FEAR 3, DragonAge2 oh the horror...

So when the hell will FEAR 3 be coming out? After Dead Space 2 I am in desperate need of more Horror games and FEAR up to now has always delivered well in that department. Know any other horror games to entertain myself with? Please let me know…

At the moment I am still entertaining myself with DragonAge2 BTW. Though it has some serious flaws it also has a lot of awesome aspects that make up for it. I even went out and bought the “collector’s edition game book” which I usually don’t do. Hell up till now the only other game book I ever bought was for Halo 3. With DA2 however I did feel the book was a good addition, after the first two play-throughs I am now discovering a lot of details and finding a lot of quests that really enrich the experience.

Selling a 18+ game to a twelve year old? No problem!

Okay so there I was picking up my copy of Dragon Age 2 Signature edition, waiting for some kid with his little sister and their mom to finish up buying an xbox and some games. The little brat could not have been older then maybe 13, most likely this was his present for his thirteenth birthday. Nothing wrong there even though I feel an xbox is quite the present and the jaded way the kid reacted, made me feel we were talking about a really spoiled brat here. I was surprised when I saw what games he was buying along with the console.

Fable2/ Halo Wars 16+
Afro Samurai 18+
Fall Out New Vegas 18+
Call of Duty Black Ops 18+

Now off course things aren’t black and white and I believe Halo Wars is rated too high for instance. Often a parent (especially one that actually plays games) can make a decision whether they want their kid to play a certain game. But this mom had no idea and completely ignored the PEGI ratings, but what is worse the lady behind the counter ignored their existence just as easily.

Selling games, or movies for that matter, disregarding the age restriction is not only showing a somewhat less socially involved market, but it’s also seriously endangering the whole industry. When actions such as these continue, many countries, like Germany and Australia have already done, will be inclined to ban or restrict certain entertainment products, especially games. Even though some games, many games even, like Dead Space, FEAR, Call of Duty are obviously intended for a mature audience, the risk of them being played by children as is evident by afore mentioned incident will be the cause of restrictions and bans of the more mature games. Which would suck…big time.

So I filed a complaint at the store… sorry E-plaza, but you need to get your shit in order!

Demo's

Demo’s

I hate demo’s. Somehow I just can’t stand not owning the complete game, or having to stop when I’m just “getting into it”. I understand the use of demo’s and I even at times used the option to check out if I would like a certain title, but only when the game was already available on the market.

Yesterday I played the DragonAge 2 demo… and it was all kinds of awesome… so now it’s extra annoying that I will have to wait for it till march 10. In hindsight it would have been better not to play it. But Bioware promised goodies if a certain amounts of downloads was done, so being the marketing victim I am I downloaded it and since it was there on my hard disk I might as well just play the damned thing… which I did… and now I want it, not on the tenth, but right now.

Well I suppose I should be glad I didn’t play a FEAR 3 demo, because that release date has just been postponed towards most likely the end of may.

Oh and... join my forum.... http://nltarot.forum2go.nl/

new year, sorry

Okay today I will make this easy on myself….

I know I haven’t posted in a while, sorry I had other, better and more important things to do. I will make this up soon, but for now I will be posting in a less… yes even less high frequency. Lazy guy that I am I will even post this one on both my blogs.

First of all I have drawn the Prey giveaway… and the winner is … drumroll… Qubert DaVaKa, he will be notified ( mail me je adres man )

So that one’s out of the way, now there’s still the nltarot.nl giveaway which will follow shortly, if you hurry you can still enter or boost your “score” (that’s posting, retweeting, sharing etc.).

So what’s happened, well I’ve been sick, symptoms resembling swine flu, oink. After that I’ve had a week off in which I have played games on my xbox (Red Dead Redemption and Halo Reach on legendary still needed finishing) and went to the Bodyworlds ( www.bodyworlds.com ) exhibition on which I will blog sometime next week.

So I hope you guys missed me and here’s to a fresh start of the new year.

My top ten of 2010 games

2010 was one of the better years game wise. Not only did Sony and Microsoft release their motion control systems but many of the larger well known gaming franchises came out with new installments. Other than that it would seem that some new games came out that definitely demand follow up the coming years. On the other hands there were some major disappointments as well.

As usual around the end of the year lists will be presented ranking achievements and happenings of the year. So I made a list, a top ten of new games I played this year. Off course because I do not own a PS3 you might miss some titles and I haven’t played every game that came out. Right now missing in my list for instance are several games people keep telling me are brilliant like; enslaved, Vanquish and Red Dead Redemption. So here it is my personal fave list of games I’ve played that came out this year.

1 Reach
2 Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
3 Bayonetta
4 Mass Effect 2
5 Darksiders
6 Castlevania Lords of Shadow
7 Dante’s Inferno
8 Guitar Hero 5
9 Overlord 2
10 Star Wars: the Force Unleashed 2

Prey give away… update…

Ladies and Gents… the day is drawing near for me to send prey on it’s way to a new owner. I will be drawing tickets next week. So if you still want to have chance to collect this game, now is the time to participate or increase your chances.

How does that actually work? Simple… for every promotional action you’ve taken you get a ticket (posting, retweeting, sharing, bringing in new followers or otherwise noteworthy promotional actions). From these tickets one will be randomly drawn and he or she will get the game sent to them by mail. So with one ticket you can win, but when half the tickets have your name on it you will greatly improve your chances.

Right now these are the “ratings”

1: Qubert DaVaKa : 6 Tickets
2: Paula Cardoso : 3 Tickets
3: Jeroen Kleingeerts : 2 Tickets

If there’s anything wrong here, let me know…

So Share, Tweet and otherwise promote your asses off to increase your chances… and let me know….

Acting like an idiot because the tiger wants me to…

Yes, I have bought Kinect. I already love it, though we got off on the wrong foot. I plugged in Johny 5’s head… or Wall-E’s for the later generations, because that’s what it kind of looks like (especially when it’s gaze is following you around the room, and I switched on my X-box, which immediately demanded an update. After agreeing with it, downloading started… and stopped… giving me an error code apparently Microsoft themselves hadn’t heard of. Off course after not downloading the update, the setup starts anyway, but since it had left Wall-E blind I was standing in my living room for 5 minutes till I thought; “Maybe something’s wrong?”… burning my delicious pizza to a crisp in the process… which I ate anyway.

After about an hour and a half the only thing I could think of was emptying up some memory space, since every time I googled “Why the FUCK doesn’t Kinect see me?” (I first tried asking why Johny Five or Wall-E didn’t want to see me but that didn’t help) I found comments on memory issues. And woppah! It worked and I got to play. First I played Kinect Adventures a bit, which is kind of cool in a “Look I’m better than Wii” sort of way. And then I played Kinectimals… which I am ashamed to say is so cute I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop. I was home alone so nobody saw me; playing dead (lying down on the floor…no cheating, you have to lie down flat on the floor), star jumping, sitting and spinning around in front off my TV, because my tiger and an annoying flying imp thingy wanted me to. But man, it was fun.

In a slightly cluttered living room, with a difficult angle for the cam to work with, I was quite impressed with how well it actually worked. It’s like Wii but much better, much more responsive and much more intuitive. I truly believe that it has a lot of interesting possibilities, I can’t wait to see what games and apps Microsoft can come up with. I only hope that they will keep supporting it, since previous efforts like the eye-toy with Sony eventually failed to entertain the masses.