Skyrim: Dawnguard DLC Review

Bethesda's first DLC is out for Xbox now and is it feels great to get back into the world of Skyrim. Now only if I could remember what house I left my stuff in. Ah well, at least I still have some things in Breezehome in Whiterun. Speaking which, with Dawnguard downloaded as soon as you return to any city during the night, it will be attacked by several vampires along with an orc vampire hunter named Durak fighting them off alongside the guards and locals. Fight off the vampires and Durak will ask you to join the Dawnguard. Accept his request to start this quest line. Your map will be updated with Fort Dawnguard's location.

From there you meet Isran who immediately sends you off to go investigate a cave filled with vampires. Equip your fire spells!  At the end of the cave where you free a woman from her slumber and escort her home is where you get to make the ultimate choice of this quest line. Join her father Lord Harkon or go back and Report to Isran. If you join Lord Harkon you are given the new ability to transform into a Vampire Lord. Come on, look at that! Who doesn't want to be this bad ass vampire lord.

Meet the Pyro

If you're a fan of Team Fortress 2 and love their animated shorts, well here's their latest with "Meet the Pyro"
I can't get enough of these.
Also if you like it and want to see all their "Meet the Team" shorts check out their website here.
http://www.tf2.com/movies.php

If you're interested in making your own movies with TF2 check out http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com

Harley Quinn's Revenge DLC Review

When I first heard on IGN that there were some new trophies featuring Joker's main squeeze, Harley Quinn, I imagined the standard character DLC like with Robin, Nightwing, and even from Arkham Asylum's PS3 exclusive of Joker's challenge maps. I was hoping to play as the psychotic sidekick wielding her giant mallet against Arkham gaurds and Gotham's police force as with Joker. We later learn prior E3 that it would be a extension of the game.

The DLC is available now for download or if you don't already have Arkham City you can get the Game Of The Year Edition which will include Harley Quinn's Revenge along with all the DLC already out there plus the animated movie of Batman: Year One. Also included, terrible cover art.

The DLC continues a few weeks after the main story of the game so **BE WARNED! SPOILERS AHEAD!**

Spec Ops launch trailer and "What's in a name?"

Spec Ops is available in stores today. I was actually looking forward to this a couple of years ago when I first heard of it. Then it disappeared. Not sure what the details was but it completely dropped from my radar until sometime this year when I started seeing trailers for it and interviews at E3 from GameTrailers.com. Anyways IT'S BACK but I'm not as excited anymore and there's to much right now for me to pick it up. What I found interesting was this trailer that popped up today. It reminded my of the name of a game I heard of in the making and thought damn this would be the perfect trailer for that game. Here's the trailer and far below it is what I think this trailer would be perfect for a certain game I'll mention below

Enter Dawngaurd!!

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has finally released it's first, and hopefully not last, DLC.
The "Dawngaurd" DLC is available on now available for Xbox 360 owners. Unfortunately for PC and PS3 it will be released 30 days later.

Here's a trailer of what's in store:

Uncharted Movies!

Not exactly! Although we won't be seeing Nathan Drake on the silver screen in 3D you can catch him on the Youtubes. Reddit user morphinapg has re-cut all the cut-scenes including his in-game scenes to stitch together what happens inbetween to give us 3 glorious feature length Uncharted films. Now I'm saying you shouldn't buy these games and just watch the films. The Uncharted games are some of the best games on the PS3. Unfortunately for many that's just the thing. They're exclusive to the PS3. Something I didn't have up till a few years ago when the PS3 Slim first arrived at its lower price point and I just figured I need a blu-ray player and the PS3 just happens to be one of the best blu-ray players out there. I was on Xbox because it's what all my friends had playing Gears of War multiplayer. So the obvious choice was join. But I digress. This could possibly push people into purchasing a PS3 just to play these games because of how awesome they are. Besides that it's just great to be able to share this modern day version of Indian Jones with those who aren't fortunate enough to own a PS3. These are some of THE BEST action adventure games I've had the delight to play. From the amazing voice acting and great back and forth dialogue to the script to the crazy action sequences to the minor details of how Drake reacts to his environment during gameplay really make this one of The Greats!

Anyways without further ado here is the Uncharted trilogy!!

Super Smash Bros: Nintendo X BandaiNamco?

A few days ago on WiiUDaily.com they announce that they have started development on the new Smash Bros. Kotaku's journalist Brian Ashcraft noticed something on Nintendo's website in the messages put out by Sora's Masahiro Sakurai and Namco's Masaya Kobayashi. He noticed that Masahiro Sakurai will be in charge of the project but Namco's team will be the ones developing it entirely.

Quoted here Masaya Kobayashi says:

Crysis 3 took an arrow in the knee

Hahahaha. Couldn't have said it better myself!
Found on videogames.memebase.com

What if they were Pacman Ghosts

Artist Dash Coleman designs what other characters would look like if they were in Pacman Ghost form.
Can you guess them all? For the answers you can check out Dash's flickr page or highlight below.

Microsoft Pulls Out

Major Nelson of Xbox mentions on his blog post that Microsoft will not be attending TGS (Tokyo Game Show) as well as Gamescom in Germany. This could be a sign that Microsoft has finally given up on its attempt at it's market in Japan as it is NOT doing well there. As for why Microsoft is not going to show up at Gamescom is still a mystery. IGN speculates the possibility of its little entanglement with Motorola.

Earlier in April, Nintendo announce that they will not be going to Gamescom and will focus more on the Wii U as well as holding their own events to showcase the Wii U and its titles.

With Nintendo and Microsoft pulling out from Gamescom, Sony will have the floor all the themselves.

The Sexy Surface by Microsoft

Microsoft show's off its new tablet the Surface in this classical dubstep blend.

What I like the most is that they took that iPad cover and actually gave it a function besides putting it to sleep. There are 2 different sized covers that attaches to the tablet with a magnetic connector. The thinner one, the Touch Cover, at 3mm that is touch sensitive and the thicker one, the Type Cover, at 5mm that provides something for you to press for those that like the feel of pressing keys. Another thing is the kickstand on the back is a nice touch.

There are 2 versions of the tablet. There's the Surface for Windows RT and the Surface for Windows 8 Pro.

E3 2012 Wrap-up

Since I made this blog post-E3 I'll talk about what I've seen and what I found interesting and what really stood out this year.

This is how I covered mostly everything at E3.

Watching live streams off IGN and following up on GameTrailers and Kotaku while watching Gametrailer's coverage on SpikeTV as well as G4TV's coverage. I believe some of them have posted up videos of the full conferences from E3. If you want you can click on each websit's name for a direct link to their E3 coverage.

Console Case Mods

On facebook Attack of the Show posted a pic this siiiick Halo Xbox case mod which led me to theChive website to find 30 more pictures of some pretty awesome case mods. Click here to check out the others.

My favorites are this one definitely and number 20, 30 and 31.

Dragon's Dogma Review

Aite so capcom being known for street fighter and the resident evil series takes a stab at an open world fantasy RPG. So there's been a saturation of fantasy games recently such as Kingdoms of Amalur, Skyrim and apparently pc's hidden gem the Witcher 2 which I still intend to get. Also mmo's like WoW still around and Tera but I'll just leave that in the mmo category.

The map in Dragon's Dogma is pretty big and you will be running around great distances encountering many foes along your travels. If you've played Skyrim you probably used fast travel A LOT! That map was massive. In Dragon's Dogma you have these stones that are pretty rare and expensive that will let only let you return to a main castle to a Port Chrystal which you can place anywhere. There are no horses to ride and your stamina is limited so be wary that you have enough before engaging in battle. There are going to be some huge enemies and which you can climb and attack them at certain points or weak spots. Even creatures like griffons you can grab on to that will take you into the air while you slash away at it. much like Skyrim you have a companion you can take with you except you can have up to 3 to take with you. One is your main pawn that you create and customize. The other 2 that you hire are pawns made by other people so you can hire mine while im using him and he'll gain knowledge and experience from traveling with you. This becomes quite helpful when my pawn returns with knowledge of a quest I'm doing and can help with some insights, clues or even lead the way. Its not a multiplayer in a sense that others play with you. It's a single player game with a community of other peoples pawns walking around the cities for you to hire. From a station called Rift Stone you can enter and search what kind of pawns you're looking for to set up your ideal team. Be sure to vary your team's abilities as situations may require range or magic or physical. This adds a nice tactical touch to the pawn system.

Now the best part of the game. The COMBAT!

E3 Reveal's Unreal Engine 4 and Luminous

Last week there were 2 tech demos revealed at E3. One by Square-Enix using the their new Luminous engine and one by Epic using the new Unreal Engine 4. If you haven't seen these beautiful demo's check them out here:

Agni's Philosophy by Square-Enix

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-agnis-philosophy/731722

Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo by Epic Games

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-unreal-engine/731875

Now here's the kicker. Both of these demos are not pre-rendered shots. In the video here below of Agni's Philosophy (cam) it starts off playing the whole video but after that they show you that this is all rendered in real time! Take a look as they pause they pause and move the camera around the scene. If you're wondering why it keeps going back into it's original position that's because the camera has keys that it follows and will be forced back into place. Aside from that we see them make changes in the character and effects and run the scene again and it looks just incredible. At the end they show you a nice side-by-side of their original pre-rendered test and the real time render.

Agni's Philosophy walkthrough:

The Unreal Engine 4 was mentioned and used earlier at GDC showing off NVIDIA's GeForce680GTX found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqNh-hxme8 In the video below Epic Game's Sr. Technical Artist Alan Willard shows off how everything thing is affected by lighting and how materials and particles react to it. He then continues to talk about what they've changed to the interface for developers.

Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo walkthrough:

MY THOUGHTS:

I think both these engines look absolutely stunning. I believe by unveiling these at E3 it really shows how far behind our current generation of consoles are. It's like Epic Games and Square-Enix are saying to Microsoft and Sony "HEY! Look what we can do now. Time to update your consoles so we can do something like this on it." I definitely hope Microsoft and Sony are paying close attention to these tech demos because it's developers that are having the constrict how they make games just so it can perform smoothly on the console versions. For Battlefield 3 instead of 64 player matches on PC it was cut down in half for it's console versions, not to mention shrinking down the maps and cutting pieces off. The Call Of Duty franchise wont do destructible environments because they don't want to sacrifice framerate like Battlefield has dropping it down to 30fps on consoles. Sure with a powerful PC you can run it at 60 but the developers get a large proportion of their sales on consoles. So that's what they cater to. Also if the Wii U can't run these tech demos and Microsoft and Sony do make powerful enough systems to run this then it will be like the Wii all over again being behind in the graphics race. I really do believe Nintendo should have waited on the Wii U but that's another story for another day.

Wreck-It Ralph! The Game

Well I'm sure most of you have seen the trailer for Disney's upcoming movie with all our favorite classic video game characters "Wreck-It Ralph." If you haven't seen it yet I encourage you to check out the trailer in the video above.

For those that have seen it and want to play the Wreck-It Ralph game, completely created from the movie in all it's 8 bit glory, then click on the link here >>> http://disney.go.com/wreck-it-ralph/#/fixitfelix

ENJOY!
:)

What This Blog Is All About

Hello everyone!

My gamertag on Xbox is Rock5teady and qRock5teadYp on psn

With this blog I'd like to share my opinions about video games and report on latest in gaming news. For my friends that often don't have time to search throughout all the websites and follow developers on twitter and such you can come here and check out what the latest news. Also being an avid gamer I'll try to provide reviews for games that I pick up along the way along with maybe comparing with what other sites might be saying about the games and what I agree or disagree on. Might add in movies here and there to review.

Much Luv,

Rock5teady