MW3 Review

So, this happened to fall into my lap recently, and I spent the entire weekend playing it.

Street dates, they have been broken

Anyways, I figured that since this game drops at midnight tonight, and major review outlets won't be posting their reviews until then, that I would write my own little review on this year's entry in the ever popular Call of Duty series.

Now, before I start, I feel I should make a few things clear. Months ago, I was anything but excited for Modern Warfare 3. Nothing I saw interested me. E3 came and went, complete with a live demo of the game during Microsoft's press conference, and I could have cared less. Same went for the Call of Duty XP event, where they unveiled the game's much touted multiplayer mode. It seemed that absolutely nothing could get me on the hype train for this game. But then, I saw this...

Oh ya, these games have a single player component, and damn good ones at that (At least IW does)

So in the span of 4 months I went from having absolutely no interest in this game, to getting it before the official release date (11-8-11, just in case you have managed to avoid the media assault).

Now, for the real question. Is this game actually any good, or will I be standing in line at a midnight release to go trade it in?

The Dog Days of Summer

Summer, a time for relaxation.

No school, no homework, and tons of time (at least for those in school).

For me, summer officially started yesterday (hooray for college!), but some of the younger people out there still have at least another month to go.

Anyways, summer is a great time to go out and have fun with friends, but it is not a good time for gamers.

Between the months of June and August, good new releases are few and far in between. This summer sees the release of LoZ: Ocarina of Time 3DS, Duke Nukem Forever, and InFamous 2. Now that's better than some years past, but those all happen in the same month, which means nothing until late August or September.

What summer IS good for though, is catching up on backlog of games. For my summer, I plan to finish Red Dead Redemption, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Final Fantasy XIII, and a whole bunch of my older games.

So how about you guys? What do you plan on finishing up this summer?

Sequelitis: A Growing Epidemic

"What? They've accidentally revealed the next Assassins Creed game?"

"That's awesome! I can't wait to play AC3 and see how the series ends!"

"Wait.....you mean......"

"FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!"

Yep, if Revelations turns out to be a full fledged game and not some side game like the DS and PSP entries, then Assassins Creed will have officially been stricken with a disease that befalls most popular original IPs (Intellectual Properties).

Sequelitis

Portal 2: GOTY or GTFO?

It has been over a week since the much anticipated release of Portal 2, and now that the laser focus of the gaming community is on other matters right now, we can take a look at how the biggest thing since sliced bread stacked up to the hype.

For those of you that have been living in caves for the past year or so, Portal 2 is the highly anticipated sequel to the surprise hit of 2007, Portal, a game that was originally bundled with the Orange Box due to fears that the game would not be well received and therefore not sell. For this I will only be talking about the single-player campaign, as the person I was planning on doing co-op with is currently suffering at the hands of the PSN outage, and lacks a decent computer to run his free PC copy. Hopefully once that mess gets sorted out we can get to that part and I can put up a review of that.

It only does identity theft

April 26, 2011

A day that will live in infamy.

The day the proverbial turd careened through the proverbial fan.

Well f*** indeed

Since Sony announced on Tuesday that personal information had been compromised, the internet has been abuzz with activity. People are pissed. People are worried about identity theft. People are worried about credit card info getting out. Am I any of the above right now? Maybe, but I want to take this time to give my view on the situation.

The ultimate Alternate Reality Game?

Today I want to take a break from retro games to talk about something that has been on the mind of the gaming community for the last few days.

Portal 2 and Valve's Alternate Reality Game (ARG)/publicity stunt.

What started as a grouping of awesome indie games for a low price (The Potato Sack) has culminated in the potential early release of one of the most anticipated games of the year.

"Why is this such a big deal MrNelson?" I'll tell you why.

How to (properly) clean game cartridges

Agh, busy week was busy (curse you higher education!), but now I'm back!

Alright, so replaced your NES pin connector, but the games still aren't playing, so now what?

Ah yes, blowing in the cartridge, the old standby. While this does work, it can have negative long term effects. The biggest one is corrosion, since you're blowing into the cartridge you're getting moisture on the contacts, which in not good. Digital Press did a test on whether or not blowing on the cartridge would cause corrosion, and you can either go here to read the whole thing, or look at this image after the jump which sums it all up.

Blue Screen BEGONE!!

Ah, the NES, such a great system, it's always great to pull that one out and fire up some classics like Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. But before you can get to the good part.....

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 7

Another day, another guide to help you get into the importing game!

Now we're going even further back, to the 80's to be specific, to take a look at the game console that helped to bring back the game industry after the video game crash of 1983.

The Nintendo Entertainment System

NES (top) and Famicom (bottom)

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 6

Moar import tips? Moar import tips.

Today, were going to look at a console that wasn't much of a commercial success, but it was still good console in its own right.

The Sega Saturn

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 5

Alright, back from the weekend! Continuing with the 90's theme, we're gonna move on to another one of Nintendo's consoles.

The Nintendo 64

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 4

Continuing with the 90's theme, I'm going to move onto a personal favorite of mine, the Super Nintendo!

A Super Nintendo (top) and Super Famicom (bottom)

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 3

New post about import gaming? New post about import gaming.

Alright guys, it's time to take a trip back to a simpler time. A time when idiots weren't running amok on an online gaming service. A time when no one cared whether or not there was online multiplayer. A time before crippiling hardware errors that caused you to go without your games for weeks because you had to ship it back while millions of others were shipping their borked consoles at the same time because rather than have quality control do their job they chose to get a head start on everyone else for the sake of money (deep breath). That time my friends, is the 90's.

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 2

Back for more import tips? Alrighty then, you want it? You got it!

Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS, like the Game Boy, is capable of playing any game from any region. The DS phat, DS Lite, DSi, and DSi XL all can play any game. However, the DSi and DSi XL can not play DSi Ware games from outside of the system's region, so no Japanese DSi Ware titles will work on an American DSi, and vise versa. Another thing to note, is that as of now, the 3DS is region protected, and no ways have been found to get around it. But it is possible to play imported DS games on a 3DS without any problems.

A guide for the aspiring import gamer: Part 1

Gaming is an activity enjoyed by many Americans. Some of those that are more active in the gaming community are probably well aware that there are games that never make it out of Japan, which is a disappointment, as there are many great games that are never seen in American stores. However, thanks to places like Ebay and Play-Asia, import gaming has become much easier to get into. But just because it is easy to acquire the games, it doesn't mean it is easy to play them. Many game consoles have some form of regional lockout, keeping people from playing games that weren't released in their country. Some are easy to bypass, some aren't, and some have no region protection whatsoever. Over the next few days, I'll be showing how to get around these lockouts, and even highlighting some games that you should play.

"But MrNelson, I don't know any Japanese!"

Neither do I! But thankfully, there are plenty of games that require no knowledge of the language to play.

Now, let's get started, shall we?

Console wars: Why?

PS3 SUXORZ!!

NO, XBOX 360 SUXORZ!!

No matter where you go, be it with your friends, or on some random internet forum, you're going to find some gamer that has a passionate hatred for a game system, and will defend to the death their system of choice. 

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fanboy

Wild Blog has appeared!

It's 2 am kids! Know what that means? It's blogging time!

What better way to start off a blog than with a rant, a gaming rant to be more specific.

I've been gaming for about the last 16 years, and while that may not be as long as some people out there, it is definitely longer than a lot of people playing today. Over the last few years, I've noticed gaming has become more and more mainstream in our culture. I can remember back when people would make fun of me because I did a lot more gaming than other people did. I honestly thought I did a lot of gaming when I was younger, but compared to what some people are doing now, that was nothing. Go boot up a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops, and look at how much play time a majority of the people playing have. Go ahead, I'll wait.

......

See what I mean? There are many people on there with weeks worth of play time logged. WEEKS!! I've even seen some with at least a months worth of play time. And these aren't your stereotypical nerds, these are (basically) the same kind of people that would mock gamers back when gaming wasn't as mainstream. So what happened? What created this double standard where it was not ok to dump dozens of hours into, say, an RPG, but it is totally fine to dump weeks and weeks into Halo or Call of Duty?

I think it has to do two things: gaming companies trying to expand their audience, and that expanded audience liking to see s*** blow up.

Playing any of these games is like watching a Michael Bay film. Tons of over the top action and violence are the substance du jour, and judging from the sales of Black Ops, people love it more than air. I'll admit, it is fun, but it does get repetitive, especially since every Call of Duty for the last few years has just been a re-skinned Call of Duty 4. I wonder what will happen when everyone else tires of it. Will these people stop gaming? Will they move onto another genre? Will gaming go back to being more niche like it used to be? Who knows? Only time will tell.