v1.07 will update Supression mode, to remove the faction dominance in some maps. Furthermore, the update will introduce “Happy Hour” which will dish out double XP for the first hour you play every day. A good way for people to be re-introduced with the title, for sure.

Visuals will also be improved as well as exploits found on two maps in the game – much to the delight of the community.

The update is due in “late August”.

[PlaystaionBlog]

Basic Tips
You always want to maximize your points at the end of a round and using your field support abilities greatly contributes to that cause. So listen to your squad leader and get those FRAGO multipliers. Is the AA down and your squad leader has FRAGO’ed it? Don’t walk, SPRINT TO IT, and grab that multiplier!
Use your skill points early for field support skills. These GREATLY contribute to secondary XP.
Heal from the field. Get a resuscitation kit ASAP. Your squad will love you for it. So will your XP bonus.
Improved Repairing is key! Basically another way of saying score XP faster!
Wanna make friends the easy way with your squad? DON’T BLEED OUT! At point of death, first use your analog stick to scan the immediate area for a medic. If one is visible, call out on the mic and wait on the countdown timer as long as possible. Your pain is your squadmates’ reward. And please say thanks – courtesy is still appreciated on the field of blood and destruction.
Advanced Tips
If on defense during a Domination match, and you are spawning at your rear point, flank the outsides of your quadrant and reach the forward destroyed bunkers. Repair and move on to another destroyed bunker if possible to repair. Repairing a bunker before repairing an AA will spawn teammates that can help in the job of repairing an AA. Team trumps Rambo every time.
While repairing a forward bunker and notice that other bunkers are destroyed, pick the farthest bunker away from your current repair. Once the repaired bunker is up, the opposition will swarm that area to investigate. If you repair far enough away from THAT focus, you’ll have a greater chance of success in getting multiple bunkers repaired. Eliminating predictability is the key to survival.
While repairing ANYTHING, always be aware of being vulnerable to an easy line of site from the opposition. Don’t make yourself a target. Don’t be a clothing mannequin with a target on your back.
Healing around ANY, yes ANY FRAGO’d targets doubles XP. Take advantage. Be an XP shark.

In that spirit, here’s another Dev Tip from PS3blog

Basic Tips:

• The Commando is the exact opposite of the Sniper. It’s all about popping up in the middle of the enemy and wrecking havoc at close range. Heck, Commandos are the modern day berserkers… a highly skilled fighter to take on a squad at 5m, and completely crazy for doing it.
• The holy trifecta of your loadout is your weapons. The shotgun is perfect for one shot take downs, but it makes a lot of noise — so it’s best used when backup is nearby since everyone and their uncle is going to hear you. The SMG with a silencer is perfect for getting in there with little or no support because of its high fire rate with the added bonus of keeping you off the enemy’s mini-maps. Finally, don’t forget to grab the “Knives: Improved Swipe Speed” and “Knives: Expanded Reach” skills. Nothing says “Commando” better than rushing in with a med kit and a knife, dropping everyone and never making a sound!
• Seriously consider Improved Stealth and Health for survivability.
• Stay out of open areas and stick to cover and flanks so that you can safely rush your opponents when the time is right.

Advanced Tips:

• The Motion Sensor can keep you alive. Equip it and you can see your enemies on the mini-map every time they twitch. Know what’s around that corner BEFORE you get there.
• Shadows are your friend. Don’t make a noise and hold still and most of the time they will run right by you! Remember: you have to get to your objective alive and undetected.

Mass Effect 2 stays on top for the 2nd week running keeping Dante’s Inferno from getting there, of course EA probably wont be sad. Elsewhere on both lists MAG keeps a similarly consistent hold on its 7th place status in the top 10.

People still seem to be going out and playing Avatar….what the hell? Although the inclusion of Fracture in the Irish top 20 is far more worrying. As usual thanks to Chart-Track.co.uk

Ireland

1 MASS EFFECT 2 BIOWARE EA GAMES
2 DANTE’S INFERNO VISCERAL GAMES EA GAMES
3 FIFA 10 EA CANADA EA SPORTS ELECTRONIC ARTS
4 CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 INFINITY WARD
5 NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
6 JUST DANCE UBISOFT (FRANCE) UBISOFT UBISOFT
7 MAG ZIPPER INTERACTIVE SONY COMPUTER ENT. SONY COMPUTER ENT.
8 WII SPORTS RESORT NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
9 ARMY OF TWO: THE 40TH DAY EA MONTREAL EA GAMES
10 MARIO & SONIC AT OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES SEGA SEGA SEGA
11 NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. NINTENDO NINTENDO
12 ASSASSIN’S CREED II UBISOFT (MONTREAL) UBISOFT
13 JAMES CAMERON’S AVATAR: THE GAME UBISOFT (MONTREAL)
14 WII FIT PLUS NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
15 LEGO BATMAN: THE VIDEOGAME TRAVELLER’S TALES WARNER BROS.
16 PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 2010 KONAMI DIGITAL
17 MARIO KART WII NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
18 FOOTBALL MANAGER 2010 SPORTS INTERACTIVE SEGA SEGA
19 FRACTURE DAY 1 STUDIOS LUCASARTS LUCASARTS
20 GRAND THEFT AUTO IV ROCKSTAR NORTH PLATINUM TAKE 2

UK

1 MASS EFFECT 2 BIOWARE EA GAMES ELECTRONIC ARTS
2 JUST DANCE UBISOFT (FRANCE) UBISOFT UBISOFT
3 CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 INFINITY WARD ACTIVISION ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
4 DANTE’S INFERNO VISCERAL GAMES EA GAMES ELECTRONIC ARTS
5 FIFA 10 EA CANADA EA SPORTS ELECTRONIC ARTS
6 WII SPORTS RESORT NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
7 MAG ZIPPER INTERACTIVE SONY COMPUTER ENT. SONY COMPUTER ENT.
8 NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
9 WII FIT PLUS NINTENDO NINTENDO NINTENDO
10 JAMES CAMERON’S AVATAR: THE GAME UBISOFT (MONTREAL) UBISOFT UBISOFT

Zipper interactive’s CJ Heine, dropped by the PS3 blog today and brought some tip with him on how to survive Suppression. If your Raven it may be worth watching because we get pwoned in Suppression.

Here’s what he said:

or players that are new to MAG, Suppression is one of the first game types they can play – keep these things in mind as you get your feet wet:

• Wins and losses in Suppression do not count in the Shadow War, but you may also find Suppression missions less stressful because you don’t have to worry about impacting the war as you learn the game.
• Remember to stick with your squad. You will improve your survivability while learning how to fight alongside your team.
• There are no vehicles or objectives to repair in Suppression, so modify your loadout appropriately (no need for the Repair Kit or Anti-tank Mines).
• Learn the locations of the Resupply Points as they’ll refill your health and ammo, so knowing the way back to these quickly will keep you alive longer. They also tend to be player magnets, and can often become the center of combat.
• Most default loadouts contain a First Aid Kit, so practice using this on yourself when your health gets too low. If you have upgraded to the Medical Kit or have the Resuscitation skill, seek out wounded allies and try healing them.
• Don’t bleed out if you’ve been killed! Get familiar with the incapacitation and bleedout mechanics in Suppression, and see if there is anyone available to revive you before you choose to respawn.

Advanced Tips

• Go easy on the low level guys! They’re in Suppression trying to learn and gain their first few levels. You are all in the same PMC, and taking the time to help them and answer their questions could make the difference down the road in a Shadow War mission.
• Suppression is a great place to experiment with your new skill unlocks. The Suppression missions are small and time to combat is quick, making them a great source for practice targets. Use this closed environment to experiment with things like anti-personnel mines, items from the Electronics skill tree, new weapon upgrades, etc.
• Right on the edge of your next player level but short on time? Often times, it’s faster to play a quick Suppression match instead of a full Shadow War mission for that last bit of needed experience.

The Valor Massive, init

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the review, let me say why I waited until a week or two after release to post my thoughts. The main one is the structure of the game. At first, you begin your game with default kits and what-not, and go into a still-rather-epic 64 man series of matches. This gives you the chance to learn the often awkward layout of controls – even for hardened FPS veterans on the console. Once you rank up a bit (ranking is handled much in the same way it is in most online shooters, giving you XP points with which to grade your character and level up to unlock new weapon upgrades etc.) the game will open up to the Acquisition mode, giving you a chance to play with 128 players. Then finally, at level 8, you reach the plateau of 256 man online warfare. With this leveling system in mind, I decided it was worth playing through the title with the community before reviewing it. 256 people is the key sales pitch, and there’s no point in me dissecting a title where I cannot experience this first hand.

The game is set in the year 2025, a world where full-scale armed forces have been scaled back to provide national security alone, rather then going to war. To protect the world and give it peace, no army is allowed to leave its own borders. World peace ensues, but if Hideo Kojima has taught us anything, it’s that PMC’s (Private Military Corporations) will rise from the ashes of peace. The PMCs compete for contracts, always trying to undercut each other, thus leading to a global war. This began the “Shadow War” as they tried to run each other out of business by straining supplies and raising budgets. MAG revolves around three powerful PMC factions – Raven, SVER and Valor which all fight for supremecy of the war economy.

Your first move as a new recruit into MAG is to join a side. Much like an MMO like Eve or WoW, this faction will be yours for the remainder of your gametime. This gives you an affinity with the team and ideally helps you gain lifelong comrades with which to fight alongside. The three factions are evenly split, with cosmetics being the only real difference. Raven is a high-tech European based PMC, while SVER is the obligatory (for this type of game) Russian-type faction and Valor is the Americanised band of ex-mercenary types.

Most people have been joining the factions their friends are in, but the lack of ability to run two or more accounts in the game means you never really get to experience “the other side”. This means there’s a potential that you could join a faction and then find your friends are in another one, and as such can never join together in a party to play on the same team. On top of this, Zipper Interactive have said countless times over that each faction would be fairly balanced. Thanks to our American cousins getting Gamestop pre-order goodies at launch, a vicious spiral of dominance has come from SVER as most of the players who had pre-ordered for free SVER unlocks were far better then anyone else at the start of the game. Then their quick progression through the ranking system meant they have consistently kept the game out of balance. Two weeks on, this issue has not been addressed. It’s hard to see Zipper being able to fix this without over-balancing the other factions, or under-balancing SVER to counter-act their dominance. One can only assume they’re hoping time will iron this out.

Seeing this in motion is something to behold in a game

Kills, assists, healing and repairing in a match all gain you XP. With XP comes skill points, which can be “spent” in the game to improve your skills and equipment. For example, I have bought such items as a red-dot scope on my machine gun and the ability to run for longer periods of time. Unlocks come in “tiers” which are only available when you spend a certain amount of skill points in the previous tier. Thus ensuring no one player is far out-skilled compared to his team or enemies. Which is exactly what happened with the Gamestop unlocks for SVER.

The game is split into a few game types. Suppression is introductory deathmatch-style game type. Here, PMCs fight amongst themselves instead of each other to challenge new players. After some ranking up, you can play in Sabotage, which asks factions to capture or defend two control points. When the attackers control two points, a third objective opens up, which the attackers must destroy. Acquisition seems to be the fan favourite, however. Here the attacking faction must capture enemy prototype vehicles and take them to transport choppers. Each of these modes are simple tit-for-tat modes with a defending and attacking team. Most of which helps gamers learn what to do with MAG in the ever-increasing player count maps.

The main mode, however, is Domination. These matches are crucial to the game’s “Shadow War,” and each match will contribute to the success of each PMC on a persistant world map. 256 players are split into various platoons and squads, and each one will have its own attack or defense objective. Victory is obtained as determined by the amount of damage given/sustained, depending on the map. With so many players in the game at any given time, it seems to break down into individual battles as squads and platoons battle each other in pockets of the map.

Commanders control various options in the game which help the troops on the ground. Spawn locations can be mobile, with players capable of spawning within moving APCs, strategically placed helicopters and most impressively, you can spawn in an AC-130 and parachute into the map. Seeing a platoon jump out of a plane and land on the map is amazing. And when defending against them, shooting wildly into the air you really have to catch a breath and realise just how massive the scale of this game is.

As epic and wild as this game is, it is certainly not the prettiest example of a shooter. A lot of migrating fans frustrated by Modern Warfare 2′s online modes or Killzone 2 fans looking for something new and dependable will feel at home with the controls, but perhaps may feel a little cheated by the lack of graphical flare. It’s doable, but by no means pretty.

The maps are biblically huge in scale

Success and failure often hinges on how well a team is communicating. A chain of command allows a clear communication path all the way from the top down to the grunts on the ground, allowing a strategic plan to unfold. Often this doesn’t work out when players ignore commands and run off to do their own thing. At the same time, without listening and paying acute attention to what’s going on, it’s incredibly easy to get confused. Not least because the HUD (heads up display) is utterly confusing and unhelpful at the best of times. For example, nearby action is shown on the HUD with a white flash hinting at the direction of the firefight. Often your screen gets filled with these white flashes as the action is consistent and almost everywhere around you. A yellow flash indicates someone is shooting directly at you, with red letting you know that indeed, you’ve been shot. The HUD-map itself is useful for spotting enemy clusters and figuring out where your squad is, but can be useless when dictating what objectives are required. Often it seems too much is required of you, and thus the squad system falls apart as squads are not focusing on simple, localised tasks in the game. Having said that, when communication does flow and a team works together well, this game is fantastic.

One of the biggest shames, however, is that you cannot opt to stay in a game party with people once a round has ended. This is unless they are your friends on PSN and you’ve buddied up in a party system, with one player becoming the leader and loading everyone into a game mode and server. This works well, but it would still be nice for servers to go into a map rotation with the same player list, thus avoiding dumping every player out into their own menu systems only to re-join a randomly selected player list on a random map. This becomes tedious and annoying, not least because you often find yourself playing on the same map over and over again with no option to choose a different map, or even veto the one the server has selected.

Glitches exist in the game, too. This is to be expected but can be rather annoying after the lengthy BETA period this game had. One such glitch is occasionally falling out of a plane without a parachute. You then get a suicide point deduction which is pointless and if you’re having a bad game could disparage you from continuing to play, or just send you back to MW2 or Killzone. Sometimes, too, you can end up waiting a while for a list of players to populate the three faction required to make up the 256 man game. This can be frustrating, and if the game is taking time to populate lists now, I can only wonder what it’ll be like in a few months after the dust has settled on the marketing and rival games like Battlefield have hit the retail shelves.

Overall this is a good game, and the Shadow War aspect could lead to an interesting future for this title. It’s absolutely worth having a look at, even if it’s just for the sheer spectacle of having 256 people run around without having a big performance hit on the system. I’ve had a lot of fun playing through this game and unlocking new items and ranking up has given me even more incentive to continue playing. Thus making it, essentially, Playstation’s first proper foray into the murky world of MMO game types. Whether the community stays is really a question of how much upkeep this title will get. No doubt further DLC is due, but with that they cannot alienate the gamers who do not choose to purchase it. Some tweaking to the community and party system is needed to make this a real rival to Killzone, Battlefield or MW2 online, but this is certainly a good start for the Shadow Wars.

So, luckily the game has been out since Wednesday for gamers in the land of the free; meaning there are plenty of new gameplay videos to go around. I’ll add videos and info all day so keep coming back if your trying to convince yourself to pick this up this afternoon. Also check out our Hands on MAG previews here and here!

Metacritic Score (not many reviews up yet!) – 7.9

Update*

MAG servers have been down this morning for maintenance but  are back online now.

Average retail price for normal edition seems to be €44.99 – €49.99

Official game Summary:

The year is 2025. The optimism and harmony of the 2010s were completely eradicated by 2020. A global crisis loomed. Food shortages sparked riots, currencies plummeted, fuel reserves dwindled, and oil-producing nations began to ration what remained. It is a dark future. Governments earmarked money for humanitarian efforts, overseas security, and intelligence services which, over time, found its way the coffers of a small group of Private Military Companies. These three private armies (Valor, Raven, and S.V.E.R.) then began to recruit aggressively. Soldiers without a country, the contractors fight wars that never happened. This is the nature of the Shadow War.

From the award-winning developer, Zipper Interactive, comes the next evolution in gaming — MAG. A first-person, online-only shooter, MAG lets you experience battles with up to 256 real people across a global battlefield. Players join one of three PMCs fighting each other in a shadow war and can either become skilled operatives or rank up to eventually command their private army to victory. Featuring unprecedented online action of a scale never before devised with player controlled strategic assets such as calling in air strikes, mortar barrages and parachute insertions; the persistent Shadow War in MAG keeps players coming back for more.

Collectors edition extra’s:

Hardcore shooter fans will be able to get their hands on a limited Collector’s Edition of MAG™, housed in a special SteelBook™ and offering exclusive extra features.
Brand new combat armour for S.V.E.R., Raven and Valor. Choose from three distinctive uniform designs: Bulldog, Spyder or Hazard.
Three new dynamic themes for the PS3™ system.
* All extras will be FREE to download from PlayStation®Store by redeeming the PlayStation®Network Voucher Code supplied.

PMC faction videos:

Valor

S.V.E.R

Raven

———————————

Non Beta gameplay vids:

But maybe you can join a MAG club and bring your PS3 along to a gaming night, it would look at lot like this and I like it!

Add MAG experience to your CV? Why not!

Whats your poison going to be? Bioware’s rich expansive space opera or Zipper Interactives almost too good to be true stats driven dynamic online war? Or will you be picking both up first thing Friday morning?

Anybody out there want to admit they have taken some annual leave to see February in with a gaming  joygasm? Let us know.

Here’s some hype to get the juices flowing.

VS

Full list below;This list of dates was sourced from several sites.

Mass Effect 2 is top of my list, what will be the top of yours?

———————————————————————-

Game Title Publisher Release Date
Fable 2 (Platinum Hits)
Microsoft Jan 05, 2010

Dragon Age: Origins — Return to Ostagar DLC
Electronic Arts Jan 05, 2010 DELAYED

Darksiders
THQ Jan 05, 2010

Bayonetta
SEGA Jan 05, 2010

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond
D3 Publisher Jan 06, 2010

Army of Two: The 40th Day
Electronic Arts Jan 12, 2010

Vancouver 2010: The Official Videogame of the Winter Olympic Games
SEGA Jan 12, 2010

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Majesco Jan 13, 2010

Xbox Live Compilation: Volume 1
Microsoft Jan 15, 2010

Xbox Live Compilation: Volume 2
Microsoft Jan 15, 2010

Dark Void
Capcom Jan 19, 2010

Mass Effect 2 (Collector’s Edition)
Electronic Arts Jan 26, 2010

MAG
Shooter – Jan 26, 2010
Zipper interactive

Blood Bowl
SouthPeak Games Jan 30, 2010

Assassin’s Creed II: Battle of Forli DLC
Ubisoft Jan 31, 2010
Action

Assassin’s Creed II: Bonfire of the Vanities DLC
Ubisoft Jan 31, 2010