This week, Black ops 2 has, wait for it, Zombies!, Shaolin
Pandas, AMD launches a mainstream powerhouse and Intel CEO bags on Windows 8!
There's a new Call of Duty Black Ops 2 trailer out
highlighting, what else, the zombie mode.
The cooperative play modes include new options such as
"Tranzit" which puts players on a bus to more easily traverse a very
open world.
The open world is a
new wrinkle not to just zombie play
modes but to COD in general since even
single player has historically been very confined. Of course the survival modes are still there
along with a an 8 player team "grief" mode where one team can
manipulate items on the map to make it more difficult for the other team. Perhaps they should have called it douchebag
mode?
The new zombie modes are now built on the multiplayer engine
instead of the single player as they've done before which supposedly adds more
functionality.
With all these stumbling hordes lurching about I have to
wonder about the rest of Black Ops 2.
Most articles and trailers focus on the zombies. I'm fairly certain "Left 4 Dead"
and "Dead Island" had fewer zombie trailers than this game.
While I appreciate the improvements to the zombie mode it
seems at this point the whole thing should just be spun off into its own
series. We've had zombies since Call of
Duty: World at War. It's been half a
dozen games since then so it should be time.
Could it be that Treyarch is afraid a standalone zombie shooter
from its development house would fail without a popular franchise backing it
up? It seems that other play modes of recent Call of Duty titles have just been rehashes
of previous games with the only real development being the zombie modes. It's resulted in stale storylines and cooperative
play modes that look like DLC for a previous incarnation of the game.
Lest we forget, we still haven't seen anything more than a
refresh of the seven year old IW Engine which can still trace its roots all the
way back to Quake.
"Whoring out the franchise"
Well it's nice to hear someone actually inside the industry
call out game publisher tactics to milk a franchise. I've said it for years but former head of
Ensemble studios, Tony Goodman, responsible for the Halo RTS, Halo Wars. heard
it firsthand.
At that time he was asked to restyle a, Ensemble Studios RTS
game in development to fit the Halo model because Microsoft was unsure of an
RTS game on consoles. Goodman went on to
say that Microsoft told him to, "just paint over what you have with
Halo stuff." Which lead to the remark from Bungie.
I'm waiting
for the Call of Duty: Cold war Fly Fishing and Battlefield: Tank Racer
myself...
If you've thought that Robot Entertainment's Orcs Must Die 2
is a bit chauvinistic, a new Booster back is available called "Family
Ties" that introduces among other things Female Orcs to the mix. Steam has a 20% off sale till September 30th bringing the
price down to just $3.99.
In a sad note for all those pre-order Borderlands 2 fans, it appears that all your efforts to
attain the rank of "badass" may be in vain due to a token reset bug
first reported via a YouTube
video. the bug causes you to lose all
your earned skill tokens whether they were spent or not. Gearbox is aware of the issue but as of this
writing there's no fix yet. There's
apparently some kind of workaround to prevent it happening again but currently
no way for Xbox 360 users to recover their lost tokens whether they're spent or
not.
Shaolin Pandas your thing? Addicted to WoW? Then you
probably already know that the latest add-on for World of Warcraft, Mists of
Pandaria is out and early visitors to the
lethal panda land are feeling some of the effects of Blizzard's media
blitz that preceded its arrival.
Apparently scores of breathless players have been flooding into the new
world causing strange effects. The net
result of this great horde made battlefield scenes look like the aftermath of a
grade school food fight. Lots of smear
everywhere...lol
If you're a fan of old games and you'd like to take a step
back down memory lane with System Shock 2 or Thief 2 on your Windows 7 PC then
today's your day. Someone found patches
and made them available to those of us who remember when multiplayer gaming
meant you were in the same room and had to be running IPX protocol.
The link is from
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it's best to
ignore the War of Roses promo on the page, you know the one about skill. Skill is not only not an unlock (double negative I know) but not present
in gaming either. But then, you already knew that.
In mainstream gaming...
Finally...
Intel CEO Paul Otellini apparently feels That Windows 8
isn't quite ready for prime time. At a
private meeting in Taiwan the Intel Ceo said that the the OS is being released
before it's fully ready.
Ok, can we stop this now?
When's the last time you installed an OS that didn't have a barrel of
patches within days of release. Even
apple can't claim that!
Beta testing's nice but until you get it into the hands of
the great unwashed masses you can't possibly deal with every glitch. Oh, by the way Mr. Otellini, you may want to
check Intel's archives. Specifically,
the bad batch of Sandy Bridge and Itanium CPU's.
Class it up guys, you're embarrassing your stock options.
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