Mongo Nation

Exclusive Mass Effect 2 footage coming soon to XBLA.

As you probably all know by now, we’ve long been advocates of original video content on Xbox Live. When Microsoft teamed with James Wann, Peter Cornwell, Peter Gunn and Andrew Douglas for “Horror Directors Do Comedy“, we were the first to let you know. We also broke the news when Felicia Day brought “The Guild” to XBLA, and we were there on day one when Netflix first became available on your home console.

Today we learned from our sources at Xbox Live that our friends at Machinima.com will be joining the XBLA video club with their original series, “Art of the Game”! The first episode is set to debut on Monday the 18th, and will feature exclusive, never before seen footage of Mass Effect 2. Machinima’s history with producing awesome gaming videos should make them a good fit for the Xbox Live community, as well as providing a welcome alternative to watching Jessica Chobot pretend to like video games while reading text off of a teleprompter.

We’re all super pumped for Mass Effect 2 here at Crave (especially Erik Norris, who just wrote a long, embarrassing love letter to Bioware earlier this week), so we’ll certainly be watching. To get a better idea of what to expect, check out this episode featuring the art design of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. Then pretend that they’re talking about aliens and robots and stuff like that instead of superheroes and you’re halfway there!

You asked for a challenge, and you got one.

By Jeremy Azevedo

Borderlands was easily one of my favorite titles of the year, if not ever. Combining the loot collecting, RPG elements of Diablo with the shooter Gameplay of Halo has resulted in one of the most refreshing titles in ages. But as much as I loved “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned”, this second DLC, “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot poses a couple of problems for me.

The arena based combat that makes up the entirety of this add-on is nothing entirely new to Borderlands veterans. There are several instances in which you have had the opportunity to compete against waves of wasteland baddies throughout the main narrative. These have always served as a fun diversion, and it would make sense to have a chance to revisit them for one very simple reason: After a certain amount of time, your character and weapons will become too strong to be properly challenged.

Borderlands’ new leading lady, Mad Moxxi.

It’s too bad then, that The Underdome is just a little too goddamn hard. I hadn’t played Borderlands in a few weeks and was surprised at how rusty I had become. So that was my first problem. My second problem, and one that many people will experience, is that there wasn’t really anyone else playing it at the same time as I was.

With five rounds of five waves of enemies, there is absolutely no way in hell that a single person could make their way through it without playing in the first playthrough (in which the enemies are significantly less hardcore) with a full set of super-orange weapons and gear. And even then, you probably wouldn’t survive long, what with the rule changes that pop up between rounds. These could range from specific weapon damage bonuses to low gravity, spastic enemies, a health sapping vampire mode (which will be none too familiar to Soulcalibur vets) or playing “naked” (with no shields). Co-op play is not just encouraged here, it’s pretty much required.

Gearbox appears to have learned a little somethin’ from Dragon Age’s infamous “Warden’s Keep” DLC…

Once you get a team together, things get a lot more interesting. Instead of being shit out of luck when you die, you instead go to a “penalty box” for the duration of the round. From here, you can still snipe enemies and participate in a limited fashion, which is sorta fun. It reminds me of Super Bomberman back on the Super SNES. The difficulty on later playthroughs really tests your ability to play well and work as a team, which is something a lot of players wanted. Plus you get a “bank” to store your favorite gear, which is awesome, especially if you do a lot of trading with other players. And you can get a couple of skill points for your trouble, which gives you a very specific edge in PvP arenas and that. Read the rest of this entry →

Final Fight and Magic Sword, coming soon to XBLA and PSN!

When I saw the announcement for Final Fight: Double Impact, I immediately thought (as any rational person might) that this would be a packaging of the first two games in the series. Or maybe they threw in the NES version, “Mighty Final Fight” just for laughs or something. I pretty much expected any pairing of Final Fight titles other than Final Fight and Magic Sword, a game that has absolutely nothing at all to do with Final Fight and probably doesn’t even have a buff dude with a mustache in it or anything.

Not that I’m complaining… I actually love Magic Sword. It’s one of my favorite games. I can even overlook the fact that this will be like the third time I’ve purchased both of these games on various systems throughout the years, because that’s just how timeless they both are. The graphical update (similar to the one applied to Marvel Vs. Capcom 2) doesn’t hurt the games’ chances any, nor does the slick arcade cabinet style presentation, which really bumps up the nostalgia factor for me.

For the uninitiated, Final Fight was the beat-em-up that really kicked off the genre, as well as setting the stage for the one-on-one fighters to follow. In fact, Final Fight characters have made several appearances in Street Fighter games to date, the latest of which is the announced addition of Guy and Cody to Super Street Fighter VI. Magic Sword was sort of a fighter/action RPG in which you beat the shit out of lizard men and manticores through 50 levels of a dark tower, collecting various weapon upgrades, armor, power-ups and followers as you go. Both games also feature the ability to make chicken appear on the floor by smashing barrels, and then eat it to regain lost health.
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Now you can wear your favorite games on your (virtual) sleeve, for free!

By Jeremy Azevedo

Months ago, Microsoft announced that “Avatar Awards” would be a part of the new user interface for Xbox Live. What this means is that, in addition to achievements, you could also unlock gear for your XBLA Avatar by completing certain objectives in a given title.

Since then, not one game that I am aware of has implemented this. I did read somewhere that “Splosion Man” was actually the first, but I don’t give enough of a shit about Splosion Man to actually look into it. Anway, moving on…

The Avatar Awards drought will end with the release of Left 4 Dead 2, which will feature a handful of unlockable shirts that you can win and then clothe your avatar with, which is a much better alternative to spending actual real money on virtual clothes for them to wear. Finally, you can stop pretending that you own a sweet leather jacket and start dressing your avatar more like yourself in real life: A nerd that wears video game t-shirts in public.

The specific Avatar Awards that have been confirmed thus far are as follows:

• Med Kit: Earned by beating all five campaigns.
• Bull Shifters Shirt: earned by winning 10 games of Versus.
• A Left 4 Dead 2 shirt: Earned by winning 10 games of Scavenge.
• Zombie Hand Shirt: Earned by killing 10,000 Infected.
• Depeche Mode Shirt: Earned by rescuing Gnome Chompski from the Dark Carnival.

It’s a nice gesture, but call me when I can equip my little dude with a bloody clown suit or an AK-47 or something radder than a shirt. Then we’ll really be onto something.

Your new favorite online obsession?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Borderlands is a strange sort of game. Of all the shooters and all the RPGs I’ve ever played, I never really thought that the two flavors would ever meet in such a complimentary manner.

It’s tempting to compare Borderlands to Fallout 3 right away, on account of it being an FPS/RPG hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But to be fair to both games, that’s where the similarities begin and end. Where Fallout is deeply rooted in dialogue trees and story, Borderlands is all action. It’s really more like Halo than it is like Fallout. There’s no mysterious underlying “Dungeons and Dragons” system of chance that dictates whether you hit or miss, or whether your shot was critical or not. You have to relay on your old school run and gun FPS skills to get ahead in Borderlands. Which is not to say that said skills are not fully customizable… There are dozens of different skills that can be attributed to any of your four different character classes, some of which really change the way you play. Not to mention the millions (not an exaggeration) of different guns that you might find as you blaze through the game.

Yipee-kay-yay motherf**ker!

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up the game is how great it looks. The graphical presentation is incredibly stylish, reminding me a bit of the Dreamcast classic Jet Grind Radio, though the cel-shading is not nearly as overbearing. In motion it looks very fluid, though I sort of wish that there were a 3rd person view option so that I could see my character in the space and have a wider field of view. Most wouldn’t agree with me, but I always feel like 1st person games always have too narrow of a visual focus for my liking. Also, I just spent all this time agonizing over which colors to make my clothes, and now I can’t even see them. WTF, at least put some mirrors in the game or something. Aside from that one minor complaint, Gearbox has constructed am incredibly detailed world in which you genuinely feel like a lone mercenary scavenger, living off of loot to survive the harsh and lonely wasteland.

The enemies, of which there are many different sizes and shapes, look crazy as hell and act equally so. In the first few missions alone, you’ll encounter warthog type creatures with mouths that look like a vagina dentate, various pissed-off midgets, fully-grown mongoloid flipper babies, and a metric shit-ton of dudes wearing hockey masks. (Apparently, hockey mask are like the cockroach of the sporting goods world.) As Mordecai the hunter, I initially found it frustrating that my sniper rifle didn’t do jack to most of these enemies, that it took forever to reload, and that after one or two shots they were all over me like a Kardashian on an NFL superstar. But after leveling up a bit and upgrading my weapons, I found myself performing better and better, softening up “skags” from a mile away with my scoped rifle and finishing them off up close with my fire bullet spewing machine pistol. Although I’m still pretty sure that the retarded bird special attack is the worst of the four. Why have a health and ammo restoring shielded turret, turn invisible, or “hulk out” in a nigh-invulnerable frenzy when you can have a goddamn bird flap around doing absolutely f**k all, so far as I can tell? Why indeed.

Mordecai and Lilith defeat the legendary “Montauk Monster”.

After playing the single player campaign and leveling up a bit so as not to come off as a total n00b, I joined an online party where I was almost immediately exposed as a n00b anyway. I don’t play games online very much, so it took me a little while to get up to speed. But by 1AM in the morning, I had a group of new friends playing as a well-balanced team, sharing loot and picking our way through hordes of over-leveled enemies in places that we most likely had no business being. I also had a sorta pissed off wifey. Invariably, some asshole always snagged the really l33t loot before anyone else could, but then, you’re constantly finding randomly generated weapons that are significantly more awesome than the one you had before so it’s not that big of an issue. I’d imagine that Borderlands is probably very similar to WOW or Diablo in it’s reward and loot sharing system, though I wouldn’t really be the one to comment on that. I’m about as likely to play WOW as I am to try heroine; I’m sure it’s probably awesome, I really just don’t need another debilitating addiction in my life. Read the rest of this entry →