Gaming Bros

Yes people it is official, Grand Theft Auto is finally coming to the PC as many anticipated. With a North American release date of November 18th and a European release date on the 21st of the same month, PC gamers will finally get to experience the best GTA game to date.

Rockstar Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. , is proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto IV will be arriving on the PC on November 18th and 21st in North America and Europe, respectively.

Expect the Middle East region to get it around the same time in November.

For more information regarding the announcement, head over to VE3D.

Square-Enix surprised everyone yesterday when it announced AND released its first game on the iPod. The game titled ‘Song Summoner: The Unsung Hereos‘ is a strategy RPG that looks and plays very similar to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and can be fully played using the iPod’s scrollwheel. The thing that makes this game unique is that the player creates his party members from his own songs, where each song can be transformed into a ‘tune trooper’ to be used in battle. The player will be able to power up his tune troopers in-game and outside the game by playing the songs of his troopers.

Gamers had never seriously considered the iPod or the iPhone as a real gaming platform because no proper gamers were made for it from traditional game developers, but on the other hand, Square-Enix and many other Japanese developers have taken mobile gaming more seriously and had released innovative and exclusive games for the mobile platform that were only available in Japan, such games include Before Crisis: Final Fantasy 7 (a game that makes use of mobile phone cameras to take photographs of colourful objects to create materia gems), Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday, and some Front Mission, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest remakes.

Song Summoner is available on the iTunes music store – this is the Apple online store for purchasing the music, videos, and applications for the iPod and the iPhone. The iPod does not allow installation of application through any other means. The game was instantly released for Japan, the US and European iTunes music stores for the low price of $4.99, £3.99, or €4.99 depending on where you are living.

The strange thing about this is Square released it for the 5th Generation iPod and the iPod nano with video, but not for the iPhone or the iPod Touch. The build of these two models obviously differs from the scrollwheel iPods, but it is strange that Square-Enix is targeting an older version of the iPod instead of going for the most powerful one. Is Square-Enix just testing the waters before properly investing in this platform? Should Sony and Nintendo start to worry now?

However, it is such a shame that we will not be able to play this game anytime in Oman because we do not have an iTunes Store. The iPod can only install new games and application through the online store and you will need an address/credit card issued from a country that has an iTunes Store to be able to use one. The UAE very recently gove its iTunes Store, I doubt that this means that WE will be getting one anytime soon.

You can check out the video of the game and learn more about it by visiting its official website.

Infinity Ward (the developers) just can’t stop surpising us with their war FPS games. Just when you think that this genre has been done to death with the hundreds of WW2 and/or modern war variants, they come and prove that there is still lots of room for improvement and excitement. After missing on Call of Duty 3, which landed only on the consoles, Infinity ward comes back with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

The new sequel is based, from it’s subtitle, on modern age war. Using everything you ever know about current weapons and tactics. The game uses an updated version of the graphics engine used in previous Call of Duty games. Simply put, it is brought to current age graphics with up to date shaders and effects. Simple reason, and good one too, of updating from a previous engine is that you get access to a wider configurations of PCs when focusing on that market only. Optimized graphics engines that don’t have to be cutting edge is always a plus (Take a hint Crytek). Graphics can keep the wow factor for an hour or so, gameplay can keep it as long as the game lasts. Which brings me to probably the only annoyance in CoD4, it’s length which is about 4-6 hours long for it’s single player campaign, that is if you are slow. Other than that, you are in for a heck of a ride.

I never played a realistic FPS war game that is so engaging. As soon as you start a level, you get the feeling of really being part of a team that are storming, ambushing, defending and whatever other means of actions you get to do in the different levels of the game. The enemies also put you on your edge and going guns blazing rambo style won’t work here, and it never worked in real life too. Taking cover and being non static is the way forward. Stick too long behind a single cover and the enemies will swarm on you or will flush you with grenades. The missions themselves have interesting variety in them, from one of the best sniping missions to spectacular base assaulting missions. You also have to always check your flank, the enemy is so good at this that you can easily get carried away by focusing on the ones infront of you and then suddenly get killed be someone from behind. The thing is, when you are going through the single player campaign, you get that cinematic feeling that you might find in a Metal Gear Solid game which is of course nice to have a little of. Maybe because the music is composed by the same composer that did the music for MGS series, Harry Gregson-Williams.

One small thing I noticed is that rag-doll physics are absent almost throughout all Call of Duty series. The physics when it debut, was of course silly and funny but current implementations are far more realistic that before so it might have been a good time to have it implemented. It isn’t a big issue but rather a slight note that won’t affect your experience in this amazing game.

Now from all the three versions: PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, getting the PC version is best if you have a good setup simply because of the keyboard+mouse control which is almost always better than the controllers used in consoles for FPS games. Still, whichever version you get, you will be sure that you will have a blast playing this game.

Yep, that is one big surprise even to me but it is as real as it gets. Doom 4 has been announced and is being worked on by id itself. This is the first time id is working with two games at the same time: Rage and Doom 4. It seems Doom 4 is response to what the audience thought of Doom 3, as in, either to fix what was supposed to be an awesome remake or continue on what people liked about Doom 3. No clear answer is visible yet but when the time comes, we will sure know.

I myself fully enjoyed Doom 3 regardless of what has been said about the game, it was fun, dark and scary (even though with the many pop scares you get). It was all in the mood and the graphics were nice and ran pretty smoothly on current generation cards (Hint Crysis!).

For the full announcement, you can read it here at shacknews.

Hello everyone,

This is my first blog and first post and hopefully not the last. Of course main reason for creating this blog is for fun and I hope I can make it alive as much as I can with nice, fun and useful information in the gaming realm. Feel free to help me out or point me to make improvements always. I might be slow at first but hopefully when I pick up things will be very exciting so stay stuned.