A Cooperative Borderlands Review

Note: I enlisted the help of OXCGN’s Arthur Kotsopoulos in Australia to take a different look at the time sink that is Borderlands. This cooperative effort at reviewing the cooperative game also ran on OXCGN.com.

Omaha Gamers Line Up at Midnight for Modern Warfare 2

Having to choose between participating in what may have been an occult ritual, and getting out of line to be the first to have a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Max Sexson, 21, Andrew Bleich, 17, Spencer Sexson, 19 and Charles Vitols, 22, chose to stay in line.

Borderlands [review]

First person shooter gamers and role playing gamers do not really mix that often. The former enjoys the thrill of a headshot and multiplayer melees while the later is hooked by personalizing their character and looting new gear from dungeons. Borderlands takes a little from each genre and adds enough cooperative elements to create an addictive game best played with others. Whereas Fallout 3 was a role playing game first and a shooter second, Borderlands is the opposite.

Darkest of Days [review]

If you could go back in time, would you attempt to change history for personal enrichment or to prevent atrocities? Or would to restrain yourself in order to preserve the causality that leads to your existence, or in fear of unleashing a worse future by preventing mankind from learning from its mistakes? That is the question at the heart of Darkest of Days, a new game from Phantom EFX of Cedar Falls, Iowa. The game represents Phantom’s first entry in the first-person shooter genre and its first appearance on the Xbox 360.

Wolfenstein [review]

Throughout the history of video games, few enemies have made more appearances or better targets than Nazis. It is not implausible to estimate at least a trillion digital Nazis have met bloody ends on gaming systems worldwide since Wolfenstein 3D kick started the first-person-shooter genre 17 years ago. Wolfenstein-3DWolfenstein 3D blazed the trail for id Software’s 1993 release of Doom, which took the gaming world by storm and cemented the genre’s place as a pillar of video game design. While the latest reimagining of the franchise is nowhere near as revolutionary as the original, it sticks close to the proven formula and delivers a fun, adrenaline-filled Nazi extermination experience.

Prototype [review]

Prototype is a brutal game, and Mercer is no hero. He does not care how many civilians are killed on his path to vengeance. In fact, the game rewards players for killing in the form of evolution points. This creates a disconnect between the Mercer you want to root for in the cut scenes, and the homicidal maniac you play in the game. This detachment is even more pronounced than in other games with this problem, such as Grand Theft Auto.

An interview with NCAA Football 10 designer Ben Haumiller

Last week I had the opportunity to chat with NCAA Football 10 designer Ben Haumiller. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our discussion. Cornfed Gamer – You only have one year between releases of NCAA, how do you balance the time between adding new features and improving the core, on the field experience? Ben Haumiller – That’s a fun part about it, is that we do have such a tight time line every year that there really is no down time. We don’t ship for six days and I’m already working fully on next year’s title.