If you weren’t one of the lucky few to receive an early access demo from Nintendo last week your time has come. The demo for Super Smash Bros. 3DS is now up on the eShop and available for everyone to download right now.
The demo is fairly limited but does feature 5 playable characters including 3 veterans Mario, Link, Pikachu as well as two brand new fighters in Mega Man and Villager. Battlefield is the only stage available however you can switch between its normal and ‘omega’ form, which will remove all the platforms and also turn off items for the match. All matches are 2 minute time matches but you can play with up to 4 people. Fighting against the CPU and local multiplayer via wireless is supported. Here’s a small secret not many people know about the demo, if you hold R during the stage select screen you will get a song from Melee playing instead of the usual Battlefield theme!
I have played a few matches of the demo so far and while initially I had a hard time coming to grasp with the controls, I soon got that under control. I am very impressed by the smoothness of the gameplay and the visual quality the game offers, it looks amazing on the 3DSXL. So jump on the e-Shop, download the demo and drop us a comment letting us know your opinions on it. We have included the QR code below which you can scan with your 3DS camera to initiate the demo download. Hold L + R at the main menu on your 3DS to activate camera mode and then tap the QR scan button on the bottom screen to scan the code.
Battlefield: Hardline is the upcoming installment to EA’s immensely popular Battlefield franchise and it looks to be shaking up the generic “soldiers at war” format quite a bit. Forgoing traditional war zones for the urban sprawl of cops and robbers, Hardline looks to be grittier and hopefully fresher than before. One of the new game-types that Hardline is presenting is the new Hotwire mode that puts you behind the wheels of a fast car, with your gun at your side. High speed chases are the name of the game here, with the cops trying to outmaneuver and outgun the criminals using a combination of solid FPS tactics and a bit of Need for Speed thrown in.
EA have put up a short video that shows off the mode, so check it out below. You can also check out 12 minutes of single player footage here. Battlefield: Hardline is set for release next year, so make sure you stay tuned to Capsule Computers for all the news and updates as they become available.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse is quickly becoming the most hyped Dragon Ball game of all time and with the latest trailer and details released from Bandai Namco at TGS it’s not hard to see why. We now have a few more details on the story and some new characters, how the online hub world will work and more details about the battle system.
Continuing the strong link between this game and Dragon Ball Online, even more characters are being brought forward from that game. Towa and Mirra, a husband and wife team and also the main villians of DBO are returning here and play a very interesting role. As known before, your custom character will travel back in time to key moments in Dragon Ball history, however now we know you will be fixing the events of history that are changed due to the actions of these new villians. One key example is when the villians take control of Raditz so he avoids Piccolo’s Special Beam Cannon altogether meaning Goku still dies but Raditz lives. It will be up to you to fix this course of events and restore the rightful course of history. Many more moments like this can be expected throughout the story.
The Supreme Kai of Time and Toki Toki Bird are another pair of new characters joining the cast, however there role in the story is still unknown. In the trailer below we can see the story will cover at least the entirety of the Z saga as well as the Bardock TV special. Scans courtesy of Kanzenshuu.
A new addition in Xenoverse is the hub world of Toki Toki City and we finally got some video footage of it to show us what it’s all about. In what looks very similar to Destiny’s hub world, players will be able to interact with other online players, pull off dance moves and poses, change costumes and go shopping for new outfit parts and items all in a free roaming environment. The outfit variety looks just as impressive as the character creator and some keen eyed users even spotted some items from Dragon Ball GT. Frieza’s race was also confirmed to be one of the races you can make a character of in a recent scan and the latest video showed how you can change the skin tone and body types of existing race types to make them look like other characters, showing off a very good impersonation of the Ginyu force.
If that wasn’t cool enough, it was confirmed that there are offline multiplayer battles of at least the 1 vs 1 variety and that there will be 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 and even one vs many fights present in the game. In offline mode, the camera will focus on both characters as opposed to being split screen in similar fashion to the Naruto Storm series. The battle mechanics look very improved from the last time we saw them, with characters throwing punches and teleporting behind their opponents at great speed. Combos are present and so is chasing down your opponent and slamming them into the ground followed by a barrage of ki blast. Jumping, throwing and firing multiple ki blast are also confirmed as are two melee buttons in the form of strong and weak attack buttons (bound to triangle and square on the PS4 control). The melee clash from previous Dimps games is back and has both characters furiously attacking each other and then doing a back flip to reset their positions. New stages seen include the plains stage, World Tournament and Kami’s Lookout.
The game seems to be catering to all types of Dragon Ball fans, from those who like custom characters and team battles to those who like a more hardcore fighting system. Dragon Ball Xenoverse has a confirmed Japanese release date of early 2015. Be sure to check out the trailer at the very bottom of this article and some of the most recent gameplay videos straight out of Tokyo Game Show 2014 showcasing the hub world and tons of battle footage.
EA today announced Need for Speed: Rivals Complete Edition, a comprehensive version of the well received racer by Ghost Games that includes all previously released DLC. This Complete Edition will be available from October 23 in Australia and October 24 in New Zealand, digitally via Origin for PC, XBL for Xbox One and Xbox 360, and PSN for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3.
Here is a descriptive list of the aforementioned six pieces of DLC included within the Complete Edition:
Simply Jaguar Complete Pack – Includes both Cop and Racer versions of the Jaguar C-X75, the most advanced Jaguar ever created, and the Jaguar XJ220 – the world’s first Hypercar.
Ferrari Edition Special Compete Pack – Includes both Cop and Racer versions of these extreme machines – The Ferrari F40 and the Ferrari F50.
Concept Lamborghini Complete Pack – Includes both Cop and Racer versions of the astonishing Lamborghini Gallardo LP 570-4 Super Trofeo and the stunning Lamborghini Miura Concept.
The Koenigsegg Agera One – The Koenigsegg One:1 is in a category of its own. It´s not a Supercar, not a Hypercar…It´s a One:1. The name refers to the almost impossible and highly sought-after ratio of one horsepower per kilogram.
Complete Movie Pack – Includes Cop and Racer versions of the GTA Spano; and Lamborghini Sesto Elemento. Plus, the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR 722 Edition as a Cop and the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR Roadster 722 S as a Racer.
Loaded Garage Pack – Complete your vehicle collection with the Loaded Garage Pack which includes the Ultimate Cop Pack, Ultimate Racer Pack, Premium Livery Pack, Classic Muscle Livery, Track Day Livery, VIP Matte Kit Livery and Digital Revolution Livery.
Read our review of the original release here, and check out some fresh screenshots below.
Flat Earth Games‘ arcade stealth-shooter Metrocide, which was first announced back in June, now has a tight release window of mid-October for PC and Mac. You will be able to purchase the game via Steam as well as other digital stores. For those who aren’t familiar with the game, here are some further, official details on the story and gameplay that expands on what we first reported in June;
In Metrocide, players take on the role of T.J. Trench, a notorious contract killer in a cyberpunk dystopia, who must buy transit out of the city one assassination at a time.
Players can weild a variety of weapons and tools to push their way through this fast-paced arcade stealth-shooter – utilising everything from traditional rifles and blasters to EMP Bombs and Holo-lures, ditching bodies as they go. Ever-present is a nightmarish fleet of cop drones, lurking above the skyscrapers and ready to pounce the second Trench’s cover is blown.
With escalating difficulty, multiple game modes and perma-death, Metrocide will push players to balance reflexes and tactics in a city where everyone wants you dead.
Check out Metrocide‘s Steam page here, and if you’re coming to PAX Australia, give the Sydney-siders a visit at Booth #2708.
Indie Gala and Capsule Computers have released the fourth Steam Greenlight Bundle. The sale features ten indie games looking to raise support on Steam Greenlight, in hopes of making it onto the Steam store.
Into The Gloom – A first person puzzler mixed with retro simplicity in a tri-colour palette. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Catmouth Island – Explore Catface island, home of more than 60 NPCs and retro low-poly graphics in this point and click adventure. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Sam Glyph: Private Eye! – A mysterious phone call plunges Sam into an epic adventure in an attempt to stop life itself being destroyed. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Mind Dead– It started as babysitting scientists at an abandoned oil production facility, but now Max Cooper is fighting for his life in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Undead Legions – A top down shooter featuring four playable characters in single player or co-op play. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
BANZAI PECAN: Last Hope for the Young Century – Banzai Pecan’s boyfriend has been kidnapped and succubi are running unchecked. What is a girl supposed to do? Turn into Buxom and Brave Banzai Pecan and beat them senseless until she gets her boyfriend back! Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Bomb the Monsters– With only a few bombs, players will need to carefully set up their explosions to knock out those pesky monsters in this puzzle game. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Social Justice Warriors– An RPG satirizing the current battle between so called “Social Justice Warriors” and their pesky opposition. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Astroloco: Worst Contact– A hilarious point and click adventure game about deadly moon-sized trains locked in corporate combat. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Three Fourths Home– An artistic adventure game about a starring Kelly, a girl who is moving back in with her parents. While driving home with her family in the car, an intense storm hits Nebraska and Kelly must maneuver through both the ensuing conversation and the tricky road home. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
The bundle only costs $1.00 for all ten games. All buyers will get Desura keys for the game for now. When the game gets Greenlit on Steam, buyers will also receive Steam keys. Head on over to Indie Gala to pick up your bundle.
With so many trailers showing Styx’s abilities as a a master assassin, Focus Home Interactive and Cyanide Studios have released a trailer showing the consequences of failure. In the new Styx: Master of Shadows trailer, Styx dies in a variety of ways after being detected or failing to escape from a difficult situation.
Styx: Master of Shadowsis an upcoming stealth title for next gen systems. The game features the goblin Styx as he climbs the Tower of Akenash in search of untold riches and his origins. Cyanide Studio will be launching the game for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows this October.
Focus Home Interactive and Frogwares released a new trailer for their upcoming mystery game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments. The trailer explores the dark seedy underbelly of London, catching criminals in the act of their dastardly crimes. The video’s release comes along with the announcement of a morality system in the game. Sherlock Holmes will need to make hard choices in the game, as some of the criminals are simply good people caught in bad situations. Holmes has the option to either turn the perpetrator to the police or let them go, but he must live with the consequences of his actions.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments will be released for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows on September 30th, 2014.
Destiny is one of the most hyped and most anticipated games of this year. I didn’t really get sucked into all the hype, as all the promotional trailers and artwork never wowed me. Now I’ve finally picked up and played the game, and I can say that I was right in not being sucked in by the hype, but that doesn’t mean that Destiny should be dismissed so easily. It is an expensive and ambitious experiment by Bungie and Activision that may not quite have paid off how they had hoped, but regardless still offers a lot of merit. I had fun with Destiny, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its problems.
Story
Destiny is a game about… Well It is a game about a resurrected soldier who is on a mission to save the Earth and its giant floating semi-sentient sphere from an approaching darkness. If that sounds kind of vague, that is because that is how Destiny presents its plot. We are given small snippets of story but there is nothing cohesive or flowing. Narration and exposition is kept to a minimum, almost assuming that the player is already as well-versed in the events of the world as the characters that inhabit it.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the story for the game and its universe can be found on the official Destiny website, which makes people look up the game in a constant cycle spanning multiple devices. While sitting on your couch you can flick through some of the game’s plot on your phone and suddenly get the urge to do a few more strike missions, so you boot up your console and start playing. While it is a clever marketing tactic, it is more than a little infuriating that there is a hefty game sitting in my Xbox that I have to look elsewhere for its story.
Gameplay
Here we go. Destiny is a cross between an FPS and an MMO that draws inspiration from heavyweights in each genre like Halo (no surprise there), World of Warcraft and Borderlands. Taking elements from these games, and the genre’s they represent is an interesting experiment that hasn’t quite paid off how Bungie and Activision might have hoped. No one element of the gameplay is stronger than the other (so it is as much an FPS as it is an MMO) but because of this it also doesn’t specialise in anything, resulting in a game that while fun, lacks substance and excitement.
The game’s characters are split into three classes; Titan, Hunter and Warlock. For MMO players out there these break down into a Tank, and to DPS classes. Yeah, not a whole lot of variation between the classes here folks. Each class has its own unique special ability and proficiency in certain weapons that keeps it apart from its others, but once you progress far enough into the game, the differences in weapons are negligible and you will just end up playing the weapon(s) that suit you best. The addition of a medic-type class would be a great boon to the game and would help with some of the end-game strike missions and raids, but as it stands now all you do is run and gun the opposition.
Mission design is really (and I do mean really) linear, with every mission literally following the same progression: Shoot your way through a few enemies, find something for your ghost to hack, shoot enemies while your ghost hacks, encounter and kill a boss enemy. I’m not exhaggerating when I say that more than 95% of the game’s story missions play this way. While they are fun and engaging in the beginning, after a few hours you start to realise that you have been running through the same motions for eight hours and the whole thing becomes a lot more tiresome after that. You will encounter the same enemies time and time again, adding to the monotony of the experience and making you want to pull your hair out when you come up against your 2000th Dreg. Bosses are visually distinct from their underlings and are a really imposing force, unfortunately there is no finesse or tactics required to face these guys (who are in essence just bullet sponges), only that you hide behind cover to avoid their shots, then pop back out and lay into them a few times, lather, rinse, repeat.
Destiny is designed to be played with other people, and to that end it is an experience that is far more enjoyable with friends. Playing through a couple of the game’s story missions with a few of my buddies was much more enjoyable than sitting on my own shooting wave after wave of enemy, but a lot of that might be because just about anything is fun with other people. Like many MMOs, Destiny is all about the end-game content. Once you have reached the conclusion of the story you are given access to more strike missions and bounties to collect. However, these are just as linear and repetitive as the story misions. Although there is a really satisfying feeling to downing a huge boss with a team of two other players and reaping the rewards at the end of a 45 minute firefight.
That’s really it though isn’t it, a game can feel boring and repetitive but if you are enjoying it then does it all really matter? For the most part I enjoyed my time with Destiny and I don’t feel like my time would have been better spent playing anything else. Though I don’t know if it will be a game that I revisit time and time again over, but maybe every once in a while I will throw it in and take down a strike mission with some mates before putting it back on the shelf.
As is expected from Bungie, Destiny also features a PvP battle area; The Crucible. Once you reach level 5 you can play in the Crucible which acts much like a traditional FPS multiplayer zone. Featuring game modes like Team Deathmath and Control (king of the hill) this will no-doubt scratch the itch that anybody out there is having while they wait for the next Halo title. The controls and the way the game operates do feel a lot like Halo and that will hopefully allow players to transition into the game quite easily. I’m not a big PvP FPS player, so my time with the crucible was less than fruitful, but once you’re good enough you can level up pretty quickly (sharing your character level through PvE and PvP) which can get you access to better loot and more gear in the campaign.
The new Vault of Glass raid mission has gone live and it is a challenge no matter what your level. The mission is designed for players over level 26 and requires you and five other people to tackle it. The worst part is that the game offers no matchmaking for the raid, requiring you to know all of the people that you are going to be playing with. It is an interesting choice considering that Bungie basically created the matchmaking system that we use in gaming today and this feels like a massive step back for them. Regardless, if you can get the requisite number of people for the Raid you will find an experience so much different to the rest of the game. Harder enemies require team-work and precision to eliminate, as well as puzzles to solve and caverns to explore. Basically, it takes that linear and repetitive gameplay that I mentioned before and throws it out the window. Unfortunately though there is only one of these raids available at the moment and its limitations mean that many players won’t get to explore its depths for quite a while.
Visuals
If Destiny has one thing going for it, it is its absolutely beautiful visuals. Everything in the game looks amazing and really helps set the tone and pace for the world. Lighting is especially notable here as the illumination and shadows really do create the crux of the game’s ambiance. Tackling a horde of enemies in a dark, dank cavern with only a faint green glow to illuminate you really creates that sense of isolation and fighting against the world. Character models are just as well-designed for the characters, NPCs and enemies that litter the world. While enemy types are reused quite frequently in the game, they still look as interesting at the end of the game as they did when you first booted up.
While the visuals are outstanding, they are let down by the fact that the game’s world only consists of a handful of maps. While these maps are all huge and are filled with secrets, short-cuts and other hidden goodies throughout, they do get repetitive quickly especially if you are running through the game’s campaign. You can only see the same beautiful landscape so many times before the novelty wares off. While there is a lot to explore in the game’s maps there is no real reason or incentive to – the only reward available at present are five hidden chests in each map. Finding each of these maps unlocks a piece of loot, and also pretty much eliminates the need to keep searching.
Audio
Destiny’s audio is for lack of a better term, a mixed bag. Soundtrack and sound effects are top-notch, but voice acting really lets the game down. Destiny is pretty light on voice acting, instead opting to go more akin to an old western where actions speak louder than words. This creates a sense of tense hostility everywhere, where the only voice you will hear is that provided by your companion Ghost, voiced by none of than Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage. However, Dinklage’s exceptional acting talent seems wasted here as his portrayal of the ghost just comes off sounding bored and uninterested. This could easily be explained away as him being a robot, but there is no trace of roboticness in his voice just sleepy boredom like the lines were recorded when Dinklage got out of bed in the morning. This becomes especially noticeable since it is by far the most prominent voice you hear. Nathan Fillion does have a cameo role in the game, and his energy is always present in everything he does so it is always great to have him on board. Certain characters will encounter the Firefly star more than others, but that doesn’t mean that we all can’t enjoy it.
Thankfully, the game’s voice acting is the least important part of the audio package. The game’s soundtrack and ambient noises are really well done and without a strong story or interesting characters is the primary way that the game conveys its tone. Music is all well picked and fits the environments and situations, while the sound effects of guns and other weapons really feel alive and realistic (this is true even of the outlandishly fictional weapons and abilities of the characters).
Overall
Destiny is an ambitious experiment by Bungie, but it is no where near the industry-changing title that many expected it to be. It tries to combine elements of Halo, World of Warcraft and Borderlands to create a game that will presumably last a decade. Unfortunately in its desire to step out it ends up as a jack of all trades but master of none as it fails to excel at anything in particular and the end result is a game that is fun but doesn’t feel in any way to be groundbreaking or genre-defining. The shooting mechanics are tight but lack the finesse of Halo 3 or the Call of Duty franchise, the questing and storyline are bland and repetitive and the loot system leaves a lot to be desired. The newly released Raid content does add a lot to the package, but doesn’t eliminate a lot of the aforementioned problems. Despite its shortcomings, I did enjoy my time with Destiny and a big part of me is looking forward to the future of the game with a cautiously optimistic eye.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
About a week and a half ago Atlus USA released the first pair of English character trailers for Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth which focused on the protagonists of Persona 3 and 4. This time around they have released English trailers for Persona 3’s Mitsuru Kirijo and Persona 4’s Yosuke Hanamura.
You can check out the trailers below, while Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is set for release in North America on November 25th while gamers in Europe will be able to pick it up on November 28th.
