Square Enix announces exclusive Rise of the Tomb Raider Collector’s Edition for Xbox One
Highly Limited Edition Comes Loaded with Iconic Lara Croft Relics and Collectibles
LONDON (August 26, 2015) – Square Enix Inc. today announced a collector’s edition forRise of the Tomb Raider® that is available exclusively from the Square Enix e-store and the Official Tomb Raider store.
The collector’s edition is packed with valuable memorabilia, including a 12 inch tall statue of Lara Croft that depicts her search for answers on her first tomb raiding expedition, a model of the jade necklace that was Lara’s first archeological discovery, and a collectible steel book case.
The exclusive Rise of the Tomb Raider Collector’s Edition (£109.99) is available for pre-order here. It includes:
Full Xbox One retail copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider
12 inch tall statue of Lara Croft
Collectible steel case
Replica of Lara’s leather in-game journal
Model of Lara’s jade necklace
Rise of the Tomb Raider launches exclusively for Xbox One and Xbox 360 on Nov. 13, 2015 in Europe, and is coming to other platforms in 2016.
About TOMB RAIDER
The TOMB RAIDER franchise has sold over 42 million copies worldwide and inspired one of the most successful video game film adaptations in history, grossing over $300 million at the global box office with protagonist Lara Croft becoming a contemporary global icon. TOMB RAIDER, released March 5, 2013 has received over 70 “Best of” nominations and is the fastest selling game in the history of the franchise with more than 6.5 million units sold. TOMB RAIDER: DEFINITIVE EDITION released January 28, 2014 and is one of the highest rated games on next generation systems. All of this has made TOMB RAIDER once again a destination brand for action-adventure.
About Square Enix, Inc.
Square Enix, Inc. develops, publishes, distributes and licenses SQUARE ENIX, EIDOS® and TAITO® branded entertainment content throughout the Americas as part of the Square Enix Group. The Square Enix Group operates a global network of leading development studios and boasts a valuable portfolio of intellectual property, including: FINAL FANTASY, which has sold over 110 million units worldwide; DRAGON QUEST®, which has sold over 66 million units worldwide; TOMB RAIDER®, which has sold over 42 million units worldwide; and the legendary SPACE INVADERS®. Square Enix, Inc. is a U.S.-based, wholly-owned subsidiary of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.
FINAL FANTASY, the FINAL FANTASY logo, DRAGON QUEST, SQUARE ENIX, the SQUARE ENIX logo, SPACE INVADERS, LARA CROFT, TOMB RAIDER, and RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Square Enix Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
New zone: The Ruins of Sescheron
The frozen wasteland that is the Ruins of Sescheron are now open for exploration! Filled with new enemies, traps, and environmental hazards, you’ll be able to explore the region and learn more about what befell the barbarians of Mount Arreat. Explore the Immortal Throne and obtain the ultimate treasure: Kanai’s Cube.
New Feature: Kanai’s Cube
Kanai’s Cube is a new artisan that offers a slew of new recipes to fully customise your items and catalogue your Legendary powers. Several recipes are available to players immediately upon acquiring Kanai’s Cube:
Extract Legendary Power: Destroy an item to add its Legendary power to your catalogue of collected powers. Once a power has been extracted, it can be equipped to your character without the need to equip the item. Players may have one Weapon, one Armour, and one Jewellery power equipped at a time. Players may only equip powers from items that their characters can normally equip and use.
Reforge a Legendary Item: Completely re-rolls a Legendary item as though it had dropped for the first time. This includes any powers that may have been previously enchanted on the item. Note that reforged items may re-roll as either Ancient or non-Ancient, so reforge at your own discretion!
Upgrade Rare Item: Upgrades the quality of a level 70 Rare item to Legendary. This item will roll as a randomised Legendary that shares that item’s equipment type.
Remove Level Requirement: Removes the level requirement from an item, allowing it to be equipped by a character of any level.
Convert Gems: Converts 9 of any colour gem to 9 of any other colour.
Convert Crafting Materials: Converts 100 normal, magic, or rare Crafting Materials to 100 of another type of non-legendary Crafting Material
To acquire Kanai’s Cube, visit Zoltun Kulle in New Tristram, Hidden Camp, Bastion’s Keep Stronghold, or The Survivor’s Enclave in Adventure Mode. He’ll be quite pleased to guide you on your way.
New Feature: Season Journey
Each player approaches a new Season a little differently, and we wanted to celebrate individual player successes. Beginning in Season 4, you’ll be able to track your personal progress through the Season Journey interface.
A player’s Season Journey is divided into chapters, each with their own descriptive goals and achievements. The further you advance in your Season Journey, the more difficult the milestones become, and you’ll find there are challenges for every level of player. Completing the highest level Tiers will unlock new portrait frame rewards to celebrate your accomplishments.
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut Brings The Godfather Of Post-Apocalyptic RPG To The New Generation
Remastered and enhanced versions for Xbox One and PS4 launching on October 16, 2015
Deep Silver and inXile today announced that Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut will be available at retail and digitally for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 from 16th October in Australia and New Zealand. Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut includes overhauled graphics, expanded voice-overs, gameplay enhancements & tweaks as well as some brand-new features.
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut takes last year’s critically acclaimed PC release and offers a complete visual overhaul; including a more sophisticated lighting system, upgraded environments and improved textures as well as brand new, higher quality character models. On the audio side all major speaking parts and NPCs have also received new voice-overs and weapon sounds have been revisited in order to provide more variety and punch. This comes along with new features and gameplay advances such as improvements to combat encounters, additional passes to balancing, enhanced cutscenes plus all-new “Precision Strike” and “Perk & Traits” systems. In addition, the game’s UI and control scheme have been completely reworked and optimized for consoles.
Key Features:
The Director’s Cut: Overhauled graphics with fully redone character and level art, voice-over expanded with tens of thousands of lines, and new features make this the definitive version of Wasteland 2.
Turn-Based Tactical Combat: Tackle explosive and deadly squad-based combat encounters against the wasteland’s raiders, mutants, robots and more that will test the limits of your planning and tactics.
Your Squad Your Way: Don’t feel like finding the key for a door? Pick the lock, bash it down with your boot, or just blow it open with a rocket launcher!
A Huge Reactive Story: With hundreds of choices and consequences at your disposal, with both short and long term reactivity to the players choices and 80-100 hours of gameplay, no two players will have the same experience.
Huge & Customizable: Dozens of hours of game. Hundreds of characters. Thousands of variations on your Rangers’ appearance. Over 150 weapons. Dozens of skills!
Enhanced Classic RPG Game Play: Classic RPG game play ideas updated with modern design philosophies.
About Wasteland 2
Wasteland 2 is the direct sequel to 1988’s Wasteland, the first-ever post-apocalyptic computer RPG and the inspiration behind the Fallout series. Until Wasteland, no other CRPG had ever allowed players to control and command individual party members for tactical purposes or given them the chance to make moral choices that would directly affect the world around them. Wasteland was a pioneer in multi-path problem solving, dripping in choice and consequence and eschewing the typical one-key-per-lock puzzle solving methods of its peers, in favor of putting the power into players’ hands to advance based on their own particular play style.
The Wasteland series’ impressive and innovative lineage has been preserved at its very core, but modernized for the fans of today with Wasteland 2. Immerse yourself in turn-based tactical combat that will test the very limits of your strategy skills as you fight to survive a desolate world where brute strength alone isn’t enough to save you. Deck out your Ranger squad with the most devastating weaponry this side of the fallout zone and get ready for maximum destruction with the RPG-style character advancement and customization that made the first Wasteland so brutal. Save an ally from certain death or let them perish – the choice is yours, but so are the consequences.
The Wasteland’s hellish landscape has been waiting for you to make your mark… or die trying.
About Deep Silver
Deep Silver develops and distributes interactive games for all platforms. The Deep Silver label means to captivate all gamers who have a passion for thrilling gameplay in exciting game worlds. Deep Silver works with its partners to achieve a maximum of success while maintaining the highest possible quality, always focusing on what the customer desires.
Deep Silver has published more than 200 games since 2003, including its own brands like the open world extravaganza Saints Row, the zombie action franchise Dead Island, the grim post-apocalyptic future of the Metro series and action packed role-playing from the Sacred world. Upcoming highlights from Deep Silver include Dead Island 2 and Homefront: The Revolution. Deep Silver also owns the development studios Deep Silver Dambuster Studios in Nottingham, UK; Deep Silver Fishlabs in Hamburg, Germany, and Deep Silver Volition based in Champaign, IL, USA. For more information please visit www.deepsilver.com
Koch Media is a leading producer and distributor of digital entertainment products (software, games and films). The company’s own publishing activities, marketing and distribution extend throughout Europe and the USA. The Koch Media group has more than 20 years of experience in the digital media business, and has risen to become the number one distributor in Europe. It has also formed strategic alliances with numerous games and software publishers: Bethesda, Capcom, Kaspersky Labs, NC SOFT, Sega, Square Enix and Tecmo-Koei, etc. in various European countries. With Headquarters in Planegg near Munich/Germany, Koch Media owns branches in Germany, England, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Nordic regions, Benelux and the United States. www.kochmedia.com
Today Gust has released a new two minute long gameplay trailer for Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book where they focus on introducing many of the key mechanics in the title, including the beginning of the game’s story where Sophie meets the talking book Prachta, a number of new characters that will help her in her journey, the new alchemy system, combat, and exploration.
Currently Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is set to be released for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PS Vita in Japan on November 19th after it was recently delayed by Koei Tecmo.
Although Koei Tecmo recently announced that Yoru no Nai Kuni had been delayed from its initial September release to October 1st due to last minute adjustments that doesn’t mean they are slowing down their promotions for the game. As such Gust has released a new trailer for Yoru no Nai Kuni that continues to follow the simplistic naming sense of past videos by being titled ‘Movie File #04.’
This minute and a half long trailer shows off a number of the forms that the main character Arnatha can transform into after dealing/receiving a certain amount of damage with each form offering various boosts and a number of unique attacks.
Square Enix has announced that they will be selling a collector’s edition for Rise of the Tomb Raider which is set to be released as a temporary Xbox exclusive on November 10th in North America and November 13th in Europe. Those who wish to purchase this collector’s edition will find that it can only be purchased through Square Enix’s online store and is priced at $149.99.
The collector’s edition includes:
Full Xbox One retail copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider
12 inch tall statue of Lara Croft that depicts her search for answers on her first tomb raiding expedition
Collectible steel case
Replica of Lara’s in-game leather journal
Model of Lara’s jade necklace that was Lara’s first archaeological discovery
This collector’s edition for Rise of the Tomb Raider can currently be pre-ordered though it appears that only the Xbox One verson of the title will be available in this format and not the 360 version. As for the PlayStation 4 and PC versions, they are set for release sometime during the holiday season in 2016.
Capcom initially tried to hold a closed online beta for Street Fighter V back near the end of July however thanks to server issues it was quickly shut down and delayed until an unknown date. Well now Capcom has announced when those who had access to the beta on the PlayStation 4 can expect to play it again.
The beta will run from Friday, August 28 at 4 p.m. PST to Wednesday, September 2 at 7 a.m. PST. Street Fighter V associate producer Peter Rosas statedthat “Outside of the servers being shut down for periodic maintenance, we expect everything to run continuously throughout the entire five day beta period.” That being said the company is noting that the beta may still run into connection issues due to the early nature of the game.
Despite being released originally for the Xbox 360 and then given a “Director’s Cut” version in 2013 for the PlayStation 3, Deadly Premonition never was given anything fancy despite the title becoming a cult classic. Well NIS America is going to be changing that as they have announced that they will be releasing a collector’s edition for Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut for the PlayStation 3 on November 24th. This version of the game will be priced at $49.99 and can be pre-ordered at NIS America’s online store.
As for what is contained in the Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut Classified Edition as it is called, you can check out the list below:
Earlier this week Cliff Bleszinski began teasing that he would reveal more details about Boss Key Productions’ Project BlueStreak sometime this week and now that announcement has come. Today Bleszinski revealed the Project BlueStreak is now a futuristic first-person arena shooter that will be titled LawBreakers.
On Friday he plans on revealing gameplay for LawBreakers but for now they have released a live-action trailer to help establish the backstory of the game where mankind is trying to recover from a cataclysmic event that altered gravity and has divided into two factions that have gone to war with one another and you can check that out below.
Overview There are many different aspects for a romantic comedy to base itself around though so many base themselves around harem antics that they barely fall into that category anymore. Then there are series that try to use established formulas such as opposites attracting to try and craft an entertaining series, with one such series being My Little Monster. With NIS America bringing the My Little Monster anime adaptations over to North America, is the show worth your time?
Story Shizuku Mizutani has had one dream that she has strived for since she was a little girl… being able to land a job that earns over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Due to this she has focused entirely on studying, going so far as to ask for study guides as birthday presents instead of toys as a child. Thanks to her solid focus on studying and ignoring everything around her, Shizuku was given the nickname “Dry Ice” to match her cold personality towards others.
Despite being something of a model student who only focuses on work, Shizuku is asked by her teacher to bring worksheets to Haru, the student who should be sitting next to her if he hadn’t been suspended for fighting during the first day of school only to never return to class. When she arrives at where Haru is living the boy immediately misunderstands the situation and believes that what Shizuku is doing is similar to what friends would do for someone missing class.
After quickly confessing that he loves her after she steps in to prove his current group of friends are untrustworthy people, Haru begins to return to school.The only problem is, Haru sticks to Shizuku like glue and while the girl never thought of anything but studying before, the outgoing boy who has suddenly found his way into her life has left her rattled. To make matters worse, while Shizuku usually places first in the school test rankings she realizes that Haru is the only person in the school who is smarter than she is despite how he acts.
With the pairing of the cold Shizuku unwilling to show her emotions and attempting to put everything she has into studying and Haru who wears his emotions on his sleeves and can’t read social queues or act relatively normally most of the time but puts all of his energy into spending time with Shizuku, we find ourselves with two stark opposites and My Little Monster follows the pair’s relationship through highs and lows.
My Little Monster is a bit of a classic example of how opposites can attract. While it may be difficult to become invested in some romantic leads, thanks to both Haru and Shizuku being flawed characters that end up compensating for one another’s flaws creates a great combination at times. That being said, there are plenty of rough spots in their relationship due to the friction caused by their personalities. While Haru can be caring and seen as a good guy, he initially comes off as a brutish teenager with a child-like personality of easily giving into his emotions while Shizuku is level-headed but lives up to her cold nature by burying herself under heaps of books even when she does start to make a few friends.
Of course thanks to these two working well together, we see Haru constantly being rebuked by Shizuku whenever he takes things a step to far or becomes too violent with others while Haru manages to bring Shizuku out of her shell and brings new feelings into her previously single focused life with the focus being on learning to deal with others and understanding your feelings. That being said, despite both characters proclaiming that they like one another very early in the series there is very little actual progression made throughout the series as both characters regress often enough to be problematic, especially since this anime adaptation was created before the original manga ended.
There is something that can be said about the series’ brand of humor however as it is as quirky as they come. Thanks to Haru’s personality he often ends up doing random things, with a running joke being a rooster that he ended up taking in and building a coop to shelter it on school grounds. On the other hand, thanks to three of the four members of the main group having very few friends or interactions with others we see plenty of sharp quips and retorts anytime the group gets together which makes for some rather humorous scenes where they hold little back. While a quick joke is made during an episode how Shizuku told Haru to wait for her to think about how she felt only for a month to pass with her forgetting entirely about it, it becomes something of a theme in the series that doesn’t feature much of a payoff since barely any of the characters are given much in the way of development.
Sure we do learn some details about Shizuku and Haru’s lives and the addition of a number of side characters, including a beauty named Natsume who dislikes most boys because they make other girls not like her, and the friendly baseball player Sasahara help flesh out the group and contribute to the humor but in the end viewers will likely feel unsatisfied with how the show plays out. That being said, although My Little Monster doesn’t really try anything fresh it still feels rather heartwarming due to Shizuku and Haru’s interactions and how their relationship, albeit slow paced and oft backpedaling, develops over the course of the series.
Visuals For the first time in quite a while NIS America has released a series that comes in both DVD and Blu-ray formats, which is a nice touch for those who still haven’t upgraded to the format but obviously the choice you want to go with here is the Blu-ray discs. My Little Monster features some rather standard character designs but the background art is highly detailed at times thanks to a number of events held at the school.
It is worth noting that there are some moments of choppy looking animation in the series but when the series slows down and focuses on a silent moment between characters it really shines, especially when it comes to the way facial expressions are handled. While most of their expressions can be simply used for laughs, these simpler moments express quite a bit of emotion between a pair of characters, especially whenever Haru and Shizuku have a touching moment where they aren’t arguing with each other.
Audio NIS America has released My Little Monster with only the original Japanese voice track accompanied by English subtitles. The Japanese cast features quite a number of veteran voice actors who handle the characters well, especially in regards to Mizutani as her usual dead-pan retorts work exceptionally well thanks to Haruka Tomatsu’s handling of her character.
The soundtrack for the series is fairly predictable for a romantic comedy by not really offering anything exceptional but simply comes across as adequate. The same can be said about the opening and ending themes of the series, with the opening “Q&A Recital!” sung by Mizutani’s voice actress is fitting for the series but is largely forgettable while the ending theme “White Wishes” by 9nine is similar to the opening theme’s tone and works well as a closer for most episodes.
Extras My Little Monster has been given the premium edition treatment by NIS America with their now standard DVD height chipboard art boxes replacing the oversized containers that many people seemed to have found awkward. The actual on-disc bonuses are rather slim as they only feature a clean version of the opening and ending theme, trailers for other series, and a clean version of the first episode’s ending. It is worth noting that the OVA episode released a year after the anime ended in Japan is not included in this release.
As for the packaging, the chipboard art box feels a bit less impressive than some of NIS America’s past offerings but still features some nice looking artwork while containing the series in two DVD sized cases accompanied by a hardcover art book titled that is presented as Mizutani’s official study guide. In the art book there are the usual episode summaries, character details, a look at some of the background art, and some official artwork promoting the anime.
Overall My Little Monster is a romantic comedy that feels like it doesn’t know where to go at times. The combination of Mizutani and Haru is an enjoyable one as we see the pair struggling to mesh together despite their personality flaws and slowly growing closer with each other however far too often any development is dismissed in order to extend the series. Thankfully with some rather enjoyable looking moments between characters and plenty of good humor to go along with the drama, My Little Monster still manages to be a heartwarming anime once you start to see past the main couple’s flaws.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
