Finished. The campaign grinding is through. And what a great campaign this game has. We have to go back for achievement whoring and pick up more COG tags and Collectibles. The final battle is absolute chaos….thankfully there’s plenty of ammo lying around. You have to be able to focus your fire in several different directions while avoiding a crippling beam of light…it’s crazy to watch and the swearing you will do will impress everyone involved.

 There is one section involving a submarine that it seems every shooter game has a section like, and I HATED it. I compare it to being on the back of the truck and shooting the infected guys on motorcycles in Resident Evil 5. It’s cool to look at, but those out of nowhere on-rails shooting sections drive me crazy in games.

I was wrong about my surprise ending prediction from yesterday. The fallen soldier was in fact fallen, but then the person you spent all of Gears of War 1 trying to find falls as well. It’s a tragic ending, but it looks like a positive future awaits the COG. For gaming’s sake, let’s hope that’s not the case. A world with no more Gears of War games would be a sad place.

Conan had an awesome take on the game this week not being as violent as prior installments. YOU KNOW NOTHING OF FRENCH CINEMA!

Horde and Beast mode all weekend, because these Horde upgrades look fantastic. If the quality of Gears is any indication of the quality of game we will be treated to this fall, we’re all gonna be single and 100 pounds heavier thanks to all the great games this fall/winter.

-Butt Squad

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Got thru act 3, and Ice-T showed up. There are some frustrating parts in this act, as the A.I. doesn’t stay close enough to you to revive you should you go down. There’s a Lambent Berserker that makes an appearance, and he is a severe pain in the ass to kill. Your bullets don’t do anything unless he’s opened his ribcage (cool eh?) but if you can hit it, it means this beast is running straight at you at full speed and CAN be hard to avoid. He will hit you if you continue to shoot at him, but if you dodge then you don’t get as many bullets in him. It’s a tough battle.

Then the story takes a really dramatic turn that I don’t fully believe, but given the destruction involved, there’s no way it can’t be true. I’m trying to speak as spoiler-free as possible, but that’s hard. But the ensuing emo-ness that comes from one character thereafter is beyond justified, I just have a feeling that at the end of the game we’ll find out more. It can’t be done, it just can’t!

So today we will tackle Act 4, maybe 5…depending on how long it takes to write the Games for your Butt report for tomorrow. Still haven’t touched any mode but campaign, but that’s what the weekend is for, yes? That and football. What a great time to be alive!

Speaking of football…futbol to be exact, the FIFA 12 demo has been live for a couple weeks, and the collision detection has been a bit wonky to put it lightly. This video from the demo will make you laugh out loud at some of the crashes. Some of those legs are most definitely broken.

Tune in tomorrow at 930 for a full report on our time with Gears of War 3. Also there’s an absolute glut of Battlefield 3 news, we’ll see if we can stop gushing over Gears long enough to get to it.

-Butt Squad

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Day 1, Shelley and myself played thru the most of the first 3 acts of the Gears 3 campaign. Right off the bat, you remember what you love about Gears. Super dramatic tough guy posturing and just all around blowing stuff the hell up. The bad guys look super angry and are always fun to destroy. The executions are more varied, and the headshots are STILL the best in all of videogames. I defy you to find a more satisfying moment in a game.

So after day 1, Act 3 Chapter 1 is AMAZING. This was also where we stopped, but I wouldn’t mind playing this one again. You’re defending a COG base and just picking the bad guys off with longshots and Mulcher guns. When you get here, you WILL enjoy it. As mentioned in some other reviews, what would be an end-game boss battle is now a regular occurence. You always have a squad of 4 with you, so playing 4 way co-op IS an option. But the AI is better, but your teammates WILL walk right into your line of fire and screw you up. But it’s not the end of the world. Just keep firing. And remember how to active reload…I forgot all about that…

Don’t know how much of it we will get thru today, but you’ll hear more as it happens. One other thing I love about this game, EVERYTHING counts towards an overall XP. We reached Level 5 yesterday just playing the campaign. You could level up without ever playing the campaign, or without ever playing Versus mode. I really can’t wait to try out Horde 2.0 and Beast though…

-Butt Squad

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Gears of War 3, today. If you somehow didn’t know, I would like to think I helped at least one person remember to run out to get it. Friends, this is going to be a fall that is going to absolutely break your wallets, and probably your relationships. Especially in November when Skyrim finally drops. Hundreds, literally hundreds of hours of stuff to do is going to be too tempting to let go.

Look at IGN.com’s rundown of the 20 biggest games of the fall…and that doesn’t include stuff that’s already come out like Madden and Dead Island. Geez….can I leave yet???

-Butt Squad

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The reviews are mostly in, as the first of the truly AAA star games comes out on Tuesday, and everyone seems to love it. Personally, I cannot wait. I played Gears 2 for a looooong time, mainly campaign and Horde modes, and Gears 3 improves on both of those. But don’t take my word for it, here’s IGN’s review. I’m definitely looking forward to fighting off Lambent Brumaks MID-LEVEL now, and Beast mode (Horde but you’re the bad guys) looks like it will never get old. This is truly going to be a GREAT fall.

YOU WANT IT!

Also, we referenced this in the Games for Your Butt report today…the Harley Quinn motion capture feature will make you ashamed of erections past. It’s ok, because you need to know that you aren’t alone. There are support groups out there, just not anywhere near me because you people are freaks.

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-Butt Squad

Two big games come out today, both of which I want but just don’t have time to play! And it’s tragic! Dead Island is being described as Fallout with zombies. While the argument could be made that Fallout already has zombies (Feral Ghouls) they aren’t. This is a giant open world game with the one thing that people who love Fallout love the most, Side Quests! Yay! Check out IGN’s review here.

Also today is Resistance 3, the PS3-exclusive shooter that saves humanity from a crappy band called Chimaira. Oh wait, it’s Chimera…..that’s different somehow. At any rate, this is the higher rated of the 2 games coming out today. Shooting aliens just feels more satisfying than humans sometimes. Especially when they’re taking over.

-Butt Squad

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I’m posting this link as I’m clicking through it, so I don’t know the final answer, but this is a list of the 50 most dominant players in Madden history. Keep in mind there have been Madden games for like 25 years now, so there’s going to be a lot of names you haven’t heard in YEARS. But if Michael Vick from Madden 04 isn’t Number 1, I’m taking down this link.

Madden 12 is out today, but you already got it if you plan on getting it. I’m on an every other year basis with football games, NCAA gets the even years, Madden the odd. This year marking the release of the ‘12 games, I need to get NCAA….I’m slacking hard.

But we are one week away from Dead Island! Three weeks from Gears of War 3! YAAAAAy!

-Butt Squad

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A rating so rare it’s only happened once. Devin Hester got a 100 speed in Madden 10. But now for Madden 12 there’s a chance that 5 different players will have a 100 rating in SOMETHING. The categories are Throwing Accuracy, Elusiveness, Hit Power, Spectacular Catch, and Speed. There are clear leaders in each category, with names like Brady, Manning, Brees, Rodgers, Lewis, Harrison, Charles, C. Johnson, Peterson, and Edwards, and a LOT of outside shots. The voting starts next week, but each category gets its own day for voting.

Click here to read more, and find out how to get your vote in. Madden 12 will be in stores August 30.

The new Black Ops map pack comes out on Tuesday. Shelley is all about it because zombie mode is her favorite mode in COD. I’m not so sure, as this comes with 5 maps…1 new…a theme and soundtrack. The problem I have with this is that I already have 4 of these maps on my hard drive, just for Call of Duty: World at War. Do I really want to pay 15 bucks to not have to switch discs? I don’t know man, I just don’t know.

Check IGN.com for even more coverage of the Gamescon conference going on right now, because everything you’re going to play for the next year is on display there.

-Butt Squad

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You make me so excited. At Gamescon in Europe this week EA/Dice unveiled this new multiplayer trailer from Battlefield 3. And it is glorious. I don’t want to seem like I’m hopping on a bandwagon, but seriously, everything I’ve seen from Battlefield looks better than this year’s Call of Duty. But I’m one of those weird people who prefers Treyarch to Infinity Ward Call of Duty titles, so I’m not as pumped for MW3 as I was for Black Ops. But anyway, the trailer!

It’s beautiful!

-Butt Squad

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Spec Ops was a mode introduced in Modern Warfare 2 that I think I played twice. With Modern Warfare 3 just 3 months away, they released a trailer for the upgraded Spec Ops mode. And I have to say it’s the first thing I’ve seen from MW3 that’s made me say “That looks cool.” It plays more like a Horde mode. Now, with Gears 3 coming out in a little more than a month, there’s no way it can compete with the upgraded Horde 2.0 or the new Beast mode.

What’s sad, at least to me, is that the first thing I noticed is how much slicker the reloading animation is. The guns look like they spray all of the damn place, but that could just be the guns the player in the video was using.

This is going to be a very very very busy fall. But what are you guys currently playing? I’m running through Crysis 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 to get caught up on how Battlefield plays before 3 comes out. It’s going to be really hard to not pick up Rage on day 1, same goes for Dead Island…

-Butt Squad

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