Good news everyone! I just pre-ordered a copy of the Collector’s Edition of Star Wars: The Old Republic!

I’m sure everyone concerned has learned that only a list of 20 or so countries from North America and Europe get to pre-order the game and will be the first ones to have access to it while the rest of the world has to wait for an undisclosed period of time. After all these years, more waiting… but worse! A lot of people will be waiting while people from the luckier countries or people like me who pre-ordered copies from overseas get to play it while they don’t.

There are very few people who thought this game would ever be released, and apparently there are plenty of people who never wanted this game to be released ever. Generally, the reviews posted about Duke Nukem Forever have been extremely negative, however I find it a little strange that some of the reviews I’ve read are talking about Duke Nukem being offensive in terms of his lack of political correctness rather than focusing on the flaws present within the gameplay itself.

With that in mind, I’m going to attempt to write-up my own views of the game as a fan of Duke Nukem and as someone who has being enjoying video games over a period of 20+ years. Did Gearbox Software do the right thing in bringing Duke Nukem Forever back from the brink of death? How does Duke Nukem Forever hold up against Duke Nukem 3D? Will we see more of Duke or was this a one-off event? Can I stop asking one question after another like an idiot?…

I’ve written spotlight entries for the original Dead Space, the prequel that originally came out for Wii, Dead Space: Extraction, and the first animated movie of the series, Dead Space: Downfall… now after quite a long wait, I finally get to write one for Dead Space 2!

Ever since I played the original game, I’ve become quite a huge fan of Dead Space and rank it among the best games that have come out of what has been a very productive generation. Visceral and EA have invested a lot in the series with a collection comprising of comics, side-story games, animations, etc. Though, while there is a whole variety of media with the Dead Space name attached to it, it’s the games in the main series, starring Isaac Clarke, that are the ones you really need to pay attention to.

After playing the hell out of this game over the last couple of weeks, it’s about time that I got around to actually writing an entry about it…

I didn’t pay much attention to Borderlands when it was released and it ended up taking me a year or so to actually get it and play it. Though once I actually got my hands on it I couldn’t put it down for two weeks and ended up spending 170 hours on it… yeah I’ve done the math already, I realise I spent LITERALLY half of those two weeks playing Borderlands…

Ever since they came into existence, I’ve always thought that I’d be able to go through life never having to play any kind of MMO game… ever.

I had to reconsider my position on MMO’s when BioWare and LucasArts announced Star Wars: The Old Republic… it’s pretty hard to resist… BioWare, Star Wars, the successor to Knights of the Old Republic… and the fact that it’ll be the ONLY decent Star Wars game to be released in a very long time make it something I really want.

Of course, since I have… had ZERO experience with MMO’s, it was going to be a little difficult for me to learn about the basics without feeling lost for most of the first couple of days of playing it. However, thanks to The Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve begun to gain a lot of valuable insights into MMO’s and I’ve begun to understand why they work the way they do.

E3 2010 has come and gone, as a result we’ve been buried in a tonne of awesome things to look forward to in the future. Be warned, this will be an epicly long post the likes of which have not been seen on Twilight Lynk before…

As you can probably tell from the above image… Nintendo continues to laugh at the measure of their own success and their ability to print more and more money. It’s an unstoppable force unlike any we’ve ever seen and will one day consume the entire universe. Who will stop them? How can they be stopped? This is madness!

Of course, there were a lot of other great things being shown at E3 and this entry will go through everything that I have absorbed for the past few days…

This Game Spotlight is coming out of nowhere actually. It’s a case of casually looking around the net and then suddenly being reminded of a certain game you used to play way back in the age of DOS based games… wow.

For those of you who remember Stunts (aka 4D Sports Driving), just the mere mention of the name will bring back a lot of great memories of the track editor, racing against those crazy AI opponents, the strange glitches and trying to get yourself to ricochet off an obstacle and fly hundreds of metres into the air… For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, prepare to be schooled…

This month has been pretty slow. I’ve been spending too much time in the real world away from the Internet with a job and all but also playing a lot of video games too. I guess I’m spending way too much time PLAYING video games, not enough time writing about them lol.

There’s nothing much going on under the sea, just a whole lot of salt water and a whole lot of sea life… and then there’s that underwater utopian society of Rapture, a haven for the working man to make his living, the artist to express himself and the Big Daddies to protect their Little Sisters. Too bad things went oh so terribly wrong…

Isn’t it great when a game is released that has a great imaginative and interesting story that is made even better with very well handled gameplay? When it happens, the game will either become very popular due to the right kind of exposure given to it, or it will end up becoming what some people like to call a “cult hit.”

Ubisoft knew that they had something special brewing with Assassin’s Creed, and anyone who has played the game will know first hand that they have set it up to be a trilogy or possibly a long running series. But not even Ubisoft themselves were prepared for the high sales that the first game saw. Their efforts had struck an extremely good nerve with gamers, and their surprise is very understandable too since the first game of a new IP never does anywhere near as well as Assassin’s Creed did.

Even better than that, Assassin’s Creed II blew everyone away, from reviewers to the gamers themselves. I know I was blown away by the improvements they made and… some other things…

Unless you’ve decided to poke your eyes out and become a deaf-mute, you would have heard about a certain highly controversial scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that has hit a bit of a tender spot among various people.

I’ll try to get through this without giving too much away in terms of spoilers for all those concerned… and there will be warning where I have given some it away…

Following paragraph contains some minor spoilers.

The scene in question where you, the player, take part in massacring innocent civilians in a terrorist act during the game was apparently leaked to the public not long ago. Before too long, the game and developer, Infinity Ward, was being accused of promoting terrorism. It has even made a few gamers question whether they really want to play through this themselves.

// End of spoilers… for now.

Obviously it’s going to make people feel uneasy (or worse) about taking part in such a horrifying act, even if it is just pixels on a screen and no one real is getting hurt. You aren’t meant to feel good about it no matter where you stand on the issue… and that really is the point of why that scene is in the game.