A Lot of games came out this year. Actually, a lot of really good games came out this year. Not bad conidering that this time a year ago i was convinced there wasn’t anything in 2009 to be excited about. Well, wasn’t i wrong!

Things started very strong with Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter 4 and the usual summer drought never really seemed to kick in. Winter of course is under the shadow of Modern Warfare 2, but Assassin’s Creed 2, Forza, and Uncharted 2 all stand tall next to Infinity Ward’s monster.

So, what really made a difference to you in 2009? What is YOUR Game Of The Year?

I am after your top 3 games released 2009. 1st place gets 3 points, 2nd get 2, and 3rd place gets 1 point. The game with the most points at the end of 2009 is the DPD: Game Of The Year.

we also have some bonus categories for you to vote on…

Best PS3 Exclusive Title
Best 360 Exclusive Title
Best Wii Exclusive Title
Best Handheld Title
Most Anticipated Game of 2010

To vote simply PM me on the Forum, DM me on Twitter, Message me on Facebook or finally email us at dpaddependency@live.co.uk

We need as many of you to vote as possible so even if you only played one new game this year, make your vote count. You can vote in one or all Categories. Get your friends involved, more the merrier!

Thanks guys.

Halo ODST is now available at GAME for £19.99 Preowned.

To celebrate we are giving away 15 ODST Sgt.Johnson Codes. 5 on our Facebook Group, 5 on our Message boards, and 5 right here on the blog!

Can’t be bad can it!

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Shank is the second game from Klei, makers of XBLA hit a few years back Eets: Chowdown. They also had a hand in N+, also for XBLA. This time around Klei are going down the road of scrolling beat em up and boy are they doing it in style! The amazing graphic novel visuals combined with violence the likes of which would make John Rambo blush to make an action game to beat all others. The game strikes me as the bastard son of Metal Slug and Castle Crashers and that sure makes for a pretty baby!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgXdG0J_9fI

The Xbox Live Indie Games (Formerly Community Games) has something of a bad reputation.

Even on our own Facebook page people have said to steer clear a they are all rubbish. In truth of course, this is not the case. Since launch of the service over 500 titles have been released butits only recently and the change in price structure that they really started pushing for your attention and you Micosoft Points. The introduction of the 80 point price, gave developers the chance to put out extremely low cost games into a market facing steep price RISES in conventional stores. 80 points equates to around 66p! Not everything is suddenly rosey in the Garden of Indie and bad games still out number the good. So DPAD Dependency present part 1 of the Top Ten Xbox Indie Games (for 80 points)!

10. Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp

Old school platforming action at it’s finest! Starting life as a homebrew title for R4 owning Ds players, JPBR has all the 8bit/Early 16 bit charm you could ask for. The platforming action is based on a single screen, rather than the scrolling platform adventures that Mario made so popular. Each level being a puzzle asking you to kill all the enemies and collecting cups of coffee with a slurp! The graphics retain all this retro charm and always through design rather than budget restraints and lack of polish as can be seenin other Indie games. 55 levels await you starting with the very simple tutorial stages to brain bending, double jumping, pad throwing levels. but, like all great games you will say “one more go” to yourself more times than you really should!

9. Junkyard Battle

Indie games brings you experiances to your 360 that you would otherwise likely never play on the console. Junkyard Battle is a multiplayer head to head battle to build a tower from the junk dropped into the playing area from the top of the screen. Controlling a mechanical arm,  you pick up items and balance them on top of each other to create your pile quicker than the opponent.  Whoever has the lower of the two towers, suffers from a dropping life bar so the heat is on to keep you tower high while trying to lob items towards the enemy stack in an effort to sabotage their structure. Its a simple premise that will keep you and a friend coming back to time and time again. There is a single player tutorial but no additional missions.

So there you have it, two games for you to get started with. Both games are available now, at 80 points each. Given the price of Avatar clothing you get a pretty good deal. Try out the demo versions at least and comment.

You dont see them coming, but moments of genius can change your perception forever.

I pledge to only play XBLA and Indie Games on my Xbox 360, for an entire year. No Left 4 Dead 2  , Forza 3, O.D.S.T or Alan Wake for me. I want to find out if XBLA is a strong enough platform that i can survive on it alone, or break and play a full retail game. I NEED to know, if radically changing the video games i play will have an effect on my views on gaming as a whole. How will my friends react when i cant join them on the latest 360 multiplayer titles? And maybe, jut maybe will i find such a rich vein of untapped gaming goodness knee deep in XBLA that i even neglect my PS3?

So how did i land on such a hair brained scheme? Read  on…

I’m heading abroad in a few years to Australia and need to start raising cash FAST! In an effort to plan ahead i decided to trade a load of games in, and retain the value on a gift card like a squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter. I was pretty ruthless and took a huge stack of titles into Game and it was here that i learned that they were offering £120 CASH MONEY for my Nintendo Wii. The thought of not having all 3 major consoles troubled me a great deal but the dust layer on the Wii was a clear indication that i could probably live without.

Selling the Wii got me thinking. “Do i really need a 360 AND a PS3?”  i haven’t been a one console guy since the Mega Drive days, and even then i remember feeling like the pimp daddy when i bought a SNES to sit next to it.

Back to present day, and i began to face reality. Immigration aint cheap, and are there really any Xbox Exclusives im going to miss? I began to prepare myself to say goodbye to the 360. With my 360 games collection down to three titles (Ok, i have more but i dont count promo copies of games, or games ive already finished) i sat down to give em a bit of a play as a send off. Then it happened…

Despite being quick to write off virtually all of my 360 retail games, once i was eye to eye with my downloaded titles i found them much less disposable.

CastleVania: Symphony of the Night, Bomberman Live, Garou: Mark Of The Wolves, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, Pacman Championship and even Uno were putting up a much more fierce arguement to be kept than my usual 360 diet of endless first person shooters.

So here i am with a 360 and just XBLA games for company, and thats when i had the moment of genius.

Just to clarify here are the rules:

I WILL NOT play a full retail X360 game on my home console, neither store bought or from Games on Demand

I WILL only play XBLA and Indie Games

If at a friends house and they are playing a 360 game i CAN join in, but friends CANT come to my place the play a retail game. My gamercard will remain free from 306 retail games for 1 year starting today!

A little while ago I spent some time outside of work struggling with a particular application on my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone.  It seemed like it just didn’t work properly and I almost reported it to the developers as a bug.  Just before I did I came across another piece of mobile software and noted a very similar problem and this time something clicked and I realised what the issue really was.

The problem I was experiencing was that I could navigate within the applications using my physical pointer on the touch screen of the phone, but within some parts of the application there was just no response when tapping (or double tapping).  Using the inbuilt optical mouse button had an identical non-response.  Eventually I realised that the software had been written for Windows mobile devices that had a physical D-pad.

A D-pad (or directional pad) is typically found below the screen on a Windows mobile device and has five physical buttons.  One for return (usually in the centre) and four directional buttons (up, down, left and right).  Since the Omnia has no D-pad my next thought was to have a look through the inbuilt keyboard options for an on screen keyboard with directional buttons.

By default I use the “Samsung Keyboard” which does not have any directional buttons.  A quick search through the options showed that the “MS Keyboard” was the only one to have arrow keys.  I tried using this keyboard and it did indeed resolve the navigation issue in the applications.  the only problem is that whilst I could navigate using the physical pointer and the optical mouse with this keyboard it is slow and fiddly as the keys are simply so small.  I use my fingers to do most of my interaction with my phone so I decided to continue looking for another finger friendly solution.

My first investigation was in trying to find a “virtual” or “on screen” D-pad.  Unfortunately everyone’s favourite font of all knowledge (Google) didn’t yield any usable results and so I took a step back to see if there were any keyboards for Windows mobile that could be configured to have large directional keys.

This time my search was a little more fruitful.  PCM Keyboard is an incredibly flexible keyboard for Windows Mobile devices.  Using the Microsoft emulator for WM6, a base theme package for PCM Keyboard called “dream2“, some rough documentation and several hours of confusion and frustration later and I have managed to configure more than just a simple on screen D-pad.

My solution is “DPress” a theme for PCM Keyboard.  Copy the DPress.zip file to your Windows mobile device and place it into the same directory as your PCM Keyboard installation (check under Program Files on whichever storage area you installed PCM Keyboard to).  Select the options for installed keyboards and the options for the PCM Keyboard.  Select DPress and ensure that you select a keyboard type (qwerty and azerty are included).  Save the changes and then the likelihood is you’ll need to restart your device and reselect the PCM Keyboard as the input option to get the DPress keyboard.

Below are some screen shots on how to access the different displays of the keyboard.  Click on the thumbnail images for larger views.

The lower case keyboard left is the default keyboard view as one might expect. From here the keyboard layout can be changed through a number of key presses. The most obvious one is pressing the shift key. This will change the layout to upper case(shown on the right). Pressing and holding the shift button will enable what is in effect caps lock and the upper case layout will remain until the layout is again changed – e.g. by pressing shift once more.

A number of keys provide quick access to in-situ additional keys.  Pressing and holding vowel keys will give access to extended character sets, similarly pressing and holding space will give access to numbers, the comma button will allow access to emoticons and the return button will give access to some function buttons (options, cut, copy, paste).  Some of these are illustrated in the following screen shots.

Clicking the “.,123″ button swaps to a numeric keypad (left image below).  Clicking and holding the period (“.”) button swaps to a symbolic keypad (middle image below).  Finally (and the one you’ve probably been waiting for) by clicking and holding the “.,123″ button a D-pad is displayed (right image below).

Quite versatile for one keyboard theme on a mobile device? I think so.

I’ll be blogging about the pieces of software I had the issues with in the not too distant future, but in the meantime enjoy the DPress keyboard. It is provided as is with no guarantees and I’m sure it probably won’t display well on every Windows Mobile device, but if it doesn’t work why not modify it yourself and modify it to suit your purposes. That’s exactly what I did with the “Dream2” theme so ultimately my thanks go to the author of that theme and PCM Keyboard.

This is the perfect example of a crossbreed between the Super Nintendo Enterntainment System and the Sony Playstation Portable. If you didn’t know, once you install custom Firmware on your PSP, you can run SNES games without a problem.

Let’s embrace the beauty of the Xbox 360 Controller, which is perfect white with gray outlining at the bottom and such comfortable analongs and smooth D-PAD and the so shiny YBAX buttons and the gentle LT LB, RT RB buttons and the ever glowing Xbox logo in the middle. Perfect.

Distribuição gratuita da excelente magazine em formato pdf sobre as mais recentes novidades do mundo dos videojogos. Para o aficionado compulsivo do último grito da tecnologia deste mercado, por favor visite:
http://www.dpad-magazine.com
♣♣♣♣♣ Rating

Da minha experiência de alguns meses com o Xbox  360, em específico sobre o controle, para jogar Halo 3 ele é ótimo…  você sabe que é bom pelo fato de que tu nem percebe que está ali =] Acho que é o primeiro controle que não dói a mão ao usar o LB com frequência (ou L1, ou L, etc). Porém, outro dia estávamos discutindo no fórum NGM, aquele Dpad (ou direcional digital) incomoda hein… sempre curti a série Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer, foi um dos primeiros demos que baixei pela Live, e até hoje não consegui me acostumar com o digital… nesse quesito acho o Dualshock 2 muito melhor (pelo menos pra PES, porque jogos de luta ficam um pouco estranhos com aquele digital ‘dividido’). Quem sabe quando comprar o PES eu me acostume, mas não tenho muita esperança não…

Tudo isso pra falar desse texto do Destructoid sobre o tal Dpad do 360… é um pouco grande, então vejam o original em http://www.destructoid.com/undeniable-failure-an-open-letter-to-microsoft-on-the-xbox-360-dpad-76299.phtml . Um pouco deboxado, mas interessante, nas fotos abaixo por exemplo, não sabia que o digital do X360 é construído de forma diferente em relação aos outros controles… (clique para ver as fotos)

[Via Destructoid]

Direcionais originais do Super Nintendo e do Playstation 2

Como vocês podem ver, existe uma peça de plástico intermediária entre a cruz e a borracha, que raios é isso? Bom, parece ser o principal motivo dos problemas com o digital…

Outra foto mostrando o interior do controle do Xbox 360

It’s been a long, hard winter. There have been far too many drugs, and I know i’m not the only one who’s feeling jaded. The general consensus that it is now time to rest for a few weeks, Gibzone being the catalyst for this movement in the collective unconcious. At least, this is how my eyes are percieving things, for all I know, everyone else is pumping. But my gut feeling is that I am right.

I’ve been living on muffins, picnic bars, red bull and apples for the last three days, although the hours of dancing seems to have counteracted the effects that should have on a body. My back is aching and my recovering ankle, sprained from a barefoot run down a steep bank with a head full of goon a couple of weeks back, is feeling rather… tight. But even though Leo has gone into hibernation mode and is going to be living with his mother in a village near Invercargill, and Dan’s working and keeping himself well oiled with tequila, I am still pretty content. They will always be my boys, my brothers, and this is not the first bump in the road – it is simply time for a fork in the journey we have embarked upon this year, 2007. And we will each take a different path. But as always with likeminded people who share some kind of connection, the paths are bound to cross again. So i’m not sad. I’m excited.

The drum n bass was supreme over the weekend, I think it was epitomised in Undertow’s set, the early set for the creatures to begin flocking into the zone, and so we did. Everything is pretty much a big blur, just like it should be. A proper mindfuck of a weekend. Lessons learnt, people met, peace brought forward – and though the finer details are lost, the tussocks the sole witness to the madness, I’ll never forget the absolute ecstasy, the vibrancy of the people and the oneness, the istigkeit.

Isabel showed her true colours on Sunday night. I always suspected they were as they were, but they revealed themselves blindingly when she approached me and cuffed my waist, smiling eyes and sweet tongue rolling after weeks of silent glares and cold words, and without hesitation asked “Where did you get that NOS…?”. I was in little shock, and with a head recovering from a hefty cream charger ’scenario’ and peaking on a blue dove, I shrugged it off and haven’t felt any remorse for our lost friendship until now.

Yes, the winter is over, and although the clouds and the snow on the mountains beg to differ, I know it is rolling into summer. And let it come quick. I’m going to be working 55 hours a week from here on in, and living with my mother again, preparing myself for my journey which will begin next year. I am taking a one-way flight to Europe, and my naive soul is yearning for the freedom and the madness that will consume it when the time comes. Let the dollars rise with haste, for I am ready when my bank balance is.