Max Payne fans out there, get ready for the final official Max Payne 3 trailer before the launch of the game next week…
The Official Max Payne 3 Launch Trailer is coming tomorrow morning at 2am Australian Eastern Time on RockstarGames.com and at the Max Payne 3 site.
Max Payne 3 arrives for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 next week – on May 15, 2012 in North America and May 18, 2012 in Europe. Look for the PC version launching on May 29th, 2012 in North America and June 1st, 2012 in Europe.
Now, who’s going to be picking up Max Payne 3 on launch day? Let us know, leave a comment below.
Today, Electronic Arts announced that another ME3 multiplayer weekend will be upon us this soon.
Operation Silencer will run from Friday, May 11 at 6PM PST to Monday, May 14 at 5AM PST on Xbox 360 , PlayStation 3 and PC.
The challenges for the weekend are:
Allied Goal: Kill 3,000,000 banshees. Successful completion of the allied goal will grant all players a Victory Pack.
Squad Goal: Survive until a full extraction on any map against any enemy on gold difficulty. Successful completion of the squad goal will grant all squadmates a Commendation Pack.
As usual, “Upload Gameplay Feedback” must be turned on to participate!
In addition to Operation Silencer, EA also passed out a spiffy new info-graph that displays “multiplayer telemetry.” Check it out below.
Although some locales have had this app available for awhile now, Australian and New Zealand Xbox console owners can now download the MLB.TV app.
Thats right, “fans around the world can now designate their favourite teams to ensure the live games, recaps and highlights they care about most are at the forefront each time they turn on their Xbox. International audiences are able to watch every regular season Major League Baseball game without blackout restrictions live in HD with MLB.TV Premium. That’s 2,430 games live or on-demand — almost 100 games per week during the regular season, right on Xbox 360. And with Kinect, fans can even play, pause, and rewind the game with their voice or a wave of their hand.”
Of course, to sign into the app, you will need a Gold Subscription to Xbox Live and an MLB.TV Premium subscription, which costs $114/year or $25/month.
Nevertheless, the app does offer quite a few services. For more information, check out the press release below:
Premium on Xbox LIVE features include:
· Live Games, Recaps, and Archived Games – With an MLB.TV Premium Subscription, international audiences can enjoy every live regular season game without blackout restrictions, or catch it later from the game archives, which include the 2011 season as well as this season. Short game recaps, which give you the ability to take in the game in less than 5 minutes, are also available to all Xbox LIVE Gold Members, as well as a free Game of the Day.
· My Teams – Fans can select their favourite teams and put them front and center. MLB.TV on Xbox LIVE will make the live games, archives and recaps for favourite teams appear front-and-center so they can be accessed quickly and easily.
· Every game in HD – MLB.TV delivers every game in beautiful streaming HD, and most games give every fan the option of the Home or Away audio feed.
· Mini Guide – The Mini Guide gives fans a quick preview of all of today’s games right at the bottom of the screen, and makes it easier than ever to switch between games.
· Split Screen – Fans want to keep an eye on the league while taking in their own team, so MLB.TV on Xbox LIVE is adding Split Screen technology, allowing them to watch two games at once. Watch live games on both screens or a live game on one while catching up with a game recap or archive game on the other. It is even possible to control both screens independently; pausing and rewinding each separately ensuring never a second of the action is missed.
· Gesture Control and Voice Control with Kinect for Xbox 360 – Focus on the action instead of looking for the remote. Navigate through the Content Guide, skip to the next inning, or play, pause, and rewind that double play…. all with the wave of a hand or the sound of a voice with Kinect for Xbox 360.
MLB.TV Premium joins services such as FOXTEL on Xbox 360, SBS ON DEMAND, ABC iVIEW, ninemsn video, YouTube and VEVO on the Xbox 360.
The world premiere of “Diablo III: Wrath” was merely a day ago and has attributed to over half million views on YouTube. A collaborative effort from Blizzard, director Peter Chung, and animation studio Titmouse presents a film short depicting the ancient battlefields of heaven and hell. Most knowledgeable Deckard Cain offers the retelling of these events in a vision that has never been seen before.
With the council of angels waylaying the demons of the Burning Hells, a devious trap was administered by one of the Prime Evils himself – Diablo. Imperius, the golden angel, marches forward to the lair claiming they have the upper hand. Our beloved Tyrael tries to delay Imperius but to no avail. The Angel of Valor becomes entrapped to Diablo’s devices ensuing a close battle of pure strength. As Diablo manages an upper hand, the triumvirate breaks through the walls of the hellish prison.
Check out the entire video below to grasp the epic history of the Diablo saga. Leave us a comment about potential bosses to expect!
Diablo III is unleashed on the world on the 15th of May if you haven’t already done so make sure you pre order your copy from Blizzard Online here
Battleship Developer: Double Helix Publisher: Activision Platform: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 (reviewed) Release Date: May 15, 2012 Price: $59.99 (HERE)
Overview
Another year, another licensed game to go with a blockbuster movie release. Battleship, the game based on a movie based on a board game, is a first-person shooter that mixes in some strategic, grid-style ship play. Does the unique premise keep the game afloat or does it sink under the weight of its movie license?
Gameplay
Much like the summer movie that inspired it, Battleship does not include much of a story. Aliens are attacking the islands of Hawaii and you, a ground trooper who somehow is also responsible for controlling the movements and missions of the United States Navy. Yeah, I didn’t really get it either.
Anyway, the game starts off with aliens launching a surprise attack, and you’re immediately thrust into shooting your way through various levels in first-person with controls almost identical to that other Activision game that comes out about once a year. The kicker is that you have a naval command device that zooms you out of the action and shows the entire map on a grid. The device then allows you to command ships in the grid to take out enemy vessels or move into strategic points that will allow you to call in missile strikes and the like. Aliens you kill will drop power-ups which will give varying bonuses to your ships – you can upgrade armour, attack, range, or even assume direct control of a ship and blow up an enemy yourself.
While this concept is interesting at first, particularly because you can often see the ships battling alien vessels from the islands, the time it takes to load the grid view isn’t particularly quick, and you’ll often feel like you’re being taken out of the action when you do try and micromanage their positioning. This is exacerbated by the fact that loading the ship control interface completely pauses the game. So even if you’re standing in the middle of a firefight, you can load up the ship controls and move stuff around for five minutes and still be completely safe.
And, much like commanding battleships, the level design becomes repetitive and tedious. The game’s setting is the islands of Hawaii, and, as such, each and every level involves landing on a tropical island, blowing up some alien technology, and being extracted from the area. Over and over.
The objectives occasionally vary and include sniping sections or defensive missions, but it doesn’t do much to alleviate the tedium, particularly with the less than effective checkpointing that can set you back some fifteen minutes. Basically, even though the game’s campaign isn’t particularly lengthy, you’ll be quitting to go do something more interesting long before it’s over.
Though the basic design concepts behind the game may be different to the norm, the way in which they’re executed screams of a product rushed out to be released in time with the movie it’s based on. Which is unfortunate, because there really is a lot of potential there.
Audio & Visual
Battleship‘s graphics vary from pretty to ten years old. When looking out from a ridge out at the ocean with ships battling in the distance, the game gives off an epic scope that could draw anyone in. The problem is that this presentation isn’t matched in the tasks the player character himself must accomplish. You’ll see the same muddy textures over and over, the lighting is far behind the standard, and the environments, which are already similar locales, reuse assets excessively.
The game’s score fares no better. Generic battle tunes that would fail to get the blood pumping in even the twitchiest of gamers are the rule rather than the exception. The saving grace for the sound design are the good gun effects. Each weapon, be it alien or human, feels powerful, and calling in mortar strikes results in an extremely satisfying boom.
Overall
Many film companion video games comes out every year, and most are rushed, boring, and uninnovative. The same applies to Battleship.
And that’s a shame, because there were clearly some smart heads on the design team who tried to bring something new to the otherwise generic shooter via the naval elements, but whether there were time or budget constraints, the end result was poorly executed. For every reason to like Battleship, there are two to hate it. The lack of any multiplayer whatsoever does little to help the value anyone could garner from this game. Unless you’re craving a new single-player FPS and have really got nothing else going on, you should probably stay away from this game.
Loren: The Amazon Princess Developer: Winter Wolves Publisher: Winter Wolves Platforms: PC (Reviewed), Mac, Unix Release Date: April 30th, 2012 Price: $24.99 – Available Here
Overview:
There has been somewhat of a lack of old fashioned story based RPGs in recent years that focus on character development. For the most part game feature archetypes that players will easily understand, so that there really isn’t a need to flesh out the characters more, but sometimes its good to more than play through the tactics of a game and have the characters flesh out as it goes along.
Loren: The Amazon Princess is an RPG that focuses on giving the player a blank slate and filling it in as the story progresses. It includes war, rescue, and romance, so the player’s choices definitely have an effect on what happens throughout the story. Does Loren bring back what has been missing in a lot of games in recent years?
Story:
Loren is the princess of the Amazons and the story opens with her mother, the Queen, being declared dead and being instructed to take the crown as the new Queen. Loren, the girl she is, sorry, Amazon she is, refuses to believe that her mother the most powerful of all the Amazons has been killed so easily. Rebuking crown and country, she will go in search of her mother and bring her back as rightful ruler. Rebuking the Amazons however gets you a fat lot of nothing in the game of life though, so she is refused all aid of the Amazons, save a single slave capable of healing to aid her.
Which slave is the players choice: Saren, a human male, slave because he is a man in Amazonian culture; or Elenor, an elf female, slave because she is not an Amazon at all or even human. The option impacts the romance options, though no matter what there are 2 of each gender to pick from regardless who’s chosen, so players can have anything from bromance to hetero to the ideal Amazonian relationship, which is great to see and tastefully so. Allowing players to see and enjoy whatever trips their trigger provided they chose to not skip the graphic romance stuff, which is equally great to see as an option.
Back to the plot though, Loren and her new slave travel about gaining party members and beyond saving her mother, discover Loren is in fact chosen to do something great for the world. What would be so great? Destroying the evil Death Knight Fost, who is threatening to engulf the world in war amongst themselves. The story itself is well done and provides players the chance to pick from options that have some impact in later events. Ultimately there are about 24ish endings factoring in the 8 different romances, though some might not be so very different as some of the romances are on secondary characters. Though the vast majority of the player choices are romance related, not that that’s a bad thing only that so much more focused on what was going on in the camp, making the plot storyline something that could certainly be streamlined straight through.
Audio:
Audio in the game cues up at a top mark with the song that starts on the main menu, which may best be described as a combination of an anime opening theme and a song from Strawberry Shortcake. The song is very good and the lyrics certainly have meaning to the story as a whole, though it doesn’t quite fit the setting so well with how rock it is. The rest of the music does a better job fitting the setting and mood. Certain songs cuing up will indicate the seriousness of what’s happening or that the romance is coming into play.
The voice acting in the game however is incredibly minimal. Characters only speak lines in the combat either when killing an enemy, doing a major attack, or at the end of combat. It’s interesting to see how many different actors there were for such a small amount of speech. The voices seem to fit, as well, for as much as can be heard and it is surprising that the dialogue was not actually fully voice acted.
Visuals:
Visuals fit the method of so many early RPG’s by reducing the visuals to a few different poses for the characters and having whoever being on screen during scenes or dialogue. The game does however go just a bit further and have two sets of character visuals for some of the characters, which be shown depending on if romance is enabled or not. Being enabled allows for certain characters to be in much skimpier outfits, showing a lot more skin. Full-motion is a no go though, as at best characters slide around as scenes go on, which isn’t terrible and definitely probably saved a lot on the budget.
Gameplay:
Besides difficulty though players can choose between a “standard” or “tactics” style of play. Each has there own pros and cons, standard gets skills every two levels, but only start with one skill, whereas tactics starts with a lot more skills, but only getting another every three levels. This can allow for a diversity in how players can choose to play the game and get a different feel for how everything handles.
Gameplay for the story is broken down into reading through all the scenes and seeing what is going on and then when necessary selecting between anywhere from 2 and 4 options what to do. The game actually starts out with the player selecting a backstory for either Saren or Elenor, with every selection determining different additions to stats and equipment. The vast majority of conversation options are “jokingly”, “friendly”, and “forceful”, though romance will pop up in there to if players what to go down that route with that character, which is nice that it’s pretty consistent. Plot options however are for the most part binary, either do one thing or another, without either option being wrong, though some near the end will certainly be more useful than the other.
Combat gameplay is broken down by turns, though the turns can change very rapidly depending on what each character does. Some attacks can cause a character to delay, so that character is left without a turn for a while, which may need to be carefully thought out on higher difficulties. There are certainly a lot of options when it comes to tactics in the game, as with most RPGs there are usually more party members than slots, so finding the best fit for each battle is important as well as how to equip the party and how the weaknesses will interact. Though players should fret over the combat too much as the game does allow for a easy enough setting to appeal to those that are simply interested in the story. This gives the game a great range of simplicity and depth.
Overall: Loren: The Amazon Princess is a solidly built game and it has a lot of different options and choices for players to work through. The game totes how a player can’t do it all in one playthrough and even the romance aside, it can’t be. Featuring a heck of a lot of replay value, this game provides plenty of hours of enjoyment and what is actually about two novels of game text. While there are certainly things the game could have done more of or done better, such as maybe having dialogue voice acting, the game is well put together.
In unfortunate news, Irrational Games’ highly anticipated ‘Bioshock Infinite’ has been delayed till February 26 2013. The game’s original October 2012 release date was announced back in March.
But as 2K Games has announced today, more time will be needed to complete the final game and as such the game’s release date has been push to next year.
Ken Levine, Creative Director of Irrational Games said the delay is necessary “to give our talented team the time they need to deliver the best Infinite possible.”
While this is unfortunate news for Bioshock fans, this does mean that Bioshock Infinite dodges heavy competition from other Triple A titles such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 which are set to be released in the highly contested end of year holiday season.
Bioshock Infinite is set to be released on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
Both fans of Action RPGs and the legendary character Van Helsing should be interested in hearing about a new game in the works called The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Developer NeocoreGames have announced that the game is being designed for PC and Xbox LIVE Arcade, currently with a late 2012 release, and will star the son of the famed monster slayer, Van Helsing.
Featuring a 19th century European setting with all the gothic elements players would expect from something with Van Helsing in the title, the game follows the younger Van Helsing investigating the land of Borgovia at the request of former supernatural enemies. Van Helsing must find and defeat this new plight, but in a story that features “wry humor and snappy dialogue”. What’s more the monsters aren’t the straight up supernatural that players might expect as seen in the concept art below, showcasing monsters infused with steampunkesque technology.
15 hours ago from this writing Starlight Inception‘s Kickstarter had 3 hours and $15,000 left to pledge to secure funding which was quite a feat of 10%. Luckily, backers were more than willing to finish off the remainder of the cash and bring the total to more than $158,000, surpassing the goal of $150,000. Escape Hatch Entertainment set out to prove that players were still interested in the space combat genre and they certainly did it.
What’s left now? Well, backers can sit back and relax waiting for the game to be completed, but Escape Hatch Entertainment must get hard to work ensuring the game can make its estimated delivery of August 2013. Some players may be surprised to see only a $150,000 budget for a game like this, but Escape Hatch knows exactly what goes into a game and know they will be able to make a great space combat to pick up where games like Wing Commander and X-Wing left off.
Over the weekend, Pinkerton Road Studios’ Kickstarter page was able to get the finishing funds to meet the goal. This will guarantee the production of the chosen game Moebius to be produced and released next year, but through outside funding Pinkerton Road will also be producing an as of yet unnamed game, currently known as “Mystery Game X”. What does that mean for backers? Well, lower tier members will get to choose between Moebius and “Mystery Game X”, where higher tiers will actually get both.
Besides meeting their mark, Pinkerton Road has also been adding additional benefits to their tiers like Gabriel Knight related materials like eBooks of the now out of print Gabriel Knight novels and design bibles for the Gabriel Knight games. They have also been putting out videos for their backers to enjoy and see how work is coming along in the studio. Though most interesting there are a few special events going on this weekend to celebrate the final stretch. On Friday May 11th, a fan will be hosting a 24-hour live playthrough of the Gabriel Knight trilogy to be hosted on twitch.tv starting at 19:00 GMT HERE. On Sunday May 13th, Pinkerton Studio heads Jane Jensen and Robert Holmes will be having a “Ask Me Anything” session on REDDIT also at 19:00 GMT.
The Kickstarter page still has 9 days to go and every bit will be going into making the game even better, so if interested check it out HERE.
