Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category
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Games: Battle of the Bands
As promised last week, today we’re going to take a look at
Battle of the Bandsfor the Nintendo Wii, made by THQ.
At first glance, this game looks like it can be a lot of fun. Well, it can once you get past the lack of content in the game itself. Lets have a look at some of what the game has to offer:
- A decent variety of songs (of course, no where near some of the more costlier games on the market)
- The joy of rhythm based games without the need to have any extras hanging around
- A quirky variation to the plain old ‘hit the notes and you win’ formula
Battle of the Bands offers some classic favorite songs such as Black Betty and Jungle Boogie; mixed in with some fun songs like Feel Good Inc. by the Gorillaz and Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones. Though the songs are few, they’re good to play.Unlike some of the other rhythm games, Battle of the Bands uses only the wiimote to hit notes (left/right/down/stab/shake). It’s a fun concept, though a little tiring on the wrist at first on some of the higher difficulty levels. Also, if the wiimote is tilted it often doesn’t hit the note. Once you get used to this though, it’s a fantastic workout for your wrist.
Above all else what makes this game worth playing is the presentation itself. The game is one big battle, so you’re always in a versus mode against either an AI or a Player. Each band gets to choose a style of music, for example country and hip-hop. While playing, if the country team is in the lead the song which they’re playing will be done in a ‘country version’ (IE redneck accent and banjos). As the teams battle, the song jumps between the two bands’ type. It’s a riot when the types are conflicting as they switch seamlessly.
Another cooky part of this game is that you can attack the opposing player. Teams get the option of 3 weapons to use, all with different steak counts. Once a team has a streak to the length of the weapon, it will fire causing the other player to miss a beat if not blocked (hitting B). It’s quite off tilt to have a battle of the bands where you can shoot lightning at the drummer on the other team, but a blast none the less.Overall, I can understand why this game is so cheap (I got it for $15) because though the concept of it is amazing, the final execution of it is lacking. If they had access to a larger library, or even if they had more modes or unlockable content it may have made it a little more interesting. For what the game is though, it was worth the cash and I’d suggest it to any music lover out there if not only for the music player feature that allows you to switch between styles without having to actually play the game.
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Rock Band 2 Update – Downloadable Content Comes to the Wii!
Today is a day that will be rejoiced upon, as millions of Wii-geeks world wide will turn their little white boxes into even more of a rocking machine.
Nintendo and Harmonix, apparently holding true to their word to have the Music Store open for business by early 2009, today released the first wave of downloadable content for Rock Band 2 wii users. This does include a number of free songs that were given to Xbox 360 and PS3 users when the game was released, as well as songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
Songs are available for 200 wii points, which averages out to $2.00 US per song.
A list of the songs released today in the Wii music store (free songs marked with **):
WarmUp
Time is Running Out – Papa Roach
Simple Man – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Buddy Holly – WeezerApprentice
Cheeseburger in Paradise – Jimmy Buffett
El Scorcho – Weezer
**Burn you down – Opiate For the Masses
The Kill – 30 Seconds to Mars
All the Small Things – Blink 182
**Crazy Tuesday – TheNewNo2
**Bounce – The Cab
**Young – Hollywood Undead
**I’m gone I’m Going – Lesley Roy
Crushcrushcrush – Paramore
Interstate Love Song – Stone Temple Pilots
**If I ain’t Got You – The Len Price 3
**Database Corrupted – Dealership
Baba O’riley – The Who
Call Me – Blondie
**Magnetic Baby – Semi Precious WeaponsSolid
This Ain’t a Scene – Fall Out Boy
**Give It To Me – Cockail Slippers
Wonderwall – Oasis
Snow (Hey Oh) – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Sex Type Thing – Stone Temple Pilots
**Ashes To Fire – Ghost Hounds
**The Feeling – Kutless
**Sons and Daughters – The 88
Rock and Roll Band – Boston
More Than A Feeling – Boston
Beethoven’s C*** – Serj Tankian
Zero – Smashing Pumpkins
**Get It On – The Chevelles
**The Time is Wrong – Tickle Me Pink
Hammerhead – The Offspring
Message in a Bottle – The PoliceModerate
Move Along – All American Rejects
Saints of Los Angeles – Motley Crue
Inside The Fire – Disturbed
Afterlife – Avenged Sevenfold
Shockwave – Black Tide
Working Man – Rush
**I.V. – X Japan
**I Wanna Be Your Man – EndEverAfter
**Like a Fool – Shaimus
Hysteria – MuseChallenging
**Desperate Times, Desperate Measures – UnderOath
…And Justice for All – Metallica
**No Regrets – Authority ZeroNightmare
The Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails
**Prequel to the Sequel – Between the Buried and MeI’ve noticed that several songs (the one that I can think of the name to is Margaritaville) is now missing from the Music Store – it was there this afternoon for 200 wii points.
For those who are about to rock (harder), wii salute you.
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Games: Rock Band 2
Today we’re going to get some rock off with our socks off with a quick review of Rock Band 2
for the Nintendo Wii.
For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘musical gaming’ genre, Rock Band and similar products often use controllers shaped like guitars or drums. You simply hit the colored buttons on the instruments in time with the colors on the screen to play the notes. A simple concept, but incredibly fun none the less.
What first made Harmonix‘s Rock Band stand out in comparison to it’s nearest competitor Guitar Hero is that it allowed players to not only play guitar, but drum and sing as well. Though this has been evenly matched by the most recent Guitar Hero World Tour
, Rock Band 2 seems to still have better quality of the two.
Aside from just hitting the buttons to match colors, I think a huge part of the appeal of these games is that you can be part of a band, not just somebody playing a game at home on a Saturday night. Rock Band 2 takes advantage of this by giving players the ability to not only form a band with friends at close range, but to join with anybody online. This, for me, is a huge factor as the people online can’t see you dancing around in your PJs while playing We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos.
Rock Band 2 has also capitalized on the character creation factor of games, giving users the ability to make their avatar as normal or bizarre as they want it to be with everything from ripped jeans to a Viking helmet. Along those lines, users are able to register their bands online and put their custom bands into cool looking photos. They can even print out stickers and make t-shirts! (Check out yours truly rockin’ out here)But what good is playing when you don’t know any of the songs? Rock Band 2 has a ton of good songs, and (whenever Nintendo gets around to it) will feature downloadable content (DLC) to allow aspiring musicians to enhance their library even further.
The only fault I’d say (if anything) this game is lacking compared to Guitar hero is the ‘oddity’ factor. This is just playing songs, where as in Guitar hero there are ‘battles’ where you can throw off your enemy and random encores through out the game. It makes it good to spice up. Rock Band does this with ‘benefit shows’ and ‘TV recordings’, but the game play is still just playing the songs. It would be nice to see a mode to make it a little more interesting in Rock Band 3. (I have picked up another musical game today completely based around being strange, keep an eye out for a review)
So are any of you rock legends? Let me know in the comments below, maybe we can do some face melting some time. Rock on!
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I am Batman Pac-Man
Let’s stick with some gaming fun here. To follow up with the totally badass furniture that I showed last week, I have found some more cool Pac-Man stuff that I would love to own.
</a.First off, the Pac-Man Hoodie from Think Geek. If this doesn’t confuse people and earn you a hand full of cherries, an extra life and the all time high score, nothing will.
If that design made your headspin, you might be suffering from a Dot Overdose and need this shirt from Dead Zebra. Friends don’t let friends OD on Dots…But they do buy them the shirt.
And the last one for today (though not pac-man inspired) is the Most Deadly shirt from Busted Tees. You may recognize this from Perfect Dark (or maybe you don’t if you suck at it) but even the biggest lamer *cough DEL cough* can pretend to be old school now. -
A Gamer's home is his castle
*may or may not include princess*
I don’t know about you, but Pac-Man seems to constantly have an impact on my life. It may come in the form of a T-shirt from a friend or just me eating random dots off the ground. But after a long day of chasing ghosts, wouldn’t you like to just put your feet up? Me too, so buy me this footstool thanks.
While you’re at it, buy me this medal for being epicly old skool too. Console Wars Veteran
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Referral Risk x2
Readers, I need your help to rule the world!
I’ve spent the past…god knows how long setting some SEO stuff up and retagging some things. Along the way I came across and older post from years ago called Troops, Fall In with a link to referral risk on it. This was cool, so it’s coming back.
What can you do? Click somewhere on the map below, it will conquer the part of the map on behalf of I R Blogging. Click a lot of you really love us. Those who help out leave a comment so I can send you your purple heart.
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Avatar: Legends of Arena
09/20/08 Update: I’m seeing a lot of hits from people looking for the update on this after getting the “Can not connect to database,..recent version update blah blah”. Well I’ve been getting it too, doesn’t really seem to be telling the right error.
Solution: Reinstalled mine in the default directory (C:\Program Files). After starting the game (clicking on the shortcut to start the game), do not switch to another window. Do not click on any other programs or Alt-Tab to another program anytime after trying to start this game. Once it is started, it needs your full attention.
So Do not Go IM your friend while it’s loading. Do not continue to surf the internet. Do not change songs on your music player. Do not write up something in notepad. After clicking to load the game, just sit and wait for it to load, don’t do anything at all until it does. (this doesn’t mean close them all down, it just means don’t touch them anymore)
I find that if you switch to another program while this is running (at the start of the game, or anytime during) the next time it tries to load a screen it will display the ‘recent version’ error.
After the icon at the bottom of the screen spins for a minute (or 5) the yellow bar will blink green and the next screen will load. Again, just be sure you are always on the Avatar program’s window and it should be ok…most of the time.
This seems to work 9/10 times for me. So just keep trying, you’ll be able to connect eventually. It’s not you, it’s them.
Let me know if this works for you guys, thanks
——————————————————————–First off, I’m not sure why I like Avatar: The last Airbender. I guess it just hit me as “that could be cool” so I watched all of them. Don’t judge me.
Now to continue on, I just got watched the last 4 episodes of Book 3 yesterday and thought when he went into avatar form again he was totally badass. The whole dragon-turtle thing was kind of weird though. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I just saw a post talking about an MMO for Avatar titled Avatar: Legends of the Arena coming out in September and my mind just went into ‘yay’ mode.
Unfortunately, however, I then start thinking about the previous Avatar games they released and my hopes are dashed. I’ll be trying this out since it sounds to be mostly PVP which can prove for a bit of fun, but if they start charging for it my chips are off the table. Guess we’ll see in two months when it’s released.
I found a video of it (below) which could be interesting. Skip to about 2m30s to see some actual action.
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Crysis
While most people are awaiting the release of Halo 3 for the 360. I’m not one of them screw Halo3 I want to play the Crysis demo that comes out the same day. FPS games on the PC are better cause of the mouse and keyboard over a controller for playing. Crysis from the makers of Farcry is one of the best looking FPS games on the PC with support for Direct X1o and multicore processor enhancements that are supposed to make it perform more fluidly on a 64bit OS. The teasers for the game are awesome with huge maps interactive scenery and hard AI that are difficult to kill. The demo is supposed to have a fully playable first level and a special surprise from the developers.
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WoW – What is wrong with this world
This subject is a statement, not a question. World of Warcraft is what is wrong with this world. It’s obvious to me now. How did I figure this out? By looking on craigslist and seeing WoW accounts selling for $400, $500, and as high as $1100 dollars. WHAT THE HELL?
For my first point, I just want to let all of you brain dead morons that buy these accounts know: THE ENTIRE POINT OF A GAME IS TO PLAY IT. Novel idea, I know, but stick with me here. If you started mario after he’d killed Koopa, it’d be pretty boring. Same principle applies.
For my second point, if you have that kind of coin, why the HELL are you buying an account that you could get for free? Are you mentally touched? Are you THAT busy that you can’t work your way through a game? Are you Paris Hilton? Please, someone that’s bought one of these accounts, comment and tell me why I’m a closed-minded idiot for not getting this.
So in conclusion, with the economic crisis going on in many parts of the world, with genocide in Darfur and children starving to death, is it REALLY economically reliable to put your entire life savings in an MMO account?
Here’s a little free advice for you freaks, straight from me to you. STOP WASTING YOUR GOD DAMN MONEY ON GAMING ACCOUNTS AND THROW IT AWAY SOME WHERE ELSE. Here are a few suggestions:
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To kill or not to kill?
This article annoys me. Not so much just this article, but the whole idea of ‘virtual effects what really happens’. In other words, violent media breeds violence. This is such a load of horse shit. Let’s look at the bare-bone facts first:
According to this source the game Doom (known as one of the first truly ‘violent’ video games) had been downloaded by over 10 million people under under 2 years. Given that it has been out since 1994, it can be easily assumed that the number as increased substantially.
That being said , there have not been 10 million homicides related to that game. In fact, according to a quick Google search of statistics, it seems that if there were 10 million homicides it would require multiple countries to combine their homicide rates. Then multiply it by one hundred. A few times. StatsIf it were really true that video games and movies cause people to kill, one would think that the stats would be quite a bit higher. It’s foolish to say that these things are the sole cause and blame for somebody’s behavior, It is as though saying that people only eat pizza because it was the favorite food of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The media may be an aiding factor at the very least, but surely not the cause. Start finding a different link, maybe hair color. I think that would be a better way to go: ban all brown hair dye. There is a high percent of people with brown hair that go nuts and kill people than there is linked it violent video games.
A normal, healthy teenager doesn’t get off the couch after killing zombies and think “Wow, I wonder if my teacher’s head explodes like that”. It would be nice if the media would start looking up facts before they start saying that video games are causing school shootings. If I have to listen to one more ‘and the young man was a fan of the video game…’ when they’re talking about some sick fuck who mowed down cheerleaders I’m going to go kill somebody.
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