General gaming |
- Review: Rage is a Melting Pot of Post-Apocalyptica That Soon Solidifies
- How Namco Juggles Six+ Tekken Projects
- The Lack of Itagaki's Trash Talk Saddens Tekken's Harada
- Review: Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 Finds Itself as a Series in Flux
- 2D Boy Questions if XBLA is Past its Prime
- Expect a Larger Gap Between Future Assassin's Creed Releases
- Review: Tetris Axis is the Tetris Game That Does it All, Boringly
- Sega Wants You to Guess it's Working on a New Daytona USA
- Ni No Kuni to Adopt Wrath of the White Witch as a Western Subtitle
- Vita's European Box Art Revealed, All of Those App Icons Explained
| Review: Rage is a Melting Pot of Post-Apocalyptica That Soon Solidifies Posted: 03 Oct 2011 09:01 PM PDT Rage didn't start out the way I thought it would. My idea of it was mostly based on its initial reveal some years ago: depicting a barren wasteland where people live, drive, and dress in whatever they can find. Just another Mad Max pastiche, right? So imagine my surprise when the game begins inside a cold, angled underground capsule (an "Ark") from a forgotten time in the far-flung future. I guess post-apocalyptic worlds have to start somewhere. It's a harsh beginning, but Rage doesn't let up from there. After emerging on the surface of the largely-destroyed Earth, you're saved from certain death by a kind-hearted wasteland homesteader named Dan Hagar (voiced by John Goodman, who also played a "Dan" on Roseanne, which was more than enough to keep me from taking this character seriously). Hagar wastes no time in employing your "services" to wipe out a nearby influx of mutants, and perform a few odd jobs around his settlement and the neighbors'. You get the hang of shootin', drivin', and survivin', and eventually learn more about your past as an enhanced human candidate of the "Eden" project, initiated by the oppressive powers of the Authority, who try to keep this crazy world in check... for their own gains, of course. |
| How Namco Juggles Six+ Tekken Projects Posted: 03 Oct 2011 08:13 PM PDT
Feature When GamePro asked Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon in 2008 if he'd continue to reinvent the brand (after MK vs. DC Universe), or take the iterative approach of the Tekken series, his answer points to an interesting truth: "Out of our competitors, my favorite fighting series is Tekken. When I pick up [a new Tekken game] and play as Hwoarang or Jin Kazama, I feel like my character gained a few new moves but overall retained the same strategy. Prettier graphics, but the same basic gameplay... I feel like I've played them all before." "Coincidentally, their sales aren't nearly as big as they were back in the days of Tekken 3," Boon says, "I think that's something all fighting games, especially ones with multiple sequels, need to do: add something dramatically different." |
| The Lack of Itagaki's Trash Talk Saddens Tekken's Harada Posted: 03 Oct 2011 05:08 PM PDT Tomonobu Itagaki spent the better part of two decades at Tecmo and Team Ninja, where his major projects included developing the Dead or Alive fighting game series and making sure you knew the competition (Tekken in particular) wasn't any good. He left the developer several years ago and is now working on action game Devil's Third at Valhalla Game Studios. In other words, he's no longer in the fighting game business and therefore no longer trash talks the competition -- and it's exactly that which Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada misses. Speaking with 1UP at the Tokyo Game Show last month (look for a 1UP cover story on Tekken soon), Harada brought up the subject of Itagaki and how he's sad that the notoriously frank developer is no longer around to spice things up. |
| Review: Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 Finds Itself as a Series in Flux Posted: 03 Oct 2011 04:00 PM PDT A friend, who knows my predilections for the Beautiful Game well, once IM'ed me a joke: "how you you say 'almost' in spanish?" |
| 2D Boy Questions if XBLA is Past its Prime Posted: 03 Oct 2011 02:16 PM PDT This subject is explored in an in-depth piece written by Ron Carmel, a former developer at EA-owned Pogo and one of the two guys behind 2D Boy, the indie developer responsible for indie hit World of Goo. Using survey data he collected from a number of independent developers, he learned that PlayStation 3 has become the more popular platform to develop downloadable games for, and that's only going to continue to increase as XBLA's popularity declines. These numbers obviously don't account for every developer out there. However, looking at average review scores from Metacritic and Gamasutra-provided sales data based on leaderboards, these developers who are increasingly opting for PSN over XBLA account for some of the best-selling and highest-rated games on XBLA. For instance, the average number of copies a game developed by the group surveyed was 137,010, compared with just 46,281 by everyone else. Likewise, the average review score for games made by the surveyed group was 78, compared with 66 by others. Three of the five top-rated games for XBLA were also developed by those who were surveyed, so clearly, some of the best talent around is accounted for in Carmel's survey group. |
| Expect a Larger Gap Between Future Assassin's Creed Releases Posted: 03 Oct 2011 01:26 PM PDT Or, at least, it is set to end in the world of Assassin's Creed. There's belief in the real world that an apocalypse-type event of some sort will take place on December 21, 2012, and this served as the inspiration for something similar to happen in Assassin's Creed. As such, the developers feel the need to complete the story before we pass that point in the real world. "In Assassin's Creed we set up a timeline with this whole end of the world plot of December 2012," Ubisoft's Alexandre Amacio told Eurogamer. "That's fast approaching, and the story we have to tell, we obviously need to do it before we arrive at that point." |
| Review: Tetris Axis is the Tetris Game That Does it All, Boringly Posted: 03 Oct 2011 12:30 PM PDT Objectively speaking, I recognize thatTetris Axis is a pretty good game. At its base level, it's a great game; Tetris has been voted the best game of all time more than once, and for good reason. It's the most fun a person could possibly have with seven geometric shapes (barring some sort of heretofore unpublicized fetish), and testing your reflexes to see how many lines of blocks you can vanquish before they accumulate to the kill line remains as fun as it was 25 years ago. That's the concept at the heart of Axis, and that element remains enjoyable. Personally speaking, though, Axis is unbearable: A hodgepodge of ideas with no aesthetic consistency. It includes practically every Tetris derivative mini-game to have been pushed out the door by various licensees over the past decade, both good and bad, making it a sort of omnibus. At the same time, the whole thing feels cheap and generic, and there's very little visual consistency from mode to mode. The clip-art-quality graphics vary wildly from gumballs and kittens to surreal space-scapes. One minute you're looking at a Precious Moments painting of Tetriminoes making geometric snow angels, like something straight off an airbrushed T-shirt in an unpopular corner of the carnival; the next you're going head-to-head against obscure Bomberman characters. It feels like the developers were trying to hedge their bets by making Axis a game with something for everyone, but ended up with something much too aimless and slapped-together to appeal to anyone. |
| Sega Wants You to Guess it's Working on a New Daytona USA Posted: 03 Oct 2011 12:07 PM PDT After getting over how cute the bunny is, fans of Daytona USA will immediately recognize the dragged-out "rolling start" clip in the video above. (See here for a comparison.) The full instructions for how to enter the contest can be found on the official Sega blog. Those who win will get a free copy of the soon-to-be-announced game on PlayStation 3. This isn't the first we've heard of a new Daytona USA. As often happens, its existence was revealed by a listing on the Australian classification board's website (via Edge) last month. Although the free copies for contest winners will be available on PS3, that listing mentioned the game as being multiplatform, so presumably we'll also see the game come to Xbox 360. |
| Ni No Kuni to Adopt Wrath of the White Witch as a Western Subtitle Posted: 03 Oct 2011 11:21 AM PDT On September 26, a trademark on Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch was filed for in the U.S. Although Ni No Kuni, which is also known as also known as The Another World, was already released on DS last year, it never made it to the west and therefore was never given a western name. In Japan its subtitle translates to The Jet-Black Mage, whereas the PS3 version (coming out on November 17 in Japan) translates to The Queen of White Sacred Ash. That exact name likely wouldn't go over well in the west, although the new trademark is reminiscent (at least to me) of World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King. As explained in our hands-on preview from TGS, Ni No Kuni isn't the most complicated of RPGs. It is, however, incredibly good-looking, and that alone may be all it needs to grab people's attention, regardless of what its name ends up being. |
| Vita's European Box Art Revealed, All of Those App Icons Explained Posted: 03 Oct 2011 10:36 AM PDT PlayStation Vita is still without a release date for most of the world beyond a loose "early 2012." Even though we're still months away from getting our hands on it, Sony has decided to tease us with a look at the European box art for the new handheld, as well as brief descriptions for what all of those icons on its home screen are for. Many of the apps are self-explanatory based upon the picture like the camera, Trophies, and browser. The European PlayStation Blog has explained them all in any event. Starting with the upper left corner: |
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