Humble Origin Bundle is a complete steal

A new Humble Bundle has gone live and is called the Humble Origin Bundle, which gives you 8 Origin games for less than $5. I'm not a fan with EA's Origin system, but this bundle is such a steal, I can't help but make an exception. 

What's amazing about these bundles is that you can choose how much you want to spend for the bundle. No matter what price you decide on, you get Dead Space 1, Dead Space 3, Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box, Mirror's Edge, Crysis 2, and Medal of Honor. If you spend more than the average amount (currently $4.60), you are rewarded with two more games - Battlefield 3 and The Sims 3 + some starter packs.

If you really don't want to use EA's Origin system, some games will include Steam keys.

The best part is that all the money collected from this Humble Bundle goes directly to charity, not to EA. We also get to choose which charity's get your money. You're not only getting games for cheap, you are also giving back to charity.

The bundle has only been online for hours and already they have raised over $2 million.

Head over to the Humble Bundle site now to check it out.

Weekend, what are you playing?

A lot of new games reached Philippine shores this week. Tomb Raider, the new Sim City, the new Naruto game, Castlevania: Mirrors of fate, and many more hit shelves last Tuesday giving a good variety of new games to enjoy during the weekend. so pick your poison, what are you playing this weekend?

Quash:For me, instead of going for something new, I weirdly chose to backtrack for the weekend. I bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 for P950 for my Xbox 360 and I'll most likely be playing that over the weekend. I guess it was the price, plus the urge to play an JRPG. I wasn't impressed with how Final Fantasy XIII turned out, and from what I was hearing about the sequel made me decide to not get it on release. But a year later with its price down, I decided to give it a try, see if it actually turns out good for me in the end.

Well, 11 hours in, and many time travel jumps later, it's actually a lot of fun. The story though is very forgettable at this point, but the combat mechanic is still one of the best in the series. O wasn't too fond with the whole third character being captured monsters found in the wild, but the merging of monsters and finding different combinations for new skills and all always get me thinking. The freedom and the ability to backtrack is also welcome. The sequel has what the first game lacked, and if Square actually merged the two and minus the whole time travel storyline, the Final Fantasy XIII series would have gone so much better. Oh, and that damn moogle is just as annoying as Vanille, just saying.

I also might get Tomb Raider this weekend for my Xbox 360, or maybe start preparing for BioShock: Infinite?

Migoy: Don't have much planned for this weekend. I just need to finish my LP of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and DmC Devil May Cry before I go into / continue anything else. Oh that and maybe some Battlefield 3 online with the crew and homies. All of which have videos up on our youtube channel that you can check out.

Monday Impressions: Battlefield 3 campaign

I've heard good things about Battlefield 3. Even though I'm not the biggest FPS fan, I can see why people like it. I also see how different of a game it is compared to the recent Call of Duty games. However, all these good things are in the multiplayer aspect. The campaign... not so much.

Ok, so after I got BF3 as a birthday gift from my friends (you guys are awesome), a bit of time passed before I even tried out the game. I blame having zero hype. Before BF3 was released, I thought it looked fantastic running the Frostbite 2 engine and I did enjoy the older Battlefield games. Having heard from multiple sources that BF3's campaign mode was (for lack of a better word) 'shit', I would still blindly, but staunchly defend it, giving the game my benefit of the doubt. I like to believe that if you want to shit on franchise or series, one has to properly experience said franchise/series for at least a significant amount of time before calling it shite.

So after God knows how long, I finally sat down and played the damn game. After hours of updates, the game finally runs. I go into the campaign mode. Here's my experience.

Sad to say, I never booted up BF3's campaign mode since. The multiplayer seems really good (again, I'm not a huge FPS buff so bare with me) plus the graphics and sound are fantastic. I did hear the story that DICE (responsible for the Frostbite and Frostbite 2 engine, plus the Bad Company games which I like) handled the multiplayer aspect while the campaign was outsourced to Not-DICE. Such a missed opportunity for EA. Activision may be the devil in the realm of videogame publishers but they can make a damn good campaign mode in their shooters.

Is it worth a try?

Hell yeah, it is. If multiplayer shooters are your thing then that may be enough to tickle your trigger happy fancy. BF3 has gotten a butt load of updates for the multiplayer mode. All that and the heavy following that it still has should be more than enough for the average FPS fan. But if online is not your thing and you're thinking of getting this for the "story".. don't.

Battlefield 3 Aftermath DLC detailed

Battlefield 3's next DLC called Armored Kill is coming out on September but EA decided to give the community a heads up on what to expect in Aftermath, the fourth DLC that's planned for a December release.

Here is a small description given by EA about Aftermath.

Set amongst the shattered districts, streets and surrounding villages of a post-earthquake Tehran Battlefield 3™: Aftermath depicts a continuing struggle for supremacy and survival amongst the devastation.

With operational capacity severely compromised the opposing forces must adapt and engage in vertical and horizontal urban combat amongst the dust and rubble with cracks and fissures in the terrain providing unexpected cover and paths to objectives. Additional support comes in the form of heavily modified troop transports and civilian vehicles specially adapted to deliver deadly force to the enemy.

Key Features

• Urban warfare on four new maps
• Fight through the dust and rubble, use the earthquake damaged terrain to your tactical advantage
• New heavily modified military and civilian vehicles – ingenuity and firepower combined
• New game mode
• New assignments, achievements and dog tags

No official date has been given. Even Armored Kill has no date still, which is scheduled to be released first.

After Aftermath is released in December, only one DLC remain for Battlefield 3 - Endgame, which is planned for an early 2013 release. Curious to what they mean about using earthquake damaged terrain as your advantage. I have a feeling it's just properly placed rocks that can be triggered to drop on players.

Recent Buys: Episode 5 - Slow motion shooting and the early days of 3D gaming

Most of them items I'll be mention in this post aren't exactly new but this isn't called "newest buys", this is called "recent buys" which the whole "recent" aspect of it applies to myself and my wallet.

I'll be going through these items chronologically since 2 of them I got almost 2 weeks ago. Those 2 would be PS3 copies of Vanquish and Just Cause 2. Vanquish is another game by Platinum Games which involved a futuristic power suit with a design that I would say resembled the suit in P.N.03, design wise, where you can power slide while jet boosting. That plus guns, right-stick aiming, slow motion powers and a lot of explosions. What more could you want?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr1RzIr0Rzc[/youtube]

Just Cause 2 was more of an impulse buy if anything. I was originally looking for a copy of Blur and hopefully a copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Blur was out of stock but they did have 1 copy of X-Men Origins however that copy had a nasty gash on the side of the disc and was still going for 700php in the shop so I decided to drop that and spotted a Platinum release copy of Just Cause 2. Back before I got a PS3, Just Cause 2 was supposed to be my go to sandbox game but DataBlitz only ever had R2 copies and the game was going for 30$ (roughly around 1300php) on PSN. This one was 700php and worked like a charm. I decided to shell out the money for it since I might not see a disc copy of that game for a while. I haven't played it yet because there's a bug in the game that forces you to both press the Cross and Circle button at the same time to confirm, jump and even grapple. This is a problem since for Asia PS3s, Cross is cancel and Circle is confirm. Apparently there's a patch online that fixes this but since I still don't have internet at home (damn PLDT) I'll put this game on the back burner and finish Bayonetta and Vanquish first.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kjs-SC70Wg[/youtube]

For those of you who don't know me personally, my birthday is coming up and friends got me a little something (Shoutouts to the iAc Ninjas). They got me a brand new copy of Battlefield 3 Limited Edition. I only played a little bit of the campaign mode which hasn't impressed me but this game is all about the multiplayer and once I get my internet back, game oooon!

Time for the biggest purchase for this episode. I've been craving to play a lot of old Original PlayStation games like the Bust A Move/Groove 1 and 2, Chocobo Racing, and especially Mega Man Legends 1 and 2. Since PSN doesn't seem to want to add these awesome games to their PS1 Classics library, might as well take matters into my own hands. I wasn't the only one who had the PS1 craze as Tupasheep was also bitten by the nostalgia bug. He did a search on http://www.tipidpc.com/ and found 2 sellers of the original fat PS1, one of which was a recent ad and the other was a fairly recent one. Both were hovering around the 2000php mark and looked to be in good condition considering it's a 16 year old system. I got mine last Saturday (3/31/2012) from the seller retrogamerPH (Kuya Ed). The controllers were a little beat up and the open button for the disc cover gets stuck from time to time but other than that the PS1 works like a charm. It couldn't read some of the PS1 games I still had but that might be the problem of the discs themselves and not the system. I need to get my hands on some other PS1 games to test it out further but other than that I at least got my Bust A Groove 2 fix over the weekend. Fever Time!

Oh and while digging out my old PS1 games, I found this. I forgot I owned one. The Original Soundtrack for the first Metal Gear Solid game.

This is the first track from the disc.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqqq8uqSDnk[/youtube]