New Games |
- Bit.Trip Complete has new content, love letters to fans
- Live Show: Aya got a booty in Parasite Eve II on Backlog
- Carnage rage quits E3
- Transformers: Dark of the Moon almost here
- Impressions: Kinect Fun Labs
- Half-Minute Hero XBLA trailer shows the new art style
- Street Fighter: Pokémon Edition!? WHOOOOOOOAAAA!!!
- Live show: Mash Tactics plays Hunted: The Demon's Forge
- Check out Wizorb, a retro block-breaking RPG
- BOOBIES IN YOUR FACE! A Senran Kagura trailer
- Shadows of the Damned HNNNNNNNG
- Spelunky's must-watch trailer for Xbox Live Arcade
- Interview: Robb and Bryan of Devastation 2011
- The Jimquisition: The Big E3 Spectacular!
- This is Mega's final design for Mega Man Legends 3
- Free-to-play games are now welcome on Steam
- Minecraft, EVE Online, League of Legends attacked
| Bit.Trip Complete has new content, love letters to fans Posted: 14 Jun 2011 03:30 PM PDT I just finished writing up a preview of Bit.Trip SAGA (the 3DS collection of all six Bit.Trip games) when I spotted this press release about Bit.Trip Complete, the retail collection of all six Bit.Trip games on the Wii.As impressed as I was with Bit.Trip in 3D, I think I want this collection more. The amount of new content here is simply staggering. Wait a minute, have you even played any of the Bit.Trip games yet? If so, you need to head over to the Wii shop channel, Steam, or the iPhone/iPad shopping... thing, and check these games out. For those of you who have played the series already, check out the full press release below for all the details on Bit.Trip Complete's full levels of greatness. 120 challenges spread throughout all six games, new difficulty levels, a special edition CD, online leaderboards, and more? I'm not sure if my body is ready. Gaijin Games' official post on BIT.TRIP COMPLETE [GoNintendo]
| ||||||||
| Live Show: Aya got a booty in Parasite Eve II on Backlog Posted: 14 Jun 2011 02:30 PM PDT [Backlog is the ongoing quest to rid Conrad Zimmerman's collection of unfinished games. As voted on by the Destructoid community, Conrad plays each game from start to finish live on Destructoid's Justin.tv channel every weeknight at 8pm Pacific] So, we started up Parasite Eve II last night on Backlog and I think a few people were taken aback by the visual appearance of the game. I know I was a little bit surprised and I was very quick to flick on the PS3's smoothing option. The downside of this is that it makes Aya look like her mitochondria decided it was a biological imperative to give her Kim Kardashian's ass. Come join me and the goons in the live chat as we continue on with Parasite Eve II. We'll be hanging out, talking and giving me very explicit directions because I'm so easily lost and distracted. It's all happening right now on Destructoid's Justin.tv channel! | ||||||||
| Posted: 14 Jun 2011 02:00 PM PDT
I spent a good portion of E3 with Jon Carnage. That Carnage fella didn't quite care for the offerings at E3, so he rage quit and went on a journey with Daedelus. It's not that bad of a tradeoff, with Daedelus being the greatest DJ in the world and all that. Join us as we leave E3 and play around with some old joysticks. | ||||||||
| Transformers: Dark of the Moon almost here Posted: 14 Jun 2011 01:30 PM PDT
And now, a launch trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon. There is a fight which has just begun. some new evil has arisen. You get the general idea. This is likely going to be a pretty cool game if you're into the plot established by the films, as Dark of the Moon fills in events between Revenge of the Fallen and and the new movie. The thing I find absolutely fascinating about Transformers is that it's capitalizing on our nostalgia for something which was explicitly created to be a marketing campaign. It seems like this generation is the first one for which many of the things we fondly remember were manufactured to appeal to us and we never quite let go of them This isn't like bell bottoms, poodle skirts or the hula hoop. Transformers, along with many of its contemporaries, was a calculated campaign to sell a wide variety of thematically linked products to an audience incapable of knowing that it wasn't anything more. And now that we're adults and we should no longer be ignorant to this fact, we still love them as a result of that connection to our youth. It makes me think about the kind of cultural future we're going to sell to our own kids (and then sell them again in their 30's). I wonder what that will be like. | ||||||||
| Posted: 14 Jun 2011 12:30 PM PDT Microsoft's Kinect Fun Labs is supposed to be a place where smaller, experimental little Kinect programs get thrown up on Xbox Live for us to play with. But does it work, and is it really a lab filled with fun? Kinect Fun Labs is a separate program you launch from the Kinect Hub, and currently has four "gadgets": Kinect Me, Googly Eyes, Build A Buddy, and Bobble Head. I gave them all two tries, and here are some impressions of the process and end result of each of them. Kinect Me Kinect Me is where you scan your entire body (with or without clothes) to create a more lifelike avatar. It feels like a testing ground for the upcoming Avatar Kinect, which is not yet available. You start by selecting your gender and getting up close to get your face scanned in. Afterwards, you move back a little to fit yourself in a full body outline so it can scan the rest of you. Finally, you choose whether you want to add glasses or not. The result can be a bit odd. In my case, it scanned the print of PAX shirts for Knights Contract and Fallout: New Vegas pretty well. The resolution of your clothes' texturing is not very high, but you can recognize it pretty well. For those of us that have favorite shirts that we wear all the time, Kinect Me can give you a pretty accurate representation of your look in that regard. However, my face looks like I am some kind of insane extra from what would've been a mix between the kid on the Mad comic covers and The Goonies. Especially under low-light conditions as depicted below, where I was standing upright and holding a camera. Just look at it! That's my writing posture right there. With daylight lighting, my head turned out a little bit better than during the nighttime with artificial light. I never had this issue with other games like Kinectimals or Dance Central, which I only play with the curtains closed so as to not embarrass myself in front of people walking by outside. Then again, those games are about skeletal tracking and not about facial fidelity. When you are done with what comes the closest to an Avatar version of yourself, or more likely what is the last thing you do before you get tired of Kinect Me, you can select an image to start a slideshow that you can add a voice recording to. If you want, you can then share it to a private account on KinectShare.com and with your friends. Logging into KinectShare is painless as it uses your Xbox Live account info (the same that Xbox.com uses), and from there you can share it to Facebook. Your friends who have Kinect Fun Labs will also be able to watch your attempt through a Friends Feed inside the Kinect Labs menu. You can also "like" your friends shenanigans if you want, and watching any of your Xbox Live friends' posted content makes their Avatar run into the screen. It's a nice touch, and overall it works pretty well. The downside of Kinect Me is that this is all you can do with it. In the end, it's more of a tech demo than anything else, and if you don't care about sharing and posting your results to Facebook or the tiny Kinect Fun Labs area of your console environment, you're not going to use this more than once at best.
Googly Eyes lets you scan in any object, slap "googly eyes" on it so it looks like a toy, and then record some movements and voice for a small skit. You start by scanning the front of an object, followed by the back. However, you need a pretty big object for this to work. I tried to do it with a Togepi figure I have, which was too small. The only way I could make it work is to have part of my hand be included in the image, which turns it into a pretty damn freaky thing. Because it was deemed to small, I put a DualShock 3 controller below him. This worked, although parts of my fingers were still included -- it's hard to hold objects without your hands, you know? When you are done with this process, the software creates a 3D creature with googly eyes slapped on top of it. You can change the style of these eyes, but they are all googly. Like in Spore, you can also change where the eyes go. Finally, you can record a little animated sketch. The on-screen creature will follow most of your movements as far as it can (my TogepiShock 3 had no arms, sadly), and you get a couple of seconds to record something ridiculous for your friends. Sharing works like in Kinect Me through the KinectShare website. Googly Eyes works best with bigger objects and toys and even then there's not a lot you can do with it except record little sketches. This can be fun for parents with kids to play around with, but most of us won't care. On the upside, it does save your creations.
While Googly Eyes lets you create a sketch, Build A Buddy lets you create more of a virtual pet by scanning objects. Just like with Googly Eyes, I had to work with a Togepi/DualShock 3 concoction because I just don't have any big toys or fluffy animals lying around. After scanning the front and back, you have to record yourself saying three lines. Sadly, Kinect Fun Labs is a regional program so I had to deal with Dutch for all of it. When you're done, you can choose a personality for your critter by choosing between two options for three personality factors. When it's done, your new Buddy will want you to train it. Jump, dance, hide your eyes behind your hands, and it will do some silly moves as a result. Finally, it gives you a short animation where it does everything it learned. It's kind of cute, and the end result is more fun than what you get with Googly Eyes although the latter lets you customize sketches in more detail if you want to get creative. Your Build A Buddy just goes through the same couple of pre-scripted animations over and over again. They are cute to look at for a couple of times, but the novelty quickly wears off. If you do have kids, you can "play" with your Buddy after you are done with it. So if they have a favorite cuddly toy, this is a great way for them to play with it. Build A Buddy feels like a more fleshed out version of Googly Eyes in that regard. It's a bit odd that Microsoft and Good Science didn't just incorporate all of it and more into a Kinect Toys game of sorts, because they are so similar and it's a bit of a hassle to navigate all the menus just to switch between doing a sketch and having a child play with their motion-mirroring toys.
This is the most basic of all the Kinect Fun Labs playthings. Of all the Kinect Fun Labs gadgets, this one also had the most trouble with lighting. Scan your face and body just like you do in Kinect Me, and choose if you want to be male, female, if you want to have glasses, or a tail. Yes, a tail. You can stop feeling persecuted by Microsoft now, furries! Because I went with a male character in the Kinect Me, I decided to go for the more lady-like look this time around. After doing the obligatory scanning and posing, you end up with a bobblehead with your face. You can record a voice message so it will play that back when you hover over the head itself. And that's it -- there's nothing more you can do with it (probably didn't expect any more, either). Bobble Head is really a pointless feature and you're better off not even downloading it to try it out.
Kinect Fun Labs does offer some messing around for users of all ages, but to call it fun is a bit of a stretch. Kinect Me feels like a prototype of Avatar Kinect, and Googly Eyes and Build A Buddy feel like prototypes of some upcoming Kinectimals "play with your own toy!" first-party title. Bobble Head is just a pointless addition to the three. It's still an environment that could bring a lot more of these little gadgets to play with while people wait for actual good Kinect games. And from the looks of this year's E3, that might take quite a while. In time, perhaps it can grow into something more substantial and Microsoft only really needs one little application that has meme potential to get everyone to make their own version and share it. Fun Labs also takes a long time to start up and load a gadget, perhaps because it needs to check online friends feeds and whatnot. It's quite jarring for the experience as a whole, and even though there is a minimum of menus inside all the gadgets -- mostly because there isn't a lot to actually do -- you still feel like it all takes too long. I even had to launch Build A Buddy and Bobble Head from the "download completed" pop-up screen because they wouldn't get listed in my downloaded gadgets. That is, after trying to redownload them up to four times over the last couple of days. Great fun! At least you get Achievements for each of the gadgets, which is a nice bonus for those that care. As it stands, Kinect Fun Labs offers consumers some insights into the kind of things that are being worked on behind the scenes. At the same time, it offers the people at Good Science and Microsoft a way for the public to interact with whatever they come up with in early stages and a constrained way to see how the public reacts. It's still a very limited environment right now, and if you don't own a Kinect sensor, Kinect Fun Labs is no reason for you to buy one. If you do own it, you don't have to share your things with the world to get those Achievements. | ||||||||
| Half-Minute Hero XBLA trailer shows the new art style Posted: 14 Jun 2011 12:00 PM PDT
Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax (why yes, that is its real name) allows you to optionally use a new high-definition art style, or you can simply go with standard pixel graphics from the PSP version. The former is shown in this latest trailer for the offbeat game. I'm going to buy the eff out of this one, myself. When it hits Xbox Live Arcade on June 29 for $10 (!!!), expect to find the online versus mode Super Hero Wars, plus it looks as if the Evil Lord, Princess, and Knight modes have been reworked to play like Hero 30 mode. Come to think of it, Half-Minute Hero is probably my favorite game on PSP. I can only hope that more of you seize the opportunity when this new version widens the game's potential audience. Half Minute Hero XLA Promo Video [andriasang] | ||||||||
| Street Fighter: Pokémon Edition!? WHOOOOOOOAAAA!!! Posted: 14 Jun 2011 11:30 AM PDT
The above is footage of a Japanese fangame called Pokémon Type: Wild. It's a four-button fighter with assists and specials and everything. If you want to give it a spin, it can be downloaded from here. NINTENDO, MAKE THIS HAPPEN FOR REAL, YOU SLOW-ASS F#CKS!!! | ||||||||
| Live show: Mash Tactics plays Hunted: The Demon's Forge Posted: 14 Jun 2011 11:00 AM PDT Today on Mash Tactics we will be playing Hunted: The Demon's Forge. I first got my hands on this dark fantasy co-op game during PAX 2010. Jim Sterling and I share the fond memory of me completely failing as he carried the whole demo. At least that's the way I remember it. I honestly hope he has no recollection... [Join us for Mash Tactics every weekday at 4PM PST on Justin.Tv/Destructoid to watch live streams of new game releases and crazy antics with industry guests. Come join us on the chat and see what all the fuss is about! Want to get involved? We are always looking for community content to showcase. If you would like us to read your C-blog post or show off your original Dtoid art, we would love to see it. Get your voice heard by guest starring on one of our many community focused shows. Still want more? With a little bit of consistency, dedication, and responsibility, you too can have your own show on the official Dtoid channel! Join us in chat on Justin.Tv/Destructoid to find out how you can be a part our great expanding community.] Watch live video from Destructoid on Justin.tv
| ||||||||
| Check out Wizorb, a retro block-breaking RPG Posted: 14 Jun 2011 10:40 AM PDT
This looks like it could be pretty cool. It's a game called Wizorb, releasing soon to PC and Xbox Live Indie Games. You're a wizard on a quest and and that quest includes bouncing a ball off of your staff to break blocks. But it exhibits a lovely degree of polish in the trailer and I'm a big Arkanoid fan, so I'm pretty pumped for it. I know I keep saying this, but the quality level of some of the titles releasing to Xbox Live Indie Games has been really impressive as of late. I hope you're all out there buying the really good ones to encourage such behavior. Anything for just a little bit less effort from developers from just stuffing Avatars into a pile of crap and turning it into gold like it's some kind of techno-alchemy. | ||||||||
| BOOBIES IN YOUR FACE! A Senran Kagura trailer Posted: 14 Jun 2011 10:20 AM PDT
Holmes and I have had our peepers locked onto this Japanese 3DS game for a while, sucking up any and all info lactated from the teat of games JOURNALISM. In all honesty, I don't know why Holmes is so interested. He doesn't even like boobs! I've always pegged him as an ass man. What was I talking about? Oh yeah! Senran Kagura has a new trailer, as you can clearly see. The first 37 seconds are such a chore -- just scrolling moonspeak over environmental backgrounds. You feel like closing the window and finding more productive pursuits, but then BAM! There's 3D action, magical girl transformations, hand-drawn cutscenes, costume dress-up, the works! Are you telling me that this game will come bundled with a visual book, a soundtrack, and a drama CD for 5980 yen (about $74) on September 22? And why is the 3DS not region-free again? Bouncy 3DS ninja game Senran Kagura finally gets trailer [Japanator] | ||||||||
| Shadows of the Damned HNNNNNNNG Posted: 14 Jun 2011 10:00 AM PDT
I came. | ||||||||
| Spelunky's must-watch trailer for Xbox Live Arcade Posted: 14 Jun 2011 09:40 AM PDT
I've had this trailer for the Xbox Live Arcade version of Spelunky playing on repeat in an otherwise unused tab, becau--do I even need to explain why? That music! It's so upbeat and inspiring; a wonderful combination for the horrible death and destruction happening in-game. Do give this video a watch, though. Spelunky appears to be as amazing as ever, even if we are still stuck with a vague 2011 release date. Make sacrifices to whoever it is that you sacrifice to so we get this one sooner rather than later. | ||||||||
| Interview: Robb and Bryan of Devastation 2011 Posted: 14 Jun 2011 09:20 AM PDT
This year at E3, Destructoid's Justin.tv channel was able to bring interviews directly from the convention center. Robb Chiarini and Bryan Dawson are two of the guys in charge of the Devastation gaming tournament and convention held in Phoenix every year. In this interview, the guys talk about all the different events that can be found at Devastation, what their favorite games are, and what it takes to write a strategy guide. As an added bonus, for all Destructoid readers, if you want to attend Devastation and haven't purchased your ticket yet, if you use the promo code: "destructoid", you can save 5 dollars off the price of a weekend pass! Make sure to get your tickets here! These are only excerpts of the interview, so if you want to see more, make sure to tune into Destructoid's Justin.tv channel! We bring all sorts of video game live programming to you, so follow our live stream! | ||||||||
| The Jimquisition: The Big E3 Spectacular! Posted: 14 Jun 2011 09:00 AM PDT
What happens when you have a deadline to meet, E3's just around the corner, and all the electricity in America isn't enough to compete with the intensity of your own genius? If you're the host of The Jimquisition, you throw your video online anyway, because screw it. Electronic Entertainment Expo! | ||||||||
| This is Mega's final design for Mega Man Legends 3 Posted: 14 Jun 2011 08:40 AM PDT With all the E3 hullabaloo last week, I totally missed that the Mega Man Legends 3 devs had settled on a final design for our boy in blue! It's good to know that even though the game's future is still a mystery (What? No playable Prototype Version on the show floor?), development is still barreling along. Reminds me of how Mega Man 2 was but a pet project following the lukewarm response to the original, barely allowed by the Capcom heads. And we all know how that story turned out! Charged with renewed optimism, let's take a gander at Mega's suit. As you may recall, the last round of revisions featured a detailed armor design and a more human design. I was really rooting for the "sans manties" look, but the detailed suit took the crown in both Japan and the US. Art director Yuji Ishihara then took the winner and tweaked it a bit further to get what we have here. Compared to before, Mega's armor plating has been beefed up a bit and he's been given an overall height boost. Also, the backpack will be able to display health and status effects, Dead Space-style! Although, why the angry eyes, Rock? Been hanging out with Kirby much? What do you think of this design? Love it? Hate it? Indifferent? Mega Man Suit Design Decisive Round Results [Capcom Unity] | ||||||||
| Free-to-play games are now welcome on Steam Posted: 14 Jun 2011 08:20 AM PDT Today, Steam kicked off its support for free-to-play games -- and their obligatory microtransactions -- by launching five titles, all of which are now available on the service: Spiral Knights, Forsaken World, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. Tomorrow through Sunday, one game will be featured as the "F2P game of the day," meaning anyone who plays the title in question will get exclusive in-game content for their efforts. Not something I'm personally interested in, to be frank, but this move needed to happen. | ||||||||
| Minecraft, EVE Online, League of Legends attacked Posted: 14 Jun 2011 08:00 AM PDT The mysterious group known only as LulzSec has continued its rampage through the game industry, kicking off its biggest attack yet. "Titanic Takedown Tuesday" has seen Minecraft, EVE Online, League of Legends and games site The Escapist all taken offline. LulzSec has been taking requests and "laughing at crybabies" as it displays its capability to apparently strike down anything at a whim. One can't help but be impressed by the sheer audacity, at the very least. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Destructoid To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
