My Take Radio

As Ant men­tioned, the devel­op­ers of Crack­down 2, Ruf­fian Games had their web­site go down since the DLC inci­dent started. I woke this morn­ing to find it up and run­ning and was some­what hor­ri­fied to see that the home­page is so poorly updated that it is announc­ing that Crack­down 2 is under devel­op­ment and was shown at 2009’s e3 con­ven­tion. I decided to not freak out until I had gone through the whole site. I found their forums (only updated sec­tion of the site) and I found the fol­low­ing fix (which I per­son­ally con­firm that it is a work­ing solution):

(con­tinue reading…)

Today, my nephew down­loaded the Toy Box Mode Free Pre­view while I was at work. He said it was awe­some and he was play­ing it for a few hours today. I got home from work and bought the full ver­sion of the DLC. After the down­load fin­ished, I launched the game and tried to start a Keys to the City match. Lo and behold, dur­ing the load­ing screen, the entire con­sole freezes. Even load­ing a nor­mal, Main Game, it freezes dur­ing load­ing. I can’t even get into the game in any way. My good buddy Slick paid and down­loaded it and is hav­ing the same issue.

The only way to fix it and make the game playable again is to go into your Mem­ory Set­tings and delete the Toy Box mode under Game Files. Now the Main Game loads up fine, but I don’t have the DLC. What I’m hop­ing for is an update patch to make the game playable again. What I’m afraid of is that it’s some­how an issue with older Xbox 360’s and that it was for some rea­son designed only for the new Xbox 360 Slims. That doesn’t make too much sense to me, but it’s a pos­si­bil­ity. Another con­cern that has been brought to my atten­tion by Slick is that the Ruf­fian Games web site is down, coincidentally.

Just be warned, do NOT pay for and down­load the DLC pack. Play the free pre­view ver­sion until a patch is released. When one is released, I will update with a noti­fi­ca­tion. Here’s hop­ing for an announce­ment of an upcom­ing patch.

I really feel that MS dropped the ball on this one, mak­ing it work only with Win­dows Mobile phones. Just like with Apple, they severely limit their audi­ence but Apple started their game plat­form on the iPod which has a much larger install base than Win­dows Live Mobile users. Any­one with a iPod Touch/iPad/iPhone can access the games on iTunes. If this had been acces­si­ble to any­one with a portable device taht could access the inter­net then it eas­ily could have killed the “iMarket.”

Oh well, nice try…iGuess.

It seems that by the release of Poké­mon Black & White fans of the series will have no one but them­selves to blame for not “catch­ing ‘em all.” Nin­tendo is once again giv­ing train­ers access to oth­er­wise inac­ces­si­ble poké­mon, this time in the form of the sib­ling leg­ends, Latios and Latias. To catch them, you will need an Enigma Stone which will be dis­trib­uted by Nin­tendo via Wi-Fi begin­ning July 31 through August 27. For details and direc­tions, go to: http://www.pokemongoldsilver.com/us/#/news/enigma-stone

Happy hunt­ing!

ARTWORK: Latios and Latias – Shim­mer by ~Swift Chaos

Accord­ing to Wikipedia G4 is the following: 

G4, also known as G4 TV, is an Amer­i­can cable and satellite-television chan­nel orig­i­nally geared pri­mar­ily toward view­ers aged 12–34, based on the world of video games. More recently, the chan­nel has diverted its focus to general-interest pro­gram­ming that mainly tar­gets view­ers aged 18–34, although one video game show is still offered on the channel. 

Based on the def­i­n­i­tion above, you would think that the main­stream pro­gram­ming they offer would at least have a sem­blance of video game rel­e­vance. Sadly, in order to cap­ture the 12–34 view­ing clus­ter they have resorted to hav­ing the “hot chick” and the “good look­ing guy” give snarky com­men­tary and per­form skits to relate to the gam­ing audi­ence. I have no issue with this strat­egy - EXCEPT that they have no real video game knowl­edge and are just really good at read­ing a teleprompter, or shall I say try­ing to read it (Olivia Munn, I am look­ing at you). I would rather have peo­ple that can be both eye candy and are intel­li­gent. Get us a knowl­edge­able staff that actu­ally adds dimen­sion to the show. 

(con­tinue reading…)

For years we always won­dered about what would hap­pen if MK v SF hap­pened or Tekken v Street Fighter ever existed. Well one of these was announced at SDCC this week­end. For the 1st time ever Tekken fight­ers will meet against the world war­riors of Street Fighter. In a move ben­e­fit­ing fans of both fran­chises Cap­com will  over­see Street Fighter X Tekken and Namco will over­see it’s inter­pre­ta­tion Tekken X Street Fighter. Damn is it a great time to be a fight­ing game fan. With the announce­ment of SF3: Third Strike Online fresh in gamer minds it was a true icing on the cake to have this revealed. Enjoy the teaser !

Here are some screen shots as well cour­tesy of Cap­com Unity.

(con­tinue reading…)

So, today is my birth­day and I decided I was going to take a look at the upcom­ing games for the fall and see if I would pre­order any­thing. I notice some­thing weird-A(very) slightly new design on 360 game boxes. Take a look here at a few very pop­u­lar titles com­ing up:

View Full Album

All of these are stan­dard 360 box art fare. Now two of these titles are 360 exclu­sives and one is not, so I fig­ured that the new design I saw has noth­ing to do with exclu­sive titles. Now let’s take a look at the new design:

View Full Album

Now none of these titles are 360 exclu­sives but there are some high pro­file titles in there. The last Call of Duty on the 360 is prob­a­bly the high­est gross­ing game title on a home con­sole in 2010 thus far. Doing a quick search, I find that a) this “wave” was the sym­bol on the invites to the 360 Kinect event at e3 and b) prior to being called “Kinect,” one of the names Project NATAL was toss­ing around was “Wave.” Does the sym­bol indi­cate Kinect sup­port for these games or maybe it is just a box art redesign over­all with all future games to bear it? The rea­son why it stuck out in my head is that the Wave com­pletely removes “XBox Live” brand­ing from the front of a 360 title and that is huge. Brand­ing is huge to all com­pa­nies and Microsoft is no dif­fer­ent. Granted, any Call of Duty game is going to sup­port XBL but I am curi­ous to find out why they removed the brand. More on this story as I find it.

It was fit­ting that the San Diego Comic-Con would mark the the unveil­ing of new char­ac­ters.  There will be a Cap­com panel at SDCC that will shed some light on the story,characters and sur­prises we can expect in the com­ing months. Until then enjoy the pics and game footage.

Update: Let’s wel­come Thor and Amat­erasu to the party too!!

Game play

Image Credit:Kotaku

Let’s wel­come Trish,Chun-Li,Dr. Doom and the always awe­some Super Skrull.

Wouldn’t be com­plete with­out some game play footage.

Video Credit:Joys­tiq

I had been on the fence about a new M.T.O sim­ply because I have been hav­ing writ­ers block. With two back to back 3 hour shows I felt I cov­ered all the aspects of gam­ing this week and in weeks prior.That all changed  ear­lier today when I received a copy of the @Gamer mag­a­zine put out by Best Buy. After thumb­ing through it while on the toi­let I won­dered what pur­pose if any did this rag serve.

As a young gamer grow­ing up my sta­ple were EGM,Nintendo Power and the always “pop­u­lar” Game­Pro. As con­sole gam­ing grew we were treated to such “gems” as OXM,OPM and the Gamestop toi­let sta­ple Game Informer. When I was younger I would read a major­ity of these mag­a­zines from cover to cover to learn about the newest upcom­ing game or to find some codes and occa­sional scant­ily clad girl didn’t hurt either.With the rise of inter­net usage and the huge providers of con­tent nowa­days on the web it was only a mat­ter of time before some of these mags took a dirt nap.

The Orig­i­nals

The Next Gen

EGM bit the big one a few years back and my sub­scrip­tion was replaced by Maxim which was a clear indi­ca­tion that my gen­er­a­tion needed to grow up and start look­ing at boobs. Again that’s not a bad thing!! In read­ing the @Gamer mag­a­zine I real­ized why print media has hit a stand still. The stag­nant jour­nal­ism is par­tially to blame as are the lit­er­ary blowjobs given to cer­tain titles,publishers and of course retail­ers. After thumb­ing through @Gamer I real­ized that all the shit I was read­ing has been cov­ered by me or read  by me weeks ago.

Mag­a­zines for the grown up gamer aka “manda­tory gam­ing section”

I think print media while great has really become out­dated. Gam­ing mag­a­zines in par­tic­u­lar are using recy­cled and uno­rig­i­nal con­tent with the expec­ta­tion that peo­ple will pay $4.99-$6.99 for the shit they have read online or can obtain for free. What’s the value of a gamer score in a rag like Game Informer when we have sites like Metacritic,Gamespot,and IGN putting scores and opin­ions out for free. What incen­tive is there to buy this shit anymore?

This is not my rant against print media.Print media  needs to exist for those with­out com­put­ers and for those that need good read­ing mate­r­ial for a bus,train or toi­let trip. I just wish gam­ing mag­a­zines gave us some­thing dif­fer­ent to make a sub­scrip­tion worthwhile.

That’s my take! What’s yours?

The suc­cess of the Microsoft Kinect and the Sony Move rests squarely on soft­ware. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about which one is bet­ter based on hard­ware specs but it is all going to come down to soft­ware. The best exam­ple of this is Gui­tar Hero (or Rock Band). I know Rich touched on this in his last show but I wanted to break it down a bit more.

With Gui­tar Hero, the pub­lic had to buy addi­tional hard­ware to play var­i­ous ver­sions of the game. The game itself was very well done, addic­tive and became a huge hit. Peo­ple were will­ing to pay for the addi­tional hard­ware because the game was so great, and they enjoyed the nov­elty of using phys­i­cal instru­ments as the game controller.

When you boil it all down, the Kinect and Move are exactly the same as Gui­tar Hero, but with­out the allur­ing tie in of the music game. Right now peo­ple are say­ing the Kinect is rev­o­lu­tion­ary and the Move is the Wii on steroids but if nei­ther has the soft­ware to cap­ti­vate gamers in the same way as Gui­tar Hero did, or the Wii, then both will only gar­ner mar­ginal success.

Which device will get the killer title first? What do you think?