For the love of Christ, can someone please teach Andrew House how to say "today"? Laughing at your main presenter when they are not trying to be funny isn't a good thing. Or people just need to grow up but whatever. Being compared to a lesser Don Mattrick isn't a good thing, and Mattrick only gets away with it because he has serious bona fides in gaming and the other option would probably be crazy Ballmer and no one wants that.

gaming below.... Hello, back again with gaming stuff....

Have an iPad and like boardgames? Shenandoah Studio has knocked down the price of their GOTY Battle of the Bulge to $6.99. Very much worth the money with a great ruleset and a extremely healthy multiplayer. Also Victory Point Games has released a really good version of their fun but hard solitaire game, Zulus on the Ramparts! which did a pretty good job in turning the Battle of Rorke's Drift into a boardgame. And like Phantom Leader, I really prefer playing solitaire boardgames on my iPad as I'm lazy. I would read the rulebook if you've never played it before though as the tutorial is okay, it glosses over a few important things. iPad version is priced at a decent $7.99 and the iPhone version is at a cheaper $5.99

I feel bad for Bugbear Entertainment (Flatout series), their last game was pretty good but Namco slapping the Ridge Racer name on it really hurt it as the classic name brings it's own connotations with it and the game itself didn't feel like an actual Ridge Racer game so it got crapped on and sold like it. Thankfully though kinda sadly, they've gone back to what they do best if their trailer is anything to go by

As expected, Red Thread Games has blown away their kickstarter goal of $850k for the next game in the The Longest Journey series.

As expected, Namco and FromSoftware have announced the standalone expansion pack to Armored Core V. Though it's a running joke with FROM, I hope they fixed the FPS and the broken matchmaking in V, though them beefing up the Chromehounds style multiplayer makes me happy. Hopefully it doesn't fall through the cracks with it coming out as the new systems come out

ArmA 3 going Steamworks People whining but I could care less, they have my day 1 $ for their awesome but janky series. And if nothing else, this will let make the game retard proof when it comes to modding as the scene really can be quite daunting

A damn shame, Kenji Eno passed away this past week from heart failure at the age of 42. His games were always his own and wholly unique.

The Legend of Grimrock expansion pack that Almost Human was working on is now to be turned into a full fledged sequel. More Grimrock = More Goodness.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs gets a release period (Q2 of this year though more like around Halloween) and becomes a full fledged game

Square-Enix's Murdered: Soul Suspect gets a snazzy teaser and a release period (early 2014). My interest is piqued

What I wrote after the Sony presser:

Well, Sony's reveal of the PS4 happened. It felt very much like a press conference that you have at the E3 the year before you do the big blowout reveal. Can't say there was really anything that made me sit up and say that's cool outside of the social aspects (but this is Sony so eh on if/when it happens) though it would have been nice to see them use Twitch instead of Ustream as it's a better setup on making money with gaming. Also really like 8 gigs of GDDR5 though my wallet doesn't. And I hope that OS is just placeholder as it looked bad but then again, I might be an outlier as people actually liked the XMB.

I couldn't help giggle that Sony swiped the Kinect from Microsoft. And hopefully remote play this gen isn't a steaming pile of shit.

So there you go, a tiny touchpad on the controller and they didn't say what uses it will have though UI scrolling is a given. With the way it looks, I keep thinking it will shout "READY TO FORM VOLTRON! ACTIVATE INTERLOCKS!" whenever I pick it up

Killzone didn't look that hot in the graphics department and game play-wise it looked like the same uninspiring crap that filled the other games in the series.

I don't see Capcom hitting the tech demo levels of that Dragon's Dogma...I mean Deep Down trailer, it reminded me off all the target renders that Sony used to launch the PS3.

I want this to be real but I highly doubt it

Though not a vertical slice like the demo last year, Watch Dogs still looks interesting but could they pick an even more boring spot to show the game off?

Still don't grasp what it actually was that Media Molecule showed other than a virtual clay sculpting program.

Matt Southern of Evolution Studios shouldn't be in front of people in public, it was like 20 minutes of him acting like he was shitting his pants and what he showed didn't look any better as it reminded me of something you would see as f2p on iTunes but it looked really damn early.

Don't under stand why Square flew people out to the show from Japan as all they did was reshow a tech demo and told people to be hyped for them unveiling a new Final Fantasy at E3.

Please God, no more inFamous crap. I hate that series more than I hate Killzone. Though I guess on a positive is that they didn't show anything so hopefully it's better I guess. And the dude talking about the police tear gassing him at a political protest made me smile, stupid hippy.

Wish I could say anything about The Witness and new Quantic Dream tech but when you bring up the living embodiment of a turd Jonathan Blow and wannabe Hollywood hack David Cage back to back, I will tune out.

Yay, Blizzard! Now here is your port of shitty Diablo 3.

Whole lot of nothing from Activision/Bungie that wasn't shown last week outside of exclusive content for Sony.

Call me crazy but yeah, I really do believe that Sony is committing suicide on what they are doing if nothing for the fact that the BOM is insane and with them being bleeding cash on a consistent basis, they either cut their throat by subsidizing it or they're forced to sell it at about $500 which in this day and age I don't think will sell. Sure, they will get people paying for a PS+ subscription (or rumored to now be called PS World) but I just don't see them offsetting the costs especially if they actually go down the rabbit hole of streaming.

And that doesn't even touch the fact that the gaming market has completely changed since 06 so doing what they did before is a bad be it conservative bet. Sony and Microsoft didn't have to fight for time when they released the 360 and PS3 as the tablet explosion hasn't happened.

Also giggle at devs being really happy with the specs as it's quite shortsighted as costs keep going up. Selling a product that cost $100+ million to a base of maybe 80 million or so isn't exactly a healthy market.

Afternoon M&M's. I think the Dude covered the PS4 stuff fairly well. I'm a PC gamer, so that's how I think. PC Gamer did a write-up about the expected hardware in the PS4 I think the real winner of this console cycle are going to be PC Gamers. We are already ahead of the announced hardware, and also porting games is going to be faster and scale better to PC hardware. I'm looking forward to what Mister Softy has to offer.

My friend Xander of Crossing Zebras fame (or @midi2304 if you are hip to the twitters) said the big take away from the Press Conference was that Sony was going to support used games in a big way. I think he called it game changing. I told him no one really gave a fuck about that, and he doubled down. I tried to bet him on it and he would not commit because he thought MS would back down from the rumors of not supporting used games. Now there is a bit of a Cultural thing here, as Xander is Scottish, and that is a big thing there. Watch this little Rev3 vid and tell me what's not mentioned.

Also if you do play Eve, you should totally listen to the CZ CSM8 election coverage. Also if you play Eve, our in game channel is AoSHQ

I have been playing a bunch of Fire Emblem: Awakening on my 3DS. It's pretty solid besides the Voice Acting. If you liked XCOM or other turn based strategy/JRPGish things check it out. Here's GB's QuickLook:

I've gotten some great submissions from the Aoshqgaming at gmail dot com address. If you want something posted. Please shoot it there and i'll work with you. The next post came to me from there, so enjoy it.

Racing maybe?

Between the time sinks of MMOs and Eve and the casual stuff like Angry Birds there is a spot for Morons who like to get their game on but can't commit huge amounts of time to it. That spot is called racing - specifically online racing with and against other Morons.

Talking with friends I think I can come up with some good options for everyone. And I mean everyone - you know how a car works, right? Can you hold a controller? Then you can join us!

The first problem comes to platform - which device to race on. I've decided to simplify the options. We will use one game on the XBOX 360 and everything else will be on the PC. No worries - all of the games are at least a year old (some much older) so you won't need cutting edge hardware to run it. I can run every PC game on my 3-year old sub-$1000 laptop that I am typing this on.

So - on to the games! For the XBOX 360 the hands down best community racing game is Forza 4. The game has been out for a while, so the community is well established and you can pick up a used copy for cheap. It is marketed as a driving simulator (and it is as close as you can get on the XBOX), but it is so much more. You can tune cars, you can modify cars, you can paint cars, you can design vinyls and put them on cars. The possibilities are endless. And you can do all this while part of a club, so everything can be shared. Suck at driving but enjoy designing? Make an AoS HQ design that we can all put on our cars! Even the racing can be whatever you want. Don't want to concentrate on shaving tenths of a second from your lap time? Drop a Ford GT engine into a crappy old Mustang II, turn off traction control and spin the tires all the way up a mountain. Then challenge your fellow Morons to beat your time. The great thing about the Club is that we do not need to be online at the same time. If you post a time on a track, we will see it when we sign on. We can have ongoing challenges where we never are online at the same time. But if you see another club-member online, fire up a race!

The club is already in place. Just search for Ace of Spades HQ Mor. It is permission only, so send me a request to join, mention this post and you are in. If I'm on a trip it might take me a couple of days to respond, but don't worry.

So what kind of fun can you have with Forza? Here is my 1984 Toyota Supra Darth Vader model. Engine swapped, tuned and tweaked to ridiculous degrees.

She'll do 0-60 in 2.6 seconds and runs to 100 mph in 7 seconds. Here she is at Laguna Seca:

And here is my Alfa Romeo MiTO Tronmobile taking the lead at Mugello:

If you have an XBOX 360, pick up Forza 4 and join us!

For the PC, there are lot of options. I would like to include games that have similar functionality to Forza 4 as far as the community goes. One that I know that works is Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. This is the one that came out a couple of years ago, not the newest one. It has online racing (as both racers and cops) and also has a Speedwall. This is where you post times, pictures and smack talk for others to see. You can do this whenever you want, and others will see it when they play. If a bunch of people are online at the same time, we can set up a 4v4 cops vs racers free-for-all. The only downside is that EA uses their own proprietary sign-in system, so it might not match up with your Steam ID or whatever else you have. This game is also available for the XBOX 360, so we can go that route if enough people want to, but I was hoping to have some non-XBOX options.

Another option is Dirt 2. This game has had two newer versions come out (Dirt 3 and Dirt Showdown) but Dirt 2 is the best of the series. Plus since it is old it is cheap! This game is tons of smashing, spinning, crashing, cursing fun. You can play alone and advance your career (in fact you should just to get access to more cars) but the fun is when we get three or more people bashing into each other on the same track. Buy Dirt through Steam and finding other Morons through the Steam group should be easy. We should probably set up a time to do this, although that usually ends up being the hardest thing to coordinate. If this post goes up on Sunday, I will be around tonight and willing to start up a Dirt (or any other PC game) to get this party started.

Imagine doing this, but having another Moron underneath you as you land:

Good times, good times! I am open to other suggestions as well, but I wanted to at least present some options that can be flexible for those of us who like to get our game on but can't commit to certain times every day or week.

-Pilot141

Thanks Pilot141, and enjoy your Cosplay of the week

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 08:51 AM | Comments (90)
Post contains 2498 words, total size 15 kb.

73 I will probably not be able to play it.  Seems my connection speed is a tad slow. 

Which is probably a good thing since I Need to, like you, be productive to generate a revenue stream. 

Posted by: Anna Puma (+SmuD) at February 24, 2013 10:36 AM (J8Sr0)

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