cstGaming

March Madness is upon us, and no, I’m not talking about NCAA basketball. March, seems to be the month that so many games demoed at E3 the year prior seem to poke their head out and appear on retail shelves. This month has so many goodies we figured we’d showcase some of the big names so you can start saving your couch change to purchase a few of them. Most of the video’s I’ve included are teaser trailers just to get you anxious but some include gameplay footage.
TAKE A LOOK!:

…on a side note, if your into the whole Red Steel concept (East meets West) check out: Sukiyaki Western Django. It’s a Western film done Kung-Fu style. Tarantino was involved, so it has to be good!

If you didn’t notice from my post about DVD’s, Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the X-Box 360. As an X-Box owner you should be ecstatic. Square Enix makes the best RPG’s on earth and they spare no expense when it comes to the Final Fantasy series. Our boy over at IGN.com, Ignaxio, a.k.a. “X”, a.k.a. White Fudge, took the time out of his busy schedule to travel to Japan to get the public opinion of Sony losing its exclusive reign over the Final Fantasy franchise. The reaction he got was unparalleled.

Another big issue has been made about the compression and graphics engine differing from Sony version of the game…MSXBOX-WORLD.com breaks any concern you’d have

Gunblades are so badass! Click for 1680 Wallpaper

The God of War (GoW) lineup has been a quality series for the Playstation brand for quite some time but the boys over at Sony are treating this latest rendition like no other. They set out to push the PS3 to it’s limits and apparently the ESRB too. This game takes gore to a whole new level: Decapitations, Impalement, Pulling off of finger nails; This could be the goriest game I’ve ever seen, which only makes me want to play it more. Gametrailers TV (GTTV) with Geoff Keighley did a showcase (gore fest) on this very game in their latest episode. It’s only 21 minutes and it covers a few other titles coming up this year but GoW looks so ridiculous I had to post it.

The guys over at NeoGAF have already started breaking the video down and making some SICK .GIF’s: Forum Thread. You can also download the raw .FLV HERE if you want to save it and watch it at your leisure, i.e. when your boss isn’t around.

You have something in the corner of your eye. Lemme get it for you...

We’ve all wondered for some time now when the day would come when the DVD just isn’t enough and I think it’s about that time…

Let’s have a little history lesson first off:

It all started with the DVD and the PS2. The orginal PS2 disc’s weren’t infact DVD’s, but a Hybrid disc that Sony developed specifically for the PS2. They did make the PS2 compatible with DVD’s as an added feature but eventually this “added feature” became the standard media format to develop games on. The orginal X-Box used it and with the “earlier” realease of the X-Box 360, they also followed suit. Time passes and Sony who is falling behind in the gaming market boldly moves ahead and decides to develop games on there “next-gen” media format, the Blu-ray Disc. Mircosoft inturn adopts the HD-DVD and the format wars begin. Utimately the Blu-ray Disc wins because of Disney (my opinion, but do you blame me?) and Mircosoft allows returns on all the HD-DVD players that they sold for their X-Box 360’s. So here’s the result: PS3 with minimal console sales using Blu-ray, and Mircosoft using the DVD with rather large console sales. Everyone’s okay with that, right? Wrong. Microsoft’s big asset this time around was the number of Playstation exclusives that they turned into multi-console games and the number of exclusives the company acquired; The same move that Song made on the gaming world during the era of the PS2. The problem lies in the fact that their is such a dramatic difference between the DVD and a Blu-ray disc we as consumers always knew that one day this quality would play a large factor in game development itself.

This is a comparasion chart of two media mediums: (it’s a bit dated but it’s still accurate)

The medium that a game is on can make the life of a gamer much more enjoyable. Anyone remember when Half-Life 2 came out and if you bought the CD version you had to sit through a 7 CD install? Then you went over your buddies and he had his DVD version sitting there in it’s “one disc glory”. The X-Box is feeling these same effects. Developers are either packaging multiple DVD’s in one box and requiring installs of the additional discs to the harddrive or limiting the product as a whole. These limits can even be seen in graphics or features throughout the game.

One of the biggest examples of this issue is in the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII. The game itself is slated to be around 25gb total. This either means one dual-layer blu-ray disc or 3 DVD’s. 2 of those DVD’s will need to be preinstalled; a total of 18.3gb of data on your harddrive whether you like it or not. Rumor has it that the game was developed on a different graphics engine to compensate for the space restrictions of the DVD. If you search the internets you can find several sites with comparasion screenshots between the two versions but little can be distingushed between the 2, so if they did use a different graphics engine they did an awesome job with the equivalent. As a developer that has to be a major pain. (<-Great Movie) 

Games like God of War 3 are releasing with 35 gigs of content and if Microsoft doesn’t see this as a problem they should. They may have the “real” next-gen console lead but if they don’t look over their shoulder and try to fix some things the PS3 is going to sneak up on them with the consumers and the game developers leading the rush.

…well it’s been awhile, so i probably should get caught up. To get this blog-ball rolling again i figured I’d steal a page from Yahtzee over at The Escapist. Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 (CoD:MF2) smashed all the records when it came to FPS sales on opening day (over 7 million copies worldwide), making Halo 3 look like the latest in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. So does the game live up to all the hype?

1UP writes: “Mixing real-world locations with bombastic set-pieces MW2 continues the guided, thrill-ride experiences of its predecessor, and adds even more depth to its multiplayer offerings. It might not have fixed all the problems from the first game, but there’s just so much quality content packed into this game that it will almost certainly be one of the most-played games in your library for a long time to come.”

…lets see how Yahtzee feels about this game: