Marvel vs. Capcom is a series of fighting games. This series is famous for its exclusive mixing of two giants of comic world. Marvel as we all know is the name behind some of the best known super heroes of the Modern times. Capcom is one of the largest video game developers and publishers. Some of Capcom’s famous creations include Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, Resident Evil e.t.c. So you can imagine the effect of battles between super heroes of two different genres. Upcoming title for the series, Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes will be the fourth and the final game of the series. Capcom simplified the engine used in the game in order to make game more accessible to casual players and to bring new players to the fanbase. Some of the changes are made in the gameplay, like air combo system is modified and the button configuration is now reduced to 4 main buttons and 2 assist buttons. For the first time in the series NAOMI system will used, which is mostly used for the 3-D games. Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes will be developed by different developers for different platforms. PlayStation 2 and Xbox version is developed by Capcom itself. More modified version for the seventh generation gaming platforms i.e. Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is under the development of Backbone Entertainment. The game will release on July 2, 2009.

It is clear that Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes will be different from the series, as it will have different button system and different 3-D system. One more difference is the ending of the game. It will be the first game of the series without character specific endings. Ending of the game will not be affected by the character you will use to play and how fast you end the game. The game will see Earth dying and the efforts of Ruby Hearts to save the earth. In order to save the earth Ruby Heart has to find the Source of evil, who is known as Abyss, the Armor of Erosion. She orders best heroes of her airship and find the Abyss. Later on Heroes come to know the source of power to Abyss is a black metal ball within the centre. In the end it is discovered that the sphere can be destroyed if given a massive crack in it. In the end Ruby is holding it in her hand and then throws it in the water, letting it sink to the bottom. However, one thing not cleared is that whether abyss will return or not. Heroes finally rejoice as they sail back off into the distance.

With some modifications basic parts of the game are same. Players select three players from the roster of Capcom and Marvel characters. Fight is one-on-one and continues until one of the team is left without any players. At least one combo is given to each player & each team will have a common super meter. At a minimum cost of one super meter each level character can perform their supper moves or super combos. Except the screen which is now wider, all the other controls are same as the previous games. One thing you should remember is that Marvel vs. Capcom derives it controls from Street Fighter games. Major difference in the controls of the game is that instead of three kick/punch attack strength, there are only two and the last two buttons are replaced by assist buttons. A weak attack can result in two different attacks. Second one being a medium attack. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will feature the ability to Force an opponent’s teammate into the fight with a move which is commonly known as “snapback.” To perform a snapback one requires a full super meter. Snapback will start and the player will flash for a moment and so normal attack which attack will knock out the opponent. All the characters from previous games of the series are included in the game with some new players also added. This great battle of Heroes is waiting for you. Get ready to take part ion the battle of the millennium.

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Halo Wars is an upcoming game for Xbox 360. It will be a real time strategy game only to be released on Xbox 360. Don’t get confused by the name, as it will not be a first person shooter like the other games of the Halo franchise. However, it is similar to Halo as it is also set in the fictional Halo universe, 20 years before the start of first game of the Halo series Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo Wars is to be released in the PAL territories on February 27 and in North America on March 3, 2009. It is developed by the famous Ensemble Studios. Ensemble studios first hinted the release of the game in mid 2006. The game was officially announced on September 27 at Microsoft’s X06 Xbox show. The game was an attempt to bring together the Halo shooter fans to play a real time strategy title and experienced strategy players to play Halo game.

Halo Wars is a real time strategy game specifically designed for Xbox 360 console. Players have to manage resources and create and maintain buildings and armies to complete objectives. Two playable factions in the game are humans UNSC and alien covenant. Both of them have their own units, strengths, and special abilities. The armies of the players are established by building and expanding bases. The units are trained and upgrades are resourced. Base locations are rare in the game making them defense key priority. After the destruction of the last base, if a new base is not created it may result in defeat of the player. Buildings upgraded, Units are trained, and all the special abilities are utilized by using resources known as supplies. Supplies may be found on the battlefields and claimed, but the bulk of supplies are generated by building special structures at bases.

Halo: Combat Evolved was supposed to be a real time strategy game. However, the developers of the game Bungie Studios were bought by Microsoft and the game changed to first person shooter for Xbox console. After the huge success of Halo, Bungie produced two of the most hit sequels of all time. The sequels Halo 2 and Halo 3 are two of the most selling first person shooter. After producing however, these legendary games Bungie Studios separated themselves from Microsoft and became an independent once again. A small demonstration of the game was shown at E3 2007. A few months later, a video narrated by the Lead Designer was released on Xbox live marketplace. Before the presenting the game to Microsoft they developed the controls for six months, because the real time strategy games were criticized for their controls.

Official Xbox Magazine in their October 2007 issue stated that there a playable demo for Halo Wars will be available before release of the game. Playable demo for the game was released on February 5. Redemption codes were released even before the release of the demo on 29 January. In a press conference, Microsoft stated that Halo Wars set a one-day record for most download. In the last five days, it was downloaded by 5 million users.

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Don’t worry about ghost when Ghostbusters are there. In late eighties and early nineties Ghostbuster rock the world in TV series, movies, and cartoons. Now Ghostbusters is set to release as video game, Ghostbusters: the Video Game will be action game tool over. It will be available PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS. Terminal Reality will develop the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and other versions will be developed by Red Fly Studio. This game will be published by Atari. As expected game is based on Movie franchise. According to the creator of Ghostbuster this game will be like III version.

This games shows events taking place in the year 1991, two years after the events in Ghostbusters II. The character you have to portray is a new recruit hired to test Egon Spengler and Ray Stantz’s new advanced equipment. He has to use this equipment during a recent ride of strange activity. This strange activity begins to occur as the city is about to disclose a Gozer exhibit. Now the team has to investigate. While investigating the events the team faces some of famous ghosts from the movie franchise. They have to face ghost like Slimer Gozer, Vigo, library ghost, Stay Puft Marshmallow man. In addition, you have to face many mini bosses that will be encountered throughout each level.

Games development started in the year 2006 and Zootfly was the one working on it. But before working on it,  it first secured rights to develop the game from Sony. Soon after securing rights, Sony released videos of an early version of the game on the internet. But later company failed to secure rights for the game as a Ghostbusters game. After this decision was taken by Zootfly that they will continue the development of the game as a non-ghostbustergame theme and rename it as TimeO.

On Spring that year Sierra Entertainment and developer, Terminal Reality met with Sony about the probable issues of the Ghostbusters game. Zootfly had already created a positive environment with the videos of the game and they sell the concept to Sony. However, game was in a ditch after these sign ups. First Activision Blizzard announced that they would release only five game franchise, and Ghostbusters was not on their list. Activision Blizzard was the company who was the publisher for Sierra Entertainment. Later Sierra Entertainment announced that the game would not be canceled in any circumstances.

Ending this long contemplation Infrogramers announced the game would be released finally under the banner of oldest giants in the gaming world Atari. Releasing date set by Atari was in the month of June 2009. It was to coincide with the silver anniversary of first movie of the Ghostbusters series. Sony finally confirmed that the game will be released on 16^th June in U.S. and in European countries the release date was set 19th June. Announcements were made by Sony at the Consumer Electronic Show, 2009. game would be released with home video re-release of the movie.

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Just as some one tries to outrun Microsoft, they return to the field with most innovative ideas. After the enormous success of their gaming console PlayStation Sony Corporation was promising to that, they will remove the Windows from the market. This evoked Microsoft to land in the console market, they came up with Xbox and it shook the world market of gaming. Xbox soon ate large part of PlayStation’s market. To lead the market of seventh generation of gaming consoles they are back with an astonishing idea. Basic of their idea is cross platform, they are planning to connect Xbox 360 with many operating systems. This is termed, as XBMC (media centre) Originally only Microsoft Windows was considered compatible as there will not be any problems relating licensing. However, considering the popularity of Xbox 360 many other operating systems also joined the race. Other leading operating systems working with XBMC are Linux and Mac OS X.

Other than allowing, you to play video games shared on operating systems, it also supports many other media options like video, audio, image formats, audio visualization, weather reporting, slideshows and third party plugins. To make it more convenient to use, network capability is used with internet and LAN shares. XBMC is expandable through ads-ons through its plugin system, which is based on Python. You can include many features like YouTube, online movie trailer support, and television program guide. Podcast/SHOUTcast is also available through streaming.

The latest stable version of XBMC available for Xbox 360 is 8.10-point release version. It was codenamed as Atlantis and was released on November 13, 2008. XBMC for Xbox is an open Source software program that is why is stored in publicly accessed Subversion server. The code is constantly updated by developers, so sometimes the subversion server contains more features than the most recent recent stable release. XBMC with Xbox can be run as an application. It can also be run as a dashboard that appears directly when the Xbox is turned on. XBMC runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is a 32-bit application but runs well on 64-bit windows and hardware as well.

In the cross platform version of XBMC, it got few limitations. XBMC can only read first session of a multisession burnt CD or DVD media disc. It is because XBNC does not support multisession authored CD/DVD media. Second most important limitation of XBMC is that video/audio files, which are protected with DRM, can not be accessed. Any music purchased from MSN Music, iTunes Music Store, or Audible.com cannot be accessed from XMBC. XBMC proved that it is trustworthy and received two SourceForge awards for Best Multimedia Project and Best Game Project. So do not get upset if you do not have Xbox 360 to play with your friends, just get in touch with XMBC and rock the world.

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King of fighters or Za kingu obu Faitazu in Japanese, and officially abbreviated as KOF. It’s a series of fighting games produced by SNK Playmore, formerly known as SNK. Originally this fighting games series was developed for SNK’s Neo-Geo MVS arcade hardware. It served as the main platform for the series until 2004, when SNK retired the MVS in favor of the Atomiswave arcade board and moved the series to the Taito Type X2, and released King of fighters XII. Original King of Fighters and ports of the arcade games have been released for the Neo Geo Pocket, Game Boy, Neo Geo CD, PlayStation and PlayStation 2, PC, and Xbox. Most recent games of the series are KOF: Maximum Impact series.

In a fighting game player faces off against each other or against computer-controlled characters in close combat. Main difference between fighting games and beat ‘em up games is that players are of approximately equal powers to the opponents. Fights are self contained matches involving only number of chracters.Most of the fighting games include life bars and fights that lasts for odd number of rounds. Many concepts are common in most of the fighting games. Most common of them being Health, usually in the form of a rectangular “life bar”. Combos which include several attacks chained together. Special moves is another example.

Initially story of the first game of the series follows Kyo Kusangi, a young high school Japanese boy who enters The king of fighters tournaments. Being the heirs of the ancient Kusangi clan, who weilds pyrokinetic powers, Kyo manages his powers to win the tournament along with his friends. His team then meets the host of the game Rugal Bernstein, who is a powerful criminal. This freak criminal wants to meet worthy opponents to kill so that he can turn them into statues in order to remember his ruthless victories. But in turn he is defeated by Kyo. In the late version of the game Iori Yagami a fighter appears aiming to kill Kyu kusangi and destroy his clan as a revenge to from his clan. The main theme of the game revolves around the characters of King of Fighters having their own reasons of entering the tournament. King of Fighters ‘95 allowed player’s to create their own team of three members. This feature was new to players and they were given a chance to enjoy a longer fight and with different players in a single start. King of fighters soon became a favorable game of the era and its character’s also become famous all over the world. Many of its characters got listed in all time favorite gaming characters.

Fighting games saw a decline after enjoying a great success over a long time of period, both commercially and critically. And in the latter part of the 90’s fighting genre began to decline popularity, with several franchises facing failures. This also cause downfall of KOF series, as its new produced games were no longer considered as trend setter. There sales dropped down. To overcome the decline many gaming companies released their new games loaded with more players and more moves. But this doesn’t prove beneficial either. Although some experts think new games saw more loss because of increased complexity and specialization. This complexity shut out casual players and the market this genre became smaller and specialized.

King of fighters gave the players a new way of competeting each other. Its long fights were intresting, but with change of time people changed their mind and they were looking for smaller and less complex fights and a game was waiting for them. TEKKEN series was one of them. In order to gain the market again SNK has launches a new version of KOF as king of fighters XII which is gaining market and critics both. Let see how much can it success in bringing back the fame of SNK. Even though KOF is not as popular as it was in its day’s of launch, but still it will be remembered as a trend setter for fighting games.

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Counter strike or commonly known as CS is a tactical first person shoot game. It was modified from a Half Life modification by minh gooseman le cliffe. Counter strike was expanded into a series since its original launch. The counter strike series include counter strike: condition zero, counter Strike: source, counter Strike: anthology and counter strike on Xbox. The term counter strike refers to a team of counter terrorists fighting against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds.

Each round is won by either completing mission objective or eliminating the opposite force. The latest version of the series is based on the source engine developed for Half-Life 2. The game is entirely based on the dynamically streamed lined multiplayer experience activated using STEAM. According to gamespy, counterstrike is the most played half-life version in terms of players.

In the beginning, it was developed as half-life modification. Therefore named as “half life counter strike.” the original version was a 3rd party modification, but since then its has grown into a commercial mod. Now it is advertised as a separate game itself. However, it still uses and runs on half-life game engine and is based on its unchanged structure.

It got commercial success because it was a much simple action packed game compared that to half-life and other games. Players got only few minutes to finish the round, that makes it swifter, and action loaded game. Counter strike is a first person shooter; you can either join terrorists or counter terrorist’s team. Each round starts with teams players are spawned simultaneously, usually at opposite ends of the map from each other. A player can choose as one of the players from ten characters five from each side (earlier four). At the start of each round players are given a few seconds (freeze time) to prepare and buy weapons and equipments. They cannot attack or walk in that period. You can buy weapons ranging from sidearm pistol nighthawk to heavy machine gun M249. Its inventory includes famous M4 carbine of USA to Galil of Israel. They can return to buying area within a set amount of time to buy more equipment. Once the round ends, surviving players retain their weapons for use in next round; players who were killed begin the next round with the basic starting equipment.

Money bonuses are awarded for winning a round, losing a round, killing an enemy, being the first to instruct the hostage to follow, rescuing a hostage to rescue point or planting the bomb. The scoreboard displays team scores. IT also shows statistics for each player: name, kills, deaths, and latency. Whether a player is dead, carrying a bomb, or is the VIP (in assassination maps). However, the information is hidden from the opposite player until his/her death, as can be important. Killed players become “spectators” for the duration of round. Generally spectators able to watch the rest of the game through various multiple spectacle views.

Originally, it was played online through WON gaming service. It was shut down in the year 2004.After that players shifted to STEAM. After WON was closed a part of player’s community created their own WON network as WON2. Counter strike remains extremely popular to this day. Many professional online leagues supporting counter strike are popular round the globe like Cyber athlete Amateur league (CAL) and Cyber Evolution are few pay to play league. LAN tournaments are held through out the world largest being Cyberathelete Professional League, the Electronic Sports World cup and the World cyber games. So next time when you found a counter strike game going on a nearby cafe do not lose the opportunity. Counter strike is a game, which will help you increasing your team co-operation and your strategy. However, what are most important in the game are your skills. So get ready to shoot em up.

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Any one all over the earth ever played any game on P.C or on gaming console like Xbox or ever got into any kind of media file on a Microsoft platform is surely aware of DirectX.Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interface (APIs) for handling tasks related multimedia. This includes mainly game programming and video on Microsoft platforms. Microsoft start naming its APIs all starting with Direct, for example-Direct3D, DirectDRaw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so on. Direct X then was the generic term for all of the Microsoft APIs and became the name of the collection. Microsoft also released a multiplatform game development APIs such as Xinput, which are designed to supplement or replace individual DirectX components, after the release of Xbox. The DirectX software development kit or SDK consist of runtime libraries in redistributable binary form, along with accompanying documentation and headers for use in coding. But in the start runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. Windows 95 was originally not launched with DirectX, but it was included with Windows 95 OEM service release 2. Windows 98 and NT 4.0 both was launched DirectX, and after that DirectX was part of every Window release after that. The SDK available as a free download. While the runtime are proprietary, closed source software.

Success of Microsoft in software is very much dedicated to DOS. DOS allowed direct access video cards and mouse, sound devices, and all other parts of the system.

Microsoft needed a way that could let programmers what they wanted, and they wanted it quickly; the operating system was only month away from being launched. Eiser, St John, and Engstorm worked together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX. The first version of DirectX was released in September 1995 as the Windows Games SDK. It was Win32 replacement for the DCI and WinG APIs for Windows 3.1.

DirectX allows all versions of Microsoft Windows to incorporate high quality multimedia.

In console specific version, DirectX was used as a basic for Microsoft Xbox and Xbox 360 console API was developed jointly between Microsoft and Nvidia, who developed the custom hardware used in the original Xbox. The Xbox was code named DirectXbox, but this was shortened for it’s commercial name. In 2002 Microsoft released DirectX 9 with support for the use of much longer shader programs than before with pixel and vertex shader version 2.0. Since then Microsoft is updating DirectX suite. Although there are alternatives of the DirectX family of APIs, but with a combination of libraries –SDL, Allergo, OpenMAX, OpenML, FMOD, etc.—its hard to catch DirectX.

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