E3 2013

It's A Thing. Respect The Thing.

E3 2013 happened this week as you may have gathered from my last post. I hope you listened to the  BritCast I shared there featuring David and Luke with me as guest, with predictions and a bit of silly banter.
There will be a follow up.

So I watched about 90% (I needed a few breaks) of the entire livestream Gametrailers had, supplemented by Gamespot links provided by E3's official Twitter, as the livestream got very blurry at times and I wanted to see what the games looked like. I watched most of the press conferences on the E3 provided links. I also watched the Nintendo Direct, Day 2,which was fine for the most part but got a bit skippy hoppy.

Overall a great E3 coverage with tons of great stuff that I'm very keen on.

Day 1

Before the MicroSoft presser Lego Marvel Super Heroes was announced along with Rare's new title Kinect Sports Rivals. Lego really does all the geek franchises, which is fine as those games can be a lot of silly fun. Rare's game.. Yeah.. The company that once was a power house, with legendary titles such as Golden Eye 007, now just making basically mini games collections. Sad.

MicroSoft

The conference kicks off with Metal gear Solid V The Phantom Pain and Hideo Kojima, that looked awesome (non-exclusive title). Followed by Xbox Live talk. Now we'll get two free games each month with our Gold memberships. Not specified if Europe and US will get the same offer.
Next up World of Tank 360 Edition, Free to play exclusive to 360, followed by Max And The Curse Of Brotherhood from Press Play( XBLA exclusive) and Dark Souls II from Namco Bandai (360, PS3 and PC).
MicroSoft Studios segment (all exclusive) with Ryse Son of Rome from Crytek, Killer Instinct by Double Helix, F2P with one character, the rest you much buy.
Sunset Overdrive by Insomniac Games a loony cartoony shooter with energy drinks? as ammo. 
A bit of car porn courtesy of Forza 5 by Turn 10 Studios a solid racer, now with Drive-atar.
Remedy brought Quantum Break, Xbox One exclusive, I have no idea what it is yet. Looks tasty though.

Xbox One will feature the Twitch streaming service for game streaming and MS points is gone to be replaced by real currency pricing.

Crimson Dragon by Grounding, Inc.Land Ho! Co. Ltd a Kinect on rail shooter (fail on audio missing in stream).
Dead Rising 3 the zombie apocalypse exclusive to Xbox One, that seem to have lost it's humor from it predecessors.

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt by CD Project Red, will also be on PC, looks awesome!
Titanfall from Respawn Entertainment, also on PC, looks like tons of fun, FPS, Jet packs and Mechs.
Battlefield 4 (a false start) by Dice, Xbox One, PS4, PC. looks cool but kinda standard.

Indie titles such as Minecraft and Below was also present.

MS confirmed always on, check in ever 24 hours, game DRM to be determinded by publishers but the messaging was still unclear exactly what they really mean.

And Halo 5 was teased.

And Don Mattick response (in a interview post presser with Geoff Keighley of GT) to people not able to be online all the time "get a 360" (Smooth.. Not).

Price: 499$/499€/429£

Overall a good presentation with good titles ovarall. Though some of the "killer apps" aren't even truly exclusive.(to me a true exclusive is only on one platform i.e not PC as well)
I give them a B-


In between MS and EA we were presented with Saint's Row IV from Volition Inc. Same loony style, Now you're the US president powered by super powers brought by aliens. *Teal'c eyebrow*
Looks like good silly fun.
Thief from Eido Montréal a reboot of the orignal game series by Looking Glass Studios/Ion Storm. Looks alright I guess, a bit generic sneaky sneaky.

EA

Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare from Pop Cap a Team Fortress like thing based on the Plants vs Zombies games, looked like fun. And Peggle 2 (how is that going to be improved?) announced with a jump.

Titanfall out on stage. Still keen.

Dice Frostbite with Star Wars Battlefront teased and Battlefront 4.. Looks fun.
Dragon Age Inquisition by Bioware is a thing.

Need For Speed Rivals, which looks to merge single player with multi player seamlessly, a variant on the Most Wanted theme.

Sports the usual NFL, NBA Live, FIFA, NHL and new comer UFC which was introduced by Bruce Buffer in his classic style, with Dana White, Benson Henderson, Jon Jones and the EA Sports guy. All games built on the Ignite engine. Personally I, as a UFC/MMA fan, am curious about how the UFC game turns out, not sold yet.

Mirror's Edge 2 was announced, this time free roaming. Cool.

Overall a good presentation but badly paced. a C+.

Ubisoft

Aisha Tyler is the host again, yes! I like her!

Jerry Cantrell from Alice In Cahins comes out, he's demo'ing Rocksmith. Cool enough.
Splinter Cell Blacklist with a confusing trailer, out this august.
Rayman Legends re-announced from last year this time not a Wii U title only.

We got to see Assassin's Creed IV Blag Flag, Watch Dogs, Just Dance 2014 South Park the Stick of Truth and The mighty Quest For Epic Loot, the latter a F2P Hack and Slash, Trials Fusion and Frontier, one for iOS and one for consoles. And Rabbids interactive TV thing in cooperation with Nikelodeon.

New cool IPs are The Crew a car based mission based multi/single player game, looked like a cool game. As someone who has a background in the car mechanic/shop business the car assembly bit was very nice.
The Division looks so cool, that one I really want to get my hands on.

Overall a solid B

Part 2 comes later. come back for more.

BritCast E3 Prediction Show (music by "As Night Dies")

Join David, Luke and me for some E3 Predictions



We'll return post E3 :-)

Olympic Wrestling

Has cleared first hurtle one more to come

Good news in the reinstate wrestling into the Olympics battle.
The sports now competing for the one remaining spot in the2020 Olympic program is now wrestling, squash and baseball/softball.

Next vote goes down in September.

Battle on!

Go to social media and make your voice be heard.
Follow International Wrestling Federation on Twitter and throw out the hashtag #SaveOlympicWrestling and #KeepOlympicWrestling whenever you can.

Wrestling is the original Olympic sport.
Needs to stay!

XBox One Reveal

Initial reactions

So yesterday Xbox One was revealed and I joined BritCast for a reaction podcast,
It was the first time I was on a podcast as well.

Here it is



So there you have it .-)

E3 2013

I will be blogging it

This year I am going to do my version of coverage of it.
Mostly for fun but also to share my feelings and thoughts on the matter.

I will watch what there are of conferences and other coverage and do my take on it..

What will excite me?
What will puzzle me?
What will annoy me?
What will piss me off?

What will make my geek gasms go off like wild fire?

E3 2013 will tell me :)

Hope you'll join me in the week of June 11th to 13th.

The Optimists EP

Today The Optimists released their first studio recorded EP.

Visit the link below to support them.
The Optimists

Follow The Optimists on Twitter for more news on future releases and gigs.

I personally really like their music and purchased it day one.

PlayStation 4

PS Meeting 2013, My Thoughts

So at midnight on Wednesday (or technically Thursday) Sony held their PS Meeting 2013 where they announced PlayStation 4. I watched on GT since I like that they gives us the Spike pre and post shows streamed too.

I was a bit unsure if it would be called PS4 mainly because the number 4 is considered unlucky in parts of Asia (including Japan) much like 13 here. But it was.

They basically apologized to the developers for the difficult Cell environment and stated they PS4 is gamer and developer focused. They called their architecture a supercharged PC environment, built around the X86 processing (same as PC gaming) and 8GB of unified memory (a massive jump from PS3's 512MB). Also large storage.
In terms of network and download they have a dedicated chip for downloading, allowing you to background downloads, downloads while powered down and downloads of games and allowing you to start playing before the entire game is downloaded.
Also you'll be allowed to now do live streams of your gaming via their partneship with Ustream. (also Facebook integration) Also Gaikai will as time goes give you stream and play over the internet (much like OnLive has) They showed their new controller with the share buttons, headset jack and a slight modified form factor plus a touchpad. No show of actual console but I did not expect that.
Also harder PS Vita integration with ability to cross play with the PS4 games and stop and start gaming kinda like you do on Netflix with shows and movies.

I remain very positive to what I've heard, but will not jump on the hype train until Microsoft has said what their next box will be like. And until E3 has been.
But maybe I now get some use out of my Ustream account ;-)

I want to know more but I am getting the nerd tingles.

Games.

They showed real gameplay of Killzone: Shadow Fall (Guerilla Games)
While still having that floaty future shooter thing going and not the greatest jump in graphical fidelity it had a much larger scope than previous games, feeling much more open and great draw distance. AND bunch of colours. Not just brown, gray and red.

They announced InFamous Second Son (Sucker Punch), Deep Down {working title] (Capcom) and Blizzard is bringing Diablo 3 to PS3 and PS4. The Halo guys at Bungie showed up to show that tells us nothing trailer for Destiny and announced exclusive content for PS4 (now that could something as lame as a gun or a skin only) And Ubisoft came and showed off some more of Watch Dogs. And Media Molecule came and had a little cute Move demo thing with sculpting and pupped show and you know, them being them,

Square Enix in my opinion was the fail of the night, not only showing us something we saw like a year ago and telling us to look forward to E3 to hear something from them.

Presentation generally good with some issues. Best guy was Mike Cerny, that guy I really like.
Sucker Punch got too dark. Why did Destiny need four guys for that?

And Sony.. Next time demand NEW stuff from Square Enix or leave them out.

Final PlayStation 4 judgement comes after E3.

UFC in London this weekend (On Fuel 7)

I am getting pumped for this weekend! So many good fights lined up. I'll be doing my fight picks after weigh-ins.

This post will be updated with picks, how I did and FOTN, KOTN and SOTN from my perspective.

.....

Weigh-ins done and all fighters made weight.

Here are my picks:

#MyFightPicks #UFCLondon #UFC #MMA Gomez, Lee, Watson, Ogle, Sass, Etim, Mills, Te Hune, Nelson, Diabate, Swanson and McDonald
— Anneli Sørensen (@SubLevel28) February 15, 2013

Back with results
.....

Results:

Facebook Prelims

Phil Harris defeats Ulysses Gomez by unanimous decision (0-1 in picks)

Vaughan Lee defeats Motonobu Tezuka by unanimous decision (1-1 in picks)

Tom Watson defeats Stanislav Nedkov via 2nd round TKO (2-1 in picks)

Andy Ogle defeats Josh Grispi by unanimous decision (3-1 in picks)

Danny Castillo defeats Paul Sass by unanimous decision 3-2 in picks)

Renee Forte defeats Terry etim by unanimous decision (3-3 in picks)

Main Card

Matthew Riddle defeats Che Mills by Split decision (3-4 in picks)

James Te Huna defeats Ryan Jimmo by unanimous decision (4-4 in picks) (my FOTN)

Gunnar Nelson defeats Jorge Santiago by unanimous decision (5-4 in picks)

Jimi Manuwa defeats Cyrille Diabate by TKO via doctor stoppage between 1st and 2nd round (5-5 in picks)

Cub Swanson defeats Dustin Poirier by unanimous decision (6-5 in picks)

Renee Barao defeats Michael McDonald in the 4th via arm triangle sub. Defends interim bantamweight championship belt (6-6 in picks) (my SOTN and only Sub of the night)

That's it for a very fun night of fights and a rare sensible time to end for a European watching.

Next week UFC 157 with Women's first fight and title fight Ronda Rousey vs Liz Charmoche.
And co-main Lyoto Machida vs Dan Henderson.

Be back then :-)

My Fight Picks for UFC on FOX Seattle + Results

My tweet with them.

#MYFIGHTPICKS #UFConFOX Jorgenson, Phan, Trujillo, Cruickshank, Proctor, Easton, Edwards, Swick, Penn, Gustavson, Diaz. FTW
— Anneli Sørensen (@SubLevel28) December 7, 2012

Will come back to tell how I did.

Weigh-ins done. All fighters made weight except Herny Martinez who came in at 158,8 and forfeit 20% of his purse.

First off this event was great and full of action and some crazy stuff, You should have watched it ;-)

Results:

Scott Jorgenson vs John Albert
Jorgenson wins by Submission at very end of 1st round

Dennis Siver vs Nam Phan
Siver wins by unanimous decision

Marcus LeVasseur vs Abel Trujillo
Trujillo by TKO 2nd round

Daron Cruickshank vs Henry Martinez
Cruickshank by KO 2nd round

Ramsey Nijem vs Joe Proctor
Nijem by unanimous decision

Rafael Assuncao vs Mike Easton
Assuncao bu unanimous decision

Yves Edwards vs Jeremy Stephens
Edwards by KO 1st round

Mike Swick vs Matt Brown
Brown by KO 2nd round

BJ Penn va Rory MacDonald
MacDonald by Unanimous decision

Mauricio Rua vs Alexander Gustafsson
Gustafsson by unanimous decision

Benson henderson vs Nate Diaz
Henderson by unanimous decision

Kumite

MMA Commentary For Fans By Fans

You like fights? You like striking? You like grappling?
Then check out MMA; Mixed Martial Arts.

Do you want a more cerebral approach to coverage?
Do you want to get a more reflective approach?

Then I give you Kumite.
Two MMA fans that cover MMA from outside the media and the promotions.
Ross and Chris out of Scotland.

I personally find the writing very interesting to read and while I do I reflect over what I'm reading.

Also follow @TeamKumite on Twitter for event news and posts.