Mass Effect 2: The Vanguard

Image by Cystie via Flickr

This morning on my way to work I was browsing sites on my mobile broadband as usual, when I came across this gem. Details on the new Vanguard! Mass Effect fans rejoice.

Having a read on IGN, it looks like a lot of work is being put into making sure that this time around, the classes are very unique.

Beforehand, the Vanguard was a mix between the biotic and the soldier – this basically meant that you could pack a punch with “castable” abilities such as lift, throw and singularity and also be pretty handy with weapons too. This changes come Mass Effect 2.

The new Vanguard, as you will read below, has now become a hard hitting, fast-paced class – you will be charging into enemies and pulling them toward you, this means that you’ll have to use the classes ability to deal massive damage at close range with precision and skill – or die trying.

The Vanguard will also be able to put points into improved negotiation techniques, making the class ideal for those who liked the story and conversational pieces from Mass Effect 1.

IGN: What was the most important improvement you felt needed to be made for the Vanguard class?

Christina Norman: We wanted playing the Vanguard to feel totally different from playing a Soldier or Adept. Our mantra for the Vanguard was high-risk high-reward, and we designed the Vanguard’s unique Biotic Charge power to enable this kind of gameplay.

The most dangerous situation you can find yourself in when you’re playing Mass Effect 2 is when an enemy closes with you. At short range all weapons are incredibly deadly. Most classes do their best to stay far away from their enemies, but Vanguards embrace this deadly style of combat.

When a Vanguard charges, he propels himself with biotic energy directly towards his target, striking him with incredible force. On impact, the Vanguard’s defensive barriers are boosted. This gives the Vanguard a few seconds to take down any other enemies, before they finish the Vanguard.

Playing a Vanguard is a constant rush. Every charge is devastating, and taking down nearby enemies when you land is always an intense.

You can read the rest of the article here. There’s also a game play trailer here. Thanks IGN!

8-Bit Left 4 Dead: Team Shoot Louis, Retro Style!

Image by Cystie via Flickr

I’ve mentioned the sights of car rentals and buses flying through the air at you before, but never before did I think an 8-Bit Tank would be the culprit.

If you’re on the edge while waiting for The Passing, and have gotten a little bored of Left 4 Dead 2 itself, why not go zombie retro? Pixel Force have packed all the fun of Left 4 Dead into 21 MB while giving you that cozy nostalgic feeling that only an 8-bit game could bring.

You can download the game here. Sadly it is not playable over mobile broadband, as far as I can tell. 😦

If you’d like a little more view into the game before you put your hard earned time into that 21MB download, there’s a little video over at Shack News.

Left 4 Dead 2: The Passing DLC

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Somewhat old news, but I’d like to cover it for the sake of covering it really (I probably could have updated via mobile broadband went it was first announced, but oh well!) Valve recently(ish) announced the first add-on for Left 4 Dead 2, where the new survivors (Ellis, Coach, Rochelle and Nick) will meet the survivors from Left 4 Dead 1 (Bill, Francis, Zoey and Louis).

“The Passing will become the most important campaign in the Left 4 Dead story, as all the Survivors are being called together in one campaign,” Valve’s marketing VP Doug Lombardi had to say. “It will also be a huge offering of new gameplay content, with something new for every game mode plus a new uncommon common and weaponry.”

So, we get a new campaign, a new co-op mode and a few new features such as weapons and new uncommon (I refuse to say uncommon common). The new campaign will take place after Left 4 Dead 2’s Dead Centre (remember Ellis’ little “car hire“?) and before Dark Carnival, so it’ll be interesting to see how they slot that in there without breaking the continuity.

According to some sources, we’ll be taking control of the L4D2 cast and not the L4D1 cast, so it’s yet to be seen how they’ll take part in the game play or storyline.

Here’s for playing as Zoey and spamming the death scream voice command again!

Shoot… Or Run… Or Melee?

Image by Cystie via Flickr

Another Left 4 Dead 2 post! Today I bring the whats and what nots of fighting our dearest friend, the Tank!

However, before we continue, a note from the star himself, Tank:

Dear Humans. This is Tank. You probably know me from hit Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead. Well, Tank need to get something off chest.

It make Tank sad that as soon as you see him, you start shooting at him. Tank not mindless killing machine. Sure, Tank enjoy smashing human skulls to paste. What 12-foot tall, 800 pound, horribly mutated creature wouldn’t? But there is another side to Tank. Tank also enjoy stamp collecting, scrapbooking, and updating blog under pen name “Love Muffin”. Tank took origami class once at adult-learning annex, but fingers to big, so Tank smash teacher. Got B-minus.

So, when you see Tank on the streets of city, instead of shooting, try asking Tank how day is going. You may find that you and Tank have more in common than you think. Of course, Tank will still smash you, but you will die having made new friend. And that make Tank happy.

-Tank

If you’re still here and you still want to know how to make sure your skull isn’t turned into a fine paste, read on!

A user on the Steam forums posted this, (Urik) and it looks like it might just do the trick when it comes to facing our next Tank. This shows the amount of bullets, reloads, hits and time it takes for each weapon to kill a tank on Expert mode (click for bigger)! So the next time you look into the night’s sky and see a car rental drifting through the air at high speed toward you, remember – you should have picked up the frying pan. Screw the shotgun. Cook that mother fucker.

Free Sim Cards

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Alright, a little money-saving post because I really needed one of these and found a pretty helpful website. My phone still isn’t fixed though, the only thing it has at the moment is mobile broadband, anything else outgoing doesn’t work. 😦

First off, the site where I found the info is here, go there if you want any more information or links, as all credit is to them! The list of free SIM cards:

• Orange – With orange you can get free texts, 2 for one on cinema tickets & many more great offers.
• O2 – Each free O2 pay as you go sim card includes a wide choice of offers including free calls & texts to other O2 mobile users.
• T-Mobile – With no contracts or credit checks, T-mobile pay as you go is great value for money. Simply select from a choice of 3 price plans to suit you & get free unlimited texts every weekend!
• Tesco Mobile – Tesco mobile gives you free credit when you top-up, half price call deals & much more.
• Vodafone – With Vodafone pay as you go you can choose from a range of deals that will save you the most money on your mobile costs.

The source site also updates daily, so if you read this in the far future, really make sure to check it.

Steam Holiday Sales!

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Right now Bioshock is £3.49 and GTA4 is £4.99!

In case you’re a PC gamer that doesn’t like to download all of their games illegally, or if you’re into online gaming, (like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2) get Steam!

For further incentive, their holiday sales are on at the moment (and have been on since before christmas) and they have some pretty insane prices. Most of the games on Steam have money off and a few chosen games a day have up to 75% off. Here are the specials for today:

• Torchlight – £3.75
• Grand Theft Auto IV – £4.99
• Defense Grid: The Awakening – £1.75
• BioShock™ – £3.49
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl – £2.00
• Left 4 Dead 2 – £20.09
• Killing Floor – £3.75

There’s a lot more on there at the moment, and new specials every single day – so make sure to keep that mobile broadband at hand, lest you miss out on an awesomely cheap game.

This is the last day of the Steam holiday sale, and the games above are a re-offering of their best sellers over the holiday sale. Good going, Steam!

Fallout 3 storage. Items disappearing fix.

Image by Cystie via Flickr

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 a little bit lately, and overall it’s a pretty great game. I took the often walked path and dumped all my points into intelligence and hardly any into strength, which means more points when you level but you can carry jack shit when it comes to your back pack. Before I actually figured out you could fast travel (I don’t really get this anyway, does he yell for a non-existent car hire or does it just skip the amount of time it would have taken us to walk there?) after walking from one city to another while over encumbered… Yeah, that took a while. Nice profit though!

So I did what any good gamer would do, look for a place to dump my stash of weapons, ammo and oddly smelling scrap metal.

Without giving you guys any spoilers, one way or another you’re going to end up with your own place to stay in the game – complete with storage! I stuck a load of crap in one of my draws when I got there and happily set off again to find even more useless stuff, but to my surprise, when I got back all my stuff was gone. Had I been robbed? I didn’t even know people could rob my house. My first thought was to kill anyone within a 50 yard radius of my house with a mini nuke… But I decided to check on my mobile broadband first… low and behold, it’s a bug!

Easily fixed though, first check if you own whatever you’re trying to store items in, lets use a desk as an example:

1. Open Console with `
2. Click on the desk
3. Type IsOwner

It should now let you know if you own the desk or not. If you don’t own it, the items that you store inside won’t stay for long. To set yourself as owner, follow these steps:

1. Open Console with `
2. Click on the desk
3. Type SetOwnership

If you want to check if it worked, just type IsOwner again, like you did before.

Ventrillo on iPhone

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Ventrilo, the Internet‘s answer to the phone… perhaps except for Skype! So is it a bad idea to expect it on the iPhone? Probably. While it would be fun to have it on the iPhone, it would probably make the phone itself redundant, something that Apple probably wouldn’t be too happy about.

So, has anyone found anyway to get past this? Having a search around Google mostly brings up threads asking if the app exists or is in the making, but one person seems to have found a… sort of solution:

I just bought a new cell phone and I am sitting in a 3-month “Unlimited Local Talking”. Now I thought that it would be cool to be able to call a number and get linked into Ventrilo while you are out. Totally useless in my eyes as no one would ever use it except for this one moment that I wanted to use it. In thinking about that though, I got even more ideas which eventually lead me to develop (or think up) a portable Ventrilo Client.

1) I set up Ventrilo‘s speakers and microphone to my “Sound Blaster” card. I set my microphone to “What U Hear” so that any noise my computer made, was transmitted on the microphone channel.

2) I opened up Skype (as I have a $3.00 Unlimited Canada-US Calling Plan on it) and set the microphone also to the Sound Blaster’s “What U Hear” mode and the speakers to “Sound Blaster” (you can probably see where I’m going with this now).

3) I called my cell phone from Skype. When I spoke into my cell phone, it was sent to Skype, which then in turn sent it to Ventrilo so everyone can hear. Anytime someone talked on Ventrilo, Skype would pick up the noise as my microphone’s signal and send it to my cell phone allowing me to hear what was happening in Ventrilo.

Now the only problem that I was faced with was the ability to keep transmitting the signal. Taking off “Push To Talk” and leaving the sensitivity on did not produce any results as the program was canceling out its own sounds causing the “talk light” to never come on. So I had to use “Push To Talk” in order to transmit.

While it isn’t a hands on and easy app, it might give us some way to use Ventrilo on the iPhone. The problem is, it probably isn’t worth the trouble in the end. I was actually looking for something to hold me over instead of looking up free SIM cards, but this method may be a little too complicated for me 🙂

Overall, I wouldn’t expect this to appear as an official app any time soon, and I imagine that if it was made as a jail-broken app, Apple would probably take a much, much stronger stance against it.

Left 4 Dead 2 Voice Commands

Moved to Left 4 Dead 2 Voice Commands.

Microsoft challenges Steam

Image by Cystie via Flickr

Don’t change your sets or grab your getaway car hire yet, you probably won’t be playing Team Fortress 2 on a Microsoft application tomorrow, but this is interesting for us gamers nonetheless.

Microsoft‘s new service Games on Demand (Or G.O.D if you like) looks set to challenge Steam. It seems as if so far though, there are no huge gaming titles (other than Resident Evil 5) available on the service – but do they have the usual array of smaller, cheerful gaming titles.

What Microsoft had to say about it: “Our goal has always been to create a seamless online gaming experience for the Windows community, and Games on Demand is a great step toward that end.”

According to downloadsquad.com, the service will be a clone of Xbox Live (although the comments say it’s the same service, which sounds interesting) with achievements, gamerscores and voice chat.

What will Microsoft bring to the table to compete with Steam? Can they beat Steam’s already amazing offers on top selling games? Perhaps they will buy exclusive rights to certain titles?

I’ll be installing this when I get home and watching it for updates (that’s if it’s not as bad as things like EA‘s downloader).

On a quick  and unrelated note: Since my phone is playing up at the moment (yay for paying the bill and still being disconnected) I’m going to be getting a free SIM from somewhere until mine works again – does anyone know if you’re able to temporarily swap your number over to free SIM cards and back again when you’re finished with them?