Today, we are only 2 weeks from the the release of the largely anticipated game Grand Theft Auto IV. Many insiders who have had a chance to play the game have nothing negative to say about the game. Many praises were made on multiple multiplayer modes.

I wish purchase GTA 4 as soon as it ships to Canada and cannot wait to see all that GTA MP Madness.

Grand Theft Auto IV will be available in most stores on April 29. Until then, patience…

Many governments will start analyzing conversations going on in World of Warcraft. Terrorist plots are being talked about on WOW. While most of it might just be social rejects fantasizing on blowing up their school, many country’s governments such as USA and Canada will start investigating the conversations going on in the game.

World of Warcraft players can actually perform terrorist acts in game, such as getting infected by a poison that turns you into a bomb then teleporting to markets or other highly populated areas to explode and kill as much people as possible. People will gather in gangs and bomb areas at set intervals.

Taking the online terrorism to real life

While all this is pretty inoffensive and much less violent than things you can do in many other video games, it does encourage talk of terrorist actions that could be done in real life. Some kids (adults too) actually talk about blowing up public places such as Walmarts or schools with precise details of what they would do in real life to kill the most lives possible.

Internet threats about terrorist acts cannot be ignored. Just in Canada, here are 2 examples of terrorist acts that happened which could have been avoided with the right prevention:

• A very young girl killed her parents and her brother after having openly talked about it on a website which I will not link to. People thought she was just fantasising about the death of her family but she murdered them with multiple knife wounds each.
• Another terrorist act was done at Dawson College where a guy (which I wont name) killed 1 girl and shot multiple others after talking about it on a website (which I will obviously not name). He had allot of pictures of him with guns and had talked about the intention of killing people before disappearing.

Those 2 examples are nothing compared to everything that happens in the world. Prevention is key so I encourage the governments of all countrys to investigate more on what is said on the internet. Thing could save people from being raped or killed everyday like it happens now.

Here’s to hoping they will effectively patrol the internet in the future.

The Spanish equivalent of the Official Playstation Magazine talked about never before seen Grand Theft Auto 4 multiplayer info. First, they comfirmed that the game will support up-to 16 players depending on the game mode. “PlayStation Revista Oficial” also stated that GTA will have 15 different Multiplayer modes, 14 known and 1 unknown.

Here are details on the Grand Theft Auto 4 Multiplayer modes:

• Deathmatch
  The host will choose how much civilians will be on the map and what weapons players will use. He can also turn on or off the cops. The editor at the Playstation magazine said he played a game where all players had a rocket launcher and half the city was destroyed.
• Team Deathmatch
• Hangmans’n NOOSE
  This game mode is similar to many game’s VIP mode. You play as a team to escort someone to safety.
• Mafiya Work
  In this game mode, every player becomes an assassin with a list of victims to eliminate. You must succeed before the other players to win the game.
• Team Mafiya Work
  Same as above but players work as a team to strategically eliminate the list’s victims before the other team does to win the game.
• Cops N Crooks
  In the magazine’s opinion, this was their favorite game mode. It does sound promising. One teams plays the crooks, the other plays the cops. The goal of the cops is to eliminate the enemy team’s “boss”. They can see where he is on their GPS. The crooks must cover their angles and protect their boss at all cost.
• Race
  Race cars around the city.
• GTA Race
  In GTA Race, you can use weapons to eliminate enemy cars and highjack a new ride if yours gets destroyed.
• Car Jack City
• Bomb Da Base
• Bomb Da Base 2
• Turf War
• Deal Breaker
• Free Mode
• ??? Unknown

All the good news surrounding Grand Theft Auto IV make people realize that waiting for this awesome game will have been worth it. With a huge single experience and a very heavy multiplayer mode, GTA IV sounds like it will be the sandbox game every console owner has been dreaming of since the release of this generation of consoles.

During a conference he gave, CEO of activision Bobby Kotick talked about the possible future of the Call of Duty franchise.

When questioned about his plans, he revealed that a Call of Duty MMO would interest him but would cost allot and would need to be monetized in some way.

He talked about how he would like to compete with top MMOs such as world of warcraft. With the recent merging of Activision and Blizzard, it’s going to be interesting to see how it goes on with World of Warcraft. Could dual accounts be offered? Only time will say.

I think this could be a good idea but they need to think of the competition. Before they could have the time to make this game, many MMOFPS games will be on the market and they will need to convince people to switch to their game.

I hope we see some news about this in the coming months/years.

Today, Valve finally patched Team Fortress 2 for the Xbox 360. Here are the details of the patch givin by a valve programmer:

-Fixed a medic invuln exploit.
-Fixed grenades going through players or buildings.
-Fixed exploit with rockets causing damage through thin walls.
-Fixed exploit allowing snipers to fire faster than intended.
-Fixed exploit allowing players to teleport with the intelligence.
-Fixed exploit attaching sappers to buildings through walls.
-Fixed spy backstab exploit.
-Fixed spy being able to attack without dropping his disguise.
-Medics no longer heal enemy spies when they’re not disguised.
-Tweaked autobalance calculations.
-When an engineer dies in sudden death, his buildings explode.
-Fixed stats sometimes not reporting correctly.
-Added a dialog to indicate when the host shuts down the server.
-Added rumble to TF weapons.
-Fixed ping column sometimes getting hidden in some resolutions.
-Added 10 and 14 player game sizes.
-Prevent hosts selecting game sizes above their bandwidth limits.
-Improved handling of large network packets to eliminate bandwidth spikes.
Reduced respawn times for smaller games.

First thing that I love about the patch is that people with crappy connections cannot host 16 player games anymore! They think that because they have absolutely no lag (when you are host, you have 0 lag), that no one lags. You enter their game and cannot even exit your spawn because the lag is so terrible. This is gonna limit the number of 16 players games but at least this will trim out the wannabe hosts.

The added rumble is nice. It adds more feeling to the game. Most modern games have rumble so it seems like this is something that should have been there from the start

Aside from bad hosts, the net-code seems allot more solid than it previously was. Much less lag combined with the host restrictions on player capacity.

Now this is where they screwed up… They changed the medic and dispenser healing to 50% speed. This pretty much killed the medic and nerfed the engineer badly. The Team Fortress 2 community doesn’t understand why this happened and it’s not even like that on the PC version. It’s not in the official fix list so allot of people think this is an error which shouldn’t be there. If so, we can expect another patch to fix this “error?”.

Those are the numbers of february. The Nintendo Wii console actually outselled the PS3 331,627 to 89,131 units.

The rise of the Playstation 3 popularity expected in Japan seems to be overshadowed by Nintendo and its great games such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl which sold 1.33 million games in february alone.

Nintendo is destroying the competition in Japan. The Xbox 360 sold only 14,079 units in february. For the Xbox 360, it’s not surprising but for the Wii to continue outselling the PS3 like that, there’s a clear sign of how the Japan gamers like their gaming.

Ninja Gaider: Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS has officially gone gold. It will release in the US on March 25 and retail for 34.99$

In this unique game, players will control Ryu Hayabusa in his latest adventure by holding the DS sideways. This new way of playing DS games is being used by more and more game developers.

Unlike its original titles, Ninja Gaider: Dragon Sword for the DS got a T for Teen by the ESRB. The original Ninja gaiden games for the Xbox were very graphic and got M for Mature ratings.

The patch that was much anticipated by the Xbox 360 Call of Duty 4 community came out today. It fixes what gamers complained about in the lasts months. Infinity Ward is known for taking care of it’s customers and giving gamers what they want. Here’s the info IW published abut the patch:

New Kill Cams

We’ve added new Kill Cams for everything. So now those “WTF!” grenades that seemingly come from no where, you can see that a guy threw it over the house, it hit a tree branch, bounced off a rock, into a tiny window, where you happened to be pointing out of, and say…… whoa. Follow behind RPGs and M203’s kill cams, claymores, Airstrikes where you can follow the bomb from the plane until it hits you.

Host Migration

Now you won’t have to be dropped back by yourself when a host leaves. Instead, everyone will stay together, a new host will be assigned, and the game will auto-start back up. Keeping everyone together, no more re-inviting, re-joining games because some host leaves. This has been a tall order and something that we’ve put a lot of work into which has allowed us to really optimize online play all around not just specifically with Host migration.

Improved Sniper / ACOG Accuracy

Sniper and ACOG scopes have been tweaked and are really improved. I use to not snipe at all (mainly because I’m a horrible sniper), but now it’s so much more fluid and natural, while still having the same difficulty to use, it has no more “WTF I know I hit that guy!” moments.

Upgraded Spectator Cam

Now when you’re in spectator mode you can follow them in 3rd person, switch to their first person view, or rotate the camera in a full 360 degrees around whoever you’re watching.

Quick Mute Option

Users will now be able to quick mute players on the fly by pulling up the scoreboard in-game or via the lobby by simply going to their name and hitting the mute assigned button. As quickly as calling in and designating an airstike. So no longer getting killed while trying to make your way through the Xbox blades for the mute option so you can shut up the guy who always seems to find it funny to sing into his mic or cover up for his lack of skill by telling you how to play Domination his way.

A study provided by an independent warranty provider has proved the short term failure rate of the Xbox 360 to be about 16.4%.

After selling 1040 warranties between April 1 and July 31, 2007, 171 claims were made up to last week. 16.4% After such a short time period is a terrible. The group used to do the study will be followed for about 2 years so the failure rate will dramatically go up.

Out of the 171 claims, 102 were due to the 3 red lights. (3 out of 4 red lights light up when powering the console and nothing works)

Here’s the percentage of failure for the 69 other warranty claims:

• 7% Disc tray problems
• 10% Power supply problems
• 13% Hard drive problems
• 13% Video card problems
• 18% Optical drive problems

Those failure rates are the reason Microsoft had no other choice but spend the billions in making the warranty for the 3 red lights 3 years by default.

Mass Effect, the best selling Xbox 360 RPG of 2007, will come out for the PC platform May 6.

Since the sales on the Xbox 360 platform are pretty much over for the most part, Bioware or should I say Electronic Arts decided it was best to take the game to the PC world.

Note that Bioware are the creators of the Knights of the old republic franchise and other great RPGs. They were recently bought by EA.