Modern Warfare 2 release

Are you going to pick up the game on it's release date, do some midnight release party, or have it delivered to you on the release date.

Typically when you purchase a game it ships on the release date. But Amazon is offering a delivery guarantee on the release date.

I'm finding somewhere to get it at midnight, using those few hours as an advantage. Oh yeah, I'm taking the day off work.

Check out Amazon's link here
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00267S2A0?tag=plays0b-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B00267S2A0&adid=0M7TKBB5HP8A8AC800QE&

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 XBLA Release Date Announced

According to Major Nelson, the Xbox Live Arcade version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will debut on July 29th as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade promotion for 1200 MS Points ($15). Capcom's official Twitter confirmed this early earlier today.

As for the PlayStation Network version, a release date will be announced "soon." Hang tight!

Resident Evil 5 and Racism!!!

First off, how's that for a article title? Doesn't that just get the blood flowing? (And also get this article to pop out nicely in a list of blog posts, thus generating more hits.) This is how sausage is made.

I got through about three quarters of Resident Evil 5 before my XBox died. I just got my replacement system, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to work up the energy to finish the game. This is a real disappointment to me.

I was really looking forward to Resident Evil 5, since Resident Evil 4 is one of my favorite shooters, like, ever. It was the first Resident Evil game I'd played, and man, I loved it. It's out for pretty much every system in existence. You really should play it, though the Intellivision and Vectrex ports are, frankly, subpar.

And Resident Evil 5 definitely has it's good points. It's very pretty. The battles are paced nicely. It gives you a period of exploration to catch your breath, and then it hits you with a horde of zombies. I'd prefer the hordes were bigger, but still, it rarely irritates you with enemies constantly coming in dribs and drabs. And the boss fights are very cool. I liked them a lot.

But there are several elements I found super-disappointing.

1. The Plot Is Dull. This simply amazes me. The game is about a zombie outbreak. In Africa. Zombies. In Africa. HOW CAN THAT NOT BE AWESOME!?!? Packed cities. Desperately poor people with automatic weapons. Incompetent and corrupt governments. Plus, you know, the relentless assault of the living dead.

And yet, the plot is just sludge. Most of it involves finding out what happened to the former partners of the two main characters (about which I could not care less) and chasing some terr! orist fo r reasons that are never explained. (We're supposed to hate him as part of some Pavlovian response to him being called a terrorist. Didn't work.) And, while the city settings are cool and creepy, you're soon wandering around solving puzzles in some generic ancient tomb, losing all of the awesomeness of being in Africa.

What a waste.

2. The Inventory System Constantly Spoils Your Fun. Fighting the inventory system is a constant distraction. The inventory system in Resident Evil 4 was cool and realistic, and I actually had fun shifting the items around in my briefcase to solve the puzzle of making things fit. In comparison, the new system is an aggravation and trading gear back and forth with your partner is doubly so.

Now, I know I wrote a few months ago how you shouldn't be afraid to make changes to your game. But that doesn't mean every change is good. You must be merciless about improving the worst elements of your design, but you also should be determined to leave alone the parts that are actually good.

3. About the Racism Thing. I didn't have any problem with this for most of the game. You have to fight zombies somewhere. And, wherever they are, you're gonna' shoot a bunch of former people. Having that take place in Africa is no more racist then setting the action in Dubuque. The early levels, in the city, are very foreign and cool, and I think you'd have to be pretty oversensitive to have a problem with them.

Then you go out into the back hills. You enter villages of straw huts and fight zombies wearing straw skirts and wielding spears. And the bosses are ooga booga witch doctors with big masks.

I'm not going to call this racist. Throwing that accusation around cheapens it. It's not racist. It's just dumb. I may be wrong, but I suspect, if you go to an African ! village today, the young men won't have grass skirts and spears. They will be wearing ratty t-shirts and wielding AK-47s. And they will mess you up.

This is like setting the game in modern-day Japan and having the villages be full of sumo wrestlers, samurais, and J-pop stars. Although, of course, if this was the case, I would never stop playing that game.

Also, since every pot in the villages was full of either gold coins or bullets, I think they could afford something a little deadlier than spears.

4. Oh. One more race comment. About your hot, sexy, hot girl sidekick. She's an amazing bit of art direction. It's amazing how they were able to make her as white-looking as a human being could possibly be and still be plausibly identified as not white. I'm just sayin'.

This is all not so much a review as a bunch of impressions. And a bit of public mourning. I suppose it was foolish to expect more, but after the pure game goodness of Resident Evil 4, I wish I could say more than, "Meh. It's worth a rental."

Oh, and to pre-empt any criticism. I'm not politically correct. I'm just plain correct.

Nintendo DS or Sony PSP - Which Is The Better System?

By Paul Wilcox

The Sega Game Gear? Pffft. It was as much a challenge to the then reigning king, the Nintendo Gameboy, as a local football club in Tibet would be when pitted against the Reds of Manchester United. The truth is, Nintendo has remained unchallenged in the handheld gaming department since it released the very first Gameboy, and it has continued to rule the roost with the current dominance of the Nintendo DS.

Until now, that is.

With the latest generation of handhelds, Nintendo is facing some strong competition from the Sony PSP, or Playstation Portable. It's not exactly a neck-and-neck race, but the PSP is winning in some parts of the world. This is something that Nintendo has never had to face with previous generations of handheld systems. Sony's PSP is not going to disappear like the Sega Game Gear and most other competitors from past years.

The question that many people are asking - especially people planning to buy a portable gaming system - is this: Is the Sony PSP a better investment than the Nintendo DS?

Let's answer this important question by breaking it down into 4 important sub-questions that will ultimately tell us the handheld that will define this generation of portable gaming.

1. Which console is more powerful? There's really no contest here. The Sony PSP was designed to be a powerful unit, with two 333MHz CPUs rendering both gameplay and amazing graphics. The screen is built for widescreen gaming, and has a much better resolution than the DS. PSP games take more space as well, because there is so much more to them. Most Nintendo games are under 100MB. PSP games range from 300MB to 1.5GB. WINNER: Sony PSP.

2. Which console has more games? Many experts say that software creates hardware and not the other way around. What would you do with a highly powerful handheld if you won't have any games to play! with it , right? When it comes to depth of gaming library, the Nintendo DS is the runaway winner. Its releases outnumber the releases of its competitor by a ratio of almost 4:1. There are many development companies focusing only on developing games for the Nintendo DS. WINNER: Nintendo DS.

3. Which system has better multimedia capabilities? Many of today's gadgets perform specialized functions. Ipods play music.

PDAs allow mobile browsing and data mining. Digital cameras take pictures and videos. Cellular phones serve as personal organizers aside from being communication devices. However, the trend these days is for a gadget to at least attempt to become a Swiss knife of sorts for the technology-crazy market.

Handhelds are no different. The more functions they serve, the better they will appear for potential buyers. The Nintendo DS play limited audio and video files. The Sony PSP can play many audio formats and an accepted MP4 file type for videos. The Sony PSP can also surf the web, store a variety of data, act as a TV (with the aid of a TV tuner), and serve as a remote controller for the Playstation 3, even if the console is in another continent. WINNER: Sony PSP.

4. Which console has more exclusives? No doubt, not a single company can compete with Nintendo. The Nintendo DS is the home of original properties like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon , Donkey Kong, Kirby, Animal Crossing and many more. These are the biggest selling points of the system. WINNER: Nintendo DS.

The bottom line? A 2-2 tie. The better system will really depend on what you expect from your handheld gaming system. If you want the most functions and raw power, the PSP is the way to go. But if you're looking for a deep library of games with a varied gaming experience, choose the Nintendo DS.

About the Author:

Get up-to-the-minute news and information abo! ut all t he hottest video game systems at the Game Console Bundles website. We've got the best deals on games, accessories and hardware for all the popular systems, including Nintendo DS & Wii, the Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 & PSP. Visit http://www.gameconsolebundles.net for more tips & information.

Logitech debuts wireless Guitar Hero controller for Xbox 360

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Third-party wireless guitar controllers for the Xbox 360 have been disappointingly hard to come by to date, but Logitech has now come to the rescue with a new Guitar Hero-licensed controller that's similar to its PS3 and PS2 offerings, with the exception of being orange, and Xbox 360-compatible. Otherwise, you can expect the same wood neck, rosewood fingerboard, and metal frets as before, along with a touch-sensitive slider on the neck, strum bar and fret buttons that are "virtually silent," and a promised range of 30 feet. Unfortunately, the guitar also packs the same hefty $199 price tag as its PS3 counterpart, but if that's not too big a deterrent, you can look forward to picking up one of these up in August. Head on past the break for a quick video overview.

Continue reading Logitech debuts wireless Guitar Hero controller for Xbox 360

Filed under: Gaming

Logitech debuts wireless Guitar Hero controller for Xbox 360 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

by stinger2

Review: New Super Mario Bros.

written by Blain Newport

written on Sunday, June 7, 2009

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 2006) is a throwback. Sure, the graphics are 3D, but the gameplay is all 2D. Part of me says I should start discussing the game's merits and flaws, but all I can think of is how it's not as good as Super Mario 3 or Super Mario World. Of course those are flagship titles, system sellers. NSMB is portable. And it feels more like an homage to than a continuation of the 2D Mario games.

The main changes to the formula are added collectibles. Every level has three special coins to find. Some are easy to get to. Some are a huge pain. I can use them to unlock bonus levels and toad homes with power ups and extra lives. It also has the hidden worlds and levels of the older games, so there are plenty of secrets. And to me there's nothing more satisfying than clearing an especially difficult level and saving my game with a sense of accomplishment.

It's too bad the game doesn't let me do that. It's a portable game and it only lets me save when I clear a castle, and even then only the first time. This is seriously annoying and makes all the time between when I wanted to quit and when I can quit without losing all my progress annoying. There are probably dozens of perfectly good levels that I just wanted to end because of this design error. Plus I think now that I've beaten the main game, the only way to clear some of the bonus levels I skipped and save that progress would be to complete them, then finish the final castle again.

$*(# that.


The main mechanics also don't feel quite right. Sometimes I'll lose speed in the middle of a jump. Infrequently, I'll fail to jump entirely. Of course, the DS directional pad is worse than the NES one from 20 years ago, and the buttons aren't the b! est eith er so maybe it's the hardware. Regardless, it still feels good, but not great. But sometimes the difference is life and death, and that's frustrating.

For some reason the game has weird difficulty spikes. Some levels are super easy. I just breeze through and get all the secret coins, barely going out of my way. Some are a huge pain in the butt and it takes me a long time and many deaths to get all the secrets. I noticed no pattern to where these more difficult levels would occur, either. Sure, there were more of them as the game progressed, but even on the final world, there were some super easy levels and the worst level for me was back in world four. It just doesn't feel like the polish was fully applied.

Because of its faults and possibly because I'm just not that interested in the genre any more it gets a three

out of five.

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I gotta go back and play the old Mario games again to see if I just don't like them any more.

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Oh, and I almost forgot the spoilers. People who played the original SMB know that you beat Bowser at the end of every world. They put a bizarre and macabre spin on it in this game. You beat Bowser in the first world by dropping him into lava, just like in the original game. But instead of just disappearing he flails and screams and turns into a skeleton. When you meet him again his child revives his bones with dark magic. You fight skeletal Bowser and drop him from a great height so that he breaks in pieces. For the finale, the child throws the broken bones into a cauldron to resurrect a giant Bowser. For a world where death usually means disappearing or making a face and falling off of the screen, it feels pretty creepy and out of place. I think Nintendo got tired of Mario a long time ago.

Who will be on NBA2K10? Kobe? LeBron?

2K Sports will reveal the cover athlete for its much anticipated basketball simulation game, NBA 2K10, Thursday night during a 30-second spot that will run during the pre-game show for the NBA Finals (9 p.m., ABC).