If you’re an FPS fan then you are definitely anxiously awaiting the release of Modern Warfare 2 and would love to show your support for the game by dressing up your Avatar in some MW2 gear.

Today Robert Bowling has let us know via Twitter that there are in fact Xbox 360 Avatar items in the works:

“Not sure we’ll be doing any Avatar rewards, but we are making avatar items. With some free ones hopefully.”

So, expect to see Modern Warfare 2 Avatar items hit Xbox Live some time before the game’s November 10th release date.

Lil Wayne is a Grammy award winning rapper who sold over 1 million copies of Tha Carter III in its first week on store shelves. However, when he’s not busy making music, he’s apparantly an avid gamer. But he isn’t just any kind of gamer instead he is a gamer with an Xbox that plays “every game from A-Z, Atari, Nintendo, pong, movies and even porn”.

But wait, why doesn’t my Xbox 360 do that? Well, the only way this is possible is if Mr. Carter has a modded Xbox. Sure, mark it off as convenience but you would think a guy with that kind of money could afford to buy his games rather than have them all stored on one console.

via joystiq

GameStop has recently put up a listing for the Xbox 360 Wireless N network adapter that we’ve been hearing about for some time now that lets us know of both a release date and price.

Of course, GameStop has been known to put up phoney release dates as a place holder until the manufacturer actually speaks of one but they currently have the adapter listed as releasing on October 3rd at $99.99.

A steep price but if you’re looking to ramp up your wireless connection this is your answer.

Kotaku recently sat down with Microsoft’s Phil Spencer to have a bit of a chat about the forthcoming motion controllers and what consumers can expect from them. Spencer, for one, is very optimistic about motion controllers’ future saying we will most likely seeing them accompany consoles in living rooms everywhere.

Below is a quote from Spencer regarding his stance on the subject:

“Much like with multiplayer, I think it will become the norm. If you are a racing game without multiplayer the game just didn’t sell. We think that motion control, we think voice recognition, should become a part of gaming as well.”

While I agree, motion control is definitely the future (showcased by the Wii’s success) I don’t know how fast the generation of gamers who grew up with a normal control will move on. For instance, playing Halo with Project Natal? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Jefferies recently went on record to say that Microsoft has just recently given developers to go ahead to develop games that run below a 720p resolution. You’ll make note that we reported to you a while back that games like Halo 3: ODST and Modern Warfare 2 run at a resolution lower than 720p, although those developers most likely got special treatment considering the scale of both titles.

via kotaku

Currently, Best Buy has listed 231 titles that are available through the promotion including forthcoming titles such as BioShock 2 and Final Fantasy XIII.

Peep the full list here.

The game will feature intelligence warfare prominently with players getting access to unmanned drones for recon and communication purposes. In the non-xbox games every mech had its purpose and a skilled light mech pilot could defeat larger, more heavily armed opponents. Unfortunately in MechAssault there was a huge balancing issue. No matter how swiftly you ran in the lighter mechs eventually a single shot or two would land and blow you to smithereens. They’re looking to fix that by adding in experience points that you accumulate by piloting specific classes of mechs. The more time you pilot one class the greater your abilities with that type will become.

One of the perks of the title is the custom character mode where you can assemble your own legendary warrior(s) for use in the game. You start off with a handful of outfits and though you unlock more as you play, the variety is not as wide as one would hope, but they’re going to remedy this soon via DLC. I definitely feel appreciated as a fan because all the DLC for the game is completely free of charge. They’re also adding in a pack of new background music for those who are a fan of their odd composite of traditional asian music and rock.

That’s the thrust of the review today, folks–this IS in fact the ultimate racing simulation experience if you’ve either never actually had a racing simulation experience before or you’ve never actually driven anything before.

Basically, the plot of the game, such as it is, is exactly that. You’re going to drive cars.  No, this doesn’t exactly have the same literary quality of Ridge Racer’s young up-and-comer looking to burn his way through the ranks of the professional driving circuit, or the various underground racers where you’re out to gather pinks and impress hot chicks who like to wave flags half-naked for little or no conceivable reason.  You’re just here to go fast and turn left, except for when, on occasion, you will be called upon to turn RIGHT.

You may be asking yourself at this point, hey, if that’s all I’m supposed to do, then why even bother?  I mean, if I wanted to be stuck in traffic for twenty minutes while I tried to drive a car down a twisty, windy track, then why don’t I just jump in my car and actually, you know, go somewhere?  At least then everybody on the Internet’ll stop calling me a basement dweller because I haven’t left the house in months.

Sadly, I don’t have much of an answer for that.  Oh, sure, with Race Pro you’ll get to try out various different kinds of cars, on various different types of tracks, with various different types of options.  I give Race Pro due credit for having an almost OBSCENE number of options–not only can you tweak the difficulty, you can also tweak subclasses of the difficulty as well.  For instance, if you’re racing on hard mode and find the AI’s just a little TOO aggressive with the competing drivers, you can actually dial down the racers’ AI difficulty level.  It’s an absolutely customizable racing experience.

Absolutely customizable, yes…but worthwhile?  That’s where I’m going to have to say no.  I had SERIOUS problems with the controls on this one–even something that should be video-game simple, the drift maneuver, I couldn’t manage to pull off.  In fact, driving the Mini Cooper in the first level felt exactly like the headline described, like driving a brick through wet cement.  I remember trying to pull off a turn, so naturally, I decelerate so I can jam on the gas after I’ve started to pitch my nose a bit.  The car promptly decides that it prefers going straight, and thusly goes COMPLETELY OFF THE TRACK and into the dirt.  The game then warns me that I’m “cutting track”, to which I respond with a torrent of obscenities detailing the fact that, one, I already KNOW I’m off the track and, two, that I wouldn’t have been if the game had done what it was told to do in the first place.

This is, of course, profoundly irritating, but there’s probably a workaround if you’re desperate enough for a new racing game to try.  I personally say that there are better racing games out there–vastly better, in fact–but if you want a driving sim that’ll give you a huge fight, then Race Pro is the game you want.

Bioware’s newest RPG, Dragon Age Origins reportedly contains similarly racy content at some point as well and one can only assume that Mass Effect 2 will allow more boffing of sexy blue aliens (or aliens of some other hue). In an interview Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuck defended his company’s decision, citing that that they’re doing this to reflect real human relationships in a “sophisticated mature experience”. He admitted that they’re not necessary for every game but “in certain types of games it makes sense to have them.”

Do digital recreations of sex scenes, no matter how tasteful, really improve the immersiveness of a video game’s romantic subplots? Public opinion still seems to be split on the matter, so what do you think?

As both Bungie and Epic games had been given then chance to play around with the features of Natal well before its announcement, the question has been posed as to whether or not Natal controls will feature into their future titles with both Halo: Reach and Gears of War III on the horizon. Epic’s Cliff Bleszinksi says that though they’re keeping an open mind, he thinks it’s unlikely: ”Y’know, we’ll take a look at Natal–no promises–but it’s likely that the classic control interface is what Epic will be working on in the foreseeable future.”

He did admit as many have that in some ways Natal could be used in conjunction with the existing controller: “ I think there’s ways that you could merge the two interfaces and supplement a classic game with Natal controls to make something compelling.” Thus far the camps seem divided along more or less predictable lines with casual game focused companies more interested in motion devices and the rest looking at them with either mild interest or utter disdain.

First, the plot itself.  A prequel to the original Call of Juarez, this time we’re with the McCall brothers as they fight their way through Georgia at about the same time William Tecumseh Sherman began his infamous March to the Sea.  With Georgia in slowly burning ruins, the McCalls, despite their spectacular valiance, aren’t able to repulse the invasion.  It even gets personal when Sherman’s March takes the McCall family farm with it.  Thus, two out of the three brothers McCall turn outlaw and go off to find the legendary gold of Juarez.  Along the way, they’ll tackle a variety of enemies–an Apache connected to the gold, a Mexican bandit and his lovely concubine, and even the Confederate army they went AWOL from in otder to turn outlaw.  The McCall brothers will thus launch a swath of lawlessness and destruction that will in turn leave its mark on the entirety of the old West forever.

I know, it sounds like an awesome story.  And watching it unfold, it really IS an awesome story.  But this is not where the aforementioned problems come into play.  The problems themselves come in on the actual gameplay end of things.

The controls are solid enough–no real problem there–but the biggest problem is that Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is so very limited.  For instance, in the first level, you’re mostly crawling around in some trenches, trying to piece together where exactly you’re supposed to go.  Sure, you’ve got a marker giving you some idea where to go, but it’s still tough to tell if you need to take this corner or that corner back there and go around the long way, if you get my drift.

I’m convinced that I’ve become somewhat spoiled by Fallout 3 as I wind up comparing every first person shooter I play to it.  And sure enough, stacked up against an opening act like that, pretty much everything else will have to pale in comparison.  There’s just no two ways about it–you can’t eat a porterhouse steak then go chow down on meatloaf and say it’s on par with the best beef ever.  So what you have to do in response is take everything in isolation.  By itself, Call of Juarez has a decent multiplayer mode with lots of options, plenty of wild action, lots of gunplay and explosivesplay and all the things that make a shooter game solidly entertaining.  The graphics are at least fair, and the sound is solidly done.

And yet I still find myself somewhat let down, because I’ve seen what first person shooters actually can be. I’ve seen the kind of fun that can be had when you put someone behind the gun and let them roam wild and free over a huge map.  Every maze-crawler, every railroad run, every point-a-to-point-b game that follows is just a sad, sorry imitation.  Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood may be good enough for a play, but it’s definitely not as good as it could be.

Not to be outdone, the folks developing Left 4 Dead 2 have put in their own loving tribute, but this time to a far more modern piece of zombie lore: Shaun of the Dead. No, you won’t be hurling records at the shambling corpses, but you’ll have the far more satisfactory crunch involved with pounding on them with a cricket bat. The efficiency of this weapon is yet to be announced since Valve are keeping a tight lid on things, but whether it takes one or a hundred whacks with this simple implement to dispatch a zombie, every swing will be full of glee. I’m guessing once the game comes out the number of virtual cricket bats in use will far exceed the number of real cricket bats being employed.

Fuel assumes a future in which Al Gore is allowed by Federal law to laugh and point at everybody who can’t produce a receipt for a copy of An Inconvenient Truth.  Seriously, though–it’s an “alternate present” in which the weather has only very recently gone completely insane, turning large areas of the United States into “no-go” zones, or areas where no human being can safely live.  Thus, humans pack themselves into huge megacities, a la Judge Dredd, except these human hives are apparently warm and comforting places powered by wind and solar and biodiesel, and thus everyone lives in Al Gore’s fantasyland.

There are, however, a few mavericks who realize that, the sudden cessation of gasoline usage has left a whole LOT of spare capacity just sort of lying around, and thus, this gives them the opportunity to take it for their own use.  Hey, why not?  Not like anyone ELSE is using the stuff anyway!  So they appropriate large quantities of fuel and use it to stage quasi-legal offroad joyride races.

To that end, you’re dropped into a scale area of roughly five thousand square miles and set to race.  You’ll be able to select various races against other competitors, as well as having an opportunity to engage in “free riding” but more on that in a minute.  First, we have to deal with the races themselves.  In this way, Fuel is a lot like literally every other racing game on the market.  You drive around trying desperately to pass other people and reach the finish line.  In this way, Fuel is just as good as any other.  The graphics are solid enough, the controls are a little twitchy and take a little getting used to but still do fairly well, and the background music is appropriately rock.

Fuel would be a game much like any other if it weren’t for one critical difference–the free ride mode.  Free ride does just what it sounds like it does; free ride allows you to tear around the map in literally any direction you please, pulling tire-squealing turns on roads, donuts on the beach, whatever you like,  There’s even some structure here as your free ride mode allows you to drive to places where challenges are being held.  Completing these challenges nets you extra fuel, which in turn allows you to buy other vehicles.  Plus, you’ll be able to obtain new parts for your livery, find fantastic views at so-called vista points, and just generally run riot all over the map.

Fuel is, therefore, a game of surprising depth and substance, as well as plenty of fun.  For those of you who already like racing games, you may well have found the ultimate in racers right there.  But for those of you who haven’t been very fond of the racing game subgenre, then you may well want to give Fuel a try.  This is the game that just might change your mind about racers.

Every once in a while though we get an interesting game that brings an interesting take on one of the standard action formulae. First person shooters are notoriously uninventive, but Aspyr Media and Mindware Studios are teaming up to create an FPS that’ll blow your mind. Or at least blow it up. Some writers have toyed with the idea of psychic therapy, somehow going directly into someone’s mind to fix their issues, but in Dreamkiller you’ll be taking a much more cathartic approach. As psychologist Alice Drake you possess the unusual ability to enter into the minds of your patients and fight their demons with an array of weapons and powers.

The game will be spread over twelve different levels with an overarching plot that hurtles you towards a showdown with an ultimate evil force. It might not be the most unique premise in the world, feeling like the love child of the film The Cell and an HP Lovecraft story but the underlying potential is great. Games that take place in a setting which can completely ignore any laws of physics or realistic dimensions can be incredibly unique and unusual. Do I think this game will live up to its incredible potential? Probably not, but I can certainly hope. The title is set to ship this fall for PC and Xbox 360.

The device could be used in cooperation with a controller or on its own for certain portions, though to play the game entirely through gestures isn’t likely. To bank the potential success of an upcoming Halo game on the install base of an as-yet unreleased peripheral would be a huge risk, though the potential for interesting control scheme combinations does make this possibility quite interesting. Imagine controlling a vehicle by leaning side to side while controlling the turrets and assorted weaponry using the controller.

As for the plot, you play a random traveler on his way to a certain city that’s populated entirely by cheerful anthropomorphic animals despite the fact that your character is clearly human.  Those of you wondering if your avatar is, in fact, some kind of closet furry join me in wondering the exact same thing.  Your new town is admittedly rather small and quaint, but boasts a clothing shop, a museum, a bus station, and a general store run by everybody’s favorite loan shark / raccoon, Tom Nook.  A word about Tom Nook–he operates the general store Nook’s Cranny (ba DUM bum!) and will give you your first home loan to purchase a place in the small town.  He will then offer you a job in Nook’s Cranny to get you started paying down your debt, but he’ll promptly fire you after one day with a huge amount in mortgage left.  At least I think that’s the currency of choice there; I’m a little spacey on that detail.  Anyway, the good news is that Nook’s Cranny deals in pretty much EVERY ITEM KNOWN TO MAN OR ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMAL, and thus, you’ll be able to sell Nook any random piece of garbage you find anywhere to pay down your house debt, despite the fact that he could literally stay within sight of his shop and get the exact same thing himself for free.

Seriously–it’s actually quite possible to pay off a home loan in Animal Crossing City Folk with cherries you find on public trees.  No wonder Tom Nook’s a loan shark–people can pay him off with shiny rocks and sticks they found on the ground and he’s required by some kind of law to take them.  He’s got to charge ridiculous fees just to keep ahead of the deflationary curve!  If I went down to MY bank and asked if they take cherries on a mortgage payment they’d probably have me arrested.  Or shot.  Possibly both!

This game is just the epoch of absurdity.  For instance–after getting fired from Nook’s, I went to the town’s bulletin board on my first day and left a rambling, profanity-laden diatribe about how I wished every resident of the town would die in a series of horrible tragedies just to see what would happen.  Sure enough…they greeted me with cheerful smiles and sunny waves and offers to join them for dinner or bridge or knocking over garbage cans or whatever giant anthropomorphic animals do for fun.  You can’t get a rise out of these people, thus you’re left to play the game as intended.

Which is, sadly, boring.  You go fishing.  You find fossils which you take to the museum where they make appropriate oohing and aahing noises over before putting them on display.  Occasionally you can go into the city (hence the name, City Folk) and see a movie or go shopping.  It’s like life, if your banker were a raccoon that accepted tree bark on a mortgage payment and your neighbor were a five foot tall pig that walked on its hind legs and sent you a vase on your birthday.

And frankly, if I wanted my games to be more like real life, I think I’d just stop, you know, playing games.

Here’s the basic rundown on the Dynasty Warriors series for anyone unfamiliar: you (and possibly a friend) play as warriors in feudal China and spend your time plowing through hordes of opponents on a variety of battlefields. Many characters have story modes which are held together by text explanations and cutscenes, though this is a fairly optional experience as the game is in no way detracted from by skipping them. The battles are rather epic as your characters are generally larger than life, featuring heavily stylized costumes and bearing powerful weapons allowing you to sweep aside entire groups of enemy soldiers in a single swing. As you progress through battles you improve your character, gain new and superior weapons and collect horses.

The Empires games play differently than the rest of the series. Gone are the cutscenes and detailed stories where you simply go from one battle to the next. The vast majority of the game is still centered around the epic conflicts, but you’re allowed to do things at your own pace. You begin a campaign by choosing your time period which only affects which factions will be the most prominent.

There are three subsections of the campaign mode, vagrant, officer and ruler mode. Which one you begin with depends on which character you choose. In vagrant mode you are simply a wandering warrior unable to affect the overall landscape. You engage in battles by accepting mercenary assignments, though there aren’t any with a profoundly negative spin. They vary between protecting villagers from bandits or ‘monsters’ (tigers and wolves who possess elemental attacks), wiping out groups of pirates or protecting units on their way to an escape point. Each event has its own set of optional objectives which you can do to gain more experience, gold and gems (I’ll get to these later), though these would be far more interesting if there was some variation between them. In these mini battles you’ll find other characters in need of assistance; help them a few times and you can recruit them to journey with you.

Though you can spend quite a lot of time engaged in mercenary work and improve your character eventually you’ll want to join up with a faction to start making your mark on the landscape. The easiest way is to join up with an existing ruler to become an officer (you can move to whichever area has the officer you prefer to side with). As an officer you embark on battles when instructed to by your liege lord, but serve a ruler long enough and you’ll be trusted enough to help dictate policy at the occasional council meetings.

If you’re not a fan of dancing to someone else’s tune you can strike off on your own and invade a land to usurp its rule and begin your own rise to prominence. This is where strategy comes into the picture, though it’s not a terribly complex system. As a ruler you can assemble a cadre of officers, each of whom has their own troops to bring to battle. When you invade a territory you have to choose which officers to bring with you and your choices will determine how much work you’ll have to do to defeat the enemies. As with other Dynasty Warriors games the map has various bases including supply camps, armories, watchposts and each force’s main camp and while it’s not essential to conquer every camp in sight, the enemy commander doesn’t appear until you’ve connected your main camp to theirs by conquering certain bases as indicated by connecting lines on the main map.

As you battle your officers of course lose troops. Do poorly enough and you can have officers defect mid-battle. Of course the opposite can happen with enemy troops changing their stripes and joining your side. While eventually you can get enough officers so rotating out those with diminshed troop counts allows you to invade more often (you can only attack once per month) it’s important at first to be cautious and gauge your strength relative to your enemies. You also have certain cards that can be played to give you an edge, some improve attack strength, others replenish troops while still others offer more resource points (needed to utilize the cards) in future months at the expense of gold.

The greatest appeal of this game relative to standard Dynasty Warriors titles comes in the sheer level of customization. In battle you can give orders to your troops- tell them to attack and they charge forth at enemy bases. Issue an order for defense and they’ll stalwartly guard your bases. You can also instruct them to regroup on you or simply tell them to do what they think is best (which most often just means attacking).

In between battles you can also invest money into upgrading your weapon, training new skills and purchasing better horses. This is essential as unlike many other entries in the series, losing happens quite often at early levels. An enemy officer can occasionally slay you in a single quick combo. Cash gets you a stronger weapon and allows you to imbue it with elemental damage, increase its range and many other things. You also have new special skills similar to the tome abilities in DW6. Send out a sheet of fire to toast your opponents, improve your attack for a period of time, enable a high-speed dash attack or even restore your health by using one of up to four special skills. No matter how much money you have, it’s impossible to imbue your weapon or learn new abilities without the relevant gems. You get these over the course of battles and by purchasing them in shops. You can also put money into the weapons and skills of allied officers, be they the special characters we’ve come to know and love or run-of-the-mill officers, giving you the choice of either relying upon group strengths or simply pimping out your own character and blazing across the battlefield, striking down everyone in your path.

Empires also brings back a feature that has been absent from the series for some time: the ability to create your own character. The level of customization is surprisingly robust- you can change everything from hairstyle to height and even change the pitch of their voice. As you play through the campaign mode you unlock more clothing and armor options which you can add to existing customized characters as you play. While you can choose any existing character’s weapon style, it would have been interesting to have a few entirely new options to choose from.

The character roster only has one addition, Meng Huo, though they’ve addressed the complaint many had with DW6: that most characters felt the same, bearing mostly polearms, swords and clubs. They gave Zhang He back his claw weapons and Taishi Ci his characteristic dual rods. Ma Chao bears an impossibly huge sword, Cao Pi wields a long narrow sword suited to quick attacks, Ling Tong uses a three-section-staff and Yue Ying has a strange weapon mounted on a bracer that’s part sword and part crossbow. The most interesting however is Meng Huo whose weapon is a simple yet massive stone column.

The game did unfortunately drop a few of the more interesting features of Dynasty Warriors 6. In Empires when assaulting a castle or base you no longer have to smash through the door or claim ground for siege weapons. Everything is open to whatever invading army happens by, which while easier overall feels less authentic and takes away from what could have been another layer of strategy. They’ve added in the ability to select the background music for your battles and have included an incredible array of songs from the series back catalog, but unless you have a particular fascination for their odd blend of Chinese/techno/rock music I’d just recommend supplying your own soundtrack.

It’s an excellent game for fans of the series or someone who’s looking for a bit of simple escapism, but if you only had a lukewarm interest in these fanciful, semi-historically inspired tales this won’t likely do much for you.

Website Game-tuts supposedly got an early look at the achievements for Halo 3: ODST and posted it online. I’ve posted it here and if you’re truly concerned with not spoiling the experience of the game I’d advise not watching it. It’s entirely possible that this is something simply ginned up by a savvy hoaxer since things like this abound, but there is the off chance that it’s genuine.

Earlier this month Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was caught stating that a new Xbox 360 console will be released in 2010 sporting a built-in camera and a new interface. Shortly after, Microsoft proceeded to say that the executive was mistaken and that there will be no new console in 2010.

Well, it looks like Ballmer is back this time apologizing for his “misleading” statement saying, “I confused the issue with my poorly chosen words. There is no news in my comments. Things are as reported after E3. Sorry”.

Natal hopefuls need not be discouraged as the motion-sensing camera is still (presumably) slated for a release sometime in 2010. As for a new Xbox console? Probably not.

Read (Joystiq)