Siren Visual announced that they have acquired the streaming rights for Durarara!!x2. Beginning at a to-be-determined date in early January, episodes will be streamed in Australia on AnimeLab with English subtitles within a week of the initial broadcast.
Siren Visual distributed the first season of Durarara!! in Australia across three DVD sets and subsequently on Blu-ray. They have not yet announced if the first season will also be made available on AnimeLab.
Fans of the series may wish to use the current holiday period to re-watch the first season in preparation for the next season and the two seasons that will follow at a later date.
2010’s Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was a bit of a deviation from the popular Tomb Raider franchise that took the titular character and put her in a dungeon-crawler styled puzzle game instead of her usual foray of third person action/adventure games. Guardian of Light turned out to be a critical success, garnering a tonne of positive press when it released. Fast forward to this year and Crystal Dynamics are at it again with the direct sequel – Temple of Osiris. In this adventure, Lara will team up with a rival treasure hunter and two Egyptian Gods in order to uncover the secrets of the Temple of Osiris as well as make it out alive.
Story
A sequel to Guardian of Light, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris has our stalwart heroine facing off against the evil Egyptian deity – Set. The only way to stop Set’s plan for world domination is for Lara to team up with a rival treasure hunter; Carter Bell, and two imprisoned gods Horus and Isis to collect the fragments of Osiris. The story is quite frankly a little bland and forgettable. There’s nothing offensively bad with the writing, but it definitely wont be making any “best gaming stories” lists in the near future.
For those looking for a more grounded game set in the new universe that was created by 2013’s Tomb Raider, you might be a little disappointed. Temple of Osiris is separate to that universe and tells a fantastic tale featuring gods, demons and spirits. Not only is this a mythology-heavy narrative, but there is no slow introduction to the concepts, as the opening cut scenes basically introduce us to the gods and demons that inhabit the temple and threaten the world. The quick introduction to the spiritual elements means there is no slow build up means that there aren’t many “woah” moments in the story, but it is an enjoyable romp nonetheless.
Gameplay
Like its predecessor, Temple of Osiris is a dungeon-crawler which heavy puzzle elements. Lara and her cohorts each have access to a variety of weapons and skills to help them traverse the environment and solve the puzzles in their way. The two treasure hunters have access to modern firearms and a grappling hook while the gods can cast magical spells, activate a shield and even trigger some of the ancient mechanisms with their ancient power.
In addition to their basic skills, players can find additional weapons and power-ups that allow them special skills like flaming bullets or resistance to explosions. These are helpful for sure but the game’s combat is definitely its weakest part. That isn’t to say that combat is poorly implemented or designed, but it is just flat out easy. No encounter gave me any particular trouble, and unlike other games of the genre that can use combat as another type of puzzle, the battles to me feel more like obstacles in the way of the real gameplay.
Temple of Osiris is a relatively short game, which will only take you about 4-5 hours to complete. However, with the dynamic game design and all of the collectibles to find, there are plenty of reasons to play through over and over again. Temple of Osiris is a game that is absolutely designed for multiplayer and while it is possible to play through the game from beginning to end on your own, it is a much more fulfiling experience playing with friends. One thing that really impressed me about the game was how the puzzle design would change depending on the amount of players you have. Puzzles will retain the same general “gist,” but for every additional player, they change to become more difficult and require more teamwork. This not only makes the game feel more dynamic, but also grants a heap of replayability. Being able to play through the same game twice (but with a few friends the second time round) kept me interested and engaged.
The closest comparison I can think of in terms of other similar games would definitely be Gauntlet. The four player cooperative gameplay, dungeon-crawling, puzzle solving action is straight out of Gauntlet’s book. Despite their similarities, I believe Lara Croft is an all round better game than this year’s Gauntlet, offering players more reasons to play, tighter controls and a full-fledged story.
Visuals and Audio
Although it doesn’t lend itself very well to screenshots, Temple of Osiris is a surprisingly beautiful game. Character models are highly detailed and animated beautifully. I was legitimately surprised at how well done the character models were, especially considering how far out the camera is in a game like this. It would have been easy for Crystal Dynamics to half-ass the animation and still have a pretty looking game.
The game’s environments are all kinda same-y, but that is to be expected considering they are almost entirely set inside ancient tombs. While there isn’t a whole lot of variety to the backdrops, they do look pretty cool none the less. Crumbling walls and misshapen bricks on the floor make it look ancient, rustic and exactly the type of place that Lara would love to visit. It is also important to note that the game runs buttery smooth with no lag or frame rate issues – this is great and it helps Temple of Osiris not feel like a poor console port.
As for audio, it is a bit lacklustre to say the least. Whether it is a problem of the script or the audio direction I can’t say but the characters all felt lifeless and wooden. It could definitely be worse but it is far from the best voice acting this year. The rest of the audio isn’t too bad, guns sound like guns and enemies groan and grunt like you would expect.
Overall
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris isn’t the best game out there at the moment, but it is far from the worst. Although it is only a couple of hours long and the combat is a little weak, the game is still a solid multiplayer dungeon-crawling puzzler. The fact that the game adapts to how many players you have and changes the puzzle accordingly is one of its coolest features and one that keeps me wrapped in the game even after two playthroughs. If you are looking for a quick time killer, or a game to entertain your buddies who are over for a few hours then it is hard to go past this one.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
FUNimation has been announcing several acquisitions for the Winter 2015 simulcast season recently. Many new shows are premiering in January and many shows are returning for another season.
Rolling Girls was announced for simulcast at a to-be-announced date. A description of the series is provided below.
Gun your engines and get ready for the full-throttle adventure of The Rolling Girls, the first original anime from the studio that brought you Attack on Titan! In the wake of the Great Tokyo War, Japan, as the world once knew it, no longer exists. What remains is a fragmented network of independent nations ruled by heroes known as the Bests. Each Best commands an army made of the Rest as they seek to conquer anyone in their path. Enter Nozomi, Yukina, Ai, and Chiaya. These four intrepid and adorable girls are ordered by their Best to travel across the country by motorcycle, keeping a watchful eye on the field of battle wherever they encounter violence between warring nations!
Death Parade was announced with a premiere date of January 9, 2015 at 12:28pm ET. The episodes that follow will be broadcast on Fridays at 11:30am ET. A description of the series is provided below.
There is a place after death that’s neither heaven nor hell. A bar that serves you one chance to win. You cannot leave until the game is over, and when it is, your life may be too. From Studio Madhouse (Death Note, Black Lagoon) comes a thrilling new series where the stakes are high and the rules are simple: your life is on the line.
Sequels and returning series include: Tokyo Ghoul √A, Fairy Tail, Shonen Hollywood, One Piece, Yona of the Dawn, Kamisama Kiss 2 and Garo the Animation.
Lastly, a home video release was announced for Inari Kon Kon (Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha), which will include the OVA episode. It has not been clarified if there will be a Blu-ray release, but it was confirmed that this will be a subtitled-only release, a rare decision for FUNimation. A free digital calendar featuring artwork from the series is available here. A synopsis is provided below.
Inari is a cheerful girl in Kyoto who has a crush on one of the coolest guys in her middle school, but she can’t seem to confess her feelings to him. After saving a beautiful goddess’s familiar, the deity blesses Inari with the ability to shapeshift—much to the chagrin to the rest of the spiritual world. Will love bloom for the newly empowered girl when the spirits intervene?
There are still more announcements to come from FUNimation in the near future.
Tindalos Interactive & Focus Home Interactive have released their first gameplay trailer for Etherium. The trailer for the new RTSÂ show us very polished graphics, with the weather effects showing off the dynamic game engine. The GUI looks clean and well laid out, though stylized quite differently from other strategy games.
The large campaign brings to mind Star Wars: Empire at War. You build fleets and send them to planets in order to colonize them and build up tech trees. Then, battles occur both in space and on the ground. Battles can be won by either destroying enemy bases, or by destroying their space fleet, offering a twist on standard RTS engagements.
The presentation of Etherium looks to be one of the more beautiful RTS’ I’ve seen. The single player campaign brings to mind Sins of a Solar Empire, with fleets warping in from planet to planet. Players are not given a linear path for the campaign, and they can choose how they wish to conquer the solar system. Space segments in Etherium are turn-based, while the ground segments are real-time. Much like the collaboration for EVE Online & Dust 514, space fleets will be able to aid on-the-ground troops.
The bulk of the title will be ground combat, and it looks stunning. It is a resource based game, with units being flown down from your space fleet. Players will be unable to amass swarms of one unit type; various units have distinct advantages over others, so you’ll need mix troop types.
Weather effects in the game are more than just a visual effect. Various types of weather affect combat and unit movement, adding a degree of realism into the futuristic strategy game.
Etherium will be available in early 2015 for PC, and can be preordered right now on Steam.
Allow me to be upfront with you: I loved the tabletop miniature version of Mordheim. Sure, some warbands were overpowered and some unit builds were infinitely exploitable… but what endeared to me was the semi-RPG aspect of having a warband which grew more powerful with experience as the campaign progressed. When I first heard about the development of this title, I was eager to see just how well (if at all) the developers had recreated this sense of progression and growth. Unfortunately, this aspect is yet to be implemented… among pretty much a lot of other features which made the original Mordheim so interesting for me. What has been shown so far in the early access of Mordheim: City of the Damned is a fairly robust base for the rest the strategy/RPG to be built upon.
The early access for the game is the very essence of basic. There are currently only three warbands available from which the player can choose. These options are the Sisters of Sigmar, the Skaven, and Human Mercenaries. At the current build you can select any of the above warbands and customise each individual unit to your heart’s content.
There is quite a lot of detail which has gone into this aspect of the game so far, with multiple builds available in accordance with the equipment that you give each unit. Most items provide different bonuses to hit/damage while others, such as swords and shields, provide the option to parry attacks/mitigate damage. To me, it felt largely balanced and I got the impression that it would be quite easy for me to spend a significant amount of time on individually working out the perfect build for each member of my warband. I have a feeling that someone will eventually work out the optimum build for a warband but until then it’s still fun to equip your units in accordance with your own stratagems.
Although each warband has a similar structure, with each containing space for a mixture of heroes, henchmen, and a single special unit, there is plenty of asymmetrical design to keep each warband unique. This largely keeps to the spirit of the original tabletop game, which is good in its own way, but hopefully the devs have learnt the lesson of the source material and worked to carefully balance the asymmetric gameplay of each of the warbands. On my playthroughs, I favoured the Sisters of Sigmar for their ability to dual-wield Sigmarite warhammers (Basically Holy Warhammers which pack a punch).
Having kitted out my holy rollers to my specifications (Insert joke about it being *Hammer Time*) I ventured to forth to play a number of skirmishes. Skirmishes are currently the only available game mode as of writing, but a campaign mode with progression and persistent wounds appears to be on the cards soon enough. I could never quite get into a multiplayer skirmish whenever I jumped on. Whether this is because there is a problem with my connection to the servers or that the Australian timezone doesn’t match up well with the game’s peak player activity is not known to me. Instead, my holy-rollers and I spent a good solid number of hours wailing on a variety of AI-controlled opponents (alongside dabbling with other, less sanctified warbands).
Whether versing a human or a computer, the base game remains the same with your warband attempting to eliminate the opposing force by either killing them all or forcing them to rout. The gameplay is an interesting mix of turn-based actions with third-person movement. Basically, characters act in initiative order and take it in turns to spend movement or strategy points on various actions. Moving around the map, attacking, taking stances, and various other actions each require a certain amount of points from either of the individual pools. Movement itself is performed by directly moving the unit around with WASD controls and once you cross a threshold (indicated by a blue circle around the character) you spend an additional movement point. Other actions such as climbing or attacking, which have a chance of failure, are shown with the percentage chance of success when the player highlights them. Factors such as out-numbering, weapon types, and positioning all come in to play to determine the outcome of these battles. This design provides for an interesting turn-based experience as the player guides their warband through the ruins to engage with the enemy.
It is at this point that I should probably point out that the maps are absolutely amazing. There are a limited number of maps currently available but I must absolutely commend the developers for their incarnation of the ruined city of Mordheim. It may not be the most graphically pretty urban space to grace your screen, but the city itself feels like its own foreboding character with plenty of ruins, side streets, traps, and Cronenbergian flesh growths strewn about the place. The distinct grim and macabre nature of the Warhammer setting is present in spades throughout the city with a distinct feeling of oppressive gloom. I look forward to having the ‘loot’ interaction properly integrated so that I will finally have a reason to actively search through these ruins and to see more of the terrain.
The design of the unit models themselves is similarly detailed and in-keeping with the source material. Unfortunately, customisation of units before a battle is somewhat limited as armour does not change regardless of what type has been equipped but at least weapons do change to reflect the selected option. The models are all suitable digital recreations of the tabletop figurines with great amounts of details. The music is similarly suited to the setting with the score playing ominously to match the grandeur of the ruined city. The music in this instance reminds me somewhat of a cross between the soundtrack of Diablo II and the Dawn of War series.
With all of this in mind, there is a still a lot of work which needs to be done (and to which I’m looking forward to). As I’ve mentioned previously, the ‘loot’ option is still not properly integrated but I imagine it will be brought in with the same update which finally enables campaigns. AI warbands also did not appear to field the powerful unique units of each warband (i.e. Rat Ogres) but this has apparently been fixed with a patch at time of writing. I look forward to returning to try out the campaigns and to growing a managing a warband as it explores the city of Mordheim more thoroughly at a later date.
The game is being offered at a discount due to its current state as an unfinished title. It is currently at a stable build with a few glitches here and there mainly involving movement around the map. I would recommend holding off until another major update just to ensure that you have plenty of content to dig into for your first foray into the dark city of Mordheim. If you’re interested to see how the basic gameplay is going feel and you wish to help out with its development, then now is a good a time to get your hands on it.
There has been an unintended victim since the release of the debug .exe file for Dark Souls on the popular modding site Nexus Mods. Durante’s DSFix 2.3.1 was accidentally swept up in the wave of DMCA take downs when the German office of Bandai Namco issued one against the DSFix file on Dropbox.
Fans reacted with anger and confusion on NeoGaf and Reddit as DSFix is a necessity to get the PC port of Dark Souls running well. Durante explains his fix works by intercepting API calls between the game and the computer, thus containing no infringing material.
The latest update from Bandai Namco is that they have recognized that the DMCA take down is in error and that the matter is currently being resolved. In the mean time, those who just picked up Dark Souls during the Steam sale can use the temporary mirror hosted on Mega.
Today Koei Tecmo and Gust has released a slew of new screenshots and details for Atelier Rorona Plus 3DS which is currently set to be released in Japan on March 26th. It has been revealed that the game will contain all of the content added into the Plus version that was previously released for the PS Vita and PS3 though everything has been given a chibi look to work better on the 3DS. This includes the extra mode that involves Totori and Meruru appearing from the future, also in chibi form.
Atelier Rorona Plus 3DS will make use of a revamped battle system that starts like standard battles, featuring either the enemy running into the player on the field or a symbol attack that then transfers into a grid-based battle arena to allow players to easily control their party members and defeat their opponents.
Also shown off in these latest screens are our first look at the Atelier Astrid mode that allows players to play through a small original story following a younger Astrid Zexis and her partner Sterkenburg.
A flyer that is inserted into the thirteenth manga volume of Working!!, as first discovered by Twitter user nobunaga421and reported by Yaraon, has revealed that the third anime season for the series will start airing in July 2015. The title will be similar to past versions as the only change has been an added exclamation point making the official title Working!!!.
A-1 Pictures will return to animate the series and at the moment it is unknown exactly how much of the source material the third season will cover, as there is much left to be tapped since although the manga ended its nine year run in Japan last month, the second season aired back in 2011.
It is worth noting that NIS America has licensed and released both seasons of Working!! in North America under the name Wagnaria!!, meaning that if they follow suit with this third season it will likely be called Wagnaria!!! as well.
We have some good news for fans of To Love-Ru Darkness as it appears that a second anime season for the series has been announced. On Sunday during an event for the series and then confirmed later through the anime’s official Twitter, an announcement was made stating that To Love-Ru Darkness 2nd will be airing sometime in the future.
The original cast will be returning to reprise their roles and although very few details abut the anime are currently known, the key visual that has been released, and can be seen below, does show that the story will progress up to the most recent events in the manga following Yami and Nemesis.
It is worth noting that although the manga has not been licensed for release in the West, Sentai Filmworks previously licensed and released the first season of To Love-Ru Darkness earlier this year.
After revealing that Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker would be hitting North America sometime in early 2015, Atlus USA has revealed what the game’s box art will look like once it finally does hit store shelves.
You can check out the box art below and the company also happened to reveal that if you do pre-order Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker, you will be given the game’s soundtrack CD containing a special arrangement from Atlus composer Shoji Meguro and the Atlus Sound Team.
Currently no European release for Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker has been announced, but once the game is released in North America it will feature full English story voice work, a complete re-localization, and a new episode that continues the story past the final day in the original game.,
