1P Start

Evil gaming blog Kotaku recently wrote up a piece about how Left 4 Day plays online, from someone lucky enough to have some hands on time with it. Reading it was like poetry. No, it wasn’t the words, it was the amazing content that was explained in great detail. Take this passage for example, “Luckily, I exploded vomit when I died, coating my intended target with a green goo that 1) obscures that player’s vision and 2) brought down the wrath of like 20 NPC Infected that wiped out half the Survivor team.”

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Oh that’s right. After completely destroying Kotaku which includes blowing up their underwater base and wiping them from history, I’ve finally decided on my next target… the gaming site BingeGamer.net.

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Halo 3: Recon won’t be out for a very long time yet, but that doesn’t stop Halo fans from wanting to know every last detail about the game. I’ve got some quick facts for you with my thoughts along with the official sell sheet if you really need to read it.

Here’s the important info about Halo 3’s expansion pack:

1. Game takes place slightly before Master Chief’s return to New Mombasa in Halo 3.

2. You play as an ODST trooper who isn’t as durable as Master Chief, so that means there will be a lot more stealth. Hopefully, not a lot of annoying stealth, but well done stealth that isn’t ridiculously aggravating.

3. The game will have it’s own sort of muiltplayer. How it will affect Halo 3’s multiplayer or integrate with it is not yet known.

And now here’s the sell sheet if you really need to see it:

Title: “Halo 3: Recon”

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Bungie

Format: DVD for the Xbox 360 video game system; Xbox LIVE-enabled

ESRB Rating: Rating pending

Availability: Fall 2009

Product
Overview: Developed exclusively for Xbox 360 by acclaimed developer Bungie, “Halo 3: Recon” is a stand-alone expansion that extends the award-winning “Halo 3″ experience with hours of new campaign and multiplayer gameplay.* The release adds a new dimension to an all-encompassing universe that gamers around the world have known and loved for more than six years.

The new campaign chapter predates the events that unfold in “Halo 3″ and gives players a new perspective through the eyes of a new hero in the “Halo” universe. New multiplayer maps ensure that the award-winning Xbox LIVE experience of “Halo 3″ continues to thrive.

Top features include the following:

* All-new campaign content. The “Halo 3: Recon” campaign is an intriguing side story that takes place during the terrifying events leading up to the Master Chief’s return to New Mombasa in “Halo 3.” Experience the fate of Earth from the brand-new perspective of a special forces ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper), adding a unique outlook and new gameplay elements to the events that unfold in the trilogy’s finale. While the feel of this new chapter will greatly resemble that of previous “Halo” experiences, “Halo 3: Recon” will require players to employ more elements of stealth and cunning than ever before.

* A new hero: Prepare to drop. Known for their courage, valor and, at times, insanity, ODSTs are among the fiercest UNSC soldiers, priding themselves on being the first unit deployed into hostile situations. While not as large or supernaturally gifted as their Spartan comrades, these “Hell Jumpers” more than compensate with their ferocious attitudes and unwavering nerve.

* Expanded multiplayer collection. No “Halo” experience would be complete without groundbreaking multiplayer content,* and “Halo 3: Recon” gives fans more of what they love. With exclusive new maps and full Forge options, players will find more multiplayer content than ever before with “Halo 3: Recon.”

* Ever-growing community options. Players will continue to enjoy all the great “Halo 3″ technological innovations, including Saved Films, screenshots, Campaign Scoring and four-player co-op. All of the new multiplayer maps fully support the Forge editor, offering endless gameplay customization possibilities for fans.

I often wonder if first person shooters weren’t the end all, be all of American gaming if we’d see other types of games more often that don’t get as much love right now. One game type that hasn’t really caught on with consoles is the flying sim. It’s too bad, since this day and age the graphics alone are a good enough reason to take to the skies. I’d love to be able to play more flying games, especially space based ones, but they are few and far between.

Tom Clancy’s Hawx looks like it will help fill the void where more flying games should be. I have faith in both Ubisoft and the Tom Clancy series of games, so I’m hoping that it will be a decent foray into the world of air combat.

The Japanese are known for their weirdo sex games, but it’s funny that I think they’ve finally reached the technological level where I’m going to take notice. Check out this chick from Yakuza 3:

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Bungie was finally allowed to reveal in full their next game and it is Halo 3: Recon, the Halo themed expansion game featuring an ODST trooper (though it’s a UNSC Recon trooper really) that we pretty much all figured out from the teaser trailer. Here’s the full trailer if you haven’t seen it yet.

The game is a prequel to the events in Halo 3 and is due out sometime in November of ‘09. Damn, why do we have to wait so friggen long for this thing?

At first I was a bit disappointed that Bungie’s project was a Halo game, but I’m so jazzed for this now that I can’t handle it. The parts of Halo 2 and 3 are the ones where you’re on Earth and getting screwed out of the mostly Earth based campaign that was implied in the original build up to that game, it looks like I’ll finally get the Halo game I had wanted all those years ago.

Welcome to the first, and most likely only, installment of Who Cares? Gaming News. In order to write this sub-par gaming blog I have to read a lot of gaming news. It’s nice that the internet can provide much more gaming news items than a magazine ever could, but the good thing going for the magazines that I only had when I was growing up (I’m very old) is that they cut out a lot of the fat. For every interesting article, there’s about ten thousand posts that I couldn’t give a monkey thrown crap about. Here’s a couple that I ran across recently:

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If you’re as excited about Halo Wars as I am, then behold the back story!

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It’s no doubt that Call of Duty 4’s success would heavily influence every subsequent Call of Duty game and it looks like World at War is proving that theory right. In World at War kill streaks in multiplayer will get you different bonuses that will help you kill even more, just like the airstrikes and helicopters in COD4.

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The newest character in the Resident Evil franchise was revealed this week along with a returning character. Both characters will be seen in Resident Evil 5: Super Racist Propaganda Zombie Fun Time.

The returning character is Albert Wesker. I don’t know much about him except that he’s evil and once ate a kitten. Seriously folks, he’s really bad news. The new character entering the Resident Evil mythos is Titties McBoobenstien. Titties is a… I don’t know… I can’t read Japanese. I’m sure that she’s a fully developed character though, and not some sort of caricature of a woman that the Japanese are known for in their fiction.

Look for Resident Evil 5 in stores on March 13, 2009, unless you are a shut in.

Thanks to the evil Kotaku for the info.

Bungie has finally revealed their newest project with a teaser trailer that doesn’t really shed a whole lot of light on what it actually is:

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It’s something I’ve written about here and I think it needs revisiting from time to time, that is, the sad state of the American Arcade. Where once the landscape was dominated by places full of the newest and coolest videogames, now there exists only pockets of games that really mostly on gimmicks to part you from your dollars. The last bastion of the arcade outside of Dave and Busters here in the states is the nation of Japan. There they are getting a new Rambo game of all things:

The only real detail uncovered so far is that the game features a Anger System that allows John Rambo to kill better the angrier he gets, which is kind of like the Hulk with less green. Sigh, let’s hope that this puppy gets brought over here for our sad arcades.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Activision has released the entire Guitar Hero: World Tour set list so fans can finally drool over all the official goodness. I feel bad that I haven’t heard of some of these songs, I guess it means I’m getting old, but the ones that I do know are pretty damn cool. I mean, who doesn’t love, “Beat It”?

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The final list of “Kombatants” is out for Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and… well there wasn’t a whole lot of suprises that they were keeping close to the vest on this one. Here’s the list in full:

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Since the government of Australia is so oddly conservative when it come to violence, they threw up a big stink over Fall Out 3. In order to get the game approved by government censors (Is there a more disgusting couple of words? Hardly.) Now the edited version that Bethesda made for the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification is the version that the whole world is going to get.

But wait, put down your pitchforks!

The only changes that are being reported in this edited version of Fallout 3 are changes made to the names of drugs. All real life drug references have changed to made up drug names, because it’s apparently cool to have a video game character take Super Drug X and not Valium. So in the end it’s not really that big of a deal, but was it necessary? Certainly not. This game is made to appeal to adults, not children. We don’t need to be protected by big mommy government.