You remember Goozex right? If not, read up on them on one of my previous posts at this link. Well, great news, I’ve been brought on as an associate writer for their member-run blog The Goozex Report. I’m very excited to be an even bigger part of their community, and wanted to share my first article with you. Give it a spin here, and let me know what you think.

Thanks everyone!

Care to see your favorite gaming consoles and peripherals with x-ray vision? Your wish has come true. Check the following link for one person’s flickr gallery. Very cool.

X-Ray Funnies – a set on Flickr.

G4 has again been named the official broadcaster of E3 2009, and with only a month to go until keynotes, I’m definitely excited. Let’s just hope I don’t relive the fiasco that was E3 2007 on the same network. See my rant for more information on that.

G4 promises to provide over 22 hours of content, including five keynotes, hands on demos, interviews, and Steve Wiebe with another one of his live Donkey Kong high score attempts. If you’re unfamiliar with Steve, then be sure to check out the documentary: The King of Kong. It’s a great film. Other than that, additional details on the broadcast can be found at the following link.

G4 Named Official Broadcaster Of E3 2009 – G4tv.com.

And for those of you who wanted to check out the review from IGN, here you are. Sadly, they reviewed the game higher than the actual film.

IGN: X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Uncaged Edition Review.

I heard the rumors. I thought previews of the game had adequately described the game. They did not. I was wrong.

Those expecting a simple translation of the upcoming film are in for quite a surprise. A sweet one for some (me), and a sickening one for others. This game shows Wolverine portrayed, as well, more unleashed than in the film. This game is violent. Heads are cut off (by claws), heads are impaled (by claws), heads are pushed through chopper blades (with claws), and I’d imagine if the demo were a bit longer, we’d see them burnt and crushed. It just seems to be the natural progression for the content of this title. To see this happen with a licensed game is  stunning. I personally think it’s the right choice, I mean, Wolverine is supposed to be vicious.

As far as gameplay is concered, it’s pretty much standard fare for a 3rd person action game. Think Ninja Gaiden, with Wolverine instead of Ryu. I can’t say that I’ll be picking up the title based solely off its merits of violence, so we’ll have to see where reviews go, but definitely pick up the demo. You’ll be entertained in one way or another, and the only cost is bandwidth.

I spend a lot of money on games. I mean a lot. I buy 2 -3 new games a month easy. It’s an expensive habit, and it adds up, but hell, if you can’t enojoy yourself, then what good is living? I listen to a handful of gaming postcasts, and one day the topic was Goozex. I was intruiged, and looked into it further. I’m glad I did, because this site is awesome; something that anyone on a budget needs to take a good hard look at.

The idea is simple. Tired of getting ripped off at Game Crazy or Gamestop? Those unfamiliar, these companies thrive on giving you the smallest amount of money (or in store credit to be more accurate) for your game as possible. They then turn around and sell your game for the most they expect another will pay. The outcome? Sick sick profit. Goozex takes another approach. They use, what I refer to as, a lateral credit system. This means that when you trade a game, you get what Goozex deems to be the appropriate market value. No less. They have an algorithm working which takes the average value of a title, and adjusts slightly based off of demand. Using this information they then give each game a point value ranging anywhere from 100 – 1000 points.

Once you have some games you’d like to trade, you simply visit http://www.goozex.com, look up the game you’d like to dump, then place this in your offers queue. Goozex then adds your game to a list of available games. Once Goozex finds someone who wishes to purchase your games with their points, you accept their offer for your game, mail it off to them, and once they give you positive feedback, you’re credited points to your account. It sounds a bit complicated, so let me provide a quick example.

I had a copy of Silent Hill: Homecoming for my Playstation 3 which I no longer wanted (I purchased an Xbox 360 version for achievements… I feel so dirty). Goozex decided that it was worth 800 pionts (equal to $40.00), so I placed it into my offeres queue. After a few minutes, Goozex found a match, meaning someone had placed the title into their requests queue. I accepted the trade, shipped the title off using the shipping label I purchased from Goozex for $3.50 (the seller always pays the shipping), and once the recipient had received the game and found it working, they left me positive feedback, and 800 points were credited to my account. As a seller, I only paid for shipping in order to trade my game.

Once I had my points, I then decided that before trading any other titles, that I’d test the system just to be certain that it worked the way the site advertised. In order to buy games on Goozex, you first need to purchase trade tokens (your account comes with one token already). Each request costs you, the buyer, one token, which you purchase for one dollar. This means that for each game you purchse on Goozex, they make a total of one dollar. I found a couple games that I’d been meaning to test out, specifically F.E.A.R (350 points) and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 (450 points). I put the titles into my request queue, Goozex found a match within a day or so, and less than a week later, the games showed up in the mail. In the end, I spent two trade tokens, equal to $2.00, and $3.50 on shipping for a total of $5.50 to trade Silent Hill: Homecoming for F.E.A.R and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 2. Comaring this to what I might be able to get at Gamestop, and I think I came out far ahead.

Check it out. If you’d like, signup using this link, and you’ll automatically be added to my friends list. You can also check out my Goozex profile here, just in case you’d like to know what I’ve recently traded or purchsed on Goozex, as well as what games I’m playing, and some other interesting tidbits.

Enjoy.

Undeniably, some of the most innovative features added in the latest release in the Halo Franchise is the ability for players to view their past twenty five games played, then taking full hi definition images, and even creating short movies from these larger clips to post to their file share, thereby allowing them to share this content with their friends. Long sentence. One thing I would like to point out that I love, is that when you take a picture, that picture is then uploaded to your bungie.net profile, where you can view and save these images to your local machine. A fantastic touch. Today I am specifically detailing the picture taking aspect of Halo 3, and will touch upon the video taking abilities in a later post.

When viewing a replay from one of the past twenty five games played (note this includes both multilayer and campaign), you can switch to view the game from any player, at any time, or if you would prefer, you can also manually steer the camera around the level in complete freedom. Point at any angle you like, put the camera to the elevation you wish, and snap a hot photo. The controls are so easy, you’ll be getting Kodak moments in no time. Do I have any gripes with the system? Only one. The image is taken at the resolution you are viewing on your TV. For example, my TV is 1080P, so I get a 1920 x 1080 image, and the image is gorgeous, but another person viewing the screen in 480P would wind up with an image with that resolution instead. I realize this makes sense; getting the image you view, but it would have been nice to allow me to take a standard 4:3 image, and someone using a 4:3 TV take a wide screen image. I’ve uploaded some of my favorite taken shots for your viewing pleasure. Click the thumbs here for a full sized image.

I did it. I have finished the fight. Halo 3, released September 25th, 2007 was completed by yours truly, that same day, in one sitting lasting 7.5 hours. My friend asked me, “How did you like it? Give me a 2 minute review.” Here it is. Halo 3 is Halo. Do not go in expecting play mechanics to work considerably different than those in the previous titles in the franchise. Don’t expect graphics of same caliber of those seen in Bioshock or Gears of War. You will not find them. In fact, the graphics, other than a handful of exceptions, are not anything to rave about. They’re fine. Nothing more, nothing less.

So what can you expect? Expect a solid experience throughout. Does this title deserve and live up to the hype generated? Absolutely not. That kind of hype is reserved for those making genre changing decisions such as Bioshock. Everything here has been done before, and in many cases, better. You will also find a fair amount of backtracking throughout a few of the levels. Nothing to the degree as seen in the original Halo, but that is something that really needs to be completely eliminated. I know I am being harsh, but when every reviewer on the planet is raving, someone needs to be blunt. I guess that someone is me. It’s not easy, but it’s my cross to bear. More gripes? Sure. The new firearms are unimaginative, and the spike grenade is basically a plasma grenade without any real splash damage.

Those things being said, this truly is a very fun game with glaring flaws. Pick it up of course. You’ll love it, but be warned that Bungie has played the safe card with this one. Note that these are only the impressions on the campaign, and I will be including additional thoughts on other aspects of the game; namely multiplayer and the video editor.

I promised I would film the events at the Halo 3 release taking place at my local Gamestop, but I lied. I had every intention to do so, but I learned that my video camera didn’t feel like working too late to make any late plans to get a replacement. My apologies. Luckily I had my trusty iPhone on hand, and was able to take some pretty interesting pictures using that. Before presenting those to you, I would like to publicly thank Gamestop for doing such an awesome job at moving customers through. Each person was asked to pay for the game prior to 12AM, at which point all you had to do was get in line, flash your receipt and ID, then in turn your were handed your copy of the most anticipated title this year. I was about 200 people from the start of the line and was out of the mall in 20 minutes. Really, just a great job. Alright so some pictures and descriptions for each. The headline image is that of my receipt and a Diet Mountain Dew. If you were wondering, Diet Mountain Dew is the foulest diet drink of them all. Stay away. Stay far away.

Me. Manson.

Brandon.

Erik. I call this one the ‘action shot’.

Shot of the line from the Gamestop entrace.

A big pile of Halo 3.

Number of players at 2AM Mountain Time, September 25th, 2007.

Here it is. The beginning of the end. In only hours I will be finding myself in line amongst thousands of fellow gamers, all salivating at the idea of getting our hands on the latest, and probably last release, in the Halo series. Reviews have all give Halo 3 the green light, thumbs up, and pat on the back. This is supposed to truly be the Halo we’ve been waiting for. That being said I find it difficult to be excited. I’ve played Halo, and I’ve played Halo 2. Halo 3 is simply not going to offer anything new. Everything shown is something we have had in FPS titles for some time now. Reviewers seem to concur on this one detail, however they also agree that the game has been refined about as far as it can be with its current game play formula. Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I would have preferred to see a little more innovation. That being said, I am happy to announce that similar to the Wii Pre Order Event video also posted on this site, I will be filming and posting a Halo 3 release event video for your viewing enjoyment! Expect good times, dirty jokes, and best of all, Halo.