Some new screenshots have emerged out of BF3. Some of the screens are from the in game footage we have already seen, some of them are just renders and some of them are of concept art. It’s a pretty cool way of just looking at everything from start to finish. The lighting in this game is phenomenal, as well as the graphics and the animation. Please try not to get stuck on the whole thing about how the PC version will be better than the Console version, just try to enjoy what’s coming our way. One thing that I have an issue with is how the dirt kicks up. If you look at the screenshot you will notice it by the middle soldiers boot. This all makes sense if the solider was running through a muddy surface but doesn’t really fit here. I know the alley is dirty but not dirty enough to kick up that kind of dirty. One other area I saw this in was the roof tops where they go to take out the sniper. After all that running, and shooting they go up to the roof top and dirty is still kicking up all over the place. The roof just isn’t that dirty for that kind of detail. The next three shots are of the alley you just witnessed in all of its glory. Even though all three of these shots show the part of the alley it’s nice to see it going through a transition before reaching the final stage. Frostbite 2 allows for the use of features such as dynamic radiosity, dynamic shadows, and deferred lighting on a big scale. Included are some examples of an environment where you can see just the lighting information (1), the actual light probes that control how light affects dynamic objects (2 – one of these probes contain more lighting information than an entire level from BFBC2), and the finished environment the way a player would see it (3) This is pretty crazy stuff. DICE didn’t sit their rehashing old games, they actually sat down, thought how they wanted to improve the game and did it. I myself really like BFBC2 and think it looks great. But to hear that one of these probes contains more lighting information in BF3 than an entire level from BFBC2 is just mind blowing. I really didn’t think they pushed it to those kind of extremes. Just looking at these is making me salivate. It’s hard not to make myself sound like some deranged fan but when I start analyzing everything I have seen from this game it just makes me feel like a little girl on her 16th birthday that received her pony. The game is just mind blowing as it is but when you look at the physics, animation and just the fluidity of the game you can’t help but thing that just isn’t real. That has to be some kind of a cinematic cut scene. When you see the soldiers run through the alley and pay attention to how their body is position and moving as they run it’s extremely impressive. I am not knocking on Call of Duty Modern Warfare but if you watch someone running and compare that to what you see in this game it’s like day and night. Character movement isn’t the only thing worth mentioning. The environment is just as crazy, right before you enter the roof where you are looking for the sniper you kick open a door. It swings open as realistically as it’s going to get. Just look at the dust and smoke fall off of the hotel building as the sniper eats the rocket launched at him or how the ground reacts to the earthquake. Talk about taking a game to a whole new level… in fact I would go as far and say DICE just invented a level. As you know, destruction will be a major part of Battlefield 3, both on a micro and a large scale. You saw the earthquake, and the hotel getting RPG’d at the end of Battlefield 3 Executive Producer Patrick Bach’s playthrough, showcasing one of the new destruction features we’re bringing to Battlefield 3: Crumbling facades, as you can see in this four picture sequence. This level of destruction will be a feature in both single player and multiplayer. The above is what Stefan Strandberg, the audio engineer a DICE is looking at when he tries to piece together everything that can happen at any given time within the game. You can also see that this is what the schematic might look like for a tank within the audio section of Frostbite 2. This guy really seems to know his stuff, because the first thing I would try to do with that image is connect the dots, if that’s even possible. The last several images are of the concept art. Most be really interesting to work on a project and see it from just thrown around ideas, to some concept art, to renders on a screen to a finished product that you know is going to change everything.

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Battlefield 3: Screenshots, Renders & Concept Art

(Found the Picture on Photobucket by Hypersonic01) According to an article just released from the L.A. Times, Modern Warfare 3 will be released in November of 2011, and will be developed by Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, with Raven Software pulling the multiplayer development duties. Activision has quietly tapped Sledgehammer Games, a Northern California studio, to help out with the making of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, according to people familiar with the situation. The game has not been officially announced by Activision. But the title is well into production and is expected to come out in November, the same month that the publisher has annually released a new Call of Duty installment, people with knowledge of situation said. Modern Warfare 3 will be the first game Infinity Ward has produced since the departure of of company co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella. People close to the matter said Infinity Ward is working closely with Sledgehammer, which is led by a team recruited away from Activision’s rival Electronic Arts Inc. The two studios are equally sharing duties of producing the single-player portion of the game, the sources said. Activision has also brought in Wisconsin-based Raven Software, which is working on the online multi-player elements for Modern Warfare 3, sources said.

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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Information Has Surfaced

Activision-Blizzard announced earlier today that the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise has surpassed 1 billion in sales worldwide. This is nearly a month faster than it took CoD: Modern Warfare 2 to hit 1 billion. It is now on track to set another milestone in the entertainment and video game industry. Before the games launch the expectations were set pretty high but now it seems that Wall Street’s expectations for the game weren’t high enough. Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Market has stated that they are “increasing the unit estimate for ‘Black Ops’ to 19 million from 17 million”. In its first five days on shelves, Black Ops pulled in $650 million. Just by looking at the numbers you can see that the game is going to break Modern Warfare 2′s record in everyday. Just recently it was released that Activision is already working on the games first DLC. Modern Warfare 2 had two downloadable map packs, the first of which pulled in 37.5 million in its first week. I am sure we can expect that the DLC for Black Ops will top that. According to Bobby Kotick: “people should expect to see more content made available for this game”, as well as why it’s doing so well: “The reason ‘Black Ops’ has done so well is it’s more accessible as a game,” says Kotick. “The folks who are making these games are really thoughtful about incorporating user feedback into the game. Each successive iteration makes it more broadly appealing.” Honestly at this point. it doesn’t matter how bad or flawed the game can be, as long as it has the Call of Duty stamp on it people will run out and get it. I also feel that the reason the game is so popular is because what Infinity Ward did with Modern Warfare 2. SOURCE [ CNBC ]

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CoD: Black Ops Surpasses 1 Billion In Sales

According to Vgchartz , they have estimated that GT5 has sold 1.8 million units worldwide in 2 days. That would put it at the 5th fastest selling PS3 game ever only to be beaten by Black Ops, Modern Warfare 2, Final Fantasy XIII and Grand Theft Auto 4.

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Gran Turismo 5 Sells 1.8 Million in 2 Days

Herewith I present a review of the single player campaign in Call of Duty: Black Ops.  Note that there are some minor spoilers inside, so don’t read this if you like to start your campaigns completely unaware of what’s about to happen. The Black Ops single player campaign starts off with a good deal of mystery and confusion. Who are you?  Who is the guy in the balcony interrogating you?  What are all those TVs showing? And what’s with all the @#$!! numbers?? (There’s a prior game introduction, too, which doesn’t have any initially obvious connection to the rest of the plot, but it sets the stage with a woman reading a number into a microphone.  Since this occurs before you select single player vs. multiplayer, it’s not technically part of the single-player campaign, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.  It certainly baffled me at first.) For this play-through I chose Regular difficulty.  I didn’t want the game to be too easy (I’ve played a lot of FPS games before, including a couple of CoD campaigns), but I also didn’t want to spend forever trying to kill waves upon waves of invincible enemies, so Regular it was.  Then after that it was straight into the first mission. First, I’ll cover the gameplay mechanics: Weapons handling in this game is intuitive.  The controls are standard and feel well-tuned to the gameplay.  As you start the game, you won’t have any weapons right away, and this is true of several of the mission beginnings as well, but don’t worry – weapons are just around the corner.  You’ll be supplied with one by your comrades, or you’ll be allowed to draw the weapon you were already carrying as the mission gets going. General gameplay mechanics are also well tuned.  Injuries heal faster than in several other similar games, including Modern Warfare 2, and Halo.  This is a nice touch.  It’s always a bit tricky trying to balance the realism setting vs. videogame fun factor – in real life, it would take weeks to heal from a gunshot wound, if you’re lucky, but in this game, that whole process takes a couple of seconds at most.  This means you don’t have to spend a lot of time sitting back waiting for your wounds to heal while the action continues around you.  Recently, I spent quite a bit of time doing that in Rainbow Six Vegas on Realistic difficulty, so it was nice not to have to do so much waiting for a change. To counterbalance the making-it-too-easy effect of healing faster, the game has a higher-than-usual knock-back effect when you get hit with a bullet.  Your aiming and sighting will be thrown way off when this happens.  This is a case where it’s definitely more realistic that way, but in a console game where you are at a built-in disadvantage to begin with trying to aim your weapon, I found this aspect a bit much.  It wasn’t impossible to deal with, but it was somewhat annoying. At the Regular difficulty setting, it’s not too difficult to kill enemies with the weapons you’re given.  Two or three shots are generally enough to knock them down.  This is probably fairly realistic (give or take some interpretation of the location of the bullet hit), which is nice, and very different from some games such as Halo, where you have to keep shooting and shooting to get through the shields, and armor, and thick skin, etc.  Sometimes the opponents stay down, but other times they fire at you from the ground, or are only temporarily off balance and then get back up and keep firing, so you quickly learn to give them a couple of extra shots every time just to make sure. Ammunition is plentiful.  I never needed to restock.  Of course, you can pick up weapons from fallen comrades or foes on the battlefield, but I didn’t do that either.  In some ways, it’s nice not to have to worry about ammunition.  On the other hand, my organizational mind got a big kick out of the way that Rainbow Six in particular handles weapons, ammunition, and restocking.  One of my favourite moments in those games is finding an ammo/weapon box, and being able to take a breath, restock grenades, change weapons, etc.  I miss that a bit in games that are more realistically oriented, like Black Ops, and don’t come equipped with weapon and ammo depots scattered about the landscape. The “fog of war” effect is noticeable.  Other Call of Duty games (and other realistic-style war games, too) have this effect to some extent, and I always find it irritating, but I’m willing to put up with it in exchange for a more realistic war experience.  Fortunately, most of the missions make it fairly straightforward to figure out where you’re supposed to go, whom you’re supposed to be killing, and what you need to do when you get there.  But in some cases I found that I had to run around the map, get killed quite a few times and restart from checkpoints, and generally blunder about in a panic while trying to suss out the objective.  This would make more sense if the game didn’t make a regular point of telling you exactly where you needed to go and what you needed to do.  When it doesn’t, it feels out of place – more realistic, yes, but you have to change mental gears in a way that doesn’t make sense in the context of what you’ve done before. Related to the “fog of war” is the difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe.  Because your squad mates may charge off ahead of you, and because you’re frequently engaged in guerrilla warfare with very little in the way of uniforms to distinguish your side from the enemy, I found it quite challenging at times to figure out whom I was supposed to shoot at.  You get unambiguous information about this from your reticule (when you’re not aiming down the sight), but it takes a second or two to lock on.  Occasionally I fired at allies by accident and was told to stop doing that!  I think only one of them was actually killed when I fired at him, so I didn’t do my own side too much damage this way. Like previous CoD installments, the action is frequently quite hectic.  Some missions have infinite waves of enemies, which goes completely against my preferred play style of picking the opponents off one by one (preferably from a safe distance) and then leisurely making my way through the scenery, enjoying the digital modeling and animation work as I go, but most of the missions work well if you take out the enemies first, at your own pace, and then proceed.  It may be possible to use a charge-through playing style for some of these; I didn’t try that if I could possibly help it! Checkpoints are well placed.  Some games have checkpoints spaced far apart (that would be Rainbow Six Vegas again) and no way to save at other times, making it very frustrating to try to get past a difficult section involving multiple challenges.  This game has frequent checkpoints, like Halo 3, and sometimes you pass several checkpoint locations without firing a shot.  I’d rather have it that way than not enough!  Checkpoints also fix up any damage you may have incurred, so you don’t have to worry about hitting a checkpoint just as you’re about to die.  Not because that won’t happen, but because you’ll be restored to a usable state if it does – not to simply die right away over and over. The visuals are very good overall, and in at least one location, I was reminded very strongly of Uncharted 2.  This is a good thing – Uncharted 2 has wonderful visuals, and so does Black Ops.  Now in some places, it’s quite dark and difficult to see where you’re going, but there aren’t very many of these.  The rest is a treat to watch.  I especially enjoyed the facial animation of one character in a close-up scripted scene.  My wife happened to be watching at this point and she couldn’t believe how realistic this CG face looked either. The AI companions are quite good in this game (the AI enemies much less so, which I generally like, at least at the lower difficulty settings!)  Your squad members are fairly good shots, and are willing to charge in and attack, not just leave all the heavy work to you.  They won’t get too far ahead, and, in most cases, won’t do all the work for you, but occasionally they will end up doing the majority of the killing if you stay behind them long enough.  I liked that a lot.  It felt a lot more realistic than the typical squad-based game in which you, the squad leader, have to do pretty much all of the work, and your squad mates are just there as cannon fodder. The gore level in this game is fairly high.  I had to avert my eyes in a couple of places.  Not just because of blood spurting out of enemies when they are hit, but when a knife is jammed into someone’s throat at close range, and viciously twisted, with blood everywhere, that can be a bit much for me.  Those less squeamish might not mind too much. One minor complaint I have about the mechanics of moving about on foot is that the ladders in the levels are much too easy to fall off of.  Ladders have been done often enough in videogames now that you would think it’s not too difficult to figure out how to implement ladder mechanics, but quite a lot of games still get it totally wrong.  Here’s a hint for game designers: if you’re near a ladder, make it really easy to get onto it; and if you’re on a ladder, and not at the bottom or the top, make it really difficult to get off it!  Oh yes, and if you’re at the top, make it really difficult to get off the open side (thereby falling to your death)!  In Black Ops, if you nudge the controller sideways by accident while you are climbing or descending, you will fall off.  Really, now?!  You want me to believe that my highly trained military operative of a character spontaneously forgot that he was on a vertical ascent/descent device and just randomly decided to move sideways instead, only to plunge to his death?  Really??  In other parts of the game, it won’t let you fall off a high balcony or cliff, which some types of games do let you do, so it’s even more odd that you can fall off a ladder so easily. (Here’s a related gameplay hint: when you’re doing a belay on a rope, don’t forget to brake frequently… the game won’t tell you that ahead of time, and the consequences of not doing this are extremely painful!) Now, on to the missions in the actual campaign: The campaign story is quite well written.  I found the scripted interludes fun to watch, and to try to puzzle out.  There’s a lovely twist near the end, which I won’t give away, and those more attuned to plot twists than I am may be able to spot it coming.  But I sure didn’t. On the negative side (and there aren’t very many negatives to this game), I found the missions, overall, to be somewhat disjointed.  Because the story is set as a series of flashbacks, and not always to the same character’s memories, there is no direct need to make everything a coherent storyline, and it isn’t.  In some ways this is a good thing – if you don’t like crawling through the Vietnamese jungle, just wait until the next mission, which will be in the Russian tundra in winter, or a Cuban stronghold in the summer.  Fair enough, but that also means that it is difficult to build up a coherent mental map of where you’ve been, and where you’re going, and how long it’s likely to take you to get there.  This is especially true if you are not playing the game straight through in one shot.  It took me about 10-12 hours to get through it, and I’m not doing that in one day, and being of an organizational bent, I like to have at least some vague idea of the story arc as I go – it gives me more of a sense of accomplishment and progress towards a well-defined goal as I complete each mission.  So the overall shape of the story wasn’t very clear at the beginning, and it didn’t have an obvious single climactic moment at the end.  Rather it had a couple of mid-sized climaxes followed by a slightly bigger one.  This is not that bad of a design – but I would have preferred a more coherent and obvious linkage from each event to the next. One of the early missions involves a major prison breakout.  Unlike some prison breakout scenarios I’ve played, this one didn’t feel like just a couple of guys trying to escape – the breakout had obviously been planned by a large number of prisoners for quite some time, to the point that they had memorized the steps of the plan and would chant them in a sort of stylized code at the slightest opportunity.  Each step is written out as one of your objectives, just as the Russians are chanting it (in accented English, but we’ll spot them that). This was a very well written mission and one of the most engaging I’ve ever played, for that reason. The Vietnam mission was just like back in ‘Nam.  (I’ve always wanted to be able to say that.) One of the missions pits the Russians against the Germans.  This mission was set to some uplifting and patriotic Russian music, which I absolutely loved.  Give me more of that Russian music!  Another mission was set to “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones.  I’m not a big fan of that song, but it worked very well in this mission. There was also a mission that pits the Russians (I think; it could have been the Germans this time) against the British.  As a descendant of British expatriates, it definitely felt treasonous to be fighting them!  I should have been on their side! But I wasn’t given the option to defect, unfortunately. The variety of mission scenarios is exceptionally wide.  Most of the time you are fighting on foot, on the ground, in either medium-sized open spaces or indoors.  But other missions require crawling through rat tunnels, operating attack helicopters, guiding a squad from a Blackbird eye-in-the-sky at 60,000 feet (and you get to launch the Blackbird off the runway too – I’ve always wanted to be able to do that!), and driving cars, tanks, and light attack vehicles.  These alternatives to foot fighting are sufficiently polished that they feel like a natural part of the story, and not just tacked on to provide variety.  They could of course be improved – compared to the realism level involved in fighting on the ground, the helicopter feels like a Commodore 64 arcade game, and the armored attack vehicles not much better.  But since those aren’t the main focus of the game, it may be acceptable to have less realism than a flight simulator when flying, or a driving simulator when driving.  One possible improvement that could remain within the existing game parameters would be to allow a choice of seating position in vehicular combat.  For instance, in games like Halo, you can choose whether to be a driver, turret operator, or a standing infantry soldier along for the ride.  In Black Ops you are told which position you are going to occupy and you had better like it. That brings the review to a close, so, finally, we have a summary of the pros and cons: Cons : Difficult in a few places to determine the tactical objective; ladders tricky to use; vehicular action could be more realistic; replayability may be a bit low due to forced decisions on squad roles taken and routes to follow. Pros : Intuitive, standard gameplay; excellent visuals; good frame rates; a coherent and engaging storyline; NPCs that can hold their own; enough challenge to keep you busy, but not so much that you give up; smooth transitions from playing to scripted sequences; decent background music; and overall just the right length.  An outstanding addition to the Call of Duty franchise. In the end, it’s all about the numbers….

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Call of Duty: Black Ops Single-Player Campaign Review

Another indie game is making its way to PSN. This one brought to us by indiePub (and a few other folks, including Cipher Prime, Empty Clip Studios and Zoo Publishing). The title looks completely different from anything else we’ve seen (seriously, the PS3 is loaded with ‘different’ games, and I love it). The game includes the 72 original levels (called Auditorium Classic), plus another 78 (Auditorium Modern). There will also be Move and Stereoscopic 3D (imagine 3D with this) support. What is the game supposed to be about, though? Conceptually, you are transforming light into a symphony of sound. If you’ve played it before, you know what I mean. If you haven’t experienced Auditorium yet, you’ll have that “a-ha!” moment after a level or two. And then you’re hooked. The title will be released on PSN November 23rd (yeah, one day before Gran Turismo 5) for $9.99. Source

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Auditorium Coming to PSN

ComputerandVideoGames.com just released the winners of the 2010 Golden Joystick awards, as voted on by the fans. Mass Effect 2 wont 2010’s “Ultimate Game of The Year” with Modern Warfare 2 taking second and Assassin’s Creed II taking third place. I definitely have some issue with this list, however I’ll let you discuss those in the comments.. And the rest of the winners are.. The Action/Adventure Game Of The Year in association with Nuts Winner: Assassin’s Creed II Runners Up: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Red Dead Redemption Download Game Of The Year in association with Green Man Gaming Winner: Plants vs. Zombies Runners Up: Battlefield 1943, Call of Duty: World At War: ZOMBIES Fighting Game Of The Year in association with Official Nintendo Magazine Winner: Street Fighter IV Runners Up: Tekken 6, Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny Music Game Of The Year in association with Total Film Winner: Guitar Hero 5 Runners Up: DJ Hero, The Beatles: Rock Band The One To Watch in association with MSN Winner: Call of Duty: Black Ops Runners Up: Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: The Old Republic Online Game Of The Year in association with CVG Winner: League of Legends Runners Up: Aion: The Tower Of Eternity, Farmville Portable Game Of The Year in association with Habbo Winner: Pokémon Heart Gold/Soul Silver Runners Up: Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, Plants vs. Zombies Puzzle Game Of The Year in association with NGamer Winner: World of Goo Runners Up: Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box, Scribblenauts Racing Game Of The Year in association with T3 Winner: Forza Motorsport 3 Runners Up: Need For Speed: Shift. Colin McRae: Dirt 2 RPG Of The Year in association with GamesRadar Winner: Mass Effect 2 Runners Up: Fallout 3: Game Of The Year Edition, Final Fantasy XIII Shooter Of The Year in association with IGN Game On Winner: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Runners Up: Bad Company 2, Left 4 Dead 2 Soundtrack Of The Year in association with Metal Hammer Winner: Final Fantasy XIII Runners Up: Brutal Legend, Assassin’s Creed 2 Sports Game Of The Year in association with Mousebreaker Winner: FIFA 10 Runners Up: Wii Sports Resort, Skate 3 Strategy Game Of The Year in association with PC Gamer Winner: Plants vs. Zombies Runners Up: The Sims 3, Age of Empires III: Collection UK Developer Of The Year in association with Edge Winner: Jagex Runners Up: Rockstar North, Codemasters

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The Golden Joystick Awards for 2010 Have Been Announced

“Maintain noise discipline”, a phrase uttered throughout Medal of Honor is a common one used in military dialect and perhaps EA should have followed suit. The controversy surrounding the last minute change of the Taliban’s name in multiplayer has caused plenty of drama but it’s never been anything like Modern Warfare 2’s ‘No Russian’ debacle, In fact there are no civilians present at all throughout MoH, just American soldiers, the Taliban/”Opposing Forces”. As you’d expect this is an incredibly patriotic game best summed up by the cover star Dusty wearing a FDNY cap, there’s no doubt you’re doing this for America with no coalition soldiers of other nationality in sight unlike MW2’s SAS sections but then this makes sense considering the Medal of Honor is only bestowed upon US soldiers. Enough of the politics though (always inescapable when it comes to war, eh?) does Medal of Honor dethrone Call of Duty or even Battlefield 2: Bad Company to become the top dog of war? Medal of Honor aims to be the more realistic title than its competitors by setting the game in Afghanistan and basing it on real operations against a very current opposing force. This is where the realism ends though and MoH moves to the video game stereotype emulating a blockbuster movie, it’s not at the level of CoD’s Michael Bay zaniness but rather Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down without the Hans Zimmer soundtrack… and with more Linkin Park. Luckily the ridiculous elements never go too far and it all operates within a realm of respectability. The gameplay is sold with weapons providing good kickback, headshots are satisfying and quad bikes are decent even if they do suffer from that age old vehicle in FPS syndrome where they have no acceleration or deceleration (I blame Half Life 2 for this). The flow of MoH is perfect switching between the different characters you control sometimes without even leaving the scene for example a sniper saves you at the end of a mission and you’re controlling that sniper in the next. The pace of the story heats up as you get further in too encouraging you to play on as you become more engrossed in the story. This does bring the campaign mode’s short length to your attention however there is re-playability in the form of a Tier 1 mode where you have to beat levels within a certain par time with no checkpoints to test the hardcore out there. There are plenty little touches to add realism with Russian tank corpses in the desert along with references to check weapons as the “dust is like glue”, you’ll frequently find yourself marking targets for air support too and in one particularly engaging encounter you are laying down the covering fire so your squad-mates can mark a target, it works brilliantly as you see a fight from the other side and are not the one expected to charge head on at the enemy for once. The general chatter between soldiers with military lingo feels very authentic really drawing you into the operation you’re carrying out as opposed to MW’s dramatic lines or BF:BC2’s (unfunny) jokes. The best example of this is during the mission as a gunner aboard an Apache helicopter and hearing all the chatter about what to aim for etc. The aesthetics of MoH have been well thought out to immerse you into the war in Afghanistan with sprawling snow capped mountains to the water barren valleys there is always a good view. Dust clouds obscuring your view especially after large explosions you can be completely without sight from dust and smoke as the sun gazes through, it’s a spectacular and haunting 9/11-esque effect. The sound is equally good as gun shots echo throughout the valley, explosions boom with violent bass and your squad mates constant updating of the situation really helps. This results in MoH being a polished game but could still do with the odd buff here and there, some of the edges can look rough as though there is no anti-analysing, and I also noticed enemies spawning in the distance which ruined the immersion somewhat. Before some of the major set pieces you character will also lower their gun disabling your ability to shoot, this definitely ruins the shock factor of a particular scene knowing you can’t do anything to stop it. Interestingly the single and multiplayer sides of the game use different engines with single player developed by Danger Close using the Unreal engine and the multi player develop by Dice using their superb Frostbite engine. The results in MoH feeling almost like 2 completely different games multiplayer using the best engine, it looks nicer, runs with a better frame rate and contains more destructible elements of scenery although not at the same scale as BF:BC2. Multiplayer, of course, offers you a chance to be the Taliban Opposing forces with each side presenting you with different weapons for example M16 if US to the AK 47’s of OP FOR and C4 against IEDs complete with mobile phone trigger. It makes playing on each side more than just a cosmetic. There are a variety of modes from Team assault (team deathmatch), Combat Mission (where you take over a series of objectives), Sector Control (domination/king of the hill) and Objective Raid (2 positions to defend/attack). All these modes are great fun but some of the small maps result in one team dominating the other thanks to poor spawn points allowing a team to be pinned into a corner and that is never fun. There are 3 classes available; Rifleman, Special Ops and Sniper and with no healing, repair or ammunition resupplys MoH’s multiplayer is fast paced and kept simple. The kill streak rewards come in offensive and defensive flavours such as mortars or UAV and are applied via a scope so you have to see the area you’re ordering an air strike on instead of cowering in a corner with a map. There are limited perks that amount to kit upgrades such as laser sights and open-tip ammunition which are all upgraded in the standard XP point system. It fills the middle ground between the fast arcade thrills of CoD and slower more tactical BF:BC2. It’s worth noting that I had no connection or host migration issues in any matches or problems with lag, outstanding. It’s also worth mentioning that the PS3 version contains the exclusive Medal of Honor Frontline a remastered PS2 title included on the disc running at 60fps with updated controls and trophies. It’s not quite the polished job of the God of War collection with some v-sync issues and low res textures but it is definitely worth revisiting this classic game which I have fond memories of. It’s also fun to see the large jaws and slightly comic animation with Nazis standing up to die. The gameplay still stands up well though and you can see just how far FPS games have come on consoles when you check out the old default control scheme – shoulder buttons to sidestep?! Medal of Honor has been touted as EA’s first step into the modern warfare market and it’s a great start, it’s decent in all areas if not a genre leader of any becoming a halfway house between MW2 and BF:BC2. It’s easy to pick up and play and does a good job of raising awareness for the soldiers who are serving in Afghanistan even if it’s not an entirely realistic portrayal. So while Medal of Honor may not be best shooter out it’s still an honorable effort that’s worth your attention. *A copy of Medal of Honor was provided by EA for reviewing purposes. Campaign mode was played to completion twice on normal and hard. All multiplayer modes & maps were tested over 5hours of playtime using all classes.

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Medal of Honor Review

So chances are, you’ve played a violent video game or two. Maybe even killed an innocent civilian for no reason, without even giving it a second though. Or maybe perhaps when playing “No Russian” in Modern Warfare 2, you said to yourself, “Now this is just too much.” Well the website arstechina.com asked their readers what they felt. The results were mixed of course. Some readers used specific examples to back up their point, games such as Fallout 3, Manhunt 2, and Duke Nukem forever. Others were simply quoted as, “Um, nope. It’s a game.” So should there be a line drawn? Is there too much? In my opinion, every one is different. Sure, I’ve never been disgusted or repulsed by anything in a game, however others are horrified when I describe things to them. But there is no way to deny video games can effect us. They make us laugh, get us angry, even become sympathetic towards a fake person. So is it that big of a stretch to think that too much violence can affect us as well? “Nay,” says this gamer, but maybe I’m wrong. The rest is up for you to decide. Via arstechnica

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Video Game Violence, is there such a thing as too much?

First of all, this game came out of nowhere. Who would have thought that we’d even see a rodeo game? Personally, I think it’s a very interesting concept, especially since it will be a Move title. Too bad the trailer didn’t include any gameplay. Here’s a few details, according to Chris Curra, VP of Production over at Perpetual FX Creative: Everything in the game you play, see and hear was created from scratch and designed from the ground up for a completely fresh take on the modern face of rodeo. We have a ton planned for the game, including a variety of white-knuckle events like calf roping and team roping. We also are currently working on never-before-seen barrel and mounted shooting mechanics and track configurations, all of which will be playable in highly competitive online and local multiplayer. You can also customize your cowboy/girl and horse, as well as get upgrades for them down the line. It’s definitely a different type of game, and it will likely be tailored to rodeo fans, but I’ll probably keep my eye on it, if only because its different. The game comes out this December.

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Top Hand Rodeo Tour Coming to Move