Digital Body Count, run by Nick Jamieson, Aaron Calliou, and Baljot Bhatti, is your guide to the world of video games, movies, music and general current affairs.
Regular writers include Josh Pobiega and Chad Porter.
First off, I’d like to take a second and greet you with a dashing smile and a quick handshake. My name is Josh, and I will be telling you about Sony’s E3 ’09 Press Conference. I know, I know it’s a little late, but I didn’t see anything about it on DBC so here it is.
Kicking things off, Sony announced that they have 364 titles coming out amongst their three platforms. 35 of which will be exclusive. (That’s right PS2 fans, Sony still showing you some love.)I gotta say I’m pretty excited for what’s ahead for the PS3. What’s ahead you ask? Well, I’ll tell ya…
I’ll start things off with a bang and talk about our first glimpse of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Let me tell you, this game looks Be-A-Utiful.Looking from a top a tall city building over everything else below was just mind blowing. Nathan Drake makes his return with a new sexy sidekick for all of us to ogle at. (YES!)In the demo Drake and his compatriot are being hunted by a chopper, of course there are a lot of bangs, booms, and ahhhs as everything culminates into a the collapse of a building that Drake and friend are still trying to escape. Do they make it? Watch and you’ll see. Expect Uncharted 2: Among Thieves to be out sometime this November.
This brings us to the next exclusive title for the PS3, MAG. FPS fans rejoice because I believe this game is going to redefine the way we play objective based multiplayer online upon release. Boasting an impressive 265 online multiplayer online demo at the conference, I cannot wait to see this live. Everything seemed so smooth from issuing commands to landing carefully placed shots between the eyes of the enemy.What gets me is how slow paced the combat is. It’s not like Call of Duty or Halo where you just run and gun. There’s actually a lot of strategy that goes with the gunplay. (Go figure right?) Look for MAG to carpet bomb onto shelves third quarter of this year.
Next up we got a hands-on preview of Assassin’s Creed 2. The game looks killer. We’re playing another one of Desmond Miles’s carefully cloaked (and tastefully clothed if I may) ancestors, Ezio, in Italy during the Renaissance. What I like about the game thus far is that we’re not losing our “assassin powers” this time around. We’d have to learn them in order to lose them if that was the case. Yeah, that’s right. Our protagonist doesn’t really know how to kill people. (WHAT?!?!) Ezio is a wealthy nobleman when we first meet him, and he’ll have to learn from friends how to be a great assassin. Oh yeah, and did I mention one of those friends is Leonardo Da Vinci. Word.
Bringing Part 1 to a close, barely containing the excitement is God of War 3. The game play footage was demoed by none other than the Santa Monica Studio fellas. The demo introduces a couple of new enemies and some interesting button-reactions. Kratos can now grab enemies and use them as a battering ram against its compatriots. Harpies make a return and this time around you can ride them for a short period of time to help reach a distant path or cliff.
What really got me going was the fight with the chimera though. It worked as more of a mini boss fight than anything, but instead of just hacking away and waiting to perform the button sequence to kill it; this guy operates a little bit differently. See after perform the one button shock attack, the chimera changes it’s fighting style depending on what you’ve removed from it. For example: take out the snake tail, it stands on its hind legs and begins to fight you like Mike Tyson on crack. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and the demo ended in typical blockbuster game fashion…with an out of reach release date. March 2010. Deal with it.
That wraps up Part 1 of Sony’s Press Conference. I hope you’ve enjoyed our time together as much as I did.
So I was reading a preview of the new Max Payne 3 and I found out it was going to have multiplayer in it. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to work but it is going to be included. Bioshock 2 falls under the same category with the fact that it has an original style of FPS and a narrative that works with the style of the game. The multiplayer might work with the customization of the plasmids and weapons but I still think it is not required. I then had a thought, a game that has a history of great single player gameplay but no multiplayer makes me wonder…is it still required?
Have we gamers entered an age where games now must have some sort of multiplayer in order for it to be considered a game worth buying? If this is the case then we are in a world of hurt. Imagine if Elder Scrolls or Fallout had multiplayer. I mean sure on paper it might sound cool but without altering the gameplay a little we’re looking at a first person hack-n-slash, crazy, unstructured mess.
Resident Evil has some of the worst multiplayer (not co-op, that was good) I have ever seen. Resident Evil 5 is an okay single player but if you buy it for both, well prepare to make a stop at your local game exchange store because you’re not going to want this in your sweet plastic collection. Now some people might say “well I beat the single player, I want some more...”. Guess what peeps, we have DLC! Game developers need to make these either FREE or cheaper because we have paid for the game which costs $60, therefore the publisher and developer should have some semblance of customer loyalty and provide as much new content as possible rather then forcing us to pay for content that is already on the disc. All in all game developers need to realize that if the game has a great single player then multiplayer shouldn't be forced into the game, and if its has a great combination of the two then all the more power to the player!
Day 1 of E3 has ended, and let me tell you, Microsoft has a lot of stuff going down. I am writing this as a favor to our readers who aren't too well informed on what’s gone on so far. Where do I start?
The Microsoft press conference was full of surprises, ranging from the shocking to the joyous! One of these surprises was the announcement that the XBOX 360 would be getting two exclusive maps for Modern Warfare 2 via DLC (a huge win for Microsoft, as Call of Duty 4 was one of the biggest games of '07 and '08). After that, we had some teasers and gameplay footage for the previously announced Halo: ODST, which appears to be a Ghost Recon-ish game, where you play as an ODST trooper rather than a Spartan, and work in a squad, taking down the Covenant and attempting to solve a mystery inside the ruined city of New Mombassa. After that, the entire press conference was shocked with the reveal of a small teaser showing the brand new, previously unknown, Halo game, called Halo: Reach. It seems like the game is based around the Fall of Reach, a Halo novel written by Eric Nylund. No news on whether or not this is an FPS or something else. Release date: 2010.
Next thing that caught my attention (as I've been a fan of the series since its inception) was the gameplay and teaser trailers for Splinter Cell: Conviction, which has been on the burner for nearly two years. Ubisoft has changed the entire gameplay concept from what it was originally - now all combat is based around real-time events, and a unique objective system that doesn't pop up in the oft-seen HUD format. Since the main character, Sam Fisher, no longer works for the government (or anyone for that fact), his actions are based around aggression and his desire for revenge. The action seems to be faster paced, as well as working around melee combat. It seems like a better version of the Bourne video game.
Of course, another big surprise was the reveal of Left 4 Dead 2, which really, no one saw coming - the original game was released less than a year ago, and had very little DLC support. The focus here seems to be on melee combat, with chainsaws, saucepans, baseball bats, and other fun items. A new class of special zombie was revealed, which is a cross between the Tank and the Hunter. Killing zombies never gets old!
Crackdown 2 looked pretty awesome too. The original Crackdown was a game that I would often play when I was bored and didn't really want to play anything else. Some crazy new angle (maybe aliens or monsters) appears at the end of the teaser, but other than that, it appears like the game is more of the same (also, we now get 4-player co-op).
Of course, another big surprise was Hideo Kojima appearing on stage, and showing off a teaser trailer for the 360-bound Metal Gear Solid: Rising, a game based around the MGS character and Snake sidekick Raiden, the nimble, sword-wielding cyborg. Not much else is known about the game, but damn, 360 owners have been looking forward to an MGS game on their console for a looooong time!
Some new Microsoft partnerships to announce - the 360 will soon be integrated with the Facebook network. You can update your status, upload pictures and send messages via your 360, and with compatible games (hopefully all of them) you can take screenshots in game and upload them to Facebook, and update your status with your leaderboard position and scores! In the same vein of news, Microsoft announced that they would be teaming up with Twitter to work on the 360 as well - we're assuming it would work in the same way as Facebook.
That's my summing up of the first day of E3, hopefully you read this and feel more informed.
We here at Digital Body Count have decided to have as wide-ranging an opinion as possible on games, movies and music, and to do so, we've decided to take on some new writers. First in line is our good friend from Ohio, Chad Porter. Chad is an excellent gamer, and is always ready with an opinion on popular culture (and reciting lines from movies over and over to the point of annoyance).
We hope Chad will have a great time at Digital Body Count, and of course, we hope to hear him on the upcoming BodyCast (our podcast, a work in progress!).
Not much needs to be said here. It's more SupCom, the robots are bigger than ever, the battlefields are larger, and it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun!
While I can't claim to be the biggest fan of the first Mass Effect (it took nearly a year and half for the game to "grab" me and for me to finish it) I did thoroughly enjoy it once I got over the atrocious vehicular combat and the awful inventory system. The combat was enjoyable, the biotic powers fun to use and the questing and general RPG-ness made me like the game in the end, even when my character did something completely unexpected ("I DIDN'T MEAN FOR YOU TO SHOOT HIM, SHEPHERD!"). ANYWAYS, it appears Bioware has just released an E3 teaser trailer for the sequel and it is looking very good.
I read a lot of Cracked.com, and every so often I think to myself, “I ought to make a list in that style.” One topic has been on my mind pretty much since the game’s release – the songs of Rock Band. Now, I can be very picky about people who are content to group Punk, Metal, Grunge, and Pop into an overly sweeping generalization of the genre that is Modern Rock. The following is the result of carefully considering each track in the game, and crafting my personal Top 10 songs that should not have been included, and rest assured I will be very specific in why they are on the list. And like any list, this is from ‘least critical’ to ‘most critical’ offense.
10 – The COVER of “Tom Sawyer” by Rush The first thing that needs to be said here is that Tom Sawyer is bar none the best song Rush has ever made and will ever make. This is no surprise, considering it’s ranked as number 19 on the All-Time Greatest Hard Rock tunes by VH1. So you’ve developed a video game where the players get to jam along to their favorite classic rock tunes. But you can’t get the licensing rights to the most epic Rush song ever made, so what should you do? The correct answer to this question is to either a: go to your money source and beg for the extra cash to do so, or b: go straight to Rush and convince them that the fan response will balance the cost. What you should not do is find a cover band, whose lead singer sounds nothing like Geddy Lee, and show the gamers how immediately willing you are to spoil a classic. I wouldn’t doubt that the fan response to this little faux-pas was the driving reason behind the original’s introduction in the downloadable content well after the fact. Rush rocks, plain and simple. If you can’t get the rights to their greatest song, aim for the second greatest and keep working down that list until you find one you can afford.
9 – “Next To You” by The Police I’ve never proclaimed myself a huge fan of the Police – I know their hits, the rest is obscurity and sometimes appropriately so. This is one of those latter tracks. Apparently it’s the first track on their first album. Before Rock Band I had never heard the song, and from the research I’ve done on it, the reason is logically that it never got any airplay, and thusly never received any specific acclaim or award. This is a case where I would suggest to EA to aim higher on the list of Police songs that rock. Granted, this may also be a case of them actually applying the logic I suggested for Rush – maybe they went down that list and realized this was most rock-oriented and least ‘weird Police music’ song they could get on their budget.
8 – “Epic” by Faith No More And now we hit the category of songs that annoy me. In first defense, this has to be the only Faith No More song I’ve ever heard, so I’m not immediately writing off their entire career. On this list a song can annoy me for two reasons – being exceptionally difficult to play on the guitar-controllers, or just being outright annoying music. ‘Epic’ is annoying music. The lead singer’s voice has an almost whiney quality to it that I find not quite the right fit for the hard rock genre, in which this song definitely can be classified. Musically the song’s instrumentation is fine, kinetically it’s one of the least difficult to play; lyrically it’s very hard to listen to multiple times. People I’ve played the game with would support me on this – it’s just not a very good song. FNM probably have better songs; why EA picked this one is anybody’s guess.
7, 6, 5 – “Pleasure” by Bang Camaro, “Brainpower” by Freezepop, “29 Fingers” by The Konks You might think I’m being kind of hard on these bands, considering each owes their inclusion to the fact that a band member either works for Harmonix or the band itself lives near the Harmonix corporate headquarters. But they have good reason to be on this list – they all really suck. Bang Camaro earned their position by basically sounding like Def Leppard, with the critical difference of kind of missing the point of Def Leppard. It was the late 70’s – hair metal was the rage, and it was a genuine challenge to do something unique. Def pulled it off; with Bang Camaro you don’t feel any solid originality in the song - it all feels very done before. Brainpower got itself on this list right away by not being rock at all. It is electro-pop, synth heavy, cartoonish, and the lyrics themselves are literally the story of the band’s creation. The simple fact is that the song is one hundred percent electronic instrumentation, and by base definition it is not rock. The game’s called “Rock Band,” not “80’s One-Hit-Wonder Wannabe.” 29 Fingers would be number one on my list of “Most Annoying Songs in Any Rock Band Game”. The music is an uninspired riff, simple drum beat, and the modulation on the guitars it at times painful to the ears. The lyrics themselves are a bizarre clue about the band – clearly one of them is missing a digit. Was it so important that they had to write a song about it? Maybe it was lost in a particularly raucous gig and some fan has it tucked away in a box in his closet. Whatever the disfiguring tragedy may be, it can’t possibly be worth subjecting us to one of these ‘loud for the sake of loud’ songs.
4 – “Run To The Hills” by Iron Maiden First point: as with Rush and the Police, Iron Maiden rock the socks off, like that baseball hitting Charlie Brown. My problem lies not with the song. It’s definitely one of their coolest tunes. My problem lies simply in the instrumentation. With single-note strings that feel about a hundred strums long, this song is designed to wear out not only your fingers, but the controller. These things aren’t cheap, Harmonix. We want them to last us into the sequel. My own guitar was out of commission until a while back when my tinkering with it inexplicably re-enabled its strum and D-pad. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could blame this track for basic wear and tear on the strum mechanism. But mechanical stress and Carpal Tunnel aside, the song rocks.
3, 2 – “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, “Train Kept A-Rollin” by Aerosmith I list these two side by side on the grounds that they seem to have caused the most distress in band play, being the songs with nearly impassable guitar solos that would inevitably kill the performance. By themselves in solo campaign, it didn’t take too many tries to pass them (I’ve listed them by my perceived solo difficulty, which incidentally were made that much easier by getting the Stratocaster controller). ‘Enter Sandman’ may have been a tedious song with crippling solos, but after a few tries you not only internalize the pattern of the solo breaks, you start to recall the best times to deploy star power, and that’s what got me through. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ just took that stress up a notch by being such a long damn song. The worst part was deploying the star power too soon and watching it peter out in the long empty stretches before a critical solo. Obviously the songs were picked for that reason - their complexity, but seriously Harmonix. Sometimes less is more. Could have gone for some “Master Of Puppets” and “Walk This Way.”
1 – “Sabotage” by Beastie Boys I knew this was number one before even plotting out the rest of the list. The Beastie Boys are a good band in their own right, and in their own genre. Rock is not their genre. They only found a slot in the game because of the incidental fact that the band members can actually play instruments and occasionally do in their songs. What you don’t hear in their music is anything resembling what I call rock. This is a genre nitpick, one that they’ve gone on to abuse a second time in the sequel. Neither song is particularly difficult (as a matter of fact I aced the one in Rock Band 2 on the first try because it’s pitifully easy) and I don’t have anything against the band in terms of my tastes. The song has, for some reason that I can’t particularly justify, found a place on Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. That position is number 475. All this means to me is that in empirical terms it’s a little better than Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ and not quite as good as ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ by Funkadelic. Does this make it rock-worthy? Very doubtful.
A while back, THQ Australia had announced they had, in development, a Warhammer 40K game that was a brawler/God of War type game. Just now, THQ have re-announced that the game has taken a new direction - that of action RPG, similar to, say, Titan Quest - and was being developed by 40K and Company of Heroes veterans (and saviours of the RTS genre, in my humble opinion) Relic Entertainment. They also released a trailer with in-game, in-engine footage, and it is looking mighty sweet. I don't claim to be an expert on the lore and mythology behind Warhammer 40K, but I loved Dawn of War 2, and this game really appeals to me. Watch the trailer below...
This Tuesday saw the release of one of the most anticipated titles for the Playstation 3 - inFamous, developed by Sucker Punch, best known for their stellar work on the Sly Cooper (PS2) series, and man, is it amazing.
If you've been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears, then I'll give you a brief synopsis on the game - you play Cole, an average bike messenger who unknowingly transports a bomb which wipes out half of the city. Rather than killing him, the attack gives Cole electrical powers, which grow ever more powerful. The city is put under military quarantine, and Cole is left on his own to try and clean up the streets of the Reapers, a cult-like gang.
Both Aaron and I have both put in serious time with the game since release, and we're both loving it. Everything about it, from the combat, to the ranking/leveling up, to the acrobatic platforming (that could put Assassin's Creed to shame), the "Karmic" system, is fantastic, well-polished and just presented excellently. Even the story, told through radio conversations and brilliantly animated graphic novel-style sequences, has kept me interested so far. It is a shame that the PS3 has such a tiny list of exclusives that make the list worth it - thinking hard, I could only come up with 3 - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Metal Gear Solid 4, and now inFamous. From what I've played so far, it seems like Sucker Punch have possibly created the best game for the Playstation 3.
A full review will come soon, but I'm sure that Aaron and I will be posting our thoughts here and there, but until then, I can give this game my full recommendation.
The Microsoft press conference was full of surprises, ranging from the shocking to the joyous! One of these surprises was the announcement that the XBOX 360 would be getting two exclusive maps for 
