Game Name: Scrap Metal
Platforms: Xbox 360
Publisher(s): Xbox LIVE Arcade
Developer(s): Slick Entertainment
Genre(s): Racing Games
Release Date: 3/10/2010
ESRB Rating: E10 (Everyone 10+) Alcohol and Tobacco Reference Mild Suggestive Themes Mild Violence
Price: 1200MSP
Demo: Add to Download Queue

Story
“Drift around corners with guns blazing and take out legendary competitors in the fast-paced, top-down racing game Scrap Metal™. Fight your way through explosive, action-packed missions and defeat cunning bosses to add their vehicles to your garage. Customize your newly-acquired cars and then return to the track to blast through more enemies. Jump online with Xbox LIVE ® to race against your friends and crush their cars with the wheels of your monster truck in pulse-pounding online multiplayer matches.” [Via Xbox.com]

Drive around destroying your opponents in order to beat the levels and finish off the bosses. Every car you wreck while racing goes to your junkyard and enables you to drive that car. Defeat the bosses in order to gain that land and own it all!

Gameplay
Scrap Metal is a Top Down racer with weapons thrown in. Race and shoot your way through the levels and beat them all! Multiple Car Types, such as muscle cars, bulldozers, sports cars, and even tanks; customization them with with paint jobs and accessories; and finally Race them to victory.

When you wreck a car in a race you get that car in your junkyard for you to choose from. You also get upgrade points by placing in 3^rd (10 points), 2^nd (20 points), or 1^st (30 points). Use these points to make your cars even better, and make winning those races easier.

There are two sets of controls, the easy set up where the direction you point the joystick is where you go, and then the advanced controls where you drive your car like a remote control car. Since I drive a lot of remote control cars in real life I prefer the advanced controls, the advance controls also enable you to reverse and use an emergency break for extra precision. The controls are still extremely hard to get used to, and with other cars trying to shoot you the game becomes extremely hectic and anything can happen.

In the video below I demonstrate some aspects of the game. Some key points are:

• The first part shows the junkyard as well as the customization of your vehicle, as well as upgrading of one.
• The first race is an elimination race, weapons are disabled and after every lap the person in last place is destroyed. Other races have weapons enables, and it leads to a whole new level of difficulty.
• As you can see, car debris stay on the road and it become hazardous to drive. Every scattered part is a hazard that could make you lose.
• One of the biggest annoyances is getting knocked off of the path right as you are about to pass a checkpoint, causing you to miss the checkpoint and have to go backwards to go through it.
• The Second Race is a demolition derby, where you try to destroy as many cars as possible within the time limit.
• Different Cars have different weapons. I was using Machine Guns x2, but there was also a computer using a flamethrower, and another using a saw blade.
• You can also pick up power ups by shooting them, this will help a lot. All the power ups I got in the second video I simply shot at.

Audio
Engines revving, guns blazing, blades spinning; Scrap Metal focuses more heavily on the sound effects over the soundtrack. The menu’s have a nice theme, but while playing you will be focused on what is going around you, which is gun fire, vehicle driving, and vehicles ramming each other.

Achievements
A majority of the achievement list is based on completing the story. The online ones can be achieved with friends, so those are decently easy too. The hardest achievement is getting a gold star on every level, which is pretty much obtained by getting in first place in every race or derby. Even this one is easy if you take the time to get upgrade points and upgrade your vehicles as much as you can. Overall the achievements in Scrap Metal are easy to obtain.

Scrap Metal also contains 2 avatar awards.

An Awesome Scrap Metal Shirt – Complete the first chapter

A Scrap Metal RC Car! – Complete all missions in the single player game to win this costume. (It says costume, this could be a typo)

The Achievement List is:

• Kicking the Tires – Complete the Single Player tutorial mission.
• Mr. Awesome – Defeat the Awesomeland End Boss.
• Sal – Defeat the Gastown End Boss.
• Semi Slapshot – Defeat the Coal Harbour End Boss.
• Alex Alternator – Defeat the Motordome End Boss.
• Petrove Piston – Defeat the East District End Boss.
• Cletus Clutch – Defeat the Wetlands End Boss.
• Rick Bricktop – Defeat the Downtown End Boss.
• Bling Bling – Achieve all gold medals for all Single Player missions.
• King of the Hill – Win first place in an Xbox LIVE King of the Hill match.
• Dominator – Win first place in an Xbox LIVE Race match.
• Scrap Yard – Take out 20 or more opponents in an Xbox LIVE Derby.

Overview
Top down racer fans rejoice! Scrap Metal is a fun top down racer with loads of customization possibilities. The game does have a tendency to get repetitive due to a lack of different game types, but on the other hand there are loads of different cars, upgrades, power ups, and customization options that will lead to endless hours of racing and destruction for those who purchase Scrap Metal (1200MSP / 15$ USD). Scrap Metal is a fun, bullet flying, car destroying experience and I give Scrap Metal 8 Capsules out of 10.

Pros

• Customize your cars, and get new cars by destroying your enemies.
• Many Tracks, Cars, and power ups for hours of fun.
• The classic feel of a top down racer with the added benefits of guns.
• Leaderboards enable you to compete for best scores with the world.

Cons

• Like all arcade games, the online community will probably not last very long.
• The game has a tendency to get repetitive, since every level requires you to kill someone, run away from someone, or be faster than someone.
• Driving can be a nuisance sometimes because you can’t get a clear view of what is around you at all times.

Source

WANT A COPY OF SCRAP METAL?
This week’s most active community member will win Scrap Metal on the Xbox Live Arcade. Every Friday we give away a Xbox Live Arcade game or Steam code to the the most active member. For more information click here.

Robert Bowling, from Infinity ward, directed everyone who follows him on twitter to a self help site that announces Modern Warfare 2 maps are coming March 30th.

See the Tweet here.

Are you suffering from Mapathy?

Teabagging Support in Halo: Reach

Bungie has recently acknowledged a bug (if you can call it that) in the current alpha phase of Halo: Reach.

Currently whenever you die, the respawn camera flies to your respawn location keeping you from seeing any teabagging that your opponents do to you.

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Title: Teabagging / humiliation moves impossible
Type: Bug
Opened: 3/4/2010 8:53:13 AM
“The respawn camera flies back to the spawn location immediately after dying, so your opponents can’t teabag / shoot / melee your body and have a possibility of you seeing it.”
~~~

I personally like the flying camera idea, it reduces the chance of spawn camping, and honestly I feel teabagging to be a very immature move.

Do you guys feel that Bungie should fix it so that we are forced to watch the enemy teabag us? Maybe an option to turn it on or off?

Halo: Reach Ringtones
Here is a present from Bungie to you, want a Halo themed ringtone?
Well, have at them guys!

“Reach Reach Reach…” in MP3 format
“Reach Reach Reach…” in M4R format

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Recently Bizarre Creations  announced that there is no DLC for Blur in development, but they do have plans for DLC in the future. According to lead designer Ged Talbot, throughout the year or more of development not a single team has worked on any sort of DLC.

Bizarre Creations assures everyone that DLC is coming, just not on the release day. So everyone who buys the game will have to be happy with the 50 cars and 30 racing locales coming on the disc for a little while. (As well as pre-order bonuses depending on where you buy the game.

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For those of you who have been reading about the Portal 2 hints that were put into the original Portal, the conspiracy of Portal 2 coming out is no longer a conspiracy! Portal 2 is official and currently has a release frame of this holiday season.

What makes Portal 2 different from portal? It will include a separate 2 player co-op campaign and it is being released at full retail price.

The official announcement:
“Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.

Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007’s Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards” [via STEAM]

Below is a trailer for Modnation on the PS3, and Joyride for the XBox360. Does anyone notice an extreme similarity between the two?

ModNation(PS3)

JoyRide(Xbox 360)

What are your opinions on the two games? keep in mind Joyride was in development first.

Vince Zampella and Jason West are bringing a lawsuit against Activision for breach of contract and other claims, after Activision terminated their employment on March 1.

Remember those two Infinity Ward heads that were recently removed by Activision, well they are filing a lawsuit against Activision, stating that they were removed right before Activision payed the royalties to them that were due.

“Instead of thanking, lauding, or just plain paying Jason and Vince for giving Activision the most successful entertainment product ever offered to the public,” attorney Robert Schwartz said, “last month Activision hired lawyers to conduct a pretextual ‘investigation’ into unstated and unsubstantiated charges of ‘insubordination‘ and ‘breach of fiduciary duty,’ which then became the grounds for their termination on Monday, March 1st.”

(That paragraph up there basically says why they were fired, I’ve linked to Wikipedia for the bigger words. Kids, remember, never ever use Wikipedia for your papers in school, I am a very bad influence)

The lawsuit not only seeks compensation, but also seeks to try to gain the rights that Zampella and West previously owned within Infinity Ward.

What is everyone’s verdict? Should Vince Zampella and Jason West win their lawsuit?

Below is the extended Portal ending. Possible Spoilers

The video above contains the extended version of the ending of Portal.

Steam followed up the previous portal update, with a new update today. The ending has been extended, and what you see above is that extended ending.

What could this possibly mean? Is this steam’s way of shoving an eminent sequel into our face?

If a sequel is eminent, I know I’ll be picking it up, the first one was awesome.

If you haven’t yet played Portal I’d suggest to either buy it on steam, buy the orange box, or buy the arcade version. (Each one is under $20)

Steam has all these updates though, so if you want to see it yourself, you’ll need to buy it on steam.

Last Night Microsoft hosted the Final Fantasy XIII Launch Event for Xbox 360 at Sydney’s IMAX Theatre, Darling Harbour.

Ubisoft was there to present Final Fantasy XIII on behalf of Square Enix. The entire IMAX theater was jam packed with fans as they all got to see Final Fantasy XIII game play and its stunning CGI cut scenes inaction. After the presentation everyone got to even play a few demo levels.  At the end of the night Ubisoft gave away some goodies.  A standard Edition Copy of Final Fantasy XIII, The Collectors Edition, and a limited edition XBOX console full of Final Fantasy goodness, which included the STD edition of the game and some extra unlockable items.

One of Capsule Computers Community members that came along last night was lucky enough to pick up 2 PRIZES !! YES TWO !!!  MARK won the Standard Edition of Final Fantasy XIII and also a limited edition Final Fantasy XIII Calendar.  HOW LUCKY is that !!

Well it does pay off being an active member of the Capsule Computers Community
 
Capsule Computers staff MasterAbbott, Duraroc & Kingroc69 managed to catch up with community members Mark and also Cortese33 on the night.  Picture below.

(from left to right : MasterAbbott, Duraroc, Kingroc69, Mark & Cortese33)

There were more Capsule Computers community members present but we couldn’t find them.  We hope you had a great night.  Let us know what you thought of the night

Final Fantasy comes out in 5 days time, on the 9th of March.  Who’s already pre-ordered their copy ?

If you haven’t already done and you live in Australia pick up your copy from FISHPOND.  Doing so will give you FREE Postage and you can enter the Fishpond & Capsule computers Mega Competition.

Click on the links below to make your pre-order

Final Fantasy XIII – PS3 – STD : $99.99

 Final Fantasy XIII PS3 – Collectors Edition : $119.99

 
Final Fantasy XIII XBOX 360 – STD : $99.99
Final Fantasy XIII XBOX 360 – Collectors Edition : $119.99

XBOX 360 Bundle XBOX with Final Fantasy XIII  : $614.99

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Bungie released a new Multiplayer trailer for those of you who still get hyped up about every single halo game and product.

If you managed to enjoy ODST (Even a little bit), if you bought halo legends, and if you still play Halo 3 multiplayer, then you will probably love this trailer.

If the above doesn’t apply to you, I’d suggest not to watch the trailer, but it is always up to you.

So what do you guys think? Everything you were hoping? Another Halo game that will have lots of hype and then disappoint? Undecided?

Oh yeah, did i mention the Beta will land May 5th, and all the invitation is with the ODST disc. So wait until may 4th and buy a used copy of ODST, because on may 5th you’ll be stuck buying a new copy because all the used ones will be gone.

You could also WIN A COPY OF HALO ODST if you enter the Capsule Computers & Fishpond Competition.  Check it out here or on the right side for more details :)

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