Blades of 360

Okay, those who have hung around me or have gamed with me know that one of the criteria for a great time is blowing stuff up.  July 4th is one of my favorite holidays, since that means going to a friends for a picnic and it happens to be this friend lives on an Indian reservation.  The result is that fireworks that can’t be blown up off the reservation can in fact be done on the reservation.  Bottle rockets, exploding shells, screamers, smokers, the whole kit and caboodle.   We even get out the potato gun and fire stuff at floating targets.  Of course, what do I do with this desire when it’s not Independence Day or I’m at my house….not on a reservation?

  Thanks to Battlefield: Bad Company I have another  virtual way to satisfy the urge to blow stuff up and without fearing the loss of life or limbs.  If you’ve followed my writing, blogging or gaming over the life of the Xbox console, back to the original Xbox, then you know that two of my all-time favorite games are Mercenaries and Crackdown.  The reason for this is that you could blow stuff up whenever you want.  Usually this meant packing C4 charges on a vehicle and driving it into a crowd of enemies and setting them off.  This sends the vehicle skyward and takes out the enemies at the same time.  The problem was that the rest of the environment, namely buildings, other vehicles, street signs, wood signs, and the rest of the virtual world went unscathed.  No so with Battlefield: Bad Company.  Developer DICE, via publisher Electronic Arts, have brought the “virtually everything can be destroyed” mentality to the Xbox 360.  

Single-player campaigns sometimes give way to multiplayer in games, since the former are boring and not adventure-filled.  Battlefield:BC tries to marry the need to easily get into the game, interesting story and keeping your interest for long periods of time.  Of course, there’s nothing like trashing a country village with grenade launchers, rocket launchers, grenades, mines and the like to keep your interest.  Some of the features that gamers will jump for joy with include:

• The game plays like a movie with cinematic single-player experiences: The “be a wayward soldier for loot” has funny cutscenes and enough action to seem like an interactive movie.
• Destruction is the name of the game where just about everything, and I mean down to street signs, trees and buildings can be destroyed to bits (down to the foundation) 
• New vehicles, weapons, and toys: Whether on land, air, or sea, there are dozens of new tools waiting for your explosive experimentation. Put C4 on your vehicle, drive it into the enemy, jump out and blow them and the stuff around them to the sky…and beyond!
• DICE’s new Frostbite game engine drives the realistic graphics bringing vast detail to the entire virtual universe.
• Fast-paced and fun multiplayer with Gold Rush, an attacker vs defender game that supports up to 24 players simultaneously.  Use every weapon, vehicle and tactic to defend or attack “gold”.  Select from five kits, while playing on eight different maps.
• Single-player includes unlockable weapons, which can be used in the multiplayer.  Multiplayer includes ranking up, medals, dogtags and other assorted “treats” to keep your interest and give you bragging rights.

This suit isn’t flame-retardant

Every Class in One
The difference between single-player and multiplayer is that the single-player campaign lets you explore virtually every aspect of the game, whereas multiplayer mode requires you to pick among five different classes; Assault, Demolition, Recon, Specialist and Support. Of course, in multiplayer you can chance classes each time you spawn, so you can try out all the different weapons and such.

Vast and Varied
What I liked best in Battlefield: Bad Company is that the missions are fairly short, yet very involved.  That means you can invest a little time and still complete a mission, which is great for the casual and busy gamer alike.  You’ll do a variety of things in the single player campaign versus just killing the enemy.  You might need to destroy installations, defend a broken tank, kill every enemy in an area, save a rogue general and much more.  Levels are objective-based and the bite-size challenge approach lets gamers get in the game if they have a little time on hand AND keeps the action fresh.

Here comes the BOOM!

Knock it Down
Of course, Bad Company’s much vaunted environmental destruction can be found and used just as much in the single-player campaign as on Xbox LIVE. Marlowe doesn’t need an open door when he can simply create his own entrance with a grenade launcher, cannon shot, mortar strike, C4, or an RPG. Walls crumble, trees fall, sheds shatter, and roofs collapse. There are few things more satisfying in Bad Company than taking in the utter annihilation of a once pristine village square at the battle’s end.

Up to You
While each level provides a clear beginning and end, how you approach each objective within the mission is largely up to you. Want to rain down mortar strikes from afar? No problem. Want to run down enemies in an APC, slowly clear the streets with careful sniper fire from a hilltop, or shatter every building from a distance with a tank in order to reveal enemy locations? Sounds like a plan. It’s your battlefield.

Auto Injector
While the duck-and-cover approach to healing has worked so well in games like Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare™ and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Vegas 2, Bad Company takes a slightly different approach with its use of the Auto Injector.

He’s a little off maybe, but Sweetwater’s good people.

Rather than automate healing whenever you’re not being hit, Bad Company requires you to switch out your weapon for the Auto Injector, and then trigger its use manually. This slightly more tactical approach requires forethought and a shade of twitch-reflexes to pull off in the heat of battle. Because it instantly replenishes your health, you can even use it mid-run while charging an enemy encampment.

Good Things Come to Those Who Search
Once the smoke clears and the dust settles, it’s time to take stock of your surroundings and search for hidden items. Scattered throughout each level are a number of briefcases containing your squad’s gold bar retirement fund. Perhaps more important for those hoping to play multiplayer are the hidden guns. Find all five of a certain gun type, and you unlock its use for online play on Xbox LIVE. Look for these secret weapons lying on top of shiny new gun cases.

Destruction-Is-Us

I give Battlefield: Bad Company a grade of 9.1 out of 10.  It has great elements in the campaign, including funny dialogue and cool story and the ability to blow-stuff-up!  The multiplayer only includes one game type, although another one is on its way as free downloadable content.  It’s still a great game and alot of high-speed action and includes little awards like dogtags, unlockable weapons and more.  This is a must-buy of the year!

Just the facts:

Game Rating: T (Teen)
Alcohol Reference
Strong Language
Violence

1 Player (single-player campaign)

Dolby 5.1 Surround

HDTV 1080i

Players: 2-24 (online via Xbox Live)

Marketplace Downloads

Teams

Leaderboards

E3 is about half over with, but some very cool announcements have already been made, including Rock Band 2’s set list.  In that list I, as a lifelong Rush fan, was jacked to see one of my favorite songs “The Trees”.  Note also the recent Rock Band DLC releases of both “Closer To The Heart” and “Working Man”, join the previously available cuts “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight.  While I’m down with the variety of cuts in Rock Band 2, what other group in history is deserving of an entire game dedicated to it besides Rush?  (Side note:  I’m not really a huge fan of Aerosmith, yet they get a music game ahead of Rush?  Pound for pound there is no other group that has kicked out band hits for 30+ years like Rush)  Okay, enough ranting.  What I thought would be cool is to list some of the Rush songs that deserve to be in Rock Band 2, and what better route than via DLC?  Here then is my list of must-have songs.:

Song: “Freewill”
Album: Permanent Waves (Mercury Records, 1980)

Song: “Spirit of the Radio”
Album: Permanent Waves

Song: “Jacob’s Ladder”
Album: Permanent Waves

Song: “New World Man”
Album: Signals (Mercury Records, 1982)

Song: “Red Barchetta”
Album: Moving Pictures (Mercury Records, 1981)

One of my friends saw this and passed it on.  Can I count on your vote this November?  Let’s campaign on the platform of gaming for everbody!

Enjoy

There’s alot of hub-bub over Tiger Woods being gone for the rest of  the year from the PGA Tour after the U.S. Open win.  It seems he has multiple stress fractures in his leg and a torn ACL.  I’m here though to tell you that Tiger’s not gone!  At least not from the golf simulation world.  In fact, in August the latest iteration, Tiger Woods 09, will be released.

I’m a huge fan of the franchise and in fact am down to beating Adam Scott by 4-up to complete Tiger’s Challenge with all gold medals!!!!  (Note: I thrashed Tiger 7-up with four to play on Pebble Beach).  I’ve maxed out my player profile, have crushed 400+ yard drives, have a couple of hole-in-ones, shot 50 for 18 holes, etc.  I play TW08 daily, but it’s the latest version that I’m looking forward to.

A couple of features in the upcoming game to whet your appetite: 

Performance Coach	Tiger’s coach Hank Haney is now your coach - helping you to improve your performance throughout your career.
Club Tuner	Tune your clubs to maximize your swing.
Dynamic Skill	No longer do you have to build your character up from scratch. Skill are set at the beginning of your career based on your skill level and will go up and down based on your play just like real golf.
Performance Feedback	After every round your coach Hank Haney will provide feedback and customized training drills to help you improve your game.
Enhanced EA SPORTS GamerNet	Longest drive challenges, closest to the pin and more are all delivered directly to you with the all new Instant GamerNet Challenges available in all game modes. Post your own greatest moments with ease directly from the fairway and search recommend clips based on your personal play pattern
All-New Online Simultaneous Play	Play an entire 4-person round in the same time it takes to play single player. With the all-new Simultaneous Play you’ll tee off at the same time as your opponents and see their ball flight in line with yours.

I’m excited to checkout the Performance Coach and Club Tuner features, since they bring a new level of help and tweaking to the game.  I’m also excited about the Dynamic Skill, since it will come down to actual gamer skill, rather than those who can cheat or buy their way to a “skillful-golfer”.  Being the feedback gamer that I am I’m also interested in seeing how granular the Performance Feedback is…is it customized per golfer or “one size fits all?”  Finally, the Online Simultaneous Play feature is very cool, since I disliked the “slow nature” of waiting for three others to hit their balls.  I’ll do this in real golf, but hate it in virtual rounds.

Check out screens and videos on these new features at:  http://www.easports.com/tigerwoods09/media.jsp

What say you of Tiger Woods 09?  Excited, indifferent or what????  More to come on this in the coming days and weeks!

With Rock Band being played throughout the world I’m sure there are thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands of gamers who have tackled one of the Holy Grails of Game Music Games…namely “The Endless Setlist”.  For those not in the know, the Endless Setlist is unlocked when you’re “band” does the following:

• have beaten the Hall of Fame Induction setlist
• have acquired 600 stars
• and have acquired I believe 500,000 fans

Your reward is “The Endless Setlist”, which consist of playing 58…yep you read it right, 58 songs, which must be played back-to-back-to-glorious-back, until you’re done.  You can shutoff your Xbox, you can’t exit Rock Band, you can’t save it to return to later.  Nope, instead you are committing yourself and friends, along with you Xbox 360 to over four hours of rocking out to finish.  Now you know why many gamers fear to tread near “The Endless Setlist”.

Well, my son Joel and I decided to leap into the abyss and fired up this mega-rockout using our band “The Even Monks 2008″.  Normally were are three, but my oldest son was at his mom’s when we departed on the bus of agony.

Okay, so we accomplished the feat by playing 30 songs the first night, clocking in an impressive three hours of rocking.  We went to bed and awoke the next morning and another two hours plus later and the final 28 songs and we achieved the special icon.

Sounds great eh?  Well, the good news is that we’d finished the Endless Setlist, but the bad news (as evidenced by the screenshot above) is that we didn’t gain any new fans, since we’d played on Medium and we already had 100% fan devotion.  ARGGGGGG.  We’d five-starred 75% of the songs, but alas, we gained some money and a City shirt, which is in our “Virtual closets”.  Guess we’ve got that going for us!

While we’re glad to have finished this epic it’s clear that we need to be “The Even Monks 2008″ trio and get through this pit of agony and snarled fingers on Hard.

Have you tried “The Endless Setlist” yet?  Comment about your experience and you might even with a prize from the Prize Closet.

Being a soccer coach/dad/fan I am very pumped about the MLS announcement of the newest expansion team, Seattle Sounders FC.  What makes it even cooler is that they just announced a multi-year sponsorship with Microsoft!!!!!  Just imagine the team running around in the jersey’s below just one year from now (Spring 09′)  I for one am going to try to get one of the jerseys to add to my collection, right next to my Xbox 360 biking jersey, Windows Vista biking jersey, EA NHL08 hockey jersey, etc.  This is also cool, since we Pacific Northwesterners won’t have to wait for special games to show up to see good soccer.   

This just in across the “police band”, “Kill Nico in the funniest/coolest way, film it, upload it and you could win $200 worth of games”.

Okay, so how do you do this?  Well, it seems that 360style has teamed up with Bragster to create this very cool contest.  Just go to the Kill Nico, Win Games link and follow the rules.  Contest ends on June 21 @ 03:59 (Note:  not sure what time zone that time is so upload your videos early just to be safe!)

There are alot of very cool games coming out over the next few weeks and months for the Xbox 360 console.  Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of them with the tons of great games that are consistently being released.  I’m going to cover a few games that I’m excited to see and as time passes I’ll provide more info on each.

Be sure to be on the lookout for the following games coming out in the month of June.  Currently only “The Bourne Conspiracy” has a demo available on XBL Marketplace, but Ninja Gaiden II demo should be arriving this coming week.  No word on demos for Prizefighter or Alone in the Dark, but keep your eyes peeled here.

	First, unless you’ve been under a rock for the past  month or so then you’ve likely caught the “Ninja Gaiden II Fever”.  We get to revisit our hero Ryu Hayabasa to see if  he can make it through the hordes of creatures and boss levels.  It’s been a long time in game years, since the first Ninja Gaiden came out and alot of graphics/game engine/technologies have come out since then.  Will the sequel live up to the hype?  Will the game be one of 2008’s memorable games?  Will we be awed or say bleh?	Released: 6/3/2008
	Have you played the demo yet?  If not, then get on Xbox Live Marketplace and download it.  The cut-scenes are smartly done, the action is like a Bourne movie and there is plenty of running, fisticuffs, driving, jumping and sniping to keep the most rogue gamer satisfied.  It will take a little getting used to the cut-scenes that require timed, specific buttons to be pushed, but it provides another gaming aspect that gets away from the basic button mashing.	Released: 6/3/2008
	There hasn’t been a good boxing game released, since Fight Night 3, but DK Prizefighter aims to up that ante.  Live the life of a up-and-coming boxer, including fights, tempations, corrupt judges and the like.  Mini games, virtual gyms, 80+ boxers and the trimmings and trappings of fighter fame await.  Will you be the champ or a chump?	Released: 6/10/2008
	We return to that scary series “Alone in the Dark” where things go bump in the night and they aren’t nice things.  Can you uncover the scary secret that’s been held for centuries under Central Park in New York City?  Fire, paranormal behavior, told through a TV-series like style make this a edge-of-you-seat game.  Hold onto your seat and your controller, since this will be unlike any other virtual night you’ve experienced…..	Released: 6/24/2008

Have you frantically tried to find a code for the early look at the Battlefield: Bad Company demo?  Are you anxious to checkout the “built-from-the-ground-up” bleeding-edge Frostbite game-engine?  Are you jacked about being a renegade soldier who decides that sometimes the gratitude of a nation simply isn’t enough?  If you’ve answered a resounding “Yes Sir” to these questions than read on for your chance to grab a code and get into the demo early.

As most of the gaming world knows the highly anticipated demo of Battlefield: Bad Company is set to land via Xbox Live on June 5th!   Some of the key features of the game include:

• War, your way: Battlefield: Bad Company environments are highly destructible, meaning that there are few safe points to hide. Gamers can shape the battlefield to match their play style – the possibilities are literally endless.

• Genre-defining multiplayer: Support for 24 players online in a world designed to take full advantage of the game’s massively destructible environments.

• New vehicles, weapons and toys: Land, air or sea, dozens of new tools are waiting for explosive experimentation. Battlefield: Bad Company gives gamers the building blocks to get creative and usher in a new era of their own “Battlefield moments”.

• Cinematic single-player experience: A deep campaign loaded with attitude follows a wayward band of ordinary soldiers who risk it all on a quest for personal gain

• Frostbite™ game engine:  DICE’s Frostbite game engine raises the bar for next-gen gaming, with stunning HD graphics that bring characters, vehicles, and environments to life like never before.

The Demo:  Enough about the features, what about the demo?  Okay, here are a few of the “quick hits” about the demo itself:

• The Single player mode gives you an early look into the quest for Gold with Bad Company
• The Multiplayer mode lets you
  • Play the all-new Gold Rush mode on the Oasis map, featuring land, sea and air vehicles.
  • Reach rank 4 in the demo to unlock an exclusive in-game weapon

Enough already, how do I get a chance for a token?

Thanks to our great friends at EA and DICE we have a block of tokens to giveaway.  All you have to do is write a comment about which of “Bad Company” would be you and why.  (Hint:  Go to the following link, Battlefield: Bad Company, then click “Meet Bad Company” from the menu, read all four bios, then come back and comment) I’ll randomly select the winners from all the comments.  (Note: you will need to register to comment, but it’s free and gives you the ability to comment and access future contests)

Now get out there and comment and perhaps we’ll see you on the battlefield for bad, bad soldiers!!!!!!

In honor of the news that was dropped in our email laps we’ve posted this in blood red letters.  It seems that EA has revamped the FaceBreaker website with a HTML scaple and unlike most of the plastic surgery we’ve seen, this one is a seamless hit!!!!  Here’s a screenshot of the site, which includes “boxer profiles”, a few of the game’s soundtrack songs and much, much more goodness. 

Be sure to checkout the updates, including my good EA friend, Matt Tripepi’s Producer Blog, including chances to provide feedback.   Rather than rehash the site for you here…go ahead and click on the face-link below (from the game) to explore away at the goodness, which is FaceBreaker.