From July 26th to July 29th 2012, Atari’s Greatest Hits are on sale! The 100 game pack will only set you back $3.99 USD or $4.49 AUD this weekend. The 100 game pack is normally priced at $9.99 USD. The 100 game pack contains classics such as Asteroids, Centipede, Pong, Lunar Lander and Warlords.
The separate four packs of games are still priced at $0.99 so this is an incredible not to be missed deal for retro gaming fans everywhere.The games are all compatible with the official Atari Arcade – Duo powered joystick accessory.
The joystick can be purchased for $59.99 here. Atari’s Greatest Hits can be downloaded for free here. The 100 game pack is available as an in app purchase.
Everybody loves the phrase ‘’Pay what you will’’. It means you as the buyer get to decide how much to pay for something. It’s consumer god-mode and can be hugely successful for the seller and very satisfying for the buyer as well, everybody ends up happy. This has been a popular trend lately on the internets what with Kickstarter and the Humble Indie Bundle. Humble Bundle V made 5.1 million dollars last month using a pay what you will system…just so you know.
Enough about the past though, let’s talk about the present, Humble Bundle is back.
The Humble Music Bundle launched today and offers a chance for cool folks like yourself to give a little money and get a lot of music. Six musical talents are participating; Christopher Tin, They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot, Hitoshi Sakimoto and OK GO.
The albums will be DRM free and playable on any platform. If you’re not excited yet remember that you do get to choose how much to pay and will also be able to select how much of your money goes to the artists, charity and to the Humble Bundle website.
Pay what you want to who you want and do it for a good cause at www.humblebundle.com
While Final Fantasy XIV has had a rather lackluster history, it seems that is all about to change because today Square Enix revealed that the massive overhaul to FFXIV which was originally called Version 2.0 is now going to be titled Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, and if the below trailer is anything to go by then you better settle in for a brand new MMO experience.
Producer Naoki Yoshida has stated that “This new title not only becomes a symbol of a completely new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, but also marks the beginning of a new stage as the latest title in the Final Fantasy series. I hope you’re looking forward to it!”
It is also worth noting that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is still coming to the PlayStation 3 as well as the PC, though no firm release date was given besides “coming soon.”
Bethesda has released a new trailer for Dishonored today and this one covers a number of tricks and methods players can use to get themselves out of a sticky situation. While it is possible to simply shoot your way out of a dangerous encounter, stringing together possessions and dashing through the air just looks so much better.
The trailer for the game can be seen below while Dishonored itself is set to be released October 9th. If there has been anything Dishonored has shown us over the past few months is that the game will always have multiple routes and flexible gameplay options. This almost ensures high replayability simply due to the wealth of options at your disposal no matter what you choose to do.
Empty Clip Studios has announced their Indie Game Challenge winning game Symphonywill be launching August 6th, 2012 for $9.99. Pre-orders are starting today at multiple digital distribution networks for 20 percent off. Participating retailers accepting pre-orders can be found here.
Symphony is a vertical shooter that allows players to play Symphony with music from their own collection. Each song will create a unique battlefield and item. Players will be able to customize their ships with upgrade items found on each level to assist their quest to liberate the Symphony of Souls. Symphony boasts six levels of difficulty and a per song leader board and 30 unlockable achievements.
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.
