Since today is the Video Game Awards on Spike TV there are tons of trailers and cinematics popping out for various popular games. Of course Blizzard couldn’t resist the temptation to take advantage of the vast amount of people watching the show and have released their official intro cinematic for Diablo III.
If you couldn’t see the video on your television you can now see it below and catch an eyeful of the beautiful CG work that has been created to get people pumped every time they choose to start up the title. I know for a fact that a lot of people are waiting to play Diablo III and many have already taken part in the beta and those people are certainly quite lucky, as everyone else has to wait until early next year.
It appears that all of those rumors were correct, the next Alan Wake title will be called Alan Wake’s American Nightmare and it will be available exclusively on the XBLA. In this video we are introduced to the new bad guy in Alan Wake’s world an apparently evil version of Alan known as Mr. Scratch.
In the trailer seen below we are introduced to a number of similar features which are returning including enemies being possessed by darkness and Alan fighting with light and various firearms to try and stay alive. Expect to hear more soon and stay tuned throughout the night for more news from the Spike Video Game Awards.
One of the bigger reveals that was supposed to happen later today at Spike’s VGAs was a new trailer for Metal Gear Rising. Unfortunately for them however, the trailer has already made its way online and was discovered by a member of NeoGAF. You can find the trailer itself below but beware that most of the videos are dropping quite quickly due to the fact this is a leaked video.
In the trailer we see that the title of the game is now Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and it is being developed by the same people who worked on Bayonetta and MadWorld, Platinum Games. As you can see in the trailer this Metal Gear title is going to be far different from any Metal Gear title we have seen before.
2K Sports celebrates the return of the NBA with special Christmas Day games simulations for NBA 2K12. The Christmas Day match-ups are as follows: Knicks-Celtics, Mavericks-Heat, Lakers-Bulls, Thunder-Magic and Warriors-Clippers. The NBA 2K12 crew will provide full game simulations for each match to give fans a chance to see what may unfold on December 25, 2011.
The vice president of 2K Sports marketing, Jason Argent, offers the following statement:
“It sure feels like Christmas has arrived early here at 2K Sports. We’re obviously thrilled that NBA basketball is set to return, so we are offering several ways for fans to join us in our excitement.”
Help us celebrate NBA’s return by watching the following “NBA 2K12 – Welcome Back Basketball” trailer.
So, what does the Katamari world and billiards have in common? Well, this new trailer might give us the answer. The world’s best billiard player shows off the different kind of tricks that have been inspired by one particular Playstation Vita game. I, of course, refer to Touch My Katamari. They range from simple shots to some real interesting ones. The video also goes into some details for teh game. Touch controls will be present, but for those who want a more traditional style of play, then the physical controls will also be available. You can watch the trailer below to see them.
The latest installment in the Katamari series, Touch My Katamari, is the debut of the beloved franchise on PlayStation Vita. The King of All Cosmos has a whole new bunch of weird and wonderful missions in store as you once again step into the shoes of his son, the prince. Use the PlayStation Vita touch screen controls or dual analog sticks in conjunction with the rear touch pad to squeeze, stretch and roll your Katamari ball around the environments gathering up every possible object to make it grow. The King will send you to the four corners of the earth to complete your oddball missions and restore his very particular kind of Katamari order to the universe.
Touch My Katamari will be a launch title for North America and Europe on February 22 (despite the typo in the trailer).
James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D Developer: Ubisoft Publisher: Ubisoft Platform: 3DS Release Date: 25th November Available Here
Overview:
Professor Layton’s mainstream appeal wasn’t planned or expected, but was something that was welcomed with open arms by Nintendo. It proved that these bite-sized brain teasers were something that everyone could enjoy, and its profitability has since been accepted by many other publishers who have tried to emulate the Professor Layton series’ success. Given the scholar’s absence on the Nintendo 3DS, have Ubisoft sussed the enigma standing in their way of large profits by beating Layton to the punch?
Story:
As you can tell from the play-on-words title, James Noir’s Hollywood Crime attempts to capture the qualities of film noir for its narrative, but what the title doesn’t tell you is how good or bad a job it does of it. Set in the sixties, this crime fiction revolves around a series of murders made against contestants of television game show called ‘Incredible Puzzle Masters’, a show you are currently competing in. An old acquaintance now working for the FBI approaches you and using your puzzling skills you attempt to get to bottom of these killings. While it features the slow unravelling of mysteries you’d expect from film noir, it lacks the overall finesse to do the category justice.
There seems to have been some attempt at being stylised, but it walks a fine line between being stylised and being limited by a small budget. In fact, it can sometimes be difficult to tell between the two. For instance, characters are animated with some sort of stop-motion technique, so although they are real people and not computer-generated figures, they are running on a small number of frames, meaning their lips don’t match the dialogue and their movements always looks unnatural and their gestures grow repetitive. The jerkiness of their movement combined with some of the delivery of the dialogue actually makes them slightly unsettling, but it is only after you’ve completed the game – and it turns out these people aren’t meant to come across this strange – that you realise this wasn’t actually intentional, but more a defect of the storytelling.
Funnily enough, what this does is create an environment where nobody seems trustworthy. Everyone seems to be hiding something or have a hidden agenda when talking to you, and given there’s only about 5 characters in the game other than yourself, it means that everyone seems like they could be the murderer. In this sense the story was always going to be predictable, as whoever was deemed to be the culprit, you tell yourself you’d known it was them all along. Also, in much the same way as the off-kilter animation and dialogue can be unnerving, the small cast can feel bland and ruin any sense of engagement with the plot, but it can create a strange mood of something being not quite right. Like when the audience members are totally static and lifeless, you can see it in one of two ways: either the animation is in such a sorry state that they haven’t bothered to pretend the audience are living; or that in the fake world of Hollywood there’s simply a selection of cardboard cut-outs and a recording of applause to supplement to production of this game show.
Nevertheless, the lifelessness and the surreal atmosphere can lend to the storytelling – if most likely by accident. Some attempts at stylising it, however, don’t go so well, such as a (thankfully skippable) ‘Previously…’ narration played every time you return to the game from switching your system off, or initiated by you progressing to a new chapter in order to recap recent events just in case your memory lapsed in the few seconds the screen went blank to load the next chapter.
Gameplay:
One of the major down points of the game is its length, as there are a total of five chapters, giving it a playtime to completion of around 5 hours. The 3DS’s appalling battery life means its hardly something you play on the go, so sitting in and playing this in solid sessions result in it being over after a few goes. Although it is a handheld game, you would still expect more of it than this.
What it does allow you to do, though, is go back to puzzles you didn’t do in the story as you please, or indeed replay those enigmas you did do. The gameplay slots into an oddly uniform pattern thanks to the game show setting; you’ll do a bit of adventuring (if you can call it that, as there’s no actual exploring to be done) before being guided back for the next round of the show. Twist and turns in the story have an effect on this structure, but ultimately it sticks to this formula, even for the dramatic finale. Naturally, you miss out many puzzles playing the game show, so there’s more extra puzzles to play once you’ve finished the game than you played throughout the entirety of the story.
Just like Layton, the puzzles have a number of hints, which you can obtain by exchanging your hints counters, for when you’re struggling, and you can even skip a puzzle outright in exchange for a hint point penalty. You also have tools to annotate on the screen to help work it out, although sometimes the control scheme can make unnecessary use of the top screen for 3D, leaving your control of the puzzle to an time-consuming and clumsy wheel-type affair to point and click – a shame given said puzzles could have been much simpler if they’d been put directly on the touch screen. Sadly, many of the puzzles are just variants of other puzzles, so given the grand total of puzzles isn’t all that huge, it does leave you feeling like you haven’t necessarily got your money’s worth.
Visuals & Audio:
The 3D effect is lost on most of the puzzles, and most of the time it seems pointless to make whatever shape you’re working with stick out a bit. Cutscene-type scenes make better use of the 3D, such as when you enter a photograph like entering a memory, and when combined with some atmosphere-building audio, walking around corners in 3D can actually have you on edge. James Noir’s Hollywood Crimes 3D actually leads me to believe that a horror/thriller game, with things jumping out on occasion from around corners, could be a worthwhile endeavour.
Overall:
The weird atmosphere created by the basic animation techniques and each character’s speech somehow works, almost by accident creating a crime mystery that you’ll want to see to its conclusion. Everything about it gets repetitive – even the puzzles, which start to seems awfully similar towards the end – but it’s compelling while it lasts. This is precisely the problem though: ‘while it lasts’. At more or less 5 hours to completion, it’s shorter than it should be given it’s a full-priced retail release. It’s less the elaborate murder mystery envisioned that the police would have trouble solving, more a run-of-the-mill case where most of the time is taken up by excess paperwork.
While NIS America’s localization team is hard at work preparing Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 for North American release, they are also preparing the limited edition version of the title to be sold directly through their online store. While the standalone PlayStation 3 exclusive will be available for $49.99 this special bundle will cost $64.99.
It can be pre-ordered here and as you can see to the right it will come with the game itself, a soundtrack CD, a fancy hardcover art book and a deck of playing cards featuring the main heroines of the title. Some may remember that the first Hyperdimension Neptunia title also was bundled with a deck of cards so one can expect the same stellar quality here when the title is released sometime in Spring 2012.
We may have heard that Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention would be localized and released sometime in North America during the Spring of 2012 but we have yet to see how the title will look when it has been translated into English. We still have yet to see what the story looks like, but NIS America has released a plethora of combat screenshots that can be seen below.
In these screenshots we see various combat mechanics used and plenty of different battlefields, but unfortunately none of the PlayStation Vita’s features are displayed in these images. On the other hand we can certainly expect to see much more information on Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention in the coming months including more info on how the title will take advantage of what the Vita has to offer.
Welcome to Sakuga Summit, each month we will be delving into the world of Sakuga Animation. For those who do not know, Sakuga Animation means Full-Motion Animation.
Each episode of Sakuga Summit will feature footage of the most stunning Sakuga Animation of the month for your viewing pleasure. This month’s Sakuga Summit, features clips from several great series of the Fall 2011 season.
Sakuga Animation is a testament to the true capabilities of anime as an art-form. Find out for yourself by watching the Sakuga MAD below. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on Sakuga and the Sakuga Animation on display this month in the shoutbox and comments section.
While we have seen confirmations that Tecmo Koei’s Dynasty Warriors NEXT would be a PlayStation Vita launch title in Europe we had yet to hear about the North American state of the game, until now that is. Today Tecmo Koei has confirmed that Dynasty Warriors NEXT is indeed a launch title in North America as well and will be available on February 22nd.
From what we have heard of the game it seems like it will take advantage of everything the Vita has to offer, showcasing the features at their best. The game will involve use of both the touch screen, the touch pad, the camera and the gyroscope have all been built around the Dynasty Warriors’ usually formulaic gameplay style. Considering the title will also offer upwards of 65 characters including a character creation mode I find it hard to see this as anything but a launch day pick-up.
