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.

Ok my fellow TAGers. The second coming has arrived. The second coming of Modern Warfare that is. Tomorrow millions of fans will be enjoying the most hyped game of all time. And to be perfectly honest, I am absolutely sick of all this hype. How did we even get here?

    A recent "hotness" in the Talking About Gamers community has been Borderlands. Now Borderlands has grabbed so many people not just because of the loot-drop or addictive MMORPG nature of the game, but people are being drawn into the simple drop-in/drop-out co-op that is in the game. Now one feature that got me excited when I got a chance to play the game at PAX was the split-screen co-op. Sadly after hearing bad things about it from Faitios, and taking a peek at it last night, I am afraid to see another promising game that has failed with couch co-op.

    I have been playing videogames for a long time, since I was a little kid playing the NES. Some of my fondest memories, and surely many from gamers around the world, were built by playing games with friends in the same room. Mario Kart, Street Fighter 2, Donkey Kong Country, and NBA Jam were just a few of my favorite SNES games that I spent countless hours on playing with or against my friends. Then came along the Nintendo 64 and suddenly 4-player games became readily available. Deathmatches on Goldeneye. Co-op on Perfect Dark. Playing a light game of Mario Party.

    The next generation brought me the Xbox and with it came the first time, for me and many, of playing on-line against regular people on a console. Being a PC gamer of the past I had experienced on-line play but never in this form. Being able to sit, side-by-side with someone and play Unreal against people from across the globe was an amazing thing to experience. But even with the Xbox, the movement towards pushing the graphics and atmosphere was starting to create problems with my beloved couch co-op.

    The first two perpetrators that I experienced firsthand were Rainbow Six 3 and Doom 3. Both were games that featured co-op modes but didn't feature split screen. The only way to play was with two Xboxes, two TVs, and most importantly two copies of the game. I recall my excitement as I sat down with friend to show him my fancy new Rainbow Six game only to find out we couldn't play together on the same Xbox. Doom 3 was a scary game and I really wanted to play through it with my friend (who hates scary games) but again I was shut down. I wasn't too upset in this generation but much to my dismay this trend would continue into the current generation of gaming.

    So finally we come the Xbox 360 and the PS3. I leave the Wii out of this conversation because they actually have done a very good job with single-console play. In the beginning of the 360's life I found nothing to be alarmed about. Co-op games stuck with their split-screen and single-player games stuck to their guns. We got such co-op games as Perfect Dark Zero, Gears of War, and Halo 3. The first game of this generation that I recall being disappointed by was Rainbow Six Vegas. Not because split-screen didn't exist but because playing such stripped away all story from the game, leaving what seems to be endless hallways of enemies without any context. A scene in the game has your team being ambushed, but in co-op the screen goes black, you hear an explosion, and then the game comes back on. You have no idea what just happened or where the rest of your team went.

    The next perpetrator of split-screen sadness came with Crackdown. This was a huge game that sadly left out the feature of couch co-op. Now I understand the reasoning behind lack of split-screen (surely such a large world could not be rendered twice) but its omission was saddening. Halo has always tried to push the boundaries of the system but has still had the foresight to forgo graphical fidelity to allow for split-screen. This is why co-op and multiplayer doesn't look as good as single player. The worst part about Crackdown is that I heard from everywhere about how much fun the co-op was but I never experienced it myself.

Parity? What parity? If anything the past weekend of NFL football was a demonstration in disparity. It ties the record for most games where the outcome was decided by 28 points or more. The bottom 10 teams in my rankings from last week all lost or were on bye.

If the parity is becoming bad this year, can you imagine what a year without a salary cap will do to this league? It may do nothing or it may do everything. Only time will tell.

Apart from the many, many boring games this week there were some interesting ones. Houston and San Francisco battled out to see who can turn around their season the quickest, with Houston coming one win away from the franchise's best start. The golden touch of Brett Favre finally turned brass and led to Minnesota's first loss of the year. (Although some will say that the interception was Chester Taylor's fault, he did give up the fumble) Miles Austin proved that he has more in him than one amazing game by showing up for another huge performance in helping Dallas flex their muscles in the NFC. And the number one team (according to me) crawled their way back from a huge hole to maintain their undefeated record.

Looking ahead to next week I see far less blowouts, at least on paper. Perhaps as the season goes on we'll see the end of this disparity and get back to one of the NFL's favorite mottos: Any Given Sunday.