A new trailer for the soon to be released Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has been uploaded by EA, this time showing off the ins and out of the artistic progress that went into making the world of Amalur as awe-inspiring as it is.
You can check out the new inside look trailer below. It features various interviews with the staff working on the design of game as they detail in depth the art of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Watch the inside look at Reckoning’s art below and let us know what you think in the shoutbox and comments section. Reckoning is set to hit shelves across Australia on the 9th of February for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
Digital Frame Studio has released a number one Mac App Store hit, Steamscope, onto the iPad and iPhone. Steamscope is a highly addictive tunnel game, set in an awesome Steampunk world, and is designed to challenge your reaction ability and how fast you can make your way through a tunnel system while avoiding various obstacles and activating gates.
With a range of levels and different environments, Steamscope is sure to be a great tunnel game to get on your iOS device that’ll really help pass that extra time.
So if you already have the Mac app and are looking for something a little more mobile, or haven’t tried out this app yet, then make sure to grab one and have some fun making your way through some hectic tunnels!
Steamscope is available NOW for iPad, iPhone and on Mac. For the launch of the iPad and iPhone apps there are one a special launch price.
The iPhone app is $0.99 – get it HERE
The HD iPad app is $2.99 – get it HERE
The Mac app is $0.99 – get it HERE
EA Sports have released a new producer trailer which gives us some greater insights into the game, particularly in relation to Career mode and online gameplay.
Nate McDonald, one of the game’s producers, gives a brief outline of what Career mode is going to be like. It will run for ten years as you take your player through the ranks as you fight to become the world number one. EA Sports’ Game Face has also been included for GST 2, giving you the option to upload a photo of yourself to the website and create a player that will look just like you.
Online this time round will include the standard head-to-head matches as well as the all new Grand Slam Corner, where you can go compete at any of the Grand Slams for worldwide supremacy. All your wins will also count towards the Battle of the Nations leaderboards, so you’ll be playing both for yourself and for national pride.
Mamoru Hosoda’s newest creation has had its first trailer released today. ‘Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki’ ( The Wolf Children Rain and Snow) is his newest project and if is anything like his previous master pieces ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’/ ‘Summer Wars’, then this movie will be brilliant.
Summer Wars (2009) won several awards as well as the Japan 2010 Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ (2006) won numerous awards including Japan 2007 Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. Thus I already expect at least a nomination for this movie for the Japan 2012 Academy Prize for Animation of the Year.
‘The Wolf Children Rain and Snow’s’ premiere is due at Japanese theatres on July 21, 2012, don’t miss out, or you will most likely regret it.
Puzzle fans, get excited, as Konami have graced us with some new screenshots and North American release dates for the awesome looking and exceptionally innovative “Puddle”, coming to XBox Live Arcade on 25th January and shortly after on the 31st for Playstation users. The new screenshots give a small glimpse of the enormous variance in environments as well as some of the cool looking obstacles, such as electricity and ray beams players will have to navigate the various forms of liquid through. Think Mercury but on a much grander scale with varying liquids all with different physical limiations and reactivity levels to the environment. From following a blob of radioactive fuel thorugh a rockets blueprints to teaming up with water as it makes its way through the human digestive system, theres truly something for everyone.
Puddle was originally conceived as part of a student project, winning a showcase prize at Independent gaming festival as part of the Gaming conference of 2010. The aim of Puddle is to guide a variety of different liquids through a variety of environments including the human body, gardens and many many more. Rather than just simply controlling the fluid, players must manipulate the environment, tilting it in favour of the particular liquid and its particular properties, balancing gravity, friction and of course the pesky obstacles thrown in the way. The levels are also partially hidden from players, making the task much more difficult, not knowing what is coming around each corner.
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.
