Love hidden object games? Love deals? Then your week is about to start off with a great deal! Anuman Interactive is bundling up five of their most popular hidden object games together in two separate bundles for one low price.
The first pack is the Jules Verne pack. Available for iPhone , iPad, and Mac, the Jules Verne 2 in 1 pack contains 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Captain Nemo – Extended Edition and Around the World in 80 Days – The Challenge – Extended Edition. The Mac version is $9.95 and found here. The iPhone/iPod Touch pack is available for $3.99 hereand the iPad HD pack is $5.99 here.
The second pack is the Thriller 3 in 1 pack. The pack contains Jack the Ripper – Letters from Hell – Extended Edition, Dr Jerkyll and Mr Hyde – Extended Edition, and Profiler – The Hopscotch Killer – Extended Edition. The Mac bundle will cost gamers $14.95 here, the iPhone/iPod Touch pack is $4.99 on the App Store, and the iPad version is $7.99 here.
The savings for these bundles are up to 50 percent off the price if bought separately.
BulkyPix’s newest game has been dated for Thursday July 5th, 2012. Developed by Pohlm Studio, Hasta La Muerte will let iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch owners play as the emissary of death in a survival platformer. The game takes great inspiration from Pac-Man, providing players with hours of “chase and be chased” gameplay as players accompany the souls of the death and deliver them from damnation. However, these souls can quickly turn on the players, forcing the player to flee for their very lives. The game boasts over 30 levels, friendly gameplay experience for all ages, Soulpets that will provide players with a variety of buffs, a variety of enemies, and Game Center support.
Hot on the heels of the very first Indie Gala Mobile closing, Indie Gala 6 has reached a public release. This pack of games follows the traditional pay what you want format in support of AbleGamers, a charity helping people with disabilities and veterans with war injuries play video games, and the Italian Red Cross which is currently in Emilia Romagna helping earthquake survivors rebuild their lives. All Indie Gala 6 buyers will receive Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, and The Void. Those who pay more than the minimum will also receive Commandos 2: Men of Courage, Commandos 3: Destination Berlin, Ion Assault, Air Conflicts: Secret Wars, and Cargo: The Quest for Gravity. All these games are available as Steam keys.
It wouldn’t be a fighting game without DLC of some kind, even if its simply extra colors or glasses. Today Arc System Works revealed that they would be releasing some color variations and glasses as DLC for Persona 4: Arena. These new color variations will be released after the game comes out and the different glasses will appear on the player’s character sprite and animations.
Also if you happen to dislike the voice over and round announcers, Siliconera reports that you can buy some DLC to change that voice to either Mitsuru, Yosuke, Aigis, and Teddie explain menu options instead of the original voice, Margaret. Currently Atlus USA has not made any announcements about this DLC being released overseas in North America.
Want to play Far Cry 3 anytime soon? Well unfortunately that isn’t going to be happening because the title which was initially meant to be released in September has now been pushed back until December 4th in North America and November 29th in Europe. This holds true for each version of the game, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC though given Ubisoft’s track record with PC releases, it won’t be seen until 2013.
Anyways, Dan Hay, producer at Ubisoft stated that the reason for the delay was due to the team “taking more time to create the best possible gameplay experience” as “Far Cry 3 is a huge offering and we want every element of this insane, action-packed adventure to be of the highest possible quality for the players.”
If you haven’t pre-ordered Tecmo Koei’s upcoming Dead or Alive 5 then perhaps you better dig around for at least $5 to toss down because the company revealed a number of pre-order bonuses for the game. Those of us in North America who pre-order the title at GameStop or Amazon will receive a set of in-game bunny-style swimsuits for three members of the female cast with GameStop pre-orderers receiving the “DOA Angels” white swimsuits for Kasumi, Leifang and Hitomi, while Amazon gets the black “DOA Devils” swimsuits for Christie, Tina, and Ayane. Luckily those in the UK can choose which set of suits to receive if they happen to pre-order the game over there.
Revealed alongside the aforementioned pre-order bonuses is a special collector’s edition which will cost $79.99 in North America and be sold exclusively at GameStop while those in the UK will have to shell out a currently unrevealed price at Centresoft. This Dead or Alive 5 Collector’s Edition will include an embossed metal case, an art book, physical soundtrack, both sets of swimsuits as well as a poster. Could the poster be the nice Kasumi image below? Possibly…
Journey has broken records on the PlayStation Network by being the fastest selling PSN game ever, and now it seems that the game will be receiving a disc-based collector’s edition on August 28th in North America. Today thatgamecompany revealed that the collection will be released for a paltry sum of $29.99.
As one would expect, the Journey Collector’s Edition includes Journey, but it also includes flOw, Flower, soundtracks and commentaries for all three of the games, reversible cover art and a thirty minute documentary.
The full list of what is included in the collector’s edition can be seen below:
30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Journey
Creator Commentary play-throughs of all three games
Three exclusive mini-games from thatgamecompany
Concept art and screenshot galleries for all three games
Original soundtracks for all three games
PS3 dynamic themes and wallpapers
PSN avatars including 8 exclusive new Journey avatars never released before
You may remember a big hullabaloo over the last few months where Zenimax’s (Bethesda’s owners) legal team was engaged in some rather drawn out legal proceedings with Mojang over their game Scrolls. Well, now that those legal proceedings have ended, it seems Mojang wanted to celebrate by showing off the game for the first time.
The gameplay trailer can be seen below which show that it is a game that some people probably won’t like but I digress. The title will use the same sort of “paid beta” system that Minecraft used back in the day, so those who buy the open beta early will get the game for a cheaper price.
It may seem a little sudden, but then again with modern day conveniences like motor vehicles and the ability to buy things online, acquiring the 1600 Microsoft Points required to purchase Skyrim’s first major expansion pack DLC, Dawnguard, is quite simple. If you want to be one of the first people playing the DLC then you better make sure you have those points because Bethesda confirmed today that the DLC will be released on the Xbox 360 tomorrow.
For those who don’t know, Dawnguard will see the rise of vampires in the land of Skyrim as the Vampire Lord Harkon has returned to put an end to the sun itself. Players will be able to choose between joining the Dawnguard and putting an end to his plans or join the vampires themselves and further their dastardly plot. Who will you choose to support when the life giving sun is at stake?
Have you ever come across a news article, an opinion piece, or even a text-book that you knew was just plain wrong on a certain subject? Recently, whilst perusing Kotaku, I had come across just one such article. Namely the one titled The Wii-U’s Power Problem. Essentially what it is that this article states, with the assistance of unverifiable sources, is that the Wii-U will not be able to run Unreal Engine 4 games and will be a significantly gimped gaming console in comparison to the super-mega-power-houses that are the supposed Next-gen Xbox and Playstation consoles.
While I don’t doubt that the next iteration of primary gaming consoles will be significantly more powerful in comparison to the Wii-U, I have my doubts as to this anonymous source and, by extension, Kotaku’s assertion that the Wii-U will not be able to run Unreal Engine 4 games. This is complete and utter bullshit and I will explain to you why that is so.
First of all, let’s just glance at the technical specs that have been revealed to us, shall we? For those of you unfamiliar with these, you can take a look at them Here or Here. Now as we can see, there are a lot of technical words and nonsenses that will leave the average person lost, confused and possibly even a little daunted. As such, I shall point you towards the main focuses of my argument as to why the Wii-U, technically speaking, will be fine to run Unreal Engine 4 games.
First of all, we know that the Wii-U will be running from the ATI HD graphics line. Now, what makes these special is that these particular cards have their own graphics processors. These are designed to take the grunt out of processing certain kinds of data away from your primary CPU. But, with having, what is essentially a specialised CPU, we are able to harness that extra power and theoretically use it to process double the amounts of data when it’s not being used to its fullest. This means that with the right software, this can be used to alleviate stress on the CPU – bitcoin farming is one such example of this.
The Wii-U will also be running an IBM Power Cpu. We don’t have much to go on here as it could refer to anything on the Power line of architecture. However, both power 5 and power 6 are affordable and would easily eclipse the processing capabilites of the xbox360 and ps3. Just remember folks, clock rates are only for processing time and with a modern GPU, lower clock-rates can be tolerated. However, there are citations on a wikipedia article for the Wii-U which states that it may be similar to a Power 7 CPU, which is currently the latest in IBMs processing line. Many of you will remember this particular line as being famous for running that super-computer that could win a game of Jeapordy! in 3 seconds.
I’d reasonably expect 2.6-3.5ghz processing, probably 2.6 with some of the processing passed on to the GPU. However, you could probably still even go as low as 2.4, but at that point anything lower would simply not cut it for simple word processing duties. I’ve got my money on 2.6-2.8ghz personally. – http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34683.wss
The RAM is one thing that we have no idea about, but we can assume that the device does have 8GB internal flash memory and it is expandable through SD cards and USB hard-drives. If a developer was smart, they could utilise the built in flash memory as backup ram and force the player to save to SD or HDD. There is software that does this already for USB flash drives. However this is all supposition on my part and would not honestly expect this out of a modern day console. – http://www.instructables.com/id/Use-your-USB-flash-drive-as-virtual-RAM/
These three points alone tell us that the Wii-U will be able to handle current gen games without breaking a sweat, it has even been showcased (Kotaku show this in their article). However their criticism is in UE4. Now, when UE3 came out, It ran fine on current gen PC’s at the time. It ran fine on the hardware that was released around it. Is it really that unlikely that a graphics engine would not be built to run on current hardware at minimum? The Wii-U is a step ahead of most gaming PCs these days, why would it not be able to run UE4 games?
Heck, even Unreal Engine 3 is ~Really~ versatile, I had Unreal Tournament 3 running on my old nVidia 5200 at 320×240 res with max settings at a very smooth frame-rate. Sure it looked like ass, but it worked. Why would Epic remove such versatility from their engine? At the worst, the Wii-U will see versions of titles with slightly reduced textures, or maybe a different lightmap. But if you’ve been PC gaming as long as I have, you will know that you can get the most out of a game with a little tinkering. I’m sure gamedevs will be doing just that with future titles should the Wii-U not be up to scratch.
Oh hey, a quote from epic saying that it is scalable –
“Artists and designers can bring their visions to life directly in game without programmer assistance via the new Unreal Kismet. This offers programmers the freedom to focus on core gameplay features and sophisticated systems. With significant new visual features, Unreal Engine 4 enables you to achieve high-end visuals, while remaining both scalable and accessible to make games for low-spec PCs.” – http://www.unrealengine.com/unreal_engine_4
So really, what is the Kotaku article even talking about? A quick 15minutes of research has shown that they simply have no idea about what it is that they’re trying to say and this anonymous source of theirs is probably a troll who saw easy money. Kotaku, I’m an anonymous source too, I’m telling you that the Wii-U is going to be 50,00000000000000000000 times more powerful than the “Xbox 720” and the “Playstation 4”; you can quote me on that in your next article titled “Why the Wii-U is 50-gigadrillion times as powerful as X720 and PS4”. You can stop reading here if you like, or you can continue reading on for my concerns with the current growth of the gaming console thingness.
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My primary concern with this gaming console generation is that it’s taking existing hardware architecture and not planning for the future. They seem to be taking the specs of today to run the games of today and not really thinking ahead. This is all rhetoric by me though, but I don’t see the hardware ever beating down a PC or the games ever looking as good. If console devs keep lagging behind, there will be no drive towards better looking games. It’s no fun when my PC outperforms 90% of titles even with 2-3year old hardware.
I comfortably predict that the “next-gen” (nothing next or gen about them) of consoles will show their age much more quickly than the consoles of old, with games looking dated at around two years into their life-cycle. I’m just going to sit over here and enjoy the console war that’s beginning to brew, I’ve given solid insight into the direction of the consoles and their power, now I’m just going to laugh.
