You can finally stop wondering when we’re going to get some new content for Modern Warfare 2 because the date is official, March 30th, 2010, although we still don’t know what we are getting. I think it’s safe to assume that we will be getting at least some new maps based on the new viral site that Infinity Ward has setup to promote the DLC, www.mapathy.com , but other than that it’s still a mystery. I’ll keep everyone posted here when more info leaks or you can keep an eye on the site mentioned above as I’m sure that’ll be the first place to have the info. If anyone hears anything else let us know!

Oh yeah and this is just for the Xbox 360, the PC and PS3 DLC will come at a later date…

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Yesterday I received a code which gave me access to the multiplayer beta of Bizarre’s new racing game Blur. I’m going to be honest and say that I really don’t know a whole lot about the game, but I’m a fan of arcade racing games (don’t really care for the sim ones) so it looked interesting and hey, free beta so why not. The downloaded clocked in at a little over 1 gig and seems to include 4-5 tracks (?) and a handful of cars. I haven’t had time to mess around with all of the customization or anything like that, but I did get a solid hour and a half of playing time in so that’s basically what I’m going to be telling you about.

So seeing as how I knew nothing about the game going in I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but right off the bat I figured out that it’s kind of like Mario Kart, but with real cars. Essentially you are racing through a city, shipping yard, whatever, against other players trying to finish first, but along the way you can pick up different power ups to use against enemies or to help yourself. Just like in Mario Kart you can fire these power ups forwards or backwards, you can cycle between the different things you are carrying and the power ups themselves are similar to what you would find in Mario Kart. There’s a gun of sorts that gives you 3 bullets to fire off at people, there’s a red bomb type weapon that seeks out the person in front of you and hits them, there’s another red bomb thing that goes backwards and sits on the track waiting for someone to run into it, there’s a shockwave weapon that emits a pulse that damages any vehicle around you, there’s speed boosts, there’s shields, etc… you get the point.

So the muliplayer beta is basically just a handful of courses where you race around trying to finish first. You get different amounts of points depending on what place you finish and these help you level up which I’m assuming nets you different cars and mods and stuff. The menu interface is very clean and easily navigated, the game lobbies don’t seem to have any problems, there’s a nice voting system to choose which track will be next, overall the menus seem pretty thought out. The gameplay itself is actually pretty good, I didn’t have any problems with it although a lot of people in the game were complaining about the drifting, which I felt was alright, just took a little getting used to. It also took a few races to figure out what each of the power ups does as they are just colored icons without any description of what they are, but it’s easy enough to pick up on. The cars handled like I was expecting them to handle in an arcade racing game and I actually had a lot of fun playing online. So overall the beta seems pretty promising, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be picking this one up or not. I have quite a few games to play at the moment and am still having a hard time pulling myself away from Modern Warfare 2, so we’ll see. I’m always up for a good racing game and I’ll probably pick this up eventually, but I won’t be running out on release day to get a copy.

Is anyone else in on the beta? What do you guys think of the game so far? Does the drifting seem off to you or do these other people just need to get used to it?

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It seems that this blog attracts quite a few Modern Warfare 2 players (probably because I write about it so much), so since that seems to be the core audience here I wanted to post this and get your ideas of what some of the problems with Modern Warfare 2 are. Over the past few weeks all I seem to be reading on Twitter (#mw2), Buzz and other blogs, is how Infinity Ward should fix the game before even thinking about releasing DLC or expansion packs, and my question is, what problems are you people referring to?

Sure, when the game was first released there was the big issue with the lack of dedicated servers on the PC version and the smaller game sizes. Whatever, the servers is not a game play issue, get over it. You knew that there was not going to be dedicated servers before buying it, it made major news outlets (which seems weird to me) so it’s not like Infinity Ward straight up lied and said there would be dedicated servers and then changed their minds at release time. There may have been rumblings early on in production about dedicated servers being there, but it was a well known fact long before the release that they would not make it to the final product.

Now for the in game glitches, mainly multiplayer. I see a lot of people upset that there are so many glitches and they are blaming it on the fact that there was no public beta for the game. They say that if there was a public beta, many of these things would have been discovered before the game was released. I’m sure some of the stuff would have been figured out, but majority of it would not have. IW has a slew of in house testers that are paid to sit around and try to break the game, but when I say a “slew’ I mean it’s maybe 30 people (I really have no idea how many testers they have), but when the game is released, how many people bought it? Millions! So therefore, obviously millions of people are going to be able to find things that the 30 or so in house testers happened to miss. And to be honest, I think Infinity Ward has been doing a pretty good job of getting patches out there to the consumer.

The first major glitch that was discovered was the javelin glitch that allowed you to become a walking bomb. When you would die your body would explode with the radius of a javelin missile, destroying anything around you, it was quite annoying and eventually Microsoft stepped in and started banning people from xbox live, which they have every right to do since it’s part of the ULA you accepted when you signed up for Xbox Live. The next big glitch was the unlimited care package glitch which was a bit more of a problem. There were a couple methods for pulling off this glitch, 1 that was pretty easy and another that was more difficult. IW went ahead and patched the easy method, but the harder method still existed causing them to pull back the initial patch from MS approval and fixing it once and for all (it took a little longer to push out the PS3 version, PC was pretty instant I believe). But in the end it was fixed and as far as I’m aware there is no method that still works (until someone finds one). The other glitches were fairly minor like being able to place a sentry gun inside walls so that it could shoot out, but you couldn’t shoot in and same with player collisions and objects. I’m sure some of these still exist, but they have always existed in games for those willing to seek them out. There are also some elevators that they patched, but thereĀ  are still a few of them that are accessible in the game. For those that don’t know, elevators are glitches that allow your player to basically float way up into the sky and shoot down or access places they shouldn’t be able to.

So in my eyes the major GLITCHES were fixed. There were some other issues that people had with gun balance that were also changed around, in particular the range of the Model 1887 shotguns, but I don’t consider those glitches or an issue really. I never had a problem killing people that were running up on me with the Model’s. Sure I’ve been killed up close by them many times, but they are an up close weapon. I understand the issue here was the range and power, but I never found it to be an issue. Same goes for the complaints people have with Marathon, Lightweight and Commando. Sure it’s annoying to be killed by one of these guys, but it’s also not that hard to kill them. In my eyes the problem here is skill, there are some good players online in Modern Warfare 2 and if you can’t kill the guys running around like this, you obviously aren’t as good as them. Personally my only issue with the game is those damn thermal scopes… but it’s not a problem with the game itself, it’s just the fact that I still get killed by them… oh and noob tubes also… haha.

I know there are also complaints about the lobby times and getting booted out of games and I’ll agree that sometimes it takes a couple minutes to get into a game, but it’s not a ridiculous amount of time… And at least when the host of a game leaves it usually tries to find a new one, I know it doesn’t always work, but at least it tries which is more than I can say for CoD 4. And I know there are also some hacked lobbies with super fast movement and stuff like that, but I have yet to run into one of these lobbies and, as sad as it is, I usually play for a couple hours every day (Xbox 360), so I don’t know if it’s just a PC issue, but I have yet to run into one of these “hacked lobbies”.

So I’m curious as to what everyone’s problems are with the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer? Why all the hate towards Infinity Ward? I know it comes off as if I’m trying to defend the game as a whole, but I’m actually just curious as to what problems other people have with the game since I don’t seem to have any… I really just want some new maps!

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The Xbox 360 patch for Modern Warfare 2 rolled out this morning to the cheers of many. Finally after weeks of having to deal with idiots who don’t know how to play the game, we get a fix for the unlimited care package glitches that have been plaguing the online system. The reason the patch took longer on the 360 is because while the initial patch was waiting for Microsoft approval, another version of the care package glitch was discovered so Infinity Ward pulled the patch back and updated it to include a fix for that latest glitch. So hopefully this will no longer be an issue, but you never know what people with too much time on their hands will find.

Here’s everything that the patch fixes:

  • Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades sprint speed normalized.
  • Fix for “infinite care package” exploit.
  • Sentry Guns: Improved placement detection, preventing cases of Sentry Guns inside geometry.
  • Model 1887: Bling using Akimbo and FMJ combination now has same range and damage as non-Bling Model 1887’s.
  • Fixes to prevent various XP hacks (including the prevention of negative XP)

So there you have it. Hopefully this will fix a good amount of the complaints for a while and lead to more balanced games again.

For those of you with a PS3 the newest title update for Modern Warfare 2 is already live, but those of us with an Xbox 360 will have to wait for Microsoft to put the patch through their testing (ugh). Robert Bowling aka FourZeroTwo updated his Twitter account the other day to let everyone know a little about what’s going into this latest patch.

  • Re-balancing of the 1887 Akimbo Shotguns
  • Fix for Prestige Hack
  • Fix for Private Match Glitch

For those of you that aren’t familiar with what these things mean I’ll give you a quick rundown. The 1887 Shotguns seem to have a ridiculous range and are quite powerful, especially when using them Akimbo (1 in each hand). So thankfully it looks like Infinity Ward will be re-balancing this gun so that it can’t shoot halfway across the map and maybe won’t be as powerful. I obviously don’t know exactly what they re-balanced, but anything is better than nothing I guess.

The prestige hack was a hack that allowed you to download a file off the internet and put it on a memory card (or the hard drive) and use that to somehow get your character to 10th prestige level almost instantly. It really doesn’t change the game at all other than give you some different call signs/titles and an extra class spot, but it was a problem anyways so they fixed it.

And finally the private game glitch where you could basically glitch into a private game with a bunch of other people and gain all sorts of experience points in ridiculous games (like Ground War on Rust). It was kinda fun to play one game the first time it happened to me, but like the javelin glitch it just became extremely annoying after it happened more than once.

So there you have it, hopefully MS will get it together and push this fix through the certification process so we can all go back to enjoying the game the way it was meant to be enjoyed (even though these things really don’t bother me too much, shotgun thing is a little annoying).

Update 12/22: Robert Bowling tweeted out that the patch should start going live to Xbox 360 users starting around 2 AM on 12/23.

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