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From: www.gamesradar.com

Hearthstone: The Grand Tournament Review | Trusted Reviews

Added: 07.09.2015 15:17 | 30 views | 0 comments


Trusted Reviews: Whenever Blizzard releases an expansion for any of its eSports titles WOW, Starcraft 2, HotS and, yes, Hearthstone one has to marvel at the developers meticulous attention to detail. Every Blizzard expansion and game come to think of it rolls off the assembly line balanced to the hilt. Given that the addition of new units/powers/heroes in an eSports game can completely change strategic dynamic, the Blizzards additions look mind-boggling brave on top of everything else.

From: n4g.com

Watch Heroes Of The Storm's Rexxar Stalk The Battlefield

Added: 04.09.2015 21:09 | 69 views | 0 comments



Heroes of the Storm will soon be adding Rexxar as a playable character. A new trailer from Blizzard Entertainment shows this feared hunter in action.

From: www.cinemablend.com

The least-wanted Xbox 360 games ever made (or perhaps the least-known)

Added: 04.09.2015 19:35 | 85 views | 0 comments


As of right now, the list of Xbox 360 games that people want to be playable via the Xbox One's backwards compatibility boils down to a popularity contest. 'Letting the fans decide' is one of the easiest ways to make a gigantic corporation like Microsoft feel more personable, and thousands of gamers have jumped at the chance to vote on the .

But then there are the games sitting at the bottom of the colossal totem pole that is the Xbox 360's library, all of which are sitting at 115 or fewer votes at the time of this writing. According to the vote tallies, these are essentially the least-wanted games ever made for the Xbox 360 - or perhaps just the least-known. In fact, there is absolutely no way you've heard of all of the following games. And in some cases, that's a damn shame, because a few of these oddities aren't half bad, or are even legitimately great. The rest, well... at least 100 or so people in the world would be happy to see them make a backwards-compatible return.

Considering Yo-Ho Kablammo was universally panned and has what is perhaps the in existence, you have to wonder if its few votes didn't all come from just one person. The game itself looks like a 99-cent shovelware mobile game that took a wrong turn on its way to the iTunes storefront and ended up on Xbox. There it plagued unsuspecting consumers - who were seduced by the monkey on the cover and its axe-murderer-esque eyes - with a banal, ship-to-ship combat game that makes you want to throw yourself overboard.

When the best part about your football game is the halftime marching band minigame, you have a serious problem. Such is the fate of Black College Football Xperience: The Doug Williams Edition for Xbox 360. This is less of a football game and more of a train wreck happening in slow motion. As our own Richard Grisham noted in his review, "There are missteps galore, including magically teleporting footballs, brain-dead blockers and tacklers, even obvious mathematical errors in the stats. Sadly, BCFX simply isn’t anywhere near ready for the big time."

If you've never seen professional badminton, it's pretty amazing. It's sort of like watching professional ping pong, except the 'ball' - or rather, shuttlecock - is constantly 10-feet up in the air. Then you have two people down on the ground swinging their rackets around as though a swarm of angry bees just broke into the arena. It's hard to see how you could improve upon this already amazing sport, but Blazing Birds gives it the old college try by replacing the players with what appear to be robot eagle heads mounted on unicycles. This is a great idea to be sure, but ultimately wasn't enough to mask another mediocre sports game.

Before we dive into the rules of Wits Wagers, take a look at for the game. Why did Hidden Path make the characters look absolutely horrifying? Just look at those all-too-realistic heads on top of those cartoon bodies. And that one with the clown face, it's the stuff of nightmares. Wits Wagers is a trivia game in which every question can be answered with a number - for example, "How many feet wide is an NFL football field?" Players take an educated guess, and the one who's closest to the actual answer without going over <(i>Price is Right style) is awarded points. If you don't know the answer, you can bet on someone else's answer with the hopes of sharing in their windfall. Just make sure you don't bet on the clown.

Petanque is an extremely French-sounding name for an extremely French-sounding sport where you throw balls at other balls from really far away. To my uncultured, American sensibilities, it reminds me of horseshoes, except you want your horseshoe to land as close to the stake as possible without touching it. So it's a really passive-aggressive form of horseshoes. This may sound simple enough, but Obut Petanque 2 fills the screen with so many gauges, meters, and other graphs, you'd think you were flying a fighter jet instead of throwing metal balls at the ground.

If you've seen the 1997 horror flick Cube, then you already know how lethal these shapes can be. Death by Cube is filled with killer cubes that shuffle around on four legs and explode into giant puddles of blood when you shoot them - because video games. You control a tiny, laser-shooting android who can collect various power-ups to change between spread shot, homing shot, and other weapon types. But the most exciting weapon has to be the reflector shield, which soaks up enemy fire and returns it in a giant, glorious shotgun blast of bullets. Think Robotron: 2084, but the robots bleed all over the place.

Holy Hell, based on that title alone how was this NOT the most amazing game on the Xbox 360? Let's break this down: 'CellFactor' could mean anything, but 'Psychokinetic Wars' screams giant battlefields with wacky powers. And that's what this Unreal Tournament-inspired FPS was going for, complete with a female robot named Bishop who can throw objects with her mind. Oddly enough, this is the third game in the CellFactor series, the first two being glorified tech demos designed to showcase Ageia's physics processors.

Planets Under Attack brings all of the joys of planet-on-planet violence without the hours-long complexity of, say, Planetary Annihilation. In this real-time strategy game, you control a cluster of planets and construct swarms of ships to go forth and colonize other planets in your glorious name. Of course, the other players are trying to do the same thing, which means occasionally building giant, world-cracking death rays on your planets to keep others at bay. Giant lasers aside, each of the game's three races - humans, robots, and aliens - has its own unique abilities to fit your playstyle. And while this game almost certainly won't find a new home on Xbox One, you can check it out on Steam.

Everyone who voted for this game is a hero, because 2009's Tornado Outbreak was shuttled into obscurity as soon as it left the assembly line. You control Zephyr, a wind elemental who takes the form of a teeny, tiny baby tornado (seriously, it's like the size of a chicken). Growing in size means sucking up rocks, feathers, fences, trees, houses, and everything else in sight until you're a rampaging twister leveling entire city blocks. There's also a fully voiced and surprisingly fleshed out backstory establishing Zephyr, his wind warriors, and how he's actually on a quest to save the Earth (by knocking your house over).

This game's Wikipedia entry matter-of-factly states "Marlow Briggs, a smokejumper who wields ancient Mayan powers, must prevent an industrialist from becoming a primeval Mesoamerican deity and destroying the world." Whow! Hold on there, cowboy, that's a lot to unpack. Smokejumper? Mayan powers? Ancient Mesoamerican deity? Solid Snake on his best day couldn't puzzle this one out. Thankfully, Marlow Briggs is terested in being a fun, B-movie action game than, you know, making sense. The guy runs around wailing on people with a double-bladed scythe and sweet tribal tattoos. Who needs logic?

Blood Drive takes the opening to Dead Rising 2, switches out motorcycles for cars, and makes a surprisingly well-realized vehicular combat game out of it. Had this game been released circa 1999 for, say, the original PlayStation - featuring the hit single Dragula - developer Sidhe would've been king of the world (instead of moving on to Rugby League 3 on Wii). It mixes car-on-car violence with an endless horde of zombies shuffling around the arena, which supplies the blood part of the Blood Drive equation. Think Mad Max in the post-zombie apocalypse.

When you sit down to make a first-person shooter involving the President, the secret service, and terrorists, that's a responsibility. From Metal Gear Solid 2 to Metal Wolf Chaos, video games have a time-honored tradition of building fun and/or crazy experiences around the commander-in-chief. But Secret Service doesn't come close. Despite playing a secret service agent for the President - which, in video games, could potentially be the most exciting job ever - the most secret service-y thing you do is shoot people while wearing a suit. And that's not even fun, because this game plays like a bad Call of Duty knockoff.

If you never had the pleasure of owning one, Madballs are among the quintessential 'gross-out toys' that were all the rage in the '90s: spherical, freaky foam faces that really don't do much besides sit there and look weird. In a moment of bizarre serendipity, someone on the Madballs marketing team saw a perfect opportunity to incorporate the toyline into a sequel to Babo Violent 2, a freeware twin-stick shooter populated by globes with guns. Shockingly, Madballs: Babo Invasion isn't half bad for a budget arcade shoot-'em-up, especially in four-player co-op. And the XBLA version lets you do something that the Steam port never could: let you roll around as the disembodied, weapon-wielding head of your Xbox 360 Avatar.

In some parallel universe, .

When it comes to peculiar first-person shooters with outlandish character designs and off-the-wall aesthetics, Xotic is right up there with Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and Zeno Clash. Your primary weapon resembles a gigantic fly's head, and each level evokes the feeling that you've just dropped acid at a black-light bowling alley. Rather than shooting up everything that moves, your primary objective is to score points by popping colored orbs with your icky bug-gun. You do eventually get to take potshots at some incredibly freakish enemies, including deranged cyborgs and metallic-skinned mutants. There's a lot more style here than substance, but Xotic's trippy take on the FPS archetype is certainly unique.

Virtual billiards is nothing new, and most people can appreciate the simple satisfaction of lining up a geometrical shot to sink a ball in a pocket. But Inferno Pool needed something to really set it apart - so it tossed out the smooth felt of a pool table for the grit and grime of industrial metal. For reasons unknown, you've decided to enjoy a game of eight-ball in the break room of the local foundry, which is just as dingy and rusted-over as you might imagine. The attempt at making Inferno Pool feel like regular billiards' older, edgier, street-smart cousin is rounded out by some generic techno and a ridiculous announcer with gravelly, Unreal Tournament-style callouts like "BANK SHOT!" or simply "INFERNO!" to pump you up for all the intense pool action.

If you're a fan of Japanese arcade obscurities - and really, who isn't - then you might've heard of Magical Beat, a competitive puzzle game that's like Tetris, Lumines, and Beatmania combined in one. By dropping colored blocks in time to the music, you can rain down trash blocks on your opponent while enjoying some incredibly dope beats. All that is to say: Magical Beat is amazing, and you should absolutely pick up the PS Vita port. Alternatively, you could seek out 0D Beat Drop, which is pretty much the exact same game with Avatars instead of pixelated caricatures. There's a reason these games are so similar: they're both made by Arc System Works, who you probably know as the maker of Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. In either case, you're going to have a good time - I guarantee it.

While we're on the ever-popular topic of Japanese rhythm games (see: previous slide), here's Beat'n Groovy, the Westernized version of Pop'n Music. If you've never had the pleasure of plunking some change into a colorful, cartoony Pop'n Music arcade cabinet, it's essentially the kid-friendly version of the rhythmic button-tapping from Konami's own Beatmania series. Problem is, those games are only available in Japan, and Beat'n Groovy is a poor stand-in for the genuine article. At a glance, the cutesy visuals and screen layout look the same, but upon closer inspection, you'll find all the ugliness of a Western artist trying to imitate the anime style and coming up short, landing somewhere in Bratz territory. Also, playing with a standard 360 pad just can't replicate the magic of Pop'n Music's nine-button, Fisher-Price-looking controller.

To round out this trifecta of forgotten Xbox 360 rhythm games, we've got Go! Go! Break Steady. This oddity adapts the smooth, physically demanding moves of breakdancing into a juxtaposition of simple rhythm gaming in the vein of Gitaroo Man (where inputs randomly fly in from off-screen towards a central node) and the colored-ball-blasting of Zuma. It's a strange mix, to be sure, but the gameplay's perfectly satisfactory, and it's hard not to appreciate the hand-drawn animations and funky art style. Plus, you can play as a breakdancing grandma wearing Bruce Lee's iconic yellow tracksuit.

But wait... HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER! It wouldn't be a proper XBLA music-game-hybrid fracas without this absolutely absurd rhythm-fighter. As you might've guessed from the title, all the action revolves around Snoop Dogg, legendary West Coast rapper and master of all things marijuana-related. It's likely that Snoop wasn't the only one who was high out of his mind when this game idea got greenlit, seeing as its blend of one-on-one brawls and a confusing knock-off of Elite Beat Agents is laughably abysmal. Oh, and at the time this game was released, its star was actually going by Snoop Lion, which kind of - that is, completely - diminishes the point of having 'Dogg' in the title.

Game developer James 'DJames' Goddard (not to be confused with the Olympic swimmer of the same name) has some legendary projects under his belt. The man's intimately familiar with fighting games, given how he currently works on the new Killer Instinct, had a hand in developing combat for a bunch of classic Capcom beat-'em-ups and modern Blizzard games, and even created Jamaican kickboxer Dee Jay while working as co-lead designer on Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. But he's also got an Asteroids-style space shooter on his resume, courtesy of Shred Nebula. This is an incredibly colorful, hectic, 360-degree shmup that was sadly ignored, given that it was released just after Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. If you're enjoying the recent indie standout Galak-Z, Shred Nebula might be right up your asteroid-blasting alley.

Not to be confused with the excellent bloodsucker RPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, this Masquerade may or may not actually exist. The Xbox Marketplace claims that this cel-shaded beat-'em-up was released on June 30th, 2015, yet there's next to zero information and not a millisecond of footage of the game to be found across the great plains of the Internet. From the look of what few screenshots are out there, you play as either a blue jester dude or a thief dudette (seemingly ripping off the equally obscure Pandemonium! on PS1), beating back the burly, make-up-caked legions of the evil Clown Army. This game has vaporware written all over it, yet Microsoft's site shows that 103 people have voted to give it life on Xbox One. And frankly, I find that hard to believe.

Here's another example of 'fans' 'voting' for a game they never even got to play. If you search for "sledge hammer xbox" on YouTube, you're going to find way, way too many videos of smarmy, privileged white kids smashing video game consoles. But you might also stumble across for this eccentric combat-racing game, which is chock-full of big rigs outfitted with missile launchers and rocket thrusters. Despite your instincts telling you otherwise, there's an inherent, kitschy charm to Sledge Hammer's grimy, low-budget visuals, goofy arsenal of arcade weaponry, grunge-tastic soundtrack, and the animated portrait of your burly driver in the upper left at all times. Alas, it was never released, and you can't exactly resurrect something on Xbox One when it never truly lived in the first place.

"Point-and-click detective adventure" is probably one of the last things you might think of when mulling over a name like Red Johnson's Chronicles. Unfortunate title aside, this is an intriguing (albeit mediocre) puzzle game starring Red, a ginger, trenchcoat-wearing private eye, in a modern noir take on Professor Layton. The game itself is rather clunky, but it's got a unique art style, what with the grandiose scale of the generic Metropolis city and frequent switches to a black-and-white aesthetic. If nothing else, it's one of the few games in existence to have a QTE for a high-five-to-fist-bump transition, which surely must count for something.

I know we've had some fun perusing these long-forgotten 360 games, but listen... . There is, in the world right now, a kart-racing console game that lets you race as everyone's favorite pop culture icon: Shrek. And if, for some unfathomable reason, you'd want to be anyone but Shrek, you've got plenty of DreamWorks-themed options, including the lively animals of Madagascar, the Seth Rogen-voiced blue blob B.O.B. from Monsters vs. Aliens, and the adorable Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon (who looks ridiculous when jammed into the driver's seat of a go-kart). The drab course layouts and generic power-ups can't hold a candle to anything in Mario Kart, mind you... but then again, Shrek.

$20 Million a Month and Im Still Embarrassing Myself on Hearthstone

Added: 02.09.2015 14:17 | 53 views | 0 comments


Alex from GamersFTW writes: Superdata analysts predict Blizzard is taking in $20 million in revenue a month and thats not bad for some pretty pixels.

From: n4g.com

The 8 Greatest Blizzard Games

Added: 27.08.2015 18:45 | 30 views | 0 comments


Blizzard is a rare developer that has almost never released a bad game. But which are the best of the best?

Tags: Blizzard
From: www.ign.com

Heroes of the Storms most versatile character is Kharazim, Diablo 3s Monk

Added: 27.08.2015 17:18 | 38 views | 0 comments


The chief goal of character design in a MOBA or team brawler or lords management game is variety. You want a new character to feel and look different from the other characters in the game first, but you also want the hero to have different builds and playstyle possibilities. Blizzard has been getting better at that with its debutantes in Heroes of the Storm recently Sylvanas, The Butcher, The Lost Vikings, and Leoric are notable successes but it may have outdone itself for variety with last weeks addition: Kharazim, Diablo 3s Monk.

From: n4g.com

Hearthstones designers on The Grand Tournament and the future danger of too many cards

Added: 26.08.2015 22:18 | 38 views | 0 comments


GamesBeat: We talked with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcrft senior game designers Ben Brode and Mike Donais about the launch of the expansion, their favorite cards, and how Blizzard will combat the problem oversaturation in the future.

From: n4g.com

Diablo 3 Patch 2.3 Launches With Game-Changing Item

Added: 26.08.2015 21:57 | 55 views | 0 comments



Blizzard is keeping the patches rolling out for Diablo 3 and they continue to add all new features and upgrades to the game that completely alter the way it's played. The latest patch, 2.3.0, brings a game-changing item to the table known as Kanai's Cube.

From: www.cinemablend.com

Diablo 3's Fantastic 2.3 Patch Further Distances Title From Original Vision

Added: 26.08.2015 20:00 | 53 views | 0 comments




Diablo 3 started out as a game that only half-fulfilled its pursuit to be the next great Diablo. Its cohesive gameplay and polished presentation demonstrated that the series could transition well into the modern gaming climate, but many of its mechanics and systems didn't deliver in a way that was deemed satisfactory by fans. It would take two years of patches and the Reaper of Souls expansion pack to move it to where it needed to be in order to earn a reputation as a title worthy of the Blizzard name. Another year of patches have only made it better.

From: www.gamerevolution.com


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