That’s right Sony have officially opened their beta testing for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale on October 17 to PlayStation Plus subscribers. The beta will become available to non PlayStation Plus users on October 24.
You can access the beta now and play as several of your favourite characters. The following characters are playable in the beta: Kratos, Sweet Tooth, Colonel Radec, Sly Cooper, PaRappa and Fat Princess. I’m sure PlayStation fans know and love these characters and can not wait to get their hands on the beta to test it all out.
The beta closes on October 30 so be sure to get in early or you just might miss out completely on the beta testing brawl of fun that is none just a few clicks away for you. Be sure to let us know in the comments section what you think.
Prepare yourself for the sequel with the game that started it all. Metro 2033, THQ’s doomsday shooter, is half price for a limited time on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
Starting today and running until Monday 22nd October, Metro 2033 is available at a 50% reduction, sitting pretty at $9.99 / £5.49 / €7.49. Set in the shattered subway of a post-apocalyptic Moscow, Metro 2033 is a story of intense underground survival in which the fate of mankind rests in the player’s hands.
For anyone that didn’t play it first time round, a better opportunity for updating yourself in time for Metro: Last Light is unlikely to present itself before it releases early 2013.
The first downloadable content and updates for Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 is now available for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. The update adds a widget system that acts as a shortcut to gathering friends together for online matches. It also adds eight people to play in a match simultaneously and Community modes, wherein friends can be automatically selected from a pre-determined list and allows communities to track and monitor their results. Users can also now concede a match at half-time as well. The content is all free and can be obtained on the Playstation Network and the Xbox Live Marketplace.
In addition to this first update, Komani has also revealed information for their second DLC update. The next update will add all summer transfers, adds further UEFA elements, team updates and 11 new boot designs. This will be available alongside the update to online features and it will be free. PES 2013 received an 8.5 out of 10 on Capsule Computers. You can check out the review right here.
Wreck-It Ralph is ready to wreck theaters soon, but the video-game adaptation is also rolling out for the Wii, Nintendo DS, and 3DS on October 30th. Today, a new trailer for the game released, showing off…well…Ralph.
Yes, it’s not a lot at the moment, but we do know that this movie is inspired by the video game universe, which should hold some merit into making one enjoyable adventure game. Check out the short clip below and don’t forget to check out Wreck-It Ralph when it hits stores within the coming weeks.
Nyu-Media, publishers of awesome Doujin games, have announced that their latest game, Fairy Bloom Freesia, will be launching on the Steam platform on the 17th of October, 2012. Fairy Bloom Freesia is being pegged as a 3D beat-em up with RPG elements.
Fairy Bloom Freesia follows the fairy character Freesia who has to protect her forest, Lita, from golems. By surviving more and more days in the forest, the enemies will grow stronger and stronger, making this more about survival.
Features
2.5D combo-crazy fighting action!
A huge repertoire of techniques, special moves and magic to obtain and use!
WWE ’13 is hitting shelves at the end of the month, but it seems the game is bringing together the whole “Attitude vs Present” storyline arc into the WWE itself. Recently, Good Ol’ JR sat down with current WWE Champion CM Punk and WWE Legend Stone Cold Steve Austin in order to promote THQ’s latest and hopefully greatest installment yet, and tension boiled over between the two egos during the interview.
Of course this feud can be recreated in the main game, but fans of the WWE will certainly want to take notice as we might be witnessing a much bigger event in the making here. Check out the video down below, and stay tuned as there is sure to be even more WWE ’13 coverage to come within coming weeks leading up to the release.
Do you like the ARDrone 2.0 but don’t like Apple or Android phones? Say you’ve got a Sony Internet Player for GoogleTV. Well, now you can fly the ARDrone using this. The application will be similar to the AR.FreeFlight piloting application available to both the former mentioned smartphones. Now you can stream from the Drone, to the Sony Internet Player to your GoogleTV – offering new ways for pilots to share their flights with others. The Sony Remote and GoogleTV compatible version will be out by the end of October. For more information visit http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/google-tv.
Deep Silver has put out a disaster warning, as Emergency 2013 is going to hit on November 9th! The sixth instalment in the series, Emergency 2013 is co-developed by franchise veterans Sixteen Tons Entertainment, developers of Emergency 2, 3 and 4, and Quadriga Games, developer of the most recent entrant, Emergency 2012, which Deep Silver published. Obviously, Deep Silver will be continuing their working relationship and will also be publishing Emergency 2013.
Emergency 2013 is essentially akin to a massive expansion pack, as it will require the ownership/purchase of Emergency 2012 to work. It will contain four new campaign missions, which center around the imminent destruction caused by an erupting volcano. Players will have to manage resultant forest fires, toxic gas emissions and frustrated civilians as they work towards containing the disaster. Emergency 2013 will also provide a new free-play map and a new unit.
Emergency 2013 will be released on Windows PC via two distribution platforms; digital and physical copies, the latter of which will also include the entire contents of the Emergency 2012 Deluxe edition. For more information, keep an eye on the official Deep Silver ‘Emergency website.
Paranormal Activity 4 is set for release in a few short days, and for those of you who haven’t caught the first three movies, then Paranormal Pictures have released a video just for you.
Even if you have seen the first three movies of the series, it’s a great way to remind yourself of what’s happened so far. Plus, there’s some new footage of the new film thrown in there for good measure. Looks like Hunter will be playing a part in the new film, not just the demon getting bored and deciding to mess with the neighbours. At least that’s good news.
So, will Paranormal Activity 4 have as much flickery-light, and flying kitchen items as the previous three movies? Well, let’s hope so. There’s nothing like good old crazy poltergeist mischief.
There’s also a few short clips from the film. The first is accurately entitled ‘Running through the house’
And the second, ‘Levitate’
Check out the new History Recap featurette below!
Paranormal Activity 4 is being released in cinemas on October 18, 2012. Keep an eye out on the site for a review, as well as other movie, gaming and TV news.
Tales of Vesperia ~The First Strike~ Studio: Production I.G Publisher: Madman Format: Blu-Ray Disc (Reviewed), DVD Release Date:September 5th, 2012 Price: $34.95(Buy here)
Overview
The Tales of franchise is an incredibly large one that has been published by Namco (and later Namco Bandai) for years. The latest entry, Tales of Vesperia was launched on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 formats and has gathered an incredibly large fanbase for this entry alone.
Of course, in this review, we’ll be looking at the Anime movie that (I believe) takes place before the events of the games. The movie shows us a lot about the world lore and issues and really allows us to get to know the characters from the games in a much more relaxing format.
Does the Anime do the game justice though? I wouldn’t know, I haven’t played the games. But after watching the movie, I kind of want to.
Story
Tales of Vesperia ~The First Strike~ follows a small band of knights as they have to deal with the daily defence of their town against seemingly more and more aggressive monster attacks. The group eventually starts to research the cause of these events which culminates in them raiding a dungeon and fighting even stronger monsters.
One thing that I noticed early on with the story was that it really felt like I was watching somebody play an RPG, rather than actually watching a movie. The first thing that made me think this was a scene early on where the main characters are pretty much forced into doing guard duty for their superior. What reinforced this even further was that the leader than took the time to talk to every single villager in the town. This to me felt like the opening quest to nearly every Role Playing Game that I have played.
I feel that having that connection to the games by having something that felt gamey only strengthened the movie, at least for me anyway. I really don’t like it when a game adaptation strives to be it’s own thing, which often leads to the detriment of the franchise.
The overall progression of the story also felt similar to that of a video game. For instance, as I already stated, the main characters are made to do a simple task at the beginning of the film, but these tasks get more and more complex as the arc advances. For example, there is an exploration based quest, there’s a quest where the party fights a tough monster for the first time and there is even the mandatory dungeon crawl. Heck, the main characters even ended up with a powerful weapon (albeit not obtained from a treasure chest) as a reward for completing the dungeon. So yeah, the progression in this film is very gamey. And as a gamer, I loved it.
So overall, fans of the Vesperia game(s) will absolutely love the story in this film, as will fans of RPG games in general. However, it is unlikely that people who are not interested in these things will find this too engaging; but there is a massive overlap between gamers and otaku, so the people that will disappointed in this are unlikely to want to pick this up in the first place.
Visuals
If you have a Blu-ray player, I would definitely recommend getting this movie as a Blu-ray disc. There are so many moments in this film where the visuals are just vibrant as magic. In particular, this is when certain characters cast a spell or when there is some kind of magical effect happening. This paragraph may make the others parts of the visuals seem bland, but this is really the strongest visual point.
I haven’t quite played the game for this franchise, so I can only go off screenshots and artwork for reference when I say this. But it seems like everything in this movie is following the aesthetics of the games quite well. I’m not a big enough fan to notice any discrepancies, but I don’t think anyone that is will really complain all too much.
What I really liked about the visuals in this was how a lot of the monsters were realised. Generally speaking, when you’ve been playing games and watching anime for as long as I have, you kind of expect a certain thing to look a certain way. This was something cool with this film, because I’m not familiar with the source, all of the monsters looked and felt really unique and interesting. For example, there is this one monster that absorbs a bunch of dogs and looks incredibly awesome.
Overall the visuals in Tales of Vesperia ~The First Strike~ are pretty cool and I doubt anyone will be disappointed. I think that they captured the world quite well and fit the theme nicely.
Audio
I’m not entirely sure if this movie features an entirely original soundtrack or it features one that is lifted from the video games. However, it does do an amazing job of conveying what is happening on screen to the person at home watching.
I can’t really comment on the audio quality negatively, except that I had to turn my speakers up much louder than usual to have the film be as audible as other films. However, this is a minor gripe as the audio quality is excellent and every aspect of the audio was incredibly well done. I have no complaints, so short audio section is short.
Extras
Tales of Vesperia ~The First Strike~ has a pretty decent selection of extras. What you’ll first notice about these is if you open up the case, you’ll see some nice artwork behind the disc-popper thingy that is quite cool.
The Picture Sound special feature is a collection of artwork that is panned through whilst a selection of background music is played. It is quite soothing and the artwork is actually quite nice to look at.
There’s also a Promotional Footage segment, which has 8 minutes of trailers for the movie. It showcases a bunch of cool scenes from the film to promote it.
There is also the U.S trailer and a bunch of trailers. This is pretty standard for an Anime release these days.
Overall
Tales of Vesperia ~The First Strike~ is a remarkably nice package that fans of both Anime and the RPG series will enjoy. It has an amazing focus on visuals and the story is very reminiscent of a video game. I absolutely loved it and I think you will too.
