Close Quarters

Battlefield 3 (PS3′s best shooter in my opinion) is just about to get ugly! You can view that in two ways, I will explain!

Coming in June will be the all new Close Quarters DLC – here are the boring details.

• Publisher:Electronic Arts
• Developer:DICE
• Formats:Playstation 3,PC and Xbox 360
• Release:June 2012
• Players:2-16
• Rating:ESRB Mature 17+,PEGI 16+

Here are the exciting details:

• Get plunged into frantic and relentless infantry combat
• Check your corners as death can come from any angle
• HD destruction lets you reduce entire locales to ruin
• Earn new weapons and bring them back to the base game
• Complete new assignments and equip unique dog tags
• Play in new ways, mixing team play and instant action

What is it? Well its 4 new maps that you can use you BF3 skills on, but these maps differ as the name suggests as theses are all close quarter battles so you can lose that sniper rifle and forget about your tanks and helos (I am only guess this part but I think its a pretty safe bet).

Close Quarters

Watch the video and be blown away, literally. DICE destruction on a huge scale happening all around you in frantic CQB (Close Quarter Battles) is going to be amazing. Your eyes and ears will hurt after playing this as it can only be a frantic HD mess of death and destruction.

I am looking forward to this as it looks great and there are new weapons and dog tags to earn – and because I play a little COD from time to time. There in lies the problem – have DICE done this to appeal to the COD junkies? Will our beloved Battlefield ever be the same after this?

Who really knows. We’ll just have to wait and see…

http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3/1/close-quarters

 

Assassins Creed 1 2 and 3, Altair Ezio and Connor

Assassins Creed 3 is the fifth game in the series – woah! Wait. I know what you are thinking how come its called Assassins Creed 3 then?

Well its all about that guy on the right who we call Connor. His actual name is Ratohnhaké:ton ,pronounced Ra-doon-ha-gay-doon, thankfully we can call him Connor.  (Source:http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Connor). Connor is our third protagonist (assassin) and descendant of the ever annoying Desmond. We are told that this could be the end of Desmond’s story and the biggest Assassins Creed adventure yet.

The additions (diversions) to Ezio’s story have been fun and reasonably well received but have not really taken the visuals experience further – we have still spent most of our time in Italy, the trip to Turkey was fun but did it really look that much different? Some warmer colours maybe but mostly the game feels very familiar.

Assassins Creed 3 had to take a trip west, whether it had been to French Revolution France or Victorian England we all wanted a new location. Ubisoft have sent us to the US and the setting of the American revolutionary War of Independence.

Connor (our Assassin) is still dressed in white, and will still battle predominantly with blades. But the location does not have tall cathedrals and temples of Rome etc so how will we move in this new world? We shall climb trees and mountains, probably there will be more horse riding and I suspect a wagon chase or two.

There have been some comparisons made with Red Dead Redemption and some speculation that you will trade in animal pelts much the same way Marsden does.

All in all we have had a wrecking ball of marketing hit us in such a short space of time and AC3 looks like it will be talk of the town, or out post, for some time yet!

For more speculation and a break down of the recent trailer go visit IGN now:

http://uk.games.ign.com/articles/122/1220172p1.html

Yes we were a little worried about the Assassin’s Creed franchise – no we are not any more!

This looks great. Meh it still looks like the old Ezio, but the surroundings, the snow – looks great.

Could this be the injection Assassin’s Creed needed?

If you haven’t seen Game of Thrones but thought you should give it a try now is your chance.

Check out the reviews on Amazon and you will see just how much praise this TV show gets. If you have never heard of Game of Thrones it was one of Sky’s exclusive’s for the new Sky Atlantic channel – and arguably the best thing on Sky at the time. Its a medieval, dark soap opera! Yes it is!

Love, lust, secrets, consipracy, drinking and fighting…

Now you can enjoy the whole first season again and on Blu Ray.

It’s frightening how easy it is to lose yourself in the high definition world of Westeros. Colors are immaculate, primaries are bold and visceral, black levels are dark and ominous, skintones are dead on (pale in the frosty north, lovely in the summery south), and contrast and clarity are nothing short of impeccable. Shadows hang heavy on occasion, but only as much as its cinematographers and showrunners allow. – www.blu-ray.com

I have been feeling slightly jaded with Ubisoft’s AC series – I haven’t even picked up Revelations. So a much needed change of scenery can only help right? Lets hope so.

Now Gamer’s Dave Cook has laid out his argument why the recently surfaced rumours and images are a good move form the series.

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Assassin’s Creed 3 looks likely to be set during the American Revolution, according to a supposed character leak. We delve deeper into the rumours to discuss why this setting makes perfect sense for Ubisoft’s series.

via Assassin’s Creed 3 Setting: Why The American Revolution Is Perfect (Column) – NowGamer.

More snippets from this article:

The first solid mention of the era came in Chapter 7 of Subject 16’s glyph trials in Assassin’s Creed 2. Solving the puzzles cause the Animus AI to say, “What is the purpose of all of this? 30. 476. 1337. 1431. 1520. 1776. 1861. 1914. 1929. 1939. 1945. 1950. 1955. 1962. 1990. 1994. 1995. 2001. It does not make sense. Emotion-centers activated. Now I understand.”

1776 is, again, the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed. Assassin’s member Shaun also makes mention of the Declaration of Independence when explaining how to decode a cipher that Machiavelli hands Ezio in Assassin’s Creed 2.

“It’s a cipher with a unique, disposable key. Imagine if someone used the first letter of every word in the Declaration of Independence to encipher something. Well, without the Declaration, you couldn’t decrypt it.”

Imagine the world of Red Dead Redemption in Assassin’s Creed 3 and you can start to see how this would work. So suddenly this character isn’t just relying on buildings and structures that just happen to be right where he wants them, he’s adapting to survive, similar to how Snake does what he can to survive in Metal Gear Solid 3.

Apart from countryside areas, is would make sense to include Alamo-style forts and other heavily guarded structures that this new character must infiltrate. The real sweetener would be a visit to a fledgling New York, in the same vein as the Leonardo Di Caprio film Gangs of New York.

Or even the Mel Gibson vehicle The Patriot, in which Gibson and Heath Ledger form a rebel militia group to drive the British our of America in 1776. This led to insane war scenes, lots of stelthy scheming and conspiracies. The subject material is ripe for the Assassin’s Creed 3 treatment.

The geography might be off on this one, but New York would give fans of Assassin’s Creed’s high-flying moments a real dose of the climbing and leaping they know and love. Plus, the setting would be downright awesome.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter will include co-op and a one shot kill mode according to a new report in the latest OXM magazine.

According to the mag (via CVG) the game will be powered by Battlefield 3′s Frostbite 2.0, allowing for details such as “swaying chandeliers, splinters fraying from support beams and gunfire that sends papers flying from desks.”

The game’s story is to be loosely set on actual events and soldiers, and is co-written by real operators during mission downtime. Heroes from the last game – Preacher, Voodoo, Mother and others will also return and will be seen visiting locations such as a flooded Isabela City in the Philippines.

Other details show that players will be given slightly more choice in single player scenario’s this time around, while details on Multiplayer also emerged, revealing that Danger Close are working on this part of the game and that gamers should also expect “a one-shot-kill hardcore mode and some kind of co-op support.”

Medal of Honor Warfighter is due for release this October.

via New Medal of Honor Warfighter details emerge.

Thanks to Shopto.net for the info in this post – go show them some love on Facebook…

Far Cry 3 is going to be massive, and freer than its predecessors, yet its open world will have more purpose.

That’s according to the game’s lead designer Jamie Keen, who talked with IGN about how the developer has learned from Far Cry 2 and improved on it for the sequel.

“The open world was cool, it was great, but it never quite comes to anything,” he said of FC2. “It’s kind of left open and you just get a bit lost in it. We’re trying to make sure we don’t end up in that situation. It’s important that it has that sense of exploration, but it needs to be getting towards something.”

But players shouldn’t worry about this newfound focus restricting their freedom. “It’s important that you have that sense that you can do something because you want to. You’re always enabled by the game,” he said.

via News: Far Cry 3 ‘is about enabling the player’ – ComputerAndVideoGames.com.

PS Vita of course!

So the moment is almost here. I guess you are probably not even reading this right now, but are actually looking up all sorts of crap on the internet that you hope to do with your new PS Vita when it arrives tomorrow!

Now is not the time to read reviews!

Now is not the time to wonder if it was worth it!

Now is the time to go to bed early because you can be sure that tomorrow you will not want to go to bed and will want to stay up as late as your weary, bleary, teary eyes will allow…

For in a matter of hours if you are lucky you will be holding in your hand the most powerful handheld games console ever!

I didn’t order one. I probably should have cos I am reading reviews and looking up all sorts of stuff that I could be doing with my shiny new PS Vita tomorrow had I ordered one.

Instead I will be going to work as usual wondering what life would be like if I had ordered a PS Vita.

Have fun and let me know how you get on!

Skylanders Adventure Pack

Dear Activision,

Please Please Please get a grip of yourselves!

For around 2-3 months now my son has had an obsession with Skylanders, so have half his friends and wait for it half the children on the planet. So why can’t you just make some more figures?

Its kinda fun shopping round for the best price, pre-ordering adventure packs and…  wait – no it isn’t!  We can’t find more than half of these characters and the availability of some including the adventure packs is simply a joke.

Do you realise what it is like to have an 8 year old boy? Do you want to make some money? Do you want to sell bucket loads of copies of the new Skylanders Giant game when it comes out later this year? If you the answer is yes to any of these questions please make some more characters! NOW!!!!

Yours desperately frustrated

Tim Norris

Father and Gamer

I caught this article on IGN yesterday, and while I can’t comment on all the films listed I can agree with some.  The age of Blu Ray and HD movies is here but we do we have to watch all our films in this glorious digital format? I don’t think so; some films lend themselves to this digital mastery but others like comedies don’t really need to be presented in this way do they?

Anyway, it seems that even some studios don’t feel the films need the digital treatment either – yet they still slap the shoddy film onto a blu ray disc and charge twice as much as they should for it!

Sometimes, for whatever reason, a title that probably should have gotten a fresh hi-def remaster, a hearty special edition or high resolution audio mix just doesn’t get the treatment it deserves. Indie distributors are often the culprits here, opting for cheaper 1080i encodes or upconverted HDTV copies of the film, often mastered in an incorrect aspect ratio. This results is a lot of consumer confusion, anger or disappointment, especially when a well-known title slips into the hands of a mediocre distributor. But while the blame may be entirely theirs, sometimes it’s completely out of the distributors’ hands. Legal issues, money issues, time constraints, shoddy film elements – these are all factors that help explain why bad discs make it to the market.

Source – Top 25 Worst Blu-rays – Blu-ray Feature at IGN.