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The Shoot Review

Philip Federico
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Game Name: The Shoot
Platform(s): Playstation 3, Playstation Move Required
Publisher(s): Sony Computers Entertainment
Developer(s): Cohort Studio
Genre(s): Shooter
Release Date: 28th October
Price: $59.99

Have you ever dreamt of being a real-life action movie hero?  Taking down cowboys in a saloon, roughing up Mafia bosses or even mowing down hoards of Zombies just like umm… “A Movie Star” well grab that Sony Playstation MOVE controller whack in “The Shoot” and be transported to an array of Hollywood-esque themed movie sets to see if you have what it takes to shine as the brightest star in Hollywood. Lights, Camera … SHOOT’EM !!

 “The Shoot” is an on-rails style shooter similar to House of the Dead, but nowhere near as intense and action packed.  You have no control on where you’re going. All you have to worry about are the enemies on the screen and making sure you don’t piss off the movie director.  The Shoot is fairly simple to play; all you need to do is aim at the bad guys press the trigger and blow them up into smithereens.  You don’t even need to worry about reloading your weapon as I was constantly flicking the MOVE controller off the screen thinking that I had to reload.

The Shoot will not blow you away with any unforgettable moments, but it still is a fun pickup and play game that you can enjoy on your own or with a friend.  As with all on-rail shooters the main point of the game is to ensure all the bad guys get shot before they shoot you.  You’ll be taken through five different movie sets starting off with the classic western set where you can take down cowboys and dynamite wielding miners and save damsels in distress.  You’ll also get to experience a Mafia Movie, Robot, underwater and everyone’s favourite, a zombie/monster horror movie.  Each movie is broken down into four scenes with a stand-off with an end of level boss on the last scene.

You start each movie with five takes (LIVES) and the director’s happiness meter is your energy, impress him with super shooting and hit streaks and your energy meter goes up, if you perform poorly by getting shot or shoot innocent civilians the happiness meter drops; pissing off the director and forcing you to start from the last checkpoint.  The Shoot focuses on accuracy and hit counts, the higher your hit streak the more points you will rack up and the more power ups you can earn.

This brings me to the Playstation Move controller, as with all on-rail shooters you’re success with taking down bad guys accurately and quickly all hangs in balance of how well the controller can handle the on-screen commands and reaction times the player throws at it.  With The Shoot, even fine tuning the controller’s smoothness and sensitivity and re-calibrating it twice, I still found the on screen accuracy a little sluggish and not as quick as I’m used to with other on-rails shooters which was a little disappointing and frustrating at times.

The Shoot has a few unique little extras thrown in to help spice up the game and make it a little more interesting.  Raking up a certain amount of hit streaks unlocks special moves that players can perform to gain the upper hand when the action gets a little hairy.  The first special move is called Shockwave, to initiate this – the player will need to swing the MOVE controller around and perform a 360 style move in the air.  If your successful this slows down time allowing you to quickly and easily take down all the enemies on the screen.  The second is Showtime; to kick this bad boy off all you have to do is point the MOVE controller down towards the floor and press the trigger button, doing this will blow up nearly everything on the screen.  The last move called Rampage will initiate when you point the controller into the air towards the ceiling and press the trigger button.  This will let you go on a rampage with machine gun style shooting allowing you to rip into all the enemies on the screen without losing your hit streak if you miss anything.  Both Showtime and Rampage are easy to pull off but the accuracy of Shockwave was a little hard to perform at times. Having to swing the controller in a 360 motion sometimes just didn’t register, if not pulled off first go and there’s a lot of enemies on the screen the feeling frustration can kick in, the director gets pissed off and you’ll certainly have to re-do that scene again.

Other motion action moves taking advantage of the MOVE controller have you side stepping left or right by moving the aim in the desired direction to move out of the way when a bad guy throws a knife at you, I found this pretty cool at first, but a waste of time as it was far easier to actually shoot the object out of the air before it got to me.  You’re also able to duck by moving the MOVE controller down to avoid projectiles being thrown at you; this however is only available to perform at specific times in the game.

Video Review below takes you through The Shoot 101 class where you can see how everything fits together with the specials moves and other features.

 [pro-player width=’530′ height=’253′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADIYCzH6ds[/pro-player]

The Shoot can be enjoyed as a single player experience or with a friend. They can either compete against you or assist you with obtaining a high score that will be posted on the online leaderboards, once you complete a Movie set the challenges and Score Attack modes open up allowing you to play each scene again to achieve high scores and obtain a five star rating, this certainly adds to the replay ability of the game.

Unfortunately The Shoot is a fairly short game, with five movie sets containing four scenes each, each movie will take you less than 30 mins. to complete.  Of course like other on-rail shooters there are hidden collectibles to shoot / pickup along the way in the form of torn up poster pieces that will have you going back to find so that you can unlock the challenge modes, but if you’re not interested in collecting collectables then you’d be able to shoot yourself into stardom and complete the game in approx. three hours.
 
The Shoot is fun casual pick up and play on-rails shooter that can be enjoyed on your own or with friends.  It hasn’t revolutionized the shooter genre in any way but it’s a nice little addition to the MOVE family and a welcomed return to the shooter style games on the PS3 that have previously only been available on the Wii.

7-5-capsules-out-of-10

PC Version of Call of Duty Black Ops Getting a Patch…

Dustin Spencer
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Despite selling 5.6 million copies of the new Call of Duty: Black Ops, some have been rather upset with the PC version’s bugs online. Thankfully, those worries have been heard by Treyarch and a new patch is on the way for that version of the game. On the Community forums, JD_2020, a developer from the Treyarch team posted what to expect with the first run of fixes. Here is the post explaining the details of what should be expected in the patch. Also take note that some problems were recently patched as well, which are all listed below:

Hey PC gamers:

We are listening to you and we’ve been busy working on updates based on feedback from the community. We have already deployed a number of updates, and there will be many more to come. Stay tuned right here for all the latest info.

LIVE FIXES

11/10
* – GameServers.com has bumped sv_maxrate to 25000 across all servers to reduce lag.
* – GameServers.com continues to improve official server distribution in various worldwide regions.

11/11
* – Friends fix for join in progress and Friends tab in server browser.
* – Performance improvement for dual and quad core.
* – Improved connectivity with Black Ops Rcon tool.

IN PROGRESS

* – GPU hitching on certain graphics cards.
* – Incomplete server browser results.
* – Improvements to Quickmatch joins (results with better ping and reduced lag).
* – Zombies “The game session is no longer available” error.

Regards,
-JD

I am glad this was taken care of so soon, and I hope for the PC owners of the title’s sake that everything runs a lot better in the longrun. Hopefully, this will also be noted for future titles so problems like what when down with the PC version of Black Ops don’t happen to start with at launch time.

Our Home’s Fox Diety & Pandora Hearts DVDs dated

Travis Bruno
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Eager to watch some Anime? Have you perchance already seen the first volumes of Our Home’s Fox Diety and Pandora Hearts? Then you are in luck because the concluding volumes have both been given release dates now by NIS America.

Pandora Hearts Vol. 2 will be released on January 25th with a premium edition. Our Home’s Fox Diety Vol. 2 however will be arriving a bit later on February 22nd. The premium edition of Pandora Hearts will come with a special grain effect, while Fox Diety will contain interview footage with the original Japanese voice actors of the series itself. NIS America says that this bonus footage racks up a quite long 280 minutes which is a great bonus feature.

One thing now however, with both of these series’ wrapping up at the beginning of next year, what Animes will NIS be picking up this time to localize in America? We shall see.

Record of Agarest War 2 brings with it 200% more soul breeding

Travis Bruno
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The Record of Agarest War series has already settled itself into a nice niche fanbase in both America and Japan. This is only more evident with the fact that Record of Agarest War Zero is making its way to American shores making it the second game of its type here. Now Compile Heart is working on yet another Record of Agarest War title and is more of a direct sequel to the first game.

They have recently released another trailer for the game, that you can see below. (NSFW) Sure it may look risque but there is nothing overly revealing inside the game itself considered that it has been given a rating equivalent to a T rating. The trailer itself doesn’t show off many of the gameplay features other than the perverted nature of parts of the game. Check out the trailer beneath that one for some actual gameplay outside of the risque parts. There hasn’t been any news of this one making its way outside of Japan, but considering the fact that the rest of the series has made its way out overseas there is a good chance of Agarest War 2 as well.

[pro-player width=’530′ height=’253′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p0ycUUlwnA[/pro-player]

Assassin’s Creed Ascendance turns out to be animated short; release set for Nov. 16

Travis Bruno
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Just yesterday we talked about how UbiWorkshop, a branch of Ubisoft, had been teasing us with some information and a video about their latest project named Assassin’s Creed: Ascendance. Only a day later however Ubisoft has completely removed the fog of the unknown with new information regarding the project. As it turns out, Assassin’s Creed: Ascendance will be a short animated film that will take place during 16th century Rome.

The short itself will be available on November 16th, a few days away, and given a recommended price of $2. While we’re not sure how long the short itself is, $2 may be a bit much to ask. On the other hand Ubisoft has promised that the film will bridge the gap between AC: 2 and AC: Brotherhood. So if you are extremely curious as to what happened between when we last saw Ezio in AC: 2 and when AC: Brotherhood begins then your chance will be arriving soon.

You can catch the trailer for the short below.

Pac-Man CE DX gets itself a new trailer and shows off gameplay modes

Travis Bruno
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Remember the days when Pac-Man was just a yellow guy that had a few colored ghosts chasing him around as he ate everything that sat in front of him? Well those days are gone but not forgotten. Because with Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, you will have your choice of being able to change your visual style to however you want to.

From appearances it looks as though you may be able to play as the good old classic Pac-Man, a revamped 3D looking Pac-Man, and even some psychedelic looking areas. It’s always good to spark a bit of life into good old Pac-Man with some fresh coats of paint. But that isn’t all because this new Pac-Man will feature a handful of new game modes that show sleeping ghosts that wake to your presence as you pass near them, and even a mode where quite a large number of ghosts are trying to take you out.

Unfortunately there has been no word from Namco Bandai as to when we will be seeing Pac-Man CE DX show up for purchase. One thing we do know however is that it will be available on both the XBLA and the PSN, so better get amped up for some Pac-Man fever.

Kinect techology apparently only costs $56

Travis Bruno
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Ever wondered exactly how much the little bits and pieces within the Kinect cost, compared to the $150 you paid at the store for it? Well according to UBM TechInsights, which happened to take the Kinect apart piece by piece and analyze every single part that goes into making the Kinect what it is. As it turns out, the Kinect packs $56 worth of hardware with the most expensive bit being a $17 PrimeSense motion detection system that includes the cameras, processor, and microphones all in one figure.

While this would seem that the Kinect is giving Microsoft quite a large profit every time one is sold, it actually is far from it. There are no official figures to go off of but we can easily estimate that, while still making some sort of profit, the actual figure is much lower. The shipping cost of each unit, the labor cost of each one (even in a factory of machines it requires maintenance), the no doubt long and expensive development phase to name a few. But perhaps one of the most expensive price tag will rest in the marketing category. Especially considering everywhere you look there is Kinect marketing. Plus the fact that every new piece of technology released is essentially starting in a hole as far as profit is concerned thanks to the pre-market costs.

Source: EETimes

Gran Turismo 5 Course and Car list Revealed

Zachariah Blue
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With the New Release date pushed foward, Info found here

This date is ALSO United states. I saw it with my own eyes at the Gamestop I work at.  No surprise really after my conspiracy article found here

There is a complete track and car list that have been released. As many know there are over 1000 cars. That is a lot of rubber and aluminum. From the list that I have, there are 71 tracks and 1032 cars in the game. Here is a complete list of the tracks;

Fuji Speedway F
Fuji Speedway GT
Suzuka Circuit
Suzuka Circuit East Course
Superspeedway – Daytona
(Daytona International Speedway)
Road Course – Daytona
(Daytona International Speedway)
Tsukuba Circuit
Circuit de la Sarthe 2009
Circuit de la Sarthe 2009 (No Chicane)
Circuit de la Sarthe 2005
Circuit de la Sarthe 2005 (No Chicane)
Nürburgring Nordschleife
Nürburgring 24h
Nürburgring GP/F
Nürburgring GP/D
Nürburgring typeV
Superspeedway – Indy
(Indianapolis Motor Speedway)
Road Course – Indy
(Indianapolis Motor Speedway)
Autodromo Nazionale Monza
Autodromo Nazionale Monza No Chicane
The Top Gear Test Track
Laguna Seca Raceway
High Speed Ring
High Speed Ring / Reverse
Cape Ring
Cape Ring Inside
Cape Ring Periphery
Cape Ring North
Cape Ring South
Autumn Ring
Autumn Ring / Reverse
Autumn Ring Mini
Autumn Ring Mini / Reverse
Deep Forest Raceway
Deep Forest Raceway / Reverse
Grand Valley Speedway
Grand Valley Speedway / Reverse
Grand Valley East Section
Grand Valley East Section / Reverse
Trial Mountain Circuit
Trial Mountain Circuit / Reverse
London
London / Reverse
Rome
Rome / Reverse
Circuito de Madrid
Circuito de Madrid / Reverse
Circuito de Madrid Mini
Circuito de Madrid Mini / Reverse
Tokyo R246
Tokyo R246 / Reverse
Special Stage Route 5 / Night
Special Stage Route 5 / Reverse / Night
Clubman Stage Route 5 / Night
Clubman Stage Route 5 / Reverse / Night
Special Stage Route 7 / Night
Côte d’Azur
Eiger Nordwand Short Track
Eiger Nordwand Short Track / Reverse
Eiger Nordwand K Trail
Eiger Nordwand K Trail / Reverse
Eiger Nordwand G Trail
Eiger Nordwand G Trail / Reverse
Eiger Nordwand W Trail
Eiger Nordwand W Trail / Reverse
Chamonix Main
Chamonix East
Chamonix West
Chamonix Mini
Toscana
Toscana / Reverse
Those dont really matter as much as the cars right? It is a heck of a long list. You could be scrolling for days. I will only list the car names im excited for and other people I know are excited for.
Camaro SS
Camaro Z28
DeLorean S2 ’04
Viper Srt ’10
Enzo Ferrari ’02
Interceptor Mk 3 ’74
Eclipse GT ’06
GTO Twin Turbo ’95
Did I spot the car from “Back to the Future” and “Mad Max” in there? Oh yes you did. Polyphony Digital knows how to salute to the classics. Dust off the ol’ prologue folks. Its going to be a long two weeks.

Angry Birds will be coming to the XBLA, PSN, and Wii

Travis Bruno
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With the extreme popularity of Rovio’s Angry Birds it is only logical that they try to step beyond just the mobile iPhone and Android. That looks exactly like what will be happening. At the first ever Social Gaming Summit, Rovio’s CEO Peter Vesterbacka confirmed that the “PSN, Wii, and Xbox” versions of the very popular game are already in the works and on the way.

He also stated at the same conference that when these new versions are released that it will mark a new dawn for the Angry Birds franchise. What this most likely means is that we won’t be seeing any direct sequel to the game until these ports are finished. Though one can expect that there will be even more Angry Birds to be coming in the future, more of a direct sequel than a holiday spinoff such as the Halloween version we saw in October.

Source: Pocketgamer

Will Activision ever learn?

Justin Mienkiewicz
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One of Activision’s key franchises just saw a new title release this week, Call of Duty: Black Ops.  Surely to make a metric buttload of cash and sales, this is no surprise.  However, one may remember not so long ago, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launched, it didn’t sell as much on PC.  Not surprising to be honest, while FPS are certainly better suited to PC’s, not everybody has the know how or pockets deep enough to fund such an endeavor in order to play PC games.

But that wasn’t good enough for Activision.  They wanted to hear from the fans themselves as to why the PC release didn’t sell so much.  Was it DRM?  Was it subpar porting?  Was it shoddy controls?  Lack of people to play multiplayer with?  They simply had to know.  So if you are looking for a place to post a serious question with intent on getting serious and informative thoughts on the subject, what one place do you want to post on that you KNOW you will get only the highest quality repsonses and insight?  That’s right, 4chan!

So Activision asked, and so 4chan hath spoken.  Dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs are scientifically proven to be awesome.  Even if they don’t fit at all into the subject matter, the addition of dinosaurs in a game will reveal marked improvement in not only sales but overall quality.  Take one of the most successful and widely known gaming franchises in freaking HISTORY, Mario.  All those Yoshi’s proved so successful that they even spawned their own spin off franchise.  Now take Call of Duty, hardly any dinosaurs!  You do the math Activision, you freakin need to add them dinosaurs, pronto!

As great a game as Call of Duty: Black Ops is, I have yet to hear about any dinosaurs.  Activision needs to seriously step up it’s game and start listening to what the fans, the very people who have made the franchise so successful, want.  Unless they begin taking advice from the fans, Activision only serves to lose its hardcore fanbase, as 4chan has proven to be.

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