According to OnLive, they’re making us an offer we can’t refuse. If we buy Mafia II, we can get another game for free. All we have to do is sign up for their site and buy a game between August 24 and August 29 (2010). Seems pretty cool and shit, but why the fuck did they have to announce this just now. I could’ve saved my money for this and got Starcraft 2 for free. Sometimes I think life is trying to chew my dick off.

3D. It’s all over the place. You want to buy a video card, and Nvidia’s 3D Vision is advertised everywhere. You want to buy a gaming console and the PS3 flaunts its’ 3D capabilities. You want to buy a monitor or television, and you can’t even find a normal LCD screen anymore because everything’s 3D. You want to buy some glasses, but, wait… optics still sell normal glasses.

Ok, but still, there’s a huge push for 3D media entertainment. That’s cool, it’s a new graphical feature (well not really, the 3D push didn’t work the last time they tried it, 20 years ago!), that some of us haven’t seen used to such a big extent yet. Well, you’d think that’d be awesome right? WRONG, you’re dumb. I’m not trolling here, this is a post by Tim and not Patrick.

Everyone’s focused on 3D technology, but it’s just eye candy. Playing Bad Company 2 or Starcraft 2 in 3D gives you no competitive edge.

So, with ATI vs. Nvidia, you have Eyefinity vs. 3D Vision.

Eyefinity is the ability to support three monitors off of one card. Now you might say “Tim, this is eye candy too! It gives you no competitive edge!” Once again, WRONG, you’re dumb. Imagine playing on three 2560×1600 monitors. That’s a lot of pixels, and that’s a lot of FOV (field of view, which is basically how many degrees you see in front of you, you see over 180 degrees in RL thanks to peripheral vision, but on most games you have a FOV from 55-90). So the extra field of view actually lets you see opponents on your right, more so than a standard monitor or even standard triple monitor setup. Now, 3D Vision gives you… double images, for eah eye. Cool. Umm, how does it help? It doesn’t.

The other problem i have with 3D is that all these manufacturers are focusing on this eye candy that isn’t really that amazing. The technology has existed for a while. What could they be focusing on instead? OLED. You can’t buy an OLED screen above 10 inches (in the U.S., the number is even smaller), because screen manufacturers aren’t willing to make the huge investment yet, because they’re pouring shittons of money into 3D. What’s OLED? Ok, so LCD monitor, kind of old. Basically one big ass white light behind the pixels that creates brightness. The pixels change hues to manipulate the white and create pictures on your screen of different colors. What’s the drawback behind this? Well, even when a pixel is black, it’s not COMPLETELY black, because there’s white light behind it. You can tell the difference between when a screen is off and when a screen is on and just has a black image, right? That’s because the white light in LCD’s can’t be blocked off by the pixels, and it gives black a navy blue appearance. OLED fixes this. Each pixel has its own tiny light behind it, instead of one big light. Energy efficient, smaller, and awesome, why? Because when a pixel is told to be black, the black is true black, since the tiny light between the individual pixel is turned off. So what does this mean? High contrast, more immersion, and true black colors that can actually help in gaming.

Here are some pictures to help since you can’t imagine it.

That’s my Zune HD, can you tell where the screen actually starts? No, that’s cause it’s OLED and the black colors are actually black. Pretty awesome, no?

/rant

Ok go read the rest of the site.

That’s right, Crytek, I’m looking at you, and Patrick is looking at us looking at each other… and Tyler is looking at a box. Nevertheless, I am looking at you, Crytek, because you suck at playing games. (the lols begin at 1:10).

Also, I was planning to do an Xbox 360 review, but I no longer need to. That video shows everything wrong with any console. Two birds with one stone, bitches.

Righto chaps, earlier today Bioware released their trailer for the highly anticipated/feared/zomg-they-changed-it-now-it-sucks Dragon Age 2. See it here.

Not only do we get an alright trailer, we also get a release date fort the game, so mark your calendars for March 8, 2011 if you want in on the fun.

Now, what sort of hints about the game do we get? Well, we get to see the new design for the Qunari in motion, although if you’ve been following the game’s development, then you shouldn’t be surprised by what the buggers look like now.

We also get a quick glimpse into our PC’s past. Besides confirming there will be more dragon slaying, it goes along with the storytelling method the team is using for this chapter in the series. That method being, everything is a bit of a flashback centered around Hawke, albeit with different people telling different parts. It also seems as though Hawke may be doing some things solo, rather than with a party. Granted, while you could do that in the first game, you were pretty retarded to try.

The trailer also shows the PC doing plenty of melee and then finishing things off with a kickass magic attack. So, hopefully you won’t be stuck to a supporting role if you are a mage…or maybe warriors can use magic. Idunno.

All in all, it’s a pretty damn good trailer, though it doesn’t reflect gameplay too well when it shows Hawke doing all sorts of flips and shit. Compare the SWTOR trailers to actual gameplay footage, if for some reason you’re retarded enough to believe otherwise. That said though, still excited for both games, and I’m more than certain the tards over at the official forums have something negative to say about EVERY FUCKING FRAME.

FUCK

I am clearly bored at school and I’m going to make another serious business post that’s not necessarily about Timothy’s Milk, but about hype within shit video games. Most of the time, I do of course refer to the video game series Call Of Duty. This isn’t the only franchise in the business who has hype over new games that don’t need to  be made. For example, the Bioshock series. I don’t know why they would create 2 extra Bioshock games to add to the first one. First of all, they aren’t direct sequels that continue off both stories and Bioshock 2 just straight up blows. It’s fans originally loved the darkness and eerie feeling they felt with the first game. The sequel has pretty lights and happy go lucky madness like a Borderlands game that sucks more.

As I mentioned earlier, the Call of Duty franchise is obviously overhyped ever since it’s release of Call of Duty 4. Since that was the only good game in the series, Treyarch is clearly milking the fuck out of it (in clear reference to Tim’s post) and using the hype the game has originally created. That same hype is now being absorbed by all the fanboys at my school and is pissing me off because of the failure they fail to see in the new game Black Ops. They can’t help falling into the hype. Since a majority and maybe even more people will buy and preorder that game, they’re all just falling into the deadly trap of marketing and Word of Mouth (Word of Mouth is the spreading of an idea or anything from other people that gets people to purchase that “anything”).

Another franchise that’s slowly losing it’s grip on it’s fans is the Battlefield series. I find it incredibly retarded to bring 3 modern games out in public in a radius of 1 year. Bad Company 2 is in no doubt, an amazing game. Medal of Honor was brought out due to the hype brought by the players of Bad Company 2. Battlefield 3, a brand new game that will be in beta within a year’s release of MoH. Clearly, hype is being brought up by many of the original players of Bad Company 2. Again Word of Mouth is put in play, and more retards are brought into the world of terrible First Person Shooters.

I say, fuck it all and just be smart about the whole thing. No one asked you to fall in the trap of peer pressure. America is downs syndrome

Patrick just left me alone in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, so I figured that in my down time I’d write about an issue that’s fairly persistent in today’s video game industry: the milking of franchises and brand names. It’s probably the most greedy thing anyone can do: release a game that’s the first of its’ kind, build up a fanbase for it, and then throw away all of that hard work (that actually payed off) within a year. Half the time it’s not even the same studio working on the project, because since they had the sense to deliver such a great product, that they poured their hearts into, they simply won’t follow it up with trash. When publishers do this to a franchise, they kill off any sort of identity that the franchise name carried for itself. For example, a franchise name usually, and should, suggest: genre, engine, gameplay, multiplayer vs. singleplayer, studio. Half-Life 2: Episode 3: we know it’s going to be an FPS running on Source with similar gameplay to Half-Life 2, along with a heavy focus on intense and gripping narrative in the singleplayer mode that will follow up the events of Episode 2. We also know that Valve’s going to develop it, because it’s the Half-Life intellectual property.

However, in the case of Call of Duty: the name itself no longer carries any sort of information, let alone identity, along with the rest of the title. When we think of a future Call of Duty game (beyond Black Ops), do we know if it will be an FPS? Do we know who will develop it? Do we know if it will be a single player narrative, or a multiplayer fragfest, or both? Do we know what characters there will be? No, Activision throws away any meaning that the Call of Duty name has. Call of Duty can be an MMO, an FPS, an action adventure title, pretty much anything at this point. Now, it would be great if Activision used the Call of Duty name to get exciting, NEW, innovative features out in these different genres that would otherwise get unnoticed, but Activision just wants the quick, quick, buck, as they have showed with previous, generic, Call of Duty titles.

I brought up Valve earlier, and how they use the Half-Life name to great avail, but they’re also falling into the trap of milking titles, yet in another sense. Left 4 Dead 2 was predictable, it was too soon, and it was too little. Turtle Rock Studios, who had always worked closely with Valve, was a fairly small team, and worked on Left 4 Dead since the release of Counter-Strike: Source. The team poured their hearts into Left 4 Dead, and Valve, realizing the huge potential in the title, bought out Turtle Rock, who release the game, but many people said it felt incomplete, as you can see here. However, people made the safe assumption, that Valve, like with Team Fortress 2, would support the title to a phenomenal extent. This was a very safe assumption, especially since Valve claimed that the DLC would roll out for Left 4 Dead at a much quicker pace than those of Team Fortress 2, as you can read here. Obviously, this wasn’t the case, as many of you know. Personally, I was getting into the competitive scene for Left 4 Dead, which was a huge blast. The community set up an IRC where competitive matches could be held. However, E3 rolled in and Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2. Immediately, the community for Left 4 Dead died, and since release we have had Survival DLC, 2 maps that were missing out of the original package, and Crash Course. Team Fortress 2 received all major class updates, along with many more bug fixes, which even Left 4 Dead does not have.

Milking… it’s a problem. What can you do? Well, money talks.