With all the craze around Google Glasses, people were bound to take it further and create some awesome, brilliant videos based on what Google is working on, and I think this has got to be my favorite video.
This is what one group of people imagine Battlefield 5 will look like.
Nintendo has teamed up with Joel McHale to bring a “viral” Nintendo 3DS ad to life. It worked out pretty well, there’s some good humor and a lot of randomness to it all, which fits well with Joel McHales show Community.
Google introduces Google Quest an 8-Bit version of Google Maps in this hilarious video. The Google Quest logo and music is quite reminiscent to Enix’s very popular RPG series, Dragon Quest.
Various video game news outlets such as Joystiq, Game Informer and the internet forum NeoGaf have published a leaked image of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed 3 game and to everyone’s surprise, it doesn’t seem to include Ezio or any one of his Italian descendants. What it does seem to show is an Native American posing in front of an 13 star American flag holding a tomahawk and pistol. The time period this hints at is the American Revolution, which raises quite a few questions, mainly:
Huh?
Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a positive change and hopefully Ubisoft will be able to pull it off. I think everyone will be wondering what this character has to do with Desmond and whether Ubisoft will be introducing a whole new cast of characters for Assassin’s Creed 3. Another question is why would the game take place during the American Revolution and how are the Templars’ involved. George Washington was known to be a Freemason and there was another leaked image that showed him alongside the new character:
So was this leak deliberate to raise awareness for the game (release date is October 30, 2012) and to pique our curiosity about what is to come? We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the next few days, if Ubisoft responds or if any more information is leaked.
UPDATE:
In-game screen shots of Assassins Creed 3 have allegedly been leaked:
I love live-action trailers, especially when they’re done right, like the ones created for the Halo franchise and even more recently, the Deus Ex live-action trailer. Now Mass Effect 3 has one. Say what you will about the franchise, it has its moments, it’s a fantastic game that has some brilliant sequences and characters. I definitely can’t wait for this to come out on March 6th!
A few months ago I posted about an online campaign called Operation Rainfall in which gamers came together to pressure Nintendo to release three highly-anticipated games (Xenoblade Chronicles, the Last Story & Pandora’s Tower) in North America.
The campaign has been quite successful. For Europe, Xenoblade Chronicles has been released while Pandora’s Tower will be out on April 13th. North American gamers are getting some love as well. Earlier today there was a surprise announcement that the Last Story would be released sometime this year in North America and Xenoblade Chronicles has already gotten a release date which is on April the 6th and will be featuring this amazing piece of art on the cover:
(source)
I love video games of all genres. I’ll play anything at least once. It doesn’t always need to be artsy or deep as long as it’s fun and entertaining. I don’t discriminate – I’ll play games made for mature audiences and games made for the casual crowd. But I have to confess something: I have a hard time playing a game when it comes to the survival horror genre in particular. It’s not that I think they’re bad games… they just freak me out. I never understood the entertainment value of sitting in front of the television with a controller in hand, choosing to scare yourself.
I’ve only beaten two games that falls into this genre – Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill 4: The Room – but I’ve started countless of them and never finished any. The first was Resident Evil (which was handed to me by a friend in school in ’96, never spoke to him again) and I’ve also tried my hand at the first Silent Hill and a few others like the Clock Tower, Fatal Frame, F.E.A.R., Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (one of my favorite games I’ve never beaten). The genre has a lot of quality games, I just can’t seem to get into them much, until recently…
The critically acclaimed Dead Space. I’ve heard plenty of good things about this series. I was ready to give it a chance and I can safely say that I don’t regret it one bit. Before I started playing the game, I set out two goals for myself and those were to try and beat a chapter a day and only play it when the sun has set. What was the point of playing a survival horror game in broad daylight? I’m four chapters in and there are parts in the game that freaked me out – one particular incident involving a large tentacle-looking thing made me react vocally.
Dead Space is really well-made and made well to scare. The timing of what sounds should play when, or when certain events should occur, and what certain monsters should appear when is top notch. When you think you’re used to a particular event and think you know a monster will jump out at you from a particular vent, it won’t happen and that makes you feel more tense. When you finally see a monster ahead of you and you think you know how it’ll come at you, it just won’t and when you think you’re safe, you’re just not. You feel isolated in the game, you feel as though there’s no one left alive on the ship and you know there’s no help coming on the way because you’re so far out in space. Having a human companion who could help you shoot and kill things would chip away at that feeling of intensity and lack of security you feel as you make your way through the poorly-lit corridors of the USG Ishimura.
The power of consoles in this generation shines through with a game like Dead Space. which was released four years ago in 2008. Four-year old games on past consoles usually don’t age well. Dead Space would still look good if it was released in the past year. Never underestimate the power of sound – I can’t stress enough on the fact that if you’re a serious gamer, invest in a nice surround sound system, it adds a whole other depth to the video games you experience. The Japanese were known for putting out great survival horror games in the past, but this franchise by EA tops every one of those games (except maybe for Silent Hill). The pacing of Dead Space is set so that the game doesn’t drag and each chapter builds momentum to the next. You know something will go wrong, but you’ll never figure out what it is until it happens and that’s the magic of Dead Space.
So if you haven’t played it yet, Dead Space is available on Xbox 360, PS3 & even the PC. You can find spin-offs for your Wii & your iOS devices.
Andy Richter is pretty well known as being the partner in crime on Conan O’Briens late night talk show, but little did we know he had a role working on Bethesda’s epic game, Skyrim.
So what would Pawn Stars be like if it existed in the video game universe? Something like this:
I used to dislike playing games on my iPhone because the idea of only using the touch-screen to control the game and nothing else did not appeal to me. It felt clumsy and inaccurate. But I feel that more recently game designers have used its touch screen effectively and some quality games have been released on the device. The games I’m going to mention in this post, are games that would probably not exist if it weren’t for the iPhone, would not have received as much recognition if they were released as Flash games and just wouldn’t work as well on any other platform.
Tiny Wings was a compulsive buy. I had seen its icon with the cute little bird and just assumed it was another Angry Birds clone, but then I came across this interview with the game’s designer (Andreas Illiger) and it finally caught my interest. I decided $0.99 wasn’t much for a game that is rated 5 stars (after more than 29,000 votes) and involves a little bird trying to fly. The game only uses one button, when you touch the iPhone’s screen your little bird will dive down, when you let go, your bird will try to fly. You have to time your dives to land on downward slopes, which will help you gain more momentum as you’re coming back and help you fly higher. The game also gives you objectives to beat and the more you do, the better your score multiplier becomes, which adds to its replay value.
I stumbled upon Jetpack Joyride by accident, I was reading Joystiq and there was a mention that some iPhone games were being given away for free, Jetpack Joyride was one of them. The beauty of Jetpack Joyride (and Tiny Wings to an extent), is that it’s exterior is of a casual game, but it has quite a bit of depth that it garners to both the casual and non-casual gamer crowd. In Jetpack Joyride you avoid obstacles like lasers or missiles by flying around them to see how far you can go while attempting to complete objectives before ultimately being hit by something, collecting coins and tokens along the way that can be used to buy other equipment.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is the epitome of gaming on a touch device. It’s an audiovisual experience that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. Everything in the game can create sound when you interact with it; the water, the bushes or the trees for example. Its game-play is a nod to some of the best video games of the 90’s like the Legend of Zelda, Monkey Island (or any 90’s point&click adventure game) and the Prince of Persia. The game also incorporates Moon phases; only letting you pass a certain point when the Moon is in a certain phase, which is a nice way of making you put the game down so you can get back to your real life. I would also like to add that it would be a crime if you play this game without headphones, the game makes great use of interactive music, your interaction with the game create sounds, it’s rare to see music & sound used in such a way that it goes hand-in-hand with game-play, enhances it and elevates it. This is one of those games where words just can’t describe how amazing it is, I can sit here and type out an entire page on how good this game is and it still wont do it any justice. If you love music, if you love video games, if you love art & design, if you love something different, if you love any of those things, you should really try this out.
Other iPhone games I’m hooked on:
16 Bit Dreams 
