thirdworldgamer

I was informed recently that the Philippines is now an Xbox Live supported region. The odd thing is, it's based on a posting by Major Nelson all the way back in October 2013: http://majornelson.com/2013/10/01/xbox-live-free-gold-weekend-this-weekend/ Starting this  Friday (4, October)  through Sunday (6, October) we’ll be unlocking Xbox Live Gold  for the below regions. If you are not a Gold Member yet, it’s a great opportunity to try Multiplayer on your favorite games. Regions include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines , Portugal, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam Your region not listed above? We’ve got your covered with the following dates: Oct. ...

Even more on Super Street Fighter 4: - Okay, Ken didn't get completely screwed after all. His Shoryuken is much better than before, and nothing beats the poking range of his jumping roundhouse kick (for guys without uppercuts/anti-airs). - M.Bison is my new favorite character, and I've picked him as my main now. I love all the options he has and how there's more variety to playing him than the usual shotos. - Ryu and Sagat seem to feel like the same characters but with far less damaging attacks. Then again, the whole cast's damage was decreased, so matches last very long now. - Online is probably 75% good, 25% bad. The 25% being that you will still get those matches that lag horribly, regardless of region select. But yeah, the netcode is still better than vanilla SF4. - What happened to all that storyline stuff they set up in vanilla SF4? It's as if they never happened. Too bad Capcom doesn't want to take too many risks with the storylines for their main charact...

I also posted this on pinoyxbox.com ************* Finished downloading Forza 3 at 1:45AM. Finished playing the demo at around 2:40AM. Unbelievable, completely lives up to the hype; everything they've said about this game is true. I'm shocked at how much fun it was to play for a 'simulator'! The other day I was trying out Need for Speed Shift, which, at the end of the day, really reminded me of Grid/PGR. This one....this is an animal all its own, it just FEELS so different in terms of driving model, and that's what seems to make it special. The 60FPS really does help enhance the 'feel' of the driving, and the way the cars move and behave is like no other driving game I've ever played before. Perhaps Forza 2 is the only game that comes close. I'm surprised they were able to even surpass that! When I first bought my PS3 one of the games I purchased with high hopes was Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, which had those dazzling cutscenes playing back on most websi...

In all these videos I play as Jin Kisaragi. (Gamertag: hadokenz)

This achievement was really hard to get and took me a very, very long time:

Hey, you never know if or when my Street Fighter IV save file might get corrupted! There are rumors on forums online that it just happens at random. So I took these pics here to preserve how much time I've put in on Street Fighter IV for the Xbox 360. Most of the games I play online are Player Matches, the reason being that I enjoy being able to relax a bit when playing and not worry about losing Battle Points or think about the skill level of the opponents that I might end up playing against. Going on Player Matches causes me to play against more 'new' players, though; but I don't really mind. It's good to play the game just for fun :) All the best players are in Championship mode or Ranked mode, occasionally I go there and I don't fare too well. But for the most part, many of my games online have just a slight bit of lag. I do have the occasional unplayable game, but I haven't had enough of those to make me hate the whole online experience with Street Figh...

The Championship Mode Update for SFIV was released yesterday night about 5PM Philippine Time. It was active early on for PSN; while Xbox Live users could get it at the same time as Playstation 3 owners, they could only use the update some time late in the evening. I've played a bit of this new mode and I am impressed by the effort Capcom put into it. I like how it doesn't deduct points when you're starting out and you lose to other players of the same rank. I do know that point deductions occur some time later in higher levels of play. That said, the competition on Championship at this time is quite fierce, perhaps because the players in the lower tiers are just starting to climb up. That means low tier and high tier players are mixed all in level 3-E. So if you're planning to play the new mode, be ready to lose a lot....I sure did. I do like how they give the matches a 'tournament' feel. Essentially this is just a different way of implementing ranked matches---...

The Street Fighter IV Championship Mode - "Power Up Pack" is now available on both the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Marketplace . For PSN it's a free update which will be prompted when you play the game, while for Xbox Live, you can get the update from the Game Marketplace (check the 'New arrivals' menu to find it). I wonder why the Xbox Live version is not a required update? Hmm.... According to Xbox Live, it weighs in at about 16.40 MB. :)

Heads up for European gamers (in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK)....hot on the heels of the success of the US, Korean and Japanese Street Fighter IV tournaments, Capcom is hosting yet another tournament, this time, to find the "Ultimate European Street Fighter Supreme Master." (Hey, that's an exact quote from the official website for the European Tournament here! I couldn't possibly come up with a title that epic .) The platform for the tournament will be the Xbox 360 , and I think it will be done via Xbox Live (according to the site, they'll be monitoring the registered players' performances online). At some point they'll pick out finalists and perhaps that's when they'll have a live event for it (just my guess). I wonder... will there ever be a South East Asian Street Fighter IV Tournament? Gah, if only there were arcade machines for SFIV here in the Philippines, then maybe interest in the game wouldn't be limited to console ow...

Tried to play some SFIV on Xbox Live today, and I couldn't get into any matches at all via matchmaking (no sessions found, and nobody would join in during arcade mode). I read reports online that the following message appears on people's gamertags: REQ: CHAMPIONSHIP ....whenever they're playing SF4 online. Rumor has it that Capcom will be releasing the game's 'Championship Mode' soon, so maybe they're testing it out? On the other hand, because Xbox Live was down, I resorted to playing Street Fighter IV on the Playstation Network. The game is still available for online play there, surprisingly.

The game didn't crack the top 10 during the first few weeks of its release. It's good to see that Street Fighter IV finally made it to this prestigious list....even if it's at the very bottom! http://majornelson.com/archive/2009/03/10/live-activity-for-week-of-march-2nd.aspx Xbox 360 Top Live Titles (based on UU’s) 1 Halo 3 2 Call of Duty: WaW 3 Call of Duty 4 4 Gears of War 2 5 GTA IV 6 Halo Wars 7 Left 4 Dead 8 Halo Wars demo 9 FIFA 09 10 STREET FIGHTER IV Go SFIV! Surprisingly SSF2HDRemix does pretty well against other XBLA games. I didn't really like HDR so much; it was fun for the first few days, then I realized it's a game I already played to death long ago. Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions purchased) 1 Watchmen: The End is Nigh 2 Castle Crashers 3 3 on 3 NHL Arcade 4 Worms 5 UNO 6 Braid 7 Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix 8 Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 9 A Kingdom for Keflings 10 Marble Blast Ultra

Capcom's big surprise for this week turned out to be Lost Planet 2! As a player who thoroughly enjoyed LP1, this is great news for me! The trailer is currently out exclusively on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Which means, I should get to downloading it .....

As a player from the Philippines, I'm no longer surprised when I usually get horrible degrees of lag in my online games. However, that isn't the case with Street Fighter IV. Despite my relatively not-so-good PLDT MyDSL Plan 999, with its paltry upload speed averaging around 200-400 kbps, STREET FIGHTER IV manages to give me fantastic performance in my online games. And I can prove it, through my online statistics and achievements I've gained in Street Fighter IV's Online Mode. Here's a SpeedTest I ran just now, if I was connecting to someone in New York, USA. Upload speed is the important thing when it comes to online games. My upload speed is pretty bad; but it manages to get me some great performance in Street Fighter IV for the Xbox 360. Los Angeles, USA. London, UK. Singapore. Brisbane, Australia. Yokohama, Japan. I'm positive I played against one guy in Singapore because I checked one of my opponent's gamertags. I had a GREEN connection icon when I pla...

Found this on Shoryuken.com; DLC Costumes for the female characters Cammy, Chun-Li, C.Viper, Rose and Sakura.

After a few days of playing, I finally racked up 1000 Battle Points in Street Fighter IV! A pretty small achievement, sure, but it's easier to get things like this early on in a game's life, when a lot of people are playing. When other games come along later, it will be harder to find players with decent connections because a lot of people will have moved on to other games that come out. Will Street Fighter IV have lasting power on Xbox Live? I really hope so. With Virtua Fighter 5 the player base thinned out after about three months, and the player base already wasn't that great to begin with. I hope players don't give up on it so easily. The game really is more accessible, compared to most other fighting games on current generation systems. Capcom has to step up their community features (like introducing things like clans or other web-based player stat tracking systems) if they want the game to continue enjoying a large player base. They also have to teach players how...

Street Fighter IV is just too much fun online. So far I've only had a handful of really laggy games (maybe 4 or less) but for the most part, it's playable. I haven't played that many Ranked Matches, so I don't really have that many Battle Points yet. I've seen some with 1,000BP already (or more). What makes Ranked Match tough is that the game will reduce your BP every time you lose. At some point I was down to 70+ BP so I really had to work my way back up. I think that the game (for the Xbox 360 version, at least) actively looks for opponents when you play it in Arcade Mode and set match request feature to ON. I had a few hosts that left the lobby or removed me from the game when the network icon onscreen indicated it was too laggy. (sometimes I get removed even before the match starts). I'm surprised by that....why would they join my game to begin with if they can already see that their network connection to me isn't so good? Furthermore, sometimes the HOST...

"A New Warrior Has Entered The Ring!" This feature for online play in Street Fighter IV...it's genius. Just genius. Capcom was just brilliant for putting in this feature. If you haven't heard yet, SF4 lets you set up Arcade mode in such a way that you can be interrupted by other online players and thus be challenged to online matches. You get prompted that 'A New Warrior Has Entered The Ring!' and then you're brought to the setup screen, where you can prepare your match. I'm surprised no other developers have thought of implementing online matchmaking for fighting games this way. This is just absolutely perfect. You can practice your combos on the A.I. while waiting for a match, and the game does all the work for you! I'm not really sure if SF4 actively 'finds' other SF4 games on Xbox Live and just matches you in the background, or if getting in a match is the result of someone else finding 'you' online via the Xbox Live option on t...

Today I decided to turn on the ability of Street Fighter IV to interrupt my Arcade Mode matches with online challenges. You can choose either PLAYER MATCH or RANKED MATCH for this mode, which is good, because I just wanted to try it, and didn't really want my account smeared with losses on my very first try. I will say, originally I wasn't too confident about the netcode for Street Fighter IV. Virtua Fighter 5 had great netcode but occasionally it would give me bad connections. It's just something you get accustomed to when playing online. That said, around 7 wins and 2 losses later, using different characters (not just my favorite ones) I came to the conclusion that Street Fighter IV has the best netcode there is for a fighting game. Period. It's really cool to get that 'A NEW CHALLENGER HAS ENTERED THE RING!' prompt for the game. It's that same feeling you get at the arcade when all of the sudden some stranger decides to put in a token and press START on...

These videos are a series of rematches between the two finalists from the WCG Philippines 2008 Tournament for Virtua Fighter 5. These games were played over XBOX LIVE. I'm using Jacky while Ismael is using Akira. In these set of rematches, Ismael won a *LOT* more matches than me :( So I suppose you could say that Ismael got his revenge hahaha! I did have a lot of fun because the matches weren't so laggy (we were both on PLDT) compared to my usual experience on XBL playing against opponents from other countries. I was able to record only 4 replays of our rematches; two of the matches were wins from me, while the other two were his wins. I'll be uploading some more in the days to come. NOTE: Fully retiring myself from the world of competitive gaming; no longer planning on joining any international competitions. I am interested in helping find future champions, though :) Never retiring from playing VF just for fun; more and more, it's becoming my favorite fighting game of ...

Sure to sell millions of copies worldwide, BIOHAZARD 5 (Resident Evil 5 in the US) now has a demo on the Xbox Live Japan Marketplace, downloadable exclusively by XBL Japan Gold members. It's about 476 MB . It should be available in other XBL regions soon.