Video Games Live (VGL) is a concert series created and produced by industry veterans and video game composers Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall. The concerts consist of segments of video game music performed by a live orchestra with video footage and synchronized lighting and effects, as well as several interactive segments with the audience. The segments are conducted by Wall.

As a gamer, this is a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to go to a concert like this. Will update when more info arose. Till then, YEAY!

“So as to ensure as broad a spectrum of customers are able to enjoy the controller, we have decided to delay release until autumn 2010 to ensure a broad variety of titles are available.”

The list of games that should support the new controller are as follow:

Ape Escape

“Jinki”

“Machi Suberi”

“Sing and Draw”

“Champions of Time”

“Motion Party”

“The Shoot”

“Tower”

Mr. Pain

Flowery

Hustler King

High Velocity Bowling

EyePet

Nothing really revolutionary, and some of the titles smells direct copy of some the the popular earlier Wii games. It must be said tho that whoever approved of the design really need to learn of the politically correct modern world

Via Sankaku Complex

The 1993 F1 season can be considered as the pinnacle of the F1 history. Relaxed ruling by the FIA means that you can see one of the most technologically advanced race car of it’s time, featuring anti lock brakes, traction control, ground effect, active suspension. Ferrari was also perfecting their semi automatic gearbox at the time, which would be the de-facto gearing mode of choice for teams in years to come.

As with many other F1 mod, you can choose all the cars and drivers that had raced in the 1993 season. This also includes some driver changes, such as Mika Hakkinen, who came to McLaren to replace the under performing Michael Andretti halfway through the season. This was also the last season that Senna drove for the team. The “Professor”, Alain Prost is in his last race season in F1, taking over from reigning world champion Nigel Mansell who decided to move to the US CART series. This is also Michael Schumacher’s first season with Benneton, that would eventually give him the first two of his seven world titles.

So how’s the mod itself then? Well in terms of graphics, it’s one of the best I’ve seen since CTDP’s release. The texture are well done, and it looks great in-game as well. The liveries are various, and you can choose if you want the default tobacco or the EU Non-tobacco ones. You can really see the love done in modelling this when you are in game, and chasing down the car in front of you. It’s THAT good. The movable arms are the best I’ve seen in rFactor, and it reminds me of the one in the F1 Challenge which shows you can add the arms in the game without it looking like it’s broken on the shoulder

The physics are top notch I must say especially after a recent patch was released. Sadly F1-S-R only released the League Edition at this time, thus every car has the same performance. But if this could be taken as a future benchmark, then expect a better physic then, as this one hits it in all the right places. The car feels monstrous to drive at first, and you can feel the rear end slip and slide as the turbo kicks in. It has quite a tendency to understeer, but somehow if you can control it with rear slide it’s magnificent to drive. I am using a stick shifter for this and I must say, the gearbox is quite good, especially when you try to drop 2 gears at once to induce engine braking. Must be warned tho, you can lock up the rears quite heavily doing this, and in some cases, blow the engine up. Thus you might need to take a while to get use to it.

Test drove the mod at Monza, and it’s feels like a dream to drive. With all the long straights, the car’s V10 engine could stretch it’s leg all it wanted, and after a few tweak, the car was ready to be driven as it’s meant to be. One thing I hate tho is the McLaren’s rev meter. The rev meter is red on a black background, and you can’t really see anything if the sun is shining straight on the dashboard. Other dashboards/rev meters on other teams don’t seem to have this problem.

If you feel you want to drive something different from the fast but easy F1 cars of the noughties, try giving the mod a try. You might end up loving it.

Rig
Intel Core2Quad Q8200
Windows 7 Ultimate (32bit)
nVidia GTS250
4X 1GB Kingston HyperX ram (3GB physically used)
rFactor 1.255 (running at 1680*1050)
Logitech G25 (200° rotation, H shifter configuration)

In the last few weeks, there was two F1 mods released for the popular car racing simulator, rFactor, the 1993 F1 mod, that I will review later, and this one, the 1999 F1 mod, by WCP.

The 1999 season of Formula One was the second year running of the rivalry that can be seen between Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher, and McLaren’s reigning world champion, Mika Hakkinen. All seems lost for Ferrari when Schumacher broke his leg at Britain that year, but his teammate Eddie Irvine suprisingly continued Ferrari’s challenge. Thankfully he fell short in the end.

This is reflected in the mod, which features all cars, liveries and drivers from the 1999 season. You can even choose Mika Salo, who subbed in for Schumacher after his crash. Liveries are well painted, and reflected all the paint scheme that was seen during that season, and you can choose between ones with tobacco or non tobacco sponsorship.

Weirdly, the default car setting for the mod is the low speed setup that is used for (at the time unchanged) Hockenheim and Monza, and not, as people would expect, a medium setup. This confused me for a while when I can’t seem to get my wings to go more than 9 clicks in the car setup menu

This leads to some interesting result. Its seems that with the default settings + low wings, you CAN drive the car comfortably, as I tested at Spa. I hardly feel any understeer, and I didn’t even loose time in the 2nd sector, which is made out of the twisty section of Spa. There is much grip, TOO MUCH in my opinion actually. Even without traction control, the car doesn’t feel like it’s going to throw it’s back out, and I can take Eau Rouge at full throttle with low wings! I think WCP need to look into this matter. It makes driving the car too easy and you don’t really have to care about the wings much, which doesn’t seem logical considering that it’s a V10 era with grooved tyres.

The car model itself does not really look well rendered, and looks really boxy when viewed from far away. Mind you I have the car model settings on FULL at the menu, and yet they look kinda crude. I hope they release a better, high res model and texture of the car, as it’s seems like a waste to see all those liveries that they painted look really ugly in game.

Might need a few more spin with the mod, but my initial view for this is that it’s a good mod for you to relieve the 1999 season, but if you want a real challenge with better physics, CTDP ‘05 and ‘06 is a better choice, that is until I review the 1993 mod, which seems promising.

Rig
Intel Core2Quad Q8200
Windows 7 Ultimate (32bit)
nVidia GTS250
4X 1GB Kingston HyperX ram (3GB physically used)
rFactor 1.255 (running at 1680*1050)
Logitech G25 (200° rotation)

If you have played Popcap Games’s Plants vs Zombies, after the end of the game you unlock the game’s theme song (Zombies on Your Lawn). Did you know that there is also a Japanese version of it? The song, Uraniwa ni Zombies ga / 芝生にゾンビが, was created by the composer of PvZ, Laura Shigihara, aka SuperShigi out of fun. By the way, not only she composed this catchy tune, she also sang it.

“Uraniwa ni Zombies ga!”
by Laura Shigihara

Himawari

(chorus)
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie wa dete ita

(verse 1)
Zombie wa kowai gaikotsu
Hanabira zenbu o toritagaru
Sono ato atama wo tabetagaru
Tadano Himawari
Dakedo watashi wa tsuyoi!
Noumiso ga suki
Zombie wa kirai

(pre-chorus 1)
Softball de asonda yo!
Helmetto wo kabutta zo!
Screen door wo motta zo!
Oretachi Zombie, Zombie, Zombie da!

(chorus)
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie wa dete ita

(verse 2)
Uraniwa de asobitai
Atama wo taberu no yamenasai
Noumiso niwa cholesterol ga ippai
Shinda node kankei nai kedo
Solar power de tatakau yo
Shokubutsu wo mamoru tame

(pre-chorus 2)
Sono sanrinsha choudai
Atama ni butter ga kuttsui jata
Noumiso taberu zo!
Oretachi Zombie, Zombie, Zombie da!

(chorus)
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie ga yatte kita
Zombie wa dete ita

They say Dota players are cray, but somehow I doubt they can be as crazy as this. I mean they are playing in a waist deep FLOOD here!

If anyone know the sauce, please contact me

Fancy watching animes on a large projector? Or play the moe card game Weiss Kreus? How about a roundtable discussion about the recent anime events/news locally or abroad? Want to see cosplayers? The possibilities are endless. Want your voice to be heard as well? Well why don’t you join the ongoing discussion thread here? We would love to listen to any ideas that you might have for this event.

The faster we can get the ideas down, the faster we can see it being confirmed and implemented for the event next year. So what are you waiting for? Join us now!

Anyways, in general 2009 theoretically should have been a good year for PC Gaming. DirectX 10, more titles, more promises, more of everything. But somehow it does not turn out that way. Let us look back at what happened throughout the year…

PC Game List for 2009
Pc Game List 2009

See that? Yeah, it’s a list of games that SHOULD have been released this year. But in the end most of the one on the list end up dud. Where’s my Alan wake dude?

The Rise of Steam
If there is something wrong with Valve’s premier game distribution system, it’s their fucked up logging in issues. Seems that it hate torrents so much that if you are torrenting, it will just say “Fuck this shit” and goes back to ignoring you in any way that it can. But if you can ignore that somewhat large issue, Steam IS the future of gaming as we see it.
All the games that you own tied directly to your account, playable wherever you login with your username. Games that are launching can be preloaded directly into your PC, and will be unlocked the moment the game is launched worldwide. The STEAM friends service, lets you see what your friend is playing and easily joining them.
But all of those are what the original STEAM are famous for since it’s release. The main reason that it’s getting more and more popular, is the fucked up price slash during promotion weekend. Since it has agreements with all the major publishers, Valve can basically sell games at any price they see fit. And when you’re talking of Valve…
How crazy did it go? Well imagine that the USD59 Team Fortress 2 was selling at a low rate of USD4.79 during it’s promotion weekend. And it does not stop there. Most of the games are sold at 50% price or less during promo weekends that it’s hard to see how Valve is getting profit out of this. But they are. They showed that they CAN gain around 200% net profit during promo weekends, when influx of buying outweighs the price cut. Now that’s business, and in a way, it sure beats all those pricey console games as well.

Controversy of L4D2
Not much of an issue is made into a LARGE one by jilted owners of the original L4D. No one thought that L4D2 would be released this early. And thus the original owner RAAAAGED when the plans for it was unveiled, feeling that they were conned into paying for an incomplete game. Thus the butthurt emofags starts to draw plan to boycott the game. Valve, being valve, give them some sweets in the forms of extra maps and gameplay. And somehow, they stopped whining…

Hardware War
While there’s nothing much that AMD can do about Intel for the time being, in the graphic department it’s a whole different story. nVidia started started strongly with the GTx series, that pwned everything that ATi threw at them, even in term of value for monies. But that’s all changed during the last quarter of 2009 when the 5xxx series by ATi was introduced. Relatively cheap, powerful and the higher end can even support 3/6 monitors natively (depending on input), users are spoilt for choice as nVidia has to cut down price to match them.

The year of the Console Port
After the failport of Grand Theft Auto IV last year, most of us were expecting much of the same this year. And for some game, that might have been the case *modernwarefare2lol*. The FIFA series is going down the drain with yet another PS2 port, when it can relatively port the next gen console version with ease. Thus it was a suprise that they best port came from Capcom, a company that has never been synonym with PC games. I mean look at the old RE4 port. It was pure crap. And yet here they are, proudly proclaiming that the BEST version of Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5 will be on the PC, fully utilised and more extras. And they did not disappoint. Resident Evil 5 was one of the best port the PC world has ever seen. Fully utilising DX10, the game will auto detect which controller you are using, whether it’s the sexbox controller or the keyboard and mouse, and will change the ingame prompt accordingly. Also worth mentioning was the awesome port of Burnout Paradise for the PC. It was one of the best racing game that I’ve encountered in ages.

Rise of the Small Games
You would certainly encounter it. Bejewelled, Desktop Tower Defense, these are small leisurely games that you play in your boring time in the office. But not many saw how PopCap Games nearly destroyed all those high tech 3D game with a simple, but mindbogglingly addictive game, Plants vs Zombies. This simple strategy game is for me THE BEST game of 2009, simply because it’s fun, cheap, and yet fully satisfying. What? Modern Warfare 2 was too short? Then Plants vs Zombies is the game for you. Once you start, you can’t stop, and with this, more and more developers are looking to produce games that can rival this. In the long run, this is a good thing as you can be sure that you can spend more time in the office wasting productive hours playing games.

Free Stuffs
Everyone loves free stuffs right? Thus it was quite a suprise to see EA releasing Battlefied Heroes for free. And you would only need a browser to launch it. And there will be a free version of Quake coming out as well. The future looks bright for stingy gamers out there.

Games for Windows Live
An app which is supposed to simplify gaming, it turned out to be broken, and need to be fast disassociated with gaming. You need to be logged in for you to save game, and thus if you don’t have an internet, bye bye save game. Indeed, as long as this exist, I doubt we can enjoy the games as it’s intended. I mean WHY FOR GOD SAKE A GAME THAT I BUY ON STEAM NEED TO HAVE THIS AS WELL? FFFFF

Windows7/DirectX11
Windows7 turns out to be a good replacement OS for Vista. Light, quick and easy to use. And it also comes with a new DirectX, DX11. While there are not many games or hardware supporting it (only the ATi 5 series and Dirt2 supports this currently), if all goes well this will mean faster, smoother games that can be calculated using the faster GPU processor instead of the onboard proc. In theory you can play new more 3D intensive game on a rig running Pentium 4, altho it’s not really recommended.