Shadow Hearts - Covenant, Ps2.

+ Smooth, fast and intense action. Fun and with a loads of cool combos. SOLID and heavy action.

+ Good blend of puzzles and action to keep it from getting repetative.

+ Over the top cool, spectacular and awesome cutscenes. Coolness factor 10.0. Take every cool move, slow motion moment and camera angle and mix it up to one intense, slowmotionpacked and cool drink and you have DMC3´s cutscenes. Matrixfans will scream with happiness. Expect alot of "woosh" sounds and guns going off in slow-mo.

+ Overall good voiceacting to go with the overall excellent characters wich truly manage to submit alot of emotions and feelings to the cutscenes.

+ Incredibly fun bossfights. And there are ALOT of them. Lots of bosses, all of them great fun to battle and all of them looks really cool. Bosses are oldschool gaming. I want more bosses in newer games!

+ Good TechoCore Metal soundtrack. heavy guitars with some kind of techobeats and synths that blends perfecly with boss fights and cutscenes. Adrenalinepumping ! The standard combatmusic that kicks in in every standard battle gets old quick tho since its the exact same track everytime and its nowhere as good as the rest of the soundtrack.

+ The Special Edition adds ALOT of value to the game. THIS is the edition to buy if youre going to buy DMC3. An extra campaign covering Vergils side of the story, perfect difficuly settings made so that everyone (and i mean EVERYONE) can enjoy this game without finding it to hard or to easy. You can watch cutscenes again and there are some more goodies that i havent even digged into yet.

+ Maybe not the best of stories but how it evolves are very nice.

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- The Playstation 2. Ive been sitting with the Xbox 360 on an HDTV for almost 1 year now and this really marks how bad the Ps2 looks now, close to 2007. The console is getting OLD and the graphics are REALLY starting to feel outdated. You have to be very ignorant of the graphics to truly enjoy a ps2 game when Gears of War is soon to be released.

- Boring leveldesign and extremely boring envorinments. Brown, grey and dark gothic halls and small rooms with some short outdoor exceptions. Grey walls with ugly textures in every room. Not much creativity when it comes to the layout either.

- Story involving demons, hell and portals to demon planes. Yaaawn. Theres some demon named Sparda, who had 2 sons..yadda yadda. It might make more sense if you have played the other 2 games first wich i have not so i will not be so harsh on this point but the background of everything going on and to the characters is nonexistant if you jump right into DMC3.

- Some backtracking through boring locations you have already visited. No thanks!

- The typical japanese static camera is often irritating and positioned so that you cant see what you´re shooting at or where you´re running to.

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Final Score: 8.7

The coolest Actiongame I´ve played in a great while. You get TONS of content and many many hours of gameplay for an extremely small amount of money in the Special Edition. The Action is smack on and the cutscenes are maybe the coolest Ive ever seen in an Actiongame.

Tested On: PsTwo, 8mb Memory Card, Standard controller, Standard cables,  HDTV 26"

The local time here right now is 01.30 AM. In 30 minutes the clock is 5 PM in San Fransisco and 2 AM here and its After Hours time! Im looking forward to it of course. I dont know how long I will last tho since the clock till be 5 in the morning after 3 hours. I will probably call it a night somewhere around then. Lets hope the Midnight Brown performance is early on. And i can get my share of the Homer cam before 5 am. I should go warm up a pizza or something...yea. Affter Hours very soon, be there! No matter where you live. Sweden here, reporting in!

Devil May Cry 3, Dantes Awekening - Special Edition, PS2.

It finally arrived in my mailbox (hmm well not really since it was to big for my mailbox so I had to go pick it up). The limited box with the Saw Movies only made in 1000 copies in total. As a huge movie fanatic i am ofcourse thrilled to have this piece in my possession. I´ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking for me. The box includes:

* Saw 1 Collectors Edition

* Saw 2 Collectors Edition

* Saw 1 UMD Movie

* Clip from the Original Saw 2 filmroll

* Certificate card with production Nr.

* A sweet round steel box

..of Button Mashing. Naturally the best one so far out of the new ones since the competitors were Gamespot editors (tho Crying Princess was a HARD laugh). Felt sorry for Greg for failing at the stupid baseball but the final with NFL Blitz was INTENSE. GG Jeff, well done. Can Jeff be bad at any game really? I would want to know what that game might be. He seems to have som allround crazy gaming skillz. I owned him in the Memory Leak tho from here. Beyond Good & Evil and Unreal 1? come on, those werent hard ones. Anyways, great episode of Button Mashing. Good job Rich being the best gameshow host ever as usual.

+ The Size. The size of this game´s map puts every other "big scale" game before it to shame. This game is huuuuuuge and its all yours to roam. By land, sea or air.

+ The Engine. The Game´s graphical engine is quite spectacular. It draws up this enormous gameworld with rich detail and fantastic scaleablility and no loadingtimes. No small jumps in gameplay and no framrateissues what so ever and it looks fantastic by land, sea or 1 kilometer up in the air. No really noticeable pop-ups and a drawdistance that makes watching the sunset over there by the horizon one of Just Cause´s strongest feautures

+ Sweet Lightning. Dawn and Dusk in particular looks absolutely Jawdroppingly beautiful on my HD tv. racing a boat or a plane into the sunset makes me go "wow..." everytime. The sun feels warm and cozy out on the open sea as well as under a palmtree through the leaves. The Tropical paradise feeling is always there !

+ The seamless smooth experience. Going from watching a yellow butterfly flying past the man who sells fresh water in the village to taking the helicopter 1000 meters up into the air, flying through some heavy rainclouds,landing on the highest mountain, basejumping from there, jacking a car, driving it out from a cliff, jumping on a boat and driving it into the setting sun or the dawning day to jumping in the water to study the aquatic life beneath the warm watersurface. All so seamless and smooth!

+ The Stuntengine. Jacking a car at high speeds has never been this much fun. Drive up close to it, jump up onto the roof of your own car, jump to the car you want to jack and slide in through the sidewindow. You can also hang onto the wings of flying wehicles, jump between boats and planes and use your grappling hook to hook onto moving things and then jump onto them. The stuntsystem has endless possibilities and for the most part it enhances the type of game that JC is. And its hella cool !

+ Fun and "kickass" Action. Its easy, it has Auto-target and its alot of action when the **** hits the fan and it feels just right in JC. Taking over bases and settlements never gets dull together with some upbeat dancemixes of Latino guitar themes that are OK.

+ The Freedom. Such a huge world and so many different flying wehicles to try out. Where to begin.

+ Sweet political satire themed story.

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- Horrible characterdesign and graphics. The textures on almost every "enemy" in the game is just plain ugly. Even Rico himself dosent look very sharp either. The design is nowhere to be found. You forget the face of every maincharacter when you turn off the game because they dont really have faces, just generic boring ones without personality.

- Disgusting Indoor locations. There are not many, only a few. But those few are so ugly i just vomit all over my controller everytime. And thats not very nice at all. Just Cause are meant to be an outdoorsgame. A prisonblock, a downtown prison and garages for example makes me compare it with less attractive Ps2 games. Yuck.

- Cutscenes are big and ugly sleepingpills. The cutscens are prerendered with some kind of bad looking computer animated graphics from a bad Pixarmovie that never was released. Like Toystory Latino or something. And they are not just ugly, they are boring to watch to. There is absolutely nothing that catches my interest in these cutscenes AND they have bad baaaad voiceactors for the main characters.

- Bugs! Get the bugspray! The bugs are swarming me. Run over a small piece of debris with you car and youre stuck. Go get a new car. Run up on land with a boat just a TINY bit and youre stuck, go get a new boat. Run over a motorcyclerider and the rider sometimes get stuck on or IN you car in some buggy way. Sometimes requested vehicle drops dont show up. I have experienced one lockup so far that forced me to turn off the console. Achievments that i unlocked days ago pops up days later..  Just to name a few of the bugs. Game feels like it might have needed some more polishing.

- Wierd system to handle Police and Rival Gang. The Wanted meter is extremely unforgiving. If you run into another car, even just a little itsy bitsy tiny bit. You will have the police after you. You just scratched his tail-light and you have wanted level 1. The police dosent even have to be near you at all, they will just pop up. And Wanted level 1 in JC means jeeps, MCs and helicopters with heavy guns blazin. They will hunt you down with rockets and automatic weapons..because you scratched a persons tail-light. It dosent end there tho. I dont really notice any huge difference in difficulty when I have wanted level 5. Its still the same annoying helicopters and crazy suicidal cops with baaad baaad AI. But the main thing here is this: You cant drive a car for more than 100 maters before you have the cops after you since every road is PACKED with traffic....

- Non existant AI. Enemies of all sorts dont have any intelligence at all. None, zero, nada. I found out the best way to take down guards in towers were to just run up to the tower because this will make the guard in it jump like a crazy fool down from the tower and land flat on the ground...... Cop cars will run into each other and fly into walls..etc etc

- Always God Mode. At least it feels like it. Rico really cant die if you have some form of gaming skill. he can take a beating like a freaking terminator. Even tho he´s just a bad Antonio Banderas copy.

- Bad Overview map. The map screen should have been alot smoother and detailed for a game this huge. I could make a long list of improvements that could have been made to the mapscreen. Now i get the feeling its very clumsy.

- Sloppy car controls. I never get that "smack on" feeling that im one with the car. I get a very unsecure feeling when in a car. They just control...wierd and you always end up stuck on a rock or with that annoying cop helicopter after you.

- Annoying helicopters! Just cut it out ! Even when you have no wanted level what so ever theres always crazy helicopters flying around shooting missiles all around you. I figured out after a while that they are probably shooting at my Guerilla friends and i think i was right but i dont like have missiles swooshing past me wherever i am. It ruins my holiday feeling.

- Ugly weather effects. The rain looks like black pencil lines rather than waterdrops.

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Final Score: 7.4

A fantastic engine with a sweet stuntengine but overall its a game that lacks polish and above all, a soul that makes you want to come back. As a free roaming sandbox its both fun and beautiful tho ! Worth checking out!

Tested on: HDTV 720p, 26"

Another x06 has come to and end. And it was a mighty impressive show for anyone intrested in the future of the Xbox 360. ALOT of nice games were shown and I will do just as i did with TGS and recap the games and pick out my personal favorites. My big favorites tho were really Peter Moore and Cliffy B for being such awesome people when speaking to a crowd. They really know how to sell a product and how to put in just the right amount of humor and personal interest into their speeches. Anyways, here´s the x06 highlights for me.

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Best Trailer: Bioshock (release 2007..)

A VERY engaging and emotianally upsetting trailer. A 50´s speakervoice explains for you the background while the camera dives to the bottom of the ocean to show the city that went horribly wrong. Rapture! The scenes after that were wonderfully disturbing. Showing everything from a first person view but all prerendered. Its all very strong and well done showing off the small girls and their Big daddies and the drug thats causing everyone to go crazy but gain powers. The video looks and sounds fantastic, the overall polish of the trailer is higher than anything else on the show and it sets the mood for the game extremely well with such a small scene. Dont miss it!

Best Gameplay: Gears of War (release Nov. 17th EU)

Epic and Cliffy B showed of quite alot of gameplay for GoW this x06 and it was pure jawdropping awesome. I saw a total of 4 different ingame videos with people from Epic playing the game and Cliffy talking about it (as well as showing of the controls in a specific video). It seems like the actiongame Ive been waiting for all my life. Its raw, its powerful, its cool as heck and its pure and full of lead! The gameplay seems to be JUST the way i hoped it would be together with some incredibly smooth controls as seen in the Cliffy controls showoff. Epic didnt hold back. They showed off cutscenes, alot of gameplay and multiplayer and I have been enjoying it all through videos and articles. I really cant wait until the release. This is already Game Of The Year, give it to me now.

Best Graphics: Gears of War (release Nov 17th EU)

To be honest. GoW didnt have as much distance to some other titles as on TGS (were they really only were there with a trailer on the MS conference). The graphical power of some of the other titles at x06 actually came pretty close to the graphical insanity that is Gears. Alan Wake for starters looked AWESOME. That games graphics really blew my mind. Assassins Creed have the potantial to look mindblowing when its all done as well as Blue Dragon, Mass Effect and Lost Planet. Lost Oddysey is also up there and almost poking at Gears but all said and done it IS Gears of War that IS the best looking game that will be release on ANY console for a great while to come. The new Unrealangine is nothing short of fantastic. x06 also showed that any framrateissues that Gears might have had as now resolved. Of course. I would expect nothing less than perfection from Cliffy, and perfection it will be.

Biggest Nice Suprise: Doom on Live Arcade (Out now)

Doom on XBLA! That was for sure the biggest and best suprise for me at the show. I love this game. Everyone should be greatful to it and its creators for making actiongaming what it is today. Im going to copy and paste a part of my previous Blogpost concerning Doom on Live Arcade: " When i got home from work this morning i instantly downloaded the game to try out Act 1 and I can tell you this is one GOOD version of Doom. Maybe the best. First off it runs perfecly and looks perfect. The graphics are intact but the square can be upsized a bit. I do however miss a widescreenmode. I dont know how well Doom would look in Widescreen tho but it would be a cool option, like in Street Fighter 2 HF. The sound has been converted into 5.1 and it sounds great. I can safely say i jumped out of my seat a bit when a pinkydemon jumped me from behind for the first time a couple of levels into the game"

Biggest Ugly Surprise: Sonic The Hedgehog (release nov 14th)

I tried out the demo and Wow this game stinks. I actually had pretty high hopes for the new Sonic. I actually thought that it would work in 3D and that it would be a nice and extremely fast experience. Instead I got poor controls and leveldesign made for a 2D game. The camera was awful and if the controls didnt make you run right into the abyss, the camera and leveldesign closed the deal for ya. You have to run slowly to see where you are supposed to go and when you think you know where to run it only results in you, off a cliff. The graphics also seemed toned down and downright ugly in some places. Some other people also talked of alof of bugs with Sonic getting stuck and things like that. Sonic dosent work in 3D, it never has and never will in my opinion. I rather go another round through Sonic Rush on my Nin DS. THATS a good Sonic game!

One game I will buy for sure: Gears of War (release nov 17th EU)

Actually I have already preordered the game. Actually everyone who owns a 360 should do so now. Those not owning a 360 yet should buy one and then order a copy of Gears of War NOW! This is probably going to be one of the most memorable actionexperiences I have ever played through with the best graphics Ive ever witnessed in a game and with the coolest and most smooth shootergameplay for years. Anyone not owning a 360 and / or considering not ordering a copy of GoW will miss the gamingexperience of the year. I pity them, I pity them all, the poor fools who cant or wont play this masterpiece. I will buy GoW, i will play through the campaign solo and co-op and I will roam the online servers for months. If the game dosent arrive in my mailbox on the day of the EU release I will knock myself unconcious with a hammer for another day. There were more games on the show that I will buy for sure ofcourse. Lost Planet, Alan Wake, DoA xtreme 2, Blue Dragon, Lost Oddysey and Assassins Creed just to name a few. But all of those can wait because first, its GEARS OF WAAAAAR!

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I have to finish this off by expressing my joy for reading that Zeschuck, Jackson and Molyneux are working together on something awesome. Everything involving Peter Molyneux is extremely interesting and seeing Jackson and Zeschuck working with him just have to turn out to something mindblowing. And of course Fable 2 will turn out to be sweet! x06 was a great show with alot of intresting stuff. I was pretty much very interested by most of the games on the floor there so to pick some of them out like this isnt completely fair. I will enjoy playing through Viva Piñata as well as Kane & Lynch and Stranglehold.I also have to underline how much Im looking forward to Mass Effect. 2007 looks to be a great year for xbox 360 owners. No, not just great, an AWESOME year!

Closing regards to Peter Moore for being a great spokesman for Microsoft!

http://www.last.fm

A Site where you get your own profile in wich all the songs you play in Winamp pops up so that you can keep track of what you are listening on, find friends who are listening to the same kid of music (or different), find more music of the same kind that you might not have heard and join groups that suits your genre. You download a small program wich you have running in the background on the computer. In that program there will also pop up information about the artist you are currently listening on AND it will show album art from the album you are listening on. Why dont you try it out and show the world what you are listening on. Also Add me to you friendslist!

http://www.last.fm/user/J_Nyman/

I cant download anything from gamespots x06 coverage. Anyone else having this problem? When i try to download anything from the x06 On The Spot to a Gears of War video it just goes dead after like 30 seconds of downloading. The speed starts out fine and then just goes down steadily to zero. Ive never had any downloading problems with GameSpot before and seeing as I am a Total Subscriber with blazin´ fast download servers i should NOT be having this problem during this very important event. I can stream the videos just fine but i want to download them. But cant. This forces me to go to less complete coverage sites for my x06 material wich does not feel good at all. Anyone have a reason or a solution for this or is it just my computer that decided to start disliking GameSpot all of a sudden? Tokyo Game Show worked smooth and I cant really imagine x06 putting more pressure on the GameSpot premium servers. Now x06 is over and I havent been able to get a single piece of x06 content from GS. Im NOT happy. Good thing Microsoft had their "Bringing It Home" campaign on the Marketplace at least. But I cant get a controlexplanation for Gears with Cliffy B from there....

[UPDATE]: Turns out it was the US-East servers that were broken. I Switched to the US-West one and can now DL all the x06 stuff.