As if you didn’t already want a new PC and a faster video setup. Today there’s a whole new reason to make you upgrade.
System requirements for Assassin’s Creed were published by Ubisoft today. Move over Crysis.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:
CPU: Pentium 4 Dual core, 2.6 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
RAM: 2 GB
Video Card: 256 MB, DirectX 9.0 with Shader Model 3.0+
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB
RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better
RAM: 3 GB
Video Card: 512 MB video card, DirectX 10
Seriously, WTF is going on with the 12 GB minimum on disk space? There’s some serious textures in there or something. Will your PC meet these standards? Will you forget about the PC version and stick to your PS3 or 360?
If you missed the parts where their own developers were cheating in the game or the really big one where their Trinity update killed Windows XP then CCP has a deal for you. Not $20, not $10, now free! Yes free!
Yeah, whether I’ve watched too many infomercials tonight or not, the developers (CCP) are giving away free 21-day trials of EVE Online. No need to sign up on the developers’ site or drive to some game shop for a free disc and a sales pitch, just hit Steam for the download.
Ignore my ranting and check it out (like I said too many infomercials tonight), EVE isn’t a bad game overall. Just had more bad PR than any MMO but WoW could have stomached. The fresh start and low population should give a few newly-hardcore a chance to set themselves apart too.
Grab 800 not-quite-free Microsoft Points from 1-800-4MY-XBOX. Microsoft started giving awayUndertow downloads as a cover-their-butts freebie to make up for the holiday Xbox Live outages.
It’s not exactly a blockbuster game, but it’s free to everyone and nice for those of us who never saw any outages because we’d gorged ourselves on pie and were napping though most of a multi-generational, family event. Early reports were that the lack of choice was even harder on users who already paid for the game. They were supposedly out of luck on getting any freebies or paybacks.
Microsoft may not be remotely close to a customer-friendly company, but they may be learning fast. Today’s reports are that if you already own Undertow you can call 1-800-4MY-XBOX and have the original purchase price (yes, 800 points) refunded to your account. No one around here has a copy of Undertow to cash out (or the patience to fake like we have one so we can confirm the rumor), but please let us know your results. Also, is the service rep. on the other end as friendly as “Mark” is from Kotaku’s original report?
Now that the Xbox Live version of Goldeneye has been halted the first leak in the wall of secrecy is above. Maybe some developer or laid-off game tester is ticked off that their work will never go live - maybe some fanboy just wants to screw with all of us. Regardless, we’re posting the vid.
Since the classic Goldeneye was awesome and the gameplay in the video (cover your ears audiophiles, sound bugs to cry over) looks sweet, we hope Nintendo and Microsoft will get a clue and realize this download could pull in some serious Microsoft Points payments.
The top-selling Blu-ray player by a huge margin is Sony’s PS3. That should be good news to all current owners, since the PS3 is (supposedly) the only Blu-ray player currently on the market that’s compatible with the Blu-ray 2.0 specifications. If you’re currently an owner of another Blu-ray player, suck it up, the bad news is you may need to shop for a new deck or take it in for some sort of crazy parts install.
What makes the 2.0 spec so hard to meet? Unless you’re reading this on an iPhone your PC already meets the requirements: two secondary decoders, 1GB of local storage, and an internet connection. The Playstation 3 meets all those requirements, with its hard drive and Ethernet port covering the last two items and the extra graphics horsepower covering the decoders. On the other hand, I figure most PC and laptop Blu-ray R/RW’s probably meet the standards too. If you dropped the cash on one of those hold your breath and hope your manufacturer is around long enough to dish out the firmware upgrades.
Electronic Arts has announced an online-only entry in the Battlefield series that will be completely ad-supported and will be able to run “on Grandma’s laptop.” As if I needed any more reasons not to make eye contact at family gatherings — if gramms frags me in an online game, I may have to skip the next reunion.
Though it’s completely ad-supported (and thus is free to users, in case you weren’t sure), there will be no ads within the game itself, EA says. The game will also be supported through “micro transactions,” which sounds like you’ll be paying for aesthetic upgrades and maybe even weapon upgrades.
Devs are looking at a summer 2008 release. In the meantime, check out the Battlefield Heroes official website for a little more information and a few peeks at the cartoony graphics, which I find sort of interesting in the current climate of hyper-realism that everyone’s striving for.
Bionic Commando is a classic 2D-scrolling shooter (and puncher, thrower, bionic armer…) from the 8-bit arcade and Nintendo consoles. Just announced by Capcom is the 3D Bionic Commando Reloaded on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network. Still a side-scroller, the gameplay looks sweet and the 3D maps and characters are killer.
Update: Thanks for putting up with any problems. You are reading this on the new server already.
While we move to new digs, please excuse any downtime over the next two to three days (Jan 19th - 21st).
What Happened? In our first month we’ve seen an unexpected surge in readers. Several stories have been ranked high in Google or made it low on digg. These maybe favorites of yours already or something you stopped by to make fun of. If you haven’t seen them all the early hits include Kiala’s Mass Effect romance, James’ realization that Halo 3 stinks in single-player, and my own painful discovery of how to drum better in Rock Band.
Apologies to everyone who has waited too long for Engamer pages to load. We’ll never get a chance to apologize to the web surfers who never became readers because the site was slow to load or didn’t load at all. Instead we’re moving to a new, faster web server so you readers will stay happy and the rest will have a chance to leave a comment and make fun of us. If you’re drooling on your keyboard for something new, hop over to our sister site GeekToob for TV editorial and reviews.
Queue yet another PR disaster buy-off from a big corporation, to the tune of $10 per cheated customer. Walmart priced preorders for Super Smash Bros Brawl at $19.82 last week. Not long after the pricing error was all over the internet and Walmart canceled all the low-priced orders.
Today Walmart announced a $10 gift card is headed out to every buyer who had an order canceled … after all they’ve already got your addresses. If you’re one of the preorder buyers you can take the cookie and pick up Super Smash Bros Brawl for just $39.82 out of pocket.
It’s always a good day to see a playable Super Mario Bros. hack, but not many days are as good as this one. James may think Halo 3 overrated but putting Halo characters in Super Mario Bros. 2/3 is ingenious. Gameplay looks smooth and the level isn’t too easy, like most hacks are. The hack in the video adds a Halo edge with three energy weapons and un-stompable Covanent.
After you finish the 12-minute trailer grab the nearly complete demo from one of two sites. There’s also a joystick emulator for keyboards and a whole lot more info on the Youtube page and, remember that turnips are almost as powerful as grenades.
The make-good for that pesky Xbox Live debacle is finally here, and it’s a fine prize, particularly for those of us who didn’t have any XBL problems. Free game for nothing? I’ll take it.
Xbox Live members — gold and silver alike — will be able to download the full version of the submerged shooter Undertow, according to the Gamerscore blog. The free download will be available from Jan. 24-28. Don’t forget. That’s a $10 value, yours for free! For those who did experience problems with XBL and aren’t so easily placated, well, there’s always the class-action lawsuit that’s brewing. Either way you’ll probably end up with the equivalent of $10, though, so why put yourself through the headache?
And if you already paid for Undertow? Ha ha, sucker!
Just kidding. A user posed that very question in the comments of the blog post, to which someone presumably official responded, “You should call support, they’re prepared to take care of you.” I picture him giving a little wink as he says this, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.
Undertow is a pretty good game, according to some cursory searching I just did. I’ve actually never heard of it, but IGN’s review is pretty favorable.
The reason it all works so well is that the level design in Undertow is top notch. It’s clear that a lot of care was taken to balance the stages and create clear strategy/counterstrategy options.
And IGN’s description of the game includes:
Based in an alternate world where earth has been completely flooded and several factions are vying for supremacy, Undertow is an underwater shooter featuring a complex multiplayer component.
I’ve been a GameFly customer ever since I bought my XBox 360, because it just isn’t convenient for me to rent games from a video store (do they even do that anymore?). If you haven’t heard of GameFly, it’s a service that allows you to rent games through the mail (think NetFlix, but for video games).
The way the service is supposed to work is like this: You pick out a bunch of games from GameFly’s fairly comprehensive inventory and add them to your “GameQ”, which is basically a big list of all the games that you’ve indicated that you want to rent so far. GameFly sends you the first two available games (more about this later) from your “GameQ” and they come to you via USPS. You can keep the games for as long or as short as you want with no late fees, and once you are sick of a game, you send it back in the provided prepaid envelope and GameFly sends you another game from you “Q”.
Sounds simple right?
…It’s not that simple.
<BEGIN RANT>
1. Games are NEVER available! When I signed up for GameFly I had these visions of getting all of the newest, biggest, and baddest games delivered to my doorstep, and that I would rush home slip them into my XBox and kicking alien ass in no time. The reality is that new games are almost never available until weeks, if not months after their initial release. You can add them to you GameQ, but when it says “Availability Low” it means it. The first two games that I received were the two games lowest in my Q, and they were both so ancient that they smelled like my Grandmother’s attic.
2. The games take forever to arrive. One of my favorite things about NetFlix is that when they ship me a movie, it arrives the next day. This is not what happens with GameFly. Most of the time I receive an email notification that a game has shipped 4-5 days before the game actually makes it into my mailbox. The thing is… I could’ve walked the game up from California by then. I suspect that they send out email notifications long before the game hits the mail.
3. The games are not in good condition. They just aren’t. They’re scratched and cracked and some won’t even play at all, which is preferable to the ones that play and then freeze as soon as you are having fun. This is called the GameFly Fun Detector™… it can detect when you are starting to have fun with a game, and it triggers the GameFly Freeze Initiator™ which hard locks the console. It’s very scientific, I won’t pretend to understand it.
4. Once they recieve a return it takes them days to ship you a new game. That’s right…. DAYS… like 4 or 5, when you add this to the additional days that it takes for the games to get back to them in the mail, it becomes almost 2 weeks from the time I send something back to the time that I receive a new game in the mail. It’s funny because they are never late in debiting the $23.99 from my bank account every month, at least they can do something in a timely manner.
5. The customer service sucks. First off, there is not customer service phone number. When this happens I start to act like my father. I get all bewildered and say things like “Customer service just isn’t what it used to be…” and “In my day you could talk to a human being on the other end of the line….” and then I get sad, cause technology is supposed to make our lives easier. Let’s face it folks, email support blows, typically IF I get a reply to a website’s “Contact Us” form, it has little (if anything) to do with my query. This makes me think that there’s an email monkey who’s job it is to cut and paste responses to these things at random, which makes me happy… because I like monkeys.
To illustrate my point here is what happened recently when I contacted GameFly’s email monkey: On December 28th I dropped a game in the mail to return it, I received an email on January 5th saying that they have received it and would ship another game from my Q. On January 9th, having heard nothing, I sent an email to their customer service team stating that it had been 4 days and they still hasn’t shipped me my next game. Finally, on January 11th an email aplology hit my inbox telling me they had shipped another game from the (bottom) of my Q, which not-so-prompty arrived 4 days later. That works out to a full 18 days in between the time the game left my hand until I had another one. At $23.99 per month - 18 days = $13.93!
6. They’re the only game in town. Most of their competitors look so shady that I’m afraid to give them my credit card number, I would gladly leave GameFly is there was a suitable alternative. Recommendations anyone?
The only thing I hate worse than movies based on video games, are video games based on movies.
So, I was a little freaked out by how excited I was by the trailer for Jumper, the game based on the movie and the teenybopper novel by Stephen Gould. I mean… if done right this game could really kick some serious ass, I totally wanna teleport someone into a shark tank… I mean, who doesn’t? Apparently the game follows the Jamie Bell character Griffin, who desperately wants to be a ballet dancer, but his father wants him to be a Boxer, blah, blah, blah… TELEPORTATION!
I should have stopped after watching the trailer, cause now I’ve gone and ruined the surprise for myself. This game looks like it might really suck, and gloriously so! Developed by Brash Entertainment, the same development powerhouse that brought the cinematic masterpiece Alvin and the Chipmunksto the PS2! Take a peek at these screens, the frosted side of me is holding out hope that they’re from the PS2 version and the 360 version will actually look like a next-gen game, but the wheaty side of me knows it isn’t true. It looks like they’ve just reused the graphics and combat engine that made Matrix: Path of Neo nearly unplayable.
Seems like the game relies upon Griffin’s teleportation skills which allow him to “jump within hand-to-hand combat range of an enemy to start dishing out devastating blows” using a “exciting and intense layered combo fighting system”, Griffin can also use finishing moves to “instantly teleport enemies to exotic perilous locations to finish them”. Meh.
This week Yahtzee looks at the PC game Crysis. When I say “PC,” I’m talking computers, not sociology. In fact, if Yahtzee’s opinion on CryTek games holds any weight, political correctness is the last thing Crysis players need to worry about. Warning: He actually likes the game, so it’s not quite as fun as his negative reviews. But it’s still funny, and hey, he can’t hate them all. Video after the jump.
Drew on Gamefly: A Completely Biased Review - Maybe Gamefly just hates you guys. I’ve had it for 2 years, and I am happy with it. The shipping times started out quite slow, but since they...
Nathan on Gamefly: A Completely Biased Review - This is very much the typical gamefly response. I guess i must be stuck on stupid, because a couple years ago i had gamefly and i stopped it because...
As if you didn’t already want a new PC and a faster video setup. Today there’s a whole new reason to make you upgrade.
Electronic Arts has announced an online-only entry in the Battlefield series that will be completely ad-supported and will be able to run “on Grandma’s laptop.” As if I needed any more reasons not to make eye contact at family gatherings — if gramms frags me in an online game, I may have to skip the next reunion.
The make-good for that 
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