How many of you spend an inordinate amount of time playing online shooters? A lot of hands in the air, great. How many of you do not wear a headset because you don’t want a teenager yelling racist/homophobic slurs at you because you didn’t listen to their directions on how to flank the enemy? Yeah, still a lot of hands. I rarely ever wear a headset for those reasons and only do so when I can play with friends in a private chat. This was the case in Gears, CoD, Halo 3, you name it. Now, that dream is no more. MS is killing Private Chats in Modern Warfare 2 because players could give away enemy locations when dead and gain a competitive advantage. Really?
No, my name isn’t Rick Ladouche and I’m not coming to you live from inside Uncharted 2, but I do bring important breaking news to my fellow gamers. Recently announced over on the Playstation Blog, PS3 owners can now get their hands on the Uncharted 2 multi-player demo. If you were like me and wasn’t able to snag a multi-player beta key from the interweb, you can now get your hands on with the game. The multi-player demo is open for all PS3 gamers now, so get on over to the Playstation Store and start downloading!
The demo clocks in at around 1.2GB, but for that size it’s packed full with multi-player content, as well as a few hidden surprises. The package ends up containing 4 maps, four competitive modes, and two co-op modes. Not bad at all! Uncharted 2: Among Thieves looks absolutely gorgeous, so one would assume that all of those maps, the high pixel counted textures and gameplay features would take up most of that space, but that isn’t the end of this post. Oh no! There is more, so read on…
Naughty Dog is also including two new innovative modes to Uncharted 2 called Cinema Mode, as well as the innovative Machinima Mode in the demo. They apparently couldn’t wait to get it into the hands of gamers, so they decided to give everyone a little taste. Cinema Mode records literally everything that goes on in a multi-player round and exports it to a multimedia video file on your PS3. Everything is tracked and recorded to this file so it can be watched over and studied over from every different angle or viewpoint. Want to check out how WombRaider69 got you from behind with that knife behind the dilapidated car? Find out how he did it in Cinema Mode by following every one of his movements in slow-motion, and watch the knife go into your body from any possible camera angle.
Uncharted 2’s Machinima Mode looks to be the first set of tools put into a box released console game dedicated to the support of user created content and videos. This means you can record any and all of Drake’s movements in the game only to use that content for a custom video or webisode. Attach your blu-tooth headset or PS3 Eye camera mic, and watch Drake’s mouth move to what you are actually saying. Pretty crazy stuff! I’m excited! Are you? I can’t wait to hear Drake tell all of my crappy dick jokes.
I was concerned about BioShock 2’s multiplayer taking away from the core single player experience. Luckily, 2K knew what I was thinking. For your online needs, you’ll be going back in time to the fall of Rapture and playing as a Plasmid test subject for Sinclair Solutions. You’ll get experience points to unlock new weapons, Plasmids, and Tonics as you power yourself up.
The multiplayer is being coded by Digital Extremes, the same people that brought you Dark Sector and who worked on the PS3 version of the first BioShock.
No word yet on how many players and what modes of play will be available, but I have a feeling it’ll be a winner throwing plasmids at people online. More info possibly coming at E3…
Pre-order case shots were leaked, people broke embargoes, and all kinds of info came out early. Sony finally dropped the hammer and officially confirmed all the details of the multiplayer modes in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. You’ll be able to rock out with 10 player (5-v-5) competitive or up to 3 player cooperative play.
The competitive modes will include your standard Deathmatch as well as a Plunder mode where you race to collect the most money. Teamwork will be essential in navigating the levels, which will be largely vertical, so communication will be key. I have a feeling that won’t happen too well, as most people online with the PS3 don’t have a headset.
Sony also confirmed the beta, which runs from June 3 through June 28. Picking up inFamous will score you a beta code, so I have a strong feeling that game is going to sell pretty well. It’s a good way to garner interest for the game which may have been overlooked by the masses otherwise.
I’m still strongly on the fence about multiplayer in Uncharted 2. While Plunder sounds very intriguing, I have to wonder if the game really needs to add competitive play?
Matt is uber gay for Patapon as are many of us. A totally different game for a growing genre. Now you can pata pata pon with all your buddies. You can licka licka licka my sacka sacka sacka ad hoc or over PSN. Check it out.
Gears 2 is an awesome game, no one can deny this. But, you also cannot deny that it has its flaws, which are glaring in the matchmaking. As of early this morning, Epic released a patch that promises to fix the issues that were driving gamers nuts. Here is what they fixed:
Adjustments to make Public matchmaking faster, especially in the single player party and the four player party case. Some of these adjustments should be felt immediately and some will play out over several days as our update enables us to reduce player segmentation by reducing the number of servers required to do matchmaking. This will increase the number of possible matches available for you to join.
A tweak that should prevent us from losing some of our additional detailed stats data that we gather for gearsofwar.com. Due to the large number of concurrent matches, our stats gathering servers were not able to collect data for every single match played. The Xbox LIVE leaderboards are 100% accurate but our existing stats web pages may have some missing data prior to the update.
A fix to address the issue where some players were unable to start the story-based campaign if Xbox LIVE was down or unavailable.
I have not had a chance to play the game since the update due to traveling, but if any of you have, let us know if the updates did anything.
There is an achievement for doing all 11 special executions in Gears 2. Each requires only a certain weapon and button press while you are with a downed opponent. To make things easier, a gamer made a montage of all the kills. You know how we feel about montages here. I like the torque bow decap the best of all.
[Editor's Note: Here's another new weekly segment at Loot Ninja. What the Eff will show up every Thursday, so make sure to keep coming back for more.]
As anyone who plays Halo 3 already knows, or those who enjoy staying up to date with video game news, there have recently been some updates to Halo 3 online. First of all we’ve been introduced to a new ranking system, which, honestly, I don’t understand nor do I see a great reason for it. From the way it’s been explained to me, and maybe I’m wrong, by simply gaining experience you will continue to rank up from Recruit to General. If this fact is the case I hate it. I feel that if you are skilled enough to attain a level 50, then you are worthy of becoming a General, if not too bad. It’s just like getting the Hayabasu helmet, if you’re skilled enough to beat the game on Legendary, then people can see that, but don’t allow everyone to become a General for playing a massive amount of multiplayer. After a while there is going to be an overabundance of General’s, and that annoys me. I like being able to look at not only a player’s skill level, but their overall rank, to determine whether or not I’m going to get pwnd.
Remember that debacle we talked about this morning with Konami putting restrictions on reviews of Metal Gear Solid 4? Adam Sessler of G4’s X-play got to speak with Stephen Totilo about how the all is going down. Check out from the mouth who broke the story.
If you are a frequent visitor of Rockstar’s Social Club, then you will remember that everytime you tried to click through to the multiplayer section, you were told to come back later. Well, later has arrived. Multiplayer stats are now trackable at the site and you can view all your multi glory anytime you want.
Note: You have to link your PSN or XBL account to your Rockstar account. After you login/register, go to edit profile and follow the steps to link to your appropriate account. Otherwise, you can’t do anything inside the club.
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