Something a little different and awesome today. A video review of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Enjoy!

It’s been awhile since I’ve done anything, so here’s my contribution to VGM Daily; a review of the Alienware Area 51-m9750 laptop. Technically speaking it’s not even a real review either…just listen to find out why.

6 days until Mario Kart Wii comes out, and then it will be complete. What will? The total number of games that I must buy for the Wii, that’s what. There are absolutely no games on the radar for the entire next year that appeal to me. Could it be true that the Wii is really just a virus? That people don’t want to buy games for it, that it’s just for Wii Sports?

I don’t know — I have a dozen or so games sitting on my shelf now, and I said over and over in the podcast that I was excited about the Wii, that I couldn’t wait for some of the possibilites that were going to come along with it: the Virtual Console, Wii Ware, the motion controls, etc. But now I’m sitting here, trying to connect up to who knows who on Smash Bros. only to have yet another time out, or network error, and I’m thinking to myself, “might as well just turn on my 360…”

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 Hey Guys!  It’s been a while, but I’m going to try to get back into the swing of things.  We’re looking at doing a few podcasts again here and there as we have our schedules, and priorities in line again.  Don’t be hoping for the frequency you had before though… that took SO much time!

One of the cool things I’m going to start doing is posting via Twitter.  If you haven’t heard of this, Twitter is a Micro-blogging tool that allows one to update all their friends with one fell swoop.

How it’s going to work is this.  Follow this blog, or create a Twitter account, and follow our Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/VGM_Daily).  Once you do that you can set the feed to update your mobile phone if you want.  What you end up with is VGM Daily, giving you mini-reviews of the biggest games out there, and our quick takes on the daily news, delivered to you in real-time, anywhere you are.  Now that’s convenient.

So let me know what you think of this new venture, and if you are a real keener, and I’ve got you interested in this Twitter  thing, then you can follow my own Twitter feed (name: rmaule) as well!

Turok for the uninitiated is a character which was first born back in the 50’s in comic books, and saw an evolution to the realm of video games back on the N64 in the late 90’s. There were several sequels, but they all stuck by the time-traveling Native American who fights dinosaurs plot point. This new “re-imagining” of Turok takes place in the future, and he is just some guy of Native American decent who crashes onto a planet that has dinos on it. No time traveling here, just guns and lizards.

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There have been few times in my gaming lifetime that I’ve been truly salivating while waiting for a game to come out. BioWare had succeeded in doing just that with Mass Effect. Showing it off to me for the first time at E3′06 was cruel, as the game nearly blew me away even then and almost made me overlook many good games actually out at the time. Now, just in time to be released around all the other great games this fall, Mass Effect is in some very stiff company, but I think BioWare likes it better that way.

For the sub-rock dwellers, Mass Effect is a 100% original sci-fi RPG developed by those guys at BioWare (the KOTOR and Baldur’s Gate guys), and has wowed gamers for the last few years by leaking out videos showing a depth in conversations and battles that we rarely see in other RPG’s. The game is also just the beginning of the Mass universe, and we’ll probably see a trilogy out of this (cliche yet?) too.

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For years and years we fought World War II with no end in sight. The Germans were strong, but we were winning successive victories again and again, but still they kept coming. There was no end in sight with more Germans pouring over every ridge, saturating every besieged town. Then, over the horizon… Was it air support? Was it a tank squadron? No, it’s Activision, finally making a non-WWII combat game. Finally, for the love of God finally. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – what a nice ring it has to it, no? Modern.

Yep, it finally happened, and lo and behold, the results didn’t completely ruin the game… it seems modern warfare, and modern scenarios can be just as intriguing!

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This fall seems to be full of games that have been hyped for 2-odd years – Rock Band, Crysis, Mass Effect, Mario Galaxy… and of course, Assassin’s Creed; the bet the farm game for UbiSoft. They’ve never spent so much money on a game as far as development and media for it. Also, besides Nintendo, no one’s ever been as secretive about a game before. Few if any of us media folks had ever gotten a chance to lay a hand on the game save for last night. That’s not to say we didn’t experience it, we just never were allowed to touch the controller (yeah, I know).

The game has been hyped to kingdom come (heh, kinda pun’ish there) and has also captured the bloggers’ and gamer-geeks’ attention by way of one of their producers, Jade Raymond (her image being run almost as much of that as Altaïr’s). But when you first get into the game and start to see the “secret” story you were never told that fuses future with distant past, you’ll see why UbiSoft really thought they had a winner on their hands.

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Ryan (as well as many of you) have been bothering me to do a review of Project Gotham Racing 4 for quite some time. In an effort to get all of you off my back, and to allow me to move on to playing Assassins Creed; I hereby take the 10 minutes out of my day to write you a review.

PGR4 really is in tough when it comes to me assigning it a final score. I was playing it while in the midst of finally playing Forza 2 and Halo 3 — tough company to be judged against.

By now most of you already know that the new inclusion to the series is the addition of bikes. My review could literally stop here, because aside from a few new tracks, and a few little tweaks here and there, PG4 really is just PG3 with bikes.

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