Dann's Vidya Adventures

That's right. Duke is back.

2010-09-03T15:43:00.000-07:00

Duke's been spotted at PAX 2010, with these neat little picture posters, and a live demo! Here's some info:

He's still cracking jokes, chewing bubblegum, and getting oral sex from two ladies at a time when he's not using his guns — or his buggy — to obliterate his enemies.
Duke Nukem Forever is, of course, a first person shooter. The controls are standard, mapped as you'd expect on the Xbox 360 controller on which I played the game. Zoom on the left trigger. Shoot on the right. Click the right stick to crouch. But, before all that, at the start of the demo, pull the right trigger to piss.
The demo starts with a first person view of the urinal. You can make Duke urinate as much as you want. The wait is over!
Well, no that's not what this game is about. You're in a football locker room. There are a couple of hot tubs and, in the main area, some soldiers gearing up for a fight. On the whiteboard they plan their move against the beast on the field. Their strategy: cockblock. You can draw on the whiteboard
The game is 100% in the spirit of classic Duke. By this point in the demo you've been hit with "Hail to the King, Baby," and sooner or later he's whistling, laughing at the bad guys he kills and lamenting that "Those alien bastards are going to pay for shooting up my ride."
When you leave the locker room, you race down some halls where aliens are fighting soldiers. These scripted sequences show some of the destructibility (mostly of your allies' limbs) and the smoke and explosion effects in the game. The effects look modern, though not beyond what we see in other games.
Out in the field, things became more impressive. A massive monster — the big aliens seen in leaked Duke artwork — is stomping across the grass. You've gone from just having your fists up to being armed with The Devastator, a big gun in each hand. Health is regenerative and the big bad guy wasn't that tough in the demo. I unloaded my ammo into him, waited for the next ammo drop, and then fired some more. Duke finished him with a button-prompted melee move.
The finale: press a button to do a "field goal," which is a punt of the monster's eye down the field.
Cue the Duke Nukem Forever logo and a camera pulls back to show that Duke, in first-person, was playing a video game. He's got a gold Xbox 360 controller with the face buttons re-named as D, U, K and E. There's a busty lady in a schoolgirl outfit near the bottom of your first-person view. And there's a second one. One stands up and wipes her mouth.

"What about the game, was it any good?" one of them asks.
"Yeah, but after 12 fucking years it should be," he answers.
After that the demo jumped forward to level 15, which began as a driving level. Duke was in a dune buggy, racing down a canyon as an alien shuttle streamed forward overhead. The buggy can boost for big jumps and, since aliens do run in its way, run over bad guys with a splat. Quickly, though, I was out of the buggy and running Duke toward an enemy turret, his laser-sighted pistol in hand. I was also able to get a railgun which had a scope and was good for headshots.
One of the most prominent tech elements of the game is a depth-of-field aspect which blurs enemies who aren't in Duke's focus. Of the obvious tech demonstrations happening in the demo — the destruction shown as cacti splintered from gunfire, the shattered mirror back in the locker room — this blurring effect was the only one that was distracting.
People wondered how Duke Nukem would make his return. Would a parody video game character steeped in 80s absurdity play in 2010? Or would he have to be a parody of a parody? It seems from the demo that Duke is strictly himself and that the kind of profane, naughty, steroid-injected humor of the Duke of old is indeed what will play in 2010 — or in 2011, to be more specific. The game is set for a 2011 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Gearbox Software is working on the game with other studios and, we believe, creators who used to be on the project at 3D Realms.
To those who don't know the Duke Nukem Forever story, the game might seem like a standard first-person shooter with a few technological gimmicks and a more absurd, played-for-laughs attitude than today's more straight-faced but equally gruff shooter games. For those who know the DNF tale, this is the king returned as if through a time machine, a playable time capsule of one of gaming's wrongest icons.
P.S. The trailer being shown behind closed doors for the game includes strippers and a three breasted giant monster. Of the latter, Duke says, "Hell, I'd still hit it."

Oh dear, don't take his PS3 away!

2010-09-02T16:36:00.001-07:00

A Florida deputy sheriff is under investigation for allegedly choking his wife after she threated to take away his Playstation 3, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Lake County Deputy Gary French was not charged nor was he arrested, but was part of an internal investigation conducted by the sheriff's office. Deputies say that French told him that he put a towel around his wife's neck and squeezed after she threated to take away his PS3.
The investigation was forwarded to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. French's punishment for lying to police was a transfer to the local county jail, where he'll work as a detention officer.
Report: Lake deputy accused of choking wife in dispute about his Playstation 3 [Orlando Sentinel]

Oh man, ladies, don't take away your husband's game systems, or make sure he's sane enough to operate without a PS3 in the future!

Guild Wars!

2010-09-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

So two friends just bought Guild Wars, and we're all running around playing. Its their first time. Should be a fun little adventure. I'm playing a Ranger. I already have an E/M I'll use later on from Factions but I've never made a Ranger. Who knows, I might just stick with it if I'm feeling up to the idea. :) Neat little game everyone should play at least once. Sure, its not like other MMOs but its got hours of entertainment and story campaign in it. Go play it!

2010-09-01T02:30:00.000-07:00

A few new images surfaced showing an outline of Yun's skateboard and Yang's skates. You may have seen these before, they were originally rumored to be fake, but as you can see from the scans of Arcadia Magazine, they're quite real.

These images likely mean Yun and Yang will be added to Super Street Fighter 4's arcade release as playable fighters. The skateboard and roller skates have long been associated with these two — in their artwork and during in-game sequences in the Street Fighter 3 series.

These outlines signal the start of the "hints" the Japanese SSF4 development team said would be coming our way concerning who the new characters are.

Also, current rumors claim there will be six new fighters total, so there may be more announcements — or hints — coming in the near future.

So, it seems that SSF4 will be getting some new fighters to play around with. Sounds great. In a related topic, I've got a fever to play SF4, but since no one plays it, the only people who do have horrible connections. Such a shame..

Video games to train military?

2010-08-31T13:38:00.000-07:00

Armed with M-4 automatic rifles, swathed in body armor and combat fatigues, the five man U.S. Special Forces Airborne entry team stacks up outside the entrance to the house.

An explosion sends bits of the door flying inside. The men slide through the still-smoking opening, fanning to the right and left, guns up, safeties off, fingers on triggers. The live rounds start flying almost immediately. Bullets tear through the men standing inside the house, knocking them to the ground. One round hits a terrorist in the head, a bright red plume of blood splatters against the wall.
Special Forces don't usually play games, but for their Fort Bragg training they sometimes make an exception to that rule.
The Laser Shot Virtual Shoot House gives these specialized warriors a chance to blow in doors, fire live ammo and take out life-sized enemies, all in a real environment helped along by quite a bit of video game technology.
The soldiers are deadly serious about their training. The weapons and ammo they use very real. But their opponents are life-sized video game avatars, the blood virtual, the threat they pose imagined. And the walls these digital enemies stand in front of are actually high-tech video screens that can project images and automatically seal up after a round passes through them.
Based in Houston, Texas, Laser Shot has been around for about 10 years now, slowly designing more intricate, more realistic, more useful "firearms training solutions" for the military and police. But what's that mean?
It means they design, develop and deliver virtual kill houses: Entire bulletproof homes created to look like bases of operation for Al-Qaeda, gang bangers, hostage takers, bad guys. Inside these homes are rooms plated floor to ceiling in ballistic tiles and covered in special self-sealing screens. Above each screen is mounted a high-resolution projector designed to throw a moving image on a wall from a very short distance without creating shadows. The whole thing is tied into an intricate network of computers that serves as the brains for the many bad guys found in the kill house. These enemies, like real world ones, are programmed to think, to see, to react.

Military using "video games" to train? More likely then you'd think. At least its safe, and hell, who doesn't think laser tag is fun?

Bioshock movie?

2010-08-31T02:10:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is working on a big screen version of underwater opus BioShock. There have been stops and starts, but the game's designer Ken Levine assures the film adaption is being "actively" worked on.
"I will say that it is still an active thing," Levine tells DC radio station 106.7. "And it is something we are actively talking about and actively working on."
That doesn't mean that filming of the project is 100 percent certain. "I can't tell you whether — you know, the movie business is complicated — I can't tell you whether it's going to happen for sure or it's not going to happen for sure," Levin adds. "But it's something we are actively discussing, quite actively, and actively working on."
Levine also discussed the challenges of bringing BioShock to live in cinema. In the game, protagonist Jack is a non-entity. "You can't really do that in a movie," Levin says. "That's your guy, that's the guy you are following through."
The trick is to stay true to the game and also round out the character "so he's not literally a hand with a gun" and "so he's actually a person who is going through some sort of progression through his life."
Honoring the source material and making it work as a film is, as Levine notes, a "super, super challenge".
Gore Verbinski, the director behind the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, was originally going to helm the project. But after budget snags, he switched to producing. He is currently working on a handful of projects.
In his place, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto, 28 Weeks Later) has signed on to direct the movie version of BioShock. Verbinski has stated that the film version needs to be R-rated — a "hard R" — and not PG-13.

Now, this sounds like a great idea. I personally think a movie in an FPS view would be a nice change, interesting at that. Let's see how they stay true to the material in the future. It's swell they're not wanting to make a movie just for the money, and actually want it to be decent.

2010-08-30T22:31:00.001-07:00

That's right! Remember this fun game right here? This is what will be taking up a majority of my time tonight. Aww yeah SSX 3 you are so much fun.

2010-08-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

I've recently gotten into vanilla Street Fighter 4. I know I'm a bit late, but I own no console to play the newer edition. I'm loving the game so far, as its the first fighter I've gotten into. Won my first random online match last night, but as you can see, everyone has absolutely horrid connections, so its hard to find a Ranked match, or even a Normal match!

Original Content

2010-08-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

This will be my blog that I talk about video games I play or new games coming out that look interesting and entertaining. I hope to create a decent blog people will come to for news and the like. Let's hope it all works out as planned. See ya around!