midlifegamer.com

To busy playing. Enough typing.

Via Gizmodo

http://gizmodo.com/5365297//gallery/?selectedImage=5

Gizmodo watermarked the crap out of the images, so I don’t feel right posting them here.

I had a great time at PAX this year and of everything I saw I most impressed with Forza 3 and Torchlight. I also got a chance to see the new Knights of the Old Republic MMO in action. This is most definetely a triple A title at its finest. The one thing (among others) that makes this game stand out is the insane amount of spoken dialog. EVERY nuance from mission descriptions to minute interactions is proffesional voice work. As stated during the presentation by the developers, this is the true succesor to the Knights of the Old Republic games. Speaking of KotOR, Bioware gave out free copies (soon available via Steam) to all the attendees! At least I have a cool momento to remember PAX.

Got a chance to play some multi player Starcraft II. The game is definitely more polished than last year. Due to the 20 minute time limit I didn’t explore many advanced units but I did get a chance to build a protoss carrier. It was like 1998 all over again. I did get a glimpse at the single player as well. Much more effort has been put into the cut scenes and single player mechanics. I honestly chose the multi player option so that the experience wasnt spoiled on release.

I spent some time with Torchlight today. I am very excited about this game. Sure its  Diablo clone but it was very fun to play. Here are some highlights:

-3 races

-Boss battles

-Armour sets

-Pets that you can send back to town (to cash in your loot!)

-Going to retail in about a month for 20 bucks!

Tomorrow is hands on with the Monk class of Diablo III

Day 1 of PAX complete and I am beat. Here a few highlights:

Diablo III crushes skulls and was better than expected. Take Diablo II and put a shine on it, add more dynamics to the combat (think combo kills and better looking special attacks) I played through a desert level with the Barbarian. There was a very neat part of the game where I entered an underground section of the desert and had 2 minutes to snag all the treasure I could find. While running around the whole level was crumbling apart around me, it was a very neat effect and added a real sense of urgency to the escape and loot grabbing. Overall it was worth the wait to play.

Forza 3 looked and played fantastic. The online videos do this game no justice. It really is a giant leap in graphics. The environments looked super detailed and the rewind feature really makes the game more enjoyable. This coming from a build that was 5 months old and a car view that was (only?) running at 30 frames per second. The game looked, sounded and felt great.

Brutal Legend surprised me in that it was so funny, Jack Black did a great job with the voice work. Another cool game I saw was Torchlight, think simple Dungeon crawling loot based stuff. I was happy to hear that this game was headed for beta but scheduled for release in late October!

So far the only disappointment was Need for Speed: Shift. Probabably didnt help that I had played Forza 3 first but it just didnt feel right. Sloppy controls and just not real fun to play.

Overall great first day. Tomorrow its more time with Diablo III and the single player campaign of Starcraft II.

Monk class announced for Diablo III..

Sweet looking hand-to-hand combat class.

Can’t wait to try this!

It’s old news at this point but it looks like this:

- PS3 3.0 Firmware on the way:

- 100$ Price drop

- PS3 Slim on its way

I have been really digging Trials HD. Its a nice distraction between Champions Online patch restarts.