Last friday Guitar Hero Metallica (GH:M) was finally released! I even managed to get it fairly cheap thanks to some trade in of useless old PS3-games that I bought cheap on the second hand market anyway. I had previously only played Guitar Hero on Wii so this was the first time I got one for the PS3 including a guitar. I don’t know if the guitar that came with GH:M was better than the usual PS3 or not but it was definetly an improvement over the Wii guitars. It felt alot more solid and especially strumming felt alot better.
I’ve only played the game a few hours in total since I had other things to do this weekend as well. From the little I’ve played the game feels alot like an improvement from the previous games. It is technically more difficult but manages to be so in a fun way.
My only problem is that now I have to try and get the old Guitar Hero games for the PS3 so I can retire my old Wii guitars! Either that or I just pick up the coming greatest hits version coming soon.
I kind of missed the release of Bionic Commando Rearmed but that might not have been an entierly bad thing, now I can get the game cheaper! The PS3 price just dropped to £3.99 / €4.99 (down from (£6.99 / €9.99) on PSN according to VG247.
Bionic Commando Rearmed is a new version of the old NES classic Bionic Commando. New graphics, new music, on-line features and other improvements. Additionally completing certain checkpoints in this game will unluck features in the upcoming Bionic Commando title.
In recent news 3D realms have gone out of business. Whatever this means for Duke Nukem Forever is currently under dispute, why end a gaming joke of ten years just because the developer is gone? With a number of employees laid off some of the material from the Duke Nukem Forever development have surfaced on the Internet. Below you will find a video of some gameplay footage. You can also visit the official website while it’s still around and grab some desktop wallpapers to help you remember this game that never was.
This piece of news will probably make Slash001 sad.
Only a few days ago I complained about Lego Rock Band, now it’s Activision turn to come with even more new about the music gaming industry. Taken from Kotaku today we have news of DJ Hero, a game to feature yet another controler, and also a new TV Show for Guitar Hero. Is there no end to this? A few years back all game companies did was FPS and RTS, now it’s all MMO and music games. I just hope that of all the money flowing into Activision Blizzard (and other companies) goes to at least some good development of new fresh ideas rather than this extrapolation of the allready successfull.
There have been many people claiming they are sure that gaming consoles as we know them are on their final generation. The reasons this has been claimed are many, from technical superiority of computers to simple sales statistics of the Playstation 3 and X-box 360. All this have been discussed earlier on this blog back in august last year. I now want to lift another very high argument that I believe the future of console games are safe: simplicity.
If you buy a game for your computer you need to make sure it runs on your current hardware. Still if you meet the requirements you are sometimes disappointed by the actual performance you get which leads you to endless trails of software and driver upgrades, operating system optimization, hard drive defragmentation and other maintenance chores. In the end you might end up having to upgrade some hardware to be satisfied. Even worse, since the computer is most likely used for other things there is sure to be some malfunction sooner or later due to viruses or other causes.
A gaming console on the other hand is a dedicated piece of software and hardware which is streamlined to play the games you buy. Reversely the games are streamlined to run on exactly that machine. This is optimal both for buyers and developers. The games require less testing before released since only one (or a few) possible machines will be known to run the game. When you receive a game it will be tested for exactly your conditions and will require no effort on your part to experience it the way the developer intended it.
More than this most game machines are so simple to operate, you insert a game and you play. As of late some machines have endeavored to become complete entertainment machines and started looking more like HTPCs than gaming consoles and in doing so have become more complicated. Maybe this is yet another reason for the success of the currently simplest machine on the market, the Wii, which still have on-line connectivity but in a much more modest form than it’s cousins PS3 and X-box 360.
In conclusion, when I want to play a game I want to relax. Give me something simple!
The new DLC “Burnout Cops and Robbers” is confirmed and will go live very soon in the Burnout store. I love Burnout since I first played it (Burnout 3 on the PS2 was the first one I tried), but I always wondered what the police where doing (or not doing!). I’m looking forward to this content, sure beats the outrageous prices for custom viechles. According to Criterions news it will cost €9.99 / £7.99 / 800MS.
We’ve previously mentioned the Onechanbara game, a game where lighly dressed women fight zombies with swords. Gamespot gave the Wii-version of the game a 3.0 grade (out of 10!). The only thing good about the game according to Gamespot was simply “you can dismember zombies”. Well, if the game fails… let’s make it a movie!
Most interestingly I’m still tempted to buy this game.
Do you remember Leisure Suit Larry? Or Police Quest? My favourite was Space Quest, I always where a sucker for science fiction. Now you can play these games through your webbrowser, multiplayer….ish. Sarien.net have posted Larry 1, Space Quest 1 & 2, Police Quest 1 and The Black Cauldron in small browser based games. It looks and feel just like the old games with a few minor improvements. First of all you can click and move and secondly you can right click to get a menu of commands. Another neat trick that is added is that you can see other players playing the game at the same time and perhaps learn a trick or two that you see them do. You cannot interact with other players but you can still follow them around and learn. These games brings nostalgic memories back to me, I’m waiting and hopeing for Kings Quest 1 to return as well since I never managed to finish that one.
Is it just me or doesn’t this smell of total lack of imagination? Nowdays you can find just about any “classic” super hero in a Lego format. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero series at the same time competes to bring you all the songs of yore. The logic combination for those with no sense of imagination is of course Lego Rock Band (source: IGN). This is as logical as “World of Guitar Hero the MMO”. We can comfort ourselves with one small fact, at least it could be worse. It could be “Lego Smurfs Rock Band”.
We’ve previously mentioned the 
