The Full Circle: 360 News Report 07.03.09

Posted by Joe Roche on 07.03.2009

It's Fourth of July weekend but before you can celebrate the countries birthday lets talk about Gears of War 2, creating games with Kodu, UFC unleashing the banhammer, Kojima and Castlevania and Battlefield 1943. Defrost the hot dogs, put the beer on ice, and let 411mania's Joe Roche take you around The Full Circle.

It has been an utterly miserable week in New England as we head towards the Fourth of July I can't think of anything that I'd rather do then celebrate with fireworks, beers and cookouts (in the rain). On top of the crap weather I also managed to get some illness that is either the flu, or the plague. I spent this entire week working out of my house or laying on my couch in immense pain which gave me plenty of time to play Fight Night Round 4 (and write a review for this site). My quick impression of Fight Night Round 4 is that the game is fantastic, although the online play does still suffer a bit from the cheapness factor of other human opponents (more on this later). So keeping in mind that I've been under the weather all week long this is going to be a bit of an abbreviated Full Circle, and for that I apologize. Without further ado let us kick off the holiday weekend right and go around The Full Circle.

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The UFC Rumor Mill
There is a rumor making the rounds that the UFC has told their fighters, and any other fighter that anyone who chooses to be a part of the upcoming EA MMA game will be either fired from the UFC, or banned from every participating in one of their events.

Is it wrong to think that Dana White is bat-shit insane? This isn't the first time that we've heard rumors about the UFC threatening fighters in regard to the UFC Undisputed franchise, and because of that it seems likely that this rumor might have at least some validity. Here is my question though and if Dana White is reading this column please feel free to comment – what happens when Fedor signs on to appear in the EA MMA game? Sure it's easy to talk tough and back it up when you're talking about Tim Sylvia, but when the best heavyweight fighter in the world is at stake are you really trying to tell me that the UFC would have no interest in Fedor because his likeness appeared in a competitors game? It puts a little chink in the armor if you start making exceptions for certain fighters to the rules you impose on all of them, but I guess as this is still just a rumor we will have to wait to find out the exact details from the man in charge.



Kojima's Castlevania Role
The upcoming Castlevania: Lord of Shadows is being developed by Madrid-based Mercury Steam Entertainment. As a result Hideo Kojima will not have a direct role in the development of the game. Instead it appears as if the development team produces ideas which are then sent to Kojima for tinkering, and/or approval.

I like this support role for Kojima and something tells me that we're going to see/hear about him doing it much more in the coming years. I know that he's still developing Metal Gear Solid franchises, which are in all likelihood going to have his finger prints all over them. But, it's an interesting approach to throw Kojima Productions logo on other games and let Kojima put his two cents into non Metal Gear based games. Having Kojima is good for business, so I'm glad to see him putting his weight behind some other franchises.



Kodu Games Lab is Live
Aspiring game designers can now download Kodu from Microsoft Games Studio for $5 on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The title can be found in the Community Games Section (or whatever we're calling it this week).

For those who don't remember Kodu it used to be called Boku and was originally designed as a learning tool for kids. Essentially what it is is a set of 200 building blocks that can be used to create games designed to drive simple game play concepts like vision, hearing, and time. I'm not sure there are any terribly creative people in the TFC audience, but if you give Kodu a whirl and come up with something interesting I'd love to hear about it.



Celebrate the 4th with Marcus Fenix
Epic Games will be releasing a new title update for Gears of War 2 that will reportedly make some changes to Horde mode before the weekend. In addition all weekend long gamers will received double XP in public playlists, as well as 500 XP to the winning team. Finally, to celebrate the 4th of July Epic will be adding additional tickers to Horde mode, and every 10th wave during Horde will be ONLY tickers.

It might be time for me to dust off Gears of War 2. I know I say that every week in this column but then something new comes up. Either Fight Night Round 4 takes up all my time, or I get sidetracked with Fallout 3 – but in the end the only constant is that I never get around to Gears of War 2. I do love me some double XP weekends though, and once we get a final word on the title update for Horde mode I might be enticed to jump into the game for the first time in quite awhile. I should probably throw this out to the crowd – is there any interest in some Gears of War 2 horde mode this weekend out there in TFC land?



Battlefield Next Week
Electronic Arts and DICE have confirmed that the highly anticipated Battlefield 1943 will be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace and Playstation Network next week. The game will retail for $15, or 1200 MS points and will be available on July 8th.

I have made my anticipation for this game known in this space before and I'm going to do it again here. If you buy only ONE Xbox Live Arcade game in your life, make it Battlefield 1943. The game will introduce two new modes that can be played across four Battlefield tropical WWII maps: Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Coral Sea. These maps are inspired by Battlefield 1942 but have been redesigned and re-engineered using the DICE destructible Frostbite engine. Sometimes I rail against $15 downloadable content, but you will get your monies worth with Battlefield 1943, I guarantee it.



More Gears Universe News
The next Gears of War book, titled Jacinto's Remnant has officially been given a July 28th release date. The book was written by Karen Traviss, who is the best selling science factor author from the Star Wars franchise, as well as the mind behind the very solid first Gears of War book.

I reviewed the first Gears of War book – "Aspho Fields" when it was released and I am hoping to be able to get my hands on a copy of "Jacinto's Remnant" when it drops as well for the same purpose. I would consider the Gears of War books as guilty pleasures of mine, but I can say that I was much more invested in the storyline of Gears of War 2 after having read Aspho Fields. According to Amazon.com, the storyline of Jacinto's Remnant is going to pick up right after the conclusion of Gears of War 2 (which I won't spoil though I'm sure you've all seen it). Apparently the story will focus on the COG getting the human's to a safe haven but they must contend with other humans, who are as "desperate and dangerous as any grub." Count me in.

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The Hot Button

Today's Topic: The Problem With Online

This is legitimately the stupidest Hot Button that I've ever written but something has started to crop up in the circles that I roam that I thought needed to be addressed here – and that is the feeling that online gaming tends to bring out the worst in people. Instead of writing a long diatribe I thought I'd bring up a couple of the worst archetypes that you run into while playing online and ask why the eff these people exist other then to make my experience worse?

The Can't Lose Guy: Everyone knows that your favorite game probably has a glitch that can be exploited to help you prevail even if it's not necessarily the most up and up thing to do. My example of this is what made me think to write this but it's my biggest problem with Fight Night Round 4 so I thought it could be discussed here. In FNR4 you are boxing, but there is a button for head butting. The problem with head butting in FNR4 is that while it is a part of boxing, it's usually not used as a weapon (at least not more then once). However, the ref's/scorers almost never catch the head butt so it's a pretty valuable weapon in FNR4. Wednesday night I was playing some online matches in World Championship mode against someone with the gamertag NinoLegit. As was obvious during the fight, and as would be obvious at the end I was ahead on every scorecard but in the 10th round with both of us very tired he decided to start using the vaunted head butt offense. The problem is that the head butt does a lot of damage, so he head butts, sends me to the mat and then waits for me to get up and head butts again. This time I'm too tired to get up and as a result of two head butts, in a boxing game I lose the match. This is a glitch with the game – a second head butt like that in a regular boxing match would have stopped the fight, got a warning (or point deduction) and not allowing the other guy to knock out his opponent. After the fight I received a messege that said simply "I couldn't lose you to" to wit I replied "that's a cheap way to win" and the final response of the night "lmao who got the L?" This is "The Can't Lose Guy" and he is a horrible person to run across online.

The Put My Controller Down Guy: You're firing up Call of Duty: World at War to fight some Nazi zombies online with some strangers. You get your group together, you are all standing around waiting for the zombies to appear when you notice someone is not moving. This is an absolute downer because certain games, like the Call of Duty: WaW Nazi zombie mode, and Gears of War 2 Horde mode require teamwork, full team work, but you know this non mover is not coming back. Why does that happen? Who goes through the trouble of turning on the Xbox, jumping on Xbox Live and then leaving the room/country/continent/plane of existence before the game starts without just turning off the console?

The Quitter: From what I understand this is a problem in UFC Undisputed 2009. Essentially you're dominating someone in a game, they know that they're about to get beat, you know that they're about to get beat and then right before you've gotten the opportunity to put them out of their misery, you get the old warning message that your opponent has left the room, and now you've got no victory on your stat sheet and you've wasted a half hour. The Quitter is really the worst of all the archtypes of online play because The Quitter is essentially taking his ball and going home. Yes we all know that not everyone on Xbox Live is a learned doctor, but at some point the pouting when things don't go your way approach is just pathetic.

The Disappearing Act: This goes alone with the "Put My Controller Down Guy" in that this guy will wait until the moment the game starts and then log out. I have absolutely NO idea why this happens but for some reason anytime I try to play Halo 3 online I will get as far as the start screen of the online match and then suddenly, and it never fails, someone will sign out and leave the teams uneven. You suck "Disappearing Act."

DJ Stupid Music: What is with this guy? Does anyone want to listen to forty minutes of Tone Loc's "Funky Cool Medina?" If you do, you might want to log into Xbox Live and try to hook up with the stupid music man. It never fails, at some point you will run across someone who is just blasting music, and it's never going to be good music, it's always going to be Vanilla Ice, or some gangster rap coming from the suburbs, but it'll never be something you actually want to listen to. I think to combat this guy I'm just going to start leaving my headset on the radio and tune it to NPR. At least then we can have some educated discourse at the end of the game.

Those are just a couple of the archetypes that I could think of off the top of my head, but now we'll throw it out to the crowd and ask which online archetypes do you run across, or what stories do you have involving the ones that I've already mentioned?

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Punching Out

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