Gate9’s medieval puzzler Dragon Town is free for a limited time. Dragon Town gives players a limited amount of space to build their town while they do battle with an evil dragon. The game boasts ten different kinds of base units. By building certain units together into combinations, players will be able to create better units. The more powerful the unit, the more points players will earn.
There are over a thousand possible combinations, so feel free to experiment. No word on how long “a limited time” exactly means, so be sure to snag a copy of Dragon Town on the iTunes App Store here.
Live the Revolution. That is WWE 13’s tag line. I left THQ’s hands on event at Sun Studios, wondering one thing, ‘Who in the world would call this a revolution?’ If there has ever been a tag line that so poorly represented the contents of the game it was attached to more than WWE 13, I haven’t see it.
Now let me start by saying that the last WWE game I played extensively was Smackdown vs. Raw 2010, I had played the previous two very briefly and found them to be a mess. Unfortunately WWE 13 was no different, in fact, it was worse.
Upon getting my hands on a controller and playing a demo build of the game (looks like this version will be hitting XBLA and PSN soon) I discovered that I had a few choices for match types. I could try out a standard singles match, an extreme rules match, a hell in a cell match and finally a special referee match. I started with a standard match, this was the most stable match type I encountered, it all got worse from there.
First up I decided to play as The Miz and versed Sheamus in a standard singles match. I was instantly confronted with a horribly laid out control scheme. There is simply too many different mechanics at play here and none of them work enough to warrant existence. The most confusing of which is the pinfall and submission mechanics. First of all both pinfalls and submission result in the same outcome, winning a match. Yet for some reason WWE 13 complicates things by having vastly different mechanics for each. In order to break out of a submission you must button mash. In order to get out of a pin you must press a button at the right moment. It doesn’t work well enough at all and I found myself instinctively either button mashing when a pinfall occurred or waiting for the press a button at the right moment prompt to appear. It may sound like not that big a deal, but it definitely ruined the flow of gameplay for me personally.
That isn’t the end of it though. I encountered a plethora of glitches, ragdolled models, and broken mechanics consistently throughout the entire experience. The worst of which occured during my extreme rules match. Once again I chose to play as The Miz, except this time I decided to face off against Mike Tyson. First off, the weapon mechanics are absolutely horrible and do not contribute much to the game at all. The weapons generally seem to have no greater effect than grapple moves or strikes and specific weapons like tables and ladders are fundamentally broken (literally in the case of tables).
Towards the end of my Miz vs. Tyson match, I had placed a table on one side of the ring while Tyson was down on the other side. He got to his feet and I decided to hit him with my finisher in order to weaken him for placement on the table. I hit the skull crushing finale (The Miz’s finishing move) and suddenly something incredibly wrong occured. After hitting the finishing move, some how the table on the complete other side of the ring broke into four pieces, I was somehow knocked out and Tyson began to pin me. The problem here though was that no kick out bar appeared, so I had no way of kicking out at all and ultimately lost the match. Thats right, I did my finishing move and somehow the game glitched into me being pinned and unable to even kick out.
Thats not all though, this kick out glitch occured numerous times. No kick out bar would appear randomly leaving me in the wind with no way to stop it. This same thing occured later on in a match that I did with The Big Show and Mark Henry. I had my fellow Capsule Computers Editor Benjamin Webb with me to play multiplayer in this one. We were playing a special referee match. I was playing as Mark Henry and he was playing as The Big Show. First of all we tried to replicate the much advertised ‘ring break’ in which the entire ring collapses after superplexing The Big Show. Unfortunately this was incredibly difficult to do as Mark Henry kept doing a back suplex which did not break the ring, instead causing us to momentarily teleport above it. Eventually I hit the suplerplex and what followed has to be one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen in a wrestling game in my life. Instead of the ring breaking, Mark Henry and Big Show glitched through the mat, ragdolled all over the place, the special guest referree (sexual chocolate Mark Henry) began to look as though he was falling over, he then began to rag doll as well. Suddenly we glitch teleported above the ring and fell back down to normal standing on the ring like nothing had even happened.
Unfortunately this was not the worst part of this match. Afterwards we decided to play around with the announce table. I pulled off the cover and climbed on top. I decided to try and do a jumping move onto Big Show, instead of that happening I appeared to hit an invisible wall and then suddenly Mark Henry did the animation of falling through a table and the announce table collapsed. Yes, that’s right, somehow I put myself through the table. The game then proceeded to replay me going through the table 6 times, which halted gameplay entirely.
After that match I tried out the hell in a cell match and was disappointed to discover that there is no way whatsoever to escape the cell. The door cannot be broken off or walked out of and the only purposed of the cage is the throw people into it. There was literally nothing special about the hell in a cell match here and it suffered all the same glitches as the other matches, the teleporting, the lack of kick out bar and of course the hilarious ragdolling. I seen in trailers for the game that you can get outside, but in this demo, there was no way that I could find. Maybe that is only available in the full version? Who knows.
Ultimately I decided to step away from the game as I really struggled to find any enjoyment in it. There was so many countless problems that I couldn’t bring myself to feel any enjoyment at all. To make matters worse, the visuals look like they were ripped from Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (a game more than 6 years old for the Playstation 2). The textures were horrible and the graphics looked incredibly dated. The entire experience was so incoherent, that I find difficulty in categorising this as a game. There was little that could properly be played here.
I was once I huge fan of this franchise, but as they say, with every great rise, there is an even greater fall. WWE 13 is the lowest point in the series history, after my hands on with the game I can not honestly recommend it. I can only hope that the full version works out these bugs as there was nothing ‘revolutionary’ here, heck there was nothing even redeemable. One last thing, why the hell is there twitter hash tags everywhere in this game?’ Is that really necessary? What more can I say besides: ‘Live the Revolution’? No thank you.
PC exclusive racer Trackmania 2 Canyon released way back in September last year. With it’s arcade gameplay, focus on player built tracks and general insanity, the game scored very highly here at CC, picking up a 9.5 rating. Now almost an entire year later, the developers have released some DLC for the cool price of nothing.
Platform is an entirely new game mode for Canyon, coming with it’s own solo campaign, 23 new tracks and a dedicated ranking system. The mode will be familiar to veterans of the series, who will spot the play style from the original Trackmania. The gameplay in Trackmania allows for instant restarts on the often insane tracks, a tool that allows for some much needed chances to learn the tricky levels. Platform removes that safety net and ramps up the focus on player skill – tracks must be completed with no respawns.
There is also a community challenge included in the DLC,”King of the Ultimate Nightmare”! This is obviously a platform challenge, and the first player who completes a full circuit of the Ultimate Nightmare platform track is in for a bit of an ego boost. Upon showing the replay to developers Nadeo, the player will receive their own dedicated video on the ManiaPlanet YouTube channel.
Speaking of videos, there is a brand new trailer for the Platform pack which can be watched below. Trackmania has a habit of having rather awesome trailers, and this one is no exception.
The Trackmania 2 Canyon Platform Pack is available for download now.
To-Fu Collection Developer:HotGen Studios Publisher: Rising Star Games Platform: DS Release Date:29th June (UK), 24th July (US) – Available Here
Overview:
Finally, vegetarians have a hero of their very own and one to rival Super Meat Boy. Rising Star Games has compiled the two iOS games To-Fu: Trials of Chi and To-Fu 2 into one easily digestible meat free package. Apparently two constitutes a collection, though with about 100 trials in each game it does still feel worthy of the title. Just about.
Gameplay:
You ping a piece of tofu wearing a kung-fu headband from wall to wall. What more do you need to know? Testing the tensile strength of the vegetarian-friendly champion – named To-Fu after the foodstuff and his chosen martial arts discipline – you tug the upper half of his body in the direction you want to fling him, release and then watch him fly to the adjacent wall which he sticks to. The aim is to collide with a pink fortune cookie to complete each level, but for completionists there are trails of glowing blue chi to collect on your way through the level and a minimum amount of moves to aim for.
It’s a simple as that to start with, although like any game it introduces new elements to make levels more complicated and therefore even more rewarding to complete. These range from surfaces which change the dynamic of movement like shifting platforms, conveyor belts, glass walls which you slide down and metal plated surfaces which allow To-Fu to bounce rather than stick; to dangers like moving circular saws and spikes. All require precise aim and planning ahead, because, thankfully, as well as using the stylus to ping To-Fu you can drag it over the screen to take a look at what you’re up against.
As you progress, the tolerated margin for error decreases. As the stakes get higher, so too does the need for pinpoint accuracy and quicker thinking, as well as there being a greater penalty for loss given that it’s much more punishing to restart from the beginning of a trial when it was already a challenge to get up to the bit where you failed.
The mechanics are sound as it’s basically a port of the mobile game, but instead of using your finger you use the DS stylus. One complaint that does arise through use of the DS stylus and touch screen is that it’s a little more inconsistent than an iPhone or smartphone, especially if you’re still using the tired old system you got at launch. With something so set on you holding the stylus over To-Fu almost the whole time, running over a dead spot of the touch screen or grabbing the edge of To-Fu and not the main body of the character can result in accidental launches. Still, these are fairly rare, if annoying, and pose more of a problem to those with handhelds with a bit of wear and tear than those opting to make use of the 3DS’s backwards compatibility.
Extras include a list of in-game achievements to work through, bonus levels and a ‘Dojo’ in which to practice your moves. To-Fu also lets you customise the lead character, suiting up in gear like an American football helmet in place of his usual kung-fu belt tied around his forehead.
Visuals & Audio:
Where direct comparisons are concerned, the graphics have taken a hit. The game has lost its glossy edge seeing as the DS is something of a downgrade from the iPhone. It doesn’t impact the game hugely, although a grainier block of tofu, more pixels being visual in your surroundings and a smaller overall display takes away some of the game’s charm, if not much.
However, added with the fact that the in-game music sounds a hell of a lot worse coming out of the DS, playing on the DS is a noticeably different experience from playing on the iPhone – presentation-wise, on top of the obvious control scheme differences. Ultimately it doesn’t matter – the gameplay is as good as it ever was – but it has visibly and audibly lost some polish along the way.
Overall:
While on paper To-Fu Collection is two mobile phone games sandwiched together and thrown on a DS cartridge, the number of levels and difficulty curve, as well as a certain amount of replay value, mean it doesn’t seem like a cop-out when compared with other DS titles. The conversion isn’t great, with the weak visuals serving to show the difference in power between the DS and the iPhone, but the gameplay is still fantastic. At £14.99 it’s a fair bit above the cost of buying the iOS games separately. But, if like me you refuse to move with the flow of technological advancements to the mobile phone market and shell out for a smartphone, it’s still a good deal where DS games are concerned at half the usual retail price, so don’t feel bad about playing this on your decrepit, ol’ faithful handheld on the smaller screen of the DS.
Disney has released the third episode in a series of videos giving a behind the scenes insight into the creation of Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two. Introduced by the game’s creator, Warren Spector of developer Junction Point, this one takes a look at the storytelling aspect to development.
In this two and half minute segment, you’ll hear how Marv Wolfman, award-winning American comic book writer and co-writer of Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two develops the relationship between Mickey and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit – Walt Disney’s long lost character at last returned to the fold.
Can it deliver a story that the player appreciates both as observer and participant in a video game context? With renewed emphasis on the very foundations of the Mickey Mouse universe, with Junction Point going over the old cartoons and such, it looks like it’s barking up the right tree.
I got a chance to sit down with Yuko Miyamura a seiyuu, or voice actress, who you’ve probably heard at one point or another whether it’s her role as Chun Li in Street Fighter (Zero, Zero 2, II X, EX, Zero 3, and EX3), Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or the training video girl Battle Royale. As well as having a bevy of voice and screen acting titles to her name she also has singing credits, clearly she’s very talented vocally, but her career already speaks volumes about that.
CC: You have a really impressive range of work that you’ve done. Do you prefer voice acting, screen acting, or singing?
YM: I definitely prefer voice and screen acting over singing.
CC: Is there a particular role that you really enjoyed, and was there any reason that it stood out?
YM: I don’t have a specific favorite, but as for the roles that I’ve done for the longest, it would be my roles in Evangelion and Detective Conan
CC: Is there any kind of character that you’d like to play in the future?
YM: Anything and everything, I’m definitely not ruling anything out and I’d like to give everything out there a shot.
CC: Is there anything that you’ve done that you struggled with or found difficult?
YM: The original Evangelion TV series was probably the most difficult one that I’ve done in my career.
CC: Have you ever played any of the games that you’ve done voices for? If so, which ones?
YM: Yes, I’ve played Kingdom Hearts, which I was the voice of Larxene, Street Fighter in which I voiced Chun-Li and some of the Japanese Love Match games, such as Refrain Love.
CC: Do you have any upcoming projects that we can tell your fans about?
YM: Well there is the new Evangelian movie that is coming out, Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo. And I also have voice acting classes that I’m starting down in Melbourne where I live, in which I’ll be teaching people the ways of the seiyuu.
CC: Thank you very much for talking with us Yuko, and I wish you all the luck in the future!
Anuman Interactive have announced that they will add to their series of time management games, with a new publishing partnership with BlooBuzz Studios for The Timebuilders: Pyramid Rising and Caveman’s Prophecy for PC and Mac.
In Pyramid Rising players get to be the Egyptian Royal Architect’s assistant and have to take on a number of challenges to help out the Egyptian economy, such as developing houses and building villages. In Caveman’s Prophecy you are sent back to prehistoric times, with a similar goal to keep your corner of the Earth running.
Anuman Interactive’s Publishing Director, Alain Milly, said this about Anuman’s new partnership:
“We are thrilled to be able to strengthen our position on the time management game market by publishing “Pyramid Rising” and “Caveman’s Prophecy”. These are quality games that will make great additions to our casual game catalogue. Also, we are delighted about taking the opportunity to widen our international horizons by signing this partnership with Quebec studios BlooBuzz.”
For more information about Anuman Interactive, head over to their site HERE. Keep tuned to Capsule Computers for more information on Timebuilders, or any other Anuman games that are coming out!
For all of those PES fans out there, the demo for the latest entry of the series, Pro Evolution Soccer 2013, is now available for Xbox 360 (via Xbox Live) and PC (via www.konami-pes2013.com). Playstation 3 owners will have to wait for a little while longer. The demo will be available on July 31, which is next week. All of these dates are for Europe and Australia.
The demo will contain the international teams of Germany, England, Portugal, and Italy and South American clubs Santos FC, SC International, Fluminense and Flamengo. The demo allows any difficulty setting to be used and localised language settings for all European languages. Konami have also released a trailer for the demo. The full game will be available just in time for the new season, Spring 2012.
UPDATE: The PS3 demo is now available on the Playstation Network, ready for download. Also, enjoy this trailer, featuring Christiano Ronaldo, the poster boy of PES 2013.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe have revealed that they will announced two brand new games at the upcoming Gamescom convention. There were no hints on what these games may be, including what platform the games could be on. The announcement would probably be made during Sony’s Gamescom conference, which will take place on the 14th of August at 7pm, a day before the start of Gamescom, which is August 15. These games have not been announced previously.
The revelation was found out through official Sony invites to the event. These invites also list the following games:
PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale
Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified
Assassin’s Creed III
Soul Sacrifice
The Unfinished Swan
Dust 514
The Last of Us
Wonder Book: Book of Spells
An update on the Little Big Planet franchise with a possible showing of LBP Karting
One game that will be absent is going to be Beyond: Two Souls. The game, being developed by Quantic Dream and starring Ellen Page, was revealed at E3 last month.
Earlier this week both Luke Halliday and Myself were invited to an event with THQ over at Sun Studios in Sydney. At the event we were able to play a bunch of as-yet unreleased video games that will be coming out later this year and early next year, but more importantly, we were able to play around with stunt men and do some stunts.
In this video that is embedded below, you can watch as both myself and Luke become stuntmen to help promote the upcoming Darksiders II video game. In the video we do some Ukemi, some fireball throwing and some awesome stunt fighting.
Be sure to check out the video embedded below for a full overview.
I got a chance to sit down with Yuko Miyamura a seiyuu, or voice actress, who you’ve probably heard at one point or another whether it’s her role as Chun Li in Street Fighter (Zero, Zero 2, II X, EX, Zero 3, and EX3), Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or the training video girl Battle Royale. As well as having a bevy of voice and screen acting titles to her name she also has singing credits, clearly she’s very talented vocally, but her career already speaks volumes about that.
Anuman Interactive have announced that they will add to their series of time management games, with a new publishing partnership with BlooBuzz Studios for The Timebuilders: Pyramid Rising and Caveman’s Prophecy for PC and Mac.
