New Move For Me

I have just received a new Playstation Move Starter Pack from my girlfriend as a birthday gift. Really didn't see this one coming, so I'm all giddly right now thinking of getting home and experiencing some 1:1 motion sensing yumminess :).

Hopefully it works much better than the Wii's motion plus hardware, which in my opinion already works amazingly good.

Mobile Phone Gaming (and a little something about the Samsung Wave)

Mobile phones aren't exactly my cup of tea when it comes to portable gaming (I have my DS and PSP to keep me company there), but there's been a pretty good supply of games coming out for these phones that I can't help but be intrigued by what they can actually offer.

I recently got myself a Samsung Wave, Samsung's new flagship phone that debuted side by side with their new Bada OS. Now the phone itself is pretty slick, has a really good camera and runs very very smooth. I mean, I haven't had the pleasure of toying around with today's smartphones but from what I've tried, oftentimes they felt sluggish when compared to the inevitable iphone. The Wave on the other hand feels just as smooth and the screen is something to die for! It looks like they slapped a really good LED HDTV in there for the screen, its that good.

Moving to the nerdy stuff, this phone packs hardware that can give almost any modern phone a run for its money (yes, even the new iphone 4). Unless I'm wrong, this phone contains the same cpu as the iphone 4 (a 1 ghz custom designed chip that's leagues faster than the usual snapdragon cpu in some android phones) but a more advanced gpu. More like a 1.5 version of the GPU of the iphone 4, so that should mean better game performance. Unfortunately from the many Gameloft ports I've tried on this phone, they seem to depict the opposite (read: really shoddy framerates). Please Gameloft, put a little bit more love on your ports. Maybe Bada is to blame for being an OS in its infancy stages, but other games seem to run just as good as their iphone siblings so c'mon, at least put a little bit more effort and don't just do it for the quick cash-ins.

Anyway, paid apps just arrived here in the Philippines and I was able to purchase both Twin Blades and ExZeus for my Wave and let me just say, these games look awesome for phones! I may be a bit behind since these were already released on other platforms before, but at least I didn't have to shell out a fortune just to have a phone that can run them.

Epic's Project Sword, aka Unreal Engine 3 drool, on the iphone 4, courtesy of IGN

Mobile gaming seems to be hittng a high note nowadays, with big time developers jumping aboard and testing the waters. ID has their latest engine running on the iphone 4 at perfect 60fps and Epic just released an amazing iphone playable demo of unreal engine 3. I hope though these developers and publishers give other competing mobile phones some love since they are more than capable to doing what the iphone's capable of.

I've reached the end of Halo Reach

Beaten and conquered (well, not exactly until I beat it in Legendary), I've finally completed all the main Halo games' campaigns yesterday. ODST is the only thing that's missing so I'm still trying to find time to beat that.

So what do I think about Bungie's final Halo game? Can't say much about multiplayer but the single player campaign seems to deliver everything Halo fans wanted. More epic set pieces, larger levels with lots of vehicle driving, and none of that corridor map crap found in previous Halo games. Yeah graphics are a mixed bag but overall, the game is just awesome! I always loved the single player campaigns of past Halo games but always put Halo CE on the top of them all. Now I can finally put that to rest as Halo Reach has finally succeeded in overthrowing the original in just about everything.

Mass Effect Marathon? Hell Yeah!

Getting ready for Mass Effect 2, I'm set to complete the prequel on my PC just so I can get my save game to carry over haha. I never finished Mass Effect 1 due to my 360 suffering a heart attack, so it'll be refreshing to play it at the best settings on my PC (hopefully my e8400 will cope. Heard that you need a quadie for the best possible performance)

Dark Void = Straight to the Void

I'm sorry to say this but it looks like Capcom and Airtight Games' Dark Void is destined to be a complete failure. In fact, the game never even grabbed my attention with the 1st trailers shown last year. I might be talking too early since I've only played through the training and 1st mission on my PC, but from what I've seen (andheard from other people who have tried out the demo), things are not looking good.

Controls are not that responsive (especially during flight), graphics are damn mediocre for a 2010 title even at the highest settings, and the gameplay itself plays like a crippled Gears of War wannabe with Rocketeer-esque sections that just are not enjoyable based on that short training course in the beginning. Plus despite the bad visuals, performance on the PC doesn't make much sense especially with all the stuttering and crap. My GTX 275 should be handling the Unreal engine with ease but that doesn't seem to be the case here!

So what just happened here? Airtight Games is composed of people who worked on one of the best Xbox games released back then, Crimson Skies, so its surprising to see them come up with a game this bad. If you ask me, Capcom should have just developed this title themselves instead of having another company do it since I believe their proprietary engine would have done wonders here (I mean, just compare this to something like Lost Planet, which was one of Capcom's first next generation games lol. Leagues apart in both performance and quality). So sad to see a very cool concept executed so poorly.

09.09.09

Damn, I skipped this all important date because of work. Anyway, what's so special with it you ask (particularly the numbers)? Why, it was when the Dreamcast first launched in the US silly (September 9, 1999).

An amazing console backed by an amazing lineup of games, the Dreamcast was one of the best things that ever happened in the gaming industry. Heck, I loved it so much that I actually have 3 working units at home right now (c'mon, their dirt cheap now).

Launching in the US, it went head-to-head with the Playstation's own Final Fantasy 8. As much as I loved the Final Fantasy series, we bought a Dreamcast instead for Christmas. The first time we laid eyes on NBA 2k and Soul Calibur, everyone at home was floored. It was crazy, truly a generation ahead of everything! All the other games were great and the Dreamcast was just in a league of its own.

So how did it fall so badly? Yep, Sony and their senseless "Playstation 2 will be better than God" banter stole a lot of the thunder. Now don't get me wrong, the PS2 was a great machine, but it wasn't exactly the behemoth Sony was preaching. In fact a lot of times, it had a lot of inferior looking games compared to the Dreamcast. If Sega's console didn't just die so quickly, I can assure you that it would have been able to stand up against the PS2's best looking titles.

In the end, for all the true gamers out there, the Dreamcast will always live in our hearts (yes, can you feel the cheesyness haha). Let's all celebrate this 10th year anniversary by showing our lil friend here some gaming love :)

Leaked PC Game "Batman: Arkham Asylum" has problems?

Yep, if you are one of those downloading the leaked direct2drive copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum right now, be warned that it contains a lot of game breaking and irritating bugs in it. It might be an early beta copy because some of the core files are actually older than the ones found in the demo. Or maybe its just a part of the Joker's gloriously sprung trap lol.

Anyway, one fix to get physx working was to copy over some of the demo files. Unfortunately, you'll still encounter frequent crashes due to some other files missing. The grappling hook also doesn't work in some key points and there are places where NPCs will just stop spawning. Game breaking indeed.

It might be a faulty crack, or a faulty beta release or whatever. The game is still a few days away from release and its a leaked copy so you can't blame the developers. Just buy it when it comes out, the developers deserve it for giving us the best comic book game ever.