E3 Highlights

For anyone who hasn't been watching the E3 live conferences, here's the general highlights so far, though a lot more "fluff" has been announced which I haven't included:

• New Tomb Raider game, explained as open world and with a young Lara Croft
• Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 1 remake
• Minecraft on the Xbox with Kinect
• Halo 4, first of a new Halo trilogy

 

• Silent Hill HD collection
• Metal Gear Solid 2/3/Peace walker remakes
• New Silent Hill
• Zone of the Enders HD collection

• Mass Effect 3 live demo and gameplay trailer
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Battlefield 3 on the Frostbite 2 engine

• Rayman: Origins
• Driver: San Francisco
• Far Cry 3
• Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
• New Trackmania
• Assassin's Creed: Revelations

 

• Uncharted 3
• Resistance 3 bundled with Move
• Ico and Shadow of the Colossus 3D
• Infamous 2
• Starhawk
• Sly 4
• Bioshock Infinite
• Bioshock on PSVita
• Modnation racers on Vita
• SF vs Tekken on Vita
• $250 and $300 models of Vita

Portal 2 Soundtrack: Free!

I don't know about you, but I thought the Portal 2 soundtrack was awesome! I'm just making a quick post today because I have been struck down with man flu so I haven't been on the computer too much.

Songs to Test by is the free soundtrack to Valve's Portal 2 (It's been a while since I made a Portal 2 post, okay?) and you can get it here.

There are 22 tracks of amazement on there, enjoy! If you haven't played the game, it might be worth a listen to the music to sway your opinion!

Dead Island Gameplay Trailer

The trailer that zombie enthusiasts have been waiting for since they saw the original cinematic trailer for Dead Island is finally here, and it's looking pretty cool.

The game gives me a Dead Rising 2/Left 4 Dead kind of feel, which should make it pretty fun! The environment looks a little like the environments from Crysis too, always good.

I can't really explain it better than the video itself though, so here it is:

Fable 3: Co op Error

Fable 3 has finally hit our PCs! Months after the Xbox 360 release and apparently rebuilt just for us. I've been ill these past few days, but I'm back, and just in time to play it.

The game itself so far is pretty fun, not the best RPG I've ever played but enjoyable. Then came the attempt at playing co-op.

My router is horrible at connecting to other people, especially if they're behind a router too, so I had tons of trouble as I expected.

The two main problems were not being on a static IP and having a weapons DLC that my co-op partner didn't have.

Your DLC is different: If you have the free weapons DLC, or your friend gets an error saying they can't join because of a DLC, you need to get rid of it. You can do that pretty simply by opening Games for Windows Live outside of Fable 3 and just deleting the content in the downloads section, it'll also disable any other DLC connected to it. You won't be able to load any of your single player games that you played using the DLCs until you reinstall it though, pretty annoying.

Network connection failure: If you're having network issues and either are you behind a router, it's a little more complicated. First off you want to get the obvious things out of the way, firewalls on your computer and router. If that doesn't work, you can do two things.

First: Make sure you're running a static IP off your router connection, you can find guides for that purpose here. This actually worked for us, and we could play without even playing with port forwarding.

Secondly: You can try opening the Xbox 360 ports, though you need to setup the static IP before that, you can find how to do that on most routers here.

Good luck setting up, guys.

Gog.com: Good Old Games

If you're a gamer into classics like Baldur's Gate and the Fallout series', Gog.com is for you. The site doesn't just deliver affordable nostalgia, it also uses a digitally distrubuted platform.

I only recently found about about Gog while trying to relive my childhood playing through some of the classics of my time. I'm surprised that it isn't a little more well known, but perhaps I'm just ignorant.

I actually still have my old boxed copies of the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, but I was searching for the easiest way to play it co-op with a friend when I found the site. Tada, instant classics! I can't recommend the site enough because I'm so impressed that it offers some of the best RPGs ever made, and digitally - something that other legal outlets have been lacking. I don't think I could ever pirate anything in the Baldur's Gate series, that would feel way too wrong.

If you're a player of Mass Effect or Dragon Age and you're yearning for some great RPG gameplay and a rich storyline, I would urge you to play any of the Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale series'. You won't regret it.

I was actually reminded of some of the music in these games when I was looking at who was going to be composing the music for Guild Wars 2 (which looks pretty good, I'll have to post about it when I get time today or tomorrow). It's the same guy who composed the music for Icewind Dale and Oblivion. Awesome music:

Also I'm still really sad that I lost my post about Borderlands in the Blogger outage the other day, are they restoring all the posts? :(

A Look At L.A. Noire

If you're a fan of any of the Grand Theft Auto games, or in fact any of Rockstar's popular games, there's no doubt you've heard about L.A. Noire. In the past couple days I've seen some sneak peeks popping up all over, so I thought I would throw one here.

First thing I should say is, the video I'm going to post will have spoilers in it, so don't click it if you don't want that.

Sadly, L.A Noire is still console only, so if you're a PC Gamer like me, bad luck! However, with the development of this new engine, perhaps we'll see something coming to the PC, maybe even some of the older GTA games ported to the new engine... But that's just a thought. I'd love to see Vice City in this engine.

Overall, I just hope it comes to the PC at some point. It looks like it was a little stripped down for consoles looking at this Reddit post:

gripes23q: I know a guy who has worked on the game. He said they had to strip a lot of the facial animation data out to get it to fit on a disc for consoles and to avoid memory limits. In much the same way you have texture memory you also have animation memory, too much animation data constantly would slow the game down.
From what I recall he said the unstripped versions looked a lot better as you'd expect.

The game is coming this month (May), so look out for it if you're a console gamer.
I've replaced the video about 3 times now, since it keeps being taken off of Youtube. But this could be a more permanent link if the video below has been taken down again.

Portal 2 Authoring Tools

 

Another Portal 2 related post so soon, sorry! But this is an interesting development. If you've ever played with the hammer editor for Team Fortress 2, you might recognise this screenshot. 

These are the tools that Valve used to create Portal 2 and they're now available to everyone who has Portal 2 on Steam. The one thing I was slightly worried about in Portal 2 was the re-playability, especially in co-op. I have a few friends I wanted to play the game with, but after playing through co-op once or twice the puzzles are engraved into my mind, and there's no fun or challenge in waiting for someone else to figure them out while you sit around with your thumb up your ass.

So, we can make our own Portal 2 levels? So what? While Hammer is unfortunately hard to learn, we'll see community content now - some that will hopefully dwarf the campaign content in quality. In other words, replay value, especially if we can co-op user created maps.

Valve official post: here.