Sunday 28 February 2010

A Good Nintendo Wii Game? Wait, what?!?

Super Mario Galaxy 2 Trailer via me on YouTube

When it comes to consoles, I’m a pretty unbiased gal, whether or not this or that console releases some really great exclusives (*ahem* Heavy Rain) I still have love for all 3 next-gen platforms. Personally, I love Wii Fit, Wii Sports and Imagine Babyz on the Wii (just kidding about that last one) but I think that recently Nintendo has definitely dropped the ball with their games : Cooper Bilbaud over at Platform Nation clearly agrees with this. For quite a long while now, I (and I’m guessing all of you) have been waiting for an awesome game that we can enjoy for the Wii and we all know that Super Mario Galaxy was a FANTASTIC game and finally we can look forward to an extremely worthy sequel. Check out the trailer above.

Related Post

Random Ramblings : Why Original IPs Are The Best

Comment Question : Do you like the look of Super Mario Galaxy 2?

Sunday 21 February 2010

First Play UK Announced

First Play UK Walkthrough video via me on YouTube

Being the only blogger at System Fail News is hard, I am the only one who runs and writes for the site and sometimes it can be really difficult to keep up. I don’t have the privilege of having lots of people on my staff the way other sites do although I do my best to bring you as much gaming goodness and as many exclusives as I can. You may have already heard about First Play, the new digital gaming news service coming to PlayStation 3s in the UK, it’s being led by the team behind the Official PlayStation Magazine UK (OPM_UK on Twitter) and so will surely be great. Wanting to go that extra mile and not just do the generic ‘copy and paste’ thing that loads of other sites do, I waited out a little while for the new edition of OPM to be released so that I could give you some extra info about the service. However, as much as I love the mag, this time it let me down, failing to mention First Play even once and therefore left out the snippets of info that I wished to tell you all here. Alas, do not be disheartened as I have posted the trailer/walkthrough video for First Play and below I will bullet point the service’s key features.

  • Is a brand new paid interactive PS3 service that will give its users heap loads of PS3 news and insider gossip before anyone else
  • Will only be available to UK PS3 owners for the meantime but apparently if it does well, the rest of Europe, followed by other parts of the world will be the next ones to get it!
  • Features HD Screenshot galleries ,HD Video Reviews and Previews , HD Trailers and all of the best user uploaded content from the PlayStation Network.
  • First Play comes out every Thursday (starting Spring-time) of every week, downloadable via the PlayStation Store
  • Prices are 99p per episode or £3.99 per month if you subscribe (approx.) – a pretty good deal if you ask me!

You can check out the First Play website @ www.firstplay.co.uk

I promise to keep you updated when I hear anything about a set start date for the First Play service


UPDATE
- it has just been announced that First Play's first episode will be available to UK users by the PlayStation store THIS THURSDAY. Mark your calendars, - April 8th. I'll be posting a hands-on of their beta issue sometime this week :D

Related Posts

System Fail News: SFN Exclusive! Alan Wake Release Date Confirmed?

Comment Questions 

Do you think First Play looks good?

For those of you who are Xbox 360/Nintendo Wii users, would you like to see a similar service come to other consoles?

Thursday 18 February 2010

Don’t Take Offense Paladins…

Single Paladin *

No proper posts for today folks, sorry. However you can take a look at this pie-chart to have a laugh!

*It’s just a joke

Also, remember to vote in the poll over there >>>>>>>>

to vote for your favourite console. The poll runs until the end of the month so get your votes in now people!

 

Keep On Gaming!

From Jasmine :D

Tuesday 16 February 2010

Team Up.Throw Down. Skate In A Quarry?

Skate 3 Dev Diary #2 via me on YouTube

There’s really not long to go before Skate 3’s released – March,April and then May , so yeah, there’s only a few months to wait until the game is in stores. So far we know this a)Skate 3 will encourage us to Team Up & Throw Down (that being the game’s tagline) and create epic teams of awesome self created in-game skaters with our friends and b)we’ve been able to customise our boards, our characters and even our surroundings in the past, and now be can even customise our pieces of clothing and create original logos for our “epic teams”. There’s hardly anything that you CAN’T make your own.

That’s what we know already and so far, so great but now we actually get to find out WHERE we can show off our team’s custom gear, grind our freshly designed boards to wood chips and rack up crazy hospital bills courtesy of one “Bailey the Bailster” in this new dev diary. Also featured in the new Skate 3 video is the behemoth of a grind palace > the quarry. Because everyone wants to bail into a pit of sharp and pointy rocks, right?

Comment Question : What locations would you add to Skate 3, if you had the chance?

Sunday 14 February 2010

Which Console Do You Like Best?

Each month I hold a video game related poll in the sidebar of System Fail News. This month I want to know which console is your favourite, what console do you love, what are you a fanboy for?

The options are between Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii - the battle of the next-gens.
There have been 10 votes already but in order to make the poll work really well and for the results to really mean something, more of you will have to vote.

So go vote for your favourite console over there>>>>>>>
I look forward to seeing the results at the end of the month.

Also - Happy Valentines Day!

Keep On Gaming!

Jasmine :D

Ethan Mars & Alan Wake – Twins?

image

Have you all heard of that site I Can Has Cheezburger? with all the pictures of the cute cats? Well they have a whole host of random sites in their “Cheezburger Network” and one of them is Totally Looks Like . TLL has loads of comparisons of people and stuff and is one of my favourite sites so I thought that I’d have a go at making a comparison myself. So what do you think, Ethan Mars and Alan Wake are secret brothers? Nah, just kidding, but it was worth a try, right?

Ethan and Alan may not be brothers but there are loads of other characters that look like each other. Leave comments with some ideas of who.

Related Posts

SFN Exclusive : Alan Wake Release Date Confirmed? – Updated!

Friday 12 February 2010

7 Questions Review : Battlefield Bad Company 2 – Multiplayer Demo

BFBC2 Logo

The year has barely begun but already there are some great games for us to buy on the market. So far we’ve seen the release of  Mass Effect 2, BioShock 2 , MAG and a whole host of other games that this girl can’t afford! And so, with all of the free demos out there that are, well, free, I saw my opportunity to get to play an extremely capable game a)for nothing and b)I get to play it with millions of other gamers around the world. For those of you who don’t have the time to download such a demo, I have taken it upon myself to ask 7 Questions about the Battlefield Bad Company 2 Multiplayer Demo to show just how great the game is.

(To see how my 7 Questions Reviews work, take a look at the review I did for the  MAG Beta > here )

1.What’s In The Demo?

When we play most demos, particularly multiplayer ones, the developer is always sure to ram the fact that the demo “is not the final product” down our throats. This warning was present in BFBC2 as well but with just over a month to go until the entire game’s release, this is pretty much the final thing aside form a few little alterations.With that in mind I’m going to tell you what was actually in the demo. In the demo of the game there’s one map, one type of gameplay match and four types of load-out. The game places you at the centre of Port Valdez, a snowy harbour compound set in the side of a mountain. The beautiful graphics literally took my breath away when I first loaded up the demo, yeah they’re THAT good! In this stunning location lies your goal : place charges at the pinpointed sites and wait for them to blow up. Easy. Not quite. The enemy are there to defend the plots (and vice versa when you’re a defender) and they make your life a living hell. You can choose 1 of 4  load-outs to “sort ‘em out” and get rid of them to allow you to do your job, they are : Assault (your average soldier) , Engineer (the guy who fixes tanks and blows stuff up) , Medic (the almighty healer) and Recon (AKA the sniper). See,  there’s something for everyone!

2.With All That Action,How Does It Play?

The game plays fantastically well to be honest. Battlefield Bad Company 2 doesn’t have the epic 256- player battles that MAG does, but it captures the essence of the classic, smaller skirmishes that we’re used to in an amazing light, giving us the tools to not just play a game but to have fun with it, allowing us to be creative. Although the demo only allows us to play on one map, each battle is never the same. Not only do you get to use the guns and artillery that other games allow (such as the stationary machine gun) you also get to drive tanks around the critically designed map, quad bikes and heavily armoured trucks can also be used to flank a position. It isn’t all good though, the variety is great but sometimes the objective can feel a bit linear and I’m growing tired of the same structure. I also saw that without the ability to make a team work together as well, the orchestrated matches of “sabotage” (as I’ve nicknamed them) did eventually fall into chaos and despair, leaving the game to descend into a run-and-gun , kill everyone match, which is the definition of Team Deathmatch and not “sabotage”.

3. We Want To Know About The GUNS!

Strictly speaking that’s not a question.. (Hehe, I’m so crafty).But it is a valid statement and I know that you’re ALL thinking it. The best class for these almighty pieces of punchy metal is the engineer class, you get to load-out with a SCAR machine gun (that one from MW2) , a rocket launcher (RPG-7 – that other one from MW2) and a pistol. I know that I shouldn’t compare BFBC2 to other games as they are completely different but games such as MAG and Call of Duty have set the bar extremely high for competitors such as Battlefield Bad Company 2 and I can’t help thinking like that. If you’ve played Battlefield Heroes on PC (the WW2 version of the game) then you’ll understand that guns have never been DICE (the developer’s) strong point. Their guns are jumpy like they’ve been ripped from an old cartoon and don’t match up to the rest of the lovely graphics in the game. Not to say that they’re not GOOD they’re just not the best.

4.What's So Great About The Graphics?

EVERYTHING! I’m seriously not joking. You all heard about Codemaster’s pathetic attempt to make a realistic shooter? Operation Flashpoint 2 : Dragon Rising? Well it was “sour milk” type of bad anyway but in comparison to this it’s as if a really big man came and did a poo on it. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is the most realistic war game out there. MW2 is an excellent game but it just isn’t very realistic. In BFBC2 your bullets can make or literally, break the scenery around you, take this example… I generally load-out as the engineer class in the game, purely for the rocket launcher, before we go on to set charges at the target and so when I get to the building/structure that the bomb site’s held in, I help my team out by OBLITERATING IT. Blasting super-fast rockets at the side of a building in most games means a few smudge marks can be seen on the side but with Battlefield Bad Company 2, buildings actually fall apart. The way they crumble like a delicious chocolate chip cookie is enough to make any gamers' mouth water in astonishment, it’s that cool. I also loved the snow. This particular map is set in the side of a mountain so of course there’s snow. Beautiful, beautiful snow that’s just a little bit too perfect.

5.Can I Hear About The Ve-Hick-Ulls?

Tanks.Quad bikes.Heavily armoured trucks with machine guns mounted to the back.Oh, and a chopper. I know that as a gamer, having played many games over the years, it is basic practice for developers to metaphorically get some sticky glue, a bunch of powerful guns, a few things that can move and then throw them into a mixing bowl and voila! portable death machines are created. Some developers don’t take the time to refine these “reapers on wheels” but instead just mash them together out of play-doh (and sticky glue). With Battlefield it really feels like the peeps at DICE HQ sat around a table, together, and talked about them. They feel polished refined and unique. For example, there are 3 types of tank. 3! I thought that only ‘slow and blasty’ tanks existed before this game! Each tank has a different type of weapon which means that they are 3 times as deadly. Tanks also allow you to have 3 other team-mates on board to rain bullets all over the enemy. Quad bikes in the game are for 2 people only and can be really useful for flanking as you can bounce around the map on one (seriously the suspension is amazing!) before ditching it to go sprint to the objective, the enemy probably will have been following the bike and not you, and so you can get away unseen! The heavily armoured trucks sort of speak for themselves hence the name “heavily armoured trucks” but if you still don’t get it they’re like smaller,weaker tanks with a little less firepower. Also featured is the chopper, DICE’s poor attempt at flight which is seriously hopeless and is too difficult to control. Plus, it really annoyed me so, it doesn’t deserve a mention.

6. What Was Good/Bad?

So far this review has been a bit long winded and so I’m really surprised that you’ve read down this far but anyway here’s the bad : the chopper (aargh!) , most of the guns, and the rubbish aiming (just like in MAG). The good : the vehicles, the visuals and the errm… ve-load-outs (as well as everything else that isn’t mentioned in the “bad”).

7. What Do I Think Overall?

It’s a lot of fun to play and I could really see myself playing this all the time. I really enjoy playing it but it needs to be refined so that a)the characters and the guns don’t flail around like a fish out of water and b)it needs to be  a bit more polished. This is truly a fantastic game but I can’t help thinking that Battlefield Bad Company 2’s multiplayer mode is trying too hard to be MAG’s little brother. Chin up little buddy, maybe next time you’ll be great like your big bro’ MAG, but for now, stay at home with Mommy, k?

You Can Also Read My “7 Questions Review” of MAG > here

Tuesday 9 February 2010

I Ask the BioShock 2 People A Question + Gameplay Footage!

2K Marin Q&A Video courtesy of me on YouTube

It’s highly likely that you may have heard of this wonderful thing called Twitter . If not you've probably been living under a rock for the past few months. I like to roll with the trends (I Can Has Cheezburger?) and so I have a Twitter page, the Official PlayStation Blog (EU Link)-(US Link) has one too. A regular occurrence on their Twitter page is asking followers to submit interview questions to ask various developers. As both a follow of the PS Blog and as a budding journalist, I seized the opportunity and asked my question (as Jasmino924).

“Was it difficult to come up with a concept for BioShock 2?”

Hear their answer a few minutes in or watch the whole thing for gameplay footage.

Follow me on Twitter @Jasmino924

Monday 8 February 2010

BioShock 2 Is Out Tomorrow! Also, Games Are Expensive

Bioshock 2 Logo

As gamers, we harbour an expensive habit that requires us to splash out on our beloved video games, spending up to $60 (or £50) a pop to fuel our “needs”. We use up most of our time debating whether or not this or that game is worth our hard-earned cash and we are always frugal about which games to buy. Personally, i hate to hear hype about a game that is biased because the magazine or website has been paid to do so, it leaves me disappointed, unhappy and broke when the game is a load of rubbish. This is why, I, as an unbiased, unpaid blogger will say this…

BioShock 2 is out tomorrow, we all played the first game, it was ace and although it may not be the best game this year it will be extremely close. If you can only afford one game in these couple of months, buy this. I promise you that you won’t regret it!

*HEADS UP* – If you check back on SFN tomorrow you can see an interview with the BioShock 2 developers, featuring game play!

Friday 5 February 2010

The Results Are In!

So, the results for that poll that I was holding over in the sidebar >>>>>
are in, and it seems that most of you would like to play either God of War 3 or Red Dead Redemption . Just 2 people voted that hey would like to play games on Xbox 360 that use "Natal" ,so clearly Microsoft need to have a little think about that... Though with just 1 of you saying that you would like to play MAG , I'm guessing that all of you are only interested n MW2's online modes, right?

I plan on putting up a new poll in a litle while so check back if you want to have your say.

Keep On Gaming!

Jasmino924 (Jasmine) :D
 
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