Final Resist4nce

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Demo Review

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:30:31 +0100

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Demo has arrived for the 360 and I must say it's a welcome arrival.

After playing only a few hours of this wonderful demo I can attest that it’s going to be one hell of a game upon launch. I am extremely glad that they actually used their heads unlike other developers and gave us a demo to help provide a smooth launch unlike Modern Warfare 2 which has been plagued with glitches since its own launch.

I have compiled a list of pros and cons for the BC Demo.

Pros

Vehicles
Team Based
Graphics
Classes have a purpose
Sound
Destructible environment
Camouflage actually works

Cons

Vehicles
Can be slow paced
Kill popup notification is kind of slow
Minor bugs
Knife
VOIP is laggy

At first glance you might notice that I put vehicles under both pros and cons and that’s because they are great they are powerful and most of all they are fun, there horrible because you always have the idiots waiting for them to spawn not doing anything.

The sound and the graphics aren’t amazing but good. One of the worst features in the game is the knife its animation is slow, and disorienting. Secondly there is some random vibration and screen jerking that can only be explained because of explosions. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the explosions were near you but a lot of the time they aren’t.

I am extremely excited to play this game when it is finished and ready for launch. I already have some great story’s from playing with friends the team aspect is great and a welcome change to the lone wolf shooters that have flooded the market today. The demo is scheduled to be brought down sometime in Febuary to help fix any issues to prepare for its release, so hurry up and get in on the action ASAP.

Watch out MW2, Battlefield is back and it’s packing one hell of a punch.

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Halo Reach Screenshots

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:42:00 +0100

EB Games has posted some rather interesting screenshots of Halo Reach, they are much better than the original leaked Halo Reach screenshots.

There is still no confirmed release date from Microsoft as of date.

Credit for these screenshots goes to IGN as EB Games has since removed them from their site.

From the looks of these pictures it seems we may definitely have a squad based shooter on our hands which could be a nice shift from the stale Halo franchise, perhaps our earlier speculations for Halo Reach might be closer than we thought.

The eleven pictures are below.

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Darksiders Review (360)

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:14:08 +0100

Famed comic book artist Joe Madureira and Vigil games just released there new game Darksiders to great success. It follows the story of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You play as War. You were mistakenly summoned to earth to start the apocalypse and destroy all of human kind. Sound familiar? Your right it doesn't. This is the first time that the Madureira name has been attached to a game. He lead the project as its creative director. Darksiders art style very closely imitates Madureira's very own comics. For a post apocalyptic setting the art style has so much color and variety. It really makes the game stand out amongst lesser titles.

Darksiders has a very unique and rich story to go along with its great art style. It shows the end times, the battle of Heaven vs. Hell. You fight demons and angels. You fight demon angels. The game takes it story very seriously. It reminds me of what Brutal Legend could have been if they wouldn't have went for the funny. As much as that game (Brutal Legend) wanted to be the 'metal game', Darksiders blows it away. From bosses that would make Eddie Briggs crap in his pants to areas that are just more "metal" that Brutal Legend. The cinematics are mostly delivered from the games engine with only the first cut scene being pre-renderd. The in-engine cut scenes are beautiful. They really show off the art style nicely and have a very cinematic movie feel. The voice acting was surprisingly awesome. Mark Hamil (Luke Skywalker) show off his impressive voice why playing as The Watcher. His voice is styled in the same way the Jokers is in Batman Arkham Asylum and The Animated series (Hamil also voices the Joker in both of these). It isn't so much a complaint but it would have been nice to hear him doing something different with his voice. War's voice was done by Liam O'Brien. He brings a dark menacing voice to his character. Wars personality is kind of non-existent. He is a one note character. Which kind of makes sense because he was created to destroy the world. I guess he can't be full of sunshine and daises.

The game play is very unexpected. This game has more in common with the Zelda series than its other hack & slash brothers. It's a true adventure game at its heart. But it still has an awesome combat system for you to play with. War has quite a few combos that are easy enough to pull off and he also has finishing moves for all of his enemies. These moves are all different depending on what enemy your fighting and all look quite awesome. From crushing heads to just cutting fool demons in half, War is lethal. It isn't all awesome though. War's blocking mechanic leaves a lot to be desired. It was really hard for me to pull of a block when I needed it. It was so hard in fact that I stopped using it and just resorted to his dash move to escape enemy attacks. The bosses that make up the game are great. Their all very different from each other and are very fun and challenging to fight. They make you incorporate you newly found weapons in order to beat them which is a great adventure game trait.

You might think that a game that is part adventure game and part action game might just be mediocre at both. Not the case here though. The action is fast and intense. The combos quickly become second nature and feel great to pull off. You will find yourself racking up 40-70 hit combos in no time. However, if you aren't giving the game your full attention you will die pretty quickly. You will go from being surrounded by enemies, slicing and dicing them to bits to a quiet adventure scene with no enemies around. The puzzles are not as complex as Zelda but lend them well to the gameplay overall. They make you think without pissing you off. The items you receive in the game are a bit typical but there all usable in combat. Which is refreshing.

The graphics of Darksiders are beautiful. I already talked about Madureira's art style and how great it is in the game. The colors pop and the environments are nice and varied. But there are some technical problems on the Xbox 360 version of the game. There is noticeable screen tearing going on though the whole game. Which is a damn shame since the art is so nice. The frame rate isn't solid and there are clipping issues. All of this can be over looked but it is there. The camera in the game isn't great. When I first started playing I felt like it was just way to close to the main character. I eventually got used to it but still felt it was to close.\

The game isn't perfect. I had a glitch where I fell through the floor of an elevator after I triggered it to go up. I fell back to the main floor where the elevator took off and couldn't call it back down. I had to load and old save and lost about 2 hours. This was only a minor set back and was the only glitch that I seen of this kind. The story is written really well but it can seem a bit to long. It defiantly seems like they added some video game elements to the story just to increase the games length. At the end of the game you are sent to receive a epic weapon that just happens to be broken into a bunch of pieces and spread across the world.

Darksiders on a whole is a great game. It hits on every level for an adventure game and makes for an even better hack n' slash. It was very nice to play a modernized Zelda game on a next gen system that was better than Nintendo's last effort, Twilight Princess. From its epic bosses to its great dungeon crawling, Darksiders is a great video game.

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Darksiders Review (PS3)

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:28:05 +0100

Darksiders. The new post apocalyptic game from Vigil Games. The story takes place in an unknown time, but seems to be in the near future. The main character who you play as, War, is one of the four horseman of the Apocalypse. As you soon find out after you begin playing, the seal that releases the four horseman was not broken and you are being blamed for the release of the demons from Hell, thus causing Heaven to send its angels to Earth to defeat them.

Right off the bat, the first thing I noticed about this game was that it was very vibrant in colors. Completely opposite of how I have always pictured apocalyptic-like settings. It is quite easy to get over as you get immersed into the story line and just go with it. Now, Darksiders isn't the greatest looking game out there, but it still does justice for any of the next gen consoles.

Next up is the combat system. I came into the game thinking there was gonna be a lot of complex combos that I would have to learn. Not the case. Darksiders is just a classic hack n slash game. You use square(for the PS3) to hack your way through the enemies and then once they become dazed, you can hit O and do like a quick finishing move. The finishing moves are flashy the first few times you see them, but after a while it gets old seeing the same little animation over and over. The one thing the game does do quite well though, is right when things start getting a little repetitive, they toss in a new item for War to use. The items you get vary from a pistol you get, to a grappling hook, to your horse, Ruin.

There were a few complications with the game. The puzzles are a plenty through out the game, but none of them are really very difficult. It takes a little bit of common sense and strategy to figure all of them out. The other issue I had with the game was the frame rate. There were some spots in the game where the frame rate would just bomb. It wasn't even a part where there was a lot of action going on for the system to try and process. The fps would just drop so fast. Mind you, it was only for a few seconds, and only happened once in a while, but when it did happen it would irritate me a little.

The game took a little while longer than I thought it was. It took me about 13 hours of play time. That is definitely worth $60 compared to most games that don't even last 10 hours. At the end of the day, it was a decent game. Great concept. This is basically the game I have been waiting for forever. It was good, but I feel like some things could have been done differently.

I give Darksiders....

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Halo + Team Fortress 2 + MW2 = Halo Reach?

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:59:13 +0100

Halo Reach is going to be a different game. Its going to be the pinnacle of Bungie trying to take back the first person shooter genre from rivals like Infinity Ward and Valve. Not much is known about the game until the beta comes out this spring. Still that doesn't keep me from comparing screen shots to other Halo games and other first person shooter games that could be an influence on Bungie's new flag ship title.

All my comparisons are going to be pure speculation seeing as how I have not played the game. But still that doesn't completely keep us from knowing what Halo Reach might be. We can easily tell that the Spartans that make up Reach are vastly different from each other and from the protagonist in the first 3 Halo games, Master Chief.

With the different designs going into all of the 6 main characters we have seen so far, you can kind of determine there play style. I noticed this the most when I looked at Game Informers cover for issue 202 pictured above. Clearly these Spartans all have there own defined roles among this group. An archetype if you want to put it that way.

The Tank. With his Huge armor and machine gun looking weapon he has to be the slow moving, tons of health, murdering tank. The reason I included the Demo man, Solider, and the Heavy from Team Fortress 2 is because I really expect him to be a hybrid of all three. Reach isn't going to have as many classes as TF2 does so theirs needs to be more flexible.

I think the flexibility will come from choosing your weapons at the start of the game along with the possibility of picking (rumored) perks. Just think about how rewarding it can be to find that perfect class in Modern Warfare. A way to play the game that some what is unique to how YOU want to play it. This is something that Reach has to answer. So lets say you could have 3 custom classes set-ups in Halo Reach. For this tank guy maybe there are three different weapons that could lend them selves to 3 different play styles. That would offer a lot of players more choice and more importantly a richer gaming experience.

Spy or Scout. How could this person not either be super fast or have a cloaking on command skill. She has only been seen carrying the very awesome Halo 1 human pistol. Even her visor indicates that she could be a super fast or sneaky class. Her visor is really large. It has to be for awesome vision while running super fast right? Also in ODST Bungie played around with different visor modes. Perhaps she could have some.

Again the flexibility and balance would have to be there for this class. We wouldn't want people sprinting around while being cloaked and just back smacking everyone. I could see her being able to use the ODST pistol perhaps if she leaning more towards spy than scout. Or the normal human pistol for some extra damage. Also from the trailer you can see that she has at least 1 fake arm. Perhaps she could get different biotic arms that would do different things.

Sniper. This is the easiest one to pin down. He is clearly the sniper. Maybe we will have some spy skills thrown in there with his strange hood thing. But he is clearly the guy you want to use when you want to pick people off from really far away. So lets just move on shall we.

The Commander. This is by far the most intresting and the hardest to nail down. He is addressed in the "Welcome to Reach" trailer as the Commander. I am not really sure if we would be a playable class in multi-player. More than likely he will have a huge presence in single player but every thing about his archetype would all be guess work. But that's what were doing here.

So let's just say that he is a multi-player class. What if you could you assign objectives to the rest of your squad. By telling them to take this point or to defend this flag. If you look closely at his left hand (pictured) you can see a small screen of some kind. Perhaps this lets you bring up a map type feature to issue these commands. Or maybe lets say your tank class on your team gets 10 kills in a row letting you use some kind of kill streak reward as the commander a la Modern Warfare 2. I mean sure MW2 lets every person gets to call in there own kill streak rewards but just think how much more team work would come out of the game by letting 1 (leader) person do it.

Rusher. The images of this guy make me think he is extremely aggressive. Looks as if he can wield everything from shotguns to assault rifles (and maybe an awesome hooked knife). I don't really who he would be based off. He also has some grenade looking type rounds around his waist and if you look at the image with the assault rifle it look like there could be a grenade launcher mounted on the bottom of the gun.

There is another character featured in the trailer. The sniper refers to him as the "new number 6". It is speculated that he is your character in single player. In the video he just looks a lot like Master Chief. I just don't know where he would fit. They tell him in the trailer to "leave that lone wolf stuff behind". My long shot guess is that he dies in the end of Halo Reach.

Another thing to look at in Halo Reach is that all of the classes have something different about there arms. The rusher has a hooked knife on his shoulder, spy/scout girl has at least 1 robotic arm, and the commander has some kind of screen. Could these all effect game play are will they just be cosmetic.

One thing I know that's true about Halo Reach though, is that I cannot wait to check out the beta this Spring.

What do you think? Think were way off base or like are ideas? Leave us a comment below or email us at feedback@finalresist4nce.com

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Torchlight Review

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:28:39 +0100

Torchlight is a new Single Player RPG from Runic Games.

I have put in 27.9 hours into this game since I picked it up via Steam for $4.99 (Sales are constantly going on so get it if you can) and I easily would of paid more for such a wonderful game.

The basic story behind of this game is you are in the mining town of Torchlight and a evil has brought doom and despair to the mines and its livelihood gem Ember.

You play one of three classes

Vanquisher
Destroyer
Alchemist

The three represent the most basic classes in all RPG the Destroyer is your melee brute heavy armor and lots of health capable of dishing out damage as well. Vanquisher is your ranged class essentially a rouge. The Alchemist is... well you guessed it the mage.

The game is simple and yet wonderful, it is fun to play and is gorgeous graphically. I Have played through both a Vanquisher and Destroyer getting to both lvl 61 Vanquisher and lvl 100 Destroyer which is the cap.

There is also a cool retirement system where after beating the campaign you have the choice to retire your character and pass down one item to a "descendant" who will receive the item with better stats and your previous char's name in the item name.

One of the best things about this game is the modding community which is growing steadily and have a wide variety of game mods to both expand and add to the existing game play. The worst part of this game I would have to say is the lack of multi-player which is minimal as I can see in the future the modding community taking this into their own hands and mulit-player might be a reality.

Runic Games is already in the works for a Torchlight MMO!

The Torchlight game is set to release on 1/12/2010 in CD-Rom form but you can get it now from Steam and the official Torchligh site.

Overall i give this game...

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Next Patch For MW2: Fixing 1887's

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:29:13 +0100

Infinity Ward community manger Robert Bowling has just announced from his Twitter account about the upcoming title update for MW2. Apparently it is going to address the new glitches that were found after the last update. Which includes the public "Private" match glitch and Infinite ammo glitch. Other fixes are to include the PS3 exclusive glitch for prestige hacking and also PC texture problems.

Robert Bowling also mentions that the 1887 akimbo shotguns are going to be "balanced". So finally those weapons can stop plaguing every game. The last update took about a week to be pushed onto all platforms. While Mr. Bowling didn't give a date it will be expected next week sometime. Christmas miracles do come true.

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Halo Reach Exclusive World Video Premier

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:04:00 +0100

The VGA has come and gone and left in it's wake millions of excited Halo fans all because of the world exclusive Halo Reach video.

It looks exciting and seems once again we will be getting a taste of some Spartan action.

Here it is enjoy!

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Google Wave Invites

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:03:42 +0100

While steering off the subject of gaming and into upcoming tech, I am a huge fan of Google and always try to get my hands on every new thing they launch even if i probably wont use it. Recently I have been playing around with the new Google Wave system for a few days and it seems like it could open a whole new way to communicate and collaborate with family, friends, and colleagues.

I have 22 Google Wave Invites that i will be giving away to the first 22 who comment here and and leave a E-Mail were i am to send the invite.

If you get an invite and have leftover invites yourself feel free to come back here and leave a comment to give them out. =)

*Note you have to have a Google Account to actually use the service.

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EA is sighting in on Call of Duty’s head.

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:03:16 +0100

37^th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference was held in New York City today and EA’s CEO John Riccitiello had some very interesting things to say about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. He believes that Battlefield Bad Company 2 along with the newly announced modern Medal of Honor will be the foundation of what will bring the FPS crown back to their eager hands.

"I think were at that point. And I think [Bad Company 2] represents our best opportunity of taking the first-person shooter business back from Activision."

"I think it does online better, it's got destructible environments, and drivable vehicles, which makes it much more interesting from an open-world perspective," he said. "I think there's room for both, but we have our competitive juices flowing.

"We've taken it back from the skate category [with the Skate series]. [The first-person shooter genre] is next." CEO Riccitiello says.

I for one cannot wait to see them at least try and take a stab out of Modern Warfare’s popularity. Competition can only lead to better games on both sides.

This comes right off the news that a new Medal of Honor game is coming out. It will be set it modern day Afghanistan and it is rumored to be loosely based off the real life "Cowboy" character from an article in Time magazine in 2002 (pictured below).

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