Brain Hood

The gaming multimedia industry is all set to infect everyone with a serious case of ‘sequelitis’ this year. Major gaming franchises make their mandatory yearly appearance, some return after a couple of years, while others, long-forgotten, attempt to make a dramatic return to the world of video games. Then there’s Grand Theft Auto V. Enough said.

Season for Seconds: Video Gaming Fun

Serving its way to the top of this article is EA Canada’s Grand Slam Tennis 2. Hoping to capitalise on everyone’s Australian Open fever

Grand Slam Tennis 2 is one of a long list of sequels that are expected to brighten 2012 u for video gaiming fans

(or hangover, as the case may be), EA’s first foray into the next-gen world of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (the previous version was a Wii-only title) promises licensed players in the form of current ATP regulars such as Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray as well as legends, including Pete Sampras, Bjorn Borg and Boris Becker. WTA players are included as well, so don’t fret. The game’s features include a career mode that spans ten years, fully licensed Grand Slams, classic matches and Playstation Move support on the PS3. You can enjoy all of this and more on February 10.

Also out in February is the highly anticipated launch title for the Playstation Vita, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, a game that is set before the events of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, where everyone’s favourite bounty hunter Nathan Drake is looking for the truth behind the massacre of a Spanish expedition. Golden Abyss promises great locales, treasure and lots more of the same action that garnered the Uncharted series’ critical acclaim and made it a hit with the gamers, while incorporating the PS Vita’s dual touch controls, accelerometer, hopefully delivering an unparalleled hand-held adventure gaming experience.

In early March, the next chapter of Bioware’s space opera will unfold through Mass Effect 3, a follow-up (which will offer closure, hopefully) to 2010′s critically acclaimed Mass Effect 2. ME3 will be back, bigger than ever before, sporting overhauled combat mechanics, an improved cover system, co-operative multiplayer and for Xbox 360 players, Kinect support with voice recognition which allows for commanding your squad of virtual human and/or turian and other alien squad mates (Garrus, flank left!).

If ordering your Xbox to do some killing on your behalf isn’t enough for you, you can take matters into your own hands in three action sequels that are set to invade your living room: Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, Max Payne 3 and Square Enix/IO Interactive’s Hitman Absolution. The GTA series returns after a three year hiatus, taking us back to the state of San Andreas, last seen in the Grand Theft Auto game of the same name in 2004. The fifth episode will be set primarily in the city of Los Santos (based on Los Angeles and regions of Southern California), and is sure to feature some of the spectacular writing and open-world gameplay, the series is famous for.

Penning both GTA V and Max Payne 3 for Rockstar Games is Mr. Vice President himself, Dan Houser, arguably one of the best writers in gaming. He showed us he could do gritty (Red Dead Redemption) just as well as the satire and humour that we see in GTA; something a character of incredible depth like Max Payne is sure to benefit from. On the opposite end of the spectrum, stone-cold killer Agent 47 will shoot bullet holes in television sets later this year, going toe to toe with brand new arch-nemesis Blake Dexter in a series of stealth/action gaming missions sure to be set in all corners of the world.

Need for Speed: The Run has a prologue level of sorts that establishes protagonist Jack’s situation – a guy in trouble with the wrong people, looking for a way out. He finds it in a cross-country race with a purse of 25 million dollars. But where The Run really begins is in a warehouse garage off the Embarcadero in San Francisco. You pick a car and roar out onto the street, greeted by the light of an early morning in the city. It’s not exact, by any means, but developer Black Box nails the feel of San Francisco’s streets well. And then crazy shit starts happening all around you, in the best way possible, as more police cars than I think San Francisco actually has are chasing you and dozens of other cars toward the Golden Gate bridge, and…

The Need for Speed: The Run Impact

It makes an impression. Need for Speed: The Run starts out so well that I coasted on that high for about 45 more minutes before I realized the game I was playing just wasn’t very good.

It takes that long to realize it because the fundamentals work pretty well. Cars in Need for Speed: The Run are fun to drive. They handle well, they sound good (some awful audio compression aside), and they feel fast. That last part is good, because The Run wants you to drive fast. Really, really fast. Faster than you probably should.

The Negatives in Need for Speed: The Run

That speed is where the trouble starts. I know that The Run wants fast. I can tell because the competition is always ahead of you, going about 150 miles an hour. If you want to catch up, you’ll need to drive like, well… an asshole. You will need to drive like an asshole. I had to cut corners sharply, pull bootlegger turns, and ricochet off of other cars most races to stand a chance. All of this seems at odds with The Run’s level design.

Unfortunately, the sound underpinnings of Need For Speed: The Run are undermined by an onslaught of strange design decisions that effectively murder most of its fun. The Driver Level aspect is first up. You don’t start with the ability to boost, you need to unlock it. I can almost wrap my head around that, since nitrous oxide is an aftermarket thing. But at Driver Level 7 in Need for Speed: The Run, you unlock the greatest perk any driver could ever ask for: the laws of physics. You are incapable of drafting other cars until level 7. Meanwhile, you’ll be sling-shoting competition around you from the second race forward.

That competition doesn’t even feel like drivers, they feel like slot cars, running what seem to be the exact same path every time you attempt a race. I say attempt here because you will wreck in The Run. Often. And that will introduce you to what is probably the most under-cooked “rewind” feature in a racing game since the feature became the norm.

Rewind in The Run isn’t what you think it is – it’s not a rewind at all. Instead, you’re greeted with a black screen with a big “Rewind” image on it, and after anywhere from five to twenty seconds(!), you’ll be set back anywhere from one to two miles in the race. It’s checkpointing, and bad checkpointing at that.

There’s also a strange, demonstrated paranoia surrounding leaving the road. If you get more than six feet or so away from the track, the screen will go dark and The Run will invoke a rewind. Sometimes it’s even more stringent. The Run demands risky driving to finish races, but is all too ready to punish a player for it. Instead of introducing a new way to succeed and compete, rewinds just get in the way of playing the game.

The races themselves don’t help. The level design in The Run is usually boring, and frequently nonsensical. One scene toward the end of the game has you fleeing a subway train at 140 miles an hour or more, and there is literally no way to outrun it. Police cars are again able to violate the laws of physics at will, pulling in front of you and screeching from 160MPH to a dead stop in just about no seconds flat. Still, the instant-kill setpiece or environmental hazard will become a bigger enemy than any car on the road. And whenThe Run isn’t trying to kill you directly, it’s tugging your pants around your ankles by killing the framerate with an explosion, which trips up the controls.

As for that story, there’s just not much there. I didn’t mind the quicktime events. They function, and they were a good palette cleanser from the frustration of the rest of The Run. But the characters are never developed, and the story exists solely as a way to contrive some truly idiotic racing situations.

Need for Speed: The Run has more to it than The Run itself, with some fairly standard multiplayer and a Challenge mode. Multiplayer is more bumper-cars. It ditches the rewind feature of The Run for Hot Pursuit style respawns. It makes for a faster and less frustrating experience, but the same underwhelming course design doesn’t make things particularly interesting. The challenge races share almost all of the same issues as The Run proper.

And issues are what The Run has more of than anything. Need for Speed: The Run‘s biggest problem is how much it has in common with a real drive from one end of the US to the other. There are a few bright spots here and there, but it’s mostly full of unexpected stops, lots of flat tires, and too many assholes on the road. This isn’t the worst Need for Speed, but it can’t place against other, better racers from the last year.

Video gaming news and review sites once had a cynosure in the form of id Software and justifiably so. These were the guys who’d literally given the world of video gaming a new perspective by pioneering the first person shooter; those of us born before the 90s have fond memories of Wolfenstein 3D. id didn’t stop there, going on to further define the genre they’d created. The highly successful Doom and Quake franchises shaped the FPS genre and symbolized an entire era in video gaming. Simply put, they pretty much established themselves as the elder statesmen of video gaming, and were now looking for an ‘unretirement’ of sorts.

The intense combat experience, weapons that were innovative as much as they were fun, and a dark, twisted sense of humor were the stand-out traits of these games and that is the formula that id is looking to revive with Rage.

Rage Review: Redefining Video Gaming Graphics

Enemies come in all varieties in Rage. Some are harder to kill than others

And what makes it really stand out is that, as they’ve done before, id have somehow managed to revisit the art of redefining standards for graphical brilliance. Of course, you’ve heard that before, what with every new game that come out aiming to mediocrity with sheer eye-candy. Rage is among the exceptions where the graphics aren’t just there for the thrills, but serve to bring alive a truly beautiful, true-to-life animated, near photo-realistic world. Yes, this world does get into your face every now and then and tries to rip your throat out, but we’re not talking about gameplay right now, are we?

Gameplay

Speaking of which, Rage scores well here too. The combat is intense, immersive and unbelievably satisfying (okay, not quite in the I-need-a-shrink way) and not just because there’s a generous dose of good old video gaming blood-&-guts. The weapons are innovative, and with multiple ammo-types, the shooting never really gets old as you keep finding new ways to wreak havoc upon all who stand in your way. Suffice it to say that Rage will make you a veritable video gaming angel of death. Some weapons are pretty much standard FPS fare, and then there are others, like the bladed boomerang, that make you feel like a kid holding a brand new flavor of (virtual, of course) candy.  The races that also allow you to shoot your opponents into oblivion make us want to dig up our old Death RaceVHS tapes and weep tears of joy.

Enemy AI

Traveling on foot, encounters with the enemy are likely to leave you shaken; make no mistake, they’re not going to roll over and die just to make you feel good about yourself. Melee enemies will try take you down with the sheer weight of numbers, while the ones with ranged weapons know how to use them to deadly effect. Not only is the AI good, different kinds of enemies have their characteristic strengths, and use those strengths as well as the video gaming environment frighteningly well. Enemies tend to utilize cover effectively, so you’re always on your toes trying to deal with different enemies and it isn’t quite Serious Sam. Every encounter, especially when you encounter a new kind of enemy, turns into a dash to safety whichever way you can manage it, trying to kill the enemy at the same time. All in all, the adrenaline pumping gameplay keeps punching you in the guts to remind you that id Software is back.

Story

The storyline is where Rage flatters to deceive. That is not to say that it is bad. It’s also not just that the overall awesomeness warrants a better story, but more than that, it’s the story itself that’s promising and yet feels underdeveloped. You meet quite a few quirky and memorable characters on your quests, and while they feel nicely fleshed out, their storylines aren’t quite. Most of them are characters that send you, the player, on various quests. However, they have a tendency to simply vanish once their quests are completed. All the same, the story keeps you involved for the duration of the campaign—which can take anything between 10 and 20 hours—and is quite interesting but again, it just ends abruptly. Also, with all the stupendous arsenal you have on you by the time the final level rolls along, one does wish—classic corridor FPS action though it does showcase—that the final fight could have made you use your death dealing contraptions a little more and offered a challenging fight, instead of ending it as it does (see, no spoilers!)

Multiplayer Video Gaming

The multiplayer was clearly not the focal point for the developers who decided to go for a superlative single-player campaign instead. That said, it gets the job done by providing a more than decent multiplayer FPS experience. So our final verdict is that Rage is a must play game for the simple fact that it’s a fun game. It seamless blends a hardcore FPS video gaming experience with some basic and interesting features of an action RPG without letting that go so far as to detract from the chief fun  element, the sheer delight of carnage-filled fighting. That it’s easy on eyes at the same time only goes on to check another box with players still looking for more reasons to buy this game. Seriously folks, buy this fine specimen of video gaming multimedia already!

It has been a while since we introduced you to the concept of cloud gaming and how it has evolved from the emerging technologies for cloud computing, to become a market unto itself, with its own demand dynamics and target segment; even in this infant stage, gamers have begun to clamor for it. We also gave you an idea of just why video game news publications are raving about it. Let us now take a deeper look at cloud gaming, its origins, and what it requires to enjoy cloud gaming.

Cloud Gaming: Where  it All Began and Current Operators

The idea of cloud gaming was first broached by a Finland firm named G-cluster, and hyped by several video gaming news journals and blogs. Since then, several firms have banked upon this technology and have been working towards it. Some firms like OnLive, Gaikai and PlayCast have been among the few to come out with a sound revenue model that they have implemented straightaway and are already operational. These operators are now working hard to bring their hardware (and thus services) to a level where they can meet the high expectations and effectively challenge the consoles. As the client base expands, they expect to be able to bring costs down and thus reach out to avid game lovers even more than before.

Games such as Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia are one of the most popular games played on the internet these days. Even the requirements for these aren’t much and you just need a PC, Mac that could access the internet.

With cloud gaming, code processing and video rendering done at the server-side you can play any game on any system including DOS/Apple/Commodore/Atari games, arcade games, console games, Windows games, Apple OS games, and phone app games. Any game can be put on server and it is the capability of the server that allows multi users to enjoy those games at the same time.

Limitations of Cloud Gaming

The main limitation of Cloud gaming is the network quality. Due to the difference in the network quality at the end of different users depending upon their distance to a game server of the cloud users may experience several problems while playing games. Some people might get disconnected while playing games due to these issues. It may irritate a player if he/she gets disconnected every now and then.

Another limiting factor may be ability of local computer or system to properly render a video stream. Video compression codecs and technologies may be used by a gaming cloud to reduce amount of data required to transfer over bandwidth, and it takes sufficient amount of processing power to decompress and/or decode such a video stream.

Cloud gaming is to retro gaming what Email is to Letters. When emails started it was feared that the letters would not exist after some time but they survived in their own category. It may be the future, it may not but one thing is for certain we are not there yet.

It will be exciting to see the choices gamers make when the next generation of consoles and gaming multimedia come up against fully operational cloud gaming services.

For now, that’s all we have on cloud gaming; keep following us for more video game news updates and game reviews.

Any and every video game news rag worth its salt is awash with speculation as to whether Hitman: Absolution would live up to the sheer euphoria of expectations that the trailers  have aroused. Before we proceed, we do categorically state that we simply loved Hitman: Blood Money, the previous iteration, and the chronological successor to IO’s coming offering.

What We Know So Far of Hitman: Absolution

It seems that Diana Blackwood, 47’s handler in the previous games, went rogue after the events of Blood Money / Contracts, purging all existing data on her from the ICA systems before doing a vanishing act. The sanction on her life was issued to 47 and that seems to be the premise of Hitman: Absolution.

Gameplay in Hitman: Absolution

The details are fuzzy so far as regards what the gameplay enhancements in Hitman: Absolution may be. However, what’s emerging apparently is that while stealth is still a part of the game, all out carnage may have just been made easier than earlier games. More on that later.

What has been clarified so far is that there is greater environmental interaction, with the ability to use various objects as improvised weapons or decoys. This was introduced in Blood Money with the coin feature and Hitman: Absolution looks all set to explore the possibilities further.

The new throttling mechanism takes a page out of Deus Ex, giving you an option to quickly break a victim’s neck as against the slower and more brutal choking. Also information has been revealed that 47 can utilize a given hiding place for both himself and a dead/ unconscious victim at the same time. This should add a whole new level of realism to Hitman: Absolution.

Better situation awareness has also been reportedly introduced in the form of what’s being called the “Super-Assassin-O-Vision”. This takes the form of an ‘instinct’ resource that helps ‘see’ enemies through walls or predict their paths. The ‘instinct’  resource means different things at differnt points; for instance, another use of it is to make disguise more effective. The resource gets used up and has to recharged, kind of like “bullet time” in Max Payne.

Is Hitman: Absolution a Departure from the Silent Assassin Stealth Gameplay Approach?

New gameplay elements such as cover mechanics have reportedly been introduced, making it possible for 47 to dig in for a firefight if required. Consequently, you may just earn that “mass murderer” rating without using a cheat-code if only you use the gameplay elements right. This action-hero style of gameplay could be an interesting variation and would lend the game more replay value (something for which the Hitman series is famous anyway).

Previous games had a problem that breaking the identity cover eventually led to a heavily outnumbered 47 being gunned down no matter how many he killed. The developers say that that is remedied by introducing another manifestation of the ‘instinct’ resource: Point Shooting, sort of like the quick-draw in some western-themed games. This could not only add a more cinematic experience to Hitman: Absolution but also offer a more viable alternative (as against previous games) to the sneaking around of old. Of course, that’s fun in its own way.

The game is due out this year, and this gaming news blog can’t wait for some more semi-sandbox murdery fun that’s coming our way in the shape of Hitman: Absolution.