HotChops

minor plot spoilers for the early part of the game:

I think they used some creative camera angles for the dragon fight, but the fight itself is gameplay. I'm hoping the game world is more awe-inspiring once it's seen in-game (as is certainly the case with Fallout and Oblivion) but I was really impressed by the improvements of the combat. You strike them with your forehand, the enemy recoils to the left. Hit them with your backhand and they recoil to the right. Then there's the special kill animations... I'm pretty hyped. I wish that with this and Battlefield they showed more than just previous screenshots in motion, but it is still February.

oh shit, there we go! Combat looks great!

same here, gahhh! Nothing on gametrailers, youtube, or Kotaku either. come on Bethesda! Didn't you plan for this? You put a countdown there for god's sake, of course a billion people would show up at once!

OMGsssszz!1!! I live for this shit, man. Hype hype hype!

Oh, right. I've seen that now. I don't think that was Kotaku's idea. She seems to like doing that sort of thing. Example: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/top-5-with-lisa-foiles Ugh, these videogame-chick videos are all the same. Stand to the left, hands on hips, turn body 30 degrees to the right, big smile, and read script. I may be a lonely gaming nerd, but when people try this crap with me it just annoys the hell out of me. It takes more than a soft voice, friendly smile and cute ass to get me to click on your site.

I think they are just linking to her rubbish on The Escapist. I'm not sure what you're talking about. What I saw was a purely Kotaku video that basically featured her getting drunk

HOLY SHIT. That looks really good. I'm sure the console versions won't be quite as pretty, but damn. edit: I found a slow-mo version of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3VJK1BKIsk

We all saw it coming. They're starting to do videos starring Lisa Foiles just like all the other gaming sites who are looking for a cute female spokesperson.

fucking awesome! I wondered if ME 3 would show the arrival of the reapers or just start in the midst of their attempted genocide of galaxy. It looks to be the latter. You know what's lame? I couldn't even talk very much about the ME3 teaser trailer when it debuted a few months ago because most of my lame-ass friends hadn't even finished ME2 yet. I hope ME3's dialogue constantly offers Shepard a "I told you so" option.

Honestly, in the case of Topware I'd tell them to go ahead and blacklist me. Who gives a fuck about their craptastic games except fringe European gamers anyway? I'll add this much though. Reading through that list of allegations, I'm more than certain that most of the major publishers out there do some of those things -- notably the posing as members of the public on forums, etc. Seriously, I see posts all the time around the internet that I could swear were written by someone on a company payroll.

And this is why COD4 is still my favorite shooter to play online, of all time. I got a chance to see them at one of Quakecon's panels this summer along with Todd Howard They're incredibly down to Earth. Jason West is the kind of silly dork who will accidentally spittle on your face while he excitedly tells a story - complete with sound effects and exaggerated arm gestures. It would be hilarious to see him interacting with Bobby Kotick because he's the complete opposite of your typical corporate executive. Back to B-Field though... I feel bad because my last post seemed kind of negative. I'd like to make it clear that I really love Battlefield, the good with the bad. A few more points from the GI article: - Single player really appears to be more robust than ever before. Most of the GI article is actually about the single player. Only a sidebar interview with exec. producer Patrick Bach offers info about the multiplayer. - BF3 apparently sports even better lighting effects than previous games. Sound is also improved. DICE wants the sound to be very functional; they want you to be able to tell the difference between the sound of a tank moving directly at you as opposed to driving around you. They also hinted that it may play an important role in tracking down the location of snipers. - It looks like there will be four player classes like in BC2. - Bach said they've taken an interest in a theater mode (like in Halo and BlOps,) but it doesn't sound like they're prepared to implement it yet. - There will be some sort of co-op included in the retail copy of the game. No other specifics about that. - While the ability to go prone is back, DICE is working on ways to expose people who go prone, such as muzzle flashes and vapor traces. - And I probably should have noted this much earlier, but DICE made clear that Battlefield 3 is being made for the PC first. Furthermore: "We are letting the PC audience make use of the very expensive hardware that they just bought so they can tick all the boxes and for the 64-player fights." and "We will not deliver mod tools in the way that we delivered them for Battlefield 2." According to Bach, creating mod tools eats up a lot of resources that they don't feel free to provide right now. However, "[DICE is] still discussing how [they] handle modifications of any kind."

First off, I don't think that Battlefield 2, 3 or whatever is the "core" franchise. Battlefield doesn't technically have a core. If I were to assign criteria to what makes a core BF experience, I'd say it's whatever sticks closest to the source -- Battlefield 1942. Anywho, I just got the Game Informer issue with the feature on BF 3. My impressions: - The article is terribly written. I'm actually a fan of GI, but this article is bereft of significant details, lacks a cohesive message and at times is ambiguous, for example... - There's a blurb heading that says "Destruction 3.0," but from what I can tell, BF3 still uses the Frostbite 2 engine used in BC2. - They said that they're not going to make squads limited to four players, or at least they're going to find some way to compensate for that limitation. Who knows how much this problem cost BC2 sales. It was hard enough to convince my friends to try BC2, but after three evenings in a row of us struggling to string together two or three separate squads, three of my friends traded their copies for Black Ops. (I understand that they already bought the game, but think about the impact that made on them seeing as how they never played a BF game before.) - The new player animations supposedly put an end to the "floaty" player animations of traditional FPS games. - The single player mode definitely has plenty of cursing in the dialogue, so it's possible that the multiplayer will also have lots of swear words. (I see one of you complained about that.) - The interview with Patrick Bach was shockingly honest. DICE basically admits that they kind of half-assed Bad Company 2 and that they never expected it to be as successful as it was. (This is particularly irritating to me and my friends, who have watched as the game's bugs and glitches remain unfixed for months on end.) - IMO, DICE is both right and wrong to balance the game as they do. Bach frequently reminds readers that they make restrictions in the gameplay to "keep it fun for everyone." What they continue to misunderstand is that there are still things that need to be fixed. For example -- the helicopter is not necessarily overpowered, but the defenses against it can be depending on the map. Port Valdez's middle segment in Rush mode is a perfect example. The helicopter can easily be shot down with the AA Tank. There's just one problem: there's 15 other assholes on the team who always jump in the tank and get it destroyed before you can use it to take down the helicopter. The same can be said for the UAV -- which can ensure that the helicopter never leaves the ground if it's utilized properly, or the tracer/AT missile combo. In these cases, one weapon is individually powerful, whereas the counterbalance against it requires collective cooperation -- which is hard to come by in online multiplayer. - DICE also argues that they don't need customization such as carving your initials into your weapon because you can customize your loadout. I could care less, but I'm annoyed that they act like that feature is something special. It's not unique. Every fucking shooter does that now.... -... which leads to my last complaint that DICE sometimes seems completely oblivious to what's going on around them. They ignore massive bugs, act like they're the only online shooter in the world, and pretend like some of us don't play their games 100 times more than they do. That's what I like about Jason West and Vince Zampella. I don't even like CoD that much, but those guys tune in to what's going on around them. They would never allow for a glitch like the win/lose screen error in BC2 to continue for more than a few hours, let alone an entire year.

fundamentally speaking, not much. It's been my experience that the various Battlefield franchises are individual experiments -- take Bad Company for example, which I believe was DICE's attempt at making a faster, more console-friendly Battlefield experience.

it's not actually a game, but dude... look at this.

convinced of what exactly? What do you need to see to feel convinced that ... uh, it might be good?

I can't speak for all game consumers, but I know that myself and most game developers are satisfied with the current state of this generation's hardware. Many industry critics, developers and analysts have pointed out that this current generation is experiencing a longer, higher-quality life cycle that seems to please most parties -- especially hardware manufacturers and software developers. Despite their flaws, I'm still impressed by games like Oblivion and Mass Effect's graphics and sound. Their main weakness was gameplay and framerate. In the few years since these games released, we have seen significant improvements in those areas. I don't think screenshots of Skyrim do the game much justice because I suspect (and hope) that the animations, combat and framerate will be vastly superior to Oblivion and Fallout 3.

I fucking love the first Transformers movie, and by that, I mean this: I did like the first Michael Bay Transformers though. It was far from perfect, but the way that they eased the audience into the story and made Sam a likable teenager worked pretty well. Revenge of the Fallen was a fucking mess. It was too long, the story sucked, and overly-reliant on action and explosions. But the WORST PART was that 10-year-old-boy-writing that permeated the film: gratuitous sexuality (far more than the first film,) blatantly offensive characters, and even more in-film commercials than before. I understand that with Bay you have to expect a certain degree of this, but in RotF it was major overkill. Honestly, I don't know what to expect with the third Tranformers film. Bay simply can't resist sexy/horny characters and dick/fart jokes, so I'm not expecting much. On a side note, I remember Bay going on Conan (or maybe Leno) just before Revenge of the Fallen and bragging about how he had the largest non-CG explosion in cinema history. He said something like they used 100,000 gallons of gasoline to make the explosion. Then I loved what happened next: the audience reflexively started to applaud, but then it seemed to dawn on everyone at the same time how terrible that was and they just stopped clapping at once, like they all remembered "Uh... isn't gasoline a precious commodity that indirectly causes terrorism? And you used it for a stupid movie instead of just using CG?"

just woke up and re-watched the trailer. It is so awesome to see the Blue/Gold uniforms in action.... like for real, that's nerdish ecstasy. I feel embarrassed to say that when I watched the trailer for the first time I kept thinking, "Is that Iceman? Where's Cyclops? How about Angel?" I finally remembered this morning that the first three x-men films screwed up their ages, so we won't see them. If we're lucky, we'll see young Scott and Jean by the end of the film. If not, they'll be in the next two b/c apparently this is the first of a planned trilogy.

I agree. And even though this movie violates the shit out of the comic's canonical story, I thought the trailer looked pretty good. I can't help but think about how different it seems from the original first issues of X-Men, and how I might do the film if I was making it. In the old school X-Men comics, the X-Men were pretty goody good. They were very prudent and well-mannered. They stood up for American values-- much like the old Superman -- "truth, justice, and the American way." But if we followed the direction that modern X-Men writers have taken, the X-men of the 1960s would have been far more progressive: more openly sexual, more defiant of cultural norms, etc. Throw in the growing counter culture and the Cold War, and you get a lot of possibilities about what the original X-Men in the 1960s would be like. Either way, I'm excited. I could care less about Thor and Captain America.