Xbox Live seems to always have a promotion going on. This month it is “The Game Feast.” That seems more apropos for November but hey, I digress (and while I digress, I continue to wonder what the hell The Game Feasts means). This month, similar to Summer of Arcade and that other promotion they had that I cannot find the name of, you will get a bonus 10 bucks (800 MS Points) for buying 30 bucks (2500 MS Points) worth of content.
What is there honestly to say about Serious Sam… it’s a very simple game with some very simple mechanics—it’s caveman smart… it’s the AK-47 in the first-person world, you can’t go wrong with it at all. It’s dead simple—complexity just doesn’t exist in the dictionary, but the game is so hectic… so visceral and so awesome that you just can’t say no to it. With a quirky sense of humor and a nice sense of action—feel—design—art—etc… this game has that aura that makes you come back for more, no matter how much you try… no matter how hard you try to ignore, that name, Serious Sam, just comes back to you urging for more.
An addiction is a dependence on a substance or action. For instance, there are many people who are addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and still others who are addicted to sex. There is one addiction; however, that does not formally exist in psychological literature, video game addiction. Video game addiction is part of a larger set of compulsive conditions, such as compulsive gambling and compulsive eating. These kinds of conditions are not normal forms of addictions as they don’t rely on substance dependence like the one users get from alcohol and the nicotine in cigarettes. Instead, these users feel like something is wrong if they don’t do the actions, like something is out of place. They don’t do these actions because they make them feel good; they do them because they feel they need to.
The classic PS2 action-adventure game Beyond Good and Evil will be remade with HD visuals for the PS3 and Xbox 360. The game was well received when it first came out, and for those who can’t remember the story follows Jade, a female investigative reporter and martial artist who works for a resistance movement trying to uncover an alien conspiracy.
Not to use hyperbole, but the best browser-based game ever has just been released. Have you ever been so infuriated by something you saw on the internet that you wanted to kill the whole web page? Well, now you can with Erik Rothoff’s Asteroids bookmarklet. It puts the tiny triangular spaceship from Asteroids on your browser page, and lets you blast way at the text and images of whatever page you’re reading.
Company of Heroes, by Relic Entertainment has been nearly a gold standard for real-time strategy games for over four years. The gameplay had been refined and defined by earlier releases from Relic in the form of Dawn of War, a Warhammer 40k RTS, and its expansions. Released in 2006, Company of Heroes perfected the system developed in Dawn of War and impressed the gaming world with flawless squad-based unit management and historically accurate scenarios, troops and equipment. It had deformable terrain and a real-time cover creation system, in which squads could take advantage of cover created on purpose of by result of battles. A peaceful French countryside often became a crater-scarred mess, allowing soldiers to automatically hide in the rubble on the fly. By some twist of fate, Relic has seen it appropriate to take the quality of Company of Heroes and make it freely available in the form of Company of Heroes Online.
Without wasting hardly any time at all, Nintendo has come out and confirmed the existence of the Wii Remote Plus at their Japanese press conference this week. For those who don’t know, the Wii Remote Plus is the new, all-in-one controller from Nintendo that combines the Wii Motion Plus and Wii Remote into one handy, little package. Unfortunately, Nintendo has declined to discuss anything more about the new controller outside of the fact that it exists. Price point and release date are still subject to speculation, with the leaked info regarding the controller’s FlingSmash pack-in being the only hint as to what the future holds for the Wii Remote Plus.
In other news, Nintendo has also just released a trailer showcasing their line-up for 2010 and early 2011. Key titles such as Kirby: Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Super Mario All-Stars, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, FlingSmash, Sonic Colors, and The Last Story were shown alongside many other games that all added up to reveal a surprisingly diverse lineup from Nintendo that aims to cover almost every genre out there right now. This is an extremely good time for Nintendo to come forward and assert themselves with such a powerful showing, especially in light of Nintendo’s waning sales figures and popularity. With Sony and Microsoft back on the rise, who knows? Nintendo just might be able to knock them back down to where they came from if this upcoming smorgasbord of games is good enough to distract Sony and Microsoft gourmands from their dinner tables.
