Moving at the speed of the internet, a video leaked to youtube with a trailer for Dead Rising 2 has prompted Capcom to confirm that there is a second Dead Rising game in the works and that it will be on the XBox 360, PS3 and the PC! You can see the aforementioned video here

This time around it looks like the protagonist is clearly not Frank West, but some similarly strong chinned man that fancies matching his hair with his sporty bike jacket. The zombie infested mall sandbox has been given a theme swap and now puts the player in some sort of luxury resort casino called Fortune City.

Dead Rising was developed and distributed by Capcom, Dead Rising 2 will still be distributed by Capcom but developed by Blue Castle Games, a developer that until now has only made a few sports games. As with all fast breaking news, details are still scarce but when it’s considered that the first Dead Rising has established a fan base and Dead Rising 2 will be multi-platform there’s little reason, other than Blue Castle Games’ repertoire, that it won’t play or sell well.

I just can’t see it. Really.

I mean, I look at Rock Band, and I look at Guitar Hero, and I can’t help but feel that Rock Band beats the other in every way. And I’m not even talking about the music each one contains.

I look at the interface of the general gameplay, and it really boils down to lines versus circles. I can understand why the original Guitar Hero used circles back in 2005, too. With the power of the PS2 and the quality of the video being output, circles give the most accurate representation of the timing while still being able to be seen by the player. (Coincidentally, this is why I think Rock Band AND Guitar Hero look terrible on the PS2 now that it’s just a port.) But because of the newer generation of systems, the horizontal notes work so much better and give the BEST visual cue to the song’s timing (provided you calibrate your system). I can’t understand why people would prefer Guitar Hero’s circles.
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“Bigger, better, and more badass.”

Those are the words touted by Cliffy B in every interview that he got before the release of Gears of War 2.

“Laggier, glitchier, and more shit.”
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Halo. Just by hearing that name it provokes a reaction out of anyone. Some people love it, others hate it, and some don’t understand either. Selling millions on release day, odds are if you have a Xbox, you have one of the three games. But why is it so appealing? What about it draws in so many people? And why is it still one of the most played games over Xbox Live?

Before Halo, first-person shooters usually fit into one of three categories. First-person shooters were usually either frantic frag fests (Quake, Unreal Tournament), slow tactical team oriented combat (early Rainbow Six, Counter Strike), or the old classic run-n-gun style games (Half-Life, Duke Nukem.) Halo used a blend of all three, primarily adding a tactical element to the faster styled multiplayer games.

The main difference lies within the ability to only carry two guns at a time. No longer could you just pick up every weapon you encountered like in the old run-n-gun games. You had to think and make choices on the field based on what you think you’d come up against. You had to balance your loadout, because if you end up relying too much on long, medium, or short range combat a good player could take advantage of your weaknesses. Older style tactical games allowed a small selection of weapons, but for most missions you never changed weapons and stuck primarily with what you started with. Halo blended all three styles of play, to allow a fast paced tactical run-n-gun game.
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Gears of War 2 is quite the fine single-player experience. Multiplayer not so much, what with all the bugs and the exploits that anyone who can look up an instructional youtube video can learn and grief people with. Well that’s all changed now, with the arrival of the promised title update that does away with all the physics-defying and game-breaking malarkey, as well as a few neat extras. And yes, the update itself has already gone live, so fire up those Xbox 360s to get it.

I’ve included the complete list of fixes below, but the main gist of the update is that all of the game-breaking multiplayer exploits have been fixed. No more Ninja Jumps, no more wall-penetrating chainsaw kills, no more unlimited ammo and CERTAINLY no more invisibility. Good on you, Epic!

In any case, here’s the complete (and massive list) of fixes:
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I’ve been a loyal GameFly customer since March 20, 2004.

Let that sink in for a while.

In a matter of weeks, and two more payments of thirteen dollars and some change to them, I’ll have been a paying GameFly customer for five years. Five long years. I don’t want to even think of how much of my money I’ve given to them.

It started with Viewtiful Joe for GameCube. I was trying to rent it from all my local Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos, but none of them had it, and I was getting frantic. My poor fifteen-year-old mind yielded to a banner ad on IGN or Gamespot, and I signed up for the free trial. Around the same time I had been given my own bank account with debit card linked to the family one. What better use for a 16-digit piece of plastic linked to my money than a subscription based-service?

Yes, my logic was flawed. How many 15-year-olds do you know that don’t spend their cash on video games?

But I was a happy customer. I played over a hundred games with GameFly. I never had delays on getting games and I could get the best new releases within days of release. It was fantastic. Splinter Cell, Soul Caliber, Eternal Darkness, I played them all. A glorious existence! (When it came to gaming) I saved so much money that I even was able to buy a Nintendo DS on launch day.

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Man, those things creep me out

Microsoft recently released the “new Xbox experience” to every online Xbox. First off let’s look at the structure.

Pros

· Quicker browsing through easy scrolling

· New big display panels for each task, such as edit profile or play current disc

· RB, RT, LB, LT buttons utilized for maneuvering through the menus

· Friends channel makes it easier to find those suckers (keep your friends close and your enemies closer)

· *double dragon Xbox theme still awesome looking

Cons

• New layout includes spotlight channel and other little tweaks to spurt advertising right into your face from your TV screen
• Your Xbox themes will not rotate through their pictures when you go through the new Xbox channels, only when you select something such as the video library or marketplace, unlike before when it changed while scrolling through menus.
• Big gray surface obstructing half your Xbox theme anyway
• You have to stare at your Xbox avatar abomination when you go to edit your profile

Now first off, Mii’s. Oh wait what’s that? That’s not a Mii? ‘Course not, it’s an “Xbox avatar” designed to be more realistic. Ultimately what happened is, take the bastard love child of cartoonish human personas and uncanny valley humanoids and make it into an avatar system. You are FORCED (curse the day we gave console’s sentient minds) to make one at the start of your Xbox online update that contains this ‘new experience’. These avatars although customizable in hip clothing and bling (yes they have bling, diamond rings and a chain etc., oh god) lack customization in physical feature placement. Yea you can chisel your jaw line but you can’t even move your eyebrows to their proper position. Maybe I’m just a bit biased against these things since, well they ripped off Nintendo, and that all my so-called ‘colleagues’ share my view and agree with me, thus only reinforcing my negativity, but I stand strong on my position against these little critters. I only hope that Microsoft doesn’t start charging people to customize these things, the next thing I want to hear in life is: “Hey bro, I just spent 500 MS points on a new hat and jacket combo for my Xbox avatar!” The best thing about these things is that you can put sunglasses on them, then zoom in real close, take a picture, and now you have a nice gamerpic of sunglasses.

That’s really all there is to this whole ‘new experience’ thing. Hopefully Microsoft will release some real nice homerun updates eventually. So what do you think? Good, bad, or just plain unnecessary? I’m going to go with unnecessary for now.

Since we were talking about the new experience, let’s go back to something old for just a minute, gamer pictures. This topic has made me considerably annoyed for a while now. Not only will Microsoft not let you simply make your own by using a custom uploaded image thumbnail (except for those dumb Xbox avatar photos) but they also nickel and dime you for their gamer picture designs and a lot of them aren’t even that good (here’s a nice marketing idea, give a gamer picture free with each Xbox360 game at least, maybe people will even buy the games then for picture collectability…if somebody would actually do that).

Have you ever played Mechwarrior? If the answer is no, don’t feel too bad, neither have most people. The cockpit has been empty for sometime now, specifically in first person mech simulation games. The last genuine mech game that allowed some 1st person viewing was Chromehounds for the Xbox 360, an early release that saw everything from perfect scores to abysmal ones. When one thinks about all of the asskickery that goes on in games today, such as ripping people in half with a chainsaw, punching someone so hard they explode or paying a stripper to take her clothes off, it would make sense that the “giant robots shooting other giant robots” genre would be flourishing, but of course, this is not the case.

Here are some possible reasons, but feel free to throw your own ideas in:
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Imagine getting a dollar for every gamerscore point you got in a week. That’s a potential 5000 or more dollars if someone really set their minds on it. Over at redvsblue one staff member made a bet with another that went something like this:

Achievement Marathon begins

Just fifteen minutes ago, Geoff began his week long marathon to get 10,000 Gamerscore in seven days. This all started during one of our DrunkTank sessions a few weeks ago when Geoff claimed he could “easily” score this monumental total during any given week. Here are the rules:

1. Contest runs from Friday Dec 26th to Friday Jan 2nd @ 10AM (Central times).
2. Geoff has to use his existing Gamertag (DGGeoff). He cannot start a new one.
3. At the end of the contest, for every point that Geoff has over 9,000 points, Burnie will pay him $1, up to 10,000 total points or $1000.
4. Geoff must pay Burnie $1 for every point under 9,000 points, down to 8,000 points.
5. Geoff sucks.
6. There is no rule six.
7. Burnie can do anything he wants to distract Geoff or derail his attempts to achieve gamerscore. (Addendum: Burnie may not burn down Geoff’s house or sabotage the Austin power grid),

It’s an interesting bet don’t you think? I’d love to start one of these with a friend someday. If you want to track it, you can from Geoff’s Gamerscore

I admit that the competition would have been much more spectacular if it had been a dollar for every gamerscore point he had gotten in a week with no limits to the maximum and minimum. Still it’s an interesting idea that even Microsoft could adopt for a fundraiser? Though it does preach some achievement whoring. That’s something you see quite regularly on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 community, you have people who play games so they can better their gamerscores so they can totally SHOW PEOPLE ONLINE, it reminds me a lot about this (May be NSFW).

The Tales series has always been one that I looked suspiciously at, not because it’s a japanese RPG (jRPG) series but for more on how it plays. The first Tales game I played was Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube, and to be honest I didn’t enjoy it too much. It wasn’t that the game was bland or bad, it was that the characters of the game were annoying and unlikeable, at least in my eyes. Fast forward probably about 4 years later and I find Tales of Vesperia.  I see the title and I figure why not at least try it, because games in a series can improve from their predecessors.

The first thing I can tell you right off the bat is that the game is well made and quite beautiful to look at. The characters are cell-shaded (although that is the tradition in the 3D Tales games), and the landscapes are artistic, colourful, and quite pleasing.
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