Games Cheats and Reviews

To those who include level editors in your games, be advised: this is how you’re supposed to do it. Joe Danger, the charming first shot from British developers Hello Games, includes, like seemingly every racing game these days, an easy-to-use level editor. The difference is that Joe Danger really includes it: making it a part of the challenge as you race along. You literally have to build the track as you go during the tutorial — a brilliant conceit that actually makes learning and using the level editor relevant to gamers generally, not just those with a penchant for sharing their artistic brilliance (or lack thereof)…with the ladies.

Okay, enough about level editors, already. Who is Joe Danger? He’s a dude playin’ a dude disguised as another dude! No, wait, that’s Robert Downey, Jr. from Tropic Thunder, what the hell am I thinking? Joe Danger is a former motorcycle daredevil aiming to make a comeback on the motorcycle daredeviling circuit. He looks kinda like Leisure Suit Larry, but make no mistake: unlike Larry, Joe’s actually got game…with the ladies.

GFB writes: "While fanboys argue back and forth about what holds the Xbox 360 back or why the Wii is "lame", the Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable hardware have been facing the toughest foe of all, their own manufacturer. For some reason Sony just keeps shooting itself in the foot and refusing to catch on.

Starting back with Sony’s first major marketing mistake of this generation, the home of Playstation decided to create a fake marketing campaign called ‘all i want for xmas is a psp’ which resulted in a huge backlash from gamers. Some still argue that the PSP hasn’t recovered from the viral stigma slapped on it from this horrible holiday campaign."

This week on his Pach Attack podcast, Wedbush Morgan’s games analyst, Michael Pachter covered a few questions in his short show. Though one statement stood out, when he called out developer Valve by saying, " I still kinda wonder about companies like Valve that seem to not be interested in the PS3, I think that’s kind of a mistake, because they are a first rate, you know, world class developers. I think that they could …

Let’s get this out of the way: the opening 45 minutes of God of War 3 are indescribably brilliant. Make no mistake; you won’t have seen a video game with production values anywhere near this. It is utterly incredible, and a sequence that blows me away every time I play it (four times and counting). But it is just 45 minutes out of a game that spans 10 or so hours. Does the rest of the game live up to such a show-stopping introduction to the series on PS3?

Speaking at a panel on the emerging casual gaming market today, God of War and Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe called his company’s 2007 PlayStation Network game Calling All Cars "a mistake." Jaffe made the remark at the DICE Summit, an annual gathering of industry professionals in Las Vegas.

Jaffe had been asked whether he considered the genre-bending downloadable action game a hardcore or casual experience. "I’d call it a mistake," he replied.

Barnes & Noble has the PC version of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 listed for pre-order at $19.95, but it appears that this actually covers the entire game. It’s unclear whether this is a mistake or not on the retailer’s part, but if you plan on getting Bad Company 2, you should definitely go ahead and buy this in the event that they do honor it. The game normally retails for $50.

After a big public announcement of the sort Apple had this week for the iPad CEO Steve Jobs often takes time in the day or two afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: "It’s bullshit." Audience roars.

In what can only be described as a humongous mistake, Sony accidentally offered the film Armored for free as a download on the Playstation Store. More importantly, the film in question is currently in theaters.

BossLevel writes: I was on GameTrailers and came across a photo of Mass Effect with a PlayStation 3 logo on it. Does this mean something, it would be rather odd to say this is a mistake because the photo would have to have been edited. Seems fishy to me. Picture after the link.

Eurogamer writes: "I didn’t fully appreciate how good Uncharted 2 is until I played Halo 3: ODST. "Naughty Dog" is about right. The studio did, after all, ruin a game I’d been looking forward to all year. Bungie wasn’t to know I’d play ODST right after the return of Nathan Drake, of course. But boy, that was a mistake.

How quickly does the familiar pall in the wake of fresh wonder. In Halo’s case, how uninspiring the action, how rudimentary the characterisation, how drab it all felt after 11 hours and 21 minutes in Drake’s wild world."