first, the controversy. the story for shadow complex, which tells the tale of one man trying to stop a secret organization from taking over the united states is taken from the book empire by orson scott card, an alleged homophobe. despite some people trying to keep this game from being placed in the xbox live arcade, it has managed to sell over 200,000 copies since its release, making it the best selling arcade release to date.

now the game. shadow complex plays like a mix of metroid and castlevania: symphony of the night. your character jason flemming moves through a 2d map, gains levels by exploring and defeating enemies, finds upgrades to his weapons and abilities and takes on incredibly huge bosses. my favorite power upgrade was the speed boost which makes jason run so fast he breaks the speed barrier – and anything else in his way. the first time i saw this i laughed my ass off. my one complaint about the gameplay is the aiming, which you do with the right analog stick. your enemies can move in the environment like it was 3d and jason will automatically target them in a 3d fashion. this creates moments where the people directly in front of you kill you because you were too busy aiming at the guy off in the background. still this isn’t enough to deter from how awesome this game truly is.

the graphics are made courtesy of epic’s unreal 3 engine and set a new bar for graphics in downloadable games. shadow complex is undeniably beautiful from its character models to its lush and colorful backgrounds.
there are some clipping issues when jason goes into air vents but this does nothing to diminish how fun this game is to watch and play.

the sound is very well done. the music score sets a tone of suspense which helps to further immerse you in the world. the effects are fantastic, explosions and gunfire are numerous and various, so you don’t get the same sound out of every gun and the right sounding sound comes out of each different gun. your enemies tend to make a lot of the same sounds when they die so get ready to hear the same scream, much like the movie scream i first heard in indiana jones and the temple of doom that keeps being used in other action movies.

shadow complex is 1200 microsoft points which amounts to 15 bucks, but you get the same amount of playtime and enjoyment that you got when super metroid sold for 60 bucks. despite a few small shortcomings, this instant classic will be on my playlist for years to come, long after i’ve forgotten about gears of war. 4 out of 5 stars.

You asked for it and later this week we’re delivering on it. We are making significant enhancements to the way you view your trophies online. Check out the walk-thru video so you can see these updates first hand.

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Here’s what you’ll be able to do:

• View detailed info on your trophies on PlayStation.com
• Compare your trophies with multiple friends and other PSN ID’s
• Compare details on trophies within each game
• Track your progress to the next level against friends
• See what trophies you have and what you still need to unlock for each game
• Use the sorting features to plan your game domination

In addition, the portable ID has been enhanced with trophy data so you’ll also be able to take your portable ID with you to official game sites, social networks and other third party sites making it easier to show off your trophies and gamer status with friends online. Your PlayStation Network Portable ID will link directly to your public trophy page on us.PlayStation.com.

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Yes, he’s completely serious folks. If the latest game in the long-running first-person shooter franchise manages to topple the game that generally dominates the month of August, he’ll reimburse you the full retail price for Wolfenstein.

Here’s the original tweet:

Here’s the deal folks: if Wolfenstein outsells Madden 10 in August I will personally pay for your copy (keep your receipt) – SPREAD THE WORD

Since that original post earlier this morning, Heir has gone on the clarify details about the offer. For instance, reimbursements will take place on an international level, and he’ll be using official NPD numbers to determine whether or not he needs to pay. Oh, and you need to follow him on Twitter to collect, so pay close attention to the link below.

It’s a pretty bold statement, but I’d say that going up against Madden for the month of October with a first-person shooter is like trying to entice your football-loving spouse into sex with a striptease in front of the television on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s futile, and you could get hurt.

Besides, if he has that kind of money to spend, why not buy a bunch of copies himself to pad the numbers? It would certainly save him a fortune in PayPal fees.

Update: According to the NPD Madden killed Wolfenstien so don’t expect your money back any time soon.

“Just to address one issue that we’ve been getting a lot of comments about. And this is, of course, about Trophies,” said Kojima Productions podcast hot Sean Eyestone. “I just wanna tell everybody out there right now that your voices are being heard and that we’re not ignoring you. We hear everything that you are saying. It’s just that we can’t say anything just yet.”

Sounds like trophy support for Metal Gear Solid 4 is being worked on, but at this point, does it matter? Would you replay the game just to have the trophies?

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Here’s what I like:
• Account recovery is faster—great if you play over at your friends’ places a lot, ’cause it takes damn near forever.
• Party invites are less clunky
• You actually get notifications when your subscription’s about to expire
• Achievement browser’s better, and you can launch games from it (yes!)
• Active Downloads and other screens like that are actually easy to get to
• Under My Xbox, there’s a handy troubleshooting section called Solutions that brings together all of the info that was scattered throughout the UI (scary you need this though, I mean, we’re talking about a game console, right?)
• And while it’s not as good as having more than 100 friends, you can sort your friends list in different ways

As much as we love our PS3s and as much as we love having the first three seasons of Three Sheets at our fingertips, this workaround that gets Hulu back up and running on the PS3 is still a bit much for us. We tried to read all the witchcraft, with its VMs and DNSes, but we got kinda headachey and had to lay down.

If you’ve got a stronger stomach (and are still avoiding services like PlayOn), give it a spin and let us know how it works out Here is a small Linux virtual machine that should, for most people, re-enable Hulu content on the PS3. It provides a web proxy configuration that only effects Hulu related network traffic, thus not slowing down gaming or making the PS3 otherwise dependent on the VM’s proxy. The Fix : Conceptually The fix detailed by the yPass.net guys works but does have one problem: all of your PS3’s network traffic will get routed through the Proxy server. Thus making it very annoying if the Proxy server ever goes down. Ideally, only network traffic going to Hulu should be routed through the Proxy server, which can be done by setting up your own DNS server. Thus the fix looks like this: Hulu PS3 workaround using Squid and DNSMasq

1. Step 1. Configure the PS3 to a DNS server (Dnsmasq) that you control, and that has been configured to lie to the PS3 when it asks for the IP address www.hulu.com to it and tell it to use the IP address of the local Squid proxy server instead. What is nice about this is that the PS3 can be configured with two DNS servers, a primary and secondary. Configure the PS3 to use the new DNS server as the primary DNS server, and the normal DNS server as the secondary. Thus, the PS3 will still operate normally even if Dnsmasq or Squid is down.
2. Step 2. The proxy server forwards requests onto the real Hulu servers, but changes the “User Agent” of the browser so it looks like the request is coming from a Windows machine. It does this by being configured as a “transparent reverse proxy”, which unfortunately the Windows port of Squid does not support. Thus you are pretty much stuck running Linux.
3. Step 3. Enjoy your lazy weekend mornings splayed out on the couch catching up on your favorite shows, but be aware of the limitations of Hulu on the PS3. One caveat with this setup, as compared to the original proxy setup, is that you can’t login to hulu.com and see your Queue or Subscriptions as in this configuration the Proxy can’t handle the https traffic.

To “work around” this, I just bookmark the pages of the shows I want to watch. The Fix: Download and Run It

1. 1. Download VMWare Player.
2. 2. Download 7zip, to uncompress the VM.
3. 3. Download the VM via torrent or http, 50 MB download.
4. 4. Uncompress the VM, and run it with the Vmware Player. Login and password are “notroot” / “huluproxy” if you want to login and look around.
5. 5. Configure the PS3 to use the IP of the Virtual Machine as its Primary DNS. – This means that on the PS3’s network configuration wizard, chose “custom”, and when you get to DNS, choose “manual”. – Set the primary DNS of the PS3 to 192.168.1.5, aka the IP of the VM. – Set the secondary DNS to be the ip of your router, should be 192.168.1.1
6. 6. Visit hulu.com on the PS3 and see if it works.<

Alternatively, if you have a machine available that can run Linux and that is always on, you can set it up yourself, see the Configuration section below. I recommend the Linux Mint the distribution. If you are stuck running Windows, and if downloading and running a VM from some random blog bothers you, by all means download a more stock VM image and configure Squid and Dnsmaq yourself. The VM should also “just work” for most people. By definition, if you have a PS3 and you are wanting to watch Hulu on it, you A) have a broadband Internet connection, and B) most likely have a home gateway / wifi access point (Linksys, DLink, etc). Most home gateway routers don’t dish out IP addresses that low by DHCP so it shouldn’t conflict with anything else on your network. Also, most home routers use 192.168.1.1 as their address in the home (LAN side). If your home router uses a different address, you will have to edit some config files to get it to work. The Fix : How to configure it yourself, aka not running the VM Squid: Starting with the default conf file from Squid 2.7 (what comes with Debian/Ubuntu), modify the /etc/squid/squid.conf file as follows. Uncomment this line in the file http_access allow localnet Comment out this line of the file http_port 3128 Add these lines http_port 80 accel defaultsite=www.hulu.com http11 vhost allow-direct header_access User-Agent deny all header_replace User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Dnsmasq: Starting with the default /etc/dnsmasq.conf Add the following lines:

address=/hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/www.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/static.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/ads.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/assets.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/t2.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/urlcheck.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/secure.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/a.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/b.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/c.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/d.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/e.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/f.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/g.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/h.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/i.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/j.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/k.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/l.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/m.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/n.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/o.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/p.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/q.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/r.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/s.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/t.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/u.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/v.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/w.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/x.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/y.hulu.com/192.168.1.5 address=/z.hulu.com/192.168.1.5

Hulu uses alot of sub domains. The Fix : Troubleshooting If you need to have the VM use a different static IP address, you will need to update the address in the /etc/dnsmasq.conf file and the /etc/network/interfaces files. Nano is the available text editor, “sudo nano -w /etc/dnsmasq.conf” & “sudo nano -w /etc/network/interfaces”. Either reboot when you are done or restart the services. To verify if dnsmasq is working : On a Linux machine, do “dig @192.168.1.5 hulu.com“, it should report back the 192.168.1.5 address instead of hulu.com’s real address. I don’t know how to “dig” on a Windows machine. To verify if squid is running : In a browser on another machine goto “http://192.168.1.5“, you should get a nice “The requested URL could not be retrieved.” message. source1 source2

Paul S. in England writes that “40ish bottles” washed ashore on Brighton Beach sometime before 5:37 a.m. Netherlands reader Soulofaqua described the discovery at The Hague as “sort of disappointing” The posters found in the bottles didn’t give up much about the new game.

Reader Saddler B. in Vancouver, Andrew B. at Jones Beach, New York, and Shane K. at Santa Monica also sent in snaps. Check em out in our gallery.

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In an e-mail circulated yesterday, the ECA issued a call to action:

Now is the time for you to stand up for your rights and join millions of Americans of every political persuasion in the fight for Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the principle that ensures that gamers are free to go where they want, do what they like, and connect with whom they choose onlin. Congressmen Ed Markey (D-MA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) have introduced H.R. 3458, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.

Take action now and tell Congress to make Net Neutrality the law of the land. Without Net Neutrality, your Internet Service Provider is free to: charge you extra for playing World of Warcraft, to interfere with Xbox Live, or to completely shut off your ability to access for favorite web sites. Net Neutrality effects your entire online experience…

This is our best chance yet in making sure that Net Neutrality is passed by Congress. The head of the FCC supports it, the President of the United States supports it, and we’re asking you to make sure to tell Congress you support it. Take a moment to send them the message to make Net Neutrality the law.

A suggested letter to Congressional representatives is available from the ECA website.

Any ways to the review.

Call of Duty World at War

My rating 4 out of 5

In this installment of the Call of Duty you are once again back in WW2. This time you play as the Russians, Brits, and Americans. (I have not completed the game yet so I am not sure if there is more) The graphics are amazing. The detail is great. It can handle up to 1080p and maintain the frame rate. The controls are very familiar if you have played Modern Warfare. They give you many options to change the setup if you do not like the default. As for the game play, it can get kind of frustrating but it is a great game built on a great engine. As always the Call of Duty franchise gave us a great game. The multilayer is what you would expect, getting snipped every 5 seconds from some 8 year old in bum fucked Egypt. But this time they give you ZOMBIE NAZIS!!!! That right there is worth the price for the game. This game is available on all major console including PC.

UpdateI finally beat the game and what a pain it was. I did find a little glitch on the second to last level but with a little web search was able to figure it out and continue the game. I still stand by my rating.