Operation: Cheap Plastic Tat

Xbox Live Party Chat is quite the popular thing here at  PEOWW mainly as it stopped us having to play Bomberman: Live online if we fancied a quick natter.

The only problem is that Xbox voice comms are beyond awful with voice packets being dropped constantly and the rest being muffled by the cheap piece of shit they call a headset.

Well, Microsoft are soon going to be updating the service with new codecs and more bandwidth meaning that we can all enjoy being sworn at by twelve-year old Call of Duty cunts in a slightly clearer way.  Bonus!

This was Vegas.

Warner Bros have canned their upcoming sandboxer This Is Vegas after three years, and almost $50m, in development.  With the finished game rumoured to be at least eight months away, Warner Bros decided to pull the plug completely.

The game, originally one of Midway’s projects before they went under and it was picked up by WB who, with Vegas‘s production costs spiralling to at least a quarter of a million dollars per month, have decided that maybe another blaverage GTA clone probably won’t recoup enough of their outlay to bother pursuing it.

Warner Bros haven’t confirmed the story yet.  So if it’s wrong blame whoever it was we stole it from.

No... I will not buy the sequel.

We weren’t too fussed with the original Saw game here at PEOWW but it’s a slow news day and so here’s some info about the sequel nobody wants.

Saw: Flesh and Blood has been lined up for release in October and, according to some bloke at Konami, will  “new traps and puzzles, more visceral combat, and an all-new storyline that takes place between the first and second movies.”

Its release will coincide with the cinema release of Saw 3D, the seventh and final chapter in the series.  We’re not sure which one we’re awaiting less.  Okay, it’s the game frankly.

At least it's not a picture of Shirley Crabtree.

Ken Levine, creator of Bioshock, has been speaking at Gamescom about Bioshock: Infinite, saying that he’s ready to bring the mystery back.  The only mystery about Bioshock was how they managed to make such a dull collection of fetch quests out of such a good setting.  But anyway.

“One of the most important things to us was bringing the mystery back to the franchise,” he said. “When BioShock 1 came out people were like, ‘what? What am I seeing here? What is this?’

Yeah, we here at PEOWW were like ‘argh!  What’s this green case?  Argh!  There’s a shiny disc in it!  Arghhh!  The disc goes in the white thing that says Xbox on it.  WHAT IS IT?  WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS IT?!  What’s this vibrating, plastic thing in my hands.  Why is the flat, bright thing in this room showing images.  What is a plane?  Argh!  Why can the flat thing talk to me in a bad Irish accent.

Bioshock was as mysterious as Doom 3.  Now shut up and make something as good as System Shock again. 

Lynch.

We don’t think we’ll be reviewing Kane and Lynch 2 here at PEOWW.  There’s a few reasons.

Firstly, as one of our forumers, P Wee, has noted there’s the issue of ‘why the fuck are they persisting with this shit when they should be making a new Hitman.’  We’d go one further and say a new Freedom Fighters but the point stands.

Then there’s the fact that Kane and Lynch wasn’t very good.  Although it had fleeting moments of interest, everything about it was so poorly put together that we’re not even sure why IO are even allowed to make games anymore.

Mostly though, it’s the fact that sources are saying the main campaign lasts FOUR HOURS which presumably means the focus is on playing against bastards online.  Thanks but we’re too lazy to find IO’s press email address and far too clever to buy this fucking lemon.  The demo was pants anyway.

I'll be your Huckleberry.

In a move that’ll please bounty hunters and outlaws alike, Rockstar have issued an ultimatum to  the cheating scum who are ruining Red Dead: Redemption online.  The cheats have been using hacked weapons and abilities to lord it over good honest folks but now they now have until the 24th of this month to repent for their sins and delete their cheaty save games and log back in to the game.  Failure to do so will lead to a revolver’s worth of ban-bullets at motherfucking high noon for the pesky varmints who refuse to comply. 

Well done, Rockstar.  It’s good to see a dev team taking this kind of thing seriously.  Hopefully EA will learn from your good work in time for FIFA 2011.

Seabass, earlier.

Anyone still remember when the Pro Evo series was good?  It was a while ago now but we here at PEOWW used to love it.  A lot.  Then it  got all rubbishy leaving a Fat Fwank sized opportunity for EA which they took with both hands.

Anyway, Konami have moved the date forward for PES: Whatever. It will now launch just a week after FIFA 2011.  Konami have, rather bullishly, attributed this move the fact that PES is apparently going to be good this year, thanks to the annually-repeated Seabass dogshit of “smarter AI” and “revamped passing” and whatever else, although we’ll be amazed if our first play doesn’t involve us battering the opposing keeper before losing 1-0 thanks to a badly spilled save and a cheeky tap-in [1].

Basically we don’t care but equally we’re getting very bored of EA’s efforts now as well so hopefully Konami can get the series back on track , if only to spark EA out of their current sequence of minimalist yearly (more if you include their national tournament games) updates.

[1] Otherwise known as Seabass’s Law.

Fact x Importance.

Purveyors of filthy propaganda, Fox News, are super pissed at EA thanks to Medal of Honor‘s multiplayer mode which will literally let you be the Taliban.  The mode, which does sound a tad sketch to be honest, has you shooting US troops which is absolutely not on.  They are still fine with you killing the Chinese and, you know, Mexicans though.

Their extended report feature dragged in the families of dead troops.  Including the mother of one who said “Right now, we’re going into a really, really, bad time in Afghanistan. We’ve just come off of the worst month of casualties in the whole war. This game is going to be released in October, so families that are burying their children are going to be seeing this… It’s disrespectful.”

EA have yet to say if the mode will involve any shooting or if it’s just a tedious ten-year campaign of putting bombs down and running away.  Either way we’re not arsed.  Medal of Honor is going to be completely overshadowed by Tom Clancy’s next Mexican Ninja sim anyway, and Fox have probably just increased pre-orders of MoH by 3000%.

The bad news is I don't give a fuck.

In a fate that mirrors that of the Diff’rent Strokes cast, it seems that everyone who had any part in the cult classic sandboxer Crackdown is now cursed.  The much-loved game was developed by Realtime Worlds who then split.  Part of the team formed Ruffian Games who were responsible for the incredibly blaverage Crackdown 2.

The rest of Realtime Worlds went on to finish APB, a hideously blaverage cops and robbers MMO title that spent over five years in development.  Bad reviews and little interest from PC gamers has meant that Realtime Worlds are paying the price with several redundancies announced last week and the studio dropping into administration this week.

A skeleton staff of fifty will continue to maintain APB but the future is looking bleak for the Scottish development team.

Tony Hawk about to do something "gnarly."

So when did you fall out of love with the Tony Hawk games?  For PEOWW the malaise started with the good-but-tiresome THPS4, but it wasn’t until the fratboy Bam Margera love-in of Tony Hawk: Underground that we began to actively despise the series.

We quite liked the back-to-basics approach of American Wasteland though but were beaten into submission by the joylessly tough Project 8.  As for Proving Grounds and Ride well no, neither did we.  After SKATE, the Tony Hawk games are an annoying irrelevance at best.

Well just like Gazza, it refuses to die and Tony Hawk: Shred is next up.  In a move that rips off their own excellent American Sk8land on the DS, the new game will be cell-shaded and aimed straight at da kidz.  On the plus side that might mean that they’ll tone down ‘sick’ mode as that’s been unbelievably harsh recently.  Expect the plot to involve raising cash by generating “sick footie” or some nonsense. 

Tony Hawk: Shred is expected to land Q4, 2010.