Well, christmas 2013 has come and gone, meaning we all had pressies and do dads under the tree (real or digital)

Here’s a roundup from each of the station team of what they got/treated themselves to this Christmas

Lonesamurai –

Well, no tree for me, so as I spent Christmas in the studios this year, I treated myself to a few things on the STEAM sale, plus I jumped back on World of Warcraft (the Mist of Pandaria upgrade was on special offer and I finally caved and resubbed)

Ok, first off, World of Warcraft – Mist of Pandara. (https://eu.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-mists-of-pandaria)
Yeah, its been out a year now, but patch 5.4 just came out recently and it peaked my hatred of Garrosh Hellscream, so I had to jump at the chance to slap him around abit. The BIGGEST thing I am loving about this expansion is the Pet Battles! Sure, they are a blatant Pokemon rip off, but damn I am loving playing them and they really break up questing in areas aswell
Yeah the questing hasn’t changed much outside of the new areas, but it has a renewed feel to it, especially when you find rare pets to battle aswell
Ok, I concede the community is still incredibly harsh, but ignoring trade chat and sticking to my guild helps
Fun Factor – 7/10, worth upgrading if you like WoW, and the unlimited starter edition is great for people to try the game out

Next up, SimCity Cities of Tomorrow Expansion Pack. (http://www.simcity.com/en_GB/buy/ep1)
I sat and tried this for a few days and honestly, it’s disappointing
The new buildings and changes make very little difference to your cities and the biggest gripe the community has with the game is the size of city plots. Instead of increasing this though, the devs have decided to go upwards instead of outwards and now future city buildings have multiple layers that you can build up
The game still doesn’t feel polished and there are still bugs that have been mentioned loads of times
Fun Factor – 4/10, if you have SimCity and enjoy it, get the expansion, but ONLY if you see it on special offer, it’s not worth full price at all

Crimsonshade –

It’s not very often that I get anything truly techie or videogame-y for Christmas, but this year has to be one of the rare exceptions, since ever since Pokémon X (http://www.pokemonxy.com/en-us/root/) came out worldwide I’ve been mentioning it several times in front of various family members and placed it high on my Amazon Wish List – so I knew, inevitably, it would become my main present this year. Yet I must admit, even up to the moment I tapped that glorious “X” icon, I felt a small sense of trepidation about whether the game would even live up to the lofty expectations I’d given it. Despite all my desires to get the game and enjoy the new 3D aspect and customisability and social options, having covered the game from its initial announcement all the way up to release, I’d also learnt of many features I WASN’T keen on. NPCs rating you on your “stylishness”? Poké-amie?

While I haven’t yet played the game long enough to properly judge either of these features, nor the Horde Battles and other touches I’m also iffy about, after two hours of play I must say I’m already in the mindset that even if they DO turn out to be crap, this is still going to be one of my favourite Pokémon games. One of the reasons for this has to be the battles, which are simply BREATHTAKING. The viewpoints, animations and even the way the Pokémon now faint and are recalled into the Poké Ball on defeat all feel directly lifted from the 3D Console games like Colosseum, Stadium and Battle Revolution. And while the 3D Slider doesn’t actually add much to the scene, throughout every battle now there’s a real sense of depth and of opponents standing a distance away and then getting up close for physical hits. It’s beautiful, in the way I never expected from a handheld Pokémon.

Another thing that pleasantly surprised me is just how extensive customisation of your character is. Oh yes, we already know about how the game now offers three male and three female pre-designed character models to choose from as your initial appearance in the game; and how you can later buy clothing to customise it further. But did you know you can actually give your in-game character two different NAMES? As well as setting your actual character name at the start of the game, pretty early into the actual story you’ll meet up with a group of “friends”, who will give each other nicknames. They’ll then offer to give you one too; and whatever you decide will be the name those NPCs, and a few others across the game, will call you by instead of your Player name. In a homage to early Pokémon games, as well as being able to type this name yourself, the NPCs will suggest three alternatives that you can choose from if you prefer. In a nice touch, these nicknames are generated based on your chosen Player name – for example, I chose to call my character Jay and was offered Big J, Li’l J and J-Meister as options. (In case you wondered, I wrote my own)

I still have a lot more play ahead of me before I can come to a final, fair opinion as to just how good Pokémon X is. But for now, safe to say, Santa was good to me this Christmas.

Predictedcyborg –

For me, the typical family Christmas. By that I mean waking up at my Dad’s spending most of the day there, then going over to my mother’s for Christmas dinner. Mmm, that turkey! Got only one thing I could review.

I like to go to at least one weekend event a year if I can, so what I wanted was a portable speaker that I could plug into my iPod Nano. Thus I received the Kitsound Invader Portable Speaker (http://www.kitsound.co.uk/product/KSINVADER) for Christmas and it is this I shall talk about.
The speaker cost about £15 (I was allowed to choose one myself based on what I needed) and feels fairly solid as well as being small enough to comfortably fit in one hand. The actual speaker part twists out of the base and back in, the base contains the three buttons: on/off, Vol Up and Vol Down. The box lists the three main features of the speaker, one being ‘fluorescent colour’ and it certainly has that. Mine is bright orange which’ll make it easier for me to find it in a dark tent should I choose to go camping again for my next gaming festival event. The battery has ‘up to 6 hours’ of playlife and recharges in 2 hours after being plugged into a USB port through a provided cable which also comes with a jack plug connected to link up more than one of the small speakers in a line for more power.

I haven’t been able to test the 6 hour playtime life of the battery, but for what it is the small speaker is fairly impressive. The audio is clearer than I was expecting to get from something this size and because you can twist down the speaker part into the case it makes the kit nicely portable, which is exactly what I needed from it as well as protecting what is the most delicate part of the thing. The buttons are a little bit stiff, but that’s only a minor complaint in the scheme of the thing. Not sure if I can recommend getting it if you want something amazing, but as a fairly cheap portable speaker that you can stand some chance of locating in a darkish room it’s right up there. I’ll be taking it with me to my next event and hopefully it’ll prove to be durable as well as portable.

7/10 for the small speaker.

Poultergeist0 –

Christmas is always one of my favourite times of year, unlike some people from the station *cough* Lone *cough* (Bah Humbug ~Lone)

So after the season of joy is over and we are all left penniless this January we should all look back over our holiday takings. There are a few bits i’d like to share with all of you, so you can all evaluate how much better your presents were this year.

Let’s kick of with the beginnings of a legend. I’ve decided to start building my own PC (yes I’m still 100% console at heart but I need more editing power in my life) and what’s a PC without a case with MILLIONS OF FANS!!!!! So I got the Cooler Master Cosmos II (http://www.coolermaster.com/microsite/cosmos_ii/design.html).

This master of cooling comes with 10 fans that will quite literally Blow you away (why does my brain come up with this awful excuse comedy) it also has enough space to fit 13 HDD, 4 Graphics cards, motherboard, you neighbours cat and a partridge in a pear tree. Standing a mighty 70.4cm this Titan gives me all the cooling, compartments and buttons that i need.
theirs a load more spec stuff you can check out here http://www.coolermaster.co.uk/product.php?product_id=6781
(but to be honest I don’t understand any of it i just sat spinning the fans for 4 hours Christmas day)

The next two pressies are much more my speed Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Windwaker HD that’s right the biggest Nintendo fan in here is up his WiiU collection to 6 games now… (Shut up it’s a good console)

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (http://www.monsterhunter.com/?lang=en)
Now i’ve always had a hit and miss relationship with the Monster Hunter series, I really wanted to get Monster Hunter G for the PSP and badgered my mum for ages till she got it me for my 13th birthday, but I didn’t understand what to do the game, the game was very text heavy tutorial wise and i never got what to actually do. But now that I’m older and (Contrary to popular Belief) wiser monster hunter 3 is a great experience; planning hunts with friends, scavenging loot and monster parts for armour and specialising yourself in certain weapons to benefit your play style. The game just seems to make sense this time around and although my characters are total green horns I’m having fun researching each monster and planning how to take them down.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate gets a: Well-Cooked Meat/10

Windwaker HD (http://www.zelda.com/windwaker/)
Mwahahaha you don’t think i’m gonna leave this to a micro review do you? oh no my friends you’ll have to check back at the end of the month to see how well i Wake said Wind but if it still feels like the original but with super clean Graphics the it’s gonna be worth getting.

One thing i can talk about is the Collectors item, included with the Windwaker collectors edition comes a 4” tall Ganondorf figure, the figure itself is made from molded colour plastic so should stand the test of time allot better than a painted model, in the UK version the figure comes with a plastic bell jar which to be honest looks nice and will keep the figure safe but it does feel a bit cheap and thin. the US variant however gets no such case but on the flip side the smaller plastic base in my opinion looks better.

The Collectable Wind Waker Ganondorf Figure gets a: Triforce of Power/10

Finally a small aside must go to a book I received from my mother this Christmas, a big blue book about a madman in a box. Well eleven different madmen that have saved the galaxy for the past 1200 years.

Doctor Who: The Vault (http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Doctor-Who-Vault-Marcus-Hearn/?isbn=9780062280633) includes the trials and tribulations of the Doctor and the lovely BBC crew that brought him to our Televisions, Detailing the history behind the original concept to the rebirth in 2005 and beyond.

Doctor Who: The Vault gets a: allons-y/11

Hope you all found yourselves with Glad Tidings this year and keep the spirit all year long.
In the words of Tiny Tim “God Bless Us Everyone”
(is that enough?.. that fills the quota for Christmasy stereotypical bullshit right?.. Cool)
Happy 2014 everyone.

The standalone version of DayZ was released on Steam Early Access in mid-December.

The standalone version of open-world survival game DayZ is off to a remarkable start, having sold over 800,000 copies in less than three weeks — a figure that far outpaces the amount its developer hoped to sell in the game’s first three months.

In a comment on Reddit, DayZ creator Dean Hall explained what the expectations for the game were and what this outpouring of support means for the game.

“We ([publisher Bohemia Interactive] and I) had very ambitious plans for 2014 already, however this amount of sales was completely unexpected,”

he wrote.

“Honestly, 250k within a quarter was what I would have considered a success. So to move nearly 800,000 in under a month is crazy.

“We’ll be finalizing our roadmap in mid January, but it is safe to say that this kind of result will be having a very positive effect on that roadmap.”

DayZ started out as a mod for PC shooter ArmA II and quickly became incredibly popular. Hall had aspirations of turning the mod into a standalone game from the start, with that project officially being announced in mid-2012. The game has already served as the inspiration for a number of other games — some more so than others — and last month an alpha version was released on Steam as an Early Access game.

In just 12 hours, it had already seen 88,000 downloads and was attracting new player registrations at a rate of 200 per second. Now, less than three weeks later, DayZ is well on its way to one million units sold, and all without the benefit of a Steam sale — the game was routinely among the top sellers on Steam during the Steam Holiday Sale despite not being on sale.

Hall is admirably not shy about cautioning some people away from buying the game at this stage. Games in Early Access can be at many different stages of development, some more complete and playable than others. While DayZ is playable, it’s far from finished. After explaining that buying the alpha now gets you the full version once it’s released, Hall advised one prospective buyer on Reddit,

“I would recommend a very careful and critical review of whether purchasing now is such a good idea. There are many problems which can ruin your gameplay experience. These are being actively fixed – but if you delayed your purchase by a month you would pay the same price but it would be a better experience. Something to consider.”

DayZ is now available on Steam for $29.99 / €23.99 / £19.99.

Some news stories make you smile or laugh, others make you cry or rage. Then there are the elite few that make you go “WTF?” Put this firmly in the latter category.

When Democracy 3 – the latest title in Positech Games’ series of PC-based Political Strategy games – was preparing for its US launch, not one person broke a sweat. The game, self-dubbed “the ultimate political strategy game,” was launched on Steam on October 14, 2013 – as well as a retail game for PC, Mac and Linux – with nobody raising an eyelid to its game-play simulating the career as president or prime minister of a democratic government, the very theme of the series’ eight-year history. So why, in all seriousness, is a “major U.S. advertising agency” refusing to run banner ads promoting the game due to its “political content”?

Cliff Harris, the founder of Positech Games, reported on his blog yesterday that an ad for the recently-released Democracy 3 was deemed by a “BIG game-advertising agency” to be inappropriate to run on a particular website. When Harris asked why, he was told, “We can not promote any politics as this is a sensitive topic.”

Harris was noticeably unimpressed with the response, believing politics is a MUCH less sensitive subject than some of the OTHER things commonly featured in today’s games that go without criticism – as evidenced by the next statement on his blog:

“I bet ads for games like Hitman, or GTA, or games where you get slow-mo closeups of people’s skulls being blasted apart by high-caliber bullets are just fine. But discuss income tax? OH NOES THE WORLD WILL END! It’s stuff like this that sometimes makes me ashamed to be in this industry. Half of the industry wants to be grown up and accepted as art, the other half have the mentality of seven year olds. I’m pretty cynical, but I never expected my ads for a game about government-simulation to be too controversial to be shown (for money no less…).”

True enough. What’s more, the whole controversy smacks to me as discriminating against Democracy 3 rather than a genuine concern. After all, politics in video games is not exactly unheard of – there have been games as far back as the NES era where you played as a president of the United States or leader of some fictionalised land. For example, how about Civilization? A real-time strategy series inviting players to “Build an empire to stand the test of time”, Civilization has a much longer history than Democracy, beginning in 1991 in the DOS computer era and still going 20 years later. The games involve you making decisions on places to build; wars to fight; and even setting diplomatic rules – which makes them also political in nature even if it’s not as obviously signposted. If political content is really as big a problem as this unidentified agency is implying, why has Civilization had a free pass for so long? Here’s hoping common sense prevails – though sadly, it seems to do so less often these days…

Do I want it?   Not really

Will I buy it?   Of course I bloody will, I’ve bought all the bloody DLC so far aswell…

I’m such an idiot, but hell, I want a Supreme Commander Mech in my city…

Available from Nov 12th, but available to preorder now

Get ready for a visual delight. The latest X Rebirth trailer provides a montage of gameplay action that can’t help but touch the Sci-Fi fan in each of us.

The November 15th release is fast approaching!!

 

For 14 years studio Egosoft has been synonymous with space simulation games. Starting with the 1999 release of X: Beyond the Frontier to the 2011 release of X3: Albion Prelude (not to mention the numerous notable expansions, the most recent being the 2013 Shady Business expansion), Egosoft has pushed the boundaries of what a space simulation game can be.

 

But X Rebirth is Different.

 

All prior X Games before X Rebirth represent the layering upon layering of additional features, many of which were never part of the game’s original design. Responding to the large community of space simulation fans that flocked to X: Beyond the Frontier, the developers at Egosoft obliged the plea for more – more freedom, more ships, more realism, and more things to do. However, even before the 2005 release of X3: Reunion, it had become clear that this development methodology had made the series inherently complicated and unnecessarily impenetrable for any outsider who had not begun playing the X Series games from the very start.

 

The solution? To start anew.

 

X Rebirth represents the culmination of 7 years of work redefining what a space simulation can be.

So, onto the X Rebirth Limited Edition Box Version

The additional content for the Limited Edition Box Version of X Rebirth have been finalized!
– Updated Color X Encyclopedia (ebook)
– Art Book of Concept Art (printed)
– Player’s Manual (printed)
– Sountrack
– Bonus Videos

Pre-Orders for the X Rebirth Limited Edition Box Version is now available at the Tri Synergy Store

Definitely looks great and well worth preordering we think