Blogs

- Fail of Duty - Black Oops!: - Oh this isn't pretty. In a report made by the LA Times, recently unsealed documents in the ongoing Activison v. Zampella/West case have revealed that one Thomas Fenady, Activision's former senior director of information technology, was asked to "dig up dirt" on both West and Zampella prior to their dismissals.

Fenady is quoted as having testified that Activision's in-house attorney, George Rose, asked him to "dig up dirt" on the two by secretly accessing their work emails, voicemails and computer files. The objective of (and get this) "Project Icebreaker" was to build a case for firing West and Zampella in a way that Activision could release them without paying them their royalties. Fenady was told "Don't worry about the repercussions," which suggest that, yes you guessed it, the big man himself knew all about it. And yes, I'm talking about The Dark Lord himself, Bobby Kotick.

Fenady tried to use an outside company, InGuardians, to accomplish the deed, but after expressing concerns over the "legal hurdles" they would be facing, they declined. Undaunted, Fenady testified that he tried to approach the company's facilities department to try and stage a "fake fumigation" and a "mock fire drill" to get West and Zampella away from their computers long enough to copy files on their computers. However the plan fell through for unstated reasons.

Activision declined to comment on the documents, as did attorneys for the developers.

To view the Court Documents in their entirety feel free to visit

http://documents.lat...nady-testimony/ -

- I'm Not Getting Any Younger Damn It: The upcoming Tomb Raider reboot currently in development at Crystal Dynamics has been delayed from Q3 2012 to Q1 2013. According to a statement made by Crystal Dynamics' studio head Darrell Gallagher on Eidos' own Games Forum, "Our priority now is to make sure we fully deliver the very highest-quality game. In order to do this, we have decided to move the game's release date by a few months, from fall 2012 to the first quarter of 2013."

If it helps, Gallagher did state that there would be more information revealed at this year's upcoming E3 Expo. What that will be, however, has not been disclosed yet. -

- Rolling the DICE: Various LinkedIn profile updates are hinting that DICE may be hard at work at not only the third installment to the Bad Company franchise, but FINALLY a sequel to 2008's highly underrated Mirror's Edge.

After their on again off again commitment to making a sequel to the original Mirror's Edge, I wasn't really holding my breath that, despite comments made at 2011's E3, a sequel would ever get off the ground. However, with this news coming at me, I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to be wrong this time.

As opposed to simply being wrong and bitter ALL the time. -

- Fus Ro Dah B*ches!: Bethesda Softworks has confirmed that work on an Elder Scrolls MMO is well under way, and that players could be walking the realms of Tamriel as early as next year. The game is being developed by one Matt Firor, no stranger to how MMOs work considering that he's the founder of Mythic Entertainment and one of the designers behind Dark Age of Camelot.

The game will allegedly take place "a millennium" before the events of 2011's Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and will be available on both PC and Mac. -

- Diablous Ex Machina: As you can tell by this entry's pic, it seems Diablo III's launch has been.....less than stellar. Various day one errors started hitting the servers, which forced Activision Blizzard to take Diablo III's servers offline at least twice on Tuesday to fix "several issues" that were impacting the game. Players received various mysterious error messages, including 'Error 3005', 'Error 3006', and 'Error 37' as time wore on, with some users complaining that the game wouldn't shut down at all without a complete restart of their computers.

With previous Diablo games, they have never required players to maintain a persistent internet connection to play except when they want to participate in multiplayer content. However, Diablo III does. What this means is that, until Activision/Blizzard fixes the SNAFU/FUBAR enchilada, you will be unable to play the game at all.

Blizzard's one and, currently only response to the situation has been thus:

"Due to high concurrency the login servers are currently at full capacity. This may cause delays in the login process, account pages and web services. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience while this is being resolved"

Hang in there guys. Hang in there. -

- Gee Bore TV: As if the woes of this struggling "video game" network couldn't get any worse. First comes the news that long time network persona Adam Sessler has been quietly let go from G4TV for reasons still unknown.

Sessler has been the only remaining ZDTV personality to transition over from the merger with TechTV, and it's eventual transition to G4TV. Sessler, along with co-host Morgan Webb, were the faces of GTV's X-Play program that offered up news and reviews of current and upcoming video game titles. Shortly after this news, long time host of 'Attack of the Show' Kevin Pereria stated that he too will be leaving the network as of May 31st, with his final broadcast for the channel being their E3 coverage this year.

I stopped watching that channel a long time ago anyway. Mainly because after days of having nothing but eight hour Cops and Cheaters marathons (which....wtf does that have to do with video games anyway?) there really wasn't much content on there anyway. No wonder DirecTV dropped it from their packages.

Anyway, good luck guys. And if it helps, I'm pretty sure the execs over at G4 will be joining you in the unemployment line real soon. -

- CapCon Games: Capcom has said that it will be "revising" its DLC strategy to include less content on-disc at launch. Senior VP Christian Svensson writes in a post in the Capcom has stated that "We would like to assure you that we have been listening to your comments and as such have begun the process of re-evaluating how such additional game content is delivered in the future. This comes on the heels of Capcom's recent fiasco involving on-disc content that was later changed to DLC with their release of Street Fighter X Tekken.

In an effort to rebuild bridges with their fans, Svensson has stated that upcoming Dragon's Dogma will ship with on disc content previously slated for separate DLC. -

May Releases Worth Noting:

Minecraft - May 9 - XBLA
Diablo III - May 15 - Windows, Mac
Max Payne 3 - May 15 - PS3, Xbox 360
PixelJunk 4am - May 15 - PSN
Dragon's Lair - May 18 - XBLA
Dragon's Dogma - May 22 - PS3, Xbox 360
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - May 22 - PS3, Xbox 360
Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock - May 23 - PSN
Dirt: Showdown - May 29 - Windows, PS3, Xbox 360

I imagine there will be a fairly large number of positive reviews and general touting, but right now, as good as the game is, I have some pretty big issues with it.

The Overflow.
The overflow server basically means no more queues in full instances of a zone, hurray! However there are a few things that make this great idea a hardly stellar implementation. First and foremost is when you're partied up, no one person should hit the overflow, If you're all together, you should stay that way. Everyone should go jolly off into the overflow. Secondly, there is a greater sense of disconnect when 2 people go to an overflow and neither are with each other, where are you? somewhere in the ether i would assume. Which leads me to this next bit.

The Respwan rate.
Just as baddies scale up in power and ability when more people are around and in turn decrease with less population hacking away at them, the respawn rate should also scale. Meaning longer periods of time before that last 6 guys you killed come up behind you after you've just bashed them into the ground. There were many times I found a couple of us getting back hammered simply because we couldn't zerg our way through a cave full of bandits or a crevasse full of destroyers. This is pretty much one thing i completely loathe about persistent world MMO's, and something that Arenanet really needs to get right.

World Events.
Ok, so this is a tough one, the event system as it stands needs tweaking regardless and it being a pretty new type of system, it definitely has some bugs. First and foremost is again the scalability. Yes i understand, big events aren't supposed to be done by less than say 10 people, but however, some of these events don't seem to have logical chains that trigger them. The Shadow Behemoth is one of those that you can easily either never participate in or show up with only 5 people in the area willing to take on the beast. I saw events like this pop up in numerous places and often, for the few of us around, became epic failures. One thought would be the ability to follow some of these events, like you would a forum post. Talk to someone and they would somehow inform you that they desperately need help as the OMG boss is coming, maybe through the email system. This is especially true for those events that seem to be on a timer. It also would provide feedback on the popularity of an event over time and help to make a decision whether to toss out or change a less popular one

Party system.
There's a couple of things i would change with the party system. One thing would be a right click menu option that has "Find on map". It's a friggen pain in the ass to find others in party sometimes, even in the same zone. This is especially true with the blue dot ordeal and being zoomed out of the world map. I almost feel it's better to not be in party and just randomly run around on my own not trying to find and follow various party members. Which leads me to this next bit.

Will the real mini map please stand up?
This is a must have in my book, the radar even with zoom levels is hardly a substitute for the original Guild Wars mini map, i toggled the world map so many times it felt like part of a bad habit than any kind of solution. It's possible i missed some sort of other option here, but i did look for it.

Lack of Auto Follow.
Let's face it, if you're a Guild Wars player, the auto follow features was one of the best mechanics when adventuring with your group. Granted this might be a huge issue when that person you're following is down off a 50 foot cliff and your toon is chasing them to their death mindlessly, but at the very least, if someone is relatively close, You should be able to just run in their general direction without toggling the map or trying to pick them out in the radar.

Targeting.
This may not be a big issue, but targeting is clunky at best. There might have been key bindings for select closest target, but i didn't see it. There is just way to much going on in some battles to be click targeting. Select next and previous targets would be great too!

City Lag.
The cities, any of them, are at best lagfests, if not almost unplayable on some lower end video cards and/or processors. It work great for my i5 and 6970 card, but the Intel e8500 with a 4950 card had some serious lag issues. This isn't even 3 year old hardware! I get the optimization issues still needing to be worked out and perhaps there was some issue with the pc, but it was pretty rough.

Crafting.
Last but not least, and this is a problem with most games crafting systems, is that materials for some disciplines are quite hard to come by while others are very simple and straight forward. It would be really nice if that part of the auction house was available at the specific crafting areas. In Guild Wars you could buy mats directly from vendors, why not make that happen in Guild Wars 2? Have those materials supplied by the vendors, even if they are tied to auction house prices and purchases. For cooks, it's fairly simple to just toss ingredients together and craft something, not to mention many of the items are available from vendors too, but not so for most of the other disciplines.

I just signed up for Gamespot Total Access, the paid subscription tier for the gaming website.  The process of how this came to be is a weirdly circular one which I'd like to note because it's such a strange trip to take.

The reason I joined wasn't because I wanted to pay for the service.  Nope.  The reason I joined was because I was a Giant Bomb Premium member.  You see, I was subscriber to Gamespot Complete back in the day, until what became known as the Gerstmann Affair.  In 2007, longtime Gamespot employee Jeff Gerstmann, who by then had the Editorial Director spot at the video gaming site, was fired over his pushback against the steady influence of the marketing department over editorial content.  This pushback game to a head after Gerstmann put up a fight over his review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, which he gave a "Fair" rating, essentially a mediocre grade.  Publisher Eidos threatened to pull advertising on Gamespot, advertising which had actually progressed to wrapping the entire site with ads for Eidos' game. For my part, I cancelled my Gamespot subscription in protest over Gerstmann's firing.

In the wake of the dismissal came the obligatory lawyerly suppression of information, a suppression that of course allowed naysayers to cry conspiracy, insisting that the whole thing had nothing to do with Eidos or Kane & Lynch.  Gerstmann himself went on to found Giant Bomb, a competing video game website that has steadily grown in prominence, to which I eventually paid for subscribers access in support for Gerstmann's efforts.  And here is where the story takes a hilarious turn.  Recently, parent company Whisky Media has sold off Giant Bomb to none other than CBS Interactive, owners of CNET, who operate Gamespot.  So Gerstmann ends up back with his former company, and I end up back with a Gamespot Subscription, converted from my paid access to Giant Bomb.  Funny, yes?  And all the while, the stakes in regards to big game companies eroding the editorial integrity of video game journalism keeps getting higher.  

Via the terms of Giant Bomb's purchase by CBS Interactive, the gag order on the details of Gerstmann's firings was nullified, and he revealed that marketing's pressure against negative game reviews was indeed the reason for his dismissal.  But the question remains: will game publishers continue to influence gaming sites' game ratings?  And if so, will the public do anything about it?

So I managed to get my hands on a Vita (3G/WiFi version) shortly after launch, and I also got a 16GB memory card along with Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Wipeout 2048 (Thank you Sony, I love you too).
So what do I think after a week of ownership? Well quite honestly, I couldn't be happier with this marvel of portable gaming.

So why, oh why, do I love my Vita so much?
Well let's break it down a little so I can explain how I feel about this wonderful machine.
*I have not activated any 3G services yet (I just haven't had the need). I just wanted to put that out there before I get started.

Hardware.
The Vita is much lighter than I expected but still feels very robust. It fits comfortably in the hands with a couple of matte grip areas on the back to rest your fingertips on. A quad-core processor and quad-core graphics processor power the impressive graphics, which show up wonderfully on the 5-inch display, which is the best looking handheld gaming display I've ever seen. Everything looks good on the Vita, games, movies (streamed from Netflix), and photos. Even the operating system is amazing to look at. There are left and right shoulder buttons, a PlayStation button, and Start and Select buttons. The Start and Select buttons are really small and not particularly easy to hit, but as you rarely use them whilst playing, I don't think it's going to be an issue. On top of the Vita are the power and volume buttons, along with the slot for game cards and a proprietary port of some sort (can't find any info on what this is for). The bottom of the Vita houses the headphone socket, a microphone, USB charging and communication connection, and a slot for the memory card. The memory cards are proprietary to Sony but look a lot like micro SD cards. There are two cameras built into the Vita, one front and one rear facing. They work great for the augmented reality games and some of the other game demos I've tried, but they're not going to take the place of your digital camera or even your smartphone camera anytime soon.

Controls.
First thing that you'll notice is that it looks just like any other piece of Sony gaming hardware. The screen is flanked by two analog thumb sticks, then above those are the classic PlayStation buttons on the right and a D-pad on the left. Both the buttons and D-pad feel smaller than the ones I remember on the PSP. The most impressive thing of course is that finally someone has made a portable system with dual analog sticks, hooray! Next be prepared to be blown away, not only is the gorgeous display a touch screen, but the back of the handheld is a touchpad too.
When I first got the Vita my initial reaction was that the analog controls where a little 'twitchy' but I have to say that after a week, I've gotten used to them. Both the placement and responsiveness took me a few days to get the hang of, but also remember I haven't had a portable system for the last 6 months since my first generation PSP went kaput recently.
The touch screen is ultra responsive and my only complaint is that it suffers from the same thing all touch screens do . . . . oily fingerprint smears.

Display.
I really haven't paid too much attention to OLED screens in general. I'm more than happy with my LED TV so didn't really pursue OLEDS very much. I know they're supposed to be better than LCD with greater clarity and brighter colors. Well all I can say is that 'they' are not wrong, the 5” OLED screen is amazing with awesome depth and color. It's definitely the most vivid screen I've seen, and I've yet to see any problems with screen tearing or pixilation when watching movies or playing games.

Graphics.
Gorgeous is the first word that comes to mind. I really can't tell you what the resolution is, because I haven't bothered to look it up, but I can tell you it looks just like my PlayStation 3, just on a smaller scale. I dare you to look at the screen and not be impressed!

Extras.
Playstation Vita does more than just play games. Here are some of the highlights included in the operating system:

Google Maps is included in the operating system, which works exactly as you’d expect if you’ve ever used it on a smartphone or tablet. The GPS seemed pretty accurate, but I don’t see this being used much. I just can’t imagine too many scenarios where it would be easier to pull out your Vita than your smartphone, maybe it would useful for people without smartphones though?

Web Browser. Yes there's a web browser, yes it's better than the PlayStation 3 one, but you’re only likely to use it for quickly looking something up as it’s still pretty mediocre by today’s standards.

There are currently apps for Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Netflix. More apps have been promised in the future. Netflix works flawlessly and has a very similar interface to the PlayStation 3 app. I'm hoping for a Skype app next.

Near is the app which adds a social aspect to the device by showing you nearby Vita users, what they’re playing and what trophies they’ve won etc. There's also a way to share “Game Goods” using this app, but for the life of me, I'm still not 100% sure how this all works. Quite frankly I found the app confusing.

Content manager is built into the operating system, and allows you to transfer information between the Vita and a PlayStation 3 or computer. The content manager is really easy to use, and even contains it's own installation files for your PC which organizes a database on your PC for transferring between your PC and the Vita. My only complaint would be that whilst your Vita is transferring to or from your PlayStation 3, it's not possible to use your PlayStation 3 for anything else. Background transfers are on my wish list for future firmware updates..

Remote Play is a feature which was poorly implemented on the PSP in my opinion. So I'm really pleased to say that setting up and using remote play on the Vita has been a dream and completely without problems. I've tried it from several different locations and it has performed flawlessly every time. My only wish is that more PS3 games use the full potential of this feature, as it seems that right now, only minis and PSOne games are playable via remote play. Let's hope this changes soon.

Party is the app used to create a party so you can chat and play games etc over the PlayStation network. Currently I can't get this working unless it's with other Vita users, but you're supposed to be able to cross game chat with people on the PS3 also. I'll post an update when this feature starts working.

The PlayStation store is slightly revamped and clearly structured specifically for the Vita. It's easy to navigate and also recognizes the fact that I'm a PlayStation Plus member. One downside we have discovered is that my son can't log into the Vita using his own PSN account as apparently the Vita only wants to use one account (namely mine). This is a shame as we would dearly love to be able to earn trophies and save games under our own accounts. This is another item on my wishlist.

Operating system.
Probably the one thing about the operating system that impressed me the most was how intuitive it is. I handed the Vita to my wife, who is less than technically savvy with such things, and she was able to start navigating immediately. Granted she got lost in the menus and eventually tossed it back to me, but I was still impressed that she was able to use it with no instruction from me.
Sliding between screens and switching between apps happens at lightning fast speeds, even when switching out of a game and into google maps is almost seamless.
Managing home screens, moving icons around, customizing backgrounds etc is easy and similar to the way most smartphones handle it. In fact the whole interface reminds you of a smartphone in many ways (which is probably why my wife picked it up so quickly).

So enough about hardware I hear you say, what about the games?

Games.
Games are either downloaded digitally from the PlayStation store or you can purchase them on Game Cards, which basically look like SD cards (but they're actually a format that's proprietary to Sony). From what I can tell, you get around a $5 discount for getting them digitally (I compared prices at Gamestop). Remember that if you plan on doing the digital download, you're going to need a bunch of memory cards, which are not cheap.

Uncharted: Golden Abyss.
First of all if you own a Vita (or are planning on getting one), you NEED to own this game. This game alone could sell a million Vita's. Along with the usual amazing story telling and graphics, Golden Abyss makes full use of all the extra interfaces you get with a Vita. The touchscreen and rear touchpad are extremely well implemented and playing quickly becomes very intuitive. I refuse to post any game spoilers, but apparently (and I read it on the internet so it must be true), this game is longer than Uncharted 3, and critics claim it's better than Uncharted 3. I can tell you from personal experience it's exactly what you'd expect from an Uncharted game, and then some!

Wipeout 2048.
No real surprises here. Wipeout is a great racing franchise and this game is no exception. The graphics are lightning fast and really show off the capabilities of the OLED display. This game also offers what Sony are calling “Cross-Play” (still sounds dirty to me ), which basically means that it will inter connect with Wipeout HD on the PlayStation 3. Exactly how this all works I can't really say as it's not been implemented yet, so rest assured as soon as it's working, I'll update my review.
I have to admit that as good as Golden Abyss is, I still find myself popping Wipeout 2048 into the Vita for those “I've got 20 minutes to spare” moments. I can't wait until they get cross-play working.

I have managed to copy some of my Mini's to the Vita and they play great, with no issues.
There are three free games available in the PlayStation Store for the Vita. Cliff Diver, Fireworks, and Table Soccer. All of these titles use the augmented reality cards (supplied with the Vita) to turn your everyday environment into the play are for your game. They're simple games that are well-designed to work with the Vita.

The Vita's battery life is really the only downside that I see at this stage. Sony quote battery life at 5 hours. I will use my Vita mostly whilst traveling, so I'm going to struggle with such a short battery life. Especially flying across country as I often do. I guess it's just something I'll have to live with, at least until I find the nearest USB power supply

Overall I'm extremely pleased, and pleasantly impressed with the Vita. Honestly I think Sony have a great portable gaming system, I just hope they fully implement all the possibilities that this system can offer. I would love to play my PS3 games remotely from my Vita, I'm getting tired of dragging my PlayStation 3 all around the worlds airports.

MartB64

It's been quite a long time since this aired, but i thought it be fun to resurrect this video.
We've had a fantastic and fun run since back in the day. Yet another reminder why i love this group!

It has been several months since I last posted anything here and for any regular readers I apologize.  I've been busy with real world work, but I've also become a regular contributor to VGBlogger.com.  But since it is a new year I wanted to take a moment and write about some of the new tech I've recently started using as well as some of the new gaming goodness that will be available next month.

First off Christmas was a pretty good time for all the gamers in my house.  My kids got iPods and Just Dance 3 for the Wii (which is something that I find enjoyable to watch, but almost impossible to play with my own "white man" sense of coordination) and I got Skyrim.  The other big game-friendly tech that showed up at Christmas time was Sony's new PlayStation 3D Display.  All I can say is wow.  The image on the display is absolutely amazing.

I typically have my PS3 hooked up to a 42" Westinghouse, which is sadly showing inevitable signs of decay and poor health.  Which is a shame since the TV is only four years old.  The HDMI ports on the big unit are dead, the TV tuner seems to be on the fritz, and the menu system doesn't seem to keep the settings I've adjusted.  Fortunately, Santa delivered the 3D display this year and so I found myself clearing off a desk next to my entertainment console where the new beautiful display sits.  While the viewing space is only 24" diagonally, I find that sitting in my desk chair (at a desk no less) I have the perfect distance and center "sweet spot" for watching all that is pushed out from the screen.

Okay.  I'm sorta getting ahead of myself though.  The PlayStation 3D Display is Sony's newly released panel with gaming as the core focus.  In the box is one pair of active shutter glasses, a 5' HDMI cable and of course the display and base (oh and a copy of Motorstorm Apocalypse).  Set up took less than five minutes, put the display into the base, connect the HDMI cable and fire up the PS3.  The display itself is a marvel to look at, a super high gloss front, thin, like super thin.  I'm blown away by how thin the display is compared to my chunky Westinghouse.  Speakers are built into the sides of the display and a sub woofer is built into the back.  There are 2 HDMI ports as well as 1 component cable for a total 3 inputs and a 3.5 mm headphone jack for audio out.

Turning on the display is a bit of a design flaw.  The power buttons, menu and volume buttons are on the back of the speaker on the right side.  The same side that the HDMI cable connects at.  I found that turning the display on or adjusting the volume, I would have to be careful not to bump the HDMI cable (it's kinda freaky to see the pristine image suddenly flash green and jumble and then reset back to pristine all by accidentally bumping the HDMI cable while attempting to adjust the volume).  That being said, Sony has coincidentally release an update to their PlayStation Blu-ray remote.  While the remote isn't included, I would strongly recommend picking it up (but more on that in a bit).

So the PS3 is hooked up, the display is on, how does it look playing games?  The first thing I noticed was just how much sharper items on the XMB look.  Trophies look better, installed game icon's look sharper, everything looks cleaner.  Now maybe that's because even at 1080p the screen real estate is that much smaller, and thus things look better, but I'd guess that the 3D display just has more going on to make the images look that much better.

Since Motorstorm Apocalypse was included in the box, I fired that up first.  I got a second pair of glasses with the display because one of the coolest features touted by Sony is the SimulView technology.  Basically it allows the 3D display to send a full screen 2D image to one set of glasses while sending a second 2D image to the other set of glasses so that instead of having a split screen two player local experience, each player gets a full screen view of their game.  This works really well with Motorstorm Apocalypse.  Turning off the Simulview, I switched to a single player 3D experience and the game really gives a great sense of depth and scope to the massive destruction that all of the races are centered around.

One of the cool things about PlayStation 3 games is the simple fact that lots of them had 3D capabilities that were enabled after firmware 3.30 was pushed out to the PS3.  Because of that I was able to sample 3D on a fair amount of games in my back catalog.  Super Stardust HD, Pain, Wipeout HD, were just a few downloadable games I gave a 3D go at.  Pain only has 3D enabled during a bowling section, which is fun and definitely takes advantage of the 3D display, it is nothing worth gushing over.  Wipeout HD in 3D is fairly impressive, except for the fact that everything is moving so fast the 3D effect is lost in the blurring speed of all that is going on.  Super Stardust HD is amazing.  The game displays at so many depths of field at the same time, all the while asteroids and ships and explosions are careening about giving a true feast for the eyes.

As far as disc based games go I've played a fairly wide range of titles to see just how well the display responds.  MLB 11 The Show is really awesome with 3D enabled.  Batting in 3D, you get a really great sense of when the ball is crossing the plate.  The rest of the game is fun to see the stadiums come to life with 3D.  A greater sense of how different each field really is and how that can impact a home run being just a double, depending on where the ball is hit.

Killzone 3 and Resistance 3 both support 3D output.  Killzone 3 also supports SimulView for two player local co-op.  As of right now Resistance 3 does not support SimulView, but hopefully Insomniac has a patch to add the feature at some point in the future.  Both games look awesome in 3D.  One aspect I hadn't even considered before playing a first person shooter in 3D was the simple fact that a game in 3D would actually give the effect of looking down a gun barrel and feel real!  Of course the environments pop and add a greater depth of field in both but the effect of a gun barrel sticking out in front of my nose was truly an experience I hadn't considered before.

One of the most recent titles to come out that I've probably spent the most time on while playing in 3D has been Batman Arkham City.  With over 20 hours playing in 3D I found myself impressed with how the world pops, and the various levels of field depth add to the overall immersion of the game.  My one complaint about Batman Arkham City was the initial darkness of the game.  When the active shutter glasses kick in, a dark hue plays across my field of vision.  Since most of Arkham City is played in dark alleys or dim lit buildings, I had to adjust both the level of brightness and the level of 3D being pushed out.  Once I found the sweet spot I found that I my time the game world quickly added up.

Two things I'd like to note before closing this post.  First off, I wish that developers would all figure out a way to allow for adjustments in how strong the 3D is displayed in the same section of the menu structure.  Some games would only allow for adjustments at the main menu and thus testing to see if a level was too intense couldn't be discovered without loading the game, "testing the waters" and then hoping all the way back to the main menu to adjust if necessary.  Other games allow for adjustments directly in the thick of action, which is much easier to adjust the level of intensity without losing the flow of game play.

The second closing comment I have is regarding the lack of remote control.  Since the display doesn't come with a remote, one of the first things I did was look to replace my original PlayStation Blu-ray remote.  Of course the original only remote only worked with the PS3 and not with any TVs because it only communicated via bluetooth.  The new remote connects via bluetooth and infrared and adds some additional buttons (to switch control between PS3, TV and Amp) as well as volume and channel control.  Since I don't have a cable box hooked up to the display (and there is no TV tuner built in) the channel control doesn't add any benefit, but the volume control is an absolute must in my opinion, so that you don't end up screwing up the HDMI connection as you reach behind the panel to adjust the levels.  One of the other nice enhancements on the remote is the circle directional button.  On the old remote, the directional buttons felt loose and would sometimes lead the cursor to move in the wrong direction (up instead of left for example).  With the new remote, the directional buttons almost click and have a slight snappy push back when navigating on screen menus.  The new remote is a tad longer, but is thinner and feels good even though there are additional buttons placed across the surface.  The one thing keeping the remote from being perfect is the lack of backlit buttons, but for just about $20, the remote is more than capable given all that it can control.

As a person who spends a pretty large amount of time in front of displays (both at work and at home gaming) I have to say that the new PlayStation 3D Display is just short of spectacular.  The sounds produced are good and the visuals (both 3D and non) are a feast for the eyes.  The price is incredibly good as well right now.  Best Buy is listing it at $299, Amazon is listing it for $399.  Depending on the store, the package is still incredibly good.  A pair of glasses included, an HDMI cable, plus a game.  Sony has been promoting 3D as one of the incredible features that the PS3 is capable of, and now has given gamers a truly affordable way to get a feature that really does enhance the overall gaming experience.

Check back next month as the new tech continues to roll out.  I'll be giving a review of the new Wireless Stereo Headset once my order from Amazon arrives, as well the new PlayStation Vita as soon as that becomes available.
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As part of our gaming season, we've decided to let YOU decide on a regularly scheduled event each week.

Feature a favorite is simple, reply to this thread, any multi-player game you want to see for this weekly event. Any platform, any multi-player game, any genre, from a facebook game to any device (iphone/ipad/andriod) and any console or computer platform. Every Monday night at 9pm (EST) your vote will be featured, the only thing we ask is that you promote, show up and play. This event will be posted each week on our calendar and promoted not only by the staff but by everyone interested. This can be a great way to get your friends and families involved!

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How does feature a favorite work?
Reply to the tread with the game you want to play
the game with the most entries will be the game we play
Voting is Monday through Friday

Reply HEREto pick your favorite

Hi everybody, long time no blog! ^___^
How have you all been?

Anyhow, today something very exciting happened! Me & my brother share the same PS3, and we use his e-mail for it.
He told me a few hours ago that he had received an e-mail from Ubisoft. Our PS3 ID had been one of the chosen ones to test the Assassin's Creed Revelations Beta!
You can only imagine how hyped I was! It's been painful to wait for this game to come out, and now that I get to experience some of it's features in advance, I could not be any happier.

The beta testing will start tomorrow, and end when the full game is released.(77 days?)
So, I'll be having a great 77 days of assassinating and yelling at my brothers that it's my turn now.

When I've played it enough and gathered enough info to state an opinion, I'll be making a review of some kind.
Thanks to Duchess for sharing my excitement & giving me the idea of sharing all this with you guys! ^__^

-Thudley