Community member lv99Ron went through a really rough period recently. He almost died. He went through three emergency surgeries and spent three weeks in ICU during his ordeal. Thankfully, he survived and is doing much better now.
As you can imagine though, he owes a lot in medical bills so community member Alex Barbatsis organized a Charity podcast starring himself along with Chad Concelmo, Colette Bennett, Brad Nicholson and Stella Wong. The podcast is available here and all we're asking is for you to donate at least 99 cents to help towards Ron's bills. Show some love, Community.
Hollie and the gamescom team brought us plenty more interviews and previews, Samit checked out Fallout: New Vegas, win Puzzle Quest 2 for Steam, Catherine gets a sexy trailer and more happened on 08/19/10.
The main story quest of Fallout 3 (spoiler alert!) ended the game, but the "Broken Steel" add-on changed the ending to let you go back into the Capital Wasteland. That seems unlikely to happen with Fallout: New Vegas because of the way the game ends (and what the ending tells you). At a New Vegas demo last month, senior producer Jason Bergman told me that the ending to New Vegas "explains things well beyond the end of [the] game," including "what happens to every one of our factions and major characters."
That means that once the endgame begins, you can't go back into the game world. Don't worry -- just before the ending, the game warns you that you've reached the point of no return, and automatically saves right there. After the end credits, the game gives you two options: you can load that save game, or go to the main menu. When I asked Bergman why Obsidian chose to do it that way, here's what he said:
We tell the full story of every one of your companions through the end of their lives, and it's weird to do all that and then jump back and say, "Okay! Now you can keep going again." So we end the game, and if you want to do other quests, then you go back to that save game before the end sequence.
The way Bergman explained the structure of the ending to me made it sound like Bethesda won't do something as clumsy as the retcon of "Broken Steel" again, in order to justify the add-ons for New Vegas. We'll have to wait and see.
Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks, will launch for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC on October 19, 2010, in North America, and on October 22, 2010, in Europe.
If at any point you had convinced yourself that I wasn't rock and roll, this video will indeed disprove that notion! Meet Alex, the global PR for Mad Catz, a company who specialize in peripherals with one of their biggest lines being officially licensed gear for Rock Band.
Alex spends time talking to me about the rather expensive near-replica guitar peripheral that is hanging around my neck and explains just how close to the real thing they have gotten. The interview is also laced with delicious video of Daniel Carneiro, Dan Seto and Sean (of BritToid) rocking out with other variations from the Mad Catz guitar line.
I have to give it up to Alex, the guy is an absolute legend. Points for being awesome good sir!
Hopefully, you heard about Volition's charity auction. If not -- even though you can't see this right now -- I'm menacingly scrunching my face as if to say you aren't very nice at all. Long story short, the auction was for a voice role in Saints Row 3. It's a small, goofy part.
Cheap Ass Gamer's own CheapyD won the auction with $1,725. Not only is this great news for the Ashley Ames Foundation (the charity in question) and the site's ever-generous CEO, but it's going to be a treat for us as well. Anyone who has listened to CheapyD before knows how memorable his voice is.
Now, a character in Saints Row 3 is going to have his distinct tone; it's almost like an easter egg for those of us who stay current with videogame websites. So awesome!
What the hell is InstantJam? The short answer: a Guitar Hero clone on Facebook. Nuff said.
The long answer is a social game with serious new technology driving it: it's the first music title running on the InstantAction 3D graphics engine, a system that drives games like the web-based Secret of Monkey Island port and Instant Empire: Legions. Instead of rendering crummy graphics in your browser with Flash it utilizes your PC's hardware -- and it does this without relying on cloud-based techniques like OnLive. You may remember them as IAC-acquired GarageGames, the company behind the Torque engine. I had a chance to play it and it's not vaporare -- it works! The technical aspect of their presentation was among my favorites at the GDC booth, Crysis 2 included.
We also had an opportunity to speak to game creator Louis Castle about his new role in the company and find out more about the tech and this noisy social game was about. Read on!
First of all, just because it's a Facebook game don't assume you can't play with your beloved plastic guitar. For InstantJam can communicate with any existing guitar peripheral to play it (with the exception of the Wii guitars for licensing reasons). The 360 guitars can be booked up by adding a USB RF-adapter to communicate with it. The PS3 guitars can be hooked up via Bluetooth. USB peripherals just work. If you don’t have a guitar, you can just use the keyboard. While the default keys seemed to be ASDFG, you will be able to remap the keys to pretty much whatever you want.
It's all about the notecharts
InstantJam works by having a list of ever growing notecharts, which run in the thousands already, that can be used in conjuction with any music file that is recognized. Castle said that they used the Billboard Top 100 songs from the past 20 years as a starting point, so most people will be able to find something they recognize and like. InstantJam can also scan your computer for music files, which are then imported into a playlist. No data will be sent over the web, so you don’t have to worry about your pirated mp3’s as Castle doesn’t want your privacy compromised in any way. Of course I had to ask him if you could just pirate songs and play those, and you can as long as they are the right length. Even if it has a couple of seconds before or after the song that are not officially part of the song, other tech can see through that and still recognize the song.
Users will be able to share the standard Facebook wall-cancers as well as challenge friends to beat their score. A ghost can be recorded to play against, although that is still under development and currently you could only play against your friend’s score on a song. Another ridiculous feature was being able to create embed code so you could just post InstantJam on your blog.
Players can also create their own notecharts. If you have a ton of Frets on Fire notecharts yourself, it shouldn’t be too hard to get the hang of copying those notecharts to the InstantJam format although you can’t just import them for logical reasons. If InstantJam would become a success, that would mean that players can have access to tens of thousands of songs over time.
Micropayments for tunes and threads
While browser-based gaming has changed drastically over the years, some companies still have the model of using a portal for users which then eventually become customers, leading to revenue. Game creator Louis Castle believes that instead of portals (but not instead of thinking with portals) viral is the way to go and that networks of users should access the content directly and then create revenue. If you look at the last two years of social gaming on Facebook, there is little to disagree on that front. His proposed business model is to get users to discover and share, then play free to play content, which then leads to revenue. What better way to explore that model than to put your game on Facebook?
InstantJam follows this model, which is not exactly the same as Zynga’s, in a number of ways, starting with the way it looks and works on the back end. With the rising popularity of Facebook gaming it makes perfect sense for InstantAction to reinvent themselves with the times. Piggybacking their game on InstantAction gives the game a few technological marvels: By having the processing part done on your computer, and the music files stored on your computer, InstantJam only has to send a minimum of data and note charts to let you play what is basically Guitar Hero with thousands of songs on your computer.
An interesting concept is that you can buy a song from Amazon or iTunes via InstantJam and you will get more credits in return than the song is worth. So if you buy music on Amazon or iTunes, you might as well buy it through InstantJam and get credits in the process. Which then means you are already playing the game or will probably keep playing it for a while, or that you might buy more music through Amazon or iTunes. Castle was anxious to see how the music industry would react to all of this if his game becomes a success.
You can buy skins for your guitar with in-game currency, but you can also buy things like special new guitars, which give you bonuses to fans and in-game currency per song, for credits that cost money to buy. Or buy special buffs that for instance compensate for when you strum too fast. You can trade credits for in-game currency as well and all that jazz; the usual Facebook game currency and payment system.
The man behind the game
Louis Castle worked in roles of programming, art direction, accounting, licensing, to being a compensation specialist and a visionary in development structure. So what would make one of the more interesting but largely unknown Louis Castle move from over 20 years of experience in the game industry and being a creative at EA to a company that makes free to play web games? To understand that, you first have to understand Louis Castle. He firmly believes you have to continuously reinvent yourself as a person and to always seek out those things that challenge you, instead of just being content with reaching a certain level in life and staying at that level.
Castle asked me what kind of music I wanted to play. Unfortunately, I mostly listen to awful euro dance musical art so that really didn't apply, so I played Riders on the Storm on Expert for a bit. It wasn’t too hard but it was around the difficulty of Hard for a game like Guitar Hero 5. Castle persisted in asking me euro dance artists just to see if he had it in his collection of 1500 songs on his laptop. I asked him if he had Scooter, which he never heard of. He did have Lady Gaga though! And not just that, he had around 20 songs of Lady Gaga. Because he grew up in Vegas, I chose to play Poker Face on fullscreen mode. Many mah mah mah maos were made. This was good.
InstantJam is currently in beta and is available on Facebook right now.
Bethesda's Fallout 3 set the bar for post-release support in this console generation with its robust package of five add-ons: "Operation: Anchorage," "The Pitt," "Broken Steel," "Point Lookout," and "Mothership Zeta." When I asked Fallout: New Vegas senior producer Jason Bergman if DLC would be coming for that game, too, here was his excited-but-short-on-details reply: "Yes! Yes, we do! That is the answer to that question!"
He wouldn't go into specifics, except to assure me that Obsidian and Bethesda are "working on getting the game out the door first." But in case you were wondering, plans are certainly in place to put out New Vegas add-ons "after the fact."
We likely won't have to wait too long after the game's October 19th release for the first DLC to hit. When I guessed out loud that New Vegas add-ons would be coming "way down the line," Bergman corrected me: "Not way down the line, but down the line." So if you're worried about running out of New Vegas content to explore, don't be. If anything, if you complete the game quickly, you can try a second play-through on Hardcore Mode to fill the gap.
From squealing like a fangirl with Doug Lombardi, I suddenly found acting as lady-like a possible and bowing after ever sentence as I was faced with the Japanese development team behind the new MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV.
I talked with a Japanese translator as I attempted to find out some of the key points to the newest Final Fantasy game. The Japanese team was happy to tell us all about the new title, why they have been unable to announce the game for the Xbox 360 and of course, what direction they plan to take the all-important battle system.
It's times like these that make me wish I could somehow cram two header images into one post.
I really struggled between going with the one above, and one in the attached gallery -- you can guess which picture, I'm sure. But just in case you can't, it was the photo that depicts Chuck in a heavily armed wheelchair sitting next to a stuffed bear with a red headband who also happens to be heavily armed.
Props to the person(s) responsible for presumably going through hell to achieve these tremendously goofy shots. Your behind-the-scenes magic is greatly appreciated!
On a wind swept plain stand a brother and a sister. Swords drawn ready to fight off the creatures that are heading towards them waving swords of their own. A swift blow from the brothers axe takes out one and fireball from the sister, a powerful mage, reduces another to pile of red goo. More waves of enemies arrive, the brother makes a gallant vow to keep on fighting until they are defeated. Soon, a giant troll charges into the fray and the duo battle the beast until it is defeated by a devastating spell cast by the sister.
Then we abruptly cut away. “That’s not how it happened”, declares a woman in black. “Well it's how I remember it” retorts a red haired gentleman. In Dragon Age 2 your story is not your own and Bioware have used this to make some interesting changes.
The flexible reality afforded by this notion has allowed Bioware to deal with a few complaints that were aimed towards Dragon Age: Origins. Firstly, they have taken the opportunity to improve the combat, making it much more immediate and visceral. Gone is the queuing of attacks while you wonder off to make a cup of tea. You can take control of any of the members of your party whilst still issuing commands to the others but you cannot simply relinquish control of the combat to the AI just to play out.
Bioware are also keen to give the world of Dragon Age a more unique visual style, something they are achieving by making everything seem that much more exaggerated. Swords clash in an amazingly loud clang of metal and enemies gush blood when attacked, even being reduced to nothing more than a pair of feet when they are hit with a fireball from a mage.
The conversation wheel is undergoing its first major overhaul since its inception. It's now the Emotion wheel and with every conversation choice that you have there is a small icon in the wheel to let you know whether it will be good, bad, sarcastic or any number of other variables. Bioware acknowledged that people had found the occasionally ambiguous nature of some of the options to be confusing, causing people to agonize over an option or make the wrong choice all together. The addition of this little visual clue they feel will make things easier on the player.
The PC version is getting a more streamlined UI with Potions having a slot in the bottom right of the screen, characters getting the bottom left and a hot key bar running along the bottom. It is a clean, uncluttered look that leaves players with a much more clearer view of the action.
A lot of this change Bioware puts to listening to the fans on forums. A place where few would dare to tread, Bioware sought out the problems that gamers had with the original and it’s expansion and took note. The result of this is a tighter looking game that will allow the Dragon Age series strengths to flourish.
Prepare to unsheathe your sword in March 2011 when Dragon Age 2 is released for the Xbox 360, PC and PS3.
Fable III is upon us in two months and Peter Molyneux had 20 minutes to talk about what he thought should take at least three hours. He wanted to talk to us about the story, the mechanics and some of the evolutions from Fable II.
By now you know that as the son of the protagonist in Fable II, you start as a rebel who needs to build up followers to start a rebellion that results in you becoming the king. Molyneux drew half of a graph that showed what he called Act 1. The other half of the graph was about you being king in Act 2. He thought that games and movies tend to have formulaic stories where the hero starts out very weak and ends up with more power.
Becoming king and having to deal with the aftermath of what is normally the endgame scenario is his way of playing around with avoiding that formula.
In the demo I saw, the player had to infiltrate a renegade camp. He needed a disguise to pass as a mercenary in order to do so. To that end, you had to go to the Sanctuary, a hub that was created for you by your father. The Sanctuary can be called up by what Molyneux called an "innovation to the start button."
Normally the start button just summons a 2D menu with options, or things like armory options. In Fable III, you still have the same functionality in the form of an armory and a dressing room which provides a visual representation of those traditionally 2D menus. It also has a butler voiced by John Cleese. He provides some humor and comments on whatever you choose in the armory or the dressing room. In this case, selecting the Mercenary Outfit elicited a comment about how that outfit is great for acting like a mercenary. Truly invaluable feedback. Good thing it’s John Cleese who says it.
In Fable II, only 20% of players changed their weapons in the entire game, unless they were kind of forced to change their weapon. For example, when a chest with a weapon in it was put in their path, they might change their weapon. Molyneux said that that really pisses him off and that it’s rubbish design that only 20% of people bothered to change their weaponry. That in conjunction with the fact they were bored of making new weapons. So they decided to let you the player craft your own weapons.
Fable III lets you craft your own unique weapon by not only choosing your own preferred design but also by the way you play the game. If you mash the attack button all the time, your weapon will evolve differently than when you use charge attacks, block a lot or when you time your attacks. Molyneux hates the idea that in the end game your weapon would be worth less than the most expensive weapon you can buy. It should be worth more! You can swap weapons and magic on the fly in combat, which also affects the way your weapons evolve. Although no concrete details were given about exactly how this weapon evolution process works, you should get the general idea.
Storywise, it should be better than Fable and Fable II since Molyneux thinks those games lacked story. Becoming king is all about making promises in order to gain the needed support. But when you are king, the way you handle those promises will result in different situations. There was something spoiler-ish things he couldn’t talk about to that effect, but he gave me a “pffff” face when I asked him if it was something that would carry over to Fable IV.
Finally, being king won’t be any type of god sim or anything. It will still feel like Fable so it will involve you running around and killing things when you are not screwing with spouses or manhandling your offspring.
Sega has announced that theSonic the Hedgehog 4 delay time has been spent very well indeed, listing a number of improvements that have been made to the game since last we saw it. The biggest news is that the controversial minecart level has been totally overhauled, and now is only a small part of a single act.
Act II of Lost Labyrinth is no longer a motion controlled minecart level but a torch-based exploration one. Most of the Act is in pitch black and Sonic has to keep a torch lit to see where he's going. Encouragingly, Sega has said that "Sonic is more than about speed" and has designed this level to showcase that. The cart will only be at the end of the Act, and won't require fiddly motion control.
In other changes, Sonic's animations have been tweaked so that his legs now become blurry a lot faster. This is a small fix, but it was weird to see Sonic take so long to hit top speed, so this should make the game feel a lot better. Finally, Sega has balanced the gameplay a little, working on making a game that is challenging but not frustrating.
Seems like Sega really took some criticism on board and is working to meet expectations, which is fabulous news. I love that Sega admitted that speed wasn't the only part of a Sonic game that mattered. I've been saying that for years. All in all, it's great to see Sega care, and I hope that continues.
I love Assassin's Creed II. I love it so much that I may or may not have had a nose bleed when playing it. So far, Ubisoft have shown us plenty of videos and even given us some hands-on with the new Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.
Today we got to see and discuss the single-player mode. For those that have seen some of my previous videos, you will entirely understand me when I said that I "fan-girl'd" out and sat like a wide-eyed child for the whole presentation.
I spend time with Vincent Pontbriand discussing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, the new world map set in the beautiful Rome and take some time to discuss what new features we can expect to see. Everything from paragliding to horse-back assassinations that all look smoother than ever.
Oh Ezio, I cannot wait to have you back in my life!
Hey we have merchandise! COOL! We have a number of Destructoid shirts available for purchase and we're phase some of them out ... FOREVER! Yes, some of these shirts are going to disappear for good in order to make room for new designs.
So what's on sale? Well the timing of the sale on this first shirt couldn't be any better (worse?) The cheapest torso cover is the Cashwh0re shirt for $10. This was created during the controversy surrounding GameSpot's Kane & Lynch: Dead Men review.
Also on sale are the RetroforceGO! shirts. We have both male and female sizes for $12 of possibly one of the greatest podcasts ever created. That's not hyperbole, kids. You're doing yourself a great injustice if you've never listened to our amazing podcast of retroness.
We had a look at a rough version of the Kinect Dashboard today. Actually, they started the session by announcing that Xbox Live would be available in 9 new markets: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Chile, Colombia, South Africa and Greece. So if you live in any of those countries, yay for you. I asked if they were planning to expand into China, but only got the standard PR talk as a result. So, no China or funny comments. Boo for us.
With that out of the way, we got a hands-off showing of how the Kinect Dash works. If you have been following that, there wasn't really anything new to show. If you haven’t: it’s basically a 4-by-2-window wide Wii Channels design. You hold your hand over a window for 3 seconds to enter. Instead of using the + and – buttons, you hold your hand over the next and previous page buttons at the sides and snap your hand to the opposite direction, like you’ve seen those people do in the commercials.
Kinect Chat is a video chat program: you are in a box on the left and your chat partner is on the right. If someone walks into view as you talk, the screen zooms out to compensate. For when you want to have a collaborative bitch fest about politics, or if you want to hold your own MST3K bad movie night while wearing silly costumes, you can watch news video and other content together.
After being shown what we basically already knew, we were allowed to try the Kinect Dashboard ourselves. Of course, the most important thing was to mess with it as much as I could to try and ruin it. My current 360 setup isn’t very wide, so the first thing I tried was standing about 5 feet from the Kinect camera to see if it registered my hands all over the dashboard. While this Kinect kit was the same as the E3 one -- meaning it didn’t have auto-tilting to compensate for your position and it wasn’t calibrated to me -- I was surprised to see that it did register my hands for the area I’d use. I couldn’t try then and there whether it would actually work for games, though.
Next up was playing with the Zune feature, which will also have movies in the EU as well as the music content that is currently available. You can use your hand to scroll through the movie at about 3 to 5 minutes per second, with screenshots of the movie for reference. I’d say it had about 1 screenshot for every 5 minutes or so. Unfortunately, there is no way to scroll faster. So if you have Return of the King on Zune for some reason and want to skip to the Battle of Pelennor Fields quickly, forget about it.
Back in the dashboard, I tried to grab the previous and next page buttons with two hands at the same time. It only grabbed the button that I first reached. Trying to using my right hand to grab the left button and vice versa did seem to work, as the camera just tracks your skeletal structure. I wonder how that will work for my Cousin Boneless though.
Standing up and sitting down works as it should. If you move your hand behind the chair you are sitting on, it just makes your hand cursor disappear. Standing behind someone who is sitting in a chair and waving your hands all over the place and in front of his face, makes the Kinect kit crash, though. They had to hold their hand over the camera to make it recognize us again and then it kind of worked.
Until I made it crash again.
And again with some more fooling around with hands up and down and behind objects. Supposedly the retail kit should work a lot better, but it didn’t really inspire much confidence about that.
I asked what would happen if you have, say, two wives and five kids on one couch that is far enough away to fit inside the Kinect camera angle and they're all pointing at the movie. Would it select a Master user with full control, or would it just go crazy with everyone in view? The Microsoft PR on hand wouldn’t say anything about it, and I didn't get any info when asking if it was possible to select one person as a Master user who would have access.
If you say “Xbox, take photo”, it takes a photo which you can then share in ways they wouldn’t get into. The logical thing to ask was, of course, "What would happen if you were naked on the couch with your sex partner, and were explaining that 'It can take a photo if you say Xbox, take photo'?" While they didn’t want to get in to that too much, either, there are actually parental controls that are already on the 360 that will include options for what you can do with Kinect. So getting kids to take pictures of themselves and share it with you will require some effort on your part. This will probably sadden a specific Destructoid IRC user in particular.
So the experience with the Kinect Dash overall was that it will probably work as long as you don’t actively try to mess with it -- which you will do on the first day you have Kinect in your home. It works well enough, but I can’t see myself using it when the controller is just faster for everything but taking pictures.
While this was a relatively old version of the Kinect hardware and software, or so they said, there are some things that Nick Burton (Rare) mentioned at a GDC session that did inspire some confidence about the whole Kinect thing. Basically, the Kinect hardware is just a webcam, a depth camera, and an array of three microphones that can be used to cancel out background noise -- the rest is all software.
The thing is that for the last couple of years, the Microsoft first-party studios involved with Kinect have been developing and playing around with their own things. For instance, Blitz Games wanted to do a Kinect version of their Biggest Loser Wii game. But Kinect scans your body to create a skeletal representation for tracking and creates a 3D image map of the environment. So if you lie on the floor with your feet towards the camera and want to do push-ups, the cameras will only register your feet, and there is no data to create a workable 3D silhouette of your body. Without getting too technical , Blitz Games managed to make it register enough that the game can see you laying on the floor. Which is another thing altogether: Kinect software didn’t register a floor in the beginning so that had to be coded in as well.
Burton mentioned that first- and third-party developers are likely to be porting all their casual Wii games to Kinect (and Sony's Move, probably) , constantly creating new software solutions for problems that they encounter. These solutions then get sent back to the Kinect engineers at Microsoft, who then turn their rough but workable solutions into proper integration with the Kinect software. All of that is then put back into the XDK which is available to all ‘Official Xbox Developers.’ This means that while the hardware will probably stay the same for a long time (there is no real interest in a HD camera from the developer side, at GDC at least), Kinect will constantly be upgraded on the software side and via the bi-yearly XBL updates.
What that really means though, is that we just need a couple of developers who want to play around with making a "hardcore AAA" title for Kinect and for them to run into as many problems as possible. Because the more they fail at it, the more solutions they will come up with, which other developers will then be able to use. And the more options and tools developers have at their disposal, the more likely it is that they will come up with something totally new. This is probably going to be a year or so away -- at least from the looks of it -- but one can hope. Hell, if you don’t like playing sports games with friends or don’t care about realistic fur shaders on animals to tickle, at least by then the price will have dropped.
Fun fact: Nick Burton from Rare joked about a seagull simulator for Kinect where you flap your hands to fly and squat to do a poop. I don’t know if they actually made that for fun, but release that for free on XBLA with 200 in achievements at launch, please!
[Editor's note: No official images of the Kinect dashboard were provided. Images above are from the leaked shots from July.]
In the world of MMOs, we all know the heavy hitters. There's World of Warcraft, maybe a little adventuring in Middle Earth, some crime fighting in City of Heroes and Champions Online, maybe some free-to-play action. Then there's Star Trek Online. When it launched in 2009, fans fell for the opportunity to enter the universe “where no man has gone before”. A substantial enough of a hit, Cryptic has been active in making sure new content comes to the game.
One side-effect of Star Trek Online is the “seasonal” approach to adding content. Atari and Cryptic have Season 2 available right now for Star Trek Online, and the new content will appeal to Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike. With new plot elements, mini-games, cameos and a whole lot more, it looks like there's a lot here to appeal to anyone wanting to make a return to the Star Trek universe. I had a chance for the Executive Producer of Star Trek Online, Daniel Stahl, to answer a few questions about all of this new content. We discussed the general feel of the new series, and what they hope for the future of the game. For anyone thinking about returning to Star Trek Online, this would be an important interview to read. Hit the jump for our discussion.
Destructoid: Now that the game is entering "Season 2", please describe for me the feelings you hope to evoke with this expansion. What sort of new experiences will we see with the game? Is this considered an expansion or a seasonal update?
Daniel Stahl-Executive Producer of Star Trek Online: Season 2 was a lot about reaction to the feedback we received from players. People asked for non-combat missions, so we delivered. People demanded more PvE Klingon content, so we built that.
We’re also trying something new with weekly episodes. They’re brand new, level-agnostic content that people of either faction can play. We’re debuting a new one each week for a while. The episodes are connected and tell a story new to Star Trek Online. We want people to have something to be excited about each week, and we think this is a good way to generate some of that excitement.
Season 2 isn’t really an expansion – it’s just a big update. We structure all of our updates like this. There will be a Season 3 and Season 4, as well.
Overall, I’d say we want to evoke a feeling of excited satisfaction from our current players, and to continue to provide a sense of wonder and potential from all of our players new and old.
Please describe the Diplomatic Corps. Star Trek has always been about intercultural interactions more than action and shooting, and what will fans of this side of Star Trek find?
The Diplomatic Corps is a new gameplay option for players. It has its own reward and advancement system. As you complete special missions for the Corps, you gain diplomatic experience and then progress in rank, which gives you access to higher-profile missions.
One early mission is called Quarantine. A disease has found its way onto your ship, and it’s up to you to work with Starfleet to develop a cure to save you and your crew. There are also First Contact missions, where you can reach out to civilizations that have just developed Warp technology. You can learn about the new species and speak with their leaders, and so on. But that’s just the beginning of this system. We’re going to develop it more based on what people tell us they want to play.
Will we see more references from the show make an appearance in the game?
Definitely! This is more of an “as we can” thing, and if it fits. Since Star Trek Online takes place at later time than any of the shows, it won’t make sense to see some characters from previous shows. That doesn’t necessarily tie our hands, though.
For instance, in Season 2 we introduced a gambling mini-game: Dabo. Leeta, a “Dabo girl” at Quark’s Bar, was a popular recurring character from Deep Space 9. Our community really wanted to see her included in our presentation of Dabo, so we designed a holographic Leeta and recruited Chase Masterson, the actress that played Leeta, to provide voice talent.
Plot-wise, where are we in the game now? How has the overarching narrative of the universe progressed?
The universe is still at war. The Federation and the Klingons are still engaged in hostilities, and the Borg are trying to take advantage of the instability to move against both groups. To make matters worse, the Undine, a shapeshifting race from beyond the Alpha Quadrant, have emerged as quite a threat.
In Season 2, we’ve added the Fek’ihri, a fabled enemy of the Klingons. They feature in the Klingon-exclusive episodes we put together. And in our weekly episodes, players will square off against the Breen. So really, things are pretty hot everywhere.
How has the response been to the game been? Working with the Star Trek franchise has probably been a dream come true. Has it been the flexible experience you hoped?
Star Trek fans are some of the most passionate and knowledgeable fans out there and they’re definitely not shy about giving you their opinion about the game. They have really given us encouragement and feedback as well as some great ideas for what they would like to see in the game. We’ve been taking a lot of cues from them on our mini-game designs, for instance.
I’ve been a Star Trek fan for a long, long time and I was really excited to be given the chance to add to such an awesome franchise. Fortunately for us, CBS has given us a lot of freedom with Star Trek and have been great about providing feedback and any sort of information we may have needed throughout the development cycle.
Where do you hope to go next with Star Trek Online?
We really want to get Klingons caught up, content-wise, with the Federation. And in general, we really want to polish the experience to a mirror shine. I want the things our players encounter to be good, not just there. That’s coloring everything we’re doing going forward.
When I spoke with him at a Fallout: New Vegas demo last month, senior producer Jason Bergman told me that the game is much more open-ended than Fallout 3 was. While New Vegas has no distinct "good" and "evil," you certainly have the option of playing it in those ways. In fact, you can go through the entire game without killing anyone, although Bergman cautioned that it's "exceptionally difficult." (That sounds like a challenge for those who are willing to tackle Hardcore Mode.)
And on other side of the coin, you can murder all but one of the game's 2,200 or so characters. (Bergman explained that developer Obsidian had to make that particular person un-killable, because otherwise, you could get yourself in a corner where you would be unable to finish the game.) So go to town, you psychopathic killing machines!
Bring harmony or wanton destruction to the world of Fallout: New Vegas when it launches for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, on October 19, 2010 in North America, and October 22 in Europe.
The renaissance was a time of great invention and inspiration. However, it might never have come to the city of Rome had it not been for a guild of assassins stalking the shadows, eliminating the repressive elements of society with lethal precision.
That might not be how the history books tell it, but this is how the events took place in the single-player portion of Assassins Creed: Brotherhood.
The beautiful city of Rome is your hunting ground, and at roughly three times the size of any city found in Assassins Creed 2, you can be sure that there are plenty of opportunities to stealthily tail your prey from the rooftops with deadly intent in mind. By freeing the people from their oppressive rulers who hide in twelve towers dotted across the city, you will be a catalyst for the beginning of the Renaissance. Eliminating the powerful residents of these towers and burning the structures to the ground causes art and commerce to blossom with your encouragement.
This system, called "Rome upgrade," replaces the Villa upgrade system of Assassins Creed 2 with you investing in the local economy -- albeit in a way that will benefit you. In the playthrough we were shown, Ezio approached a boarded up storefront and was asked if he wished to invest in it. This has benefits for the player above just the aesthetic change to the environment. For example, newly opened-up tailors can provide you with new outfits.
All of this improvement, however, has to be fought for. And only a mad man would try to free a whole city on his own, which is why in this Assassins Creed, you’ll be able recruit local rebels to your cause in order to form the titular Brotherhood, a group of skilled killers with a similar taste in white robes. Your brothers, on the other hand, won't start out with such incredible skill. As such, bringing them on missions will grant you points that can be used to level up weapons and armor. In the missions you undertake yourself, these improvements won’t be quite so apparent thanks to your posse eliminating designated targets and providing distractions at your behest.
The improvements you make to members of your Guild of Assassins will be of great benefit to both you and them when you send them out on missions. You can contact your guild using carrier pigeons, which are found in pigeon coups scattered throughout the game world. Additionally, you can send one of up to twelve possible recruits out into continental Europe in order to perform tasks that will earn them more skill points and impact your mission in Rome. The assassin you send out into the field won’t stand much of a chance unless you level up his armor and weapons, which is why it is important to take them out on missions with you. Death when your assassins are away from your side is possible and, most importantly, permanent.
Your team can be as individual as you want to make it. You choose what weapons and tools they take with them -- even what sort color and style of robe they wear. Getting anything out of your brotherhood will be entirely dependent on just how much you want to put in.
To prevent you from simply ordering your men to kill everyone so you don’t have to do the legwork or face certain death in battle, the Brotherhood assists operate on a cooldown that gradually builds itself back up over time. However, you can grab yourself an extra assist that won’t affect your cooldown timer if you get any of the Brotherhood tokens found in the streets and rooftops of Rome.
With only limited use of your brothers in a mission, the skills that you have are key to your survival. The combat has been overhauled and now operates much like Batman: Arkham Asylum's flow system. If you keep your flow of attacks going without being hit, the damage you do becomes greater. It’s a system that worked well in the Dark Knight's outing last year, so the inclusion of a similar system in the equally stealthy Assassins Creed series makes a lot of sense and looks solid.
With the newly tuned-up combat system and the series' familiar, elegant stealth elements, you will have to sneak into one of the twelve towers and dispose with the most-powerful person within. The way in which you do this is open to how creative and sneaky you wish to be. Straight up knocking on the front door and killing anything that moves is possible, if a little foolish; especially since there are a myriad of secret passages and back doors that you could take instead.
Upon eliminating a tower leader, the guards' moral will drop; some will still try and fight you, but most will flee in terror. The tower is now yours and it’s time to bring it down. Outside the tower, Ezio scales the building, leaping between window ledges en route to the tower's roof. A few guards who have yet to abandon their stations stand a couple of feet below, unaware of his presence. Brotherhood assassins are summoned to dispose them quickly and the ascent continues. At the top, a cutscene kicks in showing Ezio stalking about with a flaming torch in hand. The building already beginning to burn quite heavily, he turns, runs and leaps from the rooftop into the safety of a bale of hay.
Ubisoft is promising that the single-player will have up to 15 hours of gameplay for you to discretely kill your way around Rome, including developments with Desmond Miles that the Ubisoft representatives didn't wish to elaborate on. The single-player looks very strong, if not the best in the series so far. When combined with the new multiplayer mode, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood looks like a tempting prospect indeed. Keep a stealthy eye on this one due out November on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Respawn Entertainment, the new studio being led by Jason West and Vince Zampella of Infinity Ward fame, is creating an EA-published multiplatform game; we knew this already. What we didn't know -- or, some of us didn't know -- is that it's not going public for quite a while.
EA Partners' David DeMartini, speaking with Eurogamer, has made it all official-like. "This is two guys who really know what they're doing having to go find a place for the team, buy chairs and desks and furniture, find new technology from the ground up, and pull a team together," he says.
"Amongst all that administration they've pulled together the core of a fantastic team and they're starting to work on a whole bunch of ideas to try and find what is going to be the one right idea for us."
So, the very nature of the game itself is still up in the air. This shouldn't come off as shocking, or even unexpected, for that matter -- these things take time.
Fallout veterans will likely be the only people up for the challenge of Fallout: New Vegas' Hardcore Mode. As Bethesda's Jason Bergman explained, "It's not so much about difficulty as it is making every decision you do and how you play the game much, much more meaningful." Hardcore Mode forces you to play the game carefully, and it takes away many of the game-y concessions you might be used to:
ammunition has weight
you have to eat and sleep every day
stimpaks heal over time, not instantly
crippled limbs can only be healed by a doctor or a doctor's bag (which requires high Science and Medicine skills to use)
it's the Nevada desert, so you have to keep yourself hydrated -- and since this is a Fallout game, some of the water in the world is irradiated
As you can see, it's a very "tactical way of playing the game," one that keeps you on your toes at all times. According to Bergman, about half of the game's QA testers chose to play through it in Hardcore Mode. Will you be among them?
It’s easy to look at Fallout: New Vegas and assume that it’s merely Fallout 3 in the West instead of Washington, D.C. But while New Vegas is the same type of game, and it’s running on the same engine, and you’ll be doing a lot of the same kinds of things you did in Fallout 3, making that assumption is not only selling the game short -- the assumption doesn’t really hold up at all.
At a preview event last month in New York, Jason Bergman -- a senior producer working on the game at its publisher, Bethesda Softworks -- handed me an Xbox 360 controller and gave me free rein to roam around in a beta version of New Vegas. He also answered the many questions I peppered him with, including a number of questions comparing this game to Fallout 3. His responses indicated that, aside from using the same engine, New Vegas couldn’t be more different from its predecessor.
[Editor’s note: I will be discussing the very beginning of Fallout: New Vegas, so if you want to go into the game without knowing anything about the opening of the story, well, you’ve been warned. --Samit]
Fallout: New Vegas (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [previewed], PC) Developer: Obsidian Entertainment Publisher: Bethesda Softworks To be released: October 19, 2010
Fallout: New Vegas takes place in 2280, three years after Fallout 3, on the opposite side of the country. But in a post-apocalyptic America, explained Bergman, “News travels very slowly, so there aren’t really very many direct connections to Fallout 3.” That’s liable to be the case when nuclear weapons take out much of the country -- although two of the locations that seemingly lucked out were the Hoover Dam and New Vegas. Why weren’t these places bombed? How is the dam still running? The Hoover Dam is the backbone of the storyline in New Vegas: the keys in this world are the dam and the New Vegas Strip, so whoever controls them has the power.
The story structure is one of the main differences between Fallout 3 and New Vegas. There was only one main story in Fallout 3; it could go in a few ways, depending on your Karma, but you were hitting the same story beats. New Vegas has a much more non-linear story, and you determine how it plays out. About halfway through, the game presents you with a few “very different possibilities”: you can side with one of two factions, Caesar’s Legion or the New California Republic, or with Mr. House (he’s the overseer of New Vegas; this is the independent route). You can also go against Mr. House and still be independent, “so it’s four paths, but [really] more like three and a half.” There’s some overlap between the paths, but each one has its own unique quest, and “the order in which you do everything is very different depending on which route you go down.”
You play as a courier in New Vegas, and as the story opens, things aren’t looking bright. You regain consciousness in front of three mean-looking men, and one of them explains your fate:
You’ve made your last delivery. Sorry you got twisted up in this scene; from where you’re kneeling, it must seem like an 18-carat run of bad luck. Truth is... the game was rigged from the start.
Then he shoots you in the head, and his friends start shoveling dirt onto your body. The next thing you know, you’ve awakened in a dingy house, where the kindly old man sitting in front of you introduces himself as Doc Mitchell. He rescued you from your shallow grave after the gang left you for dead, and nursed you back to health.
At this point, you build your character’s identity -- you’re not a vault dweller like you were in Fallout 3, so you can pick your own age here. After I made myself Hispanic (he looked more Indian than the “Asian” choice did), I named my character “Sam” and set my S.P.E.C.I.A.L. abilities. Next, Mitchell asked me some psychological questions, which, as Bergman explained, basically serve the same purpose as the G.O.A.T. from Fallout 3 -- the answers determine what kind of player you’ll be, and the game suggests a skill allocation based on them. Of course, you’re free to ignore it: the game thought I might like to focus on Melee Weapons, but I decided to put more points into Guns (a skill into which Fallout 3’s Big Guns and Small Guns were merged) and Science.
Many Obsidian employees are former members of Black Isle Studios, the developer behind the first two Fallout games, so they brought back Traits from Fallout 2 for New Vegas. They’re entirely optional -- you can choose none, one, or two -- and most of them have some positive and negative effects. For example, Four Eyes gives you a +1 bonus to Perception as long as you’re wearing glasses; without glasses, it’s -1 Perception. Wild Wasteland brings back the humor that was in Fallout 2 -- if you choose that Trait, you might run across a refrigerator outside of Goodsprings with a fedora and a whip inside.
After I had set up my attributes, Doc Mitchell -- who lived in a Vault as a child -- handed me a Vault suit and a trusty Pip-Boy. Before I left his place, the game asked me if I wanted to enter Hardcore Mode. I declined, but according to Bergman, about half of the game’s QA testers are playing in Hardcore Mode. Mitchell suggested that I visit Sunny Smiles at the local saloon to learn some desert survival skills, so I did. She brought me out back to practice shooting at sarsaparilla cans, and then asked me to come along with her for some gecko hunting.
I asked Bergman about the first- and third-person cameras in New Vegas, because I found the weapons in Fallout 3 to be mostly useless unless I was in V.A.T.S. (the game’s non-real-time targeting system). He told me that Obsidian re-balanced all the weapons so that they work better outside of V.A.T.S. -- in fact, guns in New Vegas have iron sights, a feature that modders had to add to Fallout 3 on the PC. “We wouldn’t claim it’s a first-person shooter, but it’s definitely a lot better than it was [in Fallout 3],” said Bergman. In addition, Obsidian tweaked the third-person camera to be “more useful,” although the player character’s walking animation still “slides” around the world.
The geckos were more difficult to kill than I had anticipated -- perhaps due to the crappy hunting rifle that Sunny had given me -- and Sunny ended taking out most of them herself. I then decided to wander off into the world, but as I was leaving the town of Goodsprings, the game asked one last time -- just like Fallout 3 did when you left Vault 101 -- if I wanted to change Sam’s skills and attributes. As I ventured off into the wasteland, I asked Bergman to comment on setting and tone of the game.
He noted that New Vegas has “a very different feel from Fallout 3.” This game has a much more warm color palette -- Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland was a bleak, “almost monochrome” world, but New Vegas features blue skies and the array of colors that you would expect to see in the American West. I thought of Red Dead Redemption as Bergman told me that the sunset in this game is “very red.” Another effect of the Nevada setting of New Vegas is that the game is much less urban -- “while we do have cities, they’re kind of smaller,” explained Bergman, noting that “Nevada is very spread-out.” Not only is the world of New Vegas more colorful, it’s more varied: “We have a lot of deserts; we have a lot of canyons; we have valleys; we have mountains,” said Bergman.
In my travels, I came across some bandits who killed me. Here, Bergman told me about the morality system in New Vegas -- or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Fallout 3 may have had a much more gray world, but the morality in New Vegas is much less black-and-white. “You can say the [New California Republic is the ‘good path’] and Caesar’s Legion is the ‘bad path,’ but the NCR is going to ask you to do some really nasty things. So the NCR is -- they’re better than Caesar’s Legion in some regards, but they’re much, much worse in others. [...] Like, if you wanted to play this [on] the complete ‘good’ path, [you’d] have to make some hard decisions.”
Along those lines, “Karma has been kind of abstracted,” said Bergman. There aren’t good, neutral, and bad levels of it, and people no longer react to you based on it. Instead, the Reputation system is a replacement of sorts for Fallout 3’s Karma. As you progress, you get Reputation meters with each of the game’s major cities and factions. So if you have a bad Reputation with a particular city, the people there will treat you badly. “They don’t care what your Karma is -- Karma is more how you see yourself; Reputation is how other people see you,” Bergman explained. The Reputation meters will show up on the world map, so you’ll be able to keep track of them easily.
The communities in New Vegas are “more functional” than in Fallout 3, but they’re not exactly well-off. You’ll be able to see how they’ve been living -- some get by through tourism; others subsist by scavenging -- and one of the ways in which you build up your Reputation is by helping people do what they need to do in order to survive. A few places are even able to grow crops. That’s right: there’s real, living vegetation in New Vegas; I saw some plants and thought of Galaxy News Radio’s Three Dog, who asked in Fallout 3, “Have you guys and gals ever seen...a tree?” You can pick plants for the game’s crafting system. According to Bergman, it works like Alchemy from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion -- at any campfire, you can cook and make things like poisons and healing potions.
If you loved the music in Fallout 3, it’s back -- and thankfully, there’s more of it. Each of the themed casinos has different background music, and the game features two radio stations: one plays country music, while the other sticks to the popular music of the 1950s. I didn’t make it to the New Vegas Strip in my forty or so minutes with the game, but I could already feel myself getting engrossed in the world, just like I did with Fallout 3. “We really wanted it to be a standalone game,” Bergman told me; so far, New Vegas looks to offer a very different experience -- albeit one that could be just as engaging.
Since it was first revealed that there would be some sort of lead-in game for PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Arcade prior to the launch of Red Faction: Armageddon, I always envisioned it as playing like "Red Faction Lite" -- y'know, same core experience, but not quite as "finished."
We now know that's absolutely not the case. Red Faction: Battlegrounds is its own thing: vehicular combat presented in a top-down view. I'm simultaneously happy it's something different and sad that I don't much care for car combat games.
According to THQ, two add-ons are planned for Battlegrounds. The first throws new vehicles into the mix, naturally, and the second will be related to the SyFy Red Faction movie. More than that, project manager Steve Powel says "other platforms are being discussed." PC version, anyone?
[Our awesome community is putting together a number of charity events to help out Lv99Ron with his medical bills. Help a fellow Dtoider out and be entertained at the same time! -- JRo]
Recently our friend, Lv99Ron, almost died. After three emergency surgeries on his lungs and three weeks in the ICU, Ron is making a full recovery at home. We are so thankful and blessed to still have him in our lives. Our thanks and prayers go out to the doctors, nurses, staff, family, and friends who helped him through this ordeal. If you want to read a fantastic, scary, and ultimately happy ended detailed summary, check out Ron’s blog post I’ve Come To Far To Die Now.
Last weekend I was joined by Chad Concelmo, Colette Bennett, Brad Nicholson, and Stella Wong. Needless to say, it was glorious. I am happy to make available the Ronathon All-Star Podcast. Our main topics are Donkey Kong games, Chad’s Virtual Console reviews, the future of DLC, and PAX/convention advice and tips. Our off-topics include fawning over Brad Nicholson’s Muscles, cybering, Birdo’s history, 3D, and whether Brad will see Expendables or Scott Pilgrim first. And that’s just the beginning.
There was an issue with E-junkie and any donations that were made previously when downloading the podcast did not go through. Currently, the podcast can be downloaded for free, but we are asking everyone who downloaded/downloads to please donate 99 cents using the button below. I know paying for a podcast is kinda weaksauce, but I must stress that every cent is going to Ron and his family to help pay for medical bills. We will not be taking any money to help with distribution or any other payments whatsoever. This is a charity podcast and not a commercial endeavor. Let this be a good deed done and you will be repaid full with laughter, fun, and entertainment (not to mention how much sexier you’ll become).
Please click below to download the podcast, and PLEASE make sure to donate!
Final Fantasy XIV director Nobuaki Komoto is at gamescom showing off his work this week. It was there that Nowgamer caught up with him to ask about how he thought his game would fare against Western RPG powers Bethesda and Bioware. I would have loved to have seen his face and reaction when asked this, but the words alone give a pretty clear picture of his attitude on this:
"Although I do think both developers are creating great games, unfortunately, both are so far virtually unknown to the mass public in Japan and the sales are quite disastrous, too. They only seem to cater for a handful of core gamers."
I know that's not a direct slam, but it's a pretty clear shrug-off. "Disastrous" is a pretty strong word.
Sure, he's just calling 'em like he sees 'em, but both of these Western devs have loads of game making power that should not be underestimated. Even in Japan.
Words cannot express how much I want Catherine right now. Famitsu, the world's most prematurely-scanned game rag, has splattered a saucy new trailer and a sack full of screens onto the internet, and I'll be damned if this game doesn't look pretty f*cking awesome.
Developed by the team behind Persona 3 and 4 and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, the new action-adventure title skews - as promised - towards the adult range of the spectrum, oozing style, sexiness, Japanese rap, and...walking lambs that wear ties. It might not be work-safe, though, so buffer with caution. Suffice it to say that it goes far beyond suggestive pizza-eating.
In the space of a single night Atlus has managed to erect this game all the way to the top of my most-wanted list. Is it on yours yet?
Check below for some more details teased out of of the Famitsu preview.
As mentioned last night, the game stars Vincent, a 32-year-old bachelor who's become something of a "herbivore man" (a Japanese slang term for men who've given up on finding love), at least until he meets the 22-year-old Catherine, who's described as having a "charming face" and "well-rounded proportions".
Soon after, Vincent starts having nightmares, wherein he, stripped down to his boxers and somehow equipped with ram's horns, must climb an endless staircase to wake up, lest he end up slaughtered, like the other "lambs", who happen to be talking sheep that walk on two legs (and occasionally wear neckties).
As might be expected, there are some ties between the dream world (where the in-game action should happen) and the real world, as a news broadcast in the trailer reports a young man's dying in his sleep, and rumors that if one falls while experiencing a certain nightmare, one dies in real life.
Overall Famitsu's coverage was a bit light on information about Catherine's actual mechanics, but had some intriguing quotes from the staffers working on the game:
Director/Producer Katsura Hashino said that he and the team "wanted to try something different" for their first HD outing, before going with a "mainline" RPG, and that the results they got were "quite interesting". They're aiming to provide a deep experience with lots of play for gamers to get into, while feeling new and interesting.
Character Designer/Art Director Shigenori Soejima said that Catherine provided the opportunity for the team to try things they wouldn't otherwise dare, as well as enabling them to do things that are definitely more adult-oriented, with more "daring and audacious" visuals as well as some "shocking" scenes.
Composer/Sound Director Shouji Meguro, aside from providing helpful keywords for the game's music ("classic", "adult", and "erotic"), noted that when he answered questions with "I'm working on a game that's not an RPG", he was referring to Catherine. He joked that perhaps once this project was done, he'd be able to respond with "I'm working on a game that's an RPG".
Catherine's 2D animated scenes will be produced by Studio 4°C (Transformers Animated, Tekkon Kinkreet, Thundercats 2011). Vincent's Japanese voice will be provided by Koichi Yamada (Cowboy Bebop's Spike), and Catherine will be voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro (Durarara!!'s Celty and Bakemonogatari's Kanbaru).
The game is about 80% complete, and is scheduled for a "Winter 2010" release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The official site should open up on August 23, and more information might come out as the Tokyo Game Show rolls around.
Until then..well, I guess I'm stuck with a case of game-preview blueballs.
The Smithsonian is hosting an exhibit called "The Art of Video Games" next year. This exhibit consists of game footage, interviews, large prints of screenshots and playable classic game consoles. The creators say it will be the "the first to examine comprehensively the evolution of games as an artistic medium."
Expect to see everything from the Atari VCS to the PS3 in the display that spans four decades of gaming. The public will be asked to assist with the selection of materials by choosing the games that they feel best represent parts of gaming's history.
The exhibit will be located on the 3rd floor North, American Art Museum, and will run from March 16 through September 9 in 2012. If you go, snap some photos and share with us!
Earlier this week we found out that Sony and Subway have teamed up to give away some awesome PlayStation 3 related prizes. The "Fiery Football Frenzy Fueled by PlayStation" promotion is due to Subway's new PlayStation-branded "Fiery Footlong" sandwiches, the Turkey Jalapeno Melt and the return of the Buffalo Chicken sandwich. All you need to do to enter for a chance to win is redeem the codes that come with a drink or bag of Sun Chips on Subway's website.
Subway is also giving away prizes through their Twitter. There will be eight "fire drills" over the next few weeks where @SubwayFreshBuzz will tweet a link and the fastest people to enter their e-mail address will win prizes such as Gran Tursimo 5, $20 Subway gift cards, a year supply of Subway sandwiches and more!
The Twitter account will give people a general heads up on the days the giveaways will be held. They gave away a ton of copies of Little Big Planet 2 today as a matter of fact! Another giveaway will be held tomorrow on Subway's Twitter.
Yay yay yay! PlayStation 3 owners, it's almost time for you to experience one of the funnest beat 'em ups ever as Castle Crashers is coming to the PlayStation Network on August 31. It's been a long time coming as Dan and the crew at The Behemoth have been working on the project for over a year and a half. Snap!
The PSN version of the game will have some new stuff, such as the new volleyball mini-game. The Behemoth will be at PAX next month to show off Castle Crashers PSN ON A FREAKING ARCADE STYLE CABINET! BattleBlock Theater will also be available for playingness.
Be sure to check back later this weekend as we'll be giving away some Castle Crasher goodies in celebration of the upcoming release for the PlayStation Network!
[For his Monthly Musing, AwesomeExMachina explores bias not in terms of developers or platforms, but simply in terms of aesthetics. Want to post your own Monthly Musing? Click on this and start writing! -- JRo]
As I sit with pen and paper and try and make an annotated list of my various video game biases, I find myself crossing out each entry just after I’ve written it. It makes complete sense for a moment, for instance, to say that I’m a bit biased towards the Xbox 360 over other consoles. I play it significantly more than my Playstation 3, which often sits tearfully idle with one little red light blipping like a lonely matte-black-painted Cylon. I once owned a Wii, but not anymore. It fell casualty to the brutal Gamestop trade-in when rent was looking a little short. But this was only after I’d stopped playing the poor thing for months on end. No, my 360 is my main event each evening after work. So much so that if it red-ring-of-death’d tonight, I’d simply bow my head gracefully and whisper 'You earned it, little buddy'.
I have no problem stating my preferences. The internet made that the easiest thing of all time. But what I find hard doing – even contradictory – is to consciously claim to have bias over a console or a genre. Because the title of fanboy is not one must people assign to themselves. Rather, it’s a title bestowed upon them for time spent being belligerent on forums or making blunt judgments on a particular game series without a moments thought. No one consciously forms a one-sided opinion or becomes obnoxious and obstinate on purpose. To co-opt a friend’s theory on hipster self-awareness, no one is a fanboy by admission.
This is why these things don’t interest me – console obsessions and series worship – because they are just opinions. So when searching for where you truly have bias, it’s never quite as easy as things you love and things you hate. It’s more complex than that. It’s not your opinions themselves, but those little viewpoints that carved your predilections into shape. It’s those sinister machinations under the decisions you make that drive your choices in bad way. In a negative, unintentionally ignorant way. We all have them and I think I've come to terms with mine.
I still judge games on how pretty they look.
It’s not something I deliberately do. I have such constant and vocal respect for things like story and characters and voice acting and balancing unique gameplay with player freedom. If a game makes me react emotionally, catapulted upright with excitement or toss my controller away from me in fear, I tell all my friends at length the same way one might rant endlessly about a great chapter of a book or the best scene from a film. I love games enough to spend my waking hours writing about them and trying to explain to family and friends why they’re worthwhile. Yet, despite this near-religious reverence, I still look at a game’s flashy visuals and make snap decisions.
Perhaps it’s a nagging sense of financial welfare. The very same voice that keeps my soda off-brand and my furniture Ikea. The same sensibility that has prevented me to this day from being the proud owner of a Die Hard Arcade cabinet. Perhaps it’s this that is responsible for taking something I so lovingly see as an exceptional avenue for expression and funneling it into a single aspect. Artistic interest turned into frugal contemplation. From thrilled to thrifty. But that really can’t be the whole issue. I’m not some paragon of fiscal responsibility. My entertainment center is nothing short of a shrine to capitalism and the Macbook Pro I write this article on was purchased before my previous laptop even made so much as a single death rattle. Games are expensive and I need to know I’m buying a quality product before I drop $60.
Making judgments on graphics alone isn’t all that an illogical conclusion to land on either. Looking at a game is one third of how we interact with them. The other two being our brain’s interpretations and the following actions transmitted to the hands and back to the game through a controller. But before I can get my hands on a game, all I have are visuals. It becomes instinctual to rely on how sharp the edges look and how realistic the water can ripple to formulate a verdict. It’s a positive indication of time spent on production and it’s so easy to translate that into assuming quality. When the graphics don’t glisten and wow me with individually crafted textures, my opinion of the game involuntary suffers a few points. If a game looks closer to last generation graphics than current, I assume the quality of the game must follow suit.
I can recall a borderline unhealthy obsession with every shred of news about Fallout 3 prior to its release. Its very existence thrilled me. But when E3 dropped the first in-game footage, I recall a chunk of that excitement evaporate as I watched how rather glaringly brown and dull the environment was. I was, of course, aware the game environment was designed to replicate the apocalypse, but I suppose I hadn’t expected it to be so accurate. The jerky motions of the enemy characters – the strange lunges and standing-in-place shuffles – shook my reverence. Despite actually caring about wandering the wastes artfully crafted with surprises, intrigue, and that classic Vault Boy humor style, I let the shallow element of graphic sheen throw my opinion off track.
But when the game actually did come out, the graphic quality hardly even blipped on my radar. As I left the vault for the first time and my eyes adjusted to the harsh light, I did not focus on how detailed the rendering of the distant Lincoln Memorial happened to be. Instead, I stood quite literally dizzy with decisions. Where do I go? What are my skills? What is my character all about? How am I going to get by in the end times? Whether or not my .22 revolver – the only thing that separated me from death at the hands of demented savages - had the most detailed texture model possible never even crossed my mind.
Sometime later, I stared wispy-eyed at footage and stills of the Xbox Live Arcade title Limbo, but after hearing the price I second-guessed myself, as did plenty of others. Simple graphic design automatically transmits the idea of an equally simple game. Was a 2D platformer that operated in only two colors worth this money? I asked myself this very question and, shortly after, attempted to run a steak knife into that part of my brain.
Because Limbo has so hauntingly beautiful to me, in a way that defied even the space of this article. I couldn’t explain why I felt such concern for a voiceless, expressionless boy lost in the woods. He was only a roughly-shaped-blob of a person, when all was said and done. The enemies weren’t much more themselves. But this is where the success of the game blew my mind. How I could find myself tensing fingers around my controller, suddenly filled with skin-crawling terror, by nothing more than a crudely shaped oval with six thin leg-reminiscent lines protruding from its edges. It was the roughest design of a spider you could compose, but my brain instantly understood and I feared for my otherwise happily dry pants.
Of course, it works both ways. After the unmitigated success of Braid, the gaming community (myself included) seemed to see Limbo as a success before it was even released, based solely on its risky and experimental take on regressive graphics. To assume a visually over-polished game must be lacking in other elements is just as presumptuous as seeing merit in an artistically stylized game before playing it.
Either way you cut it, taking a game at face value is this medium’s version of judging a book by it’s cover. Graphics are a huge part of how we interact with games, but they represent only a minute benchmark of a much larger piece of work. Graphics have to be, of course, passable for it to be playable in the first place. But too quickly we shut down titles on appearances alone. The pixels stutter here or there and the edges of shadows aren’t smooth enough, so we dismiss the entire game as lacking of finishing polish. As if a poorly rendered explosion or stiffness to a character's motion belies an undercurrent of neglect from the developers. This is an oversimplification so obtuse that it's practically criminal.
So I admit my shame. I’ve given into marketing glitz and flashy visuals. A defect in my outlook that needs immediate correction. Especially considering that once, a long time ago, I snubbed the very idea of Gears of War as a dingy, lackluster, lifeless, derivative, space marine-looking pile of garbage upon first appearance of a measly handful of screenshots. Now I hail it as one of my favorite titles of all time. When games tease you with their flashiest moments or make you cringe with ugly cutscenes, it’s easy to fall into shallow tendencies and make naive critical decisions. But video games have a uniqueness that can’t be understated. Rather than a single, static, unchangeable experience, games are an intricate machine that displays ever-increasing complexity the more you bypass simple appearances and explore its dark corners. All games, even the ones that don’t size up graphically, deserve to be trod through to truly appraise their worth.
You know how you could potentially (not realistically) go through Metal Gear series games without killing a single enemy? That tradition continues with Metal Gear Solid: Rising, set to be released next year.
Konami confirms that the no-kill is possible with Rising and hints that there may be Achievements for those that make it to the end of the game without taking a life. IGN says that you can opt to slice an enemy's weapon instead, causing them to run away. If you do manage to cut off a few fingers in the process, know that you will be forgiven. Also know that mechs are fair game -- just don't kill humans.
I'm betting that this will be the most stressful experience ever.
It was neat coming back to BioWare's big gamescom announcement -- Mass Effect 2 on PlayStation 3 -- after a week-long vacation filled with scary experiences that didn't revolve around the Internet.
The recently surfaced shots of DC Direct's new Mass Effect figures are neat, but not quite on the same level. Even still, as a Garrus fanboy, I'll take what I can get. Series 2 includes him and Mordin (shown above), in addition to Miranda and Legion.
Those last two haven't been photographed yet, but you know how fast the 'net moves. We'll keep you posted!
I'm not one that needs convincing. I am always playing new PSP games. Regardless of the number of releases or sales data, there's still this odd air around Sony's first portable. People like to dump on it. I don't care. I'm done being the PSP's champion. I'll just continue quietly playing all my beloved portables while the internet bickers endlessly.
Sony is out doing damage control on these rumors with a statement with PSUK's Michael Denny:
"We don't have anything to announce and nor are we giving anything away if we say we’re always looking at the future as well,“ he told GamesIndustry.biz. "For now, we’re still concentrating on the PSP as a very attractive proposition."
He's trying to blind your eyes from a shiny new touchscreen thingy that they may or may not be showing off/working on. He continues: "It's natural that in the lifecycle of a platform as the cost comes down they do skew younger and we’re having a lot of success with the more child-friendly products on the PSP and it’s certainly a great proposition to buy in on, and the PSP has life left in it yet."
GamesIndustry also had Ubisoft chime in on the PSP. They say that they're happy with sales. "Assassin’s Creed did very well, Avatar did very well, Prince of Persia is doing good," said Ubi's Alain Corre.
Of course, Sony's not going to tell you to give up on a current product and wait for the next one.
Halfbrick has been slowly making a name for itself on iTunes. Fruit Ninja has been a stellar success, and its latest game, Monster Dash, looks set to be pretty big to o.
Barry Steakfries has returned from his time traveling adventures in Age of Zombies to tackle an even wider variety of beasties as he runs and jumps through a series of world locations. I like "runner" games, although finding good ones can be difficult. Is Monster Dash among the rare gems, or the common trash? Read on to find out!
There's no shortage of runner games on the iPhone. Canabalt, Hellkid, Dynamo Kid, the simple controls for a game in which you run from left to right and avoid stuff makes it an obvious choice for many App developers. Nevertheless, despite the simplicity, most devs find a way to muck it up. Dynamo Kid's controls are unnatural, Hellkid's swinging mechanic is poorly implemented. It's an easy genre to get wrong.
Fortunately, Halfbrick has done it right. Monster Dash is inventive without being overly complex, and simplistic without being remedial. The aim of the game is to run as far as you can, hitting the bottom left corner of the screen to jump and the bottom right to shoot. Barry will handle the running part himself, it's up the player to keep him alive.
Every 1,000 miles, Barry will be transported to a new random level with its own music, scenery and themed monster. Along the way, he can hit crates that unlock new weapons with limited ammo, such as the as railgun-like Pacifier or the excellent Machine Gun Jetpack. There are also hearts that can be used to extend the life bar, or recover from damage caused by traps and monsters.
As with all good runner games, it's an instantly fun game that encourages players to beat their own high scores and see how far they can get. Of course, the other downside is that the game can be quite repetitive, and due to its lack of surprises, it's not a game you'll be playing over and over again in one intense sitting. However, it is a game you'll definitely be returning to on regular occasions, perfect for a bored five minutes.
The game also looks good, and while it lacks the consistent humor of Age of Zombies, still makes for an entertaining romp that will surely earn Barry Steakfries a fair few fans. All told, Monster Dash is a great title and well worth the meager asking price. You'll get your money's worth, and with Halfbrick promising to update the game with new monsters and levels, you can't go wrong!
Score: 8.0 -- Great (8s are impressive efforts with a few noticeable problems holding them back. Won't astound everyone, but is worth your time and cash.)
A guy named Hidehiro Kume invented an optical pickup that was used to write/read discs in both the PS2 and original PlayStation back in the day. Obviously that was a pretty important thing for Sony. But Kume didn't feel it was important enough to them, so he took them to court.
At first a lower court denied his claim for compensation for the invention, but a high court came through for him. They ruled that Sony has to pay out 5.1 million yen (about $60k) as a reward.
"I thank the court for identifying some of my contributions to the company," Kume said of the ruling. "But the company should have appreciated my contributions when I was an employee."
Face.
Kotaku says that Kume was originally seeing 100 million yen (almost $1.2 million).
Here is a selection of screenshots featuring people looking like dicks in front of Kinect's big EyePet knock-off, Kinectimals. If you've ever wanted to jump around in front of a sentimental tiger, then Microsoft has the answer for all five of you!
Joking aside, Kinectimals looks to be among the most compelling of Kinect's first-party lineup, although that's not saying much amidst all the casual crap and an on-rails Harry Potter. I can at least imagine scraping a modicum of fun from this game, as opposed to waving my arms around and watching some ginger rat-faced wizard toddle off on his own accord.
What good is a lazy wave-your-hand menu and dashboard navigation system when you have to get off the couch and stand up to use it? That's what we've all been wondering. Now it seems that you can keep your fat ass planted when using Kinect to navigate the Xbox 360 dashboard.
Joystiq tried out the menu and movie controls at a gamescom meeting in sit mode and found that it works pretty well in several situations. Sitting in a chair on on the floor works fine, even when reclining. They couldn't get it to work correctly reclining with the Kinect sensor at their sides, but that's not really a big deal.
Joystiq says that it even worked when they used one human as a coffee table while another sat behind the human table controlling a movie. Microsoft told them that Kinect was running using a version of software that has been improved since E3. More improvements are coming before launch.
Here's a breezy, laid back, cute little matching game for you. Aqua Globs is slow paced and calm, but even so it manages to get quite hectic and be pretty challenging as it goes on.
The aim is to join globs of the same color together while making sure they don't touch globs of another color. It's simple, but it gets tricky once loads of Globs are onscreen at once. It's brightly colored, and the little globs are adorable, so it's a worthy download.
Do that thing if you want. Or don't. It's all good.
You were promised an update, and here it is: EpicWin is now available on the App Store! It's been set at $2.99, which seems fair for what you're getting. What are you getting, exactly? This is meant to help you accomplish goals in real life by giving you in-game loot as incentive and encouragement.
Not a new concept by any means, but EpicWin has two important things going for it: a slick art style, and -- perhaps most important of all -- portability. Visit this page for a look at the game in motion. Yes, I know the name bums you out too; look past it, for me.
We've heard the opinions of gamers, we've heard the opinions of pundits, and now we have some opinions from people who have more of a personal connection to Medal of Honor than anybody else -- real soldiers.
A number of soldiers have been giving mixed reactions to EA's upcoming shooter, with one criticizing the company for making a profit off war, although he did add that people freaking out about the Taliban's inclusion were being ridiculous.
"The creation of games like these is war profiteering," states Justin Polaski, "The same profiteering that Blackwater, civilian contractors, and companies that produce ACU backpacks for school children participate in. War profiteering of any form is unjust and constitutes a true insult to those who have served overseas."
A Navy member named Jason had less damning things to say: "I can honestly state as a gamer and a military man that games have less of an impact that people might think. I just push the buttons and kinda giggle at the rag-doll physics engine."
It seems that soldiers certainly have mixed views, with some being "disturbed" by the title and some believing it shouldn't be taken so seriously. I guess the only thing it proves is that everybody is different ... which anti-game pundits seem to forget when they say that videogames create killers and warmongers from normal people.
We're giving away ten codes for Puzzle Quest 2 on Steam thanks to the developers of the game, Infinite Interactive! They're currently going crazy with giveaways over on their Facebook page and now it's Destructoid's turn to share in the love!
In order to win a code, simply leave a comment with a suggestion for a new playable class in Puzzle Quest 2. There are four classes in Puzzle Quest 2 (Assassin, Barbarian, Templar and Sorcerer) but if you could add more, what would it be?
You have until August 20 at 11:59PM CDT to leave your suggestion below. No limit to entry but you must space out your submissions so that at least three other people have left a comment before entering again. We'll be randomly selecting ten comments to give a code to after the contest closes. Contest is open worldwide. Good luck!
Polyphony Digital's Kazunori Yamauchi was interviewed by Autoweek on Gran Turismo 5, and during that interview he was asked about the next Gran Turismo. And instead of blowing the interviewer off, Yamauchi spoke freely about Gran Turismo 6!
Says Yamauchi when asked about the next GT game:
Yes. You won't have to wait as long as you did for GT5. GT5 was basically the creation of a whole new operating system, and developing GT6 will be like adding new applications that run on that new operating system.
I have no idea what the hell he was talking about with the operating systems and stuff, but I did like the part about not having to wait as long. I know it's too soon to be thinking about this, but this definitely points to Polyphony Digital at least thinking about the next game. Hell, working on it now before its predecessor is released will surely cut back on some of the ridiculous delays that we should expect.
Deadly Premonition creator Swery65 didn't know that his own game was finally getting the European release it deserved. The Japanese developer only found out this morning from European fans, who congratulated him on Twitter -- much to his surprise.
"Wow! Is it true? Please give me a time ... I have to check it out myself. I can't still say," says Swery. "Let me check. So happy. But I can't still say."
Either he didn't know it's happening or he doesn't know that he's allowed to say it's happening, but it's funny to think that the coffee loving game maker managed to miss all the press releases and stories on it. Nevertheless, a big congratulations to a genuinely lovely developer. Deadly Premonition definitely deserves the glad tidings.
Back on April Fools' Day there was a fake product post by ThinkGeek for a thing called iCade. This was an arcade cabinet for your iPad: you'd simply slide in your tablet and go to town with the joystick and buttons in this minicab. But, again, it wasn't real.
Now it is real. The Freekade arcade cabinet now has walnut sides, a black matte finish and real controls that interface with your iPad via Bluetooth. It is currently compatible with ines, isnes, snes4iphone and PSX4ALL, you jailbreakers.
The rig is currently up for auction on eBay, standing now at £122 with 18 bids and 8 days left.
Double Fine's adorable looking Costume Quest has received its debut trailer today, and it looks really quite promising. I love the idea of Halloween costumes coming to life, and I call dibs on the Jack o' Lantern one. The rest of you can have the rainbow unicorn (which admittedly is awesome).
Game looks great to me. What do you reckon? Yay or nay?
Dump all your games to a harddrive (internal or USB external) with this new mod chip for the PS3. A video from OzModChips.com shows this first PS3 mod working. You'll see that a copy of Uncharted is inserted into the PS3 with the mod stick in. By launching the "Backup Manager" from the Xross Media Bar, you can back up the inserted game or launch another that you've already ripped. He launches a copy of Ratchet and Clank in the video from this manager and it appears to work beautifully, 'replacing' the disc inserted with the one chosen.
What's crazy is that hackers have said that these ripped games run two times faster than they do on Blu-ray. Homebrew will also be supported with this PS Jailbreak mod. What this does is essentially turn a PS3 into a debug unit. It's plug and play and works with the latest firmware. The best part? No invasive console hacking!
Maxconsole has a couple of videos and a growing FAQ for those interested in modding.
As far as availability goes, the sales website is currently down. The website from the makers of the above video have the chip listed at $170. Expect something more solid on pricing later.
Sony is probably sh*tting their pants right now, but I'd calm down if I were them. This could even help system sales!
People Can Fly, the studio behind Bulletstorm, is sick of people saying that it is mindless. Despite the glowing praise people have had for the admittedly brilliant looking title, studio boss Adrian Chmielarz wants people to admit that it makes them think.
"It bothers me when people say Bulletstorm looks like 'great mindless fun'," rages the developer. "'Great' and 'fun' I can live with, but how is it mindless?"
Chmielarz went on to say that the game has more strategic depth than its market rivals: "There is a hundred times more strategy involved in Skillshot gameplay than in 95% of the shooters out there."
Bulletstorm looks brilliant and I really can't wait for it. Seems like it'll be great mindless fun, which is really what I want from my shooters.
As it stands right now, the Carmine that will appear in Epic's Gears of War 3 -- Clayton Carmine -- will live. This based on sales of real t-shirts and Xbox Live Avatar t-shirts… gamers want Carmine to survive the next Gears outing.
Do you want him dead? It's not too late -- you can still buy actual "Save Carmine" or "Carmine Must Die" shirts online, if you haven't already. Not interested in displaying your allegiance on your chest? The Avatar items are still available on the Xbox Live Marketplace, too. Proceeds go towards the Child's Play charity, so in saving (or destroying) a life, you're helping out a good cause.
Are you one of the folks pulling for Carmine's survival? It would be a first for the Gears series, which has already slaughtered two of the Carmine clan, Anthony and Benjamin, in previous titles. My thinking is "why stop now?" But I'm a bit of a sick bastard. Follow the link below to the official Gears site for details on where you can get the goods. Decide The Fate of Carmine in Gears of War 3 [Gears of War]
Namco Bandai has unleashed a new cinematic trailer for upcoming hack n' slash romp Knights Contract. I have no idea when this publisher decided it would do loads of cool games, but I'm not complaining. Knights Contract looks exactly like my kind of thing, so I say bring it on.
The trailer features really ugly monsters getting cut up by a guy whose sword is also a scythe. There's also a woman with magical powers who is helping him out. It's what every videogame needs. Check it out and see if the game, which is launching next year, tickles your fancy.
Do you remain skeptical of THQ's uDraw tablet for the Wii? Check out the above video and see what a pro can do with the tool. Award-winning painter David Kassan can be seen pumping out a very impressive portrait using uDraw.
This is all well and good and I'm glad that the tools can produce such results but, really, who is going to use the uDraw for this? I think the capabilities of the tool are beyond what the consumer would need and inappropriate as a product for those who would actually use the features.
Frankly, the only thing that seems to have even a shot at commercial success as a dedicated-peripheral game using this device is Pictionary. I'm sure people would buy that by the boatload but I don't know that I would buy a separate peripheral for seventy dollars and then buy the game on top of that.
N.O.V.A is considered one of the top-tier iPhone games. Gameloft's first-person-shooter not only nailed the controls, it provided a genuine console experience and some pretty impressive graphics. Now PSP and PS3 fans can play it, as Gameloft is porting it over to PlayStation Minis.
Seems like it'll be a straightforward port with no extra content, so those who already own it on the iPhone probably don't need to worry about it. The rest of you, however, would do well to check it out. It's a pretty solid, if derivative, shooter.
You could hardly be blamed for not looking at all of these screenshots for Time Crisis: Razing Storm, but you may want to browse through them anyway. In addition to a clump of character models, there are a considerable quantity of images from the game's multiplayer mode, including a level set in a prison.
I played Time Crisis a bit in the arcades whenever I had more money than sense, but I never bothered to take the title home with me. I've always been a House of the Dead fan and the Time Crisis series just never hooked me. Are you a fan? What compels you to play these?
It seems a fairly common consensus amonst the gossiping fishwives that a PSP 2 is definitely in the works as we speak, and that we may not have to suffer another lame iteration of the original Sony handheld before we get it.
The latest rumor comes from Eurogamer, who has been able to cite three different sources claiming that Sony is showing the system off to developers. The platform holder is revealing a number of first-party titles, and some third parties are currently working on content.
The PSP 2 is said to physically resemble a PSP-3000, and it boasts a touch-sensitive surface on the back of the machine, instead of on the screen. Apparently, this is to protect the famously damage-friendly screen of the PlayStation Portable. It's claimed that the system will support physical media, which is hardly surprising considering the PSPgo's attempt at digital distribution was terrible.
Right now, it seems almost certain that we'll be hearing news of a PSP 2 soon. Nintendo has been stealing the spotlight with the 3DS and Sony needs to pull out something more special than a PSP-4000 in order to get some attention. If the Tokyo Game Show doesn't have a PSP 2 reveal, I'll be very surprised.
Go on and do it. I don't think anybody would blame you. Pac-Man Party is, conceptually, something that should be somewhat painful to consider. Another collection of mini-games for the Wii -- a market which inexplicably manages to keep enough demand to justify its continued existence -- starring one of the most over-commercialized characters in gaming history.
Of the three videos Namco Bandai sent us, the one above is the best. In this game, players throw rods through three rows of ingredients to make kabobs for grilling. It looks like it would be fun for a few goes. Down below, we have a chick-herding game and a mad swim up through a stupidly long champagne glass. I think it best that we not dwell on this.
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, the upcoming licensed Naruto arena fighter, promises to have in excess of forty characters (plus a Tekken dude) available for Naru-tards to take into battle. Not quite Marvel vs. Capcom numbers (56), but hey, these dudes are rendered in full 3D, with sexy current-gen assets.
The new trailer that Namco Bandai sent us highlights just twelve of them, namely Deidara, Sasori, Hidan, Kakuzu, Konan, Pain, Itachi, Kisame, Karin, Jugo, Suigetsu and Sasuke. Technically, Pain could be considered six characters in one, so the trailer could actually be highlighting eighteen fighters. Alongside glimpses of the huge multi-stage boss battles (including a giant enemy crab), that's a good amount of trailer to enjoy.
That said, if all the names I wrote above made you think I had some kind of seizure and started typing gibberish, you might not be in the target audience for this Naruto fighting game. In that case, there's a lot of hyperactive brawling going on, so you can watch and enjoy that, too. Expect an English-language demo next week (the Japanese one is out now), and a full release in October for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Here we have a couple of videos of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West that Namco Bandai has been kind enough to furnish. The first shows the technologically-inclined Trip building a robotic dragonfly and then using it for reconnaissance. The second, seen below, features Monkey fighting a giant robot. The two videos seem to be indicative of their individual skills but I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark here.
It looks beautiful, in my opinion. I love the lush overgrowth in the world, a demonstration of Mother Nature reclaiming her planet from the ill-fated monkeys who thought themselves its master. That's how things would really go down anyway. I think we're just so driven by our own egos that we would like to believe we are capable of creating the ruined grey/brown worlds so common in post-apocalyptic settings even while the possibility horrifies us.
I have had Heavenly Sword sitting on my shelf almost as long as I have had a PS3 and barely made it past the tutorial. Now with Enslaved on the horizon, I'm starting to think it may be time to sh*t or get off the pot. Is it worth giving the game a serious attempt? You tell me.
When Cowzilla posted those mind blowing Mega Man wallpapers last weekend, I double-freaked out. The first freak out was over the quality of the artwork. The second freak out was over the fact that I didn't recognize every character. I love Mega Man a lot more than most 33-year-olds, but I still didn't know about all of these cute little bastards.
With a little research (and help from MegaStryke), I got them all; except for one. That weird yellow dude in the corner. Who was he? There wasn't even a mention of him Udon's highly extensive Mega Man Official Complete Works (a book that features such obscure Mega Man designs as the cigarette wielding Smoke Man and the elephant-headed, sunglasses loving Elephant Borg Man).
Turns out, this new mystery man was yet another unused boss design, one that Capcom doesn't often talk about. His name is Bond Man, and he's all about glue. He's only been "officially" depicted once, in a Mega Man manga from 1995, but apparently, he's got quite the following in Japan. There's even reason to hope that he may show up in Mega Man Universe. The Mega Man Network has an extensive write up on the situation. It's required reading for any Mega Man fan.
Capcom released this gameplay footage of Okamiden yesterday and it's pretty much the cutest thing I've seen this week. Chibiterasu is just so pudgy and I love watching him scamper around. The video shows a little bit of the game's brushwork and a bit of combat. And then the cuteness gets amplified by an eager child riding Chibiterasu like a little pony.
I have to give props to Capcom for sticking with the Okami series despite failing to move copies of the original game on two different platforms. I just don't understand why this franchise is not hugely popular. It's one of the best Zelda-style titles on the market and yet it still managed to fail. Let's get the word out this time because I'd really like to see more of these games come to market.
First Final Fantasy XIV was on for the Xbox 360. Then it was off. In case you didn't catch that news the first time, we drilled it into you again a few days later. Now the game is off-with-a-chance-of-on.
Citing issues with Xbox Live policy, Final Fantasy XIV producer Hiromichi Tanaka told the press that development on the 360 port was halted. But have no fear! The project is merely on pause while Square Enix and Microsoft sweat out the details. There's no telling when work will resume, so the game remains a PS3 console exclusive for now.
For those who can't wait to see how SE tops its marathon boss battles from the previous game, Final Fantasy XIV will arrive next month on the PC and in March 2011 on the PS3.
Last month at the TED Conference, Lionhead CEO Peter Molyneux showed another demonstration of Milo & Kate. During his presentation, he speaks a bit about interacting with Milo and how no two people will create the same version of the boy. There's also some stone skipping and room cleaning action to be had.
Watching this makes me wonder what exactly the role of the player is in Milo & Kate. You seem to be able to affect his world in some way. At the same time, I don't expect that the player will ever interact directly with any other character. That leads me to question whether anyone else is aware of the player's existence. Maybe you're supposed to be an imaginary friend. If so, Milo & Kate is Drop Dead Fred: The Videogame. Awesome.
First, the video above shows us some new Pokemon. They seem to be in the middle of one of the game's "dress up" mini games, so we can't be sure how their standard designs will look. All these blurry screengrabs show us is a floating blue octopus dressed in nothing but a top hat, a beard, and a smile, and a weird pink elf thing in a white dress, brandishing a giant war hammer. I'm hoping that those designs are for real. "The new Pokemon look too much like Digimon" my ass.
Also in Pokemon Black/White news, we have the revelation that the two games will each have its own exclusive area. In Black, you'll get to go to a go to a strange city, where in White, you get a mysterious forest (see Gallery for more details). This gives me reason to choose White over Black, as my love of Animal Crossing over GTA has shown me that I generally prefer videogame forests to videogame cities. Of course, real Pokemaniacs will get both versions anyway; four versions if you count importing the games from Japan in September, then buying them again when they get localized.
How about you? What do you prefer, forests or cities? Flying blue octopi or hammer wielding elf-things?
A couple of weeks ago, Klei Entertainment offered up the complete soundtrack for their upcoming game Shank provided they could get 1,500 people to like their Facebook page. While the goal was almost instantly met, the reward is still incoming. Six of the soundtrack's thirteen songs have been posted to Klei's website with a promise that the rest will trickle out in the coming days.
To accompany the music, Klei revealed that Shank will have unlockable costumes such as the two pictured above. The one in the yellow jumpsuit is appropriately named "Yellow Jumpsuit Shank" but no details have been revealed regarding the masked man to the right. Klei will be revealing more costumes as well as info on how to unlock them through their Twitter account as we run headlong towards its inevitable release on PS3 August 24th and Xbox 360 on August 25th.
Any guesses as to what forms those silhouettes might be obscuring?
Nathan Spencer looks to be giving Haggar a run for his money in the awesome moustache department. Check out that closeup of the 'stache he's sporting in Bionic Commando: ReArmed 2. Though not as majestic as the facial hair which rests upon the mighty lip of Metro City's mayor, it has a fiery intensity which can not be denied. Stunning.
In addition to the above art, Capcom has released a few new screenshots of the upcoming sequel to one of the most impressive remakes I've ever played. I don't care that he can jump now. I'm just ready for more and am willing to hang it on faith that they'll still make it feel like Bionic Commando.
This is a delightful trailer for Super Scribblenauts which has come out of gamescom. T he focus of the trailer is on what's arguably the biggest innovation this game has over the original Scribblenauts: the addition of adjectives. I say "arguably" because some might consider the implementation of directional-pad controls to be more innovative, as they make the game playable.
I had a chance to play around with Super Scribblenauts at E3 and it's amazing. I know, we all said that last year when we were talking about Scribblenauts. But I really mean it this time. Honest, you will want to do more than play with the title screen (I still feel that was worth the price of admission) and you will actually be able to do it without being Job.
With day one gamescom 2010, the world's biggest gaming convention, now done and dusted, I and fellow blogger Daniel Carneiro take time to sit and reflect on what we have seen so far. Of course, the videos and write ups currently gracing the front page are only a fraction of what is on show. Still we have both seen things we already love and hate.
Stay tuned to Destructoid over the next few days as we continue to bring you all the best news from the lovely Cologne. Check out what we've brought you so far below.
I can't get enough of Dead Space 2! Our latest look at the game shows off a Necromorph called the Tripod. She's a big mean b*tch and will do you in good if you can't shoot at her weak point in time.
That's not all! Visceral has also released a clip from the Dead Space 2presentation at gamescom yesterday that sees Isaac get thrown into space. Check it out below. The Dead Space website has a bunch of new content as well, including a cool wallpaper and a video of Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis hyping up the soon to be reveal of Dead Space 2's multiplayer.
Here we have a video for Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions featuring one of the titular hero's alternate costumes. This is the "Scarlet Spider" who is, if you're up on your Marvel trivia (or have the internet and care), a clone of Peter Parker made by Jackal who took the name Ben Reilly. Not to be confused with the even more obscure villainous cybernetic version or the trio of Stark armor-wearing characters from recent memory.
Psyched for Valkyria Chronicles II? Is Sega's "Community BLiTZ" working? Like pre-ordering things at GameStop? If you answered "yes" to the first and third questions, then this is the announcement for you, because GameStop is offering two bonus missions with pre-orders of the PlayStation Portable-bound strategy extravaganza.
The missions themselves will be made available as a PlayStation Network download upon release. Going by the descriptions (which you can read below), they sound like "challenge" missions, with one pitting your troops in a straight-up brawl with a rival unit, and another tasking you with overcoming a group that specializes in "stonewalling defense".
Being the willing fan that I am, I've already pre-ordered the game, but are you, in light of this announcement?
Exercise vs. Class E - Exterminatory war exercise against rival class E using all areas of Leanbluff Forest. Destroy all enemies in each area to win this challenge.
Exercise vs. Class F – Defense exercise against rival class F. Break through their stonewalling defense and take over their encampment to win this mission.
Nothing like a good old game of killing the f*ck out of everything! That's just what Splatterhouse was all about back in the retro days and that's what the new one will be too. Kill, kill, kill! Violence! Gore! Blood! YAY!
On top of the retro trailer, we have a bunch of screens and two additional videos below showing nothing but gameplay. Some parts are a bit off and look like Splatterhouse needs some more polish. Otherwise, the game is looking mighty fun.
Splatterhouse will be out for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on October 26.
The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood beta starts up on September 13 in America which you can be a part of only when you pre-order the game from GameSpot. So what about Europe? Their beta date was announced to start up on October 4, 2010. The European beta is going to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive as well and you'll only be able to play it if you pre-order the multiplayer assassin game from GAME or Play.
Additionally, here are some new screens. Look at that girl cut that guy's neck with a fan! LOOK AT IT!
Bret Hart is still wrestling -- somehow -- and since he's one of the all-time WWF/WWE greats, fans are likely interested in playing as him in WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011. In North America, Hart will be a timed exclusive pre-order bonus for Best Buy and "all major Canadian retailers," according to THQ (he is, after all, Canadian). I imagine he's much more happy about this news than about being in the Walls of Jericho above.
Just like Stone Cold Steve Austin -- who was exclusive to GameStop, EB Games, and GAME pre-orders in SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 -- Hart will eventually be made available for everyone to purchase. (THQ sold Stone Cold for $1 last year, so presumably, that's how much they'll charge for Hart.)
WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 will hit stores for PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, and PS2 on October 26, 2010. Check out my full preview for more details.
For me Fallout 3 was one of those games I only picked up because everyone else was talking about it. At first I hated it but eventually I fell in love. Obsidian owes me a rather large chunk of my life back. As you would naturally expect, I am very excited for Fallout New Vegas and my hands-on time here at gamescom can only be described as a fix for a drug addict.
Josh Sawyer, Project Director of Fallout New Vegas, takes some time to talk to me about the new and more in-depth customization, the importance of moral decisions and how alliances will effect your reputation within the waste land. The game looks fantastic and I know that I look forward to locking myself into a dark room for two weeks when it finally launches on October 19th, 2010.
THQ and Volition is doing all that they can to make the next Red Faction be a big deal. The week Armageddon launches might as well be called "Red Faction week" with everything Danny Bilson, Executive VP at THQ, details above. Game, digital download, movie and more are in store for us next year.
In the mean time, you're probably more concerned with how Armageddon is shaping up. Well you can find that out below as Jacques Hennequet, Creative Director at Volition, shows us some of the awesome things we'll be able to do in the game. I think I have a new favorite weapon with that magnet gun.
I had the pleasure of being shown a pre-alpha build of Stronghold 3 by the Director of Firefly studios, Simon Bradbury, this afternoon. He opened the demo by stating that he didn't feel Stronghold 2 was a bad game, rather that it tried to do too many things and lost focus of what made the first Stronghold game so popular.
With Stronghold 3, however, the game is set to return to its roots.
The first thing that impressed me was that the focus was on the core gameplay. Stronghold 3 will run on tech developed by outside sources as opposed to the internal development favoured for its predecessor. This, along with a streamline of in-game mechanics, will leave the development team free to strengthen the original's gameplay.
With that established we were launched into the game and it soon became apparent the level of flexibility that will be available to players. With a castle constructed, players can fortify their possession by constructing battlements. It's the way in which they can be placed that is unique in that you can almost paint a labyrinthine construction to keep your foes at bay, with twisting snaking walls of solid stone should you so wish to do so. Stairs can be added that will allow your soldiers access to the battlements so that they can rain medieval death from above on those foolish to try and attack you.
Gone is the grid based system of old as you are now free to position things with utter freedom. This can have consequences for your kingdom though. The amount of people present in your villages hovels is based on the distance to your castle. For example, a hovel some distance away will be a rotten shack capable of housing only one person. However, a hovel in close proximity to your castle will be a three floored structure that can hold up to ten people.
Your actions as a lord will affect how you kingdom works on many different levels. The example that we were told was that a cruel and evil Lord will have a barbaric but unruly military compared to a benevolent Lord whose army will be noble and take less damage.
Firefly are keen to use the Havok engine to create a battlefield strewn with debris and bodies. A castle we were shown was destroyed using catapults, causing it to crumble into pieces and roll down the hillside into the valley below. One catapult was shattered when it was too close to its target. The resulting detritus bounces off nearby buildings and landscape in a dramatic way that is sure to make any victory feel great and defeat feel crushing.
The team at Firefly has listened to fan concerns and are promising a true Stronghold experience. It’s been a long time coming -- it looks as though Stronghold 3 will deliver a fun strategy game come April 2011.
Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture have announced a co-development partnership that will see a number of games come from duo. The first project from this union is called Sine Mora and is going to be a side-scroller with "unique time manipulation mechanics."
Additionally, the new game "takes advantage of the newest in 3D display technology to liver an horizontal side-scrolling shooter unlike any other." I'm still hesitant when it comes to 3D tech, but if anyone can pull of something good, it's the house that brought us No More Heroes.
Sine Mora will be out for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge has been called “Gears of Warcraft” in some publications. Whether that is entirely fair, or what you should expect from this co-op oriented action game, is what you are clicking below the jump for -- to read our hands-on impressions!
So what is Hunted: The Demon’s Forge? At its heart, it is a third-person hack-and-slash game where you walk around and hack and slash things. Amazing, I know! The thing that makes Hunted different from what you’re used to is co-op. You play one of two characters -- a female ranged one, or a bulky male melee one.
I started the hands-on as the female, while a developer was playing the male and guiding me through it. Everything felt pretty familiar, so it was really easy to run around, use LT to aim in Gears of War style and RT to shoot arrows. Many skeletons were dispatched with arrows, because arrows are a skeleton’s bane! Just kidding -- you can also use magic or swap your physical weapons from bow to shield and sword. You use A to run, you can snap to cover, and the level did look a bit gray for story reasons, so I guess you can’t blame anyone for the “Gears of Warcraft” nickname.
Still, that doesn’t really do the game any justice. While the controls and point of view were familiar, that only helped me to get into the action straight away. What was more important was the co-op design. If you play single-player, you have an AI companion. But playing with another person adds more than just the human element. For instance, you can use the ranged character to cover from a high angle while the melee character does his thing. Or the melee character can block a staircase while the ranged character runs upstairs to pick up some loot.
While you can choose to not care about coordinating, the hands-on showed me that if you do that, you can get overwhelmed and die. There were quite a few moments where we talked about the game’s specifics and ended up not looking at the screen and dying. Kind of similar to Brink, if you are incapacitated the other person can revive you. It costs you a revive potion, but you can revive your partner from anywhere, as long as you point at him or her and press a button. If you ever do get into a tough fight, you can also use magic on your partner to infuse them with the elemental magic (lightning or fire in the hands-on) and have them dash out damage like a U.S. short seller does to an economy.
After some early fights, an enemy took control of a ballista and started to shoot at cover in an open area. Cover where I was just chilling. The cover just got obliterated with my lovely female form. I would enter a sad smiley there if I could, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. Thankfully I was revived, and after some headshots to the ballista guy, the ballista was ours. My melee partner defended the only entrance to the ballista, and I was allowed to blast a ton of skeletons to bone dust. It took me a while to notice there was actually no end to these skeletons until I destroyed two pillars that spawned them.
As we continued, we got to a waypoint where you can switch characters to mix up the gameplay. As the melee character, instead of shooting a ton of arrows, you run around and hit things with your sword. Or use your shield to bash things with a short boost attack. One thing I noticed was that the sword I had was really slow to wield, but it killed enemies proper. In the full game, you will have light and heavy weapons which will be faster but less powerful or slower but harder hitting. After more killing, we got to a cutscene that I skipped on autopilot and the demo ended. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge looked like it still needed a bit of polishing on a couple of things, such as having a lack of an indicator for where you partner was. But it’s still a while until release after all. Mostly, I quite enjoyed playing it. It wasn’t very deep or heavy handed, but it satisfied my need for killing a literal ton of things. I do love the Dynasty Warriors games, and this felt like a much more focused and, well, better game than those.
The developer talked about how he loved to play old text adventures 25 years ago, because you would have a lot of hidden content in the form of side quests or dungeons that are off the beaten path. While that path seems linear in Hunted and you have a Fable 2 style indicator stream that flows from your character, Hunted will have a huge amount of hidden content if you take the time to explore. Hopefully inXile Entertainment (who also released the pretty enjoyable The Bard’s Tale "remake" in 2004) will provide enough hints to players so they won’t miss all that content. There will be plenty of hints throughout the game and a journal that collects all of them, so that will just depend on how much a hack & slash lover cares about exploration. Then again, it means more hacking & slashing!
Oh yeah, and you can execute some enemies if they are near death. Which in my case was death by penile sword impalement. And can anyone really argue against that?
Back in February, EA Sports president Peter Moore mentioned that a Madden game would soon be making its way to Facebook. We've seen neither hide nor hair of the game since then, but in the interim, EA launched FIFA Superstars on Facebook and saw it become a successful product. FIFA Superstars is developed by Playfish, the social gaming creator that EA bought for $275 million last November, and now it appears that EA may be bringing Madden to Facebook as Madden NFL Superstars.
Bitmob's community manager was trying to play FIFA Superstars this morning when he came across the following error message on Facebook: "Sorry, EA Sports Madden Superstars is currently down for maintenance but will return shortly." (You can see a screenshot, courtesy of Bitmob, in the gallery below.) Presumably, someone at Playfish messed up, and now we know the name of Facebook's Madden game.
Say what you want about casual gaming, but it's smart for EA to get into the business. They likely wanted to test the waters with FIFA Superstars before diving in with Madden, their marquee brand. But it makes sense to bring Madden to Facebook now -- FIFA Superstars' user base grew significantly during this summer's World Cup, and the 2010 NFL season kicks off in just three weeks.
We've contacted EA for comment and will update this post with any reply.
Next March, THQ bring us the forth game to the Red Faction family, Red Faction: Armageddon. And after showing us a brutal balls-to-the-wall action demo, Jameson Durel, Senior Designer, let me pick his brains.
Jameson gives you guys insight into some of the amazing new weaponry, which had my camera man Roy Malcomber's mouth on the floor. He also takes time to reassure us that just because this is the forth game, it doesn't mean that people new to the series can't join in. He remind us that THQ and Volition are the masters of blowing stuff up.
It seems I end up having to post more assets forSengoku Basara than any other game, even though less than 5% of our readers actually care about it. Well, screw the other 95% of you. I'm looking forward to it, so I'm glad to put in the extra effort for a post nobody will read.
Anyway, Sengoku Basara is coming to the PS3 and Wii this October, so here's a load of screenshots and a new gamescom trailer for you. The video's worth watching just for the announcer guy who doesn't sound like he knows what's happening.
Before any of you watch this video, let me just say that Maxx Kaufman was brilliant. Our first interview went to pieces, we recorded over our second, I messed up our third and what you are about to watch is our forth attempt. While both myself and Maxx, Game Director for Hunted, had bad cases of deja-vu he was more than obliging the entire time. To be honest I think he was rather sick of me by the end of it all but at least he hid it well!
Hunted gives the player a mash-up of role-playing elements with brute force hack and slash, allowing the player to choose a path and a character that suits them best. The female character attacks from afar with bows and magic, while the male character rushes for a testosterone induced close kill. Current release date for Hunted is sometime in 2011.
Unlike football or baseball, there isn't some sort of exclusivity contract at play with the National Basketball Association. This is somewhat great, as it affords us different basketball games from different companies, with titles as disparate as NBA Jam and the upcoming NBA 2K11.
As a result, this means developers have to challenge themselves a little bit more. While many gamers were pleased with NBA 2K10, many players felt there was a certain lack of polish and finesse to the title. Some felt like they would get locked into canned animations, and that the fluidity of the game just wasn't there. These were the two areas that the developers wanted to improve upon with NBA 2K11, and so they did. Then, of course, they got the exclusive use of Michael Jordan for NBA 2K11, turning this title into one of few that support the greatest basketball player of all time. It's a big deal, and they've done a lot to make a game that takes advantage of this contract. Hit the jump to see how much they've done.
NBA 2K11 (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, PC) Developer: Visual Concepts Publisher: 2K Sports To be released: October 5th, 2010
First, lets talk polish. When the developers first went about making NBA 2K11 more polished, they started with the cameras. All the angles now support truer broadcast shots, so now you will never play from an angle that is not true to how viewers watch the games themselves. After working through the cameras, players' faces were redesigned, and special focus was placed upon the small details. If a player has a special tic that he always does, or if he always wears a sock a certain way, that's how the game will represent him.
As for control, a lot of effort has been placed upon redesigning the animation. Whereas before players would be locked into an animation, unable to mix things up, now players can shift and move with a lot more fluidity. Again, the R-stick is used for making shots, and small “cell phone reception” bars will pop up next to a player to indicate their success at performing a shot. It's all stuff we've come to expect from an NBA 2K game, so that's all well and good.
The most exciting element of NBA 2K11 is certainly all the new stuff about Michael Jordan. Not just the cover athlete, players will be able to play through a bunch of classic and legendary Jordan matches from his career, all while fulfilling certain requirements. Called The Jordan Challenge, these games range from his April 20, 1986 game against the Boston Celtics (Score 63 points or more, and shoot 50 percent or better from the field), the June 16, 1996 match against the Sonics the day after Jordan's father was murdered, and even the June 11, 1997 match in which Jordan struggled with a nasty flu.
These are ten special matches in which everything has been done to recreate how those matches were seen by fans. Courts have been repainted, the players are all the legacy players from the match (and they themselves are playable in exhibition matches), and the voice work and announcers all speak as if in the time. Jordan himself will change in appearance as he plays different eras as well. Most interesting, however, is that The Jordan Challenge focuses entirely on the Chicago Bulls era, so no Washington Wizards matches here.
Once you've completed the ten games in the The Jordan Challenge, players can then follow up with the Creating a Legend mode. In this mode players will drop Jordan in a modern team, with him as a young upstart with a lot of talent. It's up to the player to boost his stats and make him the player he would become. It's a neat little feature tossed into the game, and all this special attention to Michael Jordan is pretty great. Considering they interviewed him and got his perspective on—well, being Jordan, this is probably the most accurate Michael Jordan game yet.
I'm pretty impressed with NBA 2K11. It's clear that the dev team has spent a lot of time trying to get the best experience out there, by listening to their fans and building this wholly Jordan-focused experience. There's a lot of polish here, and it's fantastic to see a sports game developer really try to make their game the best.
A kind word of advice to you, gentle reader: if a doomsday scenario threatens all of human civilization, and they pick your name out of a hat to enter a secluded place of safety, politely decline the offer. Otherwise, when they finally bring you back, you will find yourself knee-deep in mutants, zombies, and tribes of wild gangs. It will happen.
I’ve seen it in a videogame. It's called Rage.
The latest offering from first-person masters id Software puts you in the shoes of one such survivor, who was placed in a Pod in order to survive a catastrophic asteroid collision. When he is revived, he finds that the world has gone to hell, and embarks on a one man mission to make it better again. No one ever thinks of just getting back in the pod...
My impressions impressions were that the game's aesthetics evoked a cross between Fallout and BioShock, having the laters more chunky, primary-colored style defining a dusty, ruined world. Out of those two games mentioned, comparisons with Fallout will be made by most. However, in my own opinion, I favour Rage's take of the post-apocalyptic environs. Fallouts felt real, but occasionally dull, whereas Rage's world is pure sci-fi, with broken cities jutting out of desert landscapes, shattered skyscrapers merging with the mountains around them. It's a perfect setting for id's upcoming title.
Part of the game's mechanics is the use of vehicles to traverse the harsh, unforgiving wasteland. It's a wasteland that is filled with ruthless sorts who will stop at nothing to harm you, so it’s a good thing that you came armed. One such vehicle was a chunky-looking sports car which had been retrofitted with guns, rocket launchers, huge spikes, and a plow, leaving it the perfect vehicle to fight off wasteland raiders. Combat with other vehicles has a very Twisted Metal feel to it, with rockets and machine gun fire ripping through the air as drivers slam on the handbrakes to quickly turn for a better shot against their opponents. The section I saw took place in the winding, sun-drenched canyons of the wasteland, with opposing drivers weaving between the crumbling pillars of a bridge that once crossed a river. All a far cry from the gunplay that old school id is known for.
A couple of sections of gunplay were demonstrated, and in each the unmistakable feeling of the FPS genre's oldest developer is present. Tight, tense corridors guide you on your path, with enemies coming right for you with a psychotic blood lust. Those unfortunate enough to get in the way of some of the more heavy duty weapons in your arsenal will be reduced to a pile of gibs, and cloud of red mist. The gunplay itself feels rather light and arcadey, lacking the weight of some modern shooters; there is no running from cover to cover with you pressing your body against the nearest wall at the press of a button. It is pure and proper action-oriented first-person shooter.
The end of the world has been a popular recreational spot for gamers for a good long time; if Rage is anything to go by, it is going to to stay that way for a long time to come.
[Update: The first part of this contest is now closed! The three finalists are on Virtual Air Guitar Company's Facebook ready for you to vote on! Go cast your vote and help some folks win a 3-day pass, Kung-Fu LIVE for the PSN and other sweet items!
If you didn't enter in time, don't worry! You can still enter over here on Destructoid for a chance to get a 3-Day SOLD OUT pass to PAX, a free download of Kung-Fu LIVE when it launches on PSN this year, and an exclusive piece of KFL finery -- Virtual Air Guitar Company has offered up more prizes right here on on our site!
Submission rules for this leg of the contest are simple: Respond in the thread below telling us why it would KICK SERIOUS ASS to get into PAX Prime for 3 days, and one lucky winner will be declared on August 20th at 11:59pm. Sound easy enough? Now let's let 'em rip!
Kung-Fu Live is the upcoming PlayStation Network title that pulls you into the game through the power of Virtual Air Guitar Company’s patented FreeMotion Technology running only on the PlayStation Eye. You yourself will become the hero as you fight off evil forces with your body in real time. Check out newest trailer for the game above to see exactly how you'll play the game.
You'll be able to try out Kung-Fu Live for yourself at PAX Prime this year!
Brink is the latest first-person shooter from developer Splash Damage and I was able to get an impromptu interview with CEO Paul Wedgwood. Paul and I spend some time talking about Brink's interesting new approach to the FPS genera, the strong art direction, customization and the massive eight player co-op.
The latest build took both me and fellow BritToid editor Daniel Carneiro by surprise as previous looks at Brink had left us with a bitter taste in our mouths. This time, we left feeling pretty optimistic and I know I look forward to any further time with the game.
Many years have passed on the planet Mars since the events of Red Faction: Guerilla, and things are not well for colonists of the red planet.
Attempts to terraform the planet for human habitation have created an ecological disaster that has resulted in the habitants being driven underground for safety. To make matters worse, an ancient evil species of aliens has been awoken and is wiping out all who remain.
In comes Darius Mason -- a descendant of Red Faction:Guerilla's protagonist, Alec Mason -- who is out to fight off the intergalactic menace, and restore peace to the planet once again. To do that, he will use some seriously crazy weapons, tons of falling buildings, and one big robot.
The demo we were showed at gamecom this week opened in the cavernous underground that is now colonial humanities home. It's a dark, cavernous place that is worlds apart from Guerilla's open Martian vistas. The darkness, however, is soon disturbed by the burning carcass of a buggy, violently rolling by. Darius’s communicator springs to life with word that your alien nemesis is causing havoc nearby.
Arriving on the scene, it becomes apparent that the extra-terrestrial menace has set up shop, with buildings covered in a bizarre-looking substance. Almost immediately, Mercer is besieged by some lowly dog-like creatures that are easily dispersed with an assault riffle and a few handy head stomps. This, however, is only the first obstacle to surmount.
At this point we are introduced to the newest addition to Red Faction's arsenal of weapons, the Magnagun -- a simple, yet deadly weapon that opens up some incredible possibilities for carnage. With your first shot you magnetize the object you are targeting, and with another shot it is pulled towards a second target. In the example we were showed, a crane was targeted before a nearby building; the resulting chaos looked impressive, as the crane's top is drawn into the building, utterly destroying it.
A large group of heavier enemies turn up, and the Magnagun's potential in more intense combat is revealed; foes are taken out by large chunks of metal, even debris slamming into them. More enemies turn up, and Guerilla's Nano Rifle returns, this time with the power to repair things, a power with incredible benefits, it turns out. The amount of attacking enemies becomes overwhelming, so Darius retreats to a destroyed container and uses the Nano Rifle to repair its damaged exterior, sealing himself inside in order to recover from the brutal assault.
After this brief reprieve, we are returned into combat and Darius heads straight for a large Mech suit. Unlike the slow, lumbering industrial machines of Red Faction: Guerrilla, this is a fast, lithe exo-skeleton with machine guns and rocket launchers. The aliens are knocked aside with ease, as the Mech shoulder-barges its way through groups, with ease killing those that remain with rockets and bullets.
It was a brief showing but it gave the impression that developer Volition has taken various criticisms that were aimed at the previous Red Faction to heart. It's tweaked or wholesale removed them, leaving only a satisfying destructive romp in its wake.
Red Faction: Armageddon is out next March for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
We had the privilege of giving a couple of Gunnar's eyewear offerings a test run in our office recently. Both the MLG Legend (Chrome) gaming glasses and the Phenom (Graphite) 3D glasses were worn in the appropriate situations, tested to the best of our ability.
Know that these "tests" involve web surfing, playing games and watching movies, so you're going to get our impressions of some very non-critical experiences. In other words, these glasses are supposed to make the things that you do at your leisure look a bit better. And I think they do.
Read on for our impressions of Gunnar's offerings.
Before we get into the specifics of each offering, know that my overall impression of Gunnar's eyewear was high right off the bat. Both pair of glasses are extremely well made, and both come in very nice packaging. You get the impression that each were made to a high standard. Granted, I've only used these two pair and one other, but know that if you do drop some change on a Gunnar offering, you're likely going to get something really nice. These look good and feel nice on your face, which isn't something I usually find myself saying about gaming wear.
MLG Legend (Chrome, amber lens) MSRP: $99
Look and fit:
I've never looked cool in aviator-style sunglasses, so I didn't expect to look very cool in these Gunnar gaming glasses. Fortunately, they look really cool on my face, enough so that I found myself wearing them for no reason! The frames are very light, and the sides leave ample space for a headset. The temples are branded with the MLG logo, which I felt bad for wearing as I really suck at most games.
In use:
I cannot tell you exactly what these lenses do for your game and computer use, but I know they're doing something cool. Excuse my lack of technical terminology, but things just seem to look a bit cooler with these glasses on. Wearing the Legends in front of a computer screen gives the most pronounced effect. My less-than-optimal 26" monitor looks like a lot nicer of a model with the Legends on. On my too-reflective MacBook Pro screens, the glare is greatly reduced, and the overall look is way more contrasty and eye-pleasing. On both, text seems to be more sharp, and it feels like the screen itself is more set into my work space, making it easier to look at. There's definitely some kind of optical shift, almost as if the screen seems to flatten out, with a slight bowing in the center. I realize that this may not make total sense, so just know that the lens effect does seem beneficial.
I gave the Legends a full rundown over the course of a week in various games on a couple of different televisions. Naturally, this optical change would do the most for action games. It seems like spotting an enemy off in the distance when playing shooters is a bit easier with the Legends on. High-action, bullet heavy situations felt like they were easier to navigate in online matches of Resistance or Call of Duty. Gunnar says the glasses could give you reduced reaction time. I didn't feel that in my test time, but I did feel like I could see things a bit better, and that helped me get out of the way of bullets/projectiles/grenades a bit faster. Maybe that's what they meant. Racing in Forza 3 felt improved, but it would be hard to gauge how improved it was with the Legends on. I'd guess that I was seeing down the track a bit better with them on, and I suppose that helped in cutting down my time on the tracks I'm less versed on. In both types of games, you could definitely feel some kind of benefit from wearing the Gunnar glasses, though it is pretty difficult to quantify the benefits.
The benefit was less pronounced in the games I typically play, which are role-playing, light sports and puzzle games. Putting on the glasses to play Hot Shots Golf maybe helped me see my ball moving out into the brush a little better, but I don't know that it helped my game that much. In my ritual weekly match of Magical Drop on the Sega Saturn, I wondered if the lens tint would hinder my ability to see the colors of the different gems. It didn't at all, though the Legends didn't really help my terrible reaction time either. I didn't expect it to, mind you.
Summary:
If you heard about Gunnar lenses and were expecting an effect something like what polarized glasses give you, I think you'll be surprised when you try a pair out. Again, they're doing something cool to your eyesight, though I'm not sure I could tell you what exactly without regurgitating some of the marketing speak that has been thrown our way. There's a marked difference when looking through them, especially if you play a lot of high-action games. It also seems like these would be good for those that spend a lot of time close to a computer monitor, as text and images seem to come of the screen a lot better. If you play games at any kind of competitive level, I could see these Gunnar glasses giving you an edge. For the rest, you'll have to ask yourself if you're wiling to drop the price of two new games on Gunnar's brand of improved clarity.
Phenom Graphite 3D glasses MSRP: $99
Look and fit:
These are damned good looking glasses. While just about anything would look better than the glasses they give you at the theater at 3D movies, these make the others feel bad because of how great they look. Seriously: you'll feel so smug sitting in the theater, surrounded by all those idiots in plastic glasses.
The Phenom are really well made, too. These frames are offered in both the 3D and amber lenses, but they really look nice with the dark lenses for 3D, kind of like sunglasses. The ends of the frames have a small triangle of soft rubber that feels nice over your ears, and the frames themselves are really lightweight. These came in a nice storage box and included a soft sleeve for transport.
In Use:
It's going to be difficult to tell you how Gunnar's 3D offerings compare to the standard 3D theater glasses. They both give you the 3D effect as intended, and while it feels like the Phenom 3Ds give you a better experience, I couldn't honestly tell you exactly how they do. Naturally the optics are a lot higher quality than the cheap plastic freebies, and that has some effect on a movie's clarity in 3D. You'll get a crisp, clear and bright image right into your eyeballs.
You want the lenses to cover your eyes fully for a movie in 3D, and it seems like the Phenom really do that. They come around to the sides, closer to your temples, giving you better coverage. Gunnar says that this enhances the 3D effect, and I could see that, as getting light in at the sides of your glasses could hinder immersion.
One hang-up is that these particular lenses do not work with every 3D movie. People at the local Dolby 3D cinema tell me that the Gunnars won't work correctly there. Gunnar also says that IMAX is not compatible with these lenses, though they say they make a variant that will work. It's not a serious problem, as these glasses use RealD technology, and Gunnar says that 75% of 3D screens worldwide use this tech.
I was not able to try these glasses out in a gaming capacity, but the Gunnar 3D lenses are supposed to work with passive PC gaming solutions including offerings by nVidia. The iZ3D displays also work with Gunnar's lenses.
Note that these glasses will only work on polarized, passive 3D signals. Don't expect to wear these Gunnars with your new 3D TV at home if your set uses active shutter glasses, though I feel like home 3D would be a bit easier to sell if all the glasses looked this nice.
Summary:
In the end I think you're paying to not look stupid in the theater in 3D movies. And you're getting comfort as a bonus, as the glasses are nice and light, and have nice nose pieces and padding over the ears. Plus, think of the germs from reused 3D glasses. Put all of this on top of improved clarity from the better optics and $99 doesn't sound so bad, especially if you frequent 3D movies. If you happen to have 3D PC gaming equipment, I'd imagine that these glasses are looking even more attractive to you. As for me, I'm just happy to go to the movies and not look silly.
WWE Superstars are constantly upping the ante in and out of the ring. Whether it’s with equipment such as tables, ladders, and chairs, stipulations like Hell in a Cell, or backstage hijinks like car accidents, wrestlers do their best to entertain and please their fans. But the spontaneity and variety of the WWE is difficult to recreate in a videogame; it’s tough for THQ to keep up with new Superstars and matches.
This year, THQ is raising the bar for itself. WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 brings a host of improvements and additions that fans have been clamoring for -- and one major new mode that wasn’t a request, but looks to transform the way people play the game.
WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 (PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, PS2, iPhone) Developer: Yuke’s Publisher: THQ To be released: October 26, 2010 (North America) October 29, 2010 (Europe, Australia)
Fans of SvR love to play the exotic match types -- stuff like Tables, Ladders, and Chairs matches or Money in the Bank contests -- but those game types have been hindered by a lack of realistic physics. Slamming someone down onto a ladder never looked any more painful or effective than doing it in the ring, and tables always broke in the same way. But when your match has a particular object in its title, you want that thing to make a meaningful difference in gameplay. To that end, developer Yuke’s has outfitted SvR 2011 with a new physics engine that governs interactions between wrestlers and objects; now, wrestlers will react differently when they come into contact with different objects.
This means that you can do insane things in SvR 2011 that simply weren’t possible before. In a gameplay demo that THQ showed, Rey Mysterio rested a ladder on the ropes from outside the ring, and scampered up it as if it were a ramp into the squared circle. And once you’ve begun a move, you can target an object (such as a table) with the left stick -- when asked to relate the craziest thing he’d seen in the game, creative director Cory Ledesma told a story about someone standing up a ladder inside the ring and stacking a table atop another table outside the ring, and then suplexing his opponent off the top of the ladder through both tables. The new physics system doesn’t extend to interactions between wrestlers, who are still tied to canned animations, but it goes a long way toward making things more realistic.
Yuke’s has also redone the Hell in a Cell match, which was a mere shadow of its real-life self in years past. The cell itself wasn’t nearly as big as a regulation WWE cell, leaving only a one-person width between the cell and the ring. Finally, the game has the same cell you see on TV, which offers much more room for things like throwing your opponent into the cell or grabbing weapons from beneath the ring. And the cell is a physics object: you can target it like you would a table, and slam someone through the cell wall. Of course, you can also climb up and fight on the top of the cell -- and send your opponent crashing through the ceiling with, say, a Chokeslam.
But undoubtedly the biggest change to SvR is the introduction of the “WWE Universe” mode, a pervasive setup that Ledesma described as “career mode [and] exhibition mode all tied into one.” In sports games, selecting “exhibition” from the main menu lets you play one-and-done games that ultimately have no meaning once you complete them. Universe changes all of that. It automatically creates a WWE calendar (with Raw, SmackDown, and pay-per-view events) for you -- the main menu has a Universe ticker at the bottom that displays the contests scheduled for that night’s show, and based on the exhibition matches you play, Universe will form rivalries and set up future matches.
Universe dynamically generates all this content without you having to lift a finger, or ever go into a separate career mode. It includes all the WWE belts and championship rankings for them -- as you win and lose, the rankings change, and Superstars will make their way toward the #1 contender ranking. (Title defenses are saved for PPVs.) The game “adapts to how you play,” explained Ledesma, and it offers an experience that’s completely customizable.
You’re not forced to play anything the game puts together: if, for example, you’re presented with a John Cena-Randy Orton match, and you don’t like Cena, you can replace him with anyone you want. You even have the power to rearrange the championship rankings, placing your created Superstar at the top. In the My WWE menu, you have the ability to put Superstars on different shows, turn a Superstar from a face to a heel, and change a person’s allies and enemies. (Universe also forms tag teams/alliances based on the matches you play -- if you repeatedly put The Miz alongside The Big Show, it will recognize that.)
Universe's dynamic cutscenes will reflect those alliances, too. As an example, THQ had Sheamus feuding with Randy Orton, where John Cena was Orton’s ally. Sheamus jumped Orton during his ring intro, and later on, after Sheamus had pinned Orton and was about to whack him with a chair, Cena ran out to defend his buddy -- and Sheamus backed off. The menu ticker will update you on the status of relationships, saying things like, “Sheamus and Randy Orton’s rivalry has gotten even worse.” If you want to play exhibition matches with no consequences for Universe, you can simply click the right stick at the main menu to turn it off. But if all of this works as advertised, I don’t see a scenario where you’d ever want to do that.
THQ has spent a lot of time implementing Universe, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve left the standalone career mode, Road to WrestleMania, untouched. The three-month journey to the biggest annual PPV event is a much more open-ended experience -- THQ has brought back the free-roaming backstage area that was in WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain. It’s a living world where you can interact with Superstars and Divas, and branch out your story. A mini-map shows the layout of the area, which includes locker rooms, offices, a training room (where you can upgrade your Superstar’s attributes), and a green room.
The backstage area is like a microcosm of a city in an open-world game: you’ll encounter other wrestling personalities, who will be in the middle of their own activities. You might walk in on Randy Orton shooting a promo, or see him on the phone with Stephanie McMahon (since everything occurs in real time, you’ll be able to hear the conversation from the other side by visiting Stephanie’s office). The game allows you to interrupt anybody else, and people will approach you, too. While THQ was playing as Cena, Randy Orton came up to him and dared Cena to hit him. You can decide to take the bait, or be the better man; the decision will send your story in different directions. I noticed that the lip-synching wasn’t even close in most cases, but that’s a minor concern.
Since the backstage zone is, of course, connected to the ring area, you can even rush down there and cause chaos. THQ gave us an example of Chris Jericho running down the ramp and absconding with the title belt during a match. A smartphone hub unifies the experience, with access to e-mail, phone calls, settings, and the status of your unlockable items. One useful unlockable that THQ showed off was a time machine, which allows you to re-watch previous story cutscenes as well as go back to branching decisions so you can replay them from the other side without starting the mode again. It really seems like there’s much more do to in the mode than ever before.
The fans really enjoy the creation suites, and THQ has refined and expanded them in SvR 2011. Last year’s WWE Community Creations feature, which let gamers share their created Superstars, was a big hit with over ten million downloads. Thankfully, you can now edit the outfit or move set of any downloaded wrestler, and the streamlined creation interface makes things “way easier to do.” Attribute points are unlimited, so your created Superstar can be rated higher than anyone else in the game.
In its third year, Create-A-Finisher offers the ability to create finishing moves out of the corner as well as from the front and the top rope. You can string together up to ten animations (from a selection of more than 500), and adjust each step’s speed, rotation, and range (how much distance the finisher moves). I was able to create a pretty bad-ass finisher in under five minutes -- I sat the guy on the second rope, then brought him up to the top rope, from where I superplexed him to the mat. This year, you can create up to 130 different finishers, so go to town.
THQ also has a robust online setup this year. The major problem with keeping up with the craziness of the WWE is that the game’s on-disc content is locked a few weeks before it ships; now, THQ will be able to do that more easily with an “aggressive” slate of downloadable content. For example, Sheamus burst onto the WWE scene last fall and had a rapid ascent to the top; he wasn’t even in last year’s game, but will appear on the European cover of SvR 2011. The plan this year is to keep the game current with a steady stream of DLC -- Ledesma didn’t confirm straight-up roster updates per se, but he said we can expect additional wrestlers to be sold through the in-game WWE Store.
Ledesma promised that THQ has reduced the lag that has plagued prior versions of the game, and WWE Community Creations is better than it was last year. Of course, the entire online component of SvR 2011 will be hidden behind an online pass; if you buy the game used (or rent it, or borrow it from a friend), you’ll need to pay $10 to use the game’s online features.
With SvR 2011, THQ appears to be doing a much better job of responding to fan complaints and requests. The Universe mode alone looks fantastic, and almost everything else has received at least some attention. An annual release schedule doesn't seem to hurt this iteration of the series -- this might just be the best SvR game yet.
One of the many games being shown at gamescom is Splash Damage’s Brink. If you're not familiar with Brink, it's an upcoming team-based co-operative first person shooter in development for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, & PC. I was able to get about 20 minutes of playtime while I spoke to the developers, so go ahead and check below for my hands-on impressions of Brink's multiplayer.
Brink (PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation S3) Developer: Splash Damage Publisher: Bethesda Softworks To be released: Spring 2011
The hands-on, with around seven other press people, started with a training video that explained the core concepts and the HUD. After going through the training video, we were allowed to customize our character (which will be a persistent, leveling character in the full game) with looks, weapons, and abilities.
You can customize abilities for multiple classes, as you may want to eventually change classes as you keep playing the game. To this end, you have a set amount of ability points. One ability takes one point. The abilities are spread among universal skills -- buffs and such that work for all classes, and class specific abilities. I put the most points into the Soldier class, picking abilities that increased my damage and my health so that I wouldn’t die all the time -- because I really hate waiting for respawn timers in multiplayer. Some other points were distributed among the Engineer class, the Medic, and the Infiltrator. Many of these abilities cost mana, which regenerates slowly as you play.
If you have played Team Fortress 2, you should be pretty familiar with what each classe can do. The Soldier is a mix between the Heavy and the TF2 Soldier. The Infiltrator has some Spy skills, such as copying an enemy’s look. The Engineer and the Medic are … an Engineer and a Medic. They have mixed up the classes enough so it doesn't feel like a direct copy of TF2, and, in fact, it probably makes Brink more accessible to gamers who like team-based multiplayer combat, since the familiar aspect of those games are present.
So, it’s not TF2. What Brink feels most like is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, also from Splash Damage. Each class has specific objectives that focus your gameplay so you're not running around like an idiot. This gives players some more direction and a sense of progression, as they pursue and achieve goals, as well as the feeling that the session actually matters. Of course, the first thing I did was run around like an idiot.
We were able to play Container City, the same level that was shown at E3, but this was a newer build. In a GDC session with Lead Level Designer Neil Alphonso, he mentioned how this level was designed by David Johnston -- you might know him as the guy who created a little map called DE_Dust.
Playing Brink feels like playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at first (no surprise that Neil Alphonso also worked on both the Quake and Wolfenstein versions of Enemy Territory) but they definitely added some things that made it more interesting. First of all, the Left Bumper acts like a contextual Mirror’s Edge button. This system, S.M.A.R.T. can be used to run, grab ledges, and jump over obstacles. Heavier classes won’t be able to go as fast or jump as high as lighter classes, so what paths are open to you in a map will depend on what class you have.
I tried to Rambo my way forward as a Soldier, but it just resulted in a quick and merciless death. Death is not instant -- instead, you slowly bleed out, giving a Medic time to heal you. Of course, all Medics on our team sucked, so while I just lay on the ground for 20 seconds, I checked out all the options in the Menu. While dying, you can look at all the objectives for your team in a dialing wheel. Doing so points you into the direction of the objective, so you know where to go when you spawn or get revived. A good medic can throw you a revive syringe that you can either use to revive on the spot, or can ignore and respawn at a designated point. A few minutes and deaths later, my teammates finally chose to be Medics so I could go on after stupidly getting mowed down again. The downside to being revived, rather than respawning, is that you keep the ammo you had when you died -- if you died low on ammo, you'll revive with the same amount.
After having specific classes on our team hack into gates to open them, plant explosives, repair a crane, and escort a robot you had to get from the start to the end of the level, we won in the nick of time. As you progress through the map, the spawn points move with you so you don’t have to worry about running all the way back to the action. The game also has optional objectives that can reward experience, a Command Center where you can change classes, and various ways to boost your team.
The developers told us that we were playing at level 14 instead of level 1, which meant we were pretty much playing on Hard, or the level you would be at after playing for around five days. While I definitely died a lot, it didn’t feel impossible or that much harder than any standard multiplayer match at all. The build we played also allowed us access to some more weapons and abilities, which we normally would have had to unlock by gaining experience.
A lot of things in the game provide you with experience. Finish an objective, kill enemies, the works. While talking to Neil Alphonso afterwards, I asked him if people who prefer singleplayer games and wanted to play Brink with AI teammates should be concerned about it being so multiplayer gameplay focused. He said that singleplayer oriented people would still have a good experience, because the AI really does a great job at emulating player behavior. To be honest, I thought we were playing against another press team while we were just playing bots, so they seem to be on the right track there.
Singleplayer fans will be pleased that there is an actual narrative throughout the game, and there are a lot of visual narrative devices in the maps. Think Portal-esque graffiti and scenery such as a half broken satellite dish that people just keep on their roofs around in the hopes of receiving a signal one day. While Alphonso wouldn’t comment on the number of maps that would ship with the retail game, he did remind me that there are two sides to choose from which can give you vastly different experiences.
A thing that stops most singleplayer gamers from entering multiplayer (other than raging 12 year old boys) is the steep curve from singleplayer pacing to multiplayer frantics. But in Brink, you are basically playing a singleplayer multiplayer experience anyway. And if you do co-op missions or multiplayer missions, you gain more experience for your persistent character. We all know everyone always wants more experience!
Brink looked like it was definitely a step up from the by now classic Enemy Territory design. The new features like the S.M.A.R.T. system for parkour-like movement change the gameplay dramatically because of all the approaches you can take to a level. Although I have to admit that team based multiplayer is really not my thing, Brink was a lot of fun to play. At least, when I wasn't dying. Maybe I’ll get better at it after launch, when I have more than 15 minutes into the game and learn not to play Rambo.
If you are tired of Modern Warfare 2, and don’t care about Black Ops, then you should definitely give Brink a chance come demo time. It feels more focused, it’s short enough to pick up and play, and it should be a blast to play with other Dtoiders during FNF.
As a final remark, I have to apologize to Paul Wedgewood, the Splash Damage CEO. I mistook him for a PR guy trying to tell me things I already knew so I kind of blew him off (not literally, jeez) so I could bug Alphonso for some more info. Sorry Paul!
Despite the iPhone being better than the PSP, Sony has used its obnoxious little pet Marcus to make fun of the system (again) for having terrible games. The irony, in case you couldn't tell, is almost eye-scorching in its amazing lack of self-awareness.
The very fact that Marcus exists is proof that Sony will always give the PSP a raw deal. The PS3 gets the genuinely funny Kevin Butler, while the PSP gets this flapping gargoyle of a child. It speaks volumes of what Sony believes the PSP audience to be when this homunculus presumes to speak for them.
Anyway, maybe when Sony can offer a real digital download solution for the PlayStation Portable, it'll be better at handheld gaming than Apple. Right now though, with a wealth of robust games that cost less than five bucks (not to mention all the freebies), Apple is better. I'll take paper tossing over $40 digital versions of games that I can get for cheaper at GameStop.
I'm a huge fan of the Parasite Eve games and oh-so-happy that a new one is on the way, even if it's on the PSP. I've been keeping away from the plot up until this trailer, so not too sure what's going on other than that Aya Brea can do what the Agents do in The Matrix.
The 3rd Birthday is looking quite amazing. Loving the dark style the series has maintained here. I also like how Aya's pants represent her health and get ripped to shreds the more damage she takes.
Someone on eBay is selling his shiny little ball for $250,000. The ball is allegedly worth so much money because it is one of fifty special Final Fantasy "orbs" that was given as a prize by Nintendo Power back in 1990.
The story goes that the mold used to make the orbs was smashed, preventing any more from being made. It's made of solid lead crystal and has "Final Fantasy" etched into it, along with a shield and a sword image. There's no denying that it's quite a special little thing.
However, nobody's buying it, because I dare say that anybody who wants it doesn't have $250,000 to be spending on little round baubles. Perhaps if Paris Hilton were a Final Fantasy fan, this would have been snapped up already, but poor, degenerate NES gamers are another matter.
So, if you have a ludicrous amount of spare cash and absolutely nothing else to spend it on, this is up for grabs. Don't delay, demand for this item is ... incredibly nonexistent.
Zipper is bringing Move controls to MAG this fall! You are either really excited by this or just don't care and will continue to use the regular controller! It's not mentioned in the update, but I'm curious to see if people with the Move controller will be able to play against people with the regular controller.
Zipper has also detailed a new MAG beta program, which will allow people to test out future MAG content, including the new Escalation game type, where all three factions are fighting at once on three new maps. New weapons, clan deploy, updated skill tree, an in-game economy, and additional character slots will also be available for players to test out.
The beta starts on August 24th, and you will need to download the client software from the PlayStation Store in order to participate. Check out the PlayStation Blog for more details on all that you'll be able to get your hands on next week.
So who's excited by the news? Looking forward to Move controls, or are you just going to stick it out with the regular controller?
I've made no secret of my inability to play fighting games, but I still have a soft spot for Mortal Kombat. The new one looks really cool, and while I'll never be able to play it, I'll certainly enjoy watching other people kick each other's arses.
These new shots show off the newly announced Kitana and Cyrax, along with Reptile, Mileena, Kung Lao, and everybody's favorite, Sektor. Check them out and let us know if you're excited, or if you're one of those fighting fans who sneer at Mortal Kombat because it's not Street Fighter.
"Mafia II tells a compelling story about organized crime in America - a subject that for decades has been featured in movies, television shows and novels. Neither UNICO nor any other organization purporting to represent Italian-Americans has seen or played Mafia II.
At Take-Two, we balance our right to free expression with what we believe is a thoughtful and responsible approach to creating and marketing our products.
Mafia II is M-rated in accordance with our industry's strict standards. It is specifically not targeted toward young people.
We will only release a title that meets our standards: as art, as entertainment and as a socially responsible product. We aim to distinguish creative and compelling story telling that advances artistic expression from subject matter that gratuitously exploits or glorifies violence or stereotypes. I fully and completely stand behind our creative teams and products, including Mafia II."
There you have it. Do you think this will placate UNICO? (My guess is no.)
I am writing to officially apologized for what can only be described as "fangirl-type" behavior at our recent interview at gamescom 2010.
I was naturally overwhelmed by your charm, and the many amazing things you told me. I was so excited when you told me about your plans for showing your new game Portal 2, and how we talked about your hopes for it. I was captivated when I learned about all the different things we might to see in the future, and what led you and all of the amazing people at Valve to want to make this game.
I hope we can put this awkwardness behind us and look forward to PAX, where I hope to act in a manner far more fitting for a "serious games blogger."
Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online is going free-to-play this fall. More specifically, the free-to-play version of the game will launch for PC's in North America and Europe on September 10.
What does free mean? Well, just that -- you'll be able to download the full game and play up to level 50 for no cost. Here's where the opening the wallet comes up -- there's a new Lord of the Rings Online store opening up, where you'll be able to drop dough on expansion pack, premium content, additional character slots, items, and more. It's right in the game, so the game will be able to gently bug you about spending money from time to time. Worse things have happened for giving 50 levels of gameplay handed over to you, I suppose.
Anyone willing to give the new, free Lord of the Rings Online a shot?
Professional sourpuss and Destructoid editor-in-chief Nick Chester tells me I should stop being so excited for Kirby's Epic Yarn. I have decided instead to not learn my lesson about Aliens vs. Predator and ignore his warnings yet again. Kirby is, after all, made out of string.
Here's the box art for Kirby's Epic Yarn. You could call this a non-news story but you'd be wrong because it's actually the most important story of the week. After all, it's the box art for a game in which Kirby is made out of string, and that is very crucial information.
So enjoy the box art for Kirby's Epic Yarn. It is box art!
Torchlight II is on the way, and people with taste are all very excited indeed. This new trailer, hot off the gamescom presses, reveals co-op play for the first time. It's Torchlight II's biggest new feature, and a response to the tons of people who begged for it in the first game.
As you may expect, it looks hot! Torchlight was huge amounts of fun, and being able to play it with others should increase the loot-happy entertainment by leaps. Check out the video, let us know what you reckon.
When I posted about the Persona 3 Socialmobile game yesterday, many of you reacted along the lines of "blah blah blah where's my Persona 5 on current-generation consoles?" Well, this new game, Catherine, isn't Persona 5, but short of an official announcement for that game it's the closest you're going to get.
Don't be disappointed though, because from the looks of things, Catherine is easily as intriguing as any Persona sequel, and involves key Persona series staffers like P3/P3P director/producer Katsura Hashino and series character designer Shigenori Soejima. The game stars Vincent, a 30-something "herbivore man" who runs into the titular Catherine, a coquettish 22-year-old. Shortly after, he starts having vicious nightmares wherein he must climb an endless staircase just to wake up. Incidentally, Vincent also appeared as a mysterious NPC in Persona 3 Portable, so there might be a more direct connection at play.
Currently billed as a "horror action-adventure", the team promises that Catherine will be more adult-themed than past games they've made. Shoji Meguro, who's composing for the title, noted that keywords for the game's music include "classic", "adult-oriented", and "erotic". Looking at leaked Famitsu scans (check them out below), I can certainly confirm the latter two. There's an official site here, but as of this writing it's blank. Expect the game around "Winter 2010" for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
What do you think? Are you in DO WANT mode, or are you still just disappointed that it's not Persona 5?
The golden era of cool free Apps really seems to have ended, but I'm still managing to scrape a few noteworthy titles together. Today's game is Escape from Nom, one of those titles I'd never recommend as a paid App, but is worth checking out for free.
It's one of those games where you have to get a bouncy thing to another thing while avoiding some things. It's cute and whimsical and I like the silly music. Download it if you want!
[Got a Free App suggestion? Hitting me up on Twitter is the fastest way! Be sure to get me before 9am Central though!]
According to our own Jonathan Holmes, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World film may be the first "true videogame movie." While based on the Bryan Lee O'Malley graphic novel series and not a game, the film (much like the comic) makes enough geek culture and game reference that it makes it easy to see where Holmes is coming from. And he loved the film.
He's not alone -- critics and gaming culture aficionados alike have hailed Wright's film, starring Michael Cera as the titular Pilgrim, as one of the best films of the year. But how did it do at the box office during its opening weekend? Not so great, pulling in a meager (by Hollywood standards) $10,609,795. By comparison, Sylvester Stallone's testosterone-a-thon The Expendables topped the box office with $34,825,135 during its opening weekend (via The Numbers).
Despite receiving high praise and vuvuzela-like buzz from gamers, how did Pilgrim do compared to other videogame-related films? I hope you're sitting down -- during their respective opening weekends, films like Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Max Payne beat out Pilgrim's box office draw. In fact, Pilgrim comes in ranked 12 on a list (generated by EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich) topped by 2001's Tomb Raider: Lara Croft ($64,049,321), starring Angelina Jolie. Pilgrim did, however, manage to top game films The Wizard, Alone in the Dark, and Double Dragon; it should be noted that all three films had limited theatrical releases.
The full harrowing chart can be found after the jump, for those interested train wrecks. Hey, there's always DVD/Blu-ray sales. Did you go out and see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World last weekend? Why or why not?
In a move that will likely surprise nobody, Konami has announced that No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise will include support for PlayStation Move, giving it far more in common with the original Wii version.
If you're a fan of button mashing, the game will still support the DualShock 3, but those who'd rather get their waggle on with Sony's glow-in-the-dark dildo have the option available to them. Konami assures fans that the experience is enhanced with the latter.
There was no indication that Heroes' Paradise would support Kinect for Xbox 360, though ... most likely because that would be stupid.
Fallout: New Vegas has a definitive end
Community blogs of 08/19/10
-120x.jpg)
.png)
0 nhận xét: on "8/20 Destructoid"
Post a Comment