Couple Gaming

First is the anticipated announcement of Gears of War 3, the trailer can be found below.   Not much to say about this, but I can complain that it’s a whole year away!  But good to see 4 player co-op in it.  This is one of my favorites game series.  Right along side God of War

Netflix is sending out disks for the Wii this week, ours is suppose to be here today, lets see how well the tiny machine does with streaming shall we?  I know my daughter has been waiting for this forever.  Just wish that the Wii and PS3 could stream without the silly disk.

And last and probably the thing most people won’t see.  A new paperback book based on DeadSpace will be release July 10 of this year.

Dead Space™: Martyr (A Tor Trade Paperback; $14.99; July 2010), the first novel based on the award-winning Dead Space videogame franchise. Dead Space: Martyr delves into the back story of the fiction including the history of the Church of Unitology, the discovery of the enigmatic “Black Marker” and the mysteries behind an alien artefact of unknown power. Dead Space: Martyr will be available in July 2010 at select retailers worldwide.

Tale of Tales, the creators of “The Path”, are releasing a little more information about their newest venture, tentatively titled “Fatale”. The game is based on a biblical story, specifically Salome, a princess that demanded the head of John the Baptist. I’m definitely not up on my biblical stories, and so could care less about Salome, but they gave us a snippet of what to expect:

The character of Salome is complex because “Fatale” is designed to evoke all possible interpretations of her legend simultaneously. Salome is at once the mighty princess who mercilessly seduces men to their downfall and an innocent child on the brink of womanhood who is manipulated by the grown-ups that surround her. But she is also just a girl, a teenager who falls in love with the wrong man at the wrong time. She gets a first taste of the sweetness and the bitterness that we all know so well. And then there’s the Salome created by Oscar Wilde: a mad woman, lurking in the shadows of our souls, a selfish, passionate, wilful creature who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

Ooooh, sounds as complicated as Shakespeares Ophilia! I’m definitely a sucker for character development in game play.. so I’m excited to hear more.

If the image looks familiar, you’ve been playing too much Silent Hill. “Salome was designed, modelled and textured for the project by leading game artist Takayoshi Sato, of Silent Hill fame.”
Return to their site http://tale-of-tales.com/Fatale/ to get more information.

For you twitter addicts (myself and Ophilye included) Gamerdna has launched tweetmygaming , a great little site that shows all gaming tweets and cool little graphs about what game is being talked about most.  I know some people find twitter dull and don’t understand the allure a lot of us find with it, but for me its two things, a way to keep in touch with friends during the day who don’t live in my state and don’t have time to dedicate to IM, and an RSS feed for all things that interest me, gaming being a big one.  I think Gamerdna just gave me a new feed I will use a lot!

OK, there are about 2,000+ reviews of what is going on at E3 right now.  If you’re not following someone on twitter, or their live blog, or blah blah blah, then you’re obviously a very busy monkey… Which is why I’m going to recap some of the highlights!

Here’s just a few of the things that have come up so far:

XBOX:

• Rock Band: Beatles will be out 9-9-09.
• “Joyride”: a free game that uses the Avatars
• Lots of new Sequel games :
  • Left 4 Dead 2
  • Crackdown 2
  • Halo: ODST & Halo: Reach Multiplayer Beta
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • new Tony Hawk
  • Forza Motorsport III
  • Modern Warfare 2
  • Metal Gear Solid Rising
• Zune Video Marketplace
• Netflix: Add movies to your queue w/ Xbox, instead of just watching what has been added.
• Twitter, Facebook, & LastFM will be on Xbox.
• Project Natal: Making your body the controller with full body tracking
  • Use your face to log in, navigate the screen with your hands, actually maneuver a ball with your feet, and paint with any part of your body
• 1vs100 BETA started last night for 50,000 lucky players.  Ymiris & I played it for a good hour, fully addicted.  WAY too much fun, and highly suggested as a couple game!!!

Nintendo

• Multiplayer Super Mario Bros. released Holiday ‘09.  Excited about this as a Couple Game, with the same fun feeling of the original Mario Bros, with a smart camera that will pan out & in as players separate.
• Wii Fit Plus – Fall 2009
• *NOTE* UBISOFT announced “Your Shape” for the Wii, which will include a camera & analyze how well you do the exercises.  Looks a bit more advanced than the Wii Fit title.  We’re more excited about this one.
• A new controller “extender” called Wii Motion Plus that detects angle & precision in motion, released with Wii Sports Resort.
• New Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers.. more Shooter than Turn-based.
• New Kingdom Hearts 3.
• Mario & Luigi get microscopic & invade Bowsers body in the cheesy DS “Bowsers Inside Story”.  Looks cute, but I’m ashamed to say it just screams Rental.
• Nintendo Sun DS
• James Pattersons’ Womens Murder Club – DS game that plays like a book.  Unfortunately, this feels like a cheesy pandering to women, pulling together my favorite Room 219 with Nancy Drew.
• C.O.P: The Recruit, a racer much like a good-guy version of GTA.
• Style Savvy, which actually looks like a good Tween/Teen Clothes Shopping/Accessorizing game… one of the things I keep praying Imagine would be, but never is.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed & probably buy this one.
• NOTE: Ubisoft announced yesterday more Imagine games, including a “make crappy bead necklaces that you can buy from us”.  I DESPISE IMAGINE & KNOW THERE IS A PLACE IN HELL FOR THESE DAMNED GAMES.
• Super Mario Galaxy 2
• Finally, some Adult games!  All of look fairly delicious…
  • The Conduit
  • Resident Evil: Dark Side Chronicles
  • Dead Space: Extraction
• Metroid: Other M .  Very wild-cardy, but we’ll see what happens as they release more.  I’ve always wanted more Samus.

SONY:

• Uncharted 2, which looks like a pretty & intense watch-your-mate-play game.
• MAG
• PSP
  • Hannah Montana lilac PSP
  • Patapon 2
  • Rock Band (? — just touched on)
• PSP GO — pretty slide-out controls, tiny, light, Wifi, 16G memory, and SO sexy.  Do Want! 80% reduction in price for applications, more titles are digitally distributed.  You know I’m not a graphics girl.. but I’m seriously amazed by how good the graphics are for such a small, portable gaming system.
• • “Sense Me” analyzes your music library to create playlist moods.
  • Grant Turismo for PSP GO
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
  • Little Big Planet
  • Harry Potter / Hannah Montana
  • Resident Evil (!)
  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Rock Band Unplugged
• Final Fantasy VII will be on PSN

A long time ago ( over a year!) I wrote a short little article about a new MMO being made by funcom Dark days are coming and finally we start seeing more details about this MMO, now known as Secret World, across the gaming sphere.

Below is the teaser trailer for Secret World and I LOVE this trailer, but there is no game play and that is what we want to see and lets face it, funcoms MMO’s are always lack luster, not to say they are bad,  I loved Anarchy Online even with it’s horrible bug filled launch, and I bought AoC and played it up to level 47, but it also couldn’t keep me or that many others.  I am hoping for much better things from this MMO as the concept really appeals to me, who doesn’t want Cthulhu in their MMO?

A short blurp about the game

The Secret World will have no classes or levels. Tornquist…describes it as an “action-adventure-MMORPG” with “fast, reactive combat”. Although there will naturally be character progression and an incentive to play the game for a long time, “The Secret World begins where other MMOs end,” he says. “There’s no grind to get to a preconceived place.”…Furthermore, the entire game (which we know will include London, New York, Seoul, New England and Egypt as launch locations) will be open from the start.

Alright, I have NO idea where I found this site, I just don’t.   But i have been on a huge horror kick lately and with all the Left 4 Dead and gears of War 2 I have been playing it feels like I am on crack…..horrorcrack!

Anyway,  “The Path” from what I know is a short horror game based on a darker Red Riding Hood story, and it looks to be PC only and is being released March 18th 09.  That’s all the details I have..ohhh and a link http://grandmothers-house.net/

So why did I bring this up??  Because I am on horrorcrack! and honeslty, who doesn’t want to see more horror games??  I know I do.  To bad I couldn’t get an early demo of the game, but alas it wasn’t meant to be.

STOP!
Do NOT purchase a new Nintendo DS Lite just because your last one is not in the new Spring Colors, or because a herd of baboons have trampled over it. I promise you, those baboons will be back, and next time you will need to be prepared!

Last week, I ran across a list of all the games that were selling REALLY well in Japan (OK, I like to plan what the girls in Japan will be dressing up as during their next Comic-con, I admit it). I noticed that the “DSi” seemed to be high on some list somewhere, so I made a mental note of it, and stuck it away.

Today I saw a note from Boing Boing stating the Nintendo DSi is set for a US release on April 5th.

It comes with an SD card slot where you can save photos taken from the two cameras mounted on the DSi – one on the cover and one facing the player. You can also save bootable ISO images of Windows 95 and OSX on the SD card too which will be ignored by the DSi.

Both screens are bigger too – not a whole lot bigger but now big enough to rest your coffee cup on.
The DSi also comes with a new matte casing which will only break if ran over by a stampeding heard of wild baboons.

The stylus is now a little bit longer too for those who have deep nostrils.

DAMN!  OK, were your baboons wild, or trained?  And were they a herd or a heard?  Well, so the DSi may not be perfect, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.  If you want to see the pretty pictures of the DSi, head over to Gizmodo to have your appetite both whetted and satiated.  Bon Appetit!

So, a professor at BYU (everyone in Salt Lake, please commence vomiting now.  Everyone else, please place your bias regarding mormons here as well.  Done?  OK, let’s continue then shall we?) did a study showing how Video Games influence the life of college students.

Evidently, the media in general stole what they wanted out of it, stating that gaming and bad relationships/drug use are directly related.  Kotaku has gotten to the bottom of this and the professor has stated more the thinking below:

“Also, please remember the nature of the statistics shows that as one variable goes up the other went down. For example, the more one played video games the lower their quality of relationships. That suggests that, as with almost anything in life, that the more extreme you get in its use the more problematic it becomes. That doesn’t therefore show that moderate use is bad. Not by any means. Also please remember, these are averages. Just because you happen to be an “exception” doesn’t mean that the results cannot be “true” for a good number of young people. Right?”

OK, that makes sense.  It becomes interesting when the BYU website seems to clarify, as well as muddle…

“It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time,” Walker said. “My guess is that it’s some of both and becomes circular.”
…..
Statistical analyses also revealed that the more young adults play video games, the more frequent their involvement in risky behaviors like drinking and drug abuse. Young adults who played video games daily reported smoking pot almost twice as often as occasional players, and three times as often as those who never play.

Wait.. hold on a second.  Both of these statements are leading to same thing, but can easily lead people to believe two different things.

If you see someone going from playing 1 hour of video games a week to 10 hours, and see them fighting with their parents more & increasing drug use… which act could be causing the other??  How do you WANT to see it?

Of course, the same could be said of reading 1 hour a week to reading 10 hours a week.. or going out with friends 1 hour vs 10 hours, or watching TV.    Shouldn’t the study also have included other “escapist” activities, instead of trying specifically for this study?

Couple Gamings stance is that the study should be ruled inconclusive.  Also, we’d like to volunteer for the next study, as long as it is truly well thought out.

As aside note, when the Couple Gaming Daughter & Sometimes Test Subject fights with her parents, she does homework (as it’s the only time she can really be alone in her room without us calling her Emo).  Maybe we can use this study to link homework with drug use as well?

Ok, it has been almost to the day a full month since either Ophilye or myself have made a post to couple gaming.  It’s not that we don’t game, cause you know we do, it’s our main past time activity, but to be have been very busy getting our personal life in order, not to mention the slew of awesome games that came out in Nov and Dec,  and we figured with only 50-100 unique visitors a day it wouldn’t kill anyone if we neglected the site.   Well we noticed that on Jan 5th we got a huge surge in visitors and it has continued for some unknown reason, seriously we aren’t very interesting, but we do love that you are all here.

So with that knowledge I promise we will continue blogging at least once a day…err..once a week? ohh hell I promise at least once a month!

Welcome to all our new visitors, we love having you!

Now that you read the title and are all excited I do have to let you know the “catch”.   It won’t be playable until release, which is Sept 7th.  But if you want to avoid the rush, and don’t mind paying the same price for a digital download of the game head on over to the EA STORE and get your copy.