If one of your New Years Resolutions was to spend less on games this year, Telltale games are here to help you out.
From January 19th to January 29th certain Telltale apps are going for the crazy price of $0.99! So get your iPad and iPhones ready, because you can’t beat that price.
Telltale favourites such as Sam & Max: The Penal Zone 1 and Wallace & Gromit: The Last Resort for Ipad are some of the most popular titles that are included in this series. Also avaliable is the Hector: Badge of Carnage and Puzzle Agent series.
This sale is too good to be passed over, so head over to the iTunes store and grab some serious gaming bargains!
The Princess Case – A Royal Scoop Publisher: Anuman Interactive Developer: Microids Platforms: PC (Reviewed), iOS, Mac OSX Release Date: Out Now Price: 9.99 GBP (~15 AUD) – Buy Here
Overview
The Princess Case – A Royal Scoop is a very simple point and click puzzle game, which unfortunately lacks in both challenge and scope. What makes this game feel worse than it should, is the large number of apparent bugs. On my first boot-up of the game, I found that some of the opening logos were not displaying correctly. It was fixed on my second playthrough, and has yet to make a re-appearance. The game seemed to have a pretty intriguing plot, but the way it was presented made me feel a little bored, and each plot point being broken up with tedious point and click find-an-item puzzles made it seem like chore to reach that next piece of exposition.
Story
The Princess Case – A Royal Scoop follows the adventure of an investigative journalist who is assigned to following a case on the upcoming royal wedding taking place within the country. Unfortunately for our reporter, events that are detrimaental to the royal couple, have taken place and it is up to our female protagonist to solve the mystery and get her story.
Unfortunately for the interesting story told within the game, there are multiple interruptions to the story telling that involve solving various puzzles and find-an-item scenes within the game,that only serve to interrupt and hinder the flow of the story. I’d wager that this game would have been significantly more interesting as a visual novel style game, like Phoenix Wright, over a tedious item finding puzzler.
Over the course of the story, you meet a handful of potentially interesting characters that never actually live up to their potential. I think where the game got the characters wrong was that it had such a large cast, instead of a smaller amount of relatable characters to tell the story.
What I was severely disappointed in was that there was a massive game breaking bug in the storyline that prevented me from continuing past a certain point in the game. I would have to continue on, but unfortunately the bug was so severe and the file system was so bad, that I would have to return to the beginning of the game in order to continue on.
Gameplay
The Princess Case – A Royal Scoop plays like an average find-an-item puzzle game with very few innovations to what is an incredibly entry-level genre. The premise is very simple, you listen to some characters talk for a few scenes and then you find items that the game tells you to find. Some of these situations are incredibly believable within the context of the story, but often times, they border on the ludicrous. For instance, in one such find-an-item scene, I was required to find 15 security cameras or so. Only, the cameras were in very illogical positions and none of them were pointing to anything important.
There was one really good part of the gameplay in this game and that was when you pan around a scene, the foreground of the scene shifts against the background of the scene, making it easier for you to see hidden objects in the background. This was easily one of the most impressive aspects of the game, which goes to show how impressed I was by the rest of the package.
To be truthful though, I would mcuh rather this had been a visual novel and have tipped out the find-an-item puzzles in place of more meaningful interactions with each of the characters over using them all for a setup to a flow breaking puzzle segment, some of which are way too easy and seem to only exist to break up the story dialogue.
Audio
On the first through scenes of this game, you will be treated to what is fairly acceptable background music that seems to exist to increase your intrigue as well as giving the feel of this being an interesting puzzler. But, when you start to hear this exact theme 700,000,000 times, you start to realise that maybe the audio in this game is cheap and lazy.
That isn’t to say that the audio fidelity is low, far from it, but it is to say that is quite frequent and repetitive. I would have loved to have had a variety of tracks within the game, even if it was only to give each different area its own unique feel and impression. Impression is important for a game audibly, as people will quickly associate those sounds with your game. For instance, if The Legend of Zelda didn’t have such a memorable theme, would it have been as popular today? I think not.
Visuals
Visually, this game has what it takes to make a decent Visual Novel. The visual style will, obviously, not compare with many of the big name titles from many of the big name developers. But that’s okay for this game, it’s two dimensional feel and realistic character artwork (are they photos?) make this easy to look at and suit this kind of game perfectly.
Unfortunately though, many of the scenes are filled with rubbish items that are there purely to confuse you on your search for actual items. However, they do not do a good job of it unless it is an item hidden behind another item that must be removed before it can be found. All this does is leads you to a filled room of nonsense that doesn’t actually inhibit your ability to find 15 of whatever easily findable item during a particular scene.
My one major gripe with the visuals is that some characters are silhouetted in the game. This was strange to see because of the amount of effort that was put into other characters throughout the title. Do they ever become un-silhouetted? I wouldn’t know, the game breaking bug stopped me from progressing further.
Overall
This is not a game that I can easily recommend with the knowledge of the game that I have. For people who are fans of this kind of game, it would have made a great addition to their collection, but because of the bugs that I had encountered, I simply cannot recommend it. Maybe if it ever gets patched, but in its present condition I can not.
Did you hear? They discovered alien life this week! Aaaaand it’s coming to kill us.
Futuremark Games Studio released their newest game, Unstoppable Gorg, on Friday. And it looks intriguing.
Within a kitschy 1950s sci-fi setting, players must send satellites into orbit around a planet, moon or space station, and rotate them to the best position to intercept Gorg’s advancing army of flying saucers, in a revolutionary (geddit?) tower-defense style play.
I love the style of the game, and while its gameplay might not look as “revolutionary” as they claim, it still seems pretty fun.
Watch out for our review this week, but until then, have a look at the launch trailer below to get a sense of the retro charm on offer.
It has been announced that Fairy Tail: Zeref Awakens for the Playstation Portable will cover three of the manga’s story arcs and feature a total of 45 characters.
The three story arcs the game will cover is the Nirvana arc, the Edolas arc and the Tenrou Island arc which will bring the game to the point in which the series time skips 7 years into the future (events after which will probably be the focus of the next game).
The game will feature 45 characters from the series and some which are newly created characters exclusive to the game.
Fairy Tail: Zeref Awakens will hit shelves across Japan on March 22nd for the Playstation Portable.
The new ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Sacred Star of Milos’ movie hit theatres across North America, achieving generally positive reviews. During the LA premiere rapping star Soulja Boy made an appearance, although he left before the film finished.
The plot of the movie occurs before ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’’s conclusion, and has its own original storyline, with movie-only characters.
The story follows the Elric brothers attempting to track down a prisoner who has recently escaped from prison. During their search the brothers save a young alchemist from the very man they are trying to capture, and as the plot thickens the brothers are caught in the rebellion of Julia’s people.
Rotten Tomato’s gave this movie 82%, and though it is only released in cinemas for a week in America, FUNimation’s DVD and blu-ray release is due in Spring, making the wait for this expansion of a brilliant series bearable.
The second season of Is This a Zombie? Otherwise known as Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? was announced previously with the title Is This a Zombie? Of the Dead.
Now a trailer for the season season of Is This a Zombie? has been released and can be seen below. The new season is set to premiere in the Spring 2012 season, this coming April.
The first season was streamed by Crunchyroll so it’s possible that the second season will get the same treatment. Stay tuned for more Is This a Zombie? Of the Dead news as it comes to light.
Hitting the manga shelves in America in May are some spin offs and continuations of very popular manga stories released by Yen Press. These include the recent ‘Madoka Magica’ and the not so recent, but still fantastic ‘Soul Eater’, and the classic ‘The Disapperance of Haruhi Suzumiya’. Both these manga sets have had their own anime adaptions, and are now releasing spin off’s to the original series.
The classic ‘The Disapperance of Haruhi Suzumiya’ has it’s own spin off ‘The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-Chan’ which takes place in the world described by the fourth Haruhi novel. Soul Eater has its spin off ‘Soul Eater Not!’ which features mostly new characters, and starts in July.
Despite the typical paradigm of spin off’s I hope these spin off’s will be successful enough to have their own anime adaption, as long as ‘Soul Eater Not!’ has a better ending than the original.
Two Tribes has revealed the first animations for the upcoming title Toki Tori 2. Thus far we haven’t been able to see the characters in action, but now we can catch a glimpse of the Bubblefrog!
The developers offer the following statement:
Since our creatures are so much more important to the gameplay than in the original Toki Tori, we think they deserve more personality and custom animations. Actually, I think Toki Tori will have the least animations of all the creatures in the game, since he only whistles and stomps!
In the upcoming weeks, further animations will be provided for the public’s not only of the Bubblefrog but potentially Toki Tori as well. If you are interest in play testing the early versions of Toki Tori, you can find out more information about signing up on the Two Tribe’s website.
Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. are excited to provide a new trailer for the shoot ’em up, Sine Mora. The provided trailer shows off the stark differences between normal and insane difficulty modes. A huge difference can be seen by the sheer quantity of enemy projectiles on the screen. How the heck can a plane dodge that many bullets and come out alive?
At the moment there is no release date for Sine Mora. Just take a peek at the trailer below to see this “shmup” game in action. Anyone else intimidated by the boss in the intense difficulty?
If you’ve been following the news in the past week, then you’ll well know that the popular file-share website Megaupload has been shut down by the U.S. Government with all its founders and company employees arrested under various pricey and copyright infringement violations. However, what you may not know is that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (real name Kim Schmitz) is also the world’s number #1 FFA Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 player: “MEGARACER”.
Kim Dotcom aka MEGARACER (Kim Schmitz) Photo: AAP
Police arrested the 39-year-old in his New Zealand mansion on Friday. They found Schmitz locked in a safe room where police had to neutralise its locks and to cut their way into. Police also carried out 10 search warrants as part of the raid. As much as $NZ11 million in various accounts were frozen by police. 18 luxury vehicles valued at $NZ6 million were also seized by police, including a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe and a 1959 pink Cadillac.
Schmitz is accused by the FBI of various charges, including engaged in racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. While his site Megaupload is accused of costing copyright holders more than $US500 million in lost revenue from pirated films, music and other content. This isn’t the first time Schmitz has run into the law, he has a long list of convictions including insider trading, credit-card fraud, hacking and embezzlement.
Kim Dotcom aka MEGARACER (Kim Schmitz) Photo: AAP 