Brink

Brink is a new fps (first person shooter) released by Splash Damage. The game takes place in the future when the world is flooded. Because of the mass flooding of the world a floating city called the Ark was built to house the remaining population. After many years the Ark starts to degrade and the game portrays you as either a rebel trying to escape the Ark or a security officer trying to stop the rebellion. The game features a SMART feature that allows you to use parcore to travel across the city adding a new element to fire fights. The game has been recieved fairly well and I can't wait to play.

Agent 47 Returns

One of my favorite video game franchises is the Hitman series. The series has you playing the super bald super assassin only refered to as Agent 47. The game always involves you(Agent 47) completing a series of assignments/contracts which eventually intertwine at the end causing some big moment to happen. The game is a stealth shooter, meaning that you can either complete the missions using cloak and dager style or kick in the front door and kill everyone, big fun. The last game released was Hitman: Blood Money in 2006. It had been the best Hitman game to date, but it was only for the Xbox and PS2, but later came out for the current gene concoles with revamped graphics. Just recently a new Hitman was announced, Hitman: Absolution. A teaser trailer was released and all that is known is someone screwed 47 over, and now he's being chased by the police and that he's taking on his most dangerous assignment yet. Can't wait for this gem to come out.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Escalation Zombies

Treyarch started the zombie "franchise" when they put it in as an award for beating Call of Duty: World at War where you and three friends are locked in a building and you see how long you can last the zombie onslaught. In there new game Black Ops, they reintroduced it with new weapons and maps. They are soon releasing a new downloadable map pack with four new multiplayer maps and one new zombie map. This entry is just on the zombie map. Until resently Treyarch had only announced that the name of the map was Call of the Dead. Now it's been revealed that the map pays homage to George A. Romero and 70s zombie films. The map is a recked ship and a lighthouse island. The four regular characters have been replaced by Robert Englund (Nightmare on Elm Street), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Michael Rooker (Walking Dead), and Danny Trejo (Machete). George A. Romero will also be making an apperance as a super zombie carrying an electified hammer. This looks to be the best zombie map yet and I can't wait for it to come out

Video Games Win Sales Battle

Many companies use NPD (market research group) to track their sales. Most recently there was a dispute between NPD and some video game companies because they weren't tracking digital media sales, which was making seem like the company was losing money, when in actuallity they weren't. For instance, according to NPD there was an 8% drop in sales in February, but according to EA they had a 39% increase due to digital media. Also, companies like Activision-Blizzard where almost half of their revenue is from digital media, there isn't an accurate depiction of their sales. Officials at NPD recently announced that they see the importance of digital media and have started to track it for the market research.

Navy Death Ray

The Navy has been developing a ship bound defence FEL (Free Electron Laser). A FEL produces a laser by using something similar to a particle accelerator to speed particles up and shoot them out instead of using crystals or inverted prisms to focus light. As of now it has been used to shoot down countless drones, can burn through about 200 ft of steel per second, produces a 14-kilowatt beam, and was just recently run for eight hours at 500 kilovolts. The goal is to eventually develop a one megawatt laser that can burn through 2000 ft of steel per second. Hell yeah to real life Star Wars!!!

Ultramarines A Warhammer 40,000 Movie

Ultramarines was released a few months ago on dvd. Warhammer 40,000 is a British tabletop game produced by Gamesworkshop. The game has been adapted into many things including hundreds of books and multiple videogame adaptations. The only media form it hadn't entered was TV/Movie, and every fan of the game has been waiting along time for that, and as a fan I can vouch for that. It was produced by Codex Pictures, directed by Martyn Pick, and the screen play was written by my favorite author Dan Abnett. The movie fallows the Ultramarines (superhuman soldiers bred to combat the enemies of mankind, the xenos scum and chaos heretics) as the answer a distress beacon from the planet Mithron. When they arrive they find the planet tainted by chaos and it becomes a fight for survival. The film is all CGI and used Image Metrics animated facial capture for the animations, and the film runs about 76 minutes. I of course enjoyed the movie because I'm a fan of Warhammer, but over all I thought the production value of the film was pretty good for having a lower budget.

LA Noire

LA Noire is an upcoming game by Rockstar Games (best known for the GTA series). Based on the title you can probably guess that the game draws heavily from the film noir style (dark mood, high contrast between light and shadow/low-key lighting) for both its look and narrative. In the game you take up the role of a detective and have to solve a series of murders in 1947 LA. The game is using two advanced technologies in its production; real-time global illumination technology (used to obtain the distinct film noir style look), and motionscan (actors are filmed by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expresion at every angle, so that when interrogating suspects you can tell whether or not they're lying). The game is scheduled to release on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in spring of 2011, and Rockstar recently released an in-game trailer. The game looks very good and I can't wait for its release.