The developers behind the upcoming Total War: Rome 2 revealed today that their newest faction will be none other than the Greek influenced, forward-looking nation of Ptolemaic Egypt.
According to the Total War wiki:
“Ptolemaic Egypt has close cultural ties to the Hellenistic world, while maintaining many Egyptian traditions. Founded by Ptolemy in 305BC following the death of Alexander the Great, it has become a centre of culture and trade under the influence of its Macedonian rulers.”
If you, like every other strategy fan, are a warmonger, you’ll likely be more interested in what it has to say about their fighting style, though.
“The intermingling of Greek and Egyptian fighting styles provides the Ptolemaic Pharaohs with a military that is both advanced and balanced, yet still honours the role of the champion commander. Making great use of spear and pike, their forces are further diversified with skilled swordsmen, scythed chariots, and more exotic units such as African war elephants. Egypt’s position on the Mediterranean Sea also requires a substantial navy to protect its colonial and trade interests.”
Spear, pike, scythed chariots and war elephants!? Sounds like the pyramids do wield some mystic form of power after all!
For more information on Egypt and everything else Total War: Rome 2, be sure to check out their wiki page here.
Christian Svensson, Corporate Officer and Senior Vice President, confirmed on theCapcom-Unity forumsthat the original voice actors from the DuckTales show would be working on the DuckTales Remastered game.
The voice actor for Scrooge, Alan Young, is now 94 years old and still came into the studio. It is extremely commendable that he put the extra effort in to make the remastering of DuckTales as perfect as possible. Christian Svensson believes that the voice actors from the original show “really adds a lot to the package”.
DuckTales Remastered will be released for the Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and Wii U e-Shop some time this summer.
Last week, on the 17th of March, Toonami returned in epic style by airing the ‘Evangelion 1.11’ movie and, let me tell you, they really couldn’t have celebrated their return with a better movie choice. Even at its time slot of 1 am, the ‘Rebuild’ movie still did extremely well bringing in about 40,000 short of a million views.
The anime that came before it in the lineup had over 200,000 more viewers than Evangelion, but obviously because they were on at an earlier time. Bleach, which aired at 12 am, reached 1,197,000 and Naruto, which aired at 12:30 am, reached 1,196,00. Overall the entire line-up did well. Looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more Toonami. We all missed you the first time so don’t leave us again!
A tumblr question to Toonami about its satisfaction with how the airing went was answered with a spokesman from Toonami saying; “We were. It was a solid showing that gives us something to build off of as we think about our next movie night…”
G.I. Joe: Retaliation is mere days away from its nation-wide release on March 28th. Today, we have two final promotional pieces for you.
The Jinx vs Snake Eyes clip shows the two characters – played by Élodie Yung and Ray Park respectively – duking it out in a practice sparring match that is meant to hone Snake Eyes’ skills for his inevitable confrontation with Storm Shadow. But, the two are a little too committed and their competitiveness boils over.
The Land, Sea, Air piece is a featurette on all the “boy’s toys” in the film. It’s a really cool video, with interview snippets from The Rock (I will always call him that), Director Jon M. Chu and Adrianne Palicki as they talk about the action set pieces and what they entailed.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist the upcoming game in the Splinter Cell series has gotten another video to showcase what the game will be offering in terms of gameplay, this time commented by Game Director Patrick Redding. The point of the video is to show off the different play styles available to players in game, which have been adequately dubbed: Ghost, Panther, and Assault.
Weighing in at a little less than 9 minutes the video does a good job of explaining the differences between the three playstyles; Ghost being non-lethal stealth, Panther being lethal stealth, and Assault well that’s everything else. Interesting note is the difference in time it takes to clear the section between the methods.
Players can watch the video for themselves embedded below to see the different methods in action. Splinter Cell: Blacklist will be releasing for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on August 2oth for North America, August 22nd for Australia, and finally August 23rd for Europe.
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara is going to be a HD remake collection of Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and its sequel Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. These games are classic arcade beat-’em ups that are adaptations of Wizards of the Coast’s pen-and-paper RPG. This remake is being developed by Capcom’s Iron Galaxy.
The Original games were available on Arcade and then on the Sega Saturn, so it has been a long time coming for people who never had access to either. The HD double-pack is set to be released in June 2013 and will be available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, WiiU, and Windows PC. Pricing will be $14.99/€14.99/£11.99/1200MSP.
‘Rise of the Cobra,’ or G.I. Joe 1, was bat-shit insane. The goodies and the baddies were both very well drawn with awesome characters emerging from both sides. As far as Hollywood action blockbusters go, you couldn’t really have asked for more – the effects were huge, the pace never let up and everything made sense, even if it was ridiculous.
I remember when ‘Rise of the Cobra’ had finished I couldn’t wait to run out and watch the next one – the set up was perfect for a massively expanded universe. Alas, the direction the franchise has taken strips out everything that was interesting about the original and replaces it with… sitting around and talking about nothing heaps? Or was I supposed to supposed to have been focusing on the half thought out set pieces and their fake looking locations? I can’t put my finger on what the new angle is but it’s not a comic book movie (which, aside from the toys, are meant to have been the narrative basis for the franchise).
Story:
At the end of ‘G.I. Joe – Rise of the Cobra,’ Cobra Commander actually pulls off his diabolical plan, despite being denied the awesome explosions that acted as a red herring. The real plan was to replace the president (Jonathan Pryce) with Cobra insider Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) and control the Executive Branch of the US government. Cobra uses the office to frame the ‘Joes’ for the assassination of the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the theft of their nuclear weapons. Every single Joe is then annihilated because apparently they all went on the same mission at once despite having one of the sweetest bases ever built by man. I guess even the I.T. department came along for the ride this time. Oh, except for our protagonists, Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Lady Jane (Adrianne Palicki) & Flint (D.J. Cotrona), who manage to survive.
The film seems to struggle on giving Flint anything to do at all while resting pretty comfortably on some well worn tropes for the other two. Meanwhile Snake Eyes (Ray Park) is chilling out somewhere ages away from the action. Granted both he and the RZA appear to be training a new member, Jinx (Elodie Yung) but she has barely any lines in the film and is basically rendered redundant.
Let me take this chance to deal with how the two different films handle having females in their casts. While both films used the female characters for eye candy, in ‘Rise of the Cobra’ they were functional team members that used an equal balance of wit, brawn and sex appeal. This time around the female leads were either not given any dialogue or their only cunning was to flaunt their bodies, which is a real shame. They try to make up for this with a plot line about how Lady Jane’s father never wanted her in the army because she was a girl and that’s what inspires her. Not only is this tacky and ham-fisted, it’s delivered in the most insincere fashion.
We get no time with the villains at all. Watching the Machiavellian machinations of Cobra was one of the most interesting elements of the first film. I think Cobra Commander has 5 minutes screen time absolute tops. Destro, the arch nemesis who now has a head entirely made out of metal is left out. Why? That’s totally sick. You can’t set up something as epic as the main bad guy from the previous film getting his head turned into metal and then leave it unused. The rest of the plot revolves around ‘getting the gang back together.’ It’s hard to care when everyone you like from the previous films are now dead and replaced with people that aren’t even introduced clearly.
Visuals & Audio:
Again, this film takes another major step down from the standard set in ‘Rise of the Cobra.’ That movie was constantly filled with colour. The nano-tech added some vibrancy to the action sequences, to the point where it was almost another character. Locations weren’t just arenas for battles to take place, they were crucial to the narrative and were shot in a way that took full advantage of the space. Plus they had a dope base. I can’t talk about that base enough; that was amazing. Did Hasbro release that as a play set?
Anyway, ‘Retaliation’ fails to make use of space in that same way at every turn. Nano-tech feels like it’s only included because the first one did it. Its absence changes the palate of the film and isn’t replaced with anything. Instead of a sweet base we get a poorly lit gym that Roadblock grew up in.
The change in directors, from Stephen ‘The Mummy’ Sommers to ‘Step Up Revolution’s’ Jon M. Chu should have indicated a shift from magnificent set pieces to tightly choreographed fight scenes. Yet we get neither. Chu has had a pretty fast rise to fame and, despite what you may think of films like ‘Step Up 2’ or ‘Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,’ he’s renowned for capturing fast paced action and movement. Unfortunately this does not translate into being able to direct an action film. I wish we didn’t have to learn that with this franchise though – I had high hopes.
Some basic mistakes are made here. There’s a whole sequence where it looks like Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) are in the same location, despite one of them being in a penthouse in Tokyo and the other in some far off mountainous hideaway. I fail to understand how the editing can be so bad in such a high budget film.
Directly lifting sounds from Transformers to imply technology isn’t just lazy, it’s sad. Otherwise I can’t say the audio had much of an impact on me. Pop songs are used exactly how you’d expect them to be. Explosions sound ‘explodey’ without having all that much meat on them. The stripping back of the tech angle meant there wasn’t anywhere near as much room for audio flair as the original.
Overall:
They had so much good material to work with here that the result is pretty unforgivable. I’m placing the blame mostly in the hands of the director change. It’s a pity too, because a dance director converting to action is a pretty interesting choice and it could have worked out too. When you’re competing with the guy who made ‘The Mummy’ though, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
What’s worse is that Chu was unable to make the best of his own strengths. Fights seemed stilted and uninteresting, the dynamics between characters were dry and nobody seemed to have any grace on the screen. Actually, that’s kind of unfair. Perhaps the cutting room floor, the producers or the writers need to be slapped around a bit too. Excluding a core narrative from the villains’ perspective is a horrendous misstep. Just reading a list of their names gets me pumped. Firefly, Storm Shadow, Cobra Commander, Zartan…. I could keep going. They’re such an integral part of what makes this universe compelling – why shouldn’t we get to know what they’re up to?
That’s not all they’re guilty of though. We don’t really have anything for the Joes to fight until the 3rd act. They spend most of the film kind of flitting about, with a little time set aside to perv on each other. By the time Cobra’s scheme is introduced and the clock starts ticking, it’s already the final fight scene. There’s no pressure cooker here. ‘Rise of the Cobra’ had our protagonists chasing terrorist attacks after scrambling to protect their base while solving the mystery along the way.
The whole thing feels lazy. Some of the G.I. Joe parody youtube clips have more character development than this film.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
Death Track Review Developer: Avko Labs Publisher: Avko Labs Platforms:iPhone (Reviewed), iPad, iPod Touch, Android Release Date: 16/03/2013 Price:$0.99 – Available Here
Overview:
Death Track is another endless running title from a small developer. While these types of games are super popular lately and kind of done to death, I must admit a small smile coms to my face each time, curious to see how the developer plans on making their title stand out from the rest. While many of these titles offer little-to-no originality, Death Track grabs the gamer’s attention with pretty visuals and a futuristic setting. Spoiler alert: Death Track will most likely fail to hold your attention for long. While Death Track may not be the blockbuster title of the century, Avko Labs displays immense promise with this title and it could very well be a stepping stone towards something great in the future.
Gameplay:
Death Track’s gameplay will be quite familiar to fans of endless runners: you control a vehicle which is constantly moving by itself while you dodge obstacles in your path, racking up as many points as possible so you can purchase upgrades to help you beat your high score and so forth. This rinse and repeat formula may be nothing new, but Avko Labs keeps it fresh with a nice futuristic “tube-ish” atmosphere and really succeeds at making the player feel like they’re moving fast. This adrenaline rush with the combination of pretty visuals makes gameplay worth while. However while the speed is done greatly, it can also be hard to handle at times and maintaining control can be a problem. Controls aren’t terrible for the most part however, and the added option of tilt or touch controls before each race is also a nice touch.The need for speed is also emphasised by putting a focus on a time trial style of play, where you must reach the goal of each level by a particular time. If you fail, the doors to the exit close. The level will continue however, but you probably won’t realise until you hit a dead end wall and explode at the end.
Another nice touch is the variety of upgrades and power ups in Death Track, as options such as Ghost (which allows you to pass through obstacles), Slow Motion (you get the idea) and Flashbacks (think of it as a rewind button) are unique as they are helpful. The major flaw of the game however is a brutal and fatal one, and that is level design. Unlike most games of the genre, Death Track has designed levels rather than randomly generated ones. You’d think this would be a good thing but the design makes for really tough gameplay, expecting players to make really fast decisions from the get-go. So ultimately the key to winning isn’t awesome reflexes like it should be, but instead memorizing the layout of each coarse. For the most part, most levels feel impossible to get though without buying power ups or upgrades which requires either grinding or making in-game purchases and let’s face it – that’s not fun for anybody. On top of that, there are very little features outside the annoying single player campaign to convince gamers to stick around, so it’s very easy to lose interest in Death Track.
Audio & Visuals:
If Death Track has anything good going for it, it’s not the tracks you race on but the tracks you jam to. While not flawless, Death Track’s soundtrack contains catchy techno/dance inspired beats that’ll have your head nodding in no time. The graphics are on a similar note, with Tron-inspired visuals and a very F-Zero-ish atmosphere, there’s nothing to not love in visual terms. Death Track has it’s presentation looking and sounding swell, it’s just unfortunate that the gameplay isn’t as spot on as it’s presentation.
Overall:
Death Track has the foundations of a good game but a few gameplay flaws hold it back. It has fantastic presentation, an exciting atmosphere and simple controls but it’s frustrating level design accompanied by the fact there’s little else to keep you around dramatically stop it from achieving much. With that being said however, it still could appeal to some gamers.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Star Wars Pinball then wait no longer! The dark forces or clumsy Jawas or some other essential Star Wars reference have let up their interference that seemed to cause some rather shady delays with the final product being realised, with the title now available on the iTunes store.
Star Wars Pinball is available for $1.99 and has the very cool feature of having both Dark Side and Light Side table differences depending on your actions in the game and how you choose to play. The score that you rack up will go towards that particular side and eventually will even begin to alter and warp your user interface based on the number of points for the different sides of the Force. Buying Star Wars Pinball will also entitle you to a bonus Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back tabletop, with extra tops featuring Boba Fett and Star Wars: The Clone Wars available as in-app purchases.
You can find out more info on the game over on their official website here, and I totally won’t even close off with the annoyingly obligatory line that follows every Star Wars article.
May the Force be with you…
Dammit.
Regardless, feel free to see our own thoughts on the game here.
If you’re a big fan of Lord of the Rings or just cooperative games in general then you’re really doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t yet tried out the awesome MOBA game, Guardians of Middle-Earth. With four players on each team and ridiculously balanced gameplay, this title developed by Monolith will result in many a late night as well as having the adverse effect of causing a brofist or three to be distributed across the internet.
This latest update adds an entirely new three-lane map re-skin of the Corrupted Mirkwood forest for free and of course what we’ve all been waiting for, an entirely new Guardian. This hero (or villain?), Unglob is a monstrous spider similar to Shelob, who besides looking freaky enough to intimidate all its opponents has some powerful and unique abilities to achieve dominance in the arena. As a Striker, Unglob weaves in and out of the battle, taking advantage of weak spots and attacking with devastating damage.
Unglobs’ use of poison is sure to bring some additional shenanigans to an already fun filled title and you can purchase her off the Playstation Network or Xbox Live for just $2.50 or 160 Microsoft Points respectively (and don’t forget the free map update either!).
Check out our full thoughts on Guardians of Middle-Earth over here at our review.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation is mere days away from its nation-wide release on March 28th. Today, we have two final promotional pieces for you.
