Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Video Game Review by: Patrick Sullivan


Sequel madness, and Kinect goes open-source? It’s almost too much for a gamer to bear. The point-by-point breakdown:

A hefty number of additions to big-name video game franchises have been released for the holiday season, most prominently including the long-awaited Halo: REACH and Call of Duty: Black Ops shooters. Gritty science fiction versus covert Delta Force-esque action – which reigns supreme? (Insert squabbling fanboys here).

Lagging just behind them is another highly anticipated sequel, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Considering Ubisoft’s almost laughable showing at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Brotherhood may be the company’s saving grace as other, lower-quality games fail to do well in the market.

Little news of Portal 2, planned sequel to 2007 smash-hit 3D puzzler Portal, is coming out of Valve Corporation. Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, promises a more in-depth storytelling experience and cross-platform support for both SONY’s Playstation 3 and personal computers. No news is good news, I suppose?

Conversely, things are far from quiet on the Microsoft front. Electronics retailer Adafruit has awarded a bounty (only a few weeks ago after this writing) of $3000 to an unnamed hacker for delivering open-source drivers of the Xbox 360’s new motion-control system, dubbed Kinect. In response, Microsoft subsequently declared Kinect was meant to be an open device all along – a suspicious heel-face turn on Microsoft’s part, but this endorsement of the drivers’ use means we can expect to see good things coming from indie game developers for Kinect in the near future.

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