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I have nowhere else to go. Two days of clawing and scratching at the seeming underbelly of The City has led me all the way here, to this point of no return. “Live a little”, he says, “You can’t stay on the edge forever. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to jump!” The irony is clear enough from where I’m standing, the center of my gravity poised precariously at the edge of a thousand foot glass citadel. Straight down below, cars and people hurry about their business as if everything is normal – tiny flecks scurrying about without realizing that their mundane existence has already changed, thanks to me. I know what needs to be done. Already I see a way from where I stand to where I need to be, synapses in my brain firing – measuring, calculating and plotting my course as my body breaks out into a full sprint. Feet don’t fail me now!
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!
After being royally ignored countless number of times, Bangalore finally got its first and much deserved gaming expo in a long time. After wowing the gamers in Mumbai, the PlayStation Experience (PSE) in Mumbai, it moved down south to Bangalore, much to the delight of us gamers here. Held at the Kormangala Indoor Stadium, PSE boasted of an impressive set up that allowed the general public access to a lot of PS3, PS2 and PSP titles, some already out in the market and some just waiting to hit the shelves. The show floor was divided into different zones showcasing different genres of video games from the PS3’s roster.
GCA 2008 has come and gone and we are still pretty much disappointed that we could not be there to cover the event. However, the Experience EA event in our very own backyard in Mumbai more then made up for it, what with it’s healthy dosage of upcoming AAA titles like Mirror’s Edge, Need For Speed: Undercover and FIFA 2009 bound to put a smile on the grumpiest of the gamers.
Held at the Hotel Trident in Mumbai, we got to try out many of the games that were featured at the recently concluded Game Convention Asia 2008 held in Singapore. One of the games that have had everyone spell bound for quite a while now, besides giving rise to endless debates on whether the Third Person View of the First Person View is the better choice is Mirror’s Edge. DICE, at the helm of the game, has done a radical turnaround from their award-winning Battlefield games to a totalitarian world which Faith, the game’s protagonist and other Runners like her inhabit. After having watched countless videos of Faith soaring through the roof tops, it was quite an exhilarating experience in itself to be given the control, of which we made some good use, a couple of hard landings notwithstanding.
As if the game play videos of Mirror’s Edge were not enough to get us salivating all over our keyboards, developers DICE have confirmed to 1Up in an interview that the game would indeed be shipping with a time-trial mode as well which will unlock once you beat the game.
Producer Tom Ferrer explains that the time-trial mode won’t feature entire levels. Instead, the existing levels will be broken down to smaller chunks that you can have a go at until you master them. Online leaderboards will help you keep track of your as well as other gamer’s best time in that particular time-trial level.
In another cool touch, you can download ghost data from others playthroughs. This ghost data will show up in-game as a red silhouette as you watch them go through the level in their own unique way. Hopefully this will help us pick some nice tricks from the best in the business.
In the age where most of the games will find it hard to justify their INR 2000 price tags, Mirror’s Edge is fast turning out to be one game that we gamers would happily part with our lunch money for.
With more and more unique IPs like Dead Space, FaceBreaker, Mirror’s Edge, SPORE and Crysis: Warhead to show off, we’re still wondering why EA is playing the same old tunes every time we run into them. While we wait for our Red Alert 3 keys and a big, huge project coming your way real soon from EA India (Shh!), we’ve got our hands on the scans of the latest Mirror’s Edge comic from Comic-Con, thanks to Siliconera who were kind enough to upload them for the entire world to enjoy.
Sure, the ultra-mini-comic doesn’t really explain any part of the backstory or anything beyond what Faith and her fellow Runners do, running the Mirror’s Edge on rooftops hundreds of feet above the ground, but this is just a small teaser of what’s to come from Wildstone and Mirror’s Edge writer Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of the legendary Discworld series’ Terry Pratchett, who’s worked on games such as Heavenly Sword and Overlord.
The remaining six parts of the Mirror’s Edge comic will be released before the game ships sometime in Winter 2008.
[via Siliconera]
MIRROR’S EDGE COMIC TEASER
What’s with the recent entourage of game trailers these days? Here we are, already at the brink of having every major gaming website about to be ghastly hammered for the next few days because of You-Know-What 2008, but now it just seems companies are taunting us unfortunate no-showers with so called “new info”. Those trailers that recently popped up for Mirror’s Edge and Fallout 3? Pfft, pass. Then you got BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins. Sure, it was great to see the first ever official footage to this highly anticipated whopper of medieval fantasia. No actual gameplay, but it’s all lovingly rendered in the new Eclipse engine. Again, it’s the first trailer ever. Slack can be cut. Then those cooky, crazy Canucks released yet another one. Dialogue is more or less the same from the first teaser; some of the actual in-game segments is new, but come on! At least put a god-damn dragon in there already! Cooky, crazy Canucks.
In other E3 related news, Dawn of War II is looking relatively scrumptious. Draco grudgingly agrees, but I bet he really wants to see more dragons.