"We heard you." (Adult Swim)

That’s right. To all you ’90s kids, a childhood favorite program known as Toonami will be making its way back to Cartoon Network as tweeted by Adult Swim earlier. Toonami was a cartoon block aired during weekdays and Saturday nights that played anime/cartoon series such as Dragon Ball Z, Mobile Suit Gundam, Justice League, Teen Titans, and so on. It was also a good source for video game reviews back in the early 2000s.

Why the sudden return? On April Fools’ Day, 2012, Adult Swim brought back Toonami as their prank, including the old narrators and shows and a Mass Effect 3 game review as well.

Little did they know, fans received this notion quite well and even started Twitter campaigns with the support of voice actor Steve Blum. A month later, they heard the calls and now it’s back on May 26, 2012 for an unknown amount of time. Hopefully it stays for good.

Children of the ’90s, what do you think?

GoldenEye 007 Split-Screen

Do you remember the times when you had to go to a friend’s house to play split-screen games on their consoles? Yeah, those were the good old days! Today all we have to do is sign on and play till our heads melt. Still, I love online multiplayer games, but don’t take my following words the wrong way.

The thing is: you shouldn’t ignore good single player gameplay. Most console games take on the idea of adding multiplayer to their game and that’s all they end up paying attention to. It’s a great selling point and it certainly adds a lot of longevity to a game, but now there are games that focus more on the multiplayer and less on the fundamental single player. In my mind, this isn’t right, unless, of course, the game depends solely on the multiplayer aspect, such as MAG. Otherwise, a good single player is essential to any game’s success.

The Halo Reach Campaign

Halo is an amazing example in that it displays an evenness gameplay in each aspect. In Halo, the single player and multiplayer feels as if they help each other by delivering the storyline and keeping the game going as well as not hindering each other in the process. On the contrary, Call of Duty gained tons of praise from their multiplayer game play, but, seriously, when was the last time you’ve heard someone say “dude, did you see Modern Warfare 3′s (MW3) single player campaign, it’s amazing!”

In fact, most people completely skipped MW3’s single player campaign. So, why should the Call of Duty developers even include a single player campaign for the series?

I honestly think that Call of Duty or any similar game should do what MAG did and that is to completely scrap the single player side of things and focus on only the multiplayer to make it the best they can, and while they’re doing that they should at least come up with some damn good original content as well!

MAG for PS3

Undoubtedly, single player should become the priority for all console games, with a few exceptions, of course, for games such as MAG. If you’re a game developer and you think that single player won’t help your game flourish in any way, then your game’s major selling point is multiplayer and you should just focus on that!

After all, what do you guys think about how our current generation of games are utilizing multiplayer in a wholly different way than single player?

E3 is just around the corner and everyone is talking about which companies will be there and where they could be found. Layouts of how everything will be laid out released not too long ago look almost exactly the same as last years. Personally, I think they should have a scale to show how big it is to give us a bigger picture.

Source: “Les plans du salon dévoilés.” Nintendo-Master. 08 May. 2012.

Within the recently released document, a diagram that showed a charging dock proved that the Wii U controller will have its own rechargeable batteries. This is a good thing because, as a hardcore gamer, they made the right move by avoiding the trouble of double A batteries or by requiring an inferior third-party rechargeable battery pack.

If you look at Microsoft’s Xbox 360 controller, it has a rechargeable battery pack built into it as well as a double A battery slot. The smartest thing Nintendo could have done is to release their own rechargeable battery pack back when the Wii was still new.

Another reason the charging dock patent is great is because, well, it’s a dock. This fact alone is important because your controller isn’t going anywhere and will likely be right where you left it. Having a dock would force you to have it in only one room so you don’t forget where you left the device.

Additionally, the other patents show more ways the special controller could be used as an extra screen to display different in-game camera angles as well as an updated Wii Zapper gun accessory that’s compatible with the new controller.

Hopefully a few more patents for this new home console will unravel. Only time will tell with E3 right around the corner and with rumors pouring in all at the same time.

If you’re still interested with what the Wii U has to offer up to this point, then the best thing to do is to wait and see what will happen.

Source: “United States Patent Application: 0120108329.” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 03 May. 2012.

Back in the day, expansion packs for games such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and StarCraft would follow along shortly after their releases with a bellyful of content and many other things that positively contributed to their gaming experiences in many ways.

Morrowind’s expansion pack brought forth whole new lands to explore with new monsters and added content that added many hours to the game. When “Brood War” came out for StarCraft, it added many missions to play just to introduce new multiplayer strategies alone. What’s interesting is that you get these new features from just one payment! Great deal, right?

Within the last five years, how many of you have seen an expansion pack that was full of great content and added a chock-full of gameplay?

Expansion packs are slowly becoming a lost tradition because there has been a large push at the start of the current generation of games thanks to downloadable content (DLCs).

DLCs have given game developers the chance to release smaller packs of content to the owners of the game. It has caused them to spend less time to work on new features as well as an easier way to patch their games if a problem was ever to arise. On paper this sounds great, but what DLCs actually bring to the table a desire for more: Greed.

Today’s developers are pinching pennies by offering unneeded features ranging from extra music to armor for your horse in their games. This greed has gone so far as to having content on the disc, but not letting you use it till you pay for the DLC. A notable example of this is seen in fighting games.

Today, DLCs feel rushed, unfinished, and buggy almost all the time. Would you pay $10 just for one mission that will only last two hours long? What is the most popular gaming franchise out there that already has more than enough DLCs? It’s the Call of Duty franchise.

Call of Duty has been a large leader of shoving DLCs in front of their customers’ faces and by splitting their online community in half due to their $15 map packs that only added around five maps in the current generation of games.

What’s more, other companies that have released a lot of DLCs are Bethesda and Obsidian. Their wide selection of DLCs for Fallout provided new quests of which spanned up to five hours and offered new weapons for $10 each. The “Bloodmoon” expansion for Morrowind back in 2003 is a great example of how to use both expansion packs and DLCs effectively in that it was twenty to forty hours long and sold for around $25.

In my experience with the current generation of games so far, I’ve hated the way developers have used DLCs ineffectively as just as a money-making machine and not as a wonderful tool to get amazing content to their consumer.

Overall, DLCs are just not worth paying for anymore. They’ve made games much less of an amazing experience to the gamer for a higher price.

Despite that, however, there are still some promising expansion packs coming out soon: StarCraft 2′s ”Heart of the Swarm” and the new The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim expansion pack, which hopefully will not disappoint its audience.

The Wii U’s purpose is to carry out what the original Wii couldn’t for the reason that “[Nintendo has] not designed the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U [as] mere improved versions of their predecessors. [They] have designed them so that [consumers] can realize what has been impossible.” (Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata).

The most notable feature of the Wii U is its new touch-screen controller, which offers an accelerometer, camera, gyroscope, and augmented reality gaming technology. There aren’t many examples providing evidence that the Wii U will offer an even greater graphical experience over the other consoles that we now have at this moment yet, but at least there is a significant graphical improvement over the original Wii.

Even though it will most likely be pricey, you shouldn’t have to worry much about the price of this special controller because it’s not Nintendo’s biggest concern. They recognize that most Wii U consumers are likely to have only one touch-screen controller per household.

The ability to support up to four Wii Remotes and other various accessories at a time, including using the Nintendo 3DS as a controller, has also been hinted as features of the Wii U. Imagine how video game developers can enhance their games in ways that you never thought was possible with the new controller.

Right now, you’re probably trying to decide whether the Wii U is worth it compared to other consoles of the current generation, but in spite of that, Nintendo’s leverage in the video game market is their new touch-screen controller. For this reason, what really matters now isn’t the price of the Wii U, but what you can do with new aspects in video games that Nintendo will be bringing to the table.

So, what else should we expect from the Wii U? What do you think about it?

Recently revealed on GTTV, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is Sony’s new exclusive game due for release later in the year. The game has been shown to be similar to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series, and includes PlayStation characters such as Kratos from God of War, Sweet Tooth from Twisted Metal, Radec from Killzone, and even 90′s icon Parappa the Rappa.

From what we see, it’s doable to have up to four people in multiplayer on a variety of stages from multiple series. What do you think?

Source: “PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is Official, Coming Exclusively to PS3.” PlayStation LifeStyle. 04 Apr. 2012.

There has been and still is a lot of buzz on the internet lately about a couple of bills making their way up to the United States Congress. The first of those bills is SOPA, which stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011. The person behind the idea of SOPA is Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas. Namely, the corporations who support the bill are the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Podcast Episode 2: SOPA will Change How you Do Things

Now, let’s get it straight. If you live in a country other than the U.S., the American government isn’t all as perfect as you may think it is. It’s been corrupt for the longest time in that the government runs on money. The “people” who are trying to pass on these bills are corporations. We all know that corporations can influence a decision to an extent because they have money. The problem is that there are morons who don’t realize that they are trying to govern the internet when they have probably never used the internet enough.

The main purpose of SOPA is to protect American content creators from piracy by targeting foreign websites who put American businesses at an inconvenience. The way SOPA works is that when a court order is granted, it will be carried out on the infringing website to make it, simply put, disappear.

Protesters of the bill argue that because the way that the bill is now written, it will alter the principle of freedom. Many of the websites that you visit often are most likely protesters of SOPA, and just to name a few: Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Twitch.tv, and many other websites oppose the bill. Even the White House has announced that  if the bill ever reached President Obama’s desk, then he will veto it.

How SOPA can Change the Way you Use the Internet

There’s no denying it: It’s going to change the way you use the internet. This bill, if it does ever happen to pass, is going to allow those swindler corporations to destroy the internet when they see something they dislike. You just don’t destroy the internet just because it doesn’t fit your business standard.

One example of what could happen is at home. It’s here at Drift Apex. If our website happened to get taken down because of SOPA, then it will injure the passions and ideals of our community. It’s hard to let go of something you’re dedicated to. If the Congress is going to interfere with that, then they are morons.

Pirates are pirates. They don’t care about the law. Those people in the Congress believe that just because one person pirates a single file, then they are losing money. That is the problem. Think about it. Most people who download content illegally are not going to even buy the product they are pirating in the first place. What the Congress needs to do to defeat the pirates is give a better service than the pirates.

The language used in the bill is so vague that almost anything could be taken for copyright infringement. An example of that would be Wikipedia. All that it takes is a single link on a page to something that Viacom thinks they own for a website to be taken down without proper due process.

One of the largest podcast networks on the internet has seen how dishonest the Universal Music Group is. In one of their videos, they used a clip of the Megaupload song for reporting and commentary purposes, which falls completely under the realm of fair use. Their video was removed unjustly by the UMG in that they don’t have the rights to the Megaupload song. They just take down whatever video they think harms their business.

It’s Time to Do Something about It

Listen to the people who have the right perspective. It’s time to not just sign an online petition, but to go do something about it with bigger actions. Many websites are “blacking out” on the 18th of January to show what the internet would be like if we did not have access to certain websites that we all enjoy. It’s better to focus on things we can actually change to help everyone. It seems like the best choice right now is to keep piracy the way it is.

There is another bill that is closely related to SOPA. It’s called the PROTECT IP act, or PIPA. It denotes the Prevention of Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011. If these bills were to ever be passed, and they are very close to passing, Congress would be taking away the fundamental doors for creating jobs and growth not just from people who pirate, but from normal internet users as well. Internet censorship is not a good thing. The U.S. is already suffering in many ways. Please, don’t make it worse.

It’s time to stop being ignorant. These bills are not just going to lower the number of pirates. It’s going to threaten due process, free speech, and is just simply, a bad, bad bill. Keeping things in order is usually a good thing, but too much control is harmful.

Drift Apex is joining the group of people who are against SOPA. If you’re still pondering how to side on these matters, then just know that you can help make a difference if you believe in the following: The internet is supposed to be a wide network of limitless knowledge, a place to express yourself, and create.

Please, communicate with your congressperson, head on over to AmericanCensorship.org, share this article on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and so on to help spread the message that SOPA and other bills like it are just plain evil.