Medal of Honor beta finally launches on 360

Having been live on both PC and Playstation 3 since the first of this month, the Medal of Honor beta has finally hit the Xbox 360 after suffering numerous delays. 

In a post over at the EA forums, community manager Matthew Pruitt spilled the details.
"The team is hard at work building an awesome gameplay experience for Medal of Honor," he wrote. "Your feedback is crucial to enhancing the experience."

The beta has also been extended until July 31^st due to the issues.

The multiplayer side of the Modern Warfare retaliation from EA is being handled by DICE, the highly regarded developers of the Battlefield franchise.

If you have a code, it can be redeemed at www.medalofhonor.com/beta. You can grab one by pre-ordering the game at selected retailers. The full game, which is a reboot of the classic World War 2 series, will be on shelves in October.

The Motion Control Wars: Part 2

Today, Microsoft officially announced the pricing of its Kinect motion controller. It'll be retailing at the not-so-modest price of £129.99 along with a free copy of Kinect: Adventures.
Also revealed was an Xbox plus Kinect bundle, priced at £249.99. At this point, it's already a lot more expensive than a Wii - not to mention that the Xbox in question only has 4GB of internal flash memory.

Far from the rumoured £50 price point (which, realistically, was never going to materialise), Kinect is in danger of pricing itself out of the market.
We've seen how poor the launch line-up of games is looking for Kinect, and unless anything radical is unveiled between now and its release, it'll be stuck without titles that justify its existence.

In short, Kinect will be a mini-game feast for the opening months of its release. You can get that from Nintendo, and the shortcomings of the 4GB bundle are obvious. Indeed, it tots up to the same price as a PS3 slim console minus Sony's motion offering, Move.

But how long will it be before that 4GB needs upgrading? Yet more cash. For the long-term, Kinect really isn't a viable investment. People - families especially - who just want the system itself and to simply top it up with a few games every so often are not going to be best buds with Microsoft when they discover extra outlay is needed after a certain point.

And all for some frantic flapping during mini-games? On that front, Microsoft is four years late to the party. For such entertainment, there's only one word on the minds of consumers: Wii.

Call of Duty Multiplayer Will Remain Free – For Now

Nigh on a week ago, video game industry analyst Michael Pachter suggested that Activision should take advantage of its huge online user base by charging players who want continued access to Call of Duty multiplayer modes.  

Whilst not a new idea, similar models that have launched on Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 have not seen the same wild success as Activision-Blizzard PC mainstay World of Warcraft.

That doesn't put off Activision bigwig Robert Kotick, though, who discussed the idea merely a month back.
"I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow [if I could]," said Kotick, who also recently bemoaned Activision's lack of income from multiplayer services they supply.

Today the two main developers of the series, Infinity Ward and Treyarch, have each profusely denied that such services will appear in their games in the future.

Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling quashed the rumour, stating that "nobody has to pay to play COD or MW2 multiplayer, nor will they."

In the Treyarch camp, community manager Josh Olin confirmed that a pay to play model will not be appearing in 2010's Call of Duty title Black Ops.

It remains to be seen what newly-formed studio Sledgehammer Games will be bringing to the table for the franchise. Assigned to develop Call of Duty in 2009, Sledgehammer may well hold the key to the COD subscription model.

What does seem certain, though, is that both Infinity Ward and Treyarch will resist implementing such a service, once again highlighting the supposed poor relationship between Activision and its studios.

Music Review: Recovery - Eminem

Music reviews are something I've often considered, but ultimately shied away from. Unlike video games, music is really very subjective. Each and every one of our tastes are different - and who is a reviewer to say whether or not you'll like a particular album, track or artist?

The same could be argued for video games, of course, but in that case a technically flawed product is always technically flawed no matter which way you look at it. With music, discerning a rating is difficult. You don't get broken music. Unless you use your CDs as frisbees.

Music invokes emotions in ways that other formats can't. And music critics have it tough. All you have to do is look at the spread of reviews that Marshall Mathers' sixth album, Relapse, received on its Metacritic page. Some reviews scored Relapse with as much as eight points difference from one another.

The user reviews section just down the page is a different picture. It's filled with dissatisfied fans blasting the recent efforts of Mathers, criticising him as 'trying too hard', and 'less than average'.

Artist interaction with fans is something that doesn't happen enough. Oasis' stage presence - or total lack - epitomises the level of recognition fans have come to expect now. It's unusual then, that in a direct address to fans, an artist will admit their own faults. Mathers goes as far as accepting criticisms aimed in his direction in the lead single Not Afraid, confessing 'Let’s be honest, that last Relapse CD was eh/Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground'.

It's a statement which forms the general theme of the album, the subject appearing prominently once again in Talkin' 2 Myself (which features excellent vocals from Kobe), which documents Mathers' struggle in reclaiming his rap crown - 'Them last two albums didn't count/Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushin' 'em out'.

Most impressive is they way that Mathers keeps his word and truly shows exactly why he was held in such high regard following his first albums. There are blips, such as the Relapse-esque So Bad which appears to have survived from the first cut of the album around a year ago, but as a whole the album reasserts Mathers' position as one of the greatest lyricists around.

Now returned is Eminem's uncanny ability to weave deep meaning into only short verses which have been missing from his music in recent times, and Recovery represents exactly that - it's a true return to form, and one that sees Mathers' status returned once again.