This week at the San Diego Comic Con, Ubisoft has unveiled a short trailer for the upcoming game based on the hit Lost TV series from JJ Abrahms. The trailer doesn’t show much, but if I know Lost junkies, they will be pulling it apart and disecting every second of it.

As always, there is an HD Version Available.

It looks a lot better than I thought it would…but it is a game based on a TV Show.

Yes we are down. Yes we planned to be down tonight. No this outage is not the result of the planned outage. Talk about ironic.

Updates as they become available.

Update 7/27/2007 @ 8:11AM EST: Our hosting provider is being a bitch as usual. We still aren’t up. It looks like we are finally going to jump ship to another provider.

So I was over at 1UP reading a new blog started by NHL2k Producer Ben Bishop. I’m a huge hockey fan, and a huge NHL2k fan. Every year the game makes strides in the right direction, but at the same time it always seems to let things slide in another. The biggest thing with the past two games have been the occurrence of bugs. Some of them show stopping and season ending. These little annoyance have managed to keep the game from achieving true greatness.

So after reading the blog post by Mr. Bishop, it’s pretty easy to get excited. There are some great new features he talks about, including updated graphics, a new control scheme, new menus, and new goalies. This sounds all well and good, and a lot of it is stuff that’s promised every year, but there are just so many common cliche’s thrown around the article it’s hard to take it seriously.

Here are a few examples:

the differences are night and day between NHL 2K7 and NHL 2K8

push the game to a whole new level.

On the changing control scheme:

It definitely takes a little bit of getting used to at first, but once you do there is so much more you can do in the game.

On the new goalies:

I see something new and different from them every day.

I’m not bashing Ben here, he’s doing his job, but it just seems like we hear the same stuff year after year for games, and then we set ourselves up for dissapointment. Perhaps it would be better if developers simply didn’t talk in terms like these, but rather absolutes.

Step away from World of Warcraft. Put down Halo 2. This week these are the games you should be playing.

Project Sylpheed (Xbox 360) - So who knew Square-Enix could create a space shooter? I certainly didn’t. I’m only 5 or 6 missions in, but the game is incredibly beautiful and exciting. The game features the ability to purchase/research new weapons and customize your ship that help provide a deeper experience. Even though the story is somewhat cliche’d, the whole game just has this throwback feel to the days of Wing Commander. And at a budget price of $39.99 there’s no reason you shouldn’t be picking this up.

Wing Commander: Armada (Xbox Live Arcade) - Speaking of Wing Commander, EA is set to release an XBLA title this week titled Wing Commander: Armada. From what I’ve heard the game isn’t exactly tried and true to the Wing Commander series, but rather the game is more action oriented offering multiple views including a pseudo top down type perspective. I know, I know. Why should you play this game regardless? I’ve talked to a few people who have played it already, and so far the response has been pretty positive. I stand corrected, this game is pretty much crap. Avoid it.

Heavenly Sword Demo (Playstation 3 Network) - Word just came in that the Heavenly Sword Demo will be hitting the PSN this week. It’s the same demo that was fully playable at E3, a game I awarded #2 of the show. I absolutely can’t wait to get my hands on this again, the game is just beautiful to watch and play.

27,200 Microsoft Points. That’s how many I’ve purchased since 11/29/2006.

So doing some math at 80 points per dollar that comes out to be… $340.

I do have 43 purchased Live Arcade games. So that’s not bad. $340 isn’t even 6 “regular” games. Plus I’ve purchased a few songs and albums through the Zune Store on PC which shares the MS Point system with Xbox Live. I think I’ve maybe purchased 2 themes and 2 picture packs total.

But wow. 27,200 MS Points. That was more than I expected.

Well this will end my E3 coverage here on the Blog. I had a really great time, met some really awesome people and played a ton of incredible games.

To help ease the pain of wading through all the coverage I’ve compiled a huge list of all the games I played as well as a sentence or two of impressions with a final recommendation for the game.

The full list is available after the break.

Also, I wanted to point out this link to all the audio recordings I did during E3. There are lots of goodies there including an interview with Peter Moore and a demo of Mass Effect.

You can also hear my radio interviews Post-E3 with In-Game Chat as well as Evil Avatar Radio Episode 65 (once it’s posted).
Next up on the ol’ ba-schedule is PAX in Seattle at the end of August. I’m not sure how much I’m going to “work the show” but I’ll still be posting stuff about it. I mean, how much can a game change in 6 weeks?

Read the rest of this entry »

So during E3 I managed to find an extra 20 minutes to sneak into the Loews hotel arcade that Microsoft had set up. After chatting it up a bit with Chris, John and Tony from the The Gamerscore Blog I decided to try my hand at the only song that matters to me on Guitar Hero 3, Muse’s Knights of Cyndonia. I not so confidently chose the hard difficulty setting, I mean…I didn’t want to look like a whimp, right?

Well…then things got worse. A lot worse. A nice TV Crew decided to start filming my face melting rock and roll. That put me a bit under pressure.

You can see the video here of me melting faces. I’m about 15-20 seconds in.

And….it’s over! The last day at the show wasn’t so bad actually, and I managed to squeeze in some time with a few titles I missed out on.

Lets see I saw:
Project Gotham Racing 4
Halo Wars
Mass Effect
Fable 2
Lost Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed
Lair

Then I hopped on over to Barker Hangar and got a bunch of playtime with various titles. Guitar Hero 3, Blacksite: Area 51, NiGHTS, Virtua Fighter 5, Burnout: Paradise, Madden 08, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, WiiFit, Mario Galaxy, Crysis, World in Conflict and a few other misc titles.

Overall it was a great day. I got to meet Hironobu Sakaguchi at the Lost Odyssey Event. He really had this very confident aura about him, yet he spoke very humbly. I also got to talk to Peter Molyneaux a bit more. I rode an elevator at Loews with Reggie. So all in all it was a pretty cool day.

I’m glad the show is over though, as I’m just completely wiped. I’m running on about 3 hours of sleep right now and I think I’m just about to crash. I’ll probably just go watch a movie or something, but I’d like to get some more content up if possible.

Day 3 pics can be seen here.

Well day 2 has ended. It’s day 3 and I’m sitting in the entrance way to Microsoft’s fortress…err hotel. Day 2 was interesting as it was a lot of intimate meetings. Lets see…here is what I got to see:

Call of Duty 4 (360)
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (360 and PC)
Guitar Hero 3 (360, PS3)
Fallout 3 (360, PS3, PC)
Postal 3 (360, PC)
Stranglehold (360, PC, PS3)
Heavenly Sword (PS3)
Little Big Planet (PS3)
Eye of Judgement (PS3)
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (PS3)
Halo 3 (360)
A few Gamecock titles

It was a busy day as I was up at 4:30 AM to take the wife to the airport. I never went back to bed either so by the end of the day (11:30PM) I was out. What really sucked was at one point I had about a 90 minute break so I figured I’d head back to the hotel and just chill for a bit. No such luck though as my shuttle ended up taking over an hour and fifteen minutes to arrive (instead of 30).

Then last night I attended the MS Community Event. Before the event I was given the opportunity to interview 8 Microsoft execs for 4 minutes each. It was a nerveracking kind of thing, but it was fun and the responses I got (and gave) I think were unexpected. Overall it felt very natural and not very canned.

After the interviews it was party time where I met up with CheapyD from Cheap Ass Gamer as well as a few other people like the Angry Video Game Nerd and Screw Attack folks.

Pics can be seen here, though there isn’t many as the batteries died early on for me.

Day 1 is done. Actually right now it’s the morning of Day 2, and I’m trying to catch up on my posts and news and such. I gotta say, it’s even harder than I imagined to do this show as a 1 man gig. There is very little time, and more so, very little space to step aside and get some work done.

I had a great day yesterday hitting up both Nintendo and Sony’s press briefings. Sony’s by far outshone Nintendo’s. Not only was the presentation better, but they had stuff going on before (food), and stuff going on after (games and food). It was the first time I ever got to visit a movie studio as well, so that was hella cool.

After all the crap from that, it was time to get back to the hotels, but being 25 minutes away via a shuttle it was impossible to make my 1PM meeting with id. DAMN IT. I almost missed my 1:30 as well, but Mr. Joseph Olin of the AIAS was kind enough to still sit down with me. I had a great chat with him, and as soon as I get Odeo working I’ll link it up for you guys to listen to.

A few more press conferences followed, mostly boring. Though Activision tried to spruce things up by having Jamie Kennedy host it. While he wasn’t necessarily funny, it was a welcome break from big wig excecs spewing numbers. Plus they had a ton of special guests there like Slash from Guns N Roses, Tony Hawk, and Stan Lee.

Finally the night ended with two parties. First up was the Games for Windows party where I got to see some graphical hotness in the form of Crysis. Me want…bad. Gears was looking fantastic on PC as well, and a few other titles like World in Conflict were also standouts. I’m sure glad I have an 8800GTX. Most of the time there was spent talking to fellow Pennsylvannian Chris Grant from Joystiq. Chris rocks, and if you don’t read Joystiq you should.

Finally we hit up the Age of Conan party. I believe it was at a strip club. At least…there were strippers there. No boobies though. Pretty damn close. Oh…and there was a snake. A big white snake.