Undead Nightmare

Undead Nightmare is one of those games that, when played in a busy office, can act as a Weapon of Mass Disruption. For starters, there's the odd spectacle of zombies swarming all over Rockstar San Diego's carefully constructed Western wilderness, disrupting the cut-scenes and generally making a mess of things. Then there's the utter racket made by the undead hoards - the wails and howls boxers-browning shrieks that attract people from the adjacent room. The occasional frustrated yell adds to the disturbance, but that's nothing compared to the excitement that greets the arrival of a rare mythical creature. "WHAT THE ***K IS THAT?! Is it... wait... no! Can I ride it? I can ride it! And it's on fire!"

Thankfully for the rest of the staff here, I've now finished my battle against the plague-ridden denizens of New Austin. The fight took a surprisingly long time to finish, however - far longer than what you might expect from an 800 MS point / £7.99 piece of DLC. Undead Nightmare gives you an awful lot for your money: a new single player campaign that will take five to six hours to wrap up, a quartet of fresh weapons, and a long list side quests and challenges to complete. After you're done with all this, there's new multiplayer material to get to grips with: the territory-snatching Land Grab match-type, and a co-op mode called Undead Overrun - essentially a zombie-based variant of Gears of War 2's Horde, pitching four human survivors against 10 waves of re-animated nasties.

Aside from the volume of additions, the impressive thing about Undead Nightmare is its sheer thoroughness. Rather than going for the easy money, and perhaps just lobbing a few new enemies into the existing framework, Rockstar has opted to completely overhaul the Red Dead experience in fine detail. So alongside the new quests, foes and weapons - the kind of thing you expect from a typical expansion pack - the developers have changed the whole appearance of their world, redressing the land in gloomy hues. There's a revamped soundtrack too, including a few licensed psychobilly tunes and even new cheeky comments for Marston himself as he loots the bodies of his rotten opposition.

Google's Nexus Prime Is Here!

Last night one of the most highly anticipated phone of the year was finally on show for the world to see. Google's flag ship Android phone, The Nexus Prime. This will take over the Nexus S as the phone to take Google and their Android OS into the next generation.

As you can imagine this phone needs to compete specs wise with the newly released iPhone 4S and well. It completely blows the iPhone 4S out of the water, the Nexus Prime is currently the most powerful phone on the market right now with its 1.2 GHz dual core processor and its 1GB of ram crammed into a body thats is under 9mm thin, making this one sleek sexy beast of a phone.

As exciting as the hardware specs is that is nothing compared to the main feature of this phone. As this is a Nexus phone that can only mean one thing, the release of the brand new Android OS, Android 4.0 code named Ice Cream Sandwich. This will be the best Android OS so far as one of the biggest features of it is it finally unifies smartphones and tablets, this means it will bring the interface of Android 3.0 Honeycomb to Android smart phones. Android phone users will get the updated app launcher, holographic user interface, interactive and new homescreen widgets plus the multi-tasking panel.

Nexus Prime Specifications:

Dimensions: 136.0mm x 68.0 mm x 8.8 to 11.5 mm

Weight: 135 grams aprox

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

ARM Cortex-A9 MP Core SMP Dual-Core 1.2 GHz

Memory: 1 GB of RAM; 16/32 GB of storage

GPU: Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 540

Display: SUPER AMOLED HD: 4.65 inches with 1280×720 resolution

Main camera: 5 megapixels with LED flash; 1080p video capture

Front camera: 1.3 megapixels

Network support: W-CDMA; GSM; LTE, CDMA2000; HSPA; EDGE, GPRS; LTE; EV-DO

GPS; NFC, Bluetooth 3.0 + HS; 802.11 a/b/g/n; Wi-Fi Direct

Battery Capacity: 1750mAh

Notification LED

To some people the specs might not be quite what they were expecting as rumours were that the Nexus Prime will contain a 1.5 GHz dual core processor and an 8 megapixel main camera. This wont bother many Nexus fans, the 1.2 GHz A9 processor is still the fastest on the market and will be for some time.


As for the 5 megapixel camera you would think that the iPhone 4S's 8 MP camera would be better, but as it goes the SUPER AMOLED HD 720p screen on the Nexus (which is the highest resolution screen out there providing the brightest most crisp images) makes up for the 5 megapixels which for a phone is plenty good enough anyway. If you wanted to take high quality pictures regularly you would use a camera.


Its worth noting that you wont see the different between the iPhone's and the Nexus's picture quality as Facebook only supports 720px quality pictures so the Nexus's camera will be more than enough.

Thats it for now, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more in depth look at Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

FIFA 12 Review

So here we go again. The annual iteration, the roster update, the Fifa gravy train chugs on… Except, EA Canada has never really been into the idea of making the same thing over and over again with just a serving of updated team sheets, a couple of fresh modes and a new photo of Rooney for the cover.

After several hours of play, it's the latter that's emerging as the most important transition. As you'll know, the old trick of hitting the A button to send an AI defender hurtling toward the attacking player like an Exocet missile in polyester shorts is now gone. Well sort of. It's a little more complicated than that.

In Fifa 12, there's a multi-layered system that now lets you hold the A button to "contain" the man on the ball – it brings the player you're controlling right up to him and you'll automatically attempt to shepherd your opponent into disadvantageous positions. It's neat, it's effective and it allows you to chain into a proper tackle, like a football beat-'em-up.

That's pretty much as close as we get to the auto-defend nature of previous Fifa incarnations. Meanwhile, the jockeying function, accessed via the left trigger, allows you to face the incoming player and create a barrier between him and the goal; this can also be combined with the "run" button in order to deal with sprinting opponents. Many Fifa fans will find this forces a radical shift in their defensive philosophy, moving from a mobile approach of darting slides from the back and side and head-on nipping tackles, toward a zonal, more rigorously planned approach, where players get into position and block out attacks, only tackling when the ball is clearly there to be taken.

I have found through the rigorous playing of Fifa 12 that attacking is much like trying to get that certain someone to like you, I mean not taking it out to dinner or anything like that, what I mean is it takes time to craft a perfect, precise attack like a relationship takes time to come together, also much like in a relationship if you take the wrong turn or a heavy touch you will end up on a stretcher on your way to hospital.
Honestly though, the real beauty of the game is in its two-player mode – that's what gets the five stars in the end. I know I'll be playing this all year, mastering new aspects, trying new teams, experimenting with the EA Sports Football Club, watching the online leader boards. A year's worth of play is good value, and value is important in this day and age.

So, yes, here we go again. The annual iteration, the roster update, the accusations of cashing in, cashing up, moving on. Fifa is a symbol now of what the games industry has become – a digital Hollywood, a hit factory, with behemoth franchises, caged in and milked for all they're worth; a grinding production line of choreographed retail launches and endless DLC updates. It used to be just the annual sports titles, now it's everyone.
And yet out of this can come a game like Fifa 12. A game that isn't perfect, and that won't suit everyone, but that absolutely reeks of effort, of care, of love for the sport. Blast EA and its peers for the way they run their businesses if you want to, but recognise this: with friends, with practice, with a will to re-think your approach to defence.

Fifa is an absolute joy to play.

FIFA 12 = 5 stars

Author – The Iceman

New Episode

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Synopsis - 

This week on The Game Brewery Cast Ben and Bob are going it alone this week as a two man show, but trust me they make up for only being two of them. As they always say, when the cats away the mice will play...

Anyway as usual they tackle the burning questions this week like, What can Blackberry do to recover from their recent blackout? What is Ben and Bobs favourite App of the week? And how many more episodes will the teeth reference last?!

All this and much more in this weeks Game Brewery Cast!

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The Game Brewery Podcast

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Welcome to The Game Brewery Blog

Hello welcome to the game Brewery Blog. Basically we work along side the Podcast 'The Game Brewery Cast' which is a group of Video gamers who take their love for videogaming to the next level with a weekly chat show. This blog will consist of videogame reviews, Technology news and basically any topics we find interesting, the blog is sponsered by The Brotherhood of Valor (BHV) which is a unique online gaming community devoted to several different gaming platforms. The Brotherhood of Valor was created to provide a place for mature, friendly, and dedicated gamers to connect and share their passion for gaming. BHV is unique in that we not only game together but build our "Brotherhood" through friendships and a dedication to every member. While with most clans the "game" is always first at BHV we believe it is the "gamer" who comes first.
Gaming with Respect, Maturity and Valor