood, gore, and explosions, the movie really hits its target audience. Foxx and Butler’s work together was perfect, and the script was smooth. Regina Hall, Bruce McGill, and Leslie Bibb fill their supporting roles impressively, and aided greatly in this movie’s outcome. Unfortunately, no movie’s perfect. The cinematography is really complicated at moments, and some actions performed throughout the movie are simply unbelievable. This movie really makes for mindless entertainment.
4.5/5
Global PlayStation 3 Glitch [UPDATED]
Mar 1st
PS3 Glitch Hits “Fatty” PS3 Worldwide: What Do We Know?
Sony’s PlayStation 3 appears to be in the throes of an inadvertent global gaming lock-down, suffering from an unidentified glitch that prevents gamers from playing specific games whether online or offline. The issue appears to be related to the month change between February and March, and occurs whether you’re connected to the Internet or not. The company isn’t responding to press emails at this time or detailing what the problem is, only that it’s working on an “issue” and attempting “to restore service to all.”
Are you affected? Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
-This glitch seems to only affect “fat” PS3s. No reports of a slim-line PS3 with a glitch have been reported.
-It really is GLOBAL, affecting Japan, Europe, and North America.
-This glitch prevents you from conencting to the PlayStation Network.
-Only games prevented from starting are trophy-enabled ones. Older PS3 games without trophies should work fine.
-The error codes vary from game to game, but all appear to be trophy related.
-This glitch occurs initially when powering on your PS3. This does not matter whether you are connected to the Internet or not.
-Manually resetting your PS3s time and date will not resolve the issue.
-Some report re-seating the internal battery will resolve this problem. These claims are NOT verified, but even if they were, I wouldn’t attempt this even with a no-fault insurance policy. Aside from voiding your warranty, this would require full disassembly of you PS3 system and meddling with the core components.
As of 9:55 PST, according to Sony’s Twitter page, this glitch should be fixed by 1 PM EST March 2nd, 2010:
“@JeffRubenstein: Summary: PS3 slim is good to go, older models should be fine within 24 hrs. Leave em off until then.”
[UPDATE]
It seems that as of 00:00 GMT, all PS3s seemed to have fixed themselves. Since then, I’ve booted mine and have had no problems throughout use. It seems this “nightmare” to some has ended, and it was just a small, technical glitch by Sony. But no hatin’, we’re all human, we all make mistakes. Everything’s back up and running: PSN is good, Netflix, trophy-enabled games… all good. So relax, release your paranoia, and feel free to power up and play! Kick back, and turn on your PS3!
Resident Evil 5: Lost In Nightmares (DLC)
Feb 28th
Cost – $4.99+tax/PSN; 400 MS Points/360
You may have enjoyed Resident Evil 5, but chances are you’ve moved on by now to newer titles. Don’t rely on this content to draw you back in. But for die-hard RE fans, the game play provided by Lost In Nightmares is great for its price. It had a bit of suspense too, something many RE titles have been lacking the last few years.
Players will take control of BSAA agents Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as they enter the Spencer Estate sometime in 2005, in search of the founder of the Umbrella Corporation, Ozwell E. Spencer. This mansion highly resembles the mansion of the Arklay mountains from the first RE game. Players will work through the mansion to reach Ozwell E. Spencer just moments after he is murdered by Albert Wesker. It really captures the original essence of the Resident Evil franchise. The Moonlight Sonata will make an appearance, as well as some familiar puzzles.
This DLC will have you tensed-up about moving forward, it’s great in quality, and the experience from it is amazing as well. Pretty short in length, but great at its low cost of five dollars.
Games Inbound – March 2010
Feb 26th
Here are the games that you should keep an eye out for this March.
This will be a new monthly thing.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 – Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Dragon Age Origins Awakening – Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360 and PS3
God of War III – PS3
Just Cause 2 – Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Metro 2033 – Xbox 360 and PC
Red Steel 2 – Wii
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition – Xbox 360 and PS3
Resonance of Fate – Xbox 360 and PS3
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey – Nintendo DS
Yakuza 3 – PS3
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Feb 25th
“See ya…on the other side…of the star ocean.”
Xbox 360, Playstation 3
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the fourth and latest installment to this ever-growing space exploration series. Going against the trend that JRPGs have set in over time, Star Ocean uses its famous real time battle system, and after a decade of work on the title, it has been perfected. Although TLH is the newest publication it takes us back to the series’ origin, S.D. 10, where Earth stands on the brink of destruction after World War III. The protagonists, Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, take off on a journey across the universe for the Space Reconnaissance Force to find a new home for humanity. These two young heroes are humanity’s last hope.
In the year 2064, World War III had broken out on Earth, and weapons of mass destruction were used without hesitation, razing the planet. Critical situations began to occur, and both factions of WWIII signed a ceasefire, but it was too late; most of the Earth’s population had been killed, and the land was deteriorating at an extraordinaryily alarming rate. Any surviving population were forced to live in underground cities, and countries formed together to create the Greater United Nations. The Universal Science and Technology Administration was formed by the G.U.N. with one sole mission: to find humanity a new home in the outer reaches of space. Humans soon discover travel at warp-speed, starting the space date, S.D., calendar. Space date 10 comes along, and you have been selected as humanity’s first venture into the outer reaches of space. Will you be the one who saves humanity? Or will you parish in your attempts to find a planet suitable for human life, surrounded by monstrosities unimaginable, dooming humans to extinction?
Star Ocean: TLH comes with a whole new pack of features tagging along with it’s original. The first and foremost new features are those in the battle system. One of the most useful new technigues is the Blindside, which can be used to slip behind enemies, confusing the enemy as you attack it from behind with automatic criticals. There is also a new system called the “Battle Exalted Action Type System,” refered to in game as the “BEAT System.” There are three different choices for each character’s BEAT settings. BEAT.S, an offensive setting; BEAT.B, a defensive setting; and BEAT.N, a neutral setting which combines the stat enhancements of other BEAT settings. The “Fury” Gauge from the previous installment has been removed, and replaced with a “Rush” Gauge. The Rush Gauge build up as you land attacks and take damage, and can be released to attack faster, with more power, and without being interrupted by enemy attacks. On a sad note, MP death has been removed from this game. Yeah, now it’s harder for them to kill you! But it’s also harder for you to kill them. One final battle feature is the utilization of characters. Not only can you use four instead of three characters, like in Till The End Of Time, but death finally makes sense in this JRPG! After all four characters die in battle, you may select one reserve member to take their place in battle until everyone’s been knocked out. Not only that, but you can change party members during battle too, which can be extremely helpful.
The other big feature to TLH is your ship, the SRF-003 Calnus. With your ship, you can travel to previously visited planets to recollect items and complete mini-quests, meet with your other party members in the conference room for Item Creation, and has a quarters in which, with the right character pairings, can trigger special Private Actions, a feature from previous Star Ocean titles.
The graphics, like any other modern Square-Enix game, are near breath-taking. The quality really brings out the interstellar feel of the game, and makes it that much more interesting to play.
The audio quality itself is very good. Unfortunately, the voice acting did not meet the bar set by the former titles. The facial movements of the characters is downright terrible to a point to where it’ll make you feel like you’re playing a modern Sonic The Hedgehog game. Music, on the other hand, is fantastic. The soundtrack lives up to Sakuraba’s name.The composition is precise, and it fits most situations perfectly.
Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. Everybody knows how RPGs love their cutscenes, and TLH is no exception. Not only are there many of these out-of-game videos, but they are extremely lengthy. Some reach a point that your controller will hibernate and force the video to pause. There is an upside though: during any of these monstrous progressions, you can just press “Start” on your controller and select “Skip Cutscene,” which will promptly end the video. In return you receive a summary, and (if followed by a battle) will receive a warning before you’re thrown into a fight for you life. This feature is extremely useful for those with little to no attention span, or for those that just don’t have the time to waste on a drawn out sequence of events.
Unfortanately, the five people who actually enjoyed the Battle Arena from Till the End of Time will be disappointed in hearing the multiplayer aspect has been removed from this installment.
Throughout this massive three-disc game, no errors were experienced. The cutscenes are lengthy to a point to where your controller may shut off though, and the cutscene will pause. Don’t mistake it for a frozen game as many others have done.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a pretty lengthy game, with a story of about 40-50 hours if you watch all the cutscenes and level as you should. It’s always a nice, fun challenge to run through again on a harder difficulty, with alright re-playability. It’s full of a bunch of little twists that will catch you off guard, but nothing less is expected of Tri-Ace and Square-Enix. With that, this game gets a solid
Heavy Rain
Feb 24th
How far would you go to save the one you love?
Playstation 3
Enter the world of this new psychological thriller known as Heavy Rain. The Origami Killer is out there, taking the lives of young boys. How far will you go to stop a killer? (This review contains a few spoilers that occur in the beginning of the game).
Heavy Rain starts off with Ethan Mars, happily married, living with his wife and two children. Life seems as though it can’t get any better than it already is. That is until, an unfortunate event unfolds at the local mall. Your son Jason starts to wander off in the mall. Ethan keeps following him but eventually starts to lose him. Jason ends up crossing the street, and just when his father sees him, he decides to run back across. You can probably guess what is going to happen (unless you haven’t already seen the mall gameplay video). Let’s fast forward. You spend time with Shaun, the brother of Jason, at the local park. Suddenly you start to black out, wake up in the middle of the street, and have no idea where Shaun is. Thus, our story begins. You take the role of four different characters throughout the game. Constantly switching between them, you will learn that all of their stories intertwine with one another. You will play as Ethan Mars (Architect), Madison Paige (Photographer), Norman Jayden (FBI Profiler), and Scott Shelby (Private Investigator). This is not your typical game, during action sequences you will have to be quick with your fingers because Heavy Rain is heavily focused around QTE (Quick Time Events). Buttons will constantly appear on the screen, and you must hit them before time runs out. Messing these up could possibly alter what happens to your character, thus altering the entire game itself. Any and all of the four characters can die, and if that happens the game will continue on without them. There are multiple endings and many different choices to choose throughout your gaming experience. Some choices you will NOT want to make. Heavy Rain will make you so attached to the character that you may not want to make a tough decision. I found myself pausing the game at some instances where I had no idea which option I should pick.
Heavy Rain has an amazing graphics engine to it. Everything has such incredible detail that you may find yourself just walking around looking at all the little things and interacting with them. The world you’re in is so beautiful. I personally would have loved to have had a first person button just so I could look around at the little things better. I have to say that I think Heavy Rain has the most outstanding graphics to date.
The four main characters transfer their emotions to you so well that you may feel fully immersed. The facial animations match the dialog so well that you may not even realize you’re playing a video game. At times you may not notice the music playing, but it fits so well in most of the situations. The ambiance, voice acting, and music is all spot on. I have seen no issues at all.
This game has absolutely NO prerendered cutscenes. Everything you see is what you get, it is all ingame. If they were to have prerendered cutscenes, the only difference that we would see is some anti-aliasing, and a solid framerate.
I have only encountered one bug in this game. Sometimes when I was doing some crime scene investigating, my game froze right after Norman finished talking. I could hear the ambiance still, but the screen was frozen and I couldn’t use my controller to do anything. It has a constant autosave so if this happens to you, then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. This bug doesn’t bother me one bit because I was able to just restart my PS3 and jump right back in where I was.
Heavy Rain is roughly 8-10 hours in length, and has an amazing level of re-playability. You will probably find yourself going to play it again right after you beat it, just to see the other results for different options you choose. Combat is fun, story is amazing, and at some point you’ll find yourself yelling, “WHAT!? I DIDN’T EXPECT THAT!”
Resident Evil 5 – Lost in Nightmares
Feb 17th
Part of the new expansion of Resident Evil 5, Lost in Nightmares, has been released today on the XBL Marketplace. I’m going to assume that the content will be released late tomorrow for you PS3 users as well. You will be at Spencer’s Estate, where you team up with Jill to fight a new evil. This is just one part of the DLC that is coming out, and the full version (Resident Evil 5 GOLD) will be released March 9th, 2010. Along with the DLC today, there is also a download for two costume. One costume is a fairy tale outfit for Sheva, and the other is a Warrior outfit for Chris. Download them today!
Lost in Nightmare – 400MSP aka $4.99
Costume Pack 1 – 160MSP aka $1.99
L4D2 DLC: The Passing – Coming Late March
Feb 12th
Left4Dead 2 with be releasing new DLC called ‘The Passing’ for Xbox 360 and PC to be release late March. The Passing takes place between Dead Center and Dark Carnival. In the beginning and end of campaign, you will encounter the survivors from the first L4D (Bill, Louis, Francis, and Zoey). At the end of the campaign, they will help you fend off the horde while you try to escape.
In the campaign you will find a new weapon that looks like an LMG, as well as a golf club to bash in the heads of zombies. There will be a new kind of uncommon common infected known as ‘Fallen Survivors.’ They carry weapons, health, and all other equipment. You may see one of the running from you, but that’s when you should chase after them and kill them so you can get an item from their corpse. There will be interaction between the new and old survivors, as well as more dialog for all the characters (hurray for more stories about Ellis and his buddy Keith!)
The first Left4Dead will also be receiving DLC that explains how the original survivors get to the point where the new survivors are. Thus linking their stories together.