Today Square Enix revealed the special and limited editions that they will be offering for World of Final Fantasy and this one is a bit different from the standard collector’s editions that we generally see nowadays. The PlayStation 4 version of the game will feature a special Square Enix Online Store exclusive collector’s edition that is priced at $119.99 and includes Cloud, Lightning, and Squall mini-figures, an 80 page hardcover at book, a 20 track OST, a code that provides players with digital content in the form of a Sephiroth summon, glow moogle, red bonnetberry mirages, a white chocobo, and Japanese voice DLC, all contained in a special pop-up book container.
Those who don’t want to pay extra can pick up the $59.99 limited edition of World of Final Fantasy that simply comes with a 24 page art book and all of the digital content mentioned earlier or simply pick up the day one version that includes only the digital content for, oddly enough, the same price.
2K released a brand new trailer for their upcoming open world shooter Mafia III. The live action trailer entitled “Death Suits You” features Lincoln Clay avenging the death of two of his mafia brothers in New Bordeaux. The trailer is sharply edited and tells a great story without a single word uttered.
The game is set in the fictional city of New Bordeaux in 1968. Black mobster Lincoln Clay has returned from the Vietnam War a hardened soldier. After narrowly escaping a purge by the Italian mob, Lincoln is hitting the streets on a quest to rebuild the organization and take vengeance on those who nearly destroyed it. Mafia III will launch on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 7th.
Mafia III is at San Diego Comic Con! The trailer will be shown at the Screen Junkies Live Movie Fight Panel with Kevin Smith. The panel will be held on Saturday at 9:15 PM in Room 6DE.
2K Games and Hangar 13 have released a new trailer for Mafia III and it is the first in what will apparently be a series of six videos for the game and this one happens to be called “Lincoln Clay: The Soldier” as it gives us a look at what drives Lincoln in Mafia III. You see, Lincoln was robbed of his family and orphaned at an early age, forced to grow up on the streets of New Bordeaux, he fell in with the black mob.
Now, back from Vietnam, his adoptive family has been wiped out by the Italian Mafia – and Sal Marcano will pay with everything he holds dear. The Mob is about to learn that family isn’t who you’re born with, it’s who you die for. You can check out the video below and keep an eye out for Mafia III when it is released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on October 7th.
Ghostbusters the 2016 film may be the most controversial film release of the year, but the 2016 video game release of the same name is much tamer in comparison. A top down shooter with RPG mechanics, Ghostbusters is set just after the events of the film. The ladies have gone on a cross country ghost busting tour of the United States and have left four brand new rookies in charge of New York City. The city is plagued with a rash of ghosts and now the rookies must step up to the plate.
Story
Ghostbusters is pretty bare on plot. It serves purely as window dressing to provide the minimum background for the levels. None of it is particularly interesting, either. The writing is incredibly lazy, with the same small handful of cheap one liners being recycled throughout the game. For a game that is supposed to be a co-op title, all of the characters exist in a bubble in-game. Even though they are capable of combo attacks, there is no banter between the characters or vocal interaction. It is as if characters are just shouting corny one liners out to the universe.
Gameplay
Ghostbusters is a top down shooter presented in a 3D isometric view. Each of the four characters have their own weapon and grenade type. Grenades can be used together to create combo abilities. Score earned during a mission is converted into experience points. Get enough experience points to level and the player gets a skill point to spend. If it sounds like every other generic top down shooter, that’s because it is.
Ghostbusters is incredibly shallow. There are only five zones in the map with three levels each. Levels are an incredible drag, with some of them lasting taking up to thirty minutes to clear with side areas explored. They are almost completely linear, with a few detours here or there for optional collectibles. Players are encouraged to use their P.K.E. Meters to find the trail of a ghost or bonus points. The use of the meter feels pretty pointless as a faint purple haze signifies a bonus area and the game tells players when to pull out the meter to trigger an event. One could assume the P.K.E. Meter is designed to guide lost players to their objectives, but there’s a separate function for that, which makes the meter all the more pointless. To make matters worse, the meter causes a slowing effect which is just plain annoying.
All four characters carry the standard Proton Pack and trap combo to wrangle ghosts. Each character has a main weapon from the standard shooter archetype: a balanced assault rifle, a shotgun, a pair of fast firing pistols, and a minigun. The weapons have an unlimited supply of ammo, but they do need to be reloaded by “venting” heat. If the weapon becomes overheated, then players are saddled with a reload time penalty. Each character also has a special grenade that also draws from the standard shooter archetype. These grenades can be used together to create combo effects that are really less impressive than they sound.
Once elite enemies and bosses have their initial health pool depleted, players get their chance to capture the monster by wrangling them with their Proton Packs until they can be trapped. Wrangling ghosts requires a simple rodeo style mini-game that speeds up the process if the mouse or left thumbstick is in the correct position. Once wrangled, a trap is deployed and the player gets to mash a button for a bonus multiplier.
Each character has a skill tree they can spend their skill points on. Each tier is locked behind a level requirement. All of the skills are completely underwhelming, as they serve to provide small stat upgrades to existing equipment. The result is feeling like little has changed after leveling up and entering a new level, it’s just the same old, same old. Even more annoying is the the fact the game actively discourages players from experimenting with new characters. If players want to switch characters to try a new weapon, they must start at level one with the new character.
Ghostbusters is just a boring game. It is incredibly repetitive and dull. Players run around and pump bullets into enemies that pretty much feel the same until they die. Once in a while, an elite pops up and players have to go through the chore of capturing the ghost. The poor level design makes each level feel exactly like the last. If players want to share their misery, they’ll have to invite friends over for local couch co-op, as there is no online co-op support. The only real interesting draw are the unique bosses, and there are only a small handful of them in the game.
The controls are a mixed bag, depending on what platform you choose to play it on. It’s a standard top down shooter layout on with a controller, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s simple and it works. On the flip side, the PC port is just plain awful. The UI has clearly not been designed with PC players in mind. Instead, the controller bindings are essentially bolted on the mouse and keyboard. There is no way to rebind keys and the mouse is completely pointless for navigating the menu.
Visuals
Ghostbusters has a nice, but slightly generic cartoon art style. There isn’t too much variety in the levels, which means the levels visually start becoming a giant blur very quickly. The in-game graphics aren’t much better. Even with the graphics cranked up to max on a 1920×1080 monitor, things like player characters are suffering from a serious case of the fuzz. The blurry graphics are made even more obvious when contrasted with the sharp looking UI. For PC users, there are the standard graphic settings that can be adjusted. I couldn’t seem to get the true fullscreen setting to work, as it always seemed to behave like a windowed fullscreen instead.
Audio
The only positive thing I can really say about the audio is that the Ghostbusters theme song is in the menu. The voice acting is B movie level at best, the soundtrack is uninspiring, and the only real sound effect you can hear most of the time are the pew pew pew of the weapons. The most frustrating thing is how poor the audio is for the voice acting while in game. The voice acting audio in the menus and cutscenes sound like the standard definition used for video games. But once in game, the quality drops significantly, sounding more like a MP3 file recorded at 32kbps or below. In less technically inclined, it’s like the audio is being played out of an AM radio.
Overall
What is so disturbing about Ghostbusters isn’t the ghosts, the boring gameplay, the lacklustre story, or the poor audio/visual quality of the game. It’s the price. If Ghostbusters was a mobile game priced at three to six dollars, we would have a pretty average title. It wouldn’t be amazing or groundbreaking for a mobile game, but it would likely earn some okay reviews. Instead, players are being charged fifty dollars for a high end mobile game that overstays its welcome. It’s clear attempt to cash in on the release of the movie.
What’s really sad about this entire affair is that there are good Ghostbuster games. This one just isn’t one of them. If you’re in dire need of a Ghostbusters game that you will actually enjoy, go pick up Ghostbusters: The Video Game on Steam for $9.99 USD. You’ll have way more fun and save yourself forty dollars to boot. Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
Compile Heart has launched a brand new countdown website and from the looks of things, it is going to be a brand new Neptunia game of some sorts. I say this because the countdown website features Japanese text saying “The gate to the world of chaos will open” and English text reading 6 days to go set against a colorful backdrop featuring a silhouette of Neptune.
The last game to be released under the Neptunia franchise name in Japan was Superdimension Neptune vs Sega Hard Girls for the PS Vita and that was released back in November 2015 (with a Western release set for Fall 2016) so it is roughly around the time that the company announced a new game in the series.
NIS America has announced that they will be partnering with Natsume to release a special limited edition version of Harvest Moon: Skytree Village for the company. The 3DS title, which is set to be released sometime later this year (likely in October if the NIS America listingis anything to go by) will be available both in the standard edition and the $49.99 limited edition.
The limited edition includes a copy of the game, a collector’s box, a full color 44 page softcover art book, the game’s OST in a jewel case, a 6 lapel pin set, and a yet to be revealed Blue feather rubber strap keychain. Harvest Moon: Skytree Village is set in the land of Oasis and while many people used to live in Skytree Village, the power of the Harvest Goddess has began to wane and the land has turned parched and dry and it is up to the player to revive the seven Skytrees in order to restore the Harvest Goddess’ powers and bring the land back to life.
A little under two months ago MangaGamer announced that they had partnered with Waffle in order to bring their popular visual novel Kyonyuu Fantasy over to English speaking audiences under the name Funbag Fantasy. Now it appears that the wait for that game will be rather short as the company announced today that they are planning to have Funbag Fantasy released on September 9th for the PC.
Those who wish to get a bit of a discount on the title can currently pre-order Funbag Fantasy for a 10% discount off of the normal price of the game which is $44.95. Funbag Fantasy follows Lute Hende, described as a simple man who likes simple things such as bread and boobs. He was never very ambitious or searched for fame and glory but this didn’t stop him from spotting D-Cups from across the town. Despite this disposition he still managed to get into the Kingdom of Edelland’s prestigious Royal Knight Academy but unfortunately he spent most of his time ogling his classmate Isis’s chest before finally graduating the last of his class.
Thanks to this, Lute became the kind of person that most people would call a loser or a good-for-nothing. Though he isn’t the type to let such insults bother him, he was now a knight and that means girls everywhere or at least that is what it would have meant if he didn’t get sent to the backwater province of Boan. Little does he know, his relegation to the middle of nowhere would put him in the middle of a conspiracy to overthrow the crown, and between the busty mounds of a man-eating succubus bent on sucking the life out of him.
Today Koei Tecmo released some new details for Nioh about some characters that will serve as supporting characters that help William, the protagonist, in his travels across Japan. These two revealed so far are Hanzo Hattori, the head of the ninja clan retained by Ieyasu Tokugawa, who serves as William’s guide through the country and Muneshige and Ginchiyo Tachibana.
These two are experienced samurai and leaders of the Tachibana clan who help William on his quest with their deadly abilities and each possess their own Raiken guardian spirits that can control the element of Thunder and can perform a devastating special attack when combined. As for Hanzo, his cat is possessed by the long-living spiritual guardian Nekomata, who aids William with his strong knowledge of the supernatural and history of the land.
The company also revealed that they will be offering another Nioh demo for fans to try out on the PlayStation 4 and are aiming to have it released on August 23rd and allow players to take on new dangerous challenges and intense gameplay.
Dropzone Enters Closed Beta, First Tournament To Be Held
Gameforge, Sparkypants Studios, and ESL team up to hold first-ever Tournament as Dropzone enters its early Closed Beta phase
Karlsruhe, Germany, July, 22nd, 2016 – Leading European video game publisher Gameforge in partnership with Sparkypants Studios is providing select players with early access to Dropzone through its Closed Beta Test. In this ground-breaking RTS experience, players outfit their squad of three Rigs with specialized gear to face each other in adrenalin-fueled 1v1 battles and race against the clock in the most intense 15 minutes of RTS action ever to hit the PC. Furthermore, top ESL-Streamers will square off in Cologne, Germany at the ESL Studios to put their skills to the test as they match up against each other.
Follow the first ever Dropzone Tournament on Twitch, Saturday, July 23rd at 12 pm CET: twitch.tv/esl
Check out the newest Dropzone game play trailer here
15 Minutes of Fame on Twitch
A highly competitive title, Dropzone combines popular RTS mechanics including intense 1v1 action, multi-unit control, deep strategy and attention management with extensive ability customization, pilot leveling, positional play and tactical action found in MOBA-styled games. Underlining the competitiveness of the game, Gameforge, Sparkypants and ESL have teamed up to stream the first-ever Dropzone tournament on Saturday July 23rd at 12 pm CET. All viewers of the stream have the chance of grabbing some of the first beta-keys to be handed out during the stream. “The participants of the tournament include RTS veterans, famous MOBA players and ESL streamers.
Individual Excellence
Powered by Sparkypants Studios own Sparkle Engine, a game engine built from the ground up for competitive online play, players command a squad of three individual, highly-specialized Pilots each operating a unique Rig in 15 minute head-to-head matchups of strategy and skill.
“Dropzone delivers that adrenaline rush and individual excellence that comes from the classic 1v1 competitive experience we have always loved. We like to have it all on the line where the individual player is responsible for winning or losing,” says Stuart Jeff, Design Director, Sparkypants Studios. “With all the hard work and love we put into the game every day, it’s exciting to open Dropzone up for more players. We’re looking forward to the feedback from beta participants, as well as these tournament match-ups and what Pros and professional Streamers can do in our game as together we take Dropzone to the next level.”
On a Distant Moon
“It is the 22nd Century. All of humanity depends on a rare and powerful energy source called Cores mined from Jupiter’s moon Europa—but Europa has fallen. Now corporations, entrepreneurs and all freelancers fight the hostile Alien Kavash (and sometimes each other) to scavenge Cores and cash in on the new “Core Rush”. Doing so requires powerful mechanized Rigs, specialized gear and highly trained pilots to explore the surfaces or Europa and retrieve the cores from the Kavash.”
Dropzone is the first, new game IP from game developer Sparkypants Studios, comprised of seasoned RTS veterans of Big Huge Games. Dropzone brings together classic attributes of Real-Time Strategy such as map control and multi units the player must direct, with 1v1 intense online competitive play and familiar keyboard and mouse controls. Players must develop their tactics, customize their Rigs to suit their play-style, and then bring them into battle against their opponent to see who can score the most points during a 15-minute match. Dropzone provides for a vast array of choices between Rigs and their load-out, and rich variety of maps set on alien-infested Europa over which players will contest. Dropzone is set for a 2016 release as a free download for PC. You can read more at http://www.PlayDropzone.com/.
About Sparkypants Studios
Sparkypants Studios is a AAA game studio located in beautiful Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 2011, Sparkypants is comprised of veterans of award-winning game franchises such as Rise of Nations, Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Catan. Sparkypants has always believed that collaboration and iteration are pillars of great game development. Passionate about the games it makes (and plays), Sparkypants is on a mission to redefine the multiplayer strategy space and have fun doing it.
About Gameforge
With more than 20 titles and over 450 million registered players, Gameforge is the leading provider of free-to-play massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the western hemisphere. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, the group offers its online games in more than 75 countries and employs 450 members of staff. The portfolio encompasses numerous well-known game industry brands, including client-based titles such as Orcs Must Die! Unchained, HEX: Shards of Fate, prized role-playing game AION Free-to-Play and TERA as well as Europe’s most successful MMO, Metin2. In future, competitive RTS Dropzone and action-laden Anime MMORPG SoulWorker will add to the collection. Popular browser-based games such as OGame and Ikariam as well as a growing portfolio of mobile games complete their offering. For more information please visit http://corporate.gameforge.com/.
About ESL
ESL is the world’s largest esports company, leading the industry across the most popular video games with numerous online and offline competitions. It operates high profile, branded international and national leagues and tournaments such as the Intel® Extreme Masters, ESL One, ESL National Championships and other top tier stadium-size events, as well as grassroots amateur cups, leagues and matchmaking systems. ESL covers a broad field of services in gaming technology, event management, advertising and television production, fully catering to the needs of the esports ecosystem. With offices in North America, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, Spain, China, and partners in many other countries, it has a truly global footprint. www.eslgaming.com
NEXON Korea Launches Summer Season Events in Mabinogi Duel
The strategic mobile trading card game (TCG) Mabinogi Duel, based on Nexon Korea’s acclaimed MMO, will feature a special summer event starting today. The developers at devCAT Studio are hosting an in-game event to help players celebrate the summer season and rise to be a champion through battles with duelists from all over the world!
The summer celebration includes:
Introduction of the ‘Limited Arena’
o Starting on Saturday, July 23 through Monday, July 25 at 5 a.m. CEST and every week this summer, players (or duelists) can compete in an environment with a fixed set of rules that change every week
o Duelists who compete each week will receive Gems and Discount Coupons to acquire classic/new Generation of cards
Rewards for Returning Players
o Duelists who have not played since June 8 will receive a special gift of Gems, Coupons and pre-release boosters
o Returning duelists who are at level 11 or higher will also receive various items and rewards until August 3
Mabinogi Duel is currently available to download on iTunes and Google Play for free.
If you haven’t checked out Mabinogi Duel, please feel free to install the game and we can update your account with a nice supply of in-game currency. In addition, members of Nexon are available for an interview about the title. We’d love for you to share the news and new assets for Mabinogi Duel.
