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Archive for the ‘Gaming Lifestyle’ Category
All I can say here is just – “WOW!!. Just when you thought Chris Kline had created his masterpiece with the Contra Jungle Jam, he goes and pulls a new one out of the hat!
Check out the latest in video game music wizardry on his newest video. This one’s him performing the Castlevania Rock live at Games Live in Loveland Colorado.
The performance is an arrangement of Beginning – Castlevania 3 Dracula’s Curse, Wicked Child – Castlevania, Vampire Killer – Castlevania, Moonlight Nocturne – Symphony of the Night. And boy does it rock your socks off!
Who wants some?
After having finished playing The Lost and Damned and working to get a review out, there I was, thinking about what our next contest should be post-Killzone 2 and our upcoming Street Fighter IV announcement. Rummaging through HBO, we decided that we’d hit up our contacts at Microsoft India to see if we could do a Halo Wars contest, with us giving out a couple of copies of Halo Wars and codes for the Halo 3 Mythic Pack, which you’d have gotten if you swiped your charge card pfhor the Halo Wars Collector’s Edition.
So imagine my surprise when I get an email late afternoon with two codes pfhor the Mythic map pack to give away to our readers. After the initial shock and spending 20 minutes fighting a sudden selfish desire to keep one of them pfhor myself, we now have two codes to give away to our “dear” readers. (Gah!) Quite obviously, we’ve never had the habit of just throwing our prizes away, so yeah, you’ll have to work your fat ass pfhor your codes, typical TAP style. That’s right, no soap-box / toothpaste commercial inspired contests, no “figure out the uber-secret message in bold in our earlier reviews” and most definitely, none of those “be the first to email us and tell us you want to have our babies.” Nuh-uh!
After complaining for months about not getting any love down south in Bangalore from Milestone, we finally got ourselves a nice little launch party for Street Fighter IV this Friday at The Living Room, where fans of the game could just sit back and kick their friends’ butt every which way with punches, kicks and focus moves. In fact, the party was so awesome that we completely didn’t manage to attend it! Don’t ask us why, because it mostly involves our associate editor busy rowing the slave boat and getting whipped good at work. As for me, well, I originally wanted to say I couldn’t make it because I had a brain tumor and had to get it checked out, but if I do, I’ve been promised that I’ll get my neck snapped by Milestone’s friendly neighborhood PR liaise, Payal, who loves nothing more than keeping us on track and, err, “mothering us” to make sure we do what we’re supposed to and don’t go around doing naughty things, like eating sand, spilling cooking oil all over the floor and breaking embargoes. (Ooh, look, Jill Valentine’s dead!)
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice! And if that fails, an inexpensive GPS, Google Maps and front-row tickets could probably do wonders. But how do you get to Jaspreet Bindra, the man holding all the strings to Microsoft India’s Entertainment & Devices Division? Well, after trying for over four months through the usual PR channels, we finally decided to use my Xbox MVP status to try and spend some quality time with the newly appointed Country Manager and ask some really hard hitting questions that were just burning to be answered. So, last Wednesday, with a lot of help from the absolutely adorable Abhishek Kant – Community Program Manager for Microsoft India – we managed to burn up the telephone wires for the better part of an hour with the warm and very approachable Jaspreet and the Assistant Product Manager for the Xbox 360 – Sanjoy John, getting down to brass tacks about the Xbox 360 and the Games for Windows platforms in India.
We were originally supposed to schedule a video interview with him sometime next week, but with Vijay and Reggie rowing the slave galleon pretty hard next week (not to mention how every spare moment in Vijay’s life is now spent playing Gollum And Its Precious with his Leader Class Bulkhead action figure), we decided we’ll just roll with what we have for now and do the video interview when the stars are aligned just right. One note about the following interview, when you see text marked out in italics like this, that’s just me inserting my thoughts on what’s being said or just being the kooky klass klown. Consider yourself warned.
When Microsoft Train Simulator came out in 2001, I paid an exorbitant price in the way of an arm, a leg and several assorted body parts to experience the luxury of taking the Amtrak Acela, the Flying Scotsman and the Orient Express out on their scenic routes. There were a number of challenges that the game used to throw up, and since I wasn’t much of a sim buff, I didn’t care two cents for the game telling me that I was making the ride a living nightmare for the virtual passengers that had the misfortune of being on my train – but there wasn’t anything more thrilling than watching a legendary train rush past the camera at breakneck speed under your control.
Even though I’d heard of Microsoft Flight Simulator being used to train pilots (I usually used to practice water landings, or catastrophic crashes as most people would call them, long before Capt. Chesley Sullenberger) I guess someone’s finally seeing the point of using a rail sim to help train new employees!
Almost a hundred and fifty years in operation, Union Pacific has turned to videogames to train the thousands of new employees that have been hired by the Fat Controller to perform various tasks such as sorting carts and operating switches. Kinda like Thomas the Tank Engine, except for really real!
A tad late to the party but as they say, better late than never! With so many Game of the Year’s sprouting all over the Interwebz, it can get pretty daunting to keep track of the good stuff. Fret not for we, at the ANGRY pixel, take the pains of sifting through the banal and mediocre so that you can enjoy content that if offbeat and entertaining. Quite unsurprising then, that BossFight, one of the few Indian gaming blogs that we enjoy reading, has come up with their own GOTY 2008.
Besides the obvious categories, you will stumble across gems such as “Best Indian Game That Was Never Made” which could have featured our South Superstar Rajnikanth! Thankfully, they decided not to elaborate upon “Mortal Kombat vs. Tamil Movie Universe”. And while you are there, take a look at the “Most Tedious Installation Award”. If variety is not the spice of your life, you can very well entertain yourself with GOTY for the DS, PSP, Xbox 360…you know, the usual.
Show your appreciation by leaving a comment. After all, these guys are the one to be credited with coming up with the first ever Indian GOTY in mainstream press. Two thumbs up from the TAP team!
When SONY and Microsoft announced their next generation of consoles, both tried to out-did each other with their features. While some of them took off, others fell flat in the face. In the midst of all the hullaboo, one feature slipped past unnoticed, only to rear it’s head couple of months down the lane. The Downloadable Content or DLC, which was once viewed as something quite minor is now quite the buzzword of the industry. It’s quite common now for DLC’s to be announced even before the game has hit the shelves. Multiplatform game developers have the console makers trying to woo them to churn out exclusive DLC’s for their platforms. Throw in the money generated with the micro-transactions and the developer have discovered a virtual gold mine that not only assures them a continuous revenue stream long after a game has been released, but also delays the game being sold off after one is done with it.
Clearly, DLC’s are here to stay. So The ANGRY Pixel takes a look at what the coming months have to offer in terms of DLCs. Please note that the sequence in which the game appears is not indicative of it’s importance in the scheme of things.
Here we are, another glorious weekend, another 48 hours to blow. And thanks to every single publisher who magically hit upon the last two months to release every single title in one go, we’ve practically gone under all the fantastic games that we want to play, our unforgiving work schedules and of course, managing a tiny corner of the Interwebs here at The ANGRY Pixel.
As we slowly get our reviews out and get our posting schedule back on its rickety track, we’re going to be giving you folks a lot more to chew over the coming weeks. As you can see, we’re already tweaking our site’s look and feel in bits and will slowly be overhauling it over the coming months, in addition to taking you behind the scenes of all the interesting tedious stuff that goes on to build and run a successful videogame blog (sorry, groundless rumours have another place to call home!) which should give you folks an inside look at how things work in India all the way from the top to the dirty, dirty bottom. And obviously, we just can’t wait to start pissing everyone off. Fun times ahead!
And for all the folks eagerly awaiting the return of the Game of the Year sweepstakes, well, we’re abandoning the approach we took last year. It’s not like it wasn’t hugely successful, but there’s a whole bunch of awesome stuff that we’re working on for the moment (Shh! January!) and thriving on change constantly like we do, we let our pals at GamingIndians work on the community voting feature as well as the elaborate write-ups while we focus our energies on something “else” which we hope and pray would turn out to be a much more entertaining alternative to what we did last year. As for the cool prizes and the devilishly devious contests that y’all enjoy so much, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it – all we can ask you to do is keep checking back regularly. Something wicked this way comes! /wink
Until then, I’m just free running all over Hong Kong of the Dystopian Future The City in Mirror’s Edge, scorching and blasting through wave after wave of Locust and zombie cannon fodder in Gears 2 and L4D, and squealing with joy as I get to explore all my favourite lost underworld myths with the lovely Lara Croft. Abhinav, on the other hand is having a blast with the Prince, Elika and his donkey, Farah on the PC, even as he spends 7 hours straight hammering out 600+ swords in Fable II and getting his poor heart broken by Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Vijay seems to be in his element making Mortal Kombat and the DC universe characters beat each other silly while Jay seems hell-bent on tearing his hair out with the PC port of GTA IV. And Bobby? Well, with two broken PCs, two unused Xbox 360s and a FUBARed disc of GTA IV, he does what any sane person would do – take his tricked out Jeep out to the nearest rally track and win the damn thing. Wow!
So yeah, drop us a note or a comment telling us what kind of content you’d like to see us churn out or what craziness you’ve got planned over the weekend. Just don’t come back to us with 12 hours of sword making or 14 hours of unprotected sex in Fable II!
It’s here!
After having talked about it countless times in the past few months, the Alone In The Dark Contest has finally shown up. Blame the delay on our lazy admins for not having it up and running much earlier. Guess we will have to go with the age-old saying that it is never too late for anything.
Participants of our Game of the Year 2007 contests would immediately feel at ease with this one. This time around, to get more and more people to jump on-board, the contest has been made much more accessible. Mind you, it is just a teaser for the things to come in the following months, so you better stay sharp.
All you gamers in Delhi eager to check out Need For Speed Undercover at the Playstation Experience event coming your way next week, here is another chance to play the game before it hits the shelves.
EA India is inviting all Indian fans of Need For Speed series to try out the game at All Sports Bar, Connaught Place on 19th November, which is tomorrow. Be there by 12 p.m. if you don’t want to be stuck in a queue waiting for your turn.
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