General gaming

General gaming

Review: Fishing Resort Tries Hard to Make Fishing Un-Boring

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 05:30 PM PST

Fishing games are one of the bigger portions in the routine school lunch that is the Wii library. Realistic ones, unrealistic ones, some with controller shells to add to your pile of Wii accessories... and at the tail end of the system's life, they keep coming. XSeed's Fishing Resort, developed by Prope (Let's Tap) tries to spice things up by letting you do some things that aren't just fishing, and they do add a cute Japanese touch to an otherwise bland genre, but it still has trouble standing out.

The point of Fishing Resort is to let you do whatever you want -- as long as it's related to fishing. Your customized character arrives at the Hotel Fishing Resort and, after a control tutorial, can either keep fishing, take a run down the shore, or go back to the hotel and sign up for special events. Don't expect a Skyrim level of freedom, though -- you're bounded by all sorts of paths and walls, and you still need to keep fishing and be good at it. The game opens up bit by bit, and in a couple of in-game days, you can freely check out of the hotel and visit the neighboring resort, and many more all across the island are unlocked as you build your collection of catches.

Import Play Test: Rocket Slime Brings Happiness to the Third Dimension

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 05:15 PM PST

Rocket Slime! Not everyone played that little DS masterpiece, but everyone who did has one thing in common: They loved it. (If you somehow managed to dislike Rocket Slime, please let us know; rarely does one have the opportunity to see the living incarnation of misanthropy.) A simple sprite-based game in the style of old-school Zelda adventures, Rocket Slime focused on the exploits of Dragon Quest's iconic sprites. You know, those little smiling blue dudes with few enough hit points to count on one hand, whose death is worth all of one EXP and two gold. An unlikely hero for a game to be sure, but it worked: The protagonist, the eponymous Rocket, used his gelatinous elasticity to take on a horde of much more powerful creatures, rescuing his fellow slimes from a gang of Mafioso platypuses, the Plob. This involved reciprocal abductions and occasionally driving a giant slime-shaped tank-fortress into massive pitched battles. The end result wasn't anything mind-blowing, but it was so fun and earnestly good-natured that no one cared. To know Rocket was to love Rocket.

For the sequel -- Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 3 in Japan, which we'll call Rocket Slime 3DS for convenience -- the Dragon Quest crew isn't exactly reinventing the wheel. At first glance, Rocket Slime 3DS doesn't look particularly different from its previous-generation predecessor. The most notable change is that the backgrounds (but not the characters) are rendered with polygons. These look pretty barfy in still images, but they're quite nice once you turn the 3D slider up. Besides that, though, Rocket Slime 3DS is pretty much business as usual. Rocket possesses the exactly same repertoire of skills: He snaps into foes and objects to send them flying, and he can snag and carry up to three stunned foes or other kinds of debris at a time. He jumps, floats to a rest, and can perform a super attack by charging up briefly. And that's about it!

Microsoft Flight Needs Beta Testers

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 02:11 PM PST

Microsoft Flight

Unless you were specifically looking for information on it, you may have thought Microsoft Flight had been killed given how quiet things had been. Instead, the development team has continued to give occasional updates on its status through its official website and now it's turning to gamers to beta test the game beginning next month.

Those who are interested will need a Windows Live ID and an Xbox Live/Games for Windows Live Gamertag to sign up. Not everyone who applies will get in, and the information you're asked to provide isn't especially specific, so it doesn't sound as if it matters how fast your computer is or what beta testing experience you have. The beta will begin sometime in January; testers will be bound to an NDA and therefore disallowed from sharing any impressions, screenshots, or anything else.

The EFF Wants Console Modding and Jailbreaking Deemed Legal by the DMCA

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 01:14 PM PST

PS3 Linux

Just over a year after winning several exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions (which saw jailbreaking cell phones acknowledged as fair use), the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now trying to expand those exemptions. This time around it's interested in gaining something similar for those who want to mod their videogame consoles.

A request for this, along with three other issues, was filed this week. Exemptions are considered by the Copyright Office during a rulemaking process which takes place every three years. The exemption is for the DMCA's "prohibitions on 'circumventing' digital rights management (DRM) and 'other technical protection measures' used to protect copyrighted works." The EFF and many others feel these rules are not used properly, hence the need to seek this out in the first place.

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition's Ver. 2012 Update Detailed

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 11:43 AM PST

Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Version 2012 is a very long title, no doubt, but what it is not is the name of yet another re-release of Street Fighter IV. As previously announced, it's a huge patch being released -- for free! -- for the Arcade Edition of the game.

Arcade Edition was the third version of Street Fighter IV released following SFIV itself and Super Street Fighter IV, and is the only version this patch is being released for. It is said to be the final version of the game, and that seems to be proven by the large number of changes being made in this patch.

Four Gameplay Mechanics That Should Have Caught On

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 11:12 AM PST

Feature

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Four Gameplay Mechanics That Should Have Caught On

In spite of their potential, these ideas somehow slipped through the cracks.

By: Dennis Farrell December 1, 2011

All creative endeavors are informed by those that came before. Experiences of all kinds are absorbed, filed away in memory, and considered -- sometimes subconsciously -- in terms of how their building blocks might be expanded, altered, or fit into an entirely different framework.

In game design, the result of this process is often a slight tweak on an existing mechanic. Given the number of interconnected systems that make up even the smallest title, this is something of a necessity. Reinventing the wheel sounds noble, but try doing it a thousand times while balancing on the wobbly, ever-growing column of wheels. Which is on fire. I'm not sure why, but there it is. This was your idea.

Sometimes, however, a truly unique concept emerges and, with a lot of hard work, surpasses the "don't break everything" barrier to take a starring role in a game. If such an idea proves popular it is often co-opted rather quickly by the rest of the industry, becoming a new foundation for others to improve upon.

NeverDead Amuses us With Its Head-rolling, But Concerns us With Its Shooting

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 10:30 AM PST

At one point in NeverDead, I'm told to go against every instinct in my video game playing life by actually touching the electricity. That is, I'm explicitly told to grasp onto an electrical panel to shock myself into death. Well, death for a traditional character -- the trick with NeverDead is that your character, Bryce Boltzmann, is an immortal fellow who simply can't die. Whether blown up, torn in half, or in this case shocked with massive amounts of electricity, Bryce keeps on going with only mild impairment -- well, as mild as, "lacking in limbs or perhaps even an entire body."

A cursory look at NeverDead reveals what looks like a pretty typical third-person shooter. There's a dash of Max Payne, in that time occasionally slows down (if you purchase that specific ability), but overall, the game alternates between walking, talking, jumping, and shooting. But rather than die, Bryce just falls apart. Bad guy chop his arm off? It lays on the floor while he switches from firing guns akimbo to using a gun singlehandedly. A different demon blows a leg off? Now he's hopping to-and-fro on one foot. Get caught in an explosion that blows his entire body apart? Now you control just his head as it rolls on by in an attempt to re-combine with the rest of his body. It's like if Katamari Damacy starred The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail rather than the Prince of All Cosmos.

Minecraft Creator Moving on to New Projects

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 10:22 AM PST

Markus Persson, better known to fans of Minecraft as Notch, has stepped down from his role as lead developer of the sandbox building game.

This move comes just a few weeks after the first-ever MineCon, during which time the game finally reached a final version 1.0 state. That is not to say updates for the game are done -- there is still much to be done, it'll just be handled by Jens Bergensten, who is taking over as lead developer. Persson says Bergensten, who is going to be working alone for right now, "will have the final say in all design decisions."

Fortune Street is Fun for All, Dull for One

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 10:02 AM PST

Fortune Street stands as one of the best video board games I've ever played. It's far more traditional (read: "Monopoly-like") in feel than the likes of Culdcept Saga, but as an old-fashioned board game concept rendered as a video game it's hard to top. However, Fortune Street brings with it a single significant caveat: If you don't like board games and don't have a few friends who share your enthusiasm for the medium, there's really nothing here for you.

Sure, you can play Fortune Street solo, but you won't enjoy it. Not for lack of effort on the developers' part, though; the game sells on the strength of its Mario and Dragon Quest cameos, and those really come to the fore when playing the single-player game. Each CPU-controlled opponent burbles with a constant stream of unique dialogue to liven things up. Mario characters like Toad and Peach riff on their one-dimensional in-game personalities, while the Dragon Quest crew carry forward their various whimsical personalities (Slime makes lots of puns on the words goo and ooze, while Platypunk talks like a wiseguy gangster in reference to Rocket Slime) from the recent DQ localizations. The problem is that after a few rounds of this, you'll have seen all the dialogue and will no longer care.

Xenoblade Chronicles Confirmed for North America [Update]

Posted: 02 Dec 2011 09:08 AM PST

Xenoblade Chronicles

Update: If the information below seemed to too good to be true, Nintendo has now confirmed the news: Xenoblade Chronicles is coming to North America next year.

The game's page on Nintendo's website only lists an April release date, while GameStop's website has been updated with a listing that shows it as coming out on April 2. Whatever the exact date may be, at least we now know it's coming.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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