Games Cheats and Reviews

From Strategyinformer.com: "God of War 3 (GOW3) ends the series with Kratos seeking to destroy Olympus, the gods, and specifically his father Zeus. As Santa Monica Studio’s first official title on the PlayStation 3, they were tasked with recreating everything from their previous titles for the new platform, and indeed performed marvelously. Beginning exactly where God of War 2 left off, climbing Mount Olympus on the Titan Gaia’s back, players are treated to one of the most spectacular first levels ever. Several simple tutorials against grunt soldiers all take place on Gaia herself, the lumbering Titan who is constantly moving, allowing for an ever-changing background during combat. The entire level leads up to a tremendous battle against Poseidon, god of the sea, which sets up the rest of the game as an epic adventure with giant levels, hundreds of enemies, gargantuan bosses, and beyond melodramatic action sequences. Over the top doesn’t properly describe this first level, which is so great in scope that it may be the single greatest level of any game, ever. "

Every year, it seems like one or two adventure/puzzle games comes along that sweeps us off of our feet, reminding us why the genre is still alive. This year, one of those titles was Amanita Designs’ Machinarium. Sadly though, this gem has been given limited exposure in terms of its release scope. That is about to be amended though, as Mamba Games has obtained the rights to publish the game in the UK and Europe.

Everyone knows the iPhone doesn’t take the best pictures, but do you want to take slightly better pictures while sacrificing almost all portability and looking like a total douche at the same time? Well if all of the above apply to you, you should take a good look at the ‘phone-o-scope’. The phone-o-scope was made by a camera modder Bhautik Joshi and the idea is to attach lens from a DSLR camera to an iPhone in a very crude way involving optics from a cd or dvd player, some sticky putty and like almost 90% of homemade diy mods alot of duct tape.

Howdy, pardners – Ubisoft wanted y’all to know that Bound In Blood, the Call of Jarez FPS for the PS3 and XBox 360, is gettin’ patched.

According to thems that knows, these patches “will improve the quality of multiplayer connections & matches, and refine the overall balance of multiplayer classes & modes. Specifically for PS3, the patch will significantly reduce checkpoint loading times.”

The complete class balance patch list for Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood are:

• Spy: damage increased; health increased;
• Gunslinger: recoil reduced; accuracy improved;
• Hombre: recoil and reload time increased; damage at long range significantly reduced;
• Veteran: health and accuracy decreased; additional pistols removed;
• Sniper: no-scope accuracy and damage significantly reduced; health decreased; sidearm Ranger swapped for Classic Gun

Virtual asset sales are big business and the scope continues to grow as MMOs become more popular.

When Club Neverdie, as asteroid space resort in Entropa Universe, sold for $100,000 it was major news. The fact that it is now valued at over $1 million in value and generates a monthly income for its owner is even bigger news.

Character, item, and currency sales are also big business. There are fears that the sheer volume of sales may eventually invite government regulation or even taxation.

It’s been four years since Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios was founded — and as president Shuhei Yoshida sees it, it’s played an indispensable role in developing the PlayStation 3’s game library.

"It’s been four years since Worldwide Studios was founded," Yoshida said in an interview with Famitsu magazine this week. "Up to that point, Japan, America and Europe had their own regional creative teams — they were all separate mid-sized publishers, in a way. With the PlayStation 3, though, the scope of games was vastly broadened, and the skills and costs required to create them made things a great deal more complex. It became difficult for these somewhat separated publishers to make good titles by themselves, and so we merged them as part of our strategy to create games with the entire world in mind."

Very little information on Bungie’s latest game in development – possibly the last between Microsoft and Bungie as partners – Halo: Reach, has been released to the public, other than it may very well be the largest game yet from Bungie. What has been shown by Microsoft and Bungie is a small teaser that covers the fall of the planet Reach, a pivotal time point in Halo lore. When asked about the game, Bungie community manager Brian Jarrard answered:

"Reach is going to be a tough project for us to wrap just because the scope is really big – it’s up there," said Jarrard. "It’ll probably be our biggest game ever just in terms of the amount of people working on it and the expectations for it. I mean, it’s a big deal for us."

Personally, I thought this would be a small game, focused on the Halo universe; like Halo 3: ODST. The way Jerrard explains it, it seems like I was wrong, and that Reach will be much bigger than I ever imagined.

Bungie’s back in action following Halo 3: ODST

"I know just for at least the next year our hardcore focus is going to be on getting Reach done and awesome and hopefully getting people excited about it," he said.

At CEDEC 2009, Sony Computer Entertainment exhibited the Physics Effects SDK. The Physics Effects SDK is a physics simulation engine optimized for the Cell Broadband Engine, which is provided as part of the PlayStation 3 SDK. Because the Physics Effects SDK is optimized for PlayStation 3, it can do physics simulations very fast, even though they are considered to impose a very high computing load. This could expand developers’ scope to include even more complex physical phenomena and mechanisms in games.

G4TV doesn’t know much about Halo: Reach yet. Microsoft and Bungie showed off a teaser for the possibly final collaboration between the two companies at E3, which chronicles the fall of the planet Reach, a major part of Halo lore. At the Penny Arcade Expo, they had a chance to ask Bungie community manager Brian Jarrard about Halo: Reach.

"Reach is going to be a tough project for us to wrap just because the scope is really big — it’s up there," said Jarrard. "It’ll probably be our biggest game ever just in terms of the amount of people working on it and the expectations for it. I mean, it’s a big deal for us."

To be honest, G4TV thought it was a small, focused spin-off, ala Halo 3: ODST. It’s not. Halo: Reach sounds much bigger than I’d ever imagined, the way Jarrard puts it.

"I know just for at least the next year our hardcore focus is going to be on getting Reach done and awesome and hopefully getting people excited about it," he said.

Martin Nerurkar of Game Architecture writes:

Have I got your attention? Alright, so I admit the two are not perfectly the same but I am convinced that Level Design is nothing but a specialized application of Game Design. And I can prove it! First let’s start by looking at a pretty okay definition of Level Design:

"Level Design is the process of designing and implementing the digital spaces of a video game"

Sounds simple enough, right? Of course if we were scientific about this we’d have to take a closer look at what digital spaces are. However that’s beyond the scope of this article and will be something I’ll talk about another time. For now let’s look at board games. Why? Because they’re quite similar to video games and because it makes it a lot easier to understand the topic.