Medal of Honor to come with Battlefield 3 beta invite.

So as I'm reading about this I can only think one thing. EA has realized that the new modern reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise is a giant pile of garbage. They need some way to make people still care about this game. For them releasing a beta was probably the worst thing they could of done because all it did was show the community how bad the game was before it came out. This is what EA gets for spreading DICE so thin, developing different games at the same time. I'm guessing that DICE was working on Battlefield 3 at the same time as MOH so one of them had to suffer. DICE hasn't been the best when it comes to getting their games perfect right at launch as they usually have to release several different patches to get everything in proper working order. So now that nobody really cares about MOH EA has taken some steps to help sell the game. First was making a special edition that's just the regular game with added in weapons like in previous DICE games but with this one EA isn't charging more just giving the weapons away. But that wasn't enough so they whisper out, "Hey buy this and get access to, wait for it... BATTLEFIELD 3!" So now everyone is probably creaming themselves over the awesomeness they hope BF3 will be but you need to buy this garbage MOH to get on the hot beta action. I for one can wait because the DICE of recent memory hasn't been up to snuff as far as games have gone. For me DICE hit their climax with Battlefield 1942 and everything went down hill from there. Vietnam was an unbalanced piece of crap and I never played Battlefield 2 but I've heard good things about that one so I can give it a pass. Next you had all the console BF games which failed to grasp the PC BF experience so they can all blow. Bad Company 1 had a great single player campaign as it was nice to play a war FPS that didn't take itself to seriously, then BC2 which pretty much ignored the whole first game had the most bland, plain war story I've ever seen. The multiplayer for both of these games was just screaming, "Hey look at us! We're almost he PC BF games but we're not quite there yet!" But I don't really know it's just this whole MOH thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't want to see the game do well just because it has a BF 3 beta included with it.

Kane and Lynch 2 demo has a virus?

Well I tried to download the Kane and Lynch 2 demo from Steam the other day and my antivirus popped up with a warning. It detected a bad file in the download from Steam and stopped the download. With a little research I found out it was a false positive associated with my NOD 32 not liking something it saw. Maybe Eset were not fans of the first Kane and Lynch and decided to show their disliking in the form of false virus warnings? I don't really think that but it sucks I'm having trouble downloading it as I am a big fan of the first game and I'm really looking forward to part 2. I've read a couple of workarounds for this issuse and I'll try them a little later today and hopefully I can grab the demo and write some impressions on it.

The game comes out next month which is pretty sweet, and you can save 5 percent if you preorder on Steam before game comes out. Even with all the issues from the first game I'm just really looking forward to part 2 and seeing the continuing story of these two guys.

Plants vs Zombies vs Michael Jackson

So like everyone else I read about Michael Jackson's family wanting the "Dancing Zombie" taken out of Pop-Cap's Plants vs Zombies game. If you don't know what the Zombie in question is, it's a zombie that comes out of the ground and moonwalks with some backup dancers similar to Michael Jackson while wearing a red leather coat like Jacko wore in the Thriller days. You can see the Zombie in question at around 42 seconds into this video.




The Jackson family is threatening legal trouble if the zombie isn't removed so Pop-Cap is doing what some may call the smart thing and replacing the Jacko Zombie which is never referred to as Jackson in anyway just the look, with a Disco Zombie which I haven't seen yet. The idevice version of the game has the change already and the XBLA version will have it too, but no word on when the PC version will get a patch. The whole laws of parody would probably work in Pop-Cap's favor but I guess it's easier for them to just change the game then go through a giant legal battle over a throwaway joke that was only mildly amusing. I should note that the Zombie was in the game way before Jackson actually died so it wasn't like Pop-Cap was putting him in there to make fun of his death but really from all the news reports the dude sounded like a real scum bag. The amount of pedo charges against him were numerous and he was a straight up junkie and the family needs to let him rest and quit trying to make money off of someone who they pretty much had nothing to do with when he was alive. Greedy little bitches the whole lot of them, but this isn't the time or place for all that.

What I think should happen, if I was in charge of all gaming would be to put a Zombie MJ in ever game for now on. Hell go back and edit him into past games. Left 4 Dead needs a zombie MJ, the Call of Duty World at War Zombie mode could have a dancing Jacko with all the Nazi Zombies. In Dead Rising you would have to kill him with his own records or a stand up of him. As the blood crazed child loving zombie comes shuffling towards you hypodermic needle stuck in his arm from the last drug shoot up you'd see who it is. Oh my god! It's Jackson! Now kill it!

Let Me Ride On The Wall Of Text One More Time!

Some people have complained about the formatting of some of my posts.

They says when it's a big block of text it's annoying.

Actual quote, "I can't keep track of reading when it's all together like that because I didn't pass the third grade and learn how to read."

I hope this is an acceptable formatting style!

Let's talk about World of Warcraft

I've spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft in the past. I started with it about a month after the game first came out and played for what I call the standard MMO three months. For me in the past with any MMO I usually play it obsessively for about 3 months before I burn out and move on to something else. I've gone back to it on occasion but I always do the three months and I'm done. Every time I've come back to the game I start over usually on the opposite faction from what I played before. I just stopped playing from my most recent return and some of the things in how Blizzard handle the game just don't make me happy. The main reason I quit was my account was hacked and I lost all my good gear. The hackers kept all my crap gear to farm stuff with and then sold the good stuff. I was already not that into playing anymore but this was the breaking point for me. Blizzard was great about getting my account back to me and they were going to return all my gold and items but it was going to take some time to get it all back and I just didn't feel like using my crap gear while I waited for that to happen. I have no idea how the hackers were able to get my account info because my anti virus came up with nothing and all my malware scans came back negative. I guess it's my fault for not having an authenticator but I shouldn't need that. A friend and I came up with a great solution to this without needing an outside device to keep your account safe. If you usually log in from say Florida and then all of a sudden the servers see you logging in from, hmm I don't know uh, China your account should be locked down until you contact Blizzard. They should send an email to you to say hey is this alright and you would need to call them and sort it all out on the phone. Hell they should do this if you move and log in from another IP address with out changing the info with them. This may sound like a major inconvenience and I don't even know if it's possible but it would make a fantastic last line of defense against the WOW hacking crap that goes on. But in the end I wasn't really angry I was hacked it was just such a pain in the ass to get it all fixed. Blizzards phone support was great once I was able to get them on the phone which took about an hour but once I got through it only took a few minutes to get it all back. But then they were able to hack my email and that was a pain to get back. Google were jerks about giving me my email back but I eventually was able to. That was the big stickler to me was the hassle of getting my email back from Google but I think if Blizzard had a better anti hacking thingy I wouldn't of had these problems. Don't get me wrong WOW is still a well done MMO but I'm just done with it right now.

Valve banning Modern Warfare 2 players...

Over the weekend Valve banned a good number or people from playing Modern Warfare 2 online through Steam. Steam has this Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) software that detects cheating and gives you a permanent ban from playing Steam games online. Apparently some MW2 players were banned for what Valve is calling a software glitch.

From Valve's Statement -

"The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn't a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks)."


I'm glad to see Valve stepping up and taking the blame for the wrongful bans. It's nice to see a company admit it's fault and make things right with the fans. On top of unbanning the falsely banned Valve is offering them a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2. It just goes to show how much of a class act Valve is. I think when the history of gaming is written Valve will stand on the top of the heap as the single best company in the industry.

Starcraft 2 comes out tomorrow... and I don't really care.

I've always been a big fan of Blizzard, I love a lot of their games. Yeah I like Warcraft 1/2/3, Diablo 1 and 2, I've put a lot of time into World of Warcraft. I even love the older games they did, like The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne. But one game from them I've never been able to get down with is Starcraft. I played it a little back when it first came out and I didn't really care for it. The sudden change from Warcraft 2 to what they did with Starcraft just didn't sit well with me. I remember seeing the first screen shots of SC and it looked very similar to WC2 and I was excited to play it, because to this day Warcraft 2 is my all time favorite Real Time Strategy game and when I saw the changes to SC I didn't know what to think. I ended up only trying the game and only playing a few levels and just deciding it wasn't for me. Really around this time I just lost touch with the RTS genre and I didn't like how they were becoming these more complex versions of what they started as and yeah I know it's good for a genre to grow but this was one I didn't really like to see evolve the way it did. And to me SC was the beginning of this, with the other titles associated with RTS following along. Well recently I decided to pick up Starcraft and try it again, well I still don't really care for it but I see why it's loved by so many people. It is a good RTS but again just not what I like to see. With Starcraft 2 coming out tomorrow I'm probably the only PC gamer that just doesn't care about it. It feels weird to be sitting on the sidelines for this one as I'm usually all about the hot new release but just not this time. If they put out a demo I'll try it but I just can't see myself enjoying it. I know Blizzard can't be in any hurry to put out a new Warcraft RTS with the amazing success WOW has had but I would love to see a Warcraft 4 similar in play to WC3 but with a higher unit cap. That was my biggest complaint with WC3 was the ridiculously low unit cap on each map. I like to build up massive armies and roll out against my enemy in a relentless slaughter.