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Preview: A Weekend in Tyria – Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend

May 22, 2012 by
gw-2-classes

My first experience with Guild Wars 2 occurred just over a year ago amid the hustle and bustle of the San Diego Comic-Con. As I walked up to the demo station where the game was playable in 45-minute-session form, just one of many games on display that year, I wasn’t aware of just how deeply the game would infest itself into my memory. My time in the land of Tyria passed quickly and before I knew it, I was back among the countless hordes of convention attendees, excited about what I had seen and eager to hear more about the game…but part of me just wanted to get right back in line and go for another round.

That’s the catch with Guild Wars 2: after spending nearly seven years invested in a singular MMO, I didn’t think I had it in me to really get interested in another one. Too many titles had thrown themselves at the heels of the monolith that is World of Warcraft, and I simply hadn’t seen enough of the game to judge for myself if it was worth the plunge. That changed a few weekends ago, when I was able to spend every waking moment of my free time with ArenaNet’s upcoming MMO. It’s safe to say that not only is my interest in what they’re bringing to the table satisfied, but I am more than ready to shout the praises of this game from the highest peaks.

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Preview: Path of Exile

April 27, 2012 by
Path of Exile

Hello Toastervision patriots and new readers alike.  Today I want to tell you about an up and coming free-to-play title from Grinding Gear Games that’s been in production for over 5 years and has managed to keep a relatively low profile in the Action RPG genre.  I’m well aware Diablo 3 is less than 20 days away from release, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. The ARPG scene has been dominated by Blizzard with Diablo series of games, and I admit that I’ve spent many years playing Diablo 2 on and off for months at a time.  With games like Titan Quest, Torchlight, Dungeon Siege, and Baldur’s Gate having a huge influence on my youth, it’s safe to say that I’m a bit obsessed with spending countless hours running through dungeons to acquire gear that has no use but to be prestigious or traded for aforementioned fake gold in an e-community.  This leads me to my first point and what immediately caught my attention with Path of Exile.  Read on, fellow dungeon dwellers, to see why I think Path of Exile could be a budding star in a newly-revived genre.

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Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend scheduled for next weekend (!)

April 18, 2012 by
asuraranger5

It’s finally here, you guys: a chance to sit down for an entire weekend and play Guild Wars 2 in a hopefully only moderately restricted fashion. I haven’t played the game since August, and I’m incredibly pumped to see what’s been changed up since then. Next weekend, April 27th-29th, anyone that’s pre-purchased (like I managed to do today) the game will be able to romp around in the wilds of Tyria and kill all sorts of things in a dynamic fashion.

No lie, I’m super pumped. If you’ve already pre-purchased but you haven’t registered your account yet, that may be something you want to address. Do so right here.

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Filed Under: News, PC Tagged With: , , , ,

Review: Tribes: Ascend – Going fast never felt so good

April 17, 2012 by
tribeslogo

There is a distinctly foreign feeling to your first game of Tribes: Ascend. It seems strangely familiar at first glance, a sci-fi shooter with teams, loadouts, objectives, all the jazz you’ve come to expect from a FPS in today’s market. Ascend, however, is wrapped up in packaging that hearkens back to the days when PC shooters were the way to kill people over the Internet, and it revels in the knowledge that a player cannot just jump in and start wrecking things. Instead, they have to sit down and relearn how to move, shoot and survive. A first-person shooter with a lengthy learning curve is a rare thing these days, but when everything clicks and that player feels the surge of adrenaline that can only come from what Hi-Rez is bringing back to the shooter scene in Tribes: Ascend, it’s all incredibly worth it.

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City of Heroes entering Issue 23, “Where Shadows Lie”

April 12, 2012 by
shadowhunter

City of Heroes, which I guess has a subtitle of FREEDOM now, has always struck me as the MMO that everyone has at least tried. It’s got a nifty angle on the genre with its superhero-centrism and the shift to free-to-play that it underwent last year, and the content updates have just kept on finding their way into the limelight. That’s a good thing!

The latest content update is entitled “Where Shadows Lie” and from the sounds of things it’s more of a story conclusion to many of the plot threads that have been building up since the Going Rogue expansion began. Heroes of the world will be able to reunite to finish the Praetorian War against Emperor Cole, who in all likelihood has some nasty tricks up his sleeve. There’s also a new zone, “Night Ward” for mid-level players (30-35) and what I can only assume is a raid of sorts in the “Magisterium Incarnate Trial”…boy, that’s a mouthful.

In addition to the bigger actual “content” things coming to CoH, there’s a flurry of extra stuff you would normally expect in a big content update like this – new mobs, armor, a bunch of VIP content including new quest chains, costume sets and a “Hybrid Incarnate” specialization tree for level-capped folks. Other things slated for this patch are more “quality of life” implementations: look forward to a portal system so people don’t have to rely on those damn heliplanes all the time, as well as a server-wide LFG channel and the ability to join Super Groups at any point you want.

I might have to pop back to Professor Beaksmith, my hulking blue-toned basher with an afro and a sweet beak mask. There’s no official release on this yet, but I imagine it’ll be fairly “soon”. We’ve got some pictures beyond the cut for you, if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.

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Filed Under: News, PC Tagged With: , , , ,

Mass Effect 3 gets “Resurgence” DLC, fans complain about free things

April 6, 2012 by
main

The ME3 train just keeps on a rollin’, folks. Hot off the announcement of a new “Extended Cut” to the ending which basically amounts to “you guys win, we’re adding more cutscenes to this”, BioWare is making another foray into the realm of “free DLC”, something that I’m sure EA is just thrilled about.

Dubbed the “Resurgence Pack” and due on April 11th for all three platforms (but only free until 2014, so act quickly, I guess), this flurry of extra “things” for the multiplayer side of the final step in the Mass Effect trilogy is adding a lot of things that…well, to be honest it’s a lot of things that people said they were going to add. We’re talking about new maps, character race/class combinations, weapons and the one-time consumables that populate your micro-transaction laden “Equipment Packs”.

To be a little more specific, the two “Firebases”, Hydra and Condor, are quarian and turian outposts that get blasted by bad guys. No word if they’re going to be locations directly from the main campaign a la every other multiplayer map, but I’d say it’s somewhat likely. You’ve also got three new weapons: an assault rifle, “harpoon gun”, and a Geth-produced SMG, and some extra new power-ups like “increased headshot damage” or “increased melee damage”…y’know, what you’ve come to expect from the Equipment Packs if you’ve been playing the multiplayer a bit.

The classes are the biggest draw here, with six new ones filling in some unexpected slots. You’ve got two Geth representatives (Infiltrator / Engineer), two Batarians (Soldier / Sentinel), a Krogan “Battlemaster”Vanguard and an Asari Adept. It’ll be nice to finally play in a 4-player Geth v Geth conflict, if I do say so myself.

Of humorous note is the fact that most of the words down in the image past the cut (which we pulled straight from BioWare’s blog, mind you) has a bunch of Word processor “unrecognized” words pop up.

 

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Filed Under: News, PC, PS3, X360 Tagged With: , , , , ,

Orcs Must Die! 2! Announced! Exclamation Points!!! ORCS!

April 2, 2012 by
OrcsMustDie2-Logo

This is probably the best headline I could start off my day with, barring Valve blowing the lid off of a game we all know might as well not exist.
 
Around October last year, Texas developer Robot Entertainment pushed Orcs Must Die! into the forefront of our mind-space. It was a charming, explosive little game with lots of personality, a solid amount of humour, and enough engaging spins on the “Tower Defense” formula that made OMD! one of my favorite games of 2011. Keeping it from being perfect, however, was one big, glaring, super-saddening problem: despite your main character’s bold and rather bone-headed opinion of the many orcs he put down in the name of his “Order”, he was a pretty lonely protagonist. To put it another way, I had no co-op partner and this was a sad thing. 
 
It turns out that I wasn’t the only one that thought that, and it also turns out that Robot Entertainment is now all about that co-op experience. This morning they unveiled a sequel to their orc-smashing romp, perhaps wrongly titled Orcs Must Die! 2, seemingly slated for a PC-exclusive release sometime in the nebulous “Summer of 2012″. Personally, I would’ve gone with the much more archetypical Orcs Must Die! 2: Orc Harder, or perhaps Orcs Must Die! 2: Orc-a-palooza. The long and the short of it is that we have a short little “announcement trailer” and some screenshots beyond the cut, and in the meantime I’m going to keep thinking of better sequel names – you can take any of these for free, Robot. You’re welcome.
 
Orcs Must Die! 2: Orc-ders of Magnitude / Orcs Must Die! 2: Twelve Angry Orcs / Orcs Must Die! 2: Orclectric Boogaloo / Orcs Must Die! 2: Skulls on Skulls on Skulls / Orcs Must Die! 2: The Second / Orcs Must Die! 2: Make Love, Not Orcs / Orcs Must Die! 2: Orcish Revolution / Orcs Must Die! 2: Opposing F-orcs / Orcs Must Die! 2: The Orc-ening / Orcs Must Die! 2: Not Skyrim.
 
Okay I think I’m spent, pictures/video just a few pixels below these very words.
 
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Preview: Brick-Force

March 30, 2012 by
BackGround05 - Kopie

After getting interested in upcoming Minecraft/FPS hybrid Brick-Force late last year, I was quick on the buzzer when it was time to sign up for the game’s closed beta. Soon enough, I ended up with some free time to kill and received that wonderful email from Infernum Productions informing me that I made it into their closed beta.  Naturally, I took some time to sit down with the free-to-play game and give it a few hours to let loose.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to check out the map editing process, aside from strolling around someone’s map while they were making it.  The good news is that I was able to put in some quality time with their FPS aspect.

If you’re interested in hearing what I thought about Infernum’s debut title, keep on reading!

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Filed Under: FPS, PC, Previews Tagged With: , , , , ,

FireFall dropping NDA next Friday, moving up to 24/7 Beta access on Monday

March 30, 2012 by
830px-Gate_Entrance_(2)

Last year at PAX Prime I got a chance to check out the wicked online-shooty-type FireFall, a game that’s currently having an active NDA-filled closed beta overseen by developer Red 5 studios. It was a pretty neat mish-mash of several excellent game archetypes and I was really excited to see what else was going on with it. Luckily, it looks like we might be finding out a lot more about the very info-light multiplayer hybrid very soon. In an open letter to the current closed beta testers, staff member Phobos went through the history of the game thus far: the exciting reveal at PAX Prime 2010, the subsequent follow-up in 2011 and the success of the closed beta so far.

Interesting tidbits were scattered throughout this letter, including two very important bits of knowledge: first of all, this coming Monday (April 2nd for those of you who keep track of things on calendars) will give lucky invitees access to the game on a 24/7 non-stop basis, so you can constantly have an IV drip delicious third-person shooting into your bloodstream. The second thing concerns that ratty old NDA that keeps people from talking about the game. As of next Friday at 10AM EST, that will be gone as well, so people already in the beta can talk about their experiences without being strung up and harangued by angry Red 5 devs. Another interesting point that is a result of the date is the fact that PAX East attendees will be playing live on the beta servers with people from all around the world. That’s pretty rad.

I was very impressed with my hands-on time with the game at PAX. Hopefully I’ll get a beta key soon and we can talk about the game. The full letter is just below, in case you’re wanting to read the whole thing (it’s a good read!).

[ Source ]

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Review: Mass Effect 3 – A guilty galaxy’s last stand

March 13, 2012 by
2012-03-06_00028

When the credits roll on the 8-to-12 hour game you’ve been waiting all year for, your story, your adventure with whatever character you have just saved the world for the umpteenth time with is over. Before the intervention and widespread acceptance of DLC as a story-extender, this was simply a fact that people had to accept. As BioWare announced the Mass Effect trilogy – not just one game, but three separate titles interwoven with another through the choices the player makes along the way – they were attempting to chip away at this long-standing facet of the medium. They claimed they would bring deep and meaningful interactions with characters you would grow to know and care for over the course of three separate storylines.

With Mass Effect 3, the story of Commander Shepard and the brave crew of the Normandy finally draws to a satisfying, if somewhat technically frustrating conclusion. BioWare’s promise of crafting this world of strong characters, however, is the real star of the show. [Read more...]

Filed Under: PC, PS3, Reviews, X360
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