I love the style and setting of L.A Noire so much, I was willing to watch a silly 40 second clip about a pre-order bonus to see more of it.
However, for the first time looking at L.A Noire footage, the uncanny valley effect hit me. I think it was because of the quick cuts.
L.A Noire is slated for May 17th, 2011 release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
BestBuy.ca held an online only sale Saturday and Sunday night. Games and game accessories were 15% off.
I took advantage of the sale and pre-ordered the following titles:
All seven titles total up to $403.34 or $57.62 each. Plus, some of them even offer an additional 800 Reward Zone points (that’s a $10 value). I’ll be able to collect more RZ points as soon as my BestBuy VISA card gets here.
I could have pre-ordered more, but these are the titles I believe won’t be receiving timely price drops or promotions, so I chose them. Since these were all individual orders, if I run into cheaper offers, I’ll be able to cancel my order without much fuss.
That’s a big haul.
It’s time for another installment of…
Good idea:
Extra incentives for pre-orders.
Bad idea:
Chopping up in-game pieces for retailer specific pre-order incentives.
The end.
I pre-ordered StarCraft II over at BestBuy for both the $5 off and the multiplayer beta key. However, I quickly came to the realization that the multiplayer isn’t what I want out of my StarCraft II.
Most of South Korea may be clamoring for the competitive aspect of Blizzard’s upcoming real-time strategy game, but not me. I look forward to reacquainting myself with Jim Raynor and his wacky adventures. And after watching footage of StarCraft II’s campaign, I’m quite excited to see it continue.
To help with the wait, I’ll be replaying StarCraft and the Brood War expansion very soon for a refresher on the lore.
So why the lack of multiplayer love? I’m not big on competitive RTS multiplayer; more specifically 1-on-1 competitive play. There is team play, but unlike other genres, I found the requirement for competent partners to be way too high with real-time strategy games. Most of my multiplayer RTS games I’ve ever played were big 3 v 3 games and that’s the way I like them. Unfortunately, I was never able to find willing/capable partners to play with over Battle.net
Who knows? Perhaps I can get a regular duo or trio going when StarCraft II finally ships. Or perhaps with Blizzard’s new ranking and matchmaking systems with Battle.net 2.0, I’ll find similarly skilled individuals to team up with.
Announcements
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Debuting on October 13th (via Kotaku)
Next Xbox 360 Dashboard Coming August 11th (via Kotaku)
Intel Announces New 34 nm X-25-M Solid State Drives (via AnandTech)
Windows 7 RTM on August 6th; Family Pack Confirmed (via NeoWin)