Epic, like they do quite often, is holding a bonus XP weekend that will take place during San Diego Comic Con. This time around there is going to be a twist however.  Executive Producer  Rod Ferguson posted a challenge out to the Gears of War 2 community earlier today. He is going to take the amount of twitter followers he has and divide them by 500. Assuming that SDCC isn't for another week I imagine he is giving twitterites awhile to get the news around.

So if you want crazy amounts of XP (currently he has just over 4000 followers ie 8x XP) get the word around as much as you can. Think we could get him up to 20x XP? Higher? Lets find out!

Follow Rod Ferguson at http://twitter.com/GearsViking 

Welcome to Rapture...again.

The original Bioshock introduced us to the impressive world known as Rapture. Set in 1960, Rapture was an underwater hideaway designed by Andrew Ryan to be a refuge from the control of politics, governments, and religions found on the surface. However allowing this type of freedom in beliefs and industry would eventually lead to discoveries that would come together to destroy Rapture and cultivate not utopia, but a hellish landscape of monsters, psychopaths, and warring factions.

Bioshock is considered by many to be a masterpiece of storytelling and atmosphere, creating an environment that became the most important character in the game. Finding audio diaries explaining people's ideals or detailing parts of Rapture's demise brought the player further into the mythos of the story and made them genuinely care about where they were and what they were doing. However one of the faults of the original game was that it was not always the best game to actually play. While the areas you visited were unique and moody the actual shooting mechanics and using plasmids definitely left something to be desired.

This is the major hurdle that Bioshock 2 tries to deliver on. With a completely revamped combat system and retaining the same great city and atmosphere of the original game, will Bioshock 2 rise to improve on it's predecessor or will it fall into the same trappings as before?

Hop into the bathysphere and hit the jump for the full review.

Heavy Rain is a game where the big thing is choice. You have to make choices and then you have to live with the consequences. Many people will only play this game one time and just experience the story and intensity involved with a single playthrough. However if you are interested in what else could have happened, I'm going to give you all of the variations and cool things I have found in my 3+ playthroughs. You can use this as a guide to go back to certain scenes and watch how things play out or you can just read it and see what could have been.

If you hadn't guessed this post is spoiler heavy. I try not to give away major plot points but I do comment on each and every scene in the game. I would not recommend reading if you haven't beaten the game at least once.

Also by no means do I think of this as a definitive list of things that can be done in Heavy Rain. If you know of any more choices please comment and let me know. Also let me know if there was something fun you found in the game that you think not everyone would find.

Hey just got two beta keys for Blur on the 360.

Just tossing them up here if anyone wants to use them.

MYPE-X7M4-YNXC-9MTC
Y9UV-JEMP-MJZY-7WVE

Just go to http://www.blurgame.com/beta/ and input the code there.

On a recent episode of Talking About Gamers I voiced some of my strong opinions on Mass Effect 2 and proclaimed that I still hold Mass Effect 1 to be the superior game. In this series of blog posts I'm going to go into even more detail and hopefully get more thoughts out than I was able to on the show.

This is part three in my continued analysis. If you missed either previous section you can find them here:

Part 1 - Powers
Part 2 - Squad Members

For this post I'm going to look at how the side missions have changed between both games.

On a recent episode of Talking About Gamers I voiced some of my strong opinions on Mass Effect 2 and proclaimed that I still hold Mass Effect 1 to be the superior game. In this series of blog posts I'm going to go into even more detail and hopefully get more thoughts out than I was able to on the show.

This is Part Two in my series of who knows how many. If you missed Part One you can check it out here.

This time I'm going to be looking at how your squad characters have changed in Mass Effect 2.

On a recent episode of Talking About Gamers I voiced some of my strong opinions on Mass Effect 2 and proclaimed that I still hold Mass Effect 1 to be the superior game. In this series of blog posts I'm going to go into even more detail and hopefully get more thoughts out than I was able to on the show.

In this particular post I'm going to look at the direction Mass Effect 2 took with the powers system.

For better or worse, hit the jump.

Here I go with Part 2 of my series. If you missed Part 1 you can find it here. Again I reiterate that I’m picking out games not just for their quality but that I see as influential. For a lot of these I’m viewing potential to make an impact instead of actual impact just because they are so recent and we haven’t seen how they will affect the industry yet. I mean there was a time where someone could have predicted that Mario Party was going to cause a craze and we were going to see party games like that come to prominence. Now it did last for a couple of years with other imitators coming into the realm but it never really blew up. So remember as you read through these: grain of salt.

As the decade winds down a lot of people have started discussing the “Greatest Game of the Decade” We even have a thread in our forums here. I’m going to attempt to do that. I could make an argument for a dozen different games in that respect. In fact that led me to do this instead. I’m taking a look back at the decade and picking one game out for each year. Now I’m not necessarily picking the best game from each year. I’m looking at the quality, impact and innovation and picking one game out as Game of the Year. I’m also going to highlight another game that could have been in the top spot as well as one game that I did not play. For the game I didn’t play, I obviously don’t have any firsthand experience with the game but I will give my perception of the game, how it was received, as well as why I didn’t play it. So without further ado, here we go!

(This is Part 1: 2000-2004. I'll hit you with Part 2: 2005-2009 later this week)

Thanksgiving is here and the NFL season is past the halfway mark. This holiday has always had a strong influence of football. I mean we get three pro games on Thursday and a whole slew of college games throughout the long weekend. So I figured this would be a good time to toss out some predictions for the rest of the season.

Now those of you who know me probably know that I'm a big Vikings fan and I try to be unbiased as I can. However I can't help but look at the Vikings and think that they are the best team in football. Now I know right now, record-wise, they aren't and I actually believe that that will last until the end of the season with Indy and New Orleans winning home-field advantage. But I think the Vikings will come out strong in the playoffs and hopefully we will see our first Super Bowl win in franchise history.

My final predictions for the standings and playoffs are coming up but I'm also going to hand out some "awards" for the season so far. Hit the jump for the good stuff.