Zero Punctuation: Infamous Edition

Yahtzee brings up a few good issues about games not having a "gray area" in terms of karma and multiple endings.

My Top 5 Games of E3

The time has come to see the future of gaming. Yes the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is here. All the major developers and publishers are there, demoing and showing trailers of new games. My geek senses are tingling. Here's my top games of the expo.

1) MAG - This is a PS3 exclusive shooter that allows 256 players in one level. This game is developed by Zipper Interactive, the makers of the original SOCOM series (not the crappy SOCOM: Confrontation) so it should be pretty good. The game was announced at last years E3, but this time full gameplay demos were shown. It seems that their is very little slowdown even with all 256 players in the level. There are also not going to be any tedious waiting rooms to get into a match. No, you dont have to wait for all 256 players to hit the ready button for the match to start. The developers have also said that players leaving the matches will not effect the gameplay in terms of lag, etc.

This game has a full fledged squad based leveling up system. That means that experienced players will play as squad leaders and issue commands. These squad leaders will have even higher superiors who lead the offensive as a whole. Leveling up is a real good way to add replay value to a first person shooter, as Call of Duty has shown.

2) Star Wars : The Old Republic - After seeing the trailer for this game, all I can say is WOW!! It honestly looks like this is going to be another movie. This MMO will have full voice acting for all character interactions. The developers have stressed that this is a story based and while im not a big fan of MMO's in general, my inner Star Wars fanboy will take full control of me when this game comes out.

3) God of War III - This game looks brutal. Watching Kratos rip apart creatures with blood flying everywhere is just awesome. Entire levels will take place on the backs of Greek gods. Hopefully this game will come out around the rumored console redesign and price drop, then Sony can catch up to Xbox.

4) APB - This game is basically an MMO sandbox similar to Grand Theft Auto. Its being developed by Realtime Worlds, the makers of Crackdown and the Original Grand Theft Auto Series. It seems this game is only for PC at the moment, but hopefully there will be console ports as well. There is no doubt that City/Crime sandbox games will one day be fully online. Its just a matter of time before a game surpasses GTA. Will this be it?

5) Splinter Cell : Conviction - I was surprised to see that this game is Xbox 360 exclusive. I was even more surprised to see how different this series has gone since the first time we played as Sam Fisher. This game seems to be more Bourne-esqe, in the sense that you are a rouge agent. The gameplay seems to be a lot more fast paced and the environments a little more free form and less linear. Oh and the graphics have never been better.

With that being said, there were a few games that I wish we could have seen more from. Games like:

The Agency - This Sony espionage MMO/Shooter could be really interesting especially considering that MMO's really havent been done well on a console yet.

Red Dead Redemption - This recently announced Rockstar sequel hasn't really been shown full force yet. Maybe they are saving it for next year, but I'm looking forward to a western sandbox for the next generation.

L.A. Noire - This is another Rockstar game rumored to have a larger budget than any other video game in history. All I've heard so far is that its PS3 exclusive and set in L.A. during the 40's or 50's.

Rage - This id game will be based on the Doom 4 engine and is supposed to take a new direction from the previous Quake and Doom games. Will this become the next Duke Nukem: Forever?

Dead Rising 2 - Im a little surprised this game was not shown off in a full gameplay demo. Capcom seems to be taking their time on this one, I've heard that you will be able to battle more on screen zombies than ever and have new weapons to creatively De-Brain them.

Modern Warfare 2 Screenshots

Check out these screenshots of the new Call of Duty from this months Game Informer. A few things we do know is that the Russians are back, there are snow mobiles, some sort of campaign co-op, and it looks like there will be some SWAT bulletproof shields. It also looks like there will be a level in Rio de Janeiro. I can't wait.

Star Wars Are Officially the Greatest Movies Of All Time (according to me)

Well the numbers are in. Ive crunched the statistics from all the major box office blockbusters and reviews from IMDB in the supercomputer that is called my brain. Here's preliminary data.

*Note: Trilogies are sometimes counted as one story unless otherwise specified by an exceptional sequel (Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers) or an exceptional entry movie (the Matrix).
*Note #2: sometimes movies are offset by good reviews or box office by a certain bad-ass-factor(BAF) this ratio is equated by subtracting the suckiness (x) multiplied by the amount of girls or people who think the movie is cute (Y)
The formula is as follows (X*Y=Z) if z is less than or equal to the ammount of bullets fired, alien lifeforms, explosions, seconds of car chasing or people killed in the movie, it is officially bad ass.

For movies in 1980-1993:

Close Encounters
of the Third Kind,
The Shining,
Mad Max,
Blade Runner,
Star Trek II:
Wrath of Kahn,
Jaws,
Star Wars
Classic Trilogy,
Dune,
Escape from NY,
Top Gun,
The Abyss,
Aliens,
Indiana Jones,
Back to the Future,
Terminator 2,
Predator

Old-Ass-Movie Conference Final:

After grouping these movies into brackets and selecting the best, i ended up with 3 selections.

-Indiana Jones
-Star Wars: Original Trilogy
-Aliens

After processing the data, I came to the conclusion that the original Star wars Trilogy were the best of this era. The first two in the trilogy also hold very high ratings on IMDB and Star Wars: A New Hope is among the highest grossing movies of all time, especially when adjusted for inflation.

New Era:
1993-Jurassic Park,
Last Action Hero,
Demolition Man

1994-Forrest Gump,
True Lies,
Pulp Fiction,
Stargate

1995-Batman Forever,
Goldeneye,
Die Hard 3,
Species

1996-Independence Day,
Mission Impossible,
Mars Attacks!

1997-Titanic,
Men in Black,
Jurassic Park: The lost World,
Starship Troopers,
the Fifth Element

1998-Saving Private Ryan
Armageddon

1999-The Matrix
Star Wars Episode I

2000-Gladiator
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;
the Patriot,
X-Men

2001- LOTR: The fellowship of the Ring,
Black Hawk Down,
Harry Potter: The sorcerers stone

2002-Signs,
Star Wars: Episode 2,
LOTR: The two towers,
Minority Report

2003-LOTR: Return of the King,
Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl,
Terminator 3,
Kill Bill vol 1

2004-Passion of the Christ,
National Treasure,
I, Robot;
Troy

2005-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,
War of the Worlds,
King Kong,
Sin City,
Munich

2006-Casino Royale,
V for Vendetta,
Mission Impossible III,
Apocalypto

2007-Transformers,
I am Legend,
300

2008- The Dark Knight,
Iron Man,
Body of Lies

Here's How these movies stack up after the Preliminary round of the New Era Conference Finals:

1993: Jurassic Park
1994: Forrest Gump
1995: Goldeneye
1996: Independence Day
1997: Fifth Element
1998: Saving Private Ryan
1999: The Matrix
2000: Gladiator
2001: Black Hawk Down
2002: LOTR: Return of the King
2003: Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the black pearl
2004: Passion of the Christ
2005: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
2006: V for Vendetta
2007: 300
2008: The Dark Knight
2009 (so far): Star Trek

Now you have the modern era. The best movies by year. Now we move forward to the next round. After putting these movies in brackets, these movies advanced to the next round.

- Jurassic Park
- The Matrix
- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
- The Dark Knight

Further reducing these, two titans emerge.

The Matrix vs. The Dark Knight

The Modern Era winner is.......
THE MATRIX.

Now we have our final matchup for the greatest, biggest blockbuster, most bad ass movie of all time.......

The Matrix vs Star Wars: The Classic Trilogy


And the winner is..............




Yes its the star wars Trilogy. You can debate amongst yourselves which one is the best among the original trilogy (Return of the Jedi IMO). But we can all agree that the prequels were not as good. Can the next Star Trek movie top this? We'll See.

iPhone App Review, vol. 1

Well I had to do it. The Bold was just not working out for me and I decided to get the iphone. I would say the major factor was the bigger screen. This is crucial if you're watching video or doing any web browsing. The app store is awesome too. There's "an app for just about everything", as the apple commercial says. Thats not to say they're all good, mind you, but if you look at the reviews and it seems like something you would enjoy then go for it. Why not? Most of them are free anyways.



1) Apple Remote

This one is sweet because it allows you to control your itunes library on your phone. Big deal, you say? Well say you're having people over and you make a custom mix, you can pick and choose tracks on your computer to entertain people. Say that you don't want to sit at your desk or walk across the room to switch tracks. Hook up a decent sound system to your computer, and you don't even have a need for a boom box. The coolest thing about this app is that it downloads all the songs in your library allowing you to pick and choose, not just pause, play, or skip tracks. How many boom boxes do that?

2) Stanza and/or Kindle for iphone

Stanza was recently acquired by amazon, so i am lumping these two together. Plus they do practically the same thing anyways. Both these apps allow you to read books on the iphone. The kindle downloads via Amazon through your wifi network. There is a really good selection of books and they are all cheaper than their paper counterparts. A bonus is that you don't have to pay 400 dollars for a regular kindle to get this great service. The stanza is great too, because it allows you to get many, albeit older, books from sources like project gutenberg. This app even allows you to cut down on battery life by switching the text to white and the background on white. Using this contrast ratio makes reading on the iphone much more pleasing to your eyes. Another cool thing is that you can download Stanza for your desktop and convert pdf files into readable format and load them on your phone. This is great for downloading ebook torrents.

3) Wired Reviews

Wired is a great magazine about technology and geek culture, so its only natural that they have a great iphone app. The reviews haven't really been updated much but im sure there will be more to come. Reviews on such items as the latest phones, cameras, computers, TVs, laptops, games, and even household appliances. The app also gives you daily access to their blog, which is worth the app alone, and video blogs. The video blogs integrate well with the youTube app, kinda satisfying my need for missing flash videos on the browser. Hopefully more websites and apps just add youTube in the future until we get flash.

4) Feeds

Feeds is an RSS reader that allows you easy access to websites by providing just the headlines and then either brief descriptions or sometimes full articles. This cuts down on loading time if you have a lot of bookmarks that you want to keep up on such as news, tech, video games, etc. Best of all there is an internal browser that allows you to quickly bring up the source article, if the shorter version is not enough. The fact that it is an internal browser is key, otherwise you would be switching back and forth between the safari and the app and that would suck. There are a few gripes about this app though. If you have a lot of feeds, it can be slow to load them when you bring up the app. Gladly you can change the setting to load individual feeds as you choose them instead of loading all them at once when you open the app. The other is a minor gripe less about the app itself. Sometimes finding RSS feeds and/or typing them in can be a pain. Most major sites have them, but they may not be easily accesible. When you do find them, they are long and take a while to type in. This isn't too bad since you only have to do it once, and that's only if typing the initial web address in the app doesn't find the actual feed.

5) Flixster Movies

This is pretty much the standard movie finding app. You can scope local theaters for listings, see reviews, box office statistics and more. This app even has facebook connectivity, facebook is also a great app for the iphone.