Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Upcoming Borderlands 360 Part 1




Story
In the distant future, several colonization ships head to Pandora, a planet on the edge of the galaxy. The colonists are drawn there in search of a better life as well as vast mineral resources said to be on the planet, free for anyone's taking, akin to a futuristic gold rush. Some time after settling the colonists discover that there is little the planet offers, aside from some decrepit alien ruins. Those who have money leave, the remaining population devolves into chaos and lawlessness. Some of the settlers seek to get rich quick by discovering alien technology. Most others are just trying to survive. After seven earth years, the planet's slow orbit brings a transition from winter to spring, and many horrifying creatures emerge from hibernation.All of the creatures are randomly generated as you play the game so no two play throughs will ever be the same.
A beacon of hope for the remaining colonists emerges in the form of a mysterious vault carved in the side of a mountain. This vault is said to contain vast stores of alien technology and secrets. The only problem is that the people who discovered the vault were completely wiped out by some sort of protective force. The only evidence of their discovery is a scattered radio transmission, proclaiming the vault's majesty, but not its location.[2]

[Playable characters
There will be three playable characters in the game, all with unique skills, abilities, and back stories. As these characters level up, the player can increase basic stats for them such as health totals, ammo capacity, and accuracy. Each character also has three unique focus skill trees to develop. There is also an accessory item type specific to each character.[2]

Mordecai
Mordecai came to Pandora in search of a man from his past named Yujinny. Upon learning that Yujinny has died, Mordecai sets off to learn how he died and what he was carrying. Mordecai's play style is that of a lone ranger, preferring to snipe enemies from afar. Some of his special abilities can augment the party's damage from headshots or give accuracy boosts. Later in the game, he will befriend an alien creature that will assist in combat.[2]

Roland
Roland is a former soldier of the Crimson Lance, a sort of highly trained private military that disregards law and order. A decade-old vendetta is rekindled when Roland learns that the leader of the Brigadiers has a suspiciously similar name to a man he has sworn to kill. Some of Roland's abilities are meant to supplement and support the party. His Leadership skill can boost the party's experience gains, while his Medical skill will increase health regeneration, and Support will increase weapon damage or regenerate ammunition for the party.[2]

Lilith
Once human, Lilith was turned into a siren, one of only six Sirens, a group of people with unbelievable powers, but no way to control them. She comes to Pandora in search of another Siren, in an effort to find out more about herself. Lilith is essentially the mage of the group, using her Siren powers to support the group and attack the enemy. Some of her powers include the ability to increase the group's rate of fire, as well as the power to create temporal bubbles, which she can manipulate to slow down enemies and hostile projectiles or speed up allies.[2]


Gameplay
Little is currently known about gameplay, other than the game will feature four player cooperative play along with other singleplayer and multiplayer modes. In addition, players have access to customizable vehicles for "vehicular combat" and will also be able to customize their character. Deceased enemies will drop their equipment, which is available for you to pick up. You will be able to choose from 3 different playable characters, who each have their own unique abilities.[2] It is inspired by the Mad Max film series and Diablo by Blizzard.[2]
Like traditional RPGs, much of the player's time will be taken up by quests. There will be many quests of varying length and complexity. Many of these quests will not be mutually exclusive, and can be completed together. Gearbox wants to encourage the player to push themselves just a bit further to complete the next quest on their list. Each quest carries its own rewards, such as new weapons, or perhaps revealing a new piece of the story.[2]

Randomization
The game will also have a unique feature similar to Diablo's random level generation system. This new system will generate more than 500,000 different guns as well as at least 500,000 different item and armor variations, according to the preview of the game in Game Informer magazine,
"We saw a ridiculous amount of guns, but perhaps the strangest was a revolver that fired shotgun shells. Gearbox is constantly surprised with what the system comes up with. They've seen rifles shoot everything from homing darts to rockets. 'One of the guns tracks onto something and locks, and after three seconds, [the target] suddenly explodes,' director Matthew Armstrong says."
According to a more recent interview by 1up.com with CEO and president of Gearbox Software, Randy Pitchford, the game's astounding arsenal will feature over 600,000 weapons. An addition of 100,000 new weapons came from the inclusion of alien technology.[4]
The features of the maps will also be randomly generated. While towns, and the general paths connecting them will remain the same, Borderlands features a system that randomly instances the surrounding landscape, with randomly placed things such as bunkers, towers, caves, enemies, and exploding cacti. All of this is done without a loading screen. Gearbox plans that the player will not see a loading screen after they boot up the game.[2]

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

The Movies - PC Game (Quick Review)

There are two distinct experiences offered in The Movies, the latest game from Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios. The bulk of The Movies centers around a familiar business-management "tycoon" experience, where you play master and commander of your very own Hollywood movie studio, hiring and firing staff, building facilities, and, of course, producing and releasing movies. You can choose to either let your studio machine determine the content of your films, or you can go hands-on with the game's built-in moviemaking tools, which peg a good balance between accessibility and flexibility. Both parts of The Movies can be engrossing and time-consuming, but they feel more like parallel products rather than an integrated whole.

Now you've got a friend in the movie business--you!
Kicking things off in 1920, The Movies starts you as the chief of a small upstart movie studio, putting the challenge before you to slowly cultivate it into a top-grossing, award-winning cinematic machine staffed with the best and the brightest talent--both onscreen and off--the industry has to offer. Well, as less of a challenge and more of a suggestion, the free-form (or so-called "sandbox") nature of The Movies means you can go about your business however you see fit, without a "wrong" or a "right" way. The game starts out extremely slowly by carefully guiding you through the process of hiring studio staff (like janitors and builders), helping you decide which cinematic hopefuls will be actors and directors (and which ones will be extras or film crew), building your first set, and releasing your first movie. This handholding remains pretty intensive for your first few decades as a movie mogul--and that's a good thing, because there's a lot to digest.
The core moviemaking process itself can be pretty dense. First, you'll need a screenplay, which means you can choose to write your own (more on that later), or you can hire a staff of screenwriters to do the heavy lifting for you. Even with the latter hands-off approach, you'll still have to determine the genre of your film, with the given choices of action, comedy, romance, sci-fi, and horror. Different genres have greater general interest in different eras, so even if the film itself is good, the wrong genre at the wrong time could spell box-office disaster. Once you have your screenplay in hand, it's time for casting. The size of your cast and crew will grow over time as you produce bigger, more-sophisticated movies. But in the end, you're always going to need a director, some actors, a movie crew, and, usually, a handful of extras. Who you choose to fill these roles will ultimately affect your end product. How experienced is your crew? What sort of mood is your talent in? Do the director and the lead actor get along well? Though it can make the process of casting your movies quite maddening, it's actually rather impressive to realize the minute details that can have an impact.
You don't have much control once shooting commences, though that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a watchful eye over the production. Though most of your employees are basically just automatons doing the job assigned to them, actors and directors are much more complicated, emotional creatures, requiring significant quantities of your attention. Their true characters will often be revealed under the duress of filming, informed by a dozen or so different stats unique to each person. Most of your problems basically come down to stress--and how your talent deals with it. A stressed-out actor or director won't turn in a very good performance, and he or she will often turn to food and drink for comfort. This is tolerable in moderation, but some people have a greater proclivity toward vice than others, which, if left unchecked, can bring a production to a screeching halt. In turn, this can send the cost of your production through the roof as you send the person to your own private in-studio rehab center.

The Movies lets you choose whether you want to be a studio boss, a filmmaker, or both.
There are stress factors aside from production, too, most of which are rooted in your talent's ego. If your talent feels he or she isn't getting paid enough, his or her trailer isn't nice enough, he or she doesn't have a big enough entourage, or he or she's generally unhappy about his or her personal appearance, the talent will get grumpy right quick. Most of these problems are solved pretty simply with pay raises, better trailers, personal assistants, makeovers, plastic surgery, and/or press exposure. There's a lot of information to sift through, and the game usually does a superb job of surfacing what's relevant, though at times the screen can become totally cluttered with pop-up info bubbles. It can be fascinating how your talent grows and changes while living under the spotlight, but over time you'll see the same sorts of behavioral patterns emerging over and over again--which means the constant micromanagement can get exhausting.
Talent will grow old and eventually retire (unless he or she quits or is sold to another studio before hitting the age of 70), which brings us to one of the more peculiar quirks in The Movies. In the beginning, you'll have a surplus of hopefuls looking to join your studio. But this can taper off quickly. Problems start to arise when you expand your studio lot with new sets and various facilities and soon find that you don't have enough builders to maintain the grounds. You'll find yourself pulling people off of jobs--jobs they might already be really good at--just to fulfill a lesser position that is of more immediate urgency. Abstractly, as a mechanic in a strategy game, this isn't inherently bad. It just doesn't feel appropriate--it just ain't Hollywood. Maintaining and developing your studio facilities can prove just as consuming as pampering your stars, and is often just as necessary. The moviegoing audience will stop showing up if you use the same sets over and over again, so regularly building new sets helps alleviate that. Most of the facilities and sets you can choose to build aren't available from the outset, instead slowly unlocking over time. You can, however, speed things up (giving yourself a technological edge over the competition) by investing in a research and development facility and staff. You'd be surprised at how some novel sets and slick special effects can turn a stinker into a blockbuster. Well, maybe not that surprised.

Movies may be an art, but a little R&D science can help give you the edge you need.
There is a whole lot going on in The Movies, but the game is smart about letting you determine your own pace, and you can even scale the amount of assistance the game provides. Once you find your gait, the experience can be really addictive, and the constant production pattern of making movies and improving your back lot make it quite easy to ignore the fact that, all of a sudden, it's four in the morning and you're still playing.
If you want to get really involved in the fake filmmaking process, The Movies includes an incredible set of in-game moviemaking tools that let you create your own little masterpieces. At its most basic, you're given a timeline and the frame for a story arc. Anyone familiar with digital video editing will find this to be like a Playskool version of something like FinalCut or Premiere. You fill in your story by dragging and dropping prebuilt shots, of which there are literally dozens to choose from for any one portion of the story arc. Like the rest of the game, the moviemaker can be tuned to give you just the amount of control you're comfortable with. If you're happy with just dragging and dropping a few scenes into a timeline and letting that be that, you can operate that way...though the real fun here is getting really crazy with the details, such as lighting, the mood of the performances, the backdrop designs, the types of camera angles used, and so on. You can even add subtitles, sound effects, your own custom musical score, and, if you've got a microphone, your own dialog. Given the dozens of different sets you'll eventually have at your disposal, in addition to the five different genres you can work within and the insane amount of control you can take over virtually every single detail of your movie, there is a great amount of potential here for budding virtual filmmakers.
Unfortunately, you can pour hours into creating your own perfect piece of machinima, and it will have minimal impact inside the game itself, as the game judges the quality of the films rather mechanically, without much capacity to discern between what's garbage and what's art. In a way, this is acceptable, since the end product of the movie you've made is really the best reward. Plus, the game makes it quite easy to export the movies you've made into a common video format that you can share with others. There's even an integrated tool that makes it easy to upload your movies to the Internet for all to see. Really, with the inclusion of a sandbox mode that lets you skip the "game" part of The Movies almost entirely, it's pretty apparent that the whole package was designed with two separate, largely unrelated goals in mind. It's not a deal breaker, but it does mar the illusion that you're running your movie studio in a living, breathing world.
The amount of control you're given in The Movies and the sort of social-experiment focus it takes on are just a few of the qualities shared with EA's wickedly popular suburban lifestyle simulation, The Sims. This is amplified by the fact that The Movies is pretty shameless in the way that it cribs its realistic-yet-slightly-exaggerated visual style from The Sims. When you're looking at your studio from the ground level, it's not particularly impressive. Models look natural but simple, textures are generally clean-looking, though a little flat, and fancy lighting and particle effects are few and far between. What impresses, though, is the way that you can seamlessly zoom out from ground level to bird's-eye view in one smooth motion, without any load times. It's worth mentioning, though, that despite the relatively modest system requirements listed by the publisher, The Movies can really test the upper limits of your machine, and the frame rate can chug on even a high-end PC when you max out all the quality settings.
The sound design is a good match for the general cinematic tone of the game. The background music that plays while you manage your studio will change as you progress through different time periods, from brassy big-band accompaniments, to buzzy Hendrixian guitars, to funky wah-wah sounds, and beyond. There's some good, funny voice work in the game, with different news readers and disc jockeys delivering era-specific parody over your studio's PA system, though all the "dialogue" in your movies is spoken in a Sims-esque gibberish that's not nearly as fully realized as the made-up "simlish" language.

A slick graphics engine lets you go from fly-on-the-wall view to bird-in-the-sky view without batting an eye.
This is a game of high quality, and it shows in virtually every aspect of its execution. But all told, The Movies comes just shy of its lofty ambitions. Being a movie studio boss is completely absorbing, and there is really no other game, or, really, any piece of software that makes it as easy to build your own little movies. But the connection between these concepts is tenuous at best. Thankfully, its best qualities shine through more than enough to make The Movies a game well worth playing.

Skate 2



After purchasing skate 2 i decided to check out the reel.editor. here are some of the outcomes!

Resident Evil 5 Enemies (Infected Villager) there black

Infected Villagers
There's something seriously wrong with these townspeople. The ones that I've seen who are... intact, they act like animals: biting, clawing, and spitting. One got too close and started struggling with me, and I swear to God I saw something try to crawl out of her mouth. Then I saw another one with some kind of growth pulsing out of his head, even after his head had come off... I don't think this is the T-virus. This is something new, some kind of undocumented viral or bio-chemical agent. Gotta find Irving&

Resident Evil 5 Enemies (Executioner)

Executioner
These guys are huge, although they seem pretty dumb. I was able to trick one into slashing that giant battle axe of his around in a circular pattern, which cut down some of the infectees running past him. I tried to keep him busy while Sheva pumped his back full of shotgun pellets, but then I almost...

Resident Evil 5 Enemies (Giant Crocodile)



Giant Crocodile

Searching for more clues on Tricell's involvement. Sheva and I infiltrated a deep-jungle tribal village and watched the locals lower a bound hostage over the surrounding moat. That's when I saw it lunge -- it must have been 16 feet long from tail to snout. No telling if these crocodiles have been contaminated by whatever bio-engineered infection that has claimed the other villagers, but its aggression was...

Resident Evil 5 Enemies (Bats)


Bats
Sheva and I watched this... thing break out of a tightly-sealed armored truck like it was a paper bag. (Note: Who was transporting it? And why?) It's clearly based on some species of bat... only it's huge (800 pounds?) and it has some sort of dangling sac, like a larva's thorax except that it looks prehensile. I can see some exposed tissue on the underside of the sac, maybe if I...

Resident Evil 5 Enemies (Hyena)



Hyena



These ragged beasts infested the train yard, along with a pack of longer-eared mutts. When Sheva approached them, they let out a low growl but otherwise kept their distance, staring at us with their awful red eyes. When I stepped past, one of the older males leapt at me and took a good chunk out of my arm, shaking his head when he bit me to get a better grip...

first post. Resident Evil 5

Gameplay

Chris battles a group of enemies.
Jun Takeuchi, the game's producer, said that Resident Evil 5 will feature similar gameplay to Resident Evil 4. The player will control Chris Redfield similarly to how the player controlled Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 4.[7] Much like its predecessor, this game will have the same over the shoulder view.[8] The game's environment will also play a significant role.[7] The game implements various lighting effects. If Redfield moves between bright and dark areas his eyes will have to adjust, causing the player to briefly lose some sight.[7] The Mercenaries minigame, which was featured in both Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4, will make a return in Resident Evil 5.[9]
The game will also feature new types of enemies. The extended E3 2007 trailer revealed several sequences involving Redfield attacking hordes of fleet-footed enemies,[10] who possessed melee weapons.[11] Takeuchi has also stated the game's enemies will also possess human-like intelligence and awareness. Furthermore, he stated they will be different from the previous ganados.[7] Takeuchi said that they have "greatly increased the number of weapon variations" compared to the previous games in the series, while the requisite handguns and shotguns also return.[12]
In an interview with XBOX360ISM, Keiji Inafune stated that the game will feature some online elements.[13] Resident Evil 5's main story mode can be played with two players, in a co-operative online mode. The feature will allow players to enter or leave anytime during the game. Players will not always stick together, and can be separated at points during the gameplay.[9]
Trailers at Tokyo Game Show 2008, revealed an "offline co-op mode." This mode delivers the same co-op experience as offered by the online co-op mode, only with two local players controlling the action in split screen.[14]

[edit] Plot
Resident Evil 5's setting will have a similar feel to the film Black Hawk Down.[15][3] Takeuchi added that the development team is composed of staff members who worked on the first Resident Evil.[3] He has stated that Resident Evil 5 will be an actual sequel to the Resident Evil series.[3] Before Takeuchi took over, the game's former producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi stated "it's safe to say that Resident Evil 5 will naturally proceed from where Resident Evil 4 left off".[16]
In a July 2007 Famitsu interview, producer Jun Takeuchi revealed the main playable character as Chris Redfield and the game takes place roughly ten years after the events of the original Resident Evil. The story will explore Chris' life during the ten year interval between the two games.[17] During the game's events, he is a member of a group known as Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA), and sent to investigate an incident in a desert area that serves as the game's setting.[7] Takeuchi also confirmed that a female character from the series, who is seen briefly at the end of the trailer, will appear in the game.[7] In an online interview, Takeuchi revealed that the game's plot will be set in Africa, and will concern "the origins of the virus". He also stated one of the plot's key elements will revolve around the whereabouts of STARS and Redfield's life after the first Resident Evil game.[18] UK-based publication Xbox World 360 revealed that the game takes place in an area named Kijuju. They also confirmed the return of recurring antagonist Albert Wesker, as well as Sherry Birkin.[19] Another game trailer that was released on May 31, 2008 depicted a female character named Sheva Alomar who is an agent of the West African branch of the BSAA,[20] who will assist Redfield.[21]
Alomar will follow Redfield, while supplying him with ammo and support. She will also be able to engage enemies, and will require the player's assistance from time to time.[22]
Information from IGN.com has revealed the lady in white from the trailers to be Excella Gionne. According to IGN, she is a family member of the founder of the Tricell Pharmaceutical Company and she runs the company's African branch.[23]
In the Japanese magazine Famitsu it was revealed that Ozwell E. Spencer will be formally introduced in Resident Evil 5