New release this week : Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

This game looks a bit like someone took Battlefield, Gears and Team Fortress and tossed them into a blender. Out came Quake Wars.

It is a class based game of two opposing teams, humans vs. the aliens and includes vehicles and emplacements. The game setup is basically an attack and defend style. One side attacks while the other defends.

There are 5 classes:
Soldier / Aggressor Basic infantry, gets more health and more available weapons.

Field Ops / Oppressors Can place and fire indirect weapons such as missiles, cannons, mortars and howitzers. Can also use colored smoke to call in more fire. Humans can give out ammo packs. Aliens place temporary shields.

Medic / Technician Heal and revive teammates. Uses a defibrillator to revive. Medics can pop smoke to call in a Supply Station with health and ammo.
Technicians inject fallen human soldiers and cause them to become a “Spawn Host” and makes a new spawn location. Medics can destroy spawn hosts.

Engineer / Constructor Place anti-vehicle, anti-personnel, anti-artillery turrets and trip mines. Can repair vehicles and turrets. Can build certain objectives and outposts. Also gets a grenade/plasma launcher which is unique to this class.

Covert Ops / Infiltrator Can hack enemy deployed machines and objectives. Can steal enemy uniforms and take on the name and appearance of another enemy and use back stabs to kill unknowing “teammates.” Covert Ops also has Smoke Grenades and a Third-Eye camera to create a small radar. Infiltrators have flyer drones to scout out and annoy the enemy.

There are a few more specifics to each class, but those are the basics.

Vehicles include:
Light Vehicles such as single man vehicles
Medium Vehicles for driver, gunner and possible passengers
Heavy Vehicles such as tanks
Very Heavy Vehicles are heavy walkers and mobile command posts
Aerial Vehicles like hover planes and helicopters
Amphibious and Naval Vehicles include armored personnel carriers and armored boats

Here are links for Weapons:
Weapons Overview
Special Weapons and Items
Weapons Damage Details

The strategic elements of the game make it look to be a blast. The early reports say this game is a ton of fun, but there are some complaints. What I’ve read so far leads me to believe the graphics, animations and sound are not on par with the latest technical successes such as Call of Duty 4. However, most everyone will agree that it’s always about the gameplay. I don’t mind graphics and sound a year or so behind the curve if the fun is in the core mechanics.

Some won’t like the complexity. You won’t just dive in, run around all lone wolf and be able to dominate. It’s going to take teamwork and strategy. Some don’t have the brain for it, and truth be told, I’m glad they’ll stick to Halo and COD. I’m tired of them screaming, singing and shouting obscenities into the mic anyway.

If the online component works well with little lag and an easy way to get a game, this thing has some serious potential.

More General Info

Enemy Territory : Quake Wars Official Site
Official Community Site
Forums

It’s no secret that Grand Theft Auto IV just came out, and this sucker seems to be a huge hit.

How huge? Check out 360 Voice, one of my favorite 360 gaming pulse sites. People sign up there to have a blog auto-generated by their live status. Check an example one out here.

Anyway, they compile their data for which games are most popular, and I find this data to be pretty accurate when looking at the other numbers out there. Not total numbers, but each games’ popularity in respect to others. I’m sure the data isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good to get an idea of how popular a given title is.

I’ll let the numbers for yesterday speak for themselves:

GTA IV
32,430 gamers (UP 24,148)

Call of Duty 4
5,629 gamers (DOWN -3,712)

Halo 3
4,086 gamers (DOWN -2,365)

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles (based on Unique Users)
1 Call of Duty 4
2 Halo 3
3 Guitar Hero III
4 Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2
5 Gears of War
6 Rock Band
7 Iron Man Demo
8 FIFA 08
9 Forza Motorsport 2
10 Madden NFL 08

Top Xbox Live Arcade Titles (Full Versions)
1 Lost Cities
2 Ikaruga
3 DOOM
4 UNO
5 Brain Challenge
6 N+
7 Worms
8 Bomberman LIVE
9 Battlezone
10 Sonic The Hedgehog 2
The above arcade list is based on full versions purchased.

No surprises here this week, as COD 4 tops the charts once again. Halo who? Good to see Forza still hanging in there as well.

It’ll be interesting to see how COD fares against GTA IV this week and next, just about everyone on my friends list was playing last night.

Source: Major Nelson

Gaining XP and working with your buddies has never been this fun. The shared XP on Co-Op Campaign is great and the AI provides pretty good competition, especially when they spawn right around the corner from you. Running through the Co-Op Campaign with a friend for the second time on Realistic netted almost 30,000 points and an additional RANK. For you Achievement freaks out there, the multiplayer achievements seem to be the easiest to get on Team Leader and straight Death Match.
Arnett Out!

Well I have jumped back online with this game and I am proud to announce that the Multiplayer seems to be running very well now. I am not sure what was causing all the issues in the beginning, but the issues seem very rare now. Good gameplay and good matchmaking make this game worth playing.

Arnett Out!

Well, any fan of the Rainbow Six series will be happy to know that this game picks up right where the first Vegas left off. Technically speaking, Vegas 2 is happening in parallel with the first. While the Vegas One team is searching for Irena in Mexico and then Vegas you are searching for the other Terrorists associated with Irena in different parts of Vegas. The Ubisoft Montreal Team has woven a good web to tie these two games together.

The gameplay is almost exactly the same as the first incarnation, with the exception of a RUN button located at the Left Button position and the AI seems to be much better than the first. The XP has been tweaked and I like that the Co-Op games share the XP with the other players.

Overall, I am very happy with this game, the Campaign is awesome, the Terrorist Hunt is better than before and the Multi-Player seems to be just as good as the first time around!

I have completely enjoyed the single player Campaign of Frontlines but the Multi-Player has not lived up to the billing. I have sat in KAOS servers for over an hour “warming up” waiting for the requisite 24 players to show up to start the match, but it has only started 1 time out of about 20 tries. Also, I have given the smaller games a shot, but have not finished a single MP game.

I am very happy with the Campaign, lots of weapons, decent AI and challenging levels, but I bought this game for the MP and so far it has not lived up to ANY advanced billing. If this game follows suit with other Online games there should be some kind of patch in the works for the current MP system, and until then I will be working on clearing all the achievements in the Single Player portion of the game.

I am checking with the games developers almost every day and trying to get some kind of update on the situation and as soon as I do, I will post it up here.

Arnett Out!

‘Hi there, I just wanted to comment on the host migration portion of the patch that was released last week. I am aware that the migration helps with keeping players together, the only real problem I see here, is that since this patch, I play in a great many games with a poor signal. There is no doubt that the migration helps in the event of a host leaving, but it has greatly ruined my ability to host games.
One of my other online buddies has an enterprise level connection dedicated to his 360 just as I do and has experienced the same issues as me.
Lastly, our group of close players plays CoD4 every night and the guy that keeps getting host is located in San Diego, working on a DSL connection with 1.3 mb download and a 384 kb upload, now I know this upload is NOT sufficient for 12 player games yet he gets host over me (Fractional T1 - Dedicated 784 kb ul and 1.5 mb dl simultaneously) and another one of my buddies who pays for an enterprise level Cable connection that provides 10 mb dl and 1.0 mb upload. In every instance over the last 4 months since the game has been out either him or I have provided hosting for 12 players and a lag free environment, and since the update, we never get host, the smaller bandwidth DSL subscribers seem to rule the hosting scene in CoD4 now!

ARNETT 187

Call of Duty 4 title update is now out - simply pop in the game while connected to Live to be prompted for the update.

Well, judging by the vast number of articles on the subject out there, and the need to keep competing with Sony’s Playstation 3, it is a No-Brainer that the 360 needs to provide support for the Blu-Ray format, and they need to do it fast. There have been “rumors” circulating from “insiders” at Microsoft that a stand alone plug-in similar to their HD-DVD player has already been designed and is in the process of getting through Microsoft Certification. These rumors all point toward something coming to the shelves in May 2008. We can only hope that they stay on point and push something to the retail sector very fast.

Arnett Out!