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There’s a running joke in the Gears of War series that there is a family of brothers, all named Carmine, who all wear helmets and accompany the main GOW characters in their various missions to plug up holes in the ground. Problem is, so far two of the brothers meet an untimely end in the first two games, and now, the fate of the last brother is in your hands.

Despite this new Carmine looking like a badass from that just released photo, YOU can actually vote on whether or not he lives or dies in the new game. How? You purchase either a “Carmine Lives” or “Carmine Dies” T-shirt in the Xbox marketplace for you avatar. Before you get all fussy, the money for either item goes to Child’s Play charity, so no whining.

Personally, after seeing this picture, I’m pulling for Carmine #3 to not only live, but somehow be the hero that saves the world in the end. I’m tired of Fenix and his stupid soul patch.

So I wrote a whole post today dedicated to Ikue Otani, the voice of Pikachu who allegedly died last night at the age of 45.

But now I just learned that it was all some bizarre hoax, as according to her reps, Otani is alive an well and the whole thing was just a snowballing rumor like when the internet said Eminem died in a car crash a few years ago. I suppose the voice of Pikachu WOULD be the Japanese equivalent of Eminem.

So congrats Otani for you know, being alive. Here’s hoping you can keep pika-pika-ing for years to come.

Alright, fatigue is setting in at this point, singlehandedly liveblogging three different press conferences in the past day, but whatever, I’m a trooper, I’ll get through it.

Upon further reflection, I think that Nintendo is actually the winner so far, with their mammoth surprise stable of classic game sequels trumping expected sequels from Microsoft, and the 3DS does sound rather awesome, even if Kinect is going to let me control movies with Justin Bieber songs with my brainwaves.

What the hell is Sony going to bring? Honestly, I have no idea. Hopefully their Move tech will be a bit cooler than it was last year, and it really needs to blow the Wii out of the water, along with proving that actual gamers are going to like it, which is a pretty tough sell. It’s not as innovative as Kinect, and it might be too late to the game to compete with the Wii. I guess we’ll see.

Liveblog starts below.

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Yesterday, I covered Microsoft’s E3 press conference which left me slightly underwhelmed due to its complete lack of surprises other than a redesigned Xbox that I will only buy out of frustration if my current one breaks under warranty. Yes, we saw Halo: Reach, COD: Black Ops and Gears 3, but no real surprises there, and the other half of the conference was about Project Natal Kinect’s new functions which are cool, but are not particularly related to video games. When they WERE related to video games, the titles seemed like a slight upgrade to the Wii, and not much else, something I’m decidedly not interested in.

Speaking of the Wii, today I’m starting out with Nintendo’s press conference which starts at noon EST. I usually spend a great deal of time trashing Nintendo during E3, because I have yet to be impressed with anything other than two or three Wii games since the console came out.

What can we expect announced today? I don’t know. I really have to hope that the Wii is going to spring for SOME sort of graphics upgrade at long last, as with each passing day, the system looks more and more dated with its Gamecube graphics.

I also expect them to spent a solid twenty minutes raving about how they invented the casual games market Microsoft and Sony are now leeching off of, and they’ll have an ass ton of charts and graphs showing how much they’re kicking ass in sales, as they are every year.

You know what I would love to see? A new system. A whole new goddamn system announced with great graphics, tight motion controls  and something I could actually call a console rather than a toy. But I won’t be holding my breath for that one.

Alright, I’ve got two of these beasts to liveblog today as Sony starts at 3PM, so make me feel appreciated and chime in with some comments! Liveblog starts below: Continue Reading »

I was in a panic today when I figured out that E3 was THIS week and not next. Due to massive increase in writing responsibilities over the last year, I didn’t think I was going to be able to fit in a liveblog of the Big 3 conferences (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) this year like I’ve done the previous two times, but I’ve spent all morning busting my ass, and I’m all set to go.

Today is Microsoft, while Sony and Nintendo are tomorrow. I expect an ass-ton of the keynote today to be devoted to Project Natal tech, which debuted at last year’s show to oooh’s and ahhh’s. We’ll see if they can impress just as much this year with some actual worthwhile games for it.

Yes, I am a 360 owner, and I do not have a Wii or PS3, so I may make some backhanded jabs during my coverage, but whatever. If I wanted to be be an objective journalist I’d be working for Fox News.

Liveblog starts below when the show starts at 1PM 1:30PM Eastern. We’re old school here, so you’ll have to refresh the page if you want to read my updates.

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We don’t usually report on straight news items here so much as awesome pictures or videos, but I had to pull these quotes from Shia LaBeouf where he discusses my least favorite movie of 2009, Transformers 2, one that he starred in. As it turns out, he wasn’t a fan either.

“When I saw the second movie, I wasn’t impressed with what we did,” LaBeouf said in an interview Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival.

On the second movie, “we got lost. We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger,” LaBeouf said. “Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. … You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve previous described that Transformers franchise as “Robots crashing into each other,” but I found the first film tolerable because the human element of it worked. The sequel threw all that out the window and just crammed as many robots onscreen as possible all the time. Some being racist, some having giant robot balls.

I do NOT have faith in Bay to make a good third movie, but I do respect LaBeouf as an actor and I know he’ll try his best to talk Bay off the edge of madness and idiocy.

After seeing the Wolverine Origins movie I think it’s safe to say I’m a little bit bearish in this news..

Twentieth Century Fox’s prequel “X-Men: First Class” is set for June 3, 2011, with Matthew Vaughn on board to direct.Moving aggressively, Fox says production will begin this summer, although a cast hasn’t yet been announced.

Bryan Singer, who conceived the story for “First Class” and directed the first two “X-Men” pics, is producing with Lauren Shuler Donner and Simon Kinberg

I mean when you really think about it, the first X-Men was definitely awesome.  The second?  It was beyond bad.  The third?  It held it’s own and was kind of cool.  But then the franchise really took a dump with Origins, a film I really though would kick ass.  It was just so dumb though that it pissed me off.  And the one liners?  What are you serious here?  And what the hell was Liev Schreiber a vampire?  Just don’t get me started on that movie.

So you can excuse my ambivalence about a prequel.  Is the potential there?  I think it’s safe to say with any X-Men movie the potential is there.  Will it deliver?  I’m already predicting no.  Well, that’s unless Christopher Nolan miraculously steps in to direct the film.

Good luck guys!

[H/T Variety]

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The reason I’m posting this is A) because it sounds awesome and B) so someone can try this out and actually let me know if it works.

The glitch is said to spawn up to nine harriers at a time, which as you might imagine, would completely devastate anything and everything not cowering in a building on a map. But the process to get there? It seems a bit far fetched. How do people even figure stuff like this out? Random button mashing?

The instructions are after the jump. If you do this in one of my games later, I’ll probably be forced to just laugh rather than get pissed as it’s kind hilarious. Props if you can actually pull it off.

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Since there’s really nothing else to say to top that excellent caption, I’m going to use this space to share the news that there’s a new patch for Diablo II that was just released that fans should be eager to hear about.  Yes, people still play this game ten years later. They fixed a lot of shitty stuff that was wrong with the game (most notably, my eternal foe, Iron Maiden, has been axed), and Blizzard appears to be willing to make it rain high runes. So to speak. Here are some other changes.

- Respecialization is now possible! Completing the ‘Den of Evil’ quest
will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players
who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in
Hell difficulty.
- Increased the drop rate of high runes.
- Support for bit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be
maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users).
- Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items
required for Uber Tristam.
- Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level.
- Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character.
- Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters.
- Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal’s summoned minions no longer give experience.
- Removed Oblivion Knight’s Iron Maiden curse.

Respecing! No way! There are also a bunch of class specific changes too numerous to list here. For the full rundown, head over to Diablo3x.

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So I woke up to news that Perfect Dark had been re-released on Xbox Live Arcade, something I knew was coming but didn’t think was happening like, now. This was one of my absolute favorite games growing up, so to see a new version of it here looking pretty is something to behold. The screenshots look real slick, for an upconverted Nintendo 64 game at least, and it’s a little bit reminiscent of newer renderings of Half-Life.

Sadly, I cannot play it yet, as I’m off to Vegas which should be way, way more fun than a Perfect Dark remake (sorry Joanna), but I’ll look forward to trying it out when I get back and start laptop trapping and farsighting bitches. In the meantime, check out Joystiq’s review and take a look at some screenshots.