X-Box, Playstation, and Wii Game News

Friendly Reminder: If you simply can't wait until March 21 to try out Mass Effect: Andromeda, you can sign up for EA Access today to try out the game early for 10 hours of playtime (along with a few other exclusions.)

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/origin-access/trials

Speaking of, I found this amusing. May have to sign up for Access just to be able to experience this:



Edit: Okay so apparently there's walking issues with the game..


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Danger Zone is coming to Rock Band 4, with Sterling Archer as the new vocal character.



For those of you that aren't Archer fans, "Danger Zone" is a running joke throughout the show.

While I appreciate going with the running joke for this, I can't get over how awful Archer looks. I understand making him animated like that as opposed to fully modeled like everyone else, but its just a bad looking model. Reminds me of the Graphics from Killer 7...



Watching that footage of K7 REALLY makes me want to go back and play Killer 7 again. Its a REALLY out there game, but a cult classic. It's a Suda 51 Trip. I never got around to beating it though, sad to say.
 
Friendly Reminder: If you simply can't wait until March 21 to try out Mass Effect: Andromeda, you can sign up for EA Access today to try out the game early for 10 hours of playtime (along with a few other exclusions.)

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/origin-access/trials

I was planning on signing up for Origin Access for the month of March to for this early access and maybe play Mirror's Edge Catalyst while I had my subscription. That was before I knew I was going to buy Horizon Zero Dawn at launch though. Now I'm considering not touching Mass Effect until I finish Horizon.

This is crazy considering that Mass Effect is my favorite game series of all time and I have had Andromeda pre-ordered since Black Friday. I'm still very excited for Mass Effect. I just know from past experience with other games that if I switch over to that now my chances of ever finishing Horizon are very low.

Speaking of, I found this amusing. May have to sign up for Access just to be able to experience this:



Edit: Okay so apparently there's walking issues with the game..



That sure is something.... I really doubt that will have any effect on my enjoyment of the game but it's still surprising that this made it in to the final version of the game.
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A LOT of posts and people are complaining about the awful character animations and writing, and the question that keeps getting repeated is how is it possible that this can be from the same company that did so well in previous games?

Well, it turns out this ISN'T the same company. This is Bioware Montreal, which is not the same branch that made the original trilogy. This branch previous did supplemental content, including the Citadel DLC from the trilogy. This may be their first full fledged game on this big of a scale. On top of that, this is the first ME game made with the Frostbyte engine, which means its a completely different language and system to deal with.

This may explain why there's such a quality disparity between this and the original trilogy. Very little (if any) of the same team from the original is working on this, not to mention the original used Unreal Engine 3.
 
Speaking of Mass Effect: Andromeda, the review embargo has been lifted and the reviews are out. While the general consensus (aside from a few exceptions) seems to be that the game is in fact good and worth playing if you're a fan, it doesn't live up to the expectations set by the series.

 
I've been trying to avoid seeing as much pre-release coverage about this game as possible but the weird animation GIFs I have seen make it seem like it could have used a few more months of polish.

From reading a few of those review excerpts I haven't seen anything that is making me regret my pre-order, especially since a Black Friday deal combined with the 20% off for Amazon Prime members means I got the game for $36. It doesn't sound like it's the masterpiece I was hoping for but I'm still very much looking forward to playing the game. Hopefully by the time I finish up Horizon there will be a couple patches to improve the experience. I think people expecting them to patch in new animations are going to be disappointed though.
 
I have it coming in on PS4 but I'm not sure I'm going to delve into it right now. Not sure if I can have 2 epic games on my plate at the same time. I'm actually hoping that the game doesn't do well early on and EA starts cutting the price early so I can pick it up on Origin for like $40 shortly after I'm done with H:ZD

I do hope though that Bioware and/or EA don't get an angry deluge of abuse from jilted fans who are angry that their beloved game had a bit of a misstep after it was given to a separate development team and had a brand new engine to deal with.
 
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So I may have signed up for Origin Access and played about an hour and a half of Mass Effect Andromeda tonight. It's too early to draw any conclusions in a game this big but the animations I have seen so far are no where near what was shown in those GIFs. Looking at it now I think the person who made that was holding the sprint button down and rapidly hitting right and left to make it look like that.

That's not to say everything looks great. Parts of the environment do look very nice but some of the character faces look pretty janky for a game of this budget. It doesn't help that the game zooms in on them when you have your dialog wheel moments. This seems much more noticeable on the human NPCs than the alien ones.

Now that I have seen the game for myself I'm going to try to shift the focus back to Horizon until I'm done with only a few occasional Mass Effect nights.
 
I considered getting Origin Access as well to try out the game early, but then I figured I'd likely be better off waiting until they ironed out some bugs, not to mention the fact that game ready drivers for the game weren't out yet (They are now.) That and the fact that I didn't want it or H:ZD to suffer from my personal Open World Fatigue, which Zelda has already been a victim of.

I do have to say that so far 2017 has been pretty stacked with great releases. Hope they can keep this pace up.
 
I considered getting Origin Access as well to try out the game early, but then I figured I'd likely be better off waiting until they ironed out some bugs, not to mention the fact that game ready drivers for the game weren't out yet (They are now.) That and the fact that I didn't want it or H:ZD to suffer from my personal Open World Fatigue, which Zelda has already been a victim of.

I do have to say that so far 2017 has been pretty stacked with great releases. Hope they can keep this pace up.

Yeah this year has been awesome for games so far and were only a couple months in.

I got the Nvidia Game Ready drivers before I jumped into Mass Effect last night and I can say that the game itself runs pretty well. With all settings maxed I was getting around 70 FPS.

The strange thing is that a few of the cutscenes drop into the 45-55 FPS range. One cutscene dropped as low as 28 FPS which was strange because there didn't seem to be anything special about it. This is weird behavior that I hope will be fixed before I actually dive into this game for real but at least the actual gameplay is smooth.

I will say that G-Sync helps keep things looking smooth through most of these dips. With the exception of the one cutscene that dropped all the way to 28 FPS I'm not sure I would have noticed the other dips if I didn't have my FPS counter on. I don't normally leave it on but I do sometimes when I play a new game for the first time to get a more concrete idea of how well the game is running.
 
For Honor players are planning a "protest" to complain about the microtransaction system in the game, with the belief that it costs too much ($700+) and takes too much time to do it manually. Ubisoft responded to this controversy recently by stating that they never thought that people would try to unlock everything in the game (That didn't seem to go over well with the fanbase.)

https://gamerant.com/for-honor-microtransaction-protest/
 
It's nice to see that Bioware is posting something other than messages to "fans" to stop harassing former employees:



Interesting to see what the subject of the announcement will be..

"Our Plan to Make Our Game Less Uncomfortable to Watch and Play!"

Let's hope they don't pull a REALLY bad move and do something like announce the DLC plans. That'll go over about as well as the Mass Effect 3 ending did.
 


Rocket League is getting some Fast and Furious DLC next week. They also added a new game mode called Drop Shot last week that I have been having a pretty good time with.
 

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