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- Pokemon Black & White 2 for DS: So Backward It’s Brilliant
- TERA Korea
- Shadow Company
- Metal Gear Solid 3D Review: Neither Definitive Nor Terrible
- The Lack of Itagaki’s Trash Talk Saddens Tekken’s Harada
- Asura’s Wrath Review: A Surprisingly Shallow Cataclysmic Action Game
- Ragnarok II (KR)
- Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Gets the Limited Edition Treatment
- This Month in Misogyny: Exposed Minors, Hair-Pulling, and Advanced Elephantiasis
- Conquering Death: How Games are Reinventing Loss
| Pokemon Black & White 2 for DS: So Backward It’s Brilliant Posted: 26 Feb 2012 03:07 AM PST Nintendo’s been pumping out the weird Pokémon-related news of late, not least of which was an absolutely baffling crossover with Koei’s long-running Nobunaga’s Ambition simulation series. Nevertheless, today’s announcement just might take the cake: A direct sequel to last year’s Pokémon Black White is coming later this year to Japan and has already been confirmed for an indeterminate U.S. release. But it’s not the remixed “Pokémon Grey” version most people expected, and it’s not for 3DS like most fans hoped. Rather, say hello to Pokémon Black White 2… for Nintendo DS. On one hand, it’s nice to see the series receiving what appears to be a much-needed shake-up. Black White were pitched to gamers as a significant overhaul of the Pokémon formula, though in practice they didn’t vary that much from previous generations of the game. The prospect of a proper sequel within a generation (rather than a glorified rehash per usual) shows a willingness by the franchise’s caretakers to put their money where their mouths are. Of course, these “sequels” could prove to be little more than a standard remix by another name. [Edit: Handheld blog Tiny Cartridge has astutely noted that the U.S. title is "Pokémon Black White Version 2," which sounds more akin to the iterative Yellow/Crystal/Emerald/Platinum updates we've come to expect from the franchise.] Far more surprising — and disappointing for everyone hoping to see the series make the jump to Nintendo’s current handheld — is the fact that Black White 2 are being built for the original DS, a system that should by all rights be headed toward the retirement home. Besides being a letdown, this looks like a backward business move for Nintendo, which has been pushing hard to build its 3DS install base. A 3DS-exclusive Pokémon would sell a lot of 3DS systems, which Nintendo would love. But of course, Nintendo may have the Pokémon brand all tied up, but the series doesn’t belong to them exclusively. Black and White 2 are being developed by Game Freak, and the franchise beyond the core games is managed by The Pokémon Company. Both companies are independent entities. Their mission is to make a lot of money by selling Pokémon games and goods, and they don’t necessarily care about Nintendo’s hardware business so long as they’re raking in dough. And rake in dough they will: At last check, the DS is jockeying neck-and-neck with PlayStation 2 as the best-selling console of all time. The Pokémon Company stands to make far more money producing software for a system that 150 million people own than for a system that’s only sold a tenth that many units — especially since Pokémon sells to a young audience whose parents haven’t necessarily been willing to fork over the requisite $170 for a 3DS yet. Sure, you may love Pokémon and maintain EV and IV breeding spreadsheets for top-level multiplayer competition, but your kid brother and sister are still the series’ target audience. And, as the new games’ official announcement page is quick to point out, those old DS games play just fine on 3DS, so it’s not like 3DS fans are missing out on anything besides full-screen graphics. In other words, Black White 2 may represent the turning over of a new leaf for the series, but they’re very much business as usual. And business — at least for the franchise’s caretakers — is likely to be very good. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. Incoming search terms:
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2012 01:27 AM PST
TERA is not the only one shown in the video, with even racing games under the compatible list. The latest online title to join the list will be Nexon’s Kart Rider, which you can see in the model design below.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 25 Feb 2012 09:06 PM PST
Brought to life using Unreal Engine 3, Shadow Company distinguish itself from other generic shooters by having 4 different teams in a single map trying to KO each other. The other confirmed overseas server will be the Philippines, which will be operated by GameClub (link). Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Metal Gear Solid 3D Review: Neither Definitive Nor Terrible Posted: 25 Feb 2012 03:06 PM PST “Some say I’ve been lazy,” admits the King of All Cosmos in the opening sequence of Touch My Katamari. “Phoning it in.” This is meant to be hilarious — that crazy King, always so pompous, yet vain enough to be stung by criticism! — but the wittiness of the whole thing is badly undermined by the fact that Touch My Katamari is lazy. Namco is, in fact, phoning it in. Of course, the best parody is that which rings of the truth. In that sense, sure, this game is pretty parodic. Damningly so, I’d say. The problem is that I don’t think it was meant to be self-satire; certainly it’s not an exercise in self-reflection. All this talk of apathy and flabbiness are meant to be loving, tongue-in-cheek pokes at the character, not a frank assessment of the software itself. So, it’s either a joke that reflects a jarring lack of self-awareness by the developers, or else it’s a snide middle finger to the player: Yeah, this game is warmed-over, recycled content, but we’re gonna fix that! By… making you do the exact same things you did in the last five Katamari games. Thanks for the 30 bones, suckers.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| The Lack of Itagaki’s Trash Talk Saddens Tekken’s Harada Posted: 25 Feb 2012 01:27 PM PST 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. “I’m thinking about Itagaki and when [former 1UP editor James Mielke] was with you guys that was a big topic — the ‘what are your five most hated games?’ article where he said 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were all Tekken, right? If Itagaki was still making Dead or Alive, I’d like to ask, out of all the current Tekken titles we have planned, what’s his favorite. His answer would probably be Dead or Alive anyway, and that he hates all Tekken, but it’d be an interesting question.” “In the past, Itagaki had always mentioned various things about Tekken and stuff, especially on 1UP in his articles with Milky,” he continued. “And there were a few times when I got pissed at what I saw, but I’m kind of realizing that when I saw what he was saying — after he quit Team Ninja, I think he was asked about fighting games and what he thought, and apparently Itagaki said, ‘Well I don’t make fighting games anymore, so I’m not really in a place to comment on that’ — I felt kind of sad when I saw that.” Harada explained it used to be “interesting” to see what the competition was saying, and how both Tecmo and Team Ninja would frequently look at magazines to see what had been said about them by the other. It was “a lot more enjoyable to work when you have rivals like that, and when they continue to decrease it really is kind of sad,” he said. When we told Harada we would be interviewing Itagaki the next day, he said, “I would like to tell Itagaki that I would love to see him work on another fighting game.” He thinks it would get people more excited if Itagaki were still around to make the sort of comments he used to. It may all sound very friendly, but Itagaki could be very harsh when discussing Tekken. As Harada referenced, years ago 1UP asked Itagaki to list his five favorite and five most hated games. His favorites were very reasonable — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Dragon Quest II. His most hated were the first five Tekken games. In a separate interview, he shared some thoughts about Tekken 5 in particular: “First they put in all of these half-finished ‘features,’ then they take them right out again. Tag fights, elevation differences, walls. I don’t know if it’s because they’re impatient, or because they lack the ability, but no matter the reason those guys are a pretty weird bunch. Any of those things would have become a bonafide feature if they took the time to do it right (laughs). Oh, and come on guys, let’s quit trying to hide the prehistoric nature of the main product by tacking on some absurd ‘bonus game.’ I have been saying this for 5 years, haven’t I? If you have the time to make an action-style ‘bonus game,’ why don’t you create an honest-to-god action game and sell it as a standalone product? Oh, and if you’re going to bother including such a ‘unique’ form of ball play, you should do a beach volleyball game instead (laughs).” When we told current Team Ninja boss Yosuke Hayashi about Harada missing the old rivalry, he wasn’t keen on rekindling it himself. “I’ve only met Harada-san a few times, so we don’t have that deep of a relationship, but we are definitely trying to make Dead or Alive the top fighting game, and something that will put everything else to shame,” he said. “If you see the play video that we released, you’ll see that what we’re trying to do is take the fighting genre to another level. Essentially, it’s about what’s in the game. We’ll see whose game is better received.” Asked if he’d rather focus on what his game is all about rather than talk, he said, “Basically yeah — we want to show it through the game. You know, we’re making the best game that we can. The rivalry between Harada-san and Itagaki-san and the comments that Itagaki-san might have made — those of course are part of the history — but we want to show through the game just how good of a game we can make, and have people feel that in the game. Otherwise it’s just words. And if we were to come out now, without showing anything, and just say, ‘We’re a new team; we’re going to make a new Dead or Alive 5 and we’re going to kick everybody’s ass,’ nobody’s going to believe us. So now we have something to show — we’ll show the game, and prove ourselves through the game.” So while Hayashi would rather keep the focus squarely on the product Team Ninja is developing, what does Itagaki think about his former studio keeping quiet? “That’s because they [Team Ninja] are ordinary Japanese people,” he said with a chuckle. “Harada and I are crazy people. So I’ll say something — I’ll give him a call.” [Image courtesy of Wikipedia] Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Asura’s Wrath Review: A Surprisingly Shallow Cataclysmic Action Game Posted: 25 Feb 2012 02:52 AM PST “Some say I’ve been lazy,” admits the King of All Cosmos in the opening sequence of Touch My Katamari. “Phoning it in.” This is meant to be hilarious — that crazy King, always so pompous, yet vain enough to be stung by criticism! — but the wittiness of the whole thing is badly undermined by the fact that Touch My Katamari is lazy. Namco is, in fact, phoning it in. Of course, the best parody is that which rings of the truth. In that sense, sure, this game is pretty parodic. Damningly so, I’d say. The problem is that I don’t think it was meant to be self-satire; certainly it’s not an exercise in self-reflection. All this talk of apathy and flabbiness are meant to be loving, tongue-in-cheek pokes at the character, not a frank assessment of the software itself. So, it’s either a joke that reflects a jarring lack of self-awareness by the developers, or else it’s a snide middle finger to the player: Yeah, this game is warmed-over, recycled content, but we’re gonna fix that! By… making you do the exact same things you did in the last five Katamari games. Thanks for the 30 bones, suckers.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 25 Feb 2012 02:52 AM PST
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Gets the Limited Edition Treatment Posted: 25 Feb 2012 01:26 AM PST Just because it doesn’t contain any new games doesn’t mean the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection can’t get its own special edition bundle. The Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Limited Edition was announced by Konami today and is fairly modest in terms of its contents. In addition to the games themselves, you’ll get specialized packaging created by Yoji Shinkawa, the series’ lead artist, and an exclusive, 248-page art book titled The Art of Metal Gear Solid. Unfortunately today’s announcement didn’t include any pictures of the book’s contents, though based on its title and length it sounds like it could be a must-have item for fans of the franchise. The Limited Edition will be available on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 alongside the standard version of the game on November 8. No matter which you choose, included in the collection are the Substance and Subsistence versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3, respectively. That means in addition to high-definition versions of those two games and Peace Walker, you’ll also be able to play the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Konami didn’t mention a price for the Limited Edition, and it has yet to respond to 1UP’s request for comment on the matter. With the standard version priced at $49.99, how much would you be willing to pay for the LE package? Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| This Month in Misogyny: Exposed Minors, Hair-Pulling, and Advanced Elephantiasis Posted: 24 Feb 2012 02:49 PM PST So many racist/troll postsPosted: 02/24/2012 by stealth20k I guess since they cant disagree with anything I said using fact like I did, they just throw out insults, how pathetic
A dev can make a haulocaust game for all I care. Sure, I might find the content VERY questionable. But I would never say to a dev dont make a game. Freedom. A dev should have the freedom to make any kind of game he wants too. More power to them. Devil survivor and the character they bring up with big breasts. Who cares? Characters in japanese games can be a wide variety of proportions both laced with reality and not. But if a dev wants to do one thing, who cares
When neptunia 2 is a critical hit again, dont blame japan, you should be praising them that they are doing out there, wild, different things, that actually sell
It proves this industry has a future, and not the bleak one headed towards a crash we are down right now Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. Incoming search terms:
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| Conquering Death: How Games are Reinventing Loss Posted: 24 Feb 2012 01:28 PM PST I’m sick of dying in video games. Please don’t take that to mean that I die unusually often in games, or that doing so frustrates me, or that the concept of challenge in video games needs to go away. Honestly, in many ways, it already has; few modern games exact much of a penalty for dying, anyway. It’s just that, after 30 years of playing games, I’ve seen enough of them that explore the concept of loss in interesting ways that I the use of death increasingly seems a simplistic way to denote failure state (Game Over, press Start to continue) to speak of a depressing lack of imagination on the developers’ behalf. Most games equate failure with the death of your player avatar, and that obviously works; otherwise it wouldn’t be the medium’s standard. But there are so many more interesting things that can be done with failure in a video game. The forced restarts and checkpoint setbacks you see in most games are a holdover from the olden days of arcades, where the goal of a game was to extract as much money as possible from an audience. Those games toed the line between fun and unfairness to keep you hooked enough to drop in quarter after quarter without making it easy for any but the most dedicated to play more than a few minutes without failing. Few games operate on the coin-op payment model these days, though; why should they continue to be constrained by coin-op thinking? Granted, one could just as easily ask why death should be a concern at all in video games. Ultimately, it boils down to a natural limitation of the medium. Conflict is at the heart of any narrative, be it film, literature, music, or something as simple as “eat dots, avoid ghosts.” The gaming medium is unusual in that it makes the audience an active participant, and as such the rules change; unlike a book or a movie, a game can’t simply get along with the player as a passive witness. On top of that, the fact of the matter is that violent conflict is by far one of the easiest forms of interaction to simulate; it’s a fairly binary matter of kill-or-be-killed, and the nuances of ragdoll physics or targeted damage are child’s play next to the more subtle shading required for convincing human interaction. Developers have to work many times as hard to create an eventuality for the many possible directions and outcomes of a conversation as they do for an armed encounter. Games are violent simply because violence is far easier to render than a convincing facsimile of the less exciting things we do on a day-to-day basis. A game has to bring the player into the narrative somehow, and even those that suffer from lengthy, non-interactive cut-scenes (you know — the ones harshly decried as “interactive movies”) eventually involve the player on some level. Metal Gear Solid makes you sit and watch as characters talk about nanomachines and super babies for half an hour at a time, but eventually even Metal Gear overlord Hideo Kojima has to put aside his control-freak tendencies and relinquish control to the player. When that happens, the game shifts to conflict and the avoidance thereof. Players can slip around enemy lines and evade notice to reach their destination, but they can fight or sneak their way out of a fight (should it come to that) with an almost pornographically detailed array of weapons. Fail, however, and Snake dies; game over. Well, usually. Every once in a while, Metal Gear games do something more interesting with death than have Snake’s radio operator shout his name as the screen fades to black. In Metal Gear Solid 3, for example, players face off against an elderly sniper named The End. It’s one of the lengthiest and most stressful battles in video game history (I spent about two hours on it), but Snake can’t actually die during the fight. The End might get the jump on you, and he might outshoot you, but he won’t kill you. Lose to The End and you end up in jail — a setback, but not a complete loss. In the context of the game, this helps to establish The End as a unique and unusual foe. In the context of the series, on the other hand, it’s a surprisingly rare inversion of video game norms. Kojima is a demonstrable fan of subverting player expectations and playing with the “proper” mechanics of the medium, so it’s strange to think he’s so rarely disrupted the relationship between failure and death in the Metal Gear games. He’s even stated his desire to create a game that destroys itself when the player loses, giving them only a single chance to succeed — not exactly the most consumer-friendly concept, but definitely an interesting one. Kojima’s single-use game has been echoed in the urban legend of Killswitch, a purported Russian game that deletes itself from the player’s hard drive forever once the player loses. Then again, the idea of permanent failure for dying in a game isn’t precisely a disruption of the relationship between video game loss and avatar death — it’s more akin to the idea taken to its absolute extreme. A more interesting subversion can be seen in BioShock, a game that (perhaps unintentionally) bears a close philosophical resemblance to Metal Gear. Beneath their action trappings, both series question both cultural morality and the artifices of the video game medium in particular. Yet they each handle death in radically different ways. Death in Metal Gear is simply a fast ticket to a partial reset; in BioShock, on the other hand, death is barely even an inconvenience. The city of Rapture is densely populated with devices called Vita-Chambers, which restore the player’s character to life without resetting the surrounding world. There is almost exactly zero penalty for death in BioShock until the final battle, and players can advance through Rapture as carelessly and incompetently as they like. Eventually, they’ll chip away at enemy hordes and triumph through persistence, no matter how many trips to the Vita-Chamber it takes. Many players cried foul about the way the Vita-Chamber defuses the tension of exploring Rapture, which is a fair enough criticism. But eventually, the Vita-Chamber’s true role — a narrative device — is revealed when the player at last meets Rapture founder Andrew Ryan and is forced to kill him by his own command. Ryan robs the player of the choice to commit murder while at the same time electing to die a true, permanent death: Once Ryan breathes his last and you again regain control over your actions, the first thing you discover in the back of your victim’s office is his own personal Vita-Chamber — a chamber which has deliberately been deactivated, driving home the point that Ryan was a man of his convictions. He died preaching about the importance of making conscious choices knowing full well he had chosen a true death. The Vita-Chamber thus becomes important subtext to a not-so-subtle set-piece; its role in the play mechanics seem almost secondary to this key point of plot- and world-building. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
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