Gears Of War 2 Announced

The Greatest Xbox (and PC Game) since Halo has now been confirmed to recieve a sequal later this Year, thats right Gears Of War 2 will be coming to the Xbox 360 this winter.

IT'S OFFICIAL! At the 2008 Game Developers Conference, Epic Games' lead designer Cliff Bleszinski made the announcement fans have been waiting for: Gears of War® 2 is coming this November.

To get the latest, including the Gears of War 2 Announcement Trailer, click here.

Apart from this trailer (and a few wallpapers) no other details have been announced, but im assuming the brumak will make another awesome appearence.

My N-Gage Achievement Website Now Up

Its Very Basic, Its Very Dull - but it gets the message across. Just like the Website "achieve360points.com" and many other xbox 360 achievement help websites, ive created my own N-Gage one, at the moment its very basic text - but hopefully someone more talented will take over the project (or maybe a bigger company website like AAN (All About N-Gage)) will host the achievement lists on their website.

The general idea of this website is to boost your score and help you find out what to do to unlock thoose achievements that you can't unlock, plus to save you time browsing around on your phone. it may seem stupid, but alot of people nowadays just play the game for the points.

The Website (which i made entirely out of Microsoft Web Expression (new version of frontpage) is up and running here. I will try and update the website as often as i can, as i am a pritty busy person. Enjoy!

A look At The N-Gage Application

As most N-Gage related users know the N-Gage First Access program is a beta trial of the new n-gage application for the N81, of course when the full thing is available (and out of its beta stages) it will be available for a variety of n-series phones, such as the N93, N95, N73 and N82 and the list keeps growing with every new n-series phone released.

I myself am lucky enough (thanks to womworld) to take part in the N-Gage First Access program as they have lent me an N81 and 4 FULL Games, so here is a breif preview on what the n-gage application is like.

The N-Gage Application Interface is very similar to that of Xbox Live, as the first page you are presented with is the Home Page, which shows the last game you played on, your N-Gage Points( like 360 achievement points) and how many friends are online, in general its a mobile version of the 360 dashboard - and it works very well.

Just like on the 360 dashboard, you press left and right on the key-pad to move to different areas of the application. going all the way to the end (4 clicks to the right) brings your to the N-Gage Marketplace, this is where you can try and buy the N-Gage games, aswell as download extra content (when available).

Next To the N-Gage Marketplace is your friends list, here you can add/ remove friends from your friends list and see who is online and what they are doing, Before your friends list is your profile, this is an overally summary of what games you have played. how many points you have earned (offline, online or forum) and what point level you are. In this section you can even make alterations to your profile such as change your avatar and other small details.

The last part of the application is the "My games" section, to me this is the most important, as it lists all the games you have downloaded onto your device - and if the game you downloaded was a trial, it will say trial on it.

So To Summarise it is a very basic version of the Xbox 360's dashboard, however it works well (alot better than the Wii / PS3 Dashboard) and it is very easy to use. Also getting online is alot easier than the previous N-Gage, as you can connect online via GPRS, 3G or (if applicable to your phone) via WiFi, while i was playing online i was connected to my wireless network and everything ran perfectly fine and downloading games took less than a minute.

So far the N-Gage Applicationis great (and its still the beta version), so when its officially released it will be awesome! Playing games on a mobile phone has never been this much fun and challenging!

Devil May Cry 4 - Short But Sweet?!

After a rather short wait since the USA release of Devil May Cry 4, it was finally released in the UK last friday (8th January 2008). But after forking over £40 (or maybe £50 for Limited Edition Version), was it really worth it?

Unlike the other DMC Games in the past i , myself, really did enjoy (and understand) the storyline, but like Hideo Kojima with MGS2 and Raiden, felt a little annoyed that you weren't able to play as Dante right from the beginning.

In Short the game is 20 Missions long, with 10 additional Hidden Missions, on average (on easy) the game will take you 7 hours to complete and, on Normal, will take you around 10 hours, if you have seen the 360 achievements then you will know Mission 11 is the crucial change over from Nero to Dante, as once you finish mission 11 you change characters from nero to dante, but even so you only play as Dante for around 6 missions, however these are long and enjoyable.

In reality you play as Nero from the start, go and defeat 3 Hell Gate Demons (as well as defeat other demons such as Credo, Angus and Holliness) and not only that progress to the main headquarters building, but as soon as you get there, you change over to Dante who starts going back to where Nero originally started off, once you get there its the final boss fight using Dante (then you once you defeated the saviour you go back to Nero). So its similar to MGS2 with Snake, as you started off as Snake on the tanker, but then you change to Raiden, in this case you start with Nero and change to Dante, then back to nero to finish off the game.

Another Feature i liked about this game was the fact they made it easier for newer DMC Players and made it easier for combo attacks (and obtaining thoose crucial S, SS and SSS ranking combos).

As the title of this post suggests, Devil May Cry 4 is a short game, but alot of games are doing that nowadays (halo 3 anybody?) but it is a very sweet one and i enjoyed every moment of it (not only that the cut-scenes were fantastic) however once you have completed the game their is very little replay value left in it. If you got it cheap (like i did) then its worth the money, if you paid £40 or more then it can be a little dissapointing, espically since their is no online mode (apart from leaderboards).

A Good Way To Use VGA Output on A Laptop

As Per usually a sunday afternoon (after work) is a time of relaxation and in my case its a time of strange ideas.

Recently i have been involved in a lot of "Games For Windows", Gears Of War and Viva Pinata being the main attractions, well 5 months (or so) ago i upgraded my 4 year old pc to play these new "Games For Windows" Games, most of them play on LOW/MEDIUM, well i recently bought a laptop (DELL) Inspirion 1520 (Blue Lid if you must know) from Currys for £629.99.

Because the specifications on this laptop are so great (250GB HDD, 2GHZ Dual-Core Processor, 256mb Nvidia 8600 GTM Graphics, vista rating of 4.7) i installed ALL my games for windows games on it. And as people will know, playing on small screens after playing on big screens (like my 42" Plasma) can be annoying.

so for the first time (in a long time) i connected my laptop up to my PC via VGA and played all my PC Games on a big screen, i even p[ayed the games using a Wired 360 Controller and because the settings on my laptop for these games are set to MEDIUM/HIGH there is very little difference between their 360 counter-parts.

So if you have a BEAST of a laptop and wanna play games on a big screen and on a comfy chair, then do what i did, fair enough you have to unplug everything afterwards but its fun.

N-Gage First Access Beta Is LIVE!

The New N-gage Service (Dubbed N-Gage 2.0) for N-Series phones may have been delayed for a few months (nokia says its due to technical issues), however they have released a BETA program for called "First Access" for users who have N81 and N81 8GB Phones.

The N-Gage First Access application comes with trial versions of Space Impact, Creatures Of The Deep and System Rush Evolution, not only will you be able to play trial versions of the games but you will also be able to achieve N-GAGE POINTS, this work in the same way as 360 Achievement points, once you do something special in the game (e.g. beat a boss or lap record) you will recieve a certain amount of points, at the moment these points will only show how good you are at the games (just like on 360), but once the full N-GAGE 2.0 is released you will recieve N-GAGE POINTS for playing games offline, as well as for playing games online (with others) or just buy posting decent threads in the n-gage forum.

Since this is beta , it is strictly limted to N81 users, and all data (such as N-GAGE POINTS and saved games) will be deleted and will not be available to use on the final product.

If you have an N81 and wish to take part in the N-GAGE FIRST ACCESS BETA all you have to do is join the n-gage website and download the first access software here. If you want to report your findings to other n-gage users, then you can post them in the First Access thread here.