Gears of War 3 Announced! Trailer 1 Released! April 13, 2010

All you gears heads out there will be more than happy to hear that the leaked announcement turned out to be legitimate.  Gears of War 3 will be coming to the Xbox 360 on April 5th, 2011.

Gears of War defined the Xbox 360 and the HD gaming revolution back in 2006, this game looks to enhance and refine it.  I still remember when this game came out I had my very first Red Ring Of Death, rendering me unable to play it for several weeks, but I still got the Collector’s Edition on launch day because I was such a huge fan of the Gears of War: Road to E3 documentary.

A friend of mine was in the market for an HDTV at the time and just happened to be working at a TV appliance store, who had no problem at all if he brought his equipment down to test it on their TVs to see which worked best.  I have no idea if this is usual company policy for any store, but I have talked to a few managers and they have no issues with it, they think its a good way to get a sale.

When his co-workers saw that he had brought a 360 AND Gears of War they demanded that he hook it up to their home theatre setup.  In the back of the store they had five 1080 HDTVs hooked up, ranging in size from 60″ to 110″, and an HD projector.  We went over to the 110″ DLP and laid claim to the whole area.  We hooked his 360 into the split and had control over the images in all TVs in that area, but due to bandwith limitations (we weren’t using HDMI, it was still component, although 1080p was supported by the 360 at the time, there were no HDMI boxes yet, and the splits didn’t support HDMI yet either) we had to play the game in 1080i.  Nobody really seemed to mind, the game looked fantastic.

Two older people sat down at the 60″ Sony and started watching what was on the screens.  They looked over to us and realized what they were seeing was being manipulated by us.  The man was happy that what he saw wasn’t real, he told us he had assumed he was looking at images of the Iraq War.  That was a good night.  Why don’t more TV stores do stuff like that?  You’d think if you wanted to sell TVs you’d put something on the TVs that looked really good, like The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray.

Here’s the first official trailer for the game. 

Gears of War 3 Details Released (By Accident) April 9, 2010

After the major cliffhanger that ended Gears of War 2, many considered a third game to be all but certain, espessially given the millions of copies sold of both games of the platform.  Then take into account how many years have passed since the last release, and many were considering that Gears of War 3 might just come out by the end of this year.

Well it’s not.  It is however coming early next year.  This morning, Xbox Live posted up that Gears of War 3 will be released in April 2011, one year from now.  The post has since been removed, as it was likely posted by accident.  CliffyB was supposed to go on national telivision on Monday to premere “something” but then delayed his appearance to further polish what they were planning to show.

However, please be aware this is not official.  Microsoft’s Xbox Live news channels have never been frauded in this way so it’s unlikely this was some kind of hack.  It was likely something intended to be time delayed to coinside with the show reveal, and when the reveal didn’t happen, someone probably didn’t reset the reveal’s timer.

F.E.A.R. 3 Announced! April 9, 2010

Back in 2005, I was a huge fan of what Monolith Productions was working on.  They had first grabbed my attention with the ahead of its time (perhaps a bit TOO ahead of it’s time) Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact, which while got some great reviews and was the first game I can think of that was using the DLC payment model, it was a commercial failure and was quickly forgotten for the next game Monolith released, No One Lives Forever.

No One Lives Forever was a commercial and critical tour de force that I enjoyed tremendously.  A sequel and an expansion pack was released for the game, but after the expansion pack Monolith turned all efforts to this new PC franchise they were creating, First Encounter Assault Recon, or F.E.A.R.  That first F.E.A.R. game revolutionized first person shooters, had incredible artificial intelligence, and could show that an action game could truely be scary.

The second F.E.A.R. game, which was cross platform, was a solid game, but not the major seller of the first.

Monolith is out, replaced by Day One Studios.  John Carpenter, famous for directing such cult films as “Escape from New York” and “The Thing” is going to serve as a project consultant.  If The Spoony One has anything to say about that, espessially after the terrible “The Thing” PC/Xbox game, he might have a problem, espessially if he has to dust off his fuse box counter.

This game is going to focus on branching cooperative play, something the first games never featured.  There will be multiple protagonists with differing stories, and that alone sounds pretty interesting.  F.E.A.R. 2 really brought nothing new to the game’s formula other than slightly better graphics and widescreen support (something F.E.A.R. 1 didn’t have at launch).

I’m looking foward to it, this is going to give me an excuse to finally play through my copy of F.E.A.R. 2.

iPhone OS 4.0 Announced, Multitasking Confirmed, No New Phone April 8, 2010

Apple announced today that their new operating system for the iPhone and iPad would be a radical upgrade from their current versions.  The chief component of the upgrade is going to be the much requested multitasking feature, a feature that other phones such as the Palm Pre touted as their way to stay ahead of Apple when they debued their phones.  The feature has been implemented with battery life in mind, and the coding path to implement it is apparently very easy for private developers to update their programs with.

Also fans of Achievements (yes, those of you who own Xbox 360s) will be happy to know that iPhone OS 4.0 will have upgraded gaming support with a whole new gaming platform, and in game achievement support cross platform.  Many developers have launched competing cross program game achievement platforms, this probably will make them obsolite.  Its nice Apple has implemented this feature, although the timing could have something to do with the fact Windows Mobile 7 will support the Xbox 360 achievement platform with it’s own games.

What wasn’t announced today was something a lot of people were expecting, a new iPhone.  With every OS release announcment Apple has predictably released a new phone along with it with the OS in mind, not today.  A fourth generation iPhone has been rumored since the iPad’s launch, and the last rumors I heard involved a 940×480 resolution screen and a slightly slower iPad processor, but nothing of the sort was announced today, making credibility of those rumors plummet.  Also, rumors of these phones being provided by providers other than AT&T in the US was also not addressed, further plummeting the credibility of those as well.

iPhone OS 4.0 will come to the iPhone 3G and 3GS in the summer and iPad in the fall.  You’d think after this major press announcement they would have a more solid release date.

Alan Wake Has Gone Gold! April 7, 2010

Remedy has announced today that the game that I’ve been waiting five years for has been completed.  Alan Wake, is done.

This is quite an important day for me actually.  I remember being one of the first people to interview Remedy for my old site, The Deep Six, back when the game was announced prior E3 2005, the first E3 I was not allowed to attend.  After that E3, Remedy was on a PR whirlwind doing promotion for the game.  It was at the time coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, the later two not yet released and the former nowhere near as powerful as it needed to be at the time to handle this game.  In fact I specifically remember a question I asked Remedy if they would be targeting next generation PCs since they were targeting next generation consoles.  They didn’t know at the time, but I turned out to be right about that as the game was eventually demoed on Multi-Core Intel CPUs running Nvidia Directx 10 Graphics.  It would’ve taken a PC that powerful to run Alan Wake no doubt, and the extra development time would be quite expensive to have kept going with a PC version (to say nothing of the fact that it would’ve been exclusive to Windows Vista and Windows 7, and we all know how badly games exclusive to those platforms sold).

Congrats to Remedy for putting the wrapper on this fantastic game release.  Alan Wake will be released exclusively in the US on May 18th, 2010 on the Xbox 360.

Here’s a teaser Remedy released on April 1st for Alan Wake Wars.   I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this either, the guys at Remedy have a great sense of humor.

Mirror’s Edge iPhone Released…on iPad? April 4, 2010

Well I’m a bit dissapointed this morning.  I was following some news about what were the best games for the newly released iPad, and ironically enough the game to top that list was Mirror’s Edge.  So I of course checked my iPhone’s app store to download the iPhone version (or multi platform version) only to find it wasn’t there.

Looks like us iPhone owners who have waited since December for this game will have to wait a bit longer for the iPhone version, while the iPad owners (the three of you there are) who weren’t expecting this release at all will have one great game to play on their shiny new iPads.  Hopefully this is a sign that the iPhone version will be released soon, since other than the alternate resolutions the gameplay of both versions seem to be identical.  I’m just suprised this is how they announce the game was going to be cross platform, no iPad version was announced, unlike the iPhone version which has been anticipated since December of last year.

Maybe this is the reason the game was delayed three months, it was originally supposed to be out in January.

Apple Releases iPad Today! April 3, 2010

It’s April 3rd, and you know what that means.  The WiFi only versions of the Apple iPad are officially released.  Currently the iPad comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions, and start at $500 US.  Currently, Apple Retail Stores will probably not have any in inventory as they were likely sold out to preorders last month.  However, Best Buy is expected to have some on the shelves today, so if you really want one, don’t botther with the Apple store, go to Best Buy.

A 3G model of the iPad is expected for later this month.