So, I have some codes for Beatles tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road, but instead of redeeming them, I bought the full albums and decided to give the codes away here! All you need to do to is register for the forums and start, or join, a [...]]]>

Paul is excited for someone to win!

So, I have some codes for Beatles tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road, but instead of redeeming them, I bought the full albums and decided to give the codes away here! All you need to do to is register for the forums and start, or join, a discussion! (Real posts please!) Forum link is on the right hand side of the page. This contest will run until Saturday, and a winner will be chosen Sunday night.  We’ve got another contest in the works too! Maybe we’ll write an article or something too!

I have been surrounded by music lovers my entire life. My father gave me my first guitar, and my uncle, who lives across the street, hung his classic LPs across the walls of his basement. I’ve always had an appreciation for good classic rock because [...]]]>

Paul does not need a fur coat with that beard

I have been surrounded by music lovers my entire life. My father gave me my first guitar, and my uncle, who lives across the street, hung his classic LPs across the walls of his basement. I’ve always had an appreciation for good classic rock because of them. It’s because of them I was at my local Best Buy this morning standing in line for The Beatles: Rock Band. I was always familiar with the band through my younger years, but as I grew, so did my fondness for them, and my appreciation for what they’ve done for music. So I’ll profess my fanboy status upfront, and let you know this review is heavily biased. However, I think that in this day and age, it is more strange to not be influenced by The Beatles in the realm of music, as their short career produced the most appreciated catalog of music that the world has ever seen. So, after I returned home from Best Buy this morning, I stood there with my faux Gretsch guitar, and played through the entire story in one sitting, played some more, went to class, then called over some friends and played some more. After taking in everything the game has to offer, here’s what I came away with.

Meet The Beatles
This game gives players a chance to experience the career of the band in a way they never have before. This is how this generation will learn about The Beatles, and through 45 songs, will experience their music and see what it did to the world. Guitar Hero: Metallica/Aerosmith/Van Halen do not take the time to teach the audience anything about the bands they represent, and in the end they are a lifeless handful of lifeless note charts played by avatars that may or may not resemble their bands.

Stunning Visuals
As the band enters their studio period in the story, without live performances, the “dreamscapes” stand in for the live shows, and do a wonderful job of giving the bystanders of the game something to watch other than note charts and avatars. Harmonix did a masterful job of creating scenes that are somewhere between music videos and live performances, and they are great. Personal favorites are “Yellow Submarine” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. The menus of the game even look great and have a great sense of the Beatles’ spirit.

Set List
Though the song list is only 45 tracks, as opposed to Rock Band 2′s 84, these are 45 great songs. There were a couple oddities that I, upon hearing the song list, did not think would make for a fun game, I had fun playing 44 of the songs in the game. The back half of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is damn near painful to play through, however. Some songs I wished to see were omitted, but it is Harmonix, so we know it will be in the pipes somewhere down the line.

Behind the Scenes
After finishing my career I checked out every picture and video I unlocked, because each picture comes with an informative paragraph, and each video gives you a view of something you may not have otherwise seen about the band. On top of that, once the band is in the Abbey Road chapters, the loading screens and score screens have snippets from the recording sessions for the songs. There was a great deal of effort put into making sure this game not only lets you play the music of The Beatles, but also to let you experience their world. This additional content is fantastic, and is a great reason to make sure you finish each song perfectly.

Familiar Ground
With as much as I love Rock Band as a franchise, I still think there could have been a little more done to separate this game from the main series. It feels like its a skin, albeit a beautiful one, for the standard Rock Band. While there are improvements (harmonies, pause countdown, menu refinements) it seems like iterative improvements. In my mind, it is because they focused more time on getting The Beatles part right than the Rock Band part right. If nothing else, minor improvements from this game will roll into the inevitable Rock Band 3 that we will see next year.

So, all in all, The Beatles: Rock band is a fantastic game for anyone who likes the following:

• The Beatles
• Rhythm games
• Themselves

Go back through the annals of gaming history and I’m sure you’ll find a long standing trend in which games created from licensed properties have generally not been well accepted or well made. So the first murmurs about Batman: Arkham Asylum didn’t inspire too much excitement in me. But as [...]]]>

Ha! More like "The CHOKER."

Go back through the annals of gaming history and I’m sure you’ll find a long standing trend in which games created from licensed properties have generally not been well accepted or well made. So the first murmurs about Batman: Arkham Asylum didn’t inspire too much excitement in me. But as its release grew nearer footage of the game seemed to portray an interesting story, innovative gameplay, and polished graphics. And now that I’ve played the game I think it’s safe to say that my view on licensed video game titles has been drastically changed as this iteration of Batman lore has broken the mold and provided all of the elements you saw in pre-release footage.

Compelling Story
Even without a deep knowledge of Batman cannon, an average player can find themselves immersed in the story rather quickly. It’s not deep or overly referential to the source material. Instead it leads the player on a one night only performance of twists and turns emceed by none other than the one and only Joker.

Exceptional Visual Elements
Batman: Arkham Asylum manages to keep the player visually interested. The opening cinematic provides an aerial view of Arkham Island, which doesn’t look so big. But once you gain control of the Dark Knight you’ll quickly find yourself deep within the bowels of an almost overwhelming amount of creepy villain filled real estate.

Varied Gameplay Mechanics
Throughout the course of your evening on Arkham as Batman you’ll be put to the test. Not in a race for points or beating bosses in record time. Instead, this game tests the player with the question “What would Batman do?” Sometimes you’ll be confronted with a room full of unarmed thugs. Do you run in an beat them up? Use any of your numerous bat gadgets to take a few out from afar before taking them on? Or do you take everyone out stealthily? These are just a few of the mechanics you can use to take on each area as they grow increasingly more challenging over time. All of them are well tuned, fun, and offer the player more than one way to approach any situation.

Upgrades Schmupgrades
Batman didn’t become the world’s greatest detective over night. This is why during your stay on Arkham Island you’ll gain experience points for just about everything. The XP you gain goes towards the purchase of certain upgrades that will make things easier in a bit more interesting for Batman. Many of the upgrades are standard fare, like better batarangs, more armor, and better combos. But there are some things that you are able to buy that you’d think Batman would just know already. For instance, the inverted takedown, which is the ability to hang above a thug and silently grab him and string him up. This ability comes in handy in the many situations where stealth comes into play. It’s one of those classic Batman moves that everyone knows and you have to use experience points to get it.

Combat That’s Almost Too Fluid
The combat in Batman: Arkham Asylum is great. It’s great because it’s simple. You press X to hit, B to stun, Y to counter, and A to jump. Everything else is just icing on the cake. The combat usually begins with you approaching or surrounded by a group of thugs and your goal is to take them all down to advance. You attack quickly guiding Batman from henchman to henchman in quick succession as they recover from each previous blow, all the while building up a combo multiplier in hopes that you’re offered the opportunity to execute a devastating combo move. But the multiplier is probably a tougher foe to overcome than any of these battles. If you find yourself resting, or simply not attacking a thug for more than a second or two, your multiplier resets and starts counting up again with each subsequent strike. If you’re playing for points, you’re going to need to practice, but if you’re playing for fun this shouldn’t bother you too much, you’ll get the practice you need as you make your way through the game.

Had this been any other licensed character game, this review would probably be drastically different. The game was long enough, good enough, and fun enough to make this a definite purchase. Overall I spent about 12 hours completing the story mode on Normal for Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. I plan on going back to it soon to find more of the Riddler’s 240 challenges and riddles, take on thugs and mini bosses in Challenge Mode, and explore more of the compelling Batman universe.

We’ve been meaning to write more around here, but as we’ve both been taking summer classes and working, those opportunities are fewer. Hell, for me, even opportunities to play games are limited to late night sessions that I usually regret as I wake up the next morning to head in to work. [...]]]>

Red Faction: Guerrilla

We’ve been meaning to write more around here, but as we’ve both been taking summer classes and working, those opportunities are fewer. Hell, for me, even opportunities to play games are limited to late night sessions that I usually regret as I wake up the next morning to head in to work. So, to offset this fact, my gaming time has really been limited to games that I have good, old-fashioned fun with. Most of that comes in my group sessions of Rock Band or Scene It, however, when flying solo, I’ve been taking to Red Faction: Guerrilla.

I got the game from GameFly a couple days after its release earlier this month, and I have not sent it back yet (this was much to Sean’s chagrin, as he had been waiting for them to send him a copy until last week). The game, which I have described to my friends as “GTA on Mars”, places you in the role of Alex Mason, whose brother was just killed by the Earth Defense Force, the governing body of the Martian colonies, and you’ve taken to the Red Faction to get your revenge. The Red Faction is a group of miners and workers who aim to overthrow the martial law of the EDF – giving that word red in the title a new meaning when you realize the socialist undertones of the game.

However, the story is really ancillary to the world and gameplay, because that is far more compelling. These days we’ve got our Bioshocks, our GTAs, our Fables and our Fallouts to give us gameplay that mixes weighty moral character driving into our gameplay, and while morality becomes a bigger fixture, sometimes people seem to forget why we play games. Listen to the most recent full episode of Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted and you’ll hear that a lot of people play games for fun. Red Faction: Guerrilla is, without a doubt, a game designed for the sole purpose of fun.

It’s no surprise to hear that a game so focused on having fun is done by Volition, whose Saint’s Row 2 ads made a point to acknowledge the tedium that occurred at times in games like GTA4. While I have not played SR2, I have heard enough of it from CheapyD on the CAGCast to know that it is a game that stresses having fun more than the choices you make in the game. RFG gives you a sledgehammer in the beginning and lets you know that you can use your hammer to take down the man, and the game’s physics system makes doing so incredibly fun. While it comes off as a standard, open-world, third-person shooter at first, and the average shooting controls make this part of the game seem lackluster. As the ListenUP! guys mentioned, once you realize the potential of the weapon set that you are given, you realize that it’s much more about destroying the world than it is about running and gunning, and at that point, the game becomes much more fun and satisfying.

While the single player is fun – I spent hours simply taking the time to level the entirety of enemy bases, sometimes with only my sledgehammer – they tacked on two multiplayer modes that compound the experience. Wrecking Crew is an awesome pass-and-play local versus-mode that up to 4 people can play, each taking turns to see who can do the most damage in a variety of ways. My friends and I gathered and enjoyed watching to see how the others thought to destroy buildings in a bevy of creative ways. For example, when armed with only a jetpack and a sledgehammer, I took to the roof of the building and set about smashing through the roof, with hopes that falling debris from the top would crush everything on the way down. My friend Dave took a different approach and systematically took out all the supports for the building, and in the final seconds, it crashed to the ground, and he gained triple the score I did.

There is a full multiplayer suite too, and instead of tossing you into the open world, it has a bunch of smaller maps styled after sections of the main game, but specialized for the multiplayer modes. This is great, because as my friends and I played GTA4 online, there were many times where we would be on different parts of the map, and the game felt very empty because of it. The game has an XP system, as well as modes that range from standard deathmatch and CTF variants as well as Battlefront/Battlefield-style command point chasing. However, there are a variety of different character ability backpacks and the destructive weapons from the single player game, and it all takes place within the same high-destructibility level of the game. It breathes a whole new life into the multiplayer, which is fairly generic on paper. I normally stray from online play with strangers, but I’ve found myself playing it for quite some time now.

When too many games are spending time on things that aren’t condusive to the standard idea of fun – such as choice and morality, which are weighty, real-world situations some people play video games to escape from – RFG puts fun at the forefront. It’s the kind of escapism that only games can provide. It does not do anything to advance games as an art form, or as a medium of change. Sure, it’s got a heavy socialism coat on, but that won’t do anything to sway someone’s political views. It’s just fun to destroy stuff with a hammer.

***

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE ACTION? – m4w – 28

Some people call me a mercenary, but I’d like to think I’m just a [...]]]> If game characters had their own personal ad section on Craigslist, I can imagine that as of the past few years a lot of the postings would sound a little like this:

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LOOKING FOR A LITTLE ACTION? – m4w – 28

Some people call me a mercenary, but I’d like to think I’m just a nice guy with a wild streak. I’m into firearms and explosives but I can never get enough ammo I like riding in and hanging from a lot of different types of vehicles (just to spice things up). I’ve been described as a packrat and I’ll admit to that. I just like collecting odds and ends I find throughout the world.

I’m about 6 feet tall and weigh about 175 lbs. I’m a white guy with short hair and dreamy blue eyes. I usually wear a hoodie or a coat and I have a gruff voice. Sometimes I try to be stealthy, but I’ve found that tactic to be less effective lately. I always seem to attract attention wherever I go. Oh, and people say that I look best from behind and at a slight angle. Like what you hear?

Send me a message! No pics, no response.

***

Gears of War's Marcus Fenix

If you think you can pick out which video game character I just described here… you’re wrong. That description is what seems to be the cookie-cutter, go-to version of a majority of the game protagonists in the past few years. I’m looking at you. third person action games.  And while this isn’t a secret and you might be aware of it, you might not be aware of how strangely repetitive it’s actually getting.

Starting last week and continuing for the next two following it, a strange alignment of the game-playing planets is occurring. Let’s take a look at a highly anticipated release for each week.

This week (5/26/09) – InFamous – a third person action adventure game with a gruff talking mid to late 20’s male protagonist.

Next week (6/2/09) – Red Faction Guerilla – a third person action adventure game with a gruff talking mid to late 20’s male protagonist.

The Next Week (6/9/09) – Prototype – a third person action adventure game with a gruff talking mid to late 20’s protagonist.

Are you seeing the trend forming here?

inFamous' Cole

The only thing that seems to separate these three games is the settings and circumstances that drive the stories. And while I’m sure all of these games will be at least pretty decent (I’m honestly looking forward to playing all three), I’m seeing a wall quickly approaching.  The wall is my tolerance for the repetition of third person action games with the brazen, quick-talking, wild-eyed, former-frat-boy-turned-hero characters that have been shoved into our consoles for the entirety of this generation.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not against playing games like this as long as they contain elements that would make them great games. Innovative game play, a compelling original story, and smart stylish aesthetics are all elements that I believe make a great game. It’s disheartening to see the games coming out that have tried to synthesize those elements into a formula. Is it really that hard to sell a game that doesn’t fit this now very standard mold? Have we run out of ideas to create stories with a compelling beginning, middle, and end? Do we really need any more space marines or gravelly-voiced action heroes?!

It may only be fair to mention that it’s probably not all of the developers who are at fault for this repetitious trend. I’m sure many publishers have realized that these games make money, and money is good. But good money means that people like you and me are buying these games time after time. Maybe it’s our game decisions that need to be re-examined.

Some of the best games of all time were driven by a character that rarely spoke, if at all.  They are characters that had an element of mystery to them through the minimizing of some aspect of their interaction with the player or world. Take Half Life’s Gordon Freeman: the man doesn’t speak a word of dialogue through 4 iterations of the game so far and the games are still interesting. The original Grand Theft Auto 3 guy: he also never spoke a word (he doesn’t even have a name) and GTA3 is still one of the most impressive games of its time. And everyone’s favorite, Halo’s Master Chief. Sure, he has a few lines of dialogue here and there since the first revision of the game, but it would’ve been just as fun and interesting without it. Plus, we never even get to see the face behind the helmet.

These examples just go to show that while gruff, mouthy, frat boy-esque protagonists in space suits or hoodies are great every once in a while, it would be nice to see someone be daring and leave some things to the imagination. Don’t give it all away on the first date, or in the Craigslist ad, or in the box quotes. Save some for the honeymoon.

Are there any recently formed gaming archetypes that really make YOUR skin crawl? Leave us a comment or talk about it in the forums.