It’s the 19th of November people, that means the NXE update will be in your face at some point today. According to my time zone calculations, you should be prompted to install the update at around 10AM GMT, but don’t quote me on that.

Give the New Xbox Experience a spin and drop a comment in this post with your initial impressions. Let me know what you think of Microsoft’s new Avatars, or how easy you find the new interface for navigating. I’ve already posted my impressions from the beta, so now let’s see what the rest of the community thinks.

Let me explain the simple premise of this sweet indie game. You are a skeleton guy wearing a monocle bouncing around on a pogo stick. Your objective is to use said pogo stick to squash vampire pigs and various other animals. Yeah, I never thought I’d be writing this in a news post, but then again it wouldn’t be the first time I believed that.

The game is very small and doesn’t require installation, simply unzip the file and launch it. There’s a tutorial mode included along with scoreboards, so I encourage everyone to give it a play and post their top score in the comments. The look and sound of the game is really well done, and even though the mechanics are simple, it’s still fun and of course free.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my high score, which is currently 42040.

Direct download at TIGSource.

Word has been travelling around regarding the player who already reached the level eighty cap on Wrath of the Lich King recently. Yet more surprising is the fact that all the new PvE instances have been beaten by the joined forces of two guilds; Nihilum and SK Gaming, and it hasn’t even been a full week since the expansion’s release.

The Raiders had this to say on the matter:

We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?

I don’t think Blizzard will adjust the difficulty of these instances as it’s more likely that the guilds in question are just too good. I mean come on; Nihilum and SK Gaming are among the most well known World of Warcraft guilds. If anyone was going to rape these instances, they’d be on the usual suspects list. Still, beating all the instances within three days, talk about dedication.

Eurogamer helps answer this question for you by conducting some ultra scientific experiments for the welfare of gamers everywhere. If you’ve been on the fence about how useful HDD installations really are, then their article will help lay your concerns to rest. As you will no doubt notice from the results, some games really make a difference with HDD installations where as others will not be worth the hassle.

I could probably see myself trying to install Gears of War 2 onto my HDD purely to shorten that initial loading screen before you reach the menu. It also looks like loading times drastically improve for Team Fortress 2, so I bet Orange Box owners will definitely want to get that installed on their HDD. Most surprising however, is the fact that Halo 3’s load times are actually worse upon HDD installation, ouch.

Check out the full article at Eurogamer for full details.

The NPD Group released some interesting results to Edge regarding where gamers use their portable systems the most. 79% of the people polled claimed they use their portable systems at home far more than they do elsewhere. This is something I myself can admit to doing, as various factors lead me to playing my PSP and DS in my home instead of taking it with me when going to work and such.

When you live in London, walking around with a PSP or a DS is worrying to say the least. Also, though the systems are portable, developers tend to create games that require too much concentration to actually play on the move. Take Elite Beat Agents on the DS for example; is that something you can play properly while on the move? No, you’d need to set it down if you plan to get anywhere near a decent score. This is why I tend to take games like Lumines and turn-based strategy like Disgaea with me when I go out, they’re easy to keep up with as you get on a bus or a customer comes in to the place where you work.

The NPD Group also explained the habits of these gamers, showing which features they used most on their systems. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and I’m surprised so many DS owners play games solo when there are loads of WiFi compatible games out there. Below is a chunk from the Edge article explaining these habits in detail.

PSP

„”Gameplay is the feature used by most (84 percent) on the PlayStation Portable. Slightly more than one third of PSP owners are watching movies (35 percent) and listening to music (33 percent) on their device. The use of these cross category features is changing the scope of this gaming device to an entertainment device.”

„”Twenty five percent are listening to music more on their PlayStation Portable [compared to three months ago] and this feature also yields the highest average hours (5.8) among PlayStation Portable owners.

DS„

„”Ninety two percent of Nintendo DS owners are playing games by themselves followed by close to one quarter playing games with friends locally using one game cartridge.„”

“Nintendo DS owners are spending an average of 4.6 hours a week playing games by themselves which outweighs all other game play methods (with friends using one game cartridge, multiple game cartridges or WiFi).”

Apple

“Listening to music dominates iPod usage (96 percent) followed by playing games (20 percent) at a distant second.”

“„„iPhones are being treated as entertainment devices. Thirty percent or more iPhone owners are utilizing all of the available features with the exception of watching movies (19 percent) and using business related applications (14 percent).”

“Among iPhone users specifically, the application with the greatest increase in use over the last three months was playing games.”

Not long left for this beast to be unleashed. Capcom recently announced the American and European release dates for the upcoming Street Fighter IV. I had many chances to play this game during the London MCM Expo and I milked every chance I had, SFIV still plays and feels like a Street Fighter game, so don’t let the new visual direction turn you away.

You can expect to see this on store shelves for the PS3 and 360 on February 17th for Americans and February 20th for Europeans. The console versions will have some extras compared to the arcade one, most important of these additions is new characters such as Cammy. If you’ve been in the mood for a fighting game lately, this is the one to keep an eye on.

Battlefield Heroes developer EA DICE announced recently that their upcoming free to play online shooter has been delayed once again. They originally intended on releasing this for summer 2008, which obviously didn’t work out so it was moved to late 2008, which again clearly isn’t happening either. It doesn’t seem like there’s a solid date for the game at the moment but they aren’t planning to re-open the beta until early 2009.

Heroes is the franchise’s first jump into free to play territory. Similar to games like Maple Story, installing and playing the game is completely free of charge, though players are able to use real money to buy in-game bonus items such as new clothes or weapons.

Maple Story did a fairly good job with their items which were well balanced back when I used to play the game. They’d offer things like pets which would automatically pick up the loot monsters dropped, thus ensuring that the item you purchased was useful but not enough to give you an advantage over the cheap people.

As some of you may or may not know, I’m quite a Killzone enthusiast. The first Killzone was pretty generic in the eyes of many, but I still played through the game several times and enjoyed messing about on the multiplayer back when the PS2 was king. So it comes as no surprise that I follow up on Killzone 2, and man am I excited every time I watch multiplayer beta gameplay.

Check the full post to see three gameplay videos of the multiplayer beta and see if Killzone 2 will replace Resistance 2 as the PlayStation 3’s most popular online shooter. Oh and yeah, the person playing in the videos is awful but try your best to ignore that fact.

When it comes to keeping their game alive, Criterion are doing a great job in terms of content. Continuing this trend is the upcoming ‘legendary cars’ pack. This pack will consist of four cars – the Cavalry Bootlegger, Manhattan Spirit, GT Nighthawk and the Jansen 88 Special which pictured above. The Jansen is the first of these four to be revealed and holy shit does it sound awesome, if the other three are anywhere near as epic then count me in.

The Jansen 88 Special leaves a trail of flames when you’re cruising at high speeds, and upon clicking the left stick you can transform your vehicle to hover in the air; like another certain vehicle many of you may recall from back in the day. The vehicle can’t change altitudes from what Criterion are saying, but I wonder if it will hover high enough that most small vehicles won’t actually be able to collide with it. I assume the handling of the vehicle will most likely change when transformed, if not then that’ll just be disappointing in my eyes.

There is a catch of course. Unlike most of Criterion’s treats for Burnout Paradise, this one will cost you some cash. You can buy each vehicle separately as they are released, or buy the whole set at a discounted price. No details on when exactly these cars come out or how much they will cost. Assuming the rest of the vehicles are equally awesome and the bulk price is fair, I’ll most certainly be picking this up.

God this demo owns. I keep replaying it over and over, trying higher difficulty settings, playing about with the various weapons and so on. The Source engine may be getting a little old in terms of visual appeal, but that doesn’t stop it from creating a great atmosphere with solid gameplay. I get the feeling that anyone who hasn’t yet taken an interest in Left 4 Dead will change their mind upon playing this demo, mainly because the mechanics of the game work a lot better than I even expected.

The various weapons all feel great when fired, though it’s a little annoying there’s no focussed aim or zoom function on anything but the sniper rifle. This is an issue merely because friendly fire is enabled in L4D, so when your buddy is being gang-raped by shitloads of zombies, it’s not always smart to simply spray in his general direction hoping you kill the enemy and not him. Heck, even the sniper zoom distance is pretty freaking small, it feels more like Halo 3’s battle rifles than an actual sniper rifle.

Normal and Advanced difficulties were a breeze to play through in the demo, but Expert did provide a worthy challenge. Either that or the twats on my team were so busy fucking around that they kept getting killed. Teamwork is required just enough so that you can run around shooting shit freely with strangers without having to learn SAS infiltration tactics, it’s all very obvious and straight forward stuff. One player versus 50 zombies means dead meat, four players versus 50 zombies means no need to reload your last checkpoint. Regardless of skill, you eventually have to reload. This is the main incentive to heal your team mates and watch their backs, because every living ally means one more person shooting the shit out of that horde of undead.

Valve claimed that each play would be a unique experience as the game mixes things up based on the situation. This is true but it’s not as interesting as they made it sound. This basically means that every now and then, a special zombie will spawn close by and assault you. Either that, or a big group of zombies will just rush you. So in essence this is just Valve’s way of constantly spawning enemies on a frequent basis until you finish the level.

The demo has solidified my decision to buy this game. Small touches like voting to change the game’s difficulty, change the level or kick a certain player are nice to see, as no doubt there will be a few assholes who will try to ruin the co-op experience by team killing or luring zombies into the group. Be sure to download this when you next sign into Xbox Live, it’s definitely worth a play.