New Games |
- Join Awesome Games Done Quick on its final day
- The DTOID Show: Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout, & The Razer Edge
- PlanetSide 2 getting some good fixes this month
- Xbox Achievements for Resident Evil: Revelations surface
- Weekend PC download deals: EA, Ravaged, The Walking Dead
- Review: Fire Pro Wrestling
- LittleBigPlanet 2: Extras Edition announced, with Muppets
- HAWP: Oh Ash, your diplomacy is so thick and hard
- Dead Space 3 Dev-Team Edition detailed
- Valve: The top TF2 item creators are making six figures
- CES: Blood Sword, an impressive Nvidia Tegra 4 showcase
- CES: This is how Tomb Raider does multiplayer
| Join Awesome Games Done Quick on its final day Posted: 11 Jan 2013 03:00 PM PST Throughout the week, Speed Demos Archive has been putting on its third annual marathon, Awesome Games Done Quick. Chances are good that a fair number of you are well aware of this and have been enjoyed watching people utterly dominate a wide range of games on the live stream. The level of knowledge on display and ability to execute in front of an audience is, at times, nothing short of astounding. This evening, the donation total -- which will go to the Prevent Cancer Foundation -- surpassed $300,000. The current goal is to raise another $100,000 on top of that, and even with only a day left, something tells me they'll be able to rally together. Currently, a speedrun of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is being broadcast. If you've got time to spend this weekend, consider checking back in for the remaining titles: Devil May Cry 3, Metal Gear Solid 3, Pokémon Gold, Super Mario 3D Land, Super Mario 64, The Wind Waker, and Final Fantasy IX. Personally, I'll be hitting the archives for everything I missed this past week. Got any favorites? |
| The DTOID Show: Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout, & The Razer Edge Posted: 11 Jan 2013 02:30 PM PST Today, we talked about a Fallout-related Tweet. Then, the totally gnarkill Cyberpunk 2077 trailer. Following that, there's the controversial Tomb Raider multiplayer and the laughable The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct trailer. Also, that game is coming to Wii U. Finally, we discuss the Razer Edge, which has a manlier name than "Project Fiona" but is still sort of a strange product. |
| PlanetSide 2 getting some good fixes this month Posted: 11 Jan 2013 01:30 PM PST PlanetSide 2 is going to get a little bit sweeter at the end of this month, courtesy of Sony Online Entertainment. The patch will hit January 30 and contain a lot of pleasant fixes for the game. You can read about them all here, but here are my top three fixes:
It's always great to see the folks behind such a large game paying attention to the community and doing what they can with patches. Especially a game like PlanetSide 2, which has more potential than you can shake a stick at. Are you still playing PlanetSide 2? Or have your free-to-play interests shifted since then? |
| Xbox Achievements for Resident Evil: Revelations surface Posted: 11 Jan 2013 01:00 PM PST Following its appearance on a South Korean ratings-board listing, it looks increasingly likely that Resident Evil: Revelations will be making the unusual, albeit very welcome jump from 3DS to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Exophase has come across a list of Achievements for Revelations Unveiled Edition (seriously) that appears genuine. It's worth noting that these Achievements total 1,000 Gamerscore points, suggesting that on Xbox 360, the game would release through the platform's Games on Demand service. (Assuming this isn't a retail product.) I think the real question is, what's it going to look like? That will seemingly be the deciding factor. Many of you seem to feel that Revelations itself was good on 3DS. Resident Evil Revelations Unveiled Edition Achievement List [Exophase] |
| Weekend PC download deals: EA, Ravaged, The Walking Dead Posted: 11 Jan 2013 12:30 PM PST Now that we're firmly into 2013, you're free to start spending money on weekend deals, not that you ever stopped, right? You can help yourself to a whole heap of titles from Digital Game Factory at 60% off, including the still tough-as-nails Commandos franchise. You can get all nine games in the sale for $23.11. GamersGate has a selection of EA games reduced by up to 50% including Bulletstorm and FIFA 13. Amazon has Destructoid's 2012 game of the year, The Walking Dead for PC and Mac for $12.49, which is half price. GreenManGaming's offer this weekend is 75% off Kings Bounty: Warriors of the North. Steam's pair of offers are the brilliant FTL reduced to half price and the post-apocalyptic multiplayer FPS Ravaged which is also half price and free-to-play this weekend. As always friends, if you find a good PC/Mac weekend download deal, post it in the comments and enjoy your weekend. |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2013 12:00 PM PST The original Fire Pro Wrestling was a game specifically for the hardcore fans of pro wrestling. I'm not talking about the male soap-opera that is WWE, but a more brutal version such as some of the Japanese wrestling circuits like Dragon Gate or Philadelphia's Chikara. Flashy characters, explosive moves, and a huge amount of customization allowed fans of varying styles of wrestling to make the game uniquely their own, and the homages to all sorts of real-life athletes was a nice wink-and-nod to the fans of the sport; the variety offered by the game was stunning. This is not that Fire Pro Wrestling.
Fire Pro Wrestling (Xbox Live Arcade) This version of Fire Pro Wrestling takes the name of the beloved franchise and slams it hard onto the mat, then pins it...and then tea bags it for an hour and a half. Virtually nothing from the original series makes its way to this title, and that's a real shame. Gone are the customizable wrestlers. Instead, you fight with your avatar. And while you can customize them to some degree with costumes, moves, and items you unlock through gameplay, they all seem fairly flat. Maybe it's because the gameplay itself is so flat, as your standard wrestling tropes give way to "hit your opponent, grapple your opponent, slam your opponent," then lather, rise, repeat until it's time to pin. And your opponent. Oh boy. No clever homages to wrestlers of a bygone era, or wink-and-nods to obscure hardcore heroes. Nope, these are generic avatars with no real skill necessary to defeat. Some may be a tad harder thanks to cheap tag team tactics (where their partner, no matter how you may detain them still manage to sneak up on you and stop your pin) but for the most part, the matches shouldn't take you long to play through.
That is, if you can tolerate the control. Moving your wrestler avatar around the ring is a sluggish exercise in patience, and grappling with your opponent is tiresome as hit detection is spotty. Easy matches would be one thing, but the control seems to suck all of the fun out of what is an already boring game. There's not even that much variety in the move sets. No submission moves, no moves on the ropes (save for a few turnbuckle leaps), and no tag-specific finishers. You can't even do very much outside of the ring, except what you do in the ring, which is hit, grapple, repeat. The moves included are few and far between, and you sadly have to play through this mess of a title in order to unlock anything worth using. Special moves, once acquired, feature an unskippable animation, but are at least a decent diversion from the repetition of the standard smack-around you'll be doing. But what if someone else bought Fire Pro Wrestling, and you wanted to suffer through it together? Online play is a laggy mess, and the online modes offer the same features as offline; namely slow, boring gameplay. One thing the online mode does differently than offline, however, is remove your health, stamina, and energy bars from the screen. That's a big help for executing moves where your timing is already in question.
Fire Pro Wrestling on Xbox Live Arcade is the most basic of wrestling games. Flat, featureless, and simplistic, it is devoid of any redeeming qualities found elsewhere such as replay value or fun. What could have been a cool, cartoon-y version of a classic franchise is but a wasted shell of its former self. |
| LittleBigPlanet 2: Extras Edition announced, with Muppets Posted: 11 Jan 2013 11:30 AM PST Last year, Sony was hard at work pushing out value packs for many of its exclusive franchises. It has been a little over a year now since LittleBigPlanet 2: Special Edition was released, but it looks like Sony and Media Molecule are taking another crack at it with PS Move and PS Vita players in mind this February. LittleBigPlanet 2: Extras Edition will feature the full retail game along with three extra level kits and six costume packs. The level kits will include the Move-enabled Rise of the Cakeling DLC, the Muppets Premium Level Kit and the recently released Cross-Controller DLC, that utilizes the PS Vita for an experience eerily similar to the Wii U GamePad. Sony has put together some pretty good bundles in the past, but I am not impressed by this one. The original Special Edition contained more content and can be found at a reasonable price now. On the plus side, you do get The Muppets. No Gonzo costume though...a damn shame. The six costume packs included are:
LittleBigPlanet 2: Extras Edition coming soon! [PlayStation Blog] |
| HAWP: Oh Ash, your diplomacy is so thick and hard Posted: 11 Jan 2013 11:00 AM PST
This is... well... umm... you know what? I'm not even going to explain it. The latest Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? is brilliance, plain and simple. Go watch it and have a good laugh or two. Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? - Civilization V [GameTrailers] |
| Dead Space 3 Dev-Team Edition detailed Posted: 11 Jan 2013 10:30 AM PST Visceral Games and Treehouse Brand Stores (who you might recognize from its work with companies like BioWare and Gearbox Software) have put together a Dev-Team Edition of Dead Space 3 that should appeal to series fans with excess cash to burn. Priced at $160 with a North American copy of the game included and $100 without, the package contains:
While the Marker is the clear must-have of the bunch in my eyes, I have to say, that water bottle is pretty clever. 5,000 Dev-Team Editions have been made, so if this is something you'd be interested in, know that there's a time limit attached. |
| Valve: The top TF2 item creators are making six figures Posted: 11 Jan 2013 10:00 AM PST While it's no secret that the most successful Team Fortress 2 item designers are making serious money, this is one of those topics that never ceases to fascinate me. PC Gamer has given us some good weekend reading in the form of a profile on a handful of these creators as well as a follow-up interview with Valve's Robin Walker, which is what I'll be focusing on here. Despite the fact that contributors receive 25 percent of the sales from their items, according to Walker, "The top ten creators are all in that ['six figures'] bucket." He finds this to be "Unbelievably cool, and personally rewarding to a level that defies logic. We get much more excited on the team looking at how much money contributors make than we do about how TF2 itself is performing. Many of us come from modding backgrounds, so we often find ourselves having conversations about how we’re building systems we wish we’d had access to when we started out." Clearly, Valve is interested in growing the number of participants, whether they be a creator or a consumer. "To help more people get involved," Walker tells the outlet, "we need to address the two biggest problems we currently have. The first is the one I talked about above, that we’re just not able to keep up with the amount of content the community is creating. The second is that there are types of value the community is creating that we haven’t built systems to handle. Without a system, the distribution of the value they’re creating isn’t there, and that means it’s hard for other players to find their creation and enjoy it. Even once players do find and enjoy it, there’s no way to for them to pay back the community creator." Citing TF2 maps as an example, he continues: "Without that loop in place, creators aren’t getting the feedback they need to improve, nor are they getting the financial reward they might need to be able to spend as much time creating as they’d like." Tales from the Steam Workshop: we talk to modelers making six figure sums [PC Gamer] |
| CES: Blood Sword, an impressive Nvidia Tegra 4 showcase Posted: 11 Jan 2013 09:30 AM PST Nvidia announced the Tegra 4 mobile processor here at CES this week, and they were using a name game called Blood Sword to show it off. With this kind of power under the hood it's easy to forget you're playing a mobile game. I played an early demo of hacky-slashy Diablo clone Blood Sword on a Tegra 4-powered mystery tablet. It's a fun game, though nothing to write home to the folks about. What was notable was the lighting and particle effects coming off of my spells, or from fire pits. Lighting effects were on par with some console games, though it didn't hit the mark of some of the big franchise stuff. But overall: very nice. This tablet was docked and connected via HDMI to a television, letting me play Blood Sword with an Xbox 360 controller. After getting into some nasty messes and boss fights, I found myself forgetting that I was playing a tablet. The framerate and resolution were there for sure. If this early game demo is any indication, the Tegra 4 is a very capable processor. |
| CES: This is how Tomb Raider does multiplayer Posted: 11 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST Multiplayer in Tomb Raider? What the hell, right? As strange as it sounds, it was pretty easy to get into here at a preview event during CES 2013. The characters and locales come straight out of Tomb Raider's single-player, though it looks like producer Joe Khoury and his team at Eidos Montreal had a bit of fun building a multiplayer game around them. Wait, Eidos? Yep, Crystal Dynamics handled the main game while Eidos Montreal took care of the multiplayer component.
Tomb Raider (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [previewed]) I got a taste of what they've been working on in a mode called Rescue. Lara and her friends make up team Survivor [Keep on survivin'!], and it's their job to run out in the wilds of the island they're stranded on and find medpacks to bring back to camp. Meanwhile, the Scavengers are there to protect what they have scavenged, and will do anything they need to do so. This mode has the survivors trying to bring back five medpacks while the scavengers are trying to kill 25 survivors -- first to meet their respective goal wins the match. The match balance is interesting as there are completely different elements to each side. For example, the scavengers are... well, scavengers, so they have much more firepower, making survivors easier to take down. Survivors? Not so much in the firepower department. They can down an enemy with weapons, but a close-range melee attack is required for a proper kill. Thankfully smashing in faces with a pickaxe is fun. On the other hand, survivors can equip a bow, and in the right hands, it can be quite scary with its power to kill cleanly and quietly. The level we played in, called Chasm, has plenty of interesting obstacles to keep this Rescue mode lively. Zip lines are everywhere, letting players quickly slide between levels to try to avoid enemy fire. One group has a device that actually lets them ascend zip lines! There are also many traps to set for the enemy (or yourself, accidentally), including snares that will have you hanging upside down with a misstep. The spike trap is absolutely brutal -- walk through a rope and two sides of wooden, sharpened spikes come together to crush you into a bloody mess. The most interesting feature of the Chasm map is a sandstorm that infrequently blows through it. Being on the right side gives you an unfair advantage, letting you see your teammates and enemies clearly, while the other side sees nothing but sand, leaving them shooting blind or running for cover. These storms almost always turned the tide in the several matches I played. In fact, many of the matches were very tight, which says a lot about the balance that Eidos Montreal was able to achieve.
While I wasn't performing at the top of my game, I found Tomb Raider's multiplayer to be enjoyable. I joked that I was "flying and dying" -- meaning that I'd take a zip line right into danger. On the ground, it felt like what you'd expect from a third-person action game's multiplayer. But in the air, whether it be from jumping from heights, or coming down zip lines, it felt unique. There are a lot of opportunities for jumping, grabbing, hanging, and climbing, which gave these matches a very Tomb Raider feel. If that was the goal, well done. We'd have to play more Tomb Raider multiplayer to make a call, but from this first session, in this one map, I'd say that they're doing good things. We know there will be the standard Team Deathmatch (from experience -- it's fine, but not as fun as Rescue), but I'm looking forward to some of the more creative stuff that I know Eidos Montreal can come up with. Tomb Raider comes zipping down the line -- multiplayer and all -- on March 5, 2013. |
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