There are only 2 differences on the hardware that I’ve found so far one being the knobs on the Renegade edition are metal compared to plastic on the regular edition. Secondly the turntable is black and gold compared to black and silver. My only real complaint regarding the turn table is the cross fading mechanism. It is has 3 positions left, center and right. When sliding from right to center or vice versa there isn’t enough of a click to ensure that it is centered. I’ve often lost note streaks because of it.  FreeStyleGames even thought of the lefties, you can detach the mixer and place it on the right.

One of the biggest complaints I have had with games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the tracks. Being in my twenties the music in those games just didn’t appeal to me because I didn’t know 90 percent of the artists.  This is one of the single most important reasons I love DJ Hero the set list is fantastic. You have music from Eminem, Jay-Z, N.E.R.D, 2-Pac And 50 Cent mixed by the likes of DJ AM, DJ Grandmaster Flash and DJ Jazzy Jeff. This game is loaded with star power.

Another Hero game means another controller, so half of it is the record platter that contains 3 buttons green, red and blue. The other half is the mixer that includes the cross fader, effects knob , euphoria button (star power) and system control buttons .As the familiar red and blue and as notes come down on the screen you press the button. Scratches involve holding either the green or blue button while moving the platter back or forth, but on harder difficulty you’ll have to follow onscreen arrows that indicate whether to push it forward or pull it back.  When you get into the medium, hard and expert settings you add in the cross fader, which you’ll have to push left and right depending on what notes are being played during the song. Think of it this way, when the cross fader is in the middle position music from record 1 and record 2 are being blared through your speakers. Move it to the left and only record 1 is being played, move it to the right and it’s only record 2.

Beginner and easy mode are just like sound, lame and boring. For me this game started to take off once I switched to medium 5 starred all the songs and found my groove. Hard and expert is a challenge and some of the songs really do kick my ass but I’m ok with that since music in this game is incredible.  You can hook up a USB microphone and throw shout out’s to your TV, it’s lame but it could be fun at a party. Next time they tried to integrate a co-op mode by having 10 songs that can also be played using a guitar. The guitar and Turntable mode sounds but I really thought it was tacked on instead of being carefully thought out. One small annoyance I have is that you cannot fail a song regardless of how bad you suck, the music will keep playing. This is great if you wanted to just kick it at a party and listen to some great tunes but it’s hard to focus on where you need to improve your skills.

You can go on line, pick a set list and battle other people, I personally didn’t enjoy this mode at all as I could never seem to win a set list.

I hope Activision takes a cue from the fine folks at Harmonix and releases weekly downloadable mash up tracks for us to play. This is only way to prolong the life of this game.

Dj Hero makes a very good debut onto console platforms but FreeStyleGames needs to make a few improvements to the hardware, co-op and potentially a lower price as some people may find the current price tag a little high. At the end of the day this is one of the best music genre games I’ve played.

Battlefield Bad Company released just over a year ago on June 23, 2008, Developed by Digital Illusions using the Frostbite Engine and published by Electronic Arts (EA). The story line revolves around “B” Company of the 222nd Army battalion, more commonly known as “Bad Company and the USA are fighting a war against the Russian Federation. Your squad consists of 4 misfits, Private Preston Marlowe the games protagonist, Private Terrence Sweetwater who talks too much, Private George Gordon Haggard who often provides some sort of comic relief for the team and the leader of the group Sergeant Samuel D. Redford, He volunteered for this gig, I know he’s nuts!. During the early course of the game the 4 misfits run into the Legionnaires who are a deadly mercenary army who gets paid in gold bars. Sweetwater searches a body and takes a little gold bar from a dead body. Curiosity gets the best of Bad Company and they go on the hunt for the gold bars. During the course of the chase for the gold, they find a ship loaded with gold and guess what? The US army finds our little band of misfits and orders them to surrender. Being a party of the 222nd Army Battalion the army makes a plea deal with the 4 soldiers to investigate Serdaristan. They are ordered to capture Zavomir Serdar the dictator of Serdaristan. They take Serdar’s helicopter and fly through Serdaristan and are eventually shot down. The squad and the dictator get captured but for private Preston who manages to survive but is stripped of all his weapons. Eventually he makes his way to a monastery where the rest of his squad is being kept. They escape and flee to Sadiz, dropping Serdar off on a little island in the middle of the ocean. The squad blows up 2 bridges to slow down the US army from launching an offensive attack. The squad reaches the gold bars but their attacked by the Legionnaire and his pimped out Ka-52 Helicopter. Private Preston shots down the helicopter. The squad returns to find the US army loading the gold into trucks, Preston convinces the commanding office they are army operatives and they are given a truck filled with gold and asked to join the convoy. The 4 misfits say yes but wait they veer off from the rest of the convoy and go their own way. The game ends with the Legionnaire rising from the burning wreckage.

As you can tell the story is pretty laughable and the voice acting really sold the story. It goes to show that outstanding voice acting can really make a game memorable for the right reasons instead of the wrong reasons. One of the things I really enjoyed was equipping a grenade to my gun and blowing a hole in the wall and walking in. Who needs a doorbell right? The environments are not fully destructible which would have been kick ass. Can’t kill the sniper behind the wall? Just blow it up instead. There are a ton of guns to collect as well. The overall shooting mechanics are very well done. One thing I liked was if you died that you would just respawn and have to run back to where you died. No cut scenes, no load screens and the enemies you killed? Still dead. Your squad mates are very chatty during the game however I felt at times they were completely useless and that I was the only person doing anything to advance on each mission.
I joined a game of online multiplayer however I got my ass handed to me and was completely confused on what I was supposed to do. Maybe that was because I was playing by myself or because the players who play it have been playing for a long time. I think the objective was to find boxes and detonate them and then you would advance and try and blow up the next one. Overall my team got our asses handed to us. I could see the multiplayer being a ton of fun with a group of your friends.
Overall I paid $14.99 Canadian for Battlefield Bad Company and I really enjoyed the game. The single player campaign seemed very short some compare it to the length of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare however I found it a lot shorter. I’m still on the fence on whether or not it was too short for a single player campaign. I enjoyed the voice acting, the laughable story, and the somewhat destructive buildings and most importantly the shooting mechanics were spot on. Highly recommended if you haven’t played it yet.

Sony’s current offerings

Microsoft’s current offerings

All prices were determined on the XBL Canadian Marketplace, Canadian Playstation Network store, Bestbuy.ca,futreshop.ca and amazon.ca

You will only be able to be the One, once per week unless everyone has already been the One. This will be available to all gold members however, you can also play with silver members locally as well but they will not be eligible to win any prizes. The Canadian Beta starts Friday May 8th 2009 and runs to Sunday May 24th 2009. During the last weekend of the Canadian beta Xbox will open up the beta to all gold and silver members. A season of 1 vs. 100 live will be 13 weeks and 200 gamerscore available for those 13 weeks. There are also advertisements in the game; yes there is a mini television screen in the mob that will display advertisements from Nike, Sympatico and Zuma. Will these advertising dollars pay for the prizes? Sure seems like it. The programming schedule will be Friday Nights at 10pm EST and Saturday Nights at 7 and 10pm.

There is also another version of 1 vs. 100 call extended play. Extended play will not be live and available 7 days a week. You and thousands of Xbox live members play as the mob and battle it out for top score. 1 vs. 100 extended play features themed trivia every weeknight for the ultimate variety. Some examples mentioned were battle of the sexes and with the possibility of doing an Olympic themed night when the 2010 winter games draw closer.

1 vs. 100 features 12 achievements worth 200 gamerscore per season. The achievements are:
Low Rider – Answer instantly and incorrectly three times in a row 5G
Showboating Specialist – In a single 1 vs. 100 live round max our your avatar action 10 times 10G
Thrifty Skipper Extended play: In a single round, save up the maximum of 3 skips 10G
Speedy Delivery – In a single round, score a total of 1300 points through time bonuses 20G
Game Show Guru – In any single round, achieve a streak of 12 consecutive correct answers 25G
Quick Draw – In a single round, receive six consecutive instant answer bonuses – 25G
Hair Trigger – Get three consecutive questions right while receiving an instant answer bonus for each. 15 G
Golden Century – answer a total of 100 questions correctly 25G
Trivia Fanatic – Answer a total of 500 questions 30G
Go Streaking! – In a single round, achieved a streak of five consecutive answers 15G
Group Hug – Your team of four achieved a simultaneous streak of three consecutive correct answers 10 G
Quarter Century – Answer 25 correct answers correctly 10G
They didn’t discuss very much regarding what the prizes will be but it looked
like each round awards a prize to the top 3 high scoring crowd or mob members. For every 10 mob members eliminated, the prizing ladder moves up a level. The top prize is reached when all mob members are eliminated. If the One answers incorrectly, the prize ladder is divided among the remaining mob members. For the Canadian beta every correct answer earns you an entry into a sweepstakes to win Acer Aspire laptop, a Xbox 360 Elite with extra controller, and Xbox LIVE Arcade games. There are a maximum of 500 entries per person per season. As I stated above there seems to be some sort of use of Microsoft points, but they aren’t available during the Canadian beta. Using those MS points to buy arcade games or DLC would be cool!

The Canadian beta starts this week (on Friday May 8th 2009 at 10pm EST) and hopefully thousands of Canadians hop on to play 1 vs. 100 live with host Chris Cashman. This Canadian beta should allow Microsoft to stress-test the technology, to ensure there are no hiccups come launch date. I would expect some sort of announcement to come out of E3.

Teh Bad:
More Variety in race modes
Why is Avril Lavigne in this sound track? Like seriously!
I would prefer is the game didn’t take forever to start up at the beginning. I do not need to go my junk yard and see all the new cars at the start-up of the game. It’s quite annoying.

For $20 bucks how you can not pick up this game. Its a ton of fun and continues to get a massive of free updates.

Teh bad:
Can’t skip cut scenes
You can’t play with a controller. Buy a fight pad or a Fight stick
Matchmaking I never seem to get paired up to someone with similar abilities as me, thus facing superior opponents on a constant basis is frustrating.

I had to put Street Fighter aside for now, I just can`t play with a controller and I am on the hunt for a fight stick. If you can play with a controller I`d recommend picking this up.

There are 22 different puzzles or challenges, if you will; including a few new types of questions such as, Pixel Fix which requires you to name the movie based on an 8 bit video of the movie. Celebrity Ties is a series of clues in which you must link the two actors to a movie. Personally, I really enjoyed the filling in the quotes puzzle. They gave you a quote with a series of blanks on it and provide you with 4 possible solutions to the answer. Also, there is Which is Which, where they give you a series of four still photos and you have to link two of them to the name of the movie. There are hundreds of questions however they tend to repeat after awhile. The movies in this game range from the 60’s to 2008.
Some other highlights were the overall pacing/feel to the game – it felt quicker but, needless to say, sneaking a game in before dinner was still completely doable.

One of my biggest issues with the original Scene It was simply that the game wasn’t fun playing by your lonesome as compared to with another person or a group of people. This problem has been averted! They have fixed it in this edition by adding a feature which allows you to play on Xbox Live. Furthermore, they are promising downloadable content. Hopefully this comes sooner then later and the pricing isn’t overbearing.

I didn’t pick up the big button controllers. I don’t think there was much difference from the originals. The fact that I couldn’t pause the game to get a refill on my beverage was quite a nuisance. Also, the multipliers in the Final Cut were bothersome. It allows the player to earn multipliers based on the number of questions correctly answered in a row. It went from 1x to 2x to 5x. It can either make things really close or you can get blown out of the water. It can be a huge “cut” if you aren’t familiar with the movie clip shown.

Overall, this is a great addition to the causal line up for the 360 and should have families playing it over the holidays. However, with the repeat questions already appearing, I really hope the DLC comes quickly and is reasonably priced.