Gears Of War 3 Co-Op Offers Playable Monsters

LOS ANGELES — Back in 2008, Gears of War 2 introduced Horde mode, a co-operative way to play that saw five friends holing up and fending off wave after wave of hideous creatures. When it launches next year, Gears of War 3 will add a new Beast multiplayer mode that lets you and your friends get inside those marauding monsters.

I played a few rounds of the promising five-player Beast co-op during a hands-on E3 event here Thursday. We spawned on a map called Mercy, a church where Marcus and his COG buddies attempt to make a final stand. Our mission was to spawn as a variety of deadly creatures and attempt to off the computer-controlled humans.

The meatbags aren’t exactly helpless — they’re armed with the standard COG loadout, and they’ve also got mounted turrets, barbed wire and laser fences to keep the beasts from running roughshod over them.

I started by spawning as the smallest monster — a Ticker. I steered the small, fast-moving suicide bug around the human barricades and self-destructed at the feet of two human gunners. That was two down and many more smoldering splatters of flesh and blood to go.

Beast mode is still being tweaked, Gears of War 3’s Rod Ferguson told me. When the game ships, players will have to earn the ability to spawn as bigger, meaner monsters by getting kills and causing damage.

For the demo, we had free reign to spawn as almost anything we wanted. In this early stage, the creatures were split into four categories. Beasts are nasty little creatures like the Ticker and a new, slithering insectoid called a Serapede. (As this critter, I squirmed around the feet of humans, clamping their legs between my electrically charged tentacles. I racked up more kills as this monster than as any other.)

Other categories will be familiar to anybody who has played Gears of War. Within the Humanoid and Drone categories, players can opt to spawn as a gun-wielding locust or play as a Kantus healer.

Big beasts like the Boomers prove a real hoot to play. One of the behemoths totes a new gun called The Digger that launches burrowing missiles underground and beneath cover. A Mauler, with its giant flail, can smash human barbed-wire fences with a single swing.

Destroying humans isn’t as easy as it sounds, though. More than a few times, the A.I. defenders ran out the clock, surviving our attack and forcing us to replay the wave and slaughter more efficiently.

Even in this early state, it’s easy to tell that Beast mode will be as appealing to co-op gamers as Horde — which, I might add, is being refined and tweaked for Gears of War 3 as well.

Gears of War 3 comes out April 2011 for the Xbox 360.

Image courtesy Microsoft

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Trick Your Xbox 360 With Windows And Lights

Tons of people own an Xbox 360. But almost all of them have a boring, stock model. You know, one without a window in the top and sweet LED lights inside that let you see the components as they play. You, however, can be different.

The XCM Black Light Chameleon case lets you make your Xbox 360 the most unique console on the block. You can choose from one of 7 colors for the lights or just have them cycle through them all. It’s a DIY affair, but the kit comes with everything you need to perform the surgery yourself in about 10 to 15 minutes. Seems worth the effort to me.

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Valve Won’t Develop For PS3 Because It’s “Too hard”

Homer Simpson once said, “You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.” Valve must take that second part—“never try”—pretty seriously, since it told some dude at E3 that it has no interest in developing for the PS3. Reason being? It’s too hard. Fair enough.

The full quote, straight from a Valve dev on the E3 show floor:

The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward. We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform. [...] I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun.

Sounds reasonable to me. If Valve can sustain itself developing only for the PC and Xbox 360, why should it knock itself out trying to figure out how to develop for the PS3? It quite literally is not worth the effort.

It’s not my business to tell Valve what to do with its resources, said with an eye toward the ongoing “controversy” regarding Left 4 Dead 2.

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Left 4 Dead 2 - New Characters And A New Setting - Daytime

Max Brooks’ imaginative novel World War Z tells the story of a zombie apocalypse from multiple perspectives, invoking new characters and locations with every chapter. It’s a great story that is basically unfilmable. But that sort of episode treatment is the first thing that came to mind as I watched the trailer for Left 4 Dead 2 (press release here), in which Valve revisits their own unique zombie apocalypse in a new location, with new characters, and during a completely new time of day. Namely, day.

Set for release on November 17, the title adds melee combat to enable deeper co-operative gameplay, with items such as a chainsaw, frying pan, axe, baseball bat, and more…

Featuring new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original with more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.

While the basic gameplay doesn’t seem very different, chainsaws notwithstanding, I’m glad to see Valve concentrating on something they do so well: character. And not just people, but places. Read more

Netflix Upgrade Coming This Fall To The Xbox 360

Here is an announcement from the Netflix blog.  The upgrade sounds very cool and I’m looking forward to testing it out.

Hi, Catherine Fisher here from Netflix Corporate Communications. Microsoft swept E3 today with some exciting new ways to experience the Xbox 360. The news we are most excited about, of course, involves Netflix. Available this Fall, if you are an Xbox Gold LIVE member, you will be able to browse and add movies and TV episodes to your instant Queue directly from your Xbox 360 – you don’t have to go to your computer.

And with the announcement of Xbox LIVE Party, you will be able to simultaneously watch movies on your Xbox 360 with up to seven friends – bantering back and forth about what you are watching. More than one million Xbox LIVE Gold members have already enjoyed more than 1.5 billion minutes of movies and TV episodes via Netflix since November 2008, and we hope you are as excited about the new ways to enjoy movies and TV episodes from Netflix on your Xbox 360 as we are.

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‘Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine’ Being Developed

THQ has officially confirmed work on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, yet another game set against the backdrop of Games Workshop’s gritty tabletop universe. Relic has again been handed developer duties on the title, though unlike Dawn of War, the console-focused Space Marine will be an action RPG that lets players control individual units through a “narrative-driven story campaign and in wide-scale online battles.”

In development for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it’s unclear what ties, if any, the project has to the leaked Space Marine footage that made the rounds late last year. However, judging from this IGN-hosted trailer, the game certainly looks to keep more with 40K’s combat-heavy fiction when it eventually decides to chainsword retail shelves.

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Xbox 360 Reaches 30 Million Console Sales

Microsoft today dropped an Xbox 360 statbomb, showering figures on a range of metrics including the fact that the Xbox 360 has now sold over 30 million units worldwide.

After combing through financial reports and rooting around in bins, Shacknews offers the following list of worldwide lifetime console sales:

1. Nintendo DS - 101.78 million units (as of March 31 2009)
2. Nintendo Wii - 50.39 million units (as of March 31 2009)
3. PSP - 50 million units (as of February 13 2009)
4. Xbox 360 - 30 million units (as of May 28 2009)
5. PlayStation 3 - 22.91 million units (as of March 31 2009)

Microsoft also boasts it leads current-generation consoles in attach rate, with 8.3 titles being bought per console, as well as sales for third-party developers–$5.9 billion.

On the community front, Xbox Live’s 20 million active accounts have downloaded nearly 1 billion pieces of Marketplace content. Sony announced in February that the PlayStation Network had 20 million registered users, though this includes forum and PSP accounts.

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Fallout 3’s ‘The Pitt’ Expansion Coming March 24

Bethesda Softworks has finalized a release date for the second Fallout 3 downloadable expansion: March 24, 2009.

The add-on, dubbed “The Pitt,” gives player the chance to explore the post-nuclear wreckage of Pittsburgh. Unlike modern-day Pittsburgh, The Pitt is a decrepit industrial wasteland run by raiders and slavers.

Based on the images Bethesda has so far released, it almost looks like Barter Town from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, only with a notable lack of Tina Turner in chainmail.

As with the previously released Operation Anchorage add-on, The Pitt will be priced at $10 on release and should hit the Xbox Live Marketplace and Windows Live simultaneously.

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Left 4 Dead receives massive patch on Xbox 360

Valve just informed us that a patch has been released for the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead, just in time for the soon-to-be-released downloadable content.

The patch, applied via a mandatory title update over Xbox Live, fixes a bunch of bugs, attempts to balance online gameplay and generally improves the Left 4 Dead experience. View the entire list of changes after the break.

(Oh, PSA: Be sure to take extra care staying away from Tanks. We don’t remember asking for reduced auto-shotgun damage against them.)

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GameFly Members Award Fallout 3 With Xbox 360 Game Of The Year

GameFly’s sixth annual Q Awards have bestowed Fallout 3 with “Game of the Year” and “Xbox 360 Game of the Year” honors. The winners were selected by tallying over 100,000 votes by the rental service’s subscribers. The winners across platforms:

• PS3 game of the year - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
• PS2 game of the year - Kingdom Hearts: Re-Chain of Memories
• PSP game of the year - God of War: Chains of Olympus
• Xbox 360 game of the year - Fallout 3
• Wii game of the year - Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• DS game of the year - Final Fantasy IV

To see the runners-up in each category, check out the Q Awards page at GameFly. Looking at the list (and taking into account GameFly’s demographic), is anyone surprised?

Source: Joystiq

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