Awful holidays. Bad internet access, bad new year’s eve and, in the end, my steam account was hijacked. I’m so furious. I would have never logged in that fake steam if my connection wouldn’t disconnect me from the real steam every two minutes. I may be able to log in again in the next days but for now I’m cut out, without the control of the Gamers Inn group on steam (Catman is currently administrator and has been warned).

Anyway, because of my shitty connection I had to play mostly offline. I replayed the whole Donkey Kong Country series and started Dead Space. It’s really creepy. You never know what’s going to come out of one of the six hundred corridors you’re running in. Its best is the interface. Every menu, inventory, map etc… is drawn like an hologram in front of Isaac and turning the camera makes them rotate, except for the map that is rotated as well inside the hologram frame. Absolutely fantastic!

SNK revealed the roster of The King Of Fighters XII and I got a surprise. KoF’s re-birth affects even the looks of the characters:

According to the official japanese website, Leona and Athena are both 18!!!

Anyway, I miss Mai and the whole NESTS team.

I couldn’t get more excited for a Dead Space trailer thinking of the new control possibilities and immersion.

Also, while the Scout update for Team Fortress 2 is slowly revealed, Valve takes his time to announce us that we suck. Well, you suck. I call myself out. Despite their efforts to fix any bug and exploit they still noticed lots of cheaters and bug abusers and decided to remove their special weapons for a month. I hope nobody of you is among these unlucky people that will have their back burned online.

Edit: You know what my thoughts are about casual gaming, brain training and so on, being a hardcore-retro gamer, but this really makes my arms fall: Dream Club. (no tag in the post for this announcement. I refuse to add one)

It’s time to fight! The TF2 development team set up a new update for both The Soldier and The Demoman with an exception of a unique seventh weapon that will be given only to the strongest class. How to prove it? Just kill your opponent. Every Demoman killing Soldiers and Soldiers killing Demomen will be racking up points to deserve the extra unlockable. The challenge has already started so why don’t you go fragging some arrogant players?

After the first day Soldiers are winning with 1,390,017 kills compared to Demomen’s 1,290,988 with a gap of 99,029 kills. Those are just numbers and you know better than me that players are skittish.

Other news include tons of Dead space 2 artworks and clues. The next survival horror from Visceral Games will be set on a space station built on one of Saturn’s moons. The good news is that Isaac is still alive (don’t start singing it) and has been given new equipment. Drawing his first suit was a chore. I wonder what the final version of this suit will look like.

Time flies. It’s been almost a month after the last post already. I know I should have written this earlier but I had some exams to pass. I passed every one of them by the way and only three remain in October but I have the whole summer to work on those, between some Mario Galaxy and Metroid.

You may have read the latest news on game announcements at E3 but let’s recap, just to make sure what we’re going to buy and why.

Microsoft

Probably the most embarrassing conference I’ve seen, even worse than that Nintendo conference from 2009. Let’s face it, Kinect (Natal’s new name) is just an improved Eye toy and what they showed was a more multimedia box than a gaming console. Movies, Facebook integration and sport events aren’t that interactive when it comes to actually play. And about Skittles, I’m sure that the little girl enjoyed that part as much as we didn’t. You’ll see my comic on this later. There’s at least a really good news in the release of a new 360 model, with built-in wi-fi and larger HDD.

EA

Nice stuff, really. I’ve got a couple of friends overly excited about Battlefield Vietnam just for the lack of Carl Gustav and seeing Dead Space 2 in action with more quick time events was really a bang. I’ve been re-playing Dead Space lately after EA’s big sale on steam and I perfectly recall the adrenaline i felt the first time a drag tentacle grabbed me.

Crysis 2 is nearing completion and it has been optimized for slower machines while faster machines will star in Need for Speed: Hot pursuit featuring multiplayer police car chase.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft presented a handful of very interesting games, starting with Child of Eden, from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and ending with Rayman Origins, passing by Assassin’s creed brotherhood. They also showed a new non-video-game with plastic guns and laser sensors that allows you to battle in your living room or set up checkpoint runs. I don’t know if you have ever seen this but in the 90’s there was a game called “Laser combat” sold with 2 guns and 2 chest sensors. It’s pretty much the same, even in the look.

The most interesting product is probably the UBIart Framework: a new in-house development engine. I hope they release it as free someday, like the Unreal Engine or Quake Engine.

Nintendo

Everyone that wasn’t expecting anything big after the leaks in the months before E3 got terribly shocked. Nintendo threw on screen a huge number of games for both DS, Wii and the new 3DS, finally unveiled. Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kid Icarus Uprising, Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby Epic Yarn, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and many more. I really can’t figure out precisely how much I’m going to spend within the next year.

My bad, I couldn’t see the Nintendo 3DS in action as you don’t get the 3d effect from videos but from what I’ve read it works like a window on another world. The black border around the screen helps to isolate the 3d image from the rest and your brain reads it independently. It sounds awkward but it’s possible if your eyes aren’t too close or too far from the screen and not tilted. With the amount of games revealed and awaiting us within the end of Nintendo’s financial year (March 2011) there’s no doubt they owned the show this year.

Sony

Sony’s motion control, named Move, is finally priced at $49.99 and supported by good games and not only tech demos, like Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Media molecule’s Alex Evans unveiled a little more of Little Big Planet 2 and how it will be a platform for games and not just a platform game. I admire their intents but I feel that the LBP franchise would work way better on PC with external applications and a supportive community. Just look at how far Garry’s Mod made it.

The big bomb came with Gabe Newell, announcing that portal 2 will be released on PS3 too. I wonder what made him change his mind considering that coding forPS3 is actually time-consuming, despite his previous statements were jokes or not. Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 went on the screens again with Dead Space Extraction as bonus playable with the PlayStation Move. The conference ended with a disturbing clown in an ambulance promoting a new Twisted Metal game.

The worst part was Kevin Butler, charging up the crowd  and mocking the products of other companies like Sony invented everything in gaming since the creation of PlayStation. That’s not something you do in front of people who probably owns every console on the market.

I’m sorry to inform you that from now on I won’t publish my comics regularly twice a week but they’ll be published when they’re ready. The main cause for this is that I’m starting to have some heavy work to do for the academy, including 4 different projects and university class to attend as long as I can before the classes start to overlap at the beginning of march. In this conditions drawing the comic has turned out to be a chore in hours when I would just launch any game to rest (I can rest even playing Doom or Team Fortress 2, so you know). It’s not that I don’t enjoy drawing anymore, but rather that I put so much effort in the comic that it isn’t relaxing any more. Before the next year I’ll probably change the domain name and turn this website in my personal portfolio with illustrations, videos and the comic. Don’t worry. I still have tons of ideas for future comics, although I like to think new jokes as soon as I finish drawing one.

Now that I took the aching tooth out, here’s a little glimpse on the ongoing story: I’ve chosen the names for the two undead that will lead our heroes into the depth of the Inn’s basement once again. You’ll get more info on them in the next comics, but for now I have a nice nickname for one of the two.

The fun part is that I wanted to give more character to him and his skeletal pal but every time I had to draw his face this was the only suitable expression. I mainly wanted to make him different from the average numb zombie but that face of his will be so awkward in the future that it’s a shame not to draw it.

There’s more. The story I’m drawing lately doesn’t have any particular reference to games because I didnt’ find any laughable game in the past two months. Yes, I’ve played Dead Space 2 but it’s so “serious” and well-conceived that it’s hard to find new jokes about it. Luckily, Kirby Epic Yarn, Bulletstorm, Brink, Portal 2 and many others are drawing really near.

You may also have heard that Sony revealed its next portable console, the New Generation Portable, or NGP. Although the games in the works are less than the respective 3ds titles, its graphics are really amazing for the small piece of technology that is. I hate to look at good graphics on small screens.

Last sad news: don’t hold up your hopes for Mirror’s Edge 2. DICE shifted almost all of its employee to the development of Battlefield 3. I leave comments about this to you. I’m tired to say the old things once again to sound just like an old geezer.