Konami let slip last week (and confirmed this week at E3) that it will be porting HD remixes of the PS2 editions of some of it's most popular franchises, including Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders, and Silent Hill for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
UPDATE June 8, 2011 (3:46 PM PDT):
Just read the following article from PlayStation Universe:
"For starters, the publisher confirmed that its HD revamps of Silent Hill 2 and 3 will feature fresh voiceover work. No date for the Silent Hill Collection has been announced yet, though the set will be released for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360." -http://www.psu.com/E3-2011--Silent-Hill-Vita-to-include-multiplayer--a011942-p0.php
UPDATE to the update November 14, 2011 (4:28 PM PDT):
Apparently, the dispute between Silent Hill 2 voice actors and Konami has been (at least partially) settled, and it appears likely that the Silent Hill HD Collection will include the original vocal cast.
Update to the update to the update November 22, 2011 (3:18 PM PDT):
OK, so once again, the info provided for the HD Collection was not entirely complete. Apparently, there are also issues with the Silent Hill 3 cast. Namely, lead actress Heather Morris.
Sigh... [More]
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Tags:Konami, E3, Silent Hill, Silent Hill HD Collection, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Zone of the Enders, Zone of the Enders HD Collection, PlayStation, PS3, PSN, Sony, Microsoft, Bluepoint, voice acting, XBox 360
After decades of video gaming, the real good guys with the uniforms and badges finally get their moment to shine! But can they stand up to the vigilantes, anti-heroes, super heroes, undercover cops, crooked cops, and outright criminals that we are used to playing as?
Brain before brawn
Fighting crime isn’t all glamour and excitement. The job of a protector of the peace isn’t all shootouts, car chases, street brawls, damsels in distress, and throwing cars at super villains. There’s a lot of walking around crime scenes and looking at stuff. Figuring out what kind and size of shoe left the prints in the dirt. Reading the brand name of the lipstick of murdered women. Reading the addresses of bars off of matchbooks. Looking up the registered owner of a car with a license plate number provided by a witness. Reading through hotel registries. And accusing people of lying about stuff. It is this element of police work that L.A. Noire tries to capture. The focus of this game is taken away from gun fights, chases, and action scenes, and attempts to highlight the more cerebral elements of police work.
Although the exciting stuff does still happen, this game is a departure for Rockstar games. It puts the player in the role of a police investigator with a badge rather than the hardened criminals, vigilantes, bullies, and antiheroes that we’re used to. The exaggerated fictional cities and over-the-top dark humor have been replaced with a massive and highly detailed (although somewhat anachronistic) reproduction of 1940’s Los Angeles that takes itself much more seriously. The map is pretty large, accurate, and surprisingly densely packed with streets and alleyways. Average roads are multi-lane, sidewalks are decently-sized, and everything has a great sense of scale to it that most city-sandbox games lack. And the game only contains a fraction of the actual city! [More]
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Tags:L.A. Noire, Rockstar Games, Team Bondi, review, PlayStation, PS3, action, puzzle, interrogation, detective, noire, Grand Theft Auto, XBox 360
I recently had my full review of Portal 2 posted on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014).
If you are interested, you can also prepare for my review by reading my pre-release blog for the game, in which I express concerns that Portal may go the way of Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and other games that oversaturate themselves with annual or bi-annual releases until the public gets sick of them. Hopefully that doesn't happen.
In the meantime...
Yes GlaDOS, we brought you back because we really do love to test!
Apparently, a very long time has passed since the first game. The Enrichment Center is very different. Under the care of the watchful AI, Wheatley, the entire facility has been slowly falling apart. The degrading, decrepit test chambers make for much more interesting visuals than the sterile, white and gray chambers of the first game. They are now overgrown with weeds and vines, panels are falling off the walls, broken glass litters the floors, and fallen and bent metal beams and girders obstruct some of your paths. It’s just too bad that with all the debris and vegetation littering the environment, that none of it is interactive. It slightly breaks the immersion when you walk through dangling leaves and they don’t react to your passing at all... [More]
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Tags:Portal 2, Portal, Valve, Steam, PC, PS3, PSN, review, platformer, puzzle, multiplayer
Well, yesterday, Sony finally came out and admitted that the PlayStation Network (PSN) had been hacked. Apparently, it took them one or two whole days to find out themselves, and then another whole week before they told their customers. Well, I guess I can understand that they wouldn't want to tell anybody that the names, birth dates, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, passwords, and possibly also credit card info, billing address, and the answers to security questions to all of their 77 million accounts were hacked.
I wouldn't want to admit to that either.
But as a customer, it sure would have been nice to have been notified earlier that I needed to start changing my passwords and security question answers to any other online services that I am a subscriber to. Or that I should start double checking my bank accounts and credit reports for possible fraud.
But these sorts of things happen. A data theft this bad has never happened before, but anytime you put any personal information in an online service, you are taking a risk. So I can't really be too mad that this happened.
What I can be mad about, however, is that Sony pretty much begged for this to happen. [More]
This April has been a busy week for video games, and a very weird one, too. And the news has varied from good, to bad, to ugly, and everything in between. Here's some of the stuff that caught my attention:
Table of Contents
[More]
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Tags:E3, Sony, PSN, PlayStation, PS3, Nintendo, Wii, Microsoft, Valve, Portal, Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima, Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto, Facebook, Netflix, EA Sports, NCAA Football, Madden NFL, Backbreaker, Civilization, Sid Meier's Civilization, Civilization V, multiplayer, sports, puzzle, physics, patch, XBox 360, Civilization V
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