Big L (R.I.P)- MVP Cookin Soul remix

The remix is tight. If you haven’t heard any of the Cookin Soul crew’s work go check it out. They do remixes to plenty of artists. Old School, and Mainstream, as well as Underground. They make some real good beats filled with soul…..which lives up to their name.

Cecil Kim, concept artist for the God of War series, posted this a few days ago on his personal site. The caption on the site reads, “Fire Titan battles against Zeus and his allies.” Kim has worked on the previous God of War’s and Final Fantasy IX in the past.

The interesting thing about this artwork is the Kratos drawing in the upper right hand corner. The drawing is there to show you just how big this Fire Titan is going to be. This is drawn to scale, so when you get your hands on God of War III, you will be thrown into an epic battle environment like no other game has done before. One thing is for certain on God of War III, Sony Santa Monica is not holding anything back.

SOURCE – http://www.thisis50.com/profiles/blogs/president-obama-ends-war-in

According to bossip.com,President Obama committed to pull out nearly all combat troops by August 2010. He listened to the recommendations of the military and then roughly split the difference between what the generals requested and what he promised during the campaign.

Obama not only wants to get the troops out of Iraq, he needs to in order to meet two other commitments: lowering the federal deficit and transferring 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. In six years at war, America has spent more than $700 billion in Iraq. It costs nearly $400,000 per year to keep each soldier there. But the president doesn’t want to be accused of blowing the gains made since the surge in troops that former President George W. Bush ordered and, more significantly, the successful counter-insurgency strategy of Gen. David Petraeus.

Most of the 142,000 troops there now will leave between December and August 2010. Up to 50,000 personnel will remain, as trainers, advisers and combat troops doing anti-terrorist work — an unclear mission.

Newly Hand-Drawn in High Resolution,The Fight is on in July 2009 on PLAYSTATION®3 System and Xbox 360® Video Game and Entertainment System from Microsoft

Ignition Entertainment Ltd., a UTV Enterprise, a worldwide publisher and developer of videogames and SNK Playmore announced today that The King of Fighters XII is releasing worldwide in July 2009 on Xbox 360® and PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.

The legendary 3-on-3 fighting game series that united rival brawlers from SNK Playmore’s classic arcade franchises celebrates its 15th Anniversary in style with the release of The King of Fighters XII. For the first time in its history, this epic martial arts showdown has undergone a complete graphical overhaul. The antiquated character sprites used over the past 14 years have been dropped in favor of all-new, high-resolution fighters fluidly animating across painstakingly detailed, 100% hand-drawn backgrounds.

“Our development slogan for KOFXII is “KOF Re-Birth” and we’ve aimed to create an entirely new King of Fighters game. To make this a truly unique fighting game, we’ve revolutionized the graphics by creating state of the art visuals – and made no compromises in that process whatsoever,” said Masaaki Kukino, SNK Playmore.

“I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to commemorate The King of Fighter’s 15-Year Anniversary than with a gorgeously animated, high-definition installment that updates the KOF legacy for a new generation.” said Shane Bettenhausen, New Business Development Director of Ignition Entertainment. “While other fighting games have abandoned the time-consuming process of creating beautiful 2D art, KOFXII fully embraces the refined aesthetic beauty that only human hands can produce.”

For a sneak peek at The King of Fighters XII, check out The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match– for PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system packed with footage and content of The King of Fighters XII in every game – in stores today!

Stay tuned to Ignition Entertainment for more information, including screenshots, trailers, and loads of details on new game play features!

Where do you go when you want to read a game review? The internet is filled with plenty of blogs, and websites all offering you coverage on video games. Two of the most popular sites on the web for gamers are Gamespot and IGN, but those sites are just names, and it doesn’t really matter what they are called if they don’t have the journalist’s to give the reader something good to read. Gamers want to read reviews by gamers for gamers. So out of the two Goliath’s of gaming journalism: who gives the gamer the best journalists? Let the fight begin!

In the left corner, we have Gamespot who is known for their quality gaming news, coverage, and podcasts but how much can the average gamer really trust their owner’s integrity? Over a year ago, a game called “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” was released and unfortunately for the game it received a 6.0 out of 10 from Gamespot. The man behind the review was Jeff Gertsmann, then Editorial Director for Gamespot, who felt the game had weak A.I., average gun mechanics, and a story that does “everything in it’s power to drive you away from the game.” What did Gamespot do after this review? They fired Gertsmann. A gamer must be wondering, “Why fire a guy for giving a bad review?”. That’s because some of the higher-ups at Gamespot did something no news organization should do. They let advertising affect their news staff. Eidos, the developers behind “Kane and Lynch”, ran enormous amounts of advertising on the site prior to the release. The whole site was basically covered in “Kane and Lynch” ads and after the review Eidos put an extreme amount of pressure on Gamespot to fire Gertsmann; and unfortunately they listened.

Now don’t think that Gertsmann was fired for posting an extremely low review of the game that people could consider biased or that he was against the game. Many reviewers agreed with this score including our very own HipHopGamer:

Now as a gamer how can you trust a site that fire’s one of its best journalist’s because of pressure from advertising? A person can’t trust that. Many well respected journalist’s actually left Gamespot after this due to the fact that they couldn’t work for a company that didn’t let them do their job. Who do you want reviewing your game? A gamer or an advertising exec?

Luckily for gamers, Gertsmann landed on his feet and is currently running Giant Bomb which many consider to be one of the best gaming sites in the business. He’s a good journalist, with a good head on his shoulders who follows his journalist code of ethic’s because ,“If you stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything.”

Now in the right corner, we have IGN who many consider to be the king of gaming journalism. These guys are all over the place bringing people quality news, reviews, and such but they have had their fair share of mistakes in the past. An example of this actually comes from one of their most renown editors, Greg Miller, and a respected game, “F.E.A.R”. When the original “F.E.A.R” came out back on the Xbox 360 and PS3, instead of having one reviewer play both versions of the game, they had two different people play each copy. The results for both games were quiet different. The Xbox 360 version received a 9.1 overall and a 9.1 in graphics, while the PS3, Greg Miller, version of the game received an 8.1 overall and a 5.5 in graphics! This doesn’t add up because if you look at both games and play both games you can see the difference isn’t that big.

Can you see that big of a difference?

PS3:

360:

The problem with IGN and this review is that you can’t have two different people playing the same game for different consoles. There needs to be some type of consistency when making game reviews. Different gamers have different tastes and maybe Greg Miller didn’t like what “F.E.A.R” brought to the table, but the other guy did. Although to the reader this reads like the PS3 version of the game looks awful and isn’t nearly as good, while the 360 version is amazing. There needs to be consistency in journalism.

Both journalists should have at least worked together to have their reviews make sense. Both games are on current-gen consoles yet one version is nearly four points lower when it comes to graphics? While Gamespot made their mistakes from the higher-ups, the IGN issue stems to the journalist. Journalist’s need to work together when doing a game like “F.E.A.R”. They need to make sure that when both games look exactly the same that we don’t have a huge difference in scores. It is unfair to people who only own one console and the company releasing the game.

Well after looking at both sites and the major journalist’s behind the sites you gotta give the edge to Gertsmann for his journalistic integrity. While Miller is a great writer, on a great site, you need to be 100% fair to the public when making a review like that. Maybe it was an over thought, but he really needs to look at the other reviews on his site of the same game. Gertsmann on the other hand held his ground, wrote from the heart, and got a bad deal. Luckily for gamers he is now doing his thing at Giant Bomb. Gertsmann got the knock out, but we feel like Miller is coming for a rematch real soon!

NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the revolutionary euphoria engine, is heading to the 2009 Game Developers Conference to bring partners and members of the media up to date on the company’s product offerings. NaturalMotion recently released version 2.0 of its morpheme animation middleware, with tight integration of NVIDIA PhysX technology.

The company is taking meetings with game developers and publishers of all platforms, as well as technology and games industry press that are interested in how NaturalMotion’s technologies bring game characters to life.

Interested game developers should contact Christian Staack (U.S.) at christian.staack@naturalmotion.com or Andy Payne (UK) at andy.payne@naturalmotion.com
Additionally, NaturalMotion CTO Simon Mack will be presenting two sessions in the conference’s Visual Arts track:
Authoring Runtime Animation and Character Physics with morpheme 2.0 – Wednesday, March 25 at 10:30am – Room 3005, West Hall
morpheme & PhysX: A New Approach to Combining Character Animation and Simulation – Thursday, March 26 at 4:30pm – Room 3002, West Hall

NaturalMotion is also participating in the Game Connection America event

For those of you that don’t know, in many interviews, former Head of Team Ninja, Tomonobu Itagaki, mentioned that a deal between Tecmo and Microsoft had been struck. The deal involved releasing five exclusive titles throughout the life span of the 360; all five titles were to be developed by Team Ninja.

The titles mentioned in the interview were DOA 4, DOA Extreme 2, DOA Code Chronos, Project Progressive, And a secret title (which was later revealed to be Ninja Gaiden 2). That interview was done four years ago, and to be exact, February 2005. We know that three out of the five titles have already been released; we also know that all three were released annually from 2006; in addition, we know for a fact that in another interview with Tomonobu Itagaki, in 2007, he mentioned that all the remaining titles that are set to be released exclusively for the 360 are all in development. Not only that, but he actually mentioned that they have been in development for quite some time. If that is any indication, not only are there two remaining titles to be released exclusively for the 360, but we will probably be seeing them very very soon!

And if anyone has doubts regarding the level of polish of the two remaining titles, know this, Tomonobu itagaki left Tecmo half way through 2008. By that time, Ninja Gaiden 2 was done, and the remaining titles had already been in development for three years. Meaning, most of the work had been done in the presence of Itagaki himself. So do you actually think that the remaining part of the development can’t be completed and polished to perfection by the team that worked with him for the last seven years?!.

Some readers might oppose my predictions by mentioning that Tecmo has been having some financial troubles lately, and that they would probably go the multiplatform way to boost profit for the company. Some might even mention that with the absence of Itagaki, the deal no longer stands, and some might even claim that Tecmo will no longer support Microsoft in the absence of Itagaki.

All I have to say is this, Microsoft did not make the deal with Team Ninja but with its owner, Tecmo. Therefore, neither will the deal end with Itagaki’s departure, nor will Tecmo’s support for Microsoft diminish, and after the official approval of Tecmo’s merger with Koei in January 2009, there financial status seems much better than it did five months ago. In addition, Tecmo is making Quantum Theory as a PS3 exclusive. So apparently, their financial problems aren’t big enough to prevent them from continuing to make exclusives, and if that’s the case, then the exclusive deal with Microsoft probably still stands. And given the fact that the remaining titles have already been in development for over three years for the 360, and that porting it now to the PS3 would require a major investment of both time and money, not to mention setting up a whole team for the PS3 port which will probably despite efforts be filled with technical issues, the titles will most probably stay as 360 exclusives.

I would also like to add that Tecmo was probably the first Japanese developer to embrace the original xbox. It was also the strongest supporter from Japan for quite some time. So to claim that Tecmo’s support for Microsoft is beginning to diminish is absolutely groundless; especially, when major Japanese developers, such as Square-Enix and Capcom, are now embracing the 360 and even prefering it over the PS3 by providing it with exclusive titles and DLCs. So do you actually think that Tecmo does not see what the other Japanese developers see in Microsoft’s console and its potential for sales? why do you think Tecmo embraced the original xbox in the first place?

Now since we cleared all that out of the way, I would like to give you a quick overview on what is expected of the remaining two titles based on interviews and articles related to the subject.

Dead Or Alive: Code Chronos will be a prequel to the dead or alive series. It will relay the story of characters Ayane and Kasumi before the first tournament; that is all that is known. But what is obvious, is that it probably won’t be a another DOA title. Hopefully, it will bring something new to the table.

Project Progressive is what people need to get excited about, and the reason is this, it is a new action adventure title from Team Ninja, crafted by Itagaki himself! Apparently, it is supposed to take action games to the next level. All I can say is this, just remember the intensity of the Ninja Gaiden combat system, and then remember how Ninja Gaiden 2 took it to a whole new level. Make no mistake, Project Progressive has the potential to be the next step in the evolution of action games and to become a major smash hit in 2009. From what I gathered, Itagaki mentions, in several interviews, that Project Progressive resembles Ninja Gaiden’s intensity, but differs in story and gameplay. In other words, Itagaki wants this title to take the action adventure genre in a new direction and to new heights at the same time, and if anyone can pull that of, its Itagaki. According to all the research, he is already done with over 70% of the work on the title!

The remaining work to be done can easily be completed by the current members of Team Ninja. However, no matter how you slice the information presented here, one thing is certain, we are only months away from a major announcement from Team Ninja regarding there next 360 title, and that could be exactly what Microsoft needs to change the tides of expectations in 2009.

God Bless You Itagaki-san; this one’s for you

Master Samo