It seems that Skylanders was just the beginning of bringing the gap between virtual gaming and physical toys. Disney is now bringing out a mobile app which will allow kids to use the iPad as a virtual play mat.
Disney has released these shots, showing that they seem to be aiming the product at Cars first. Will this be the way of the future? Who knows, but I think that if it is we’re going to see a spike in broken iPad screens.
So here’s a financial tip from me, invest in companies that make big business from iPad screen repairs, cos they are going to see some definite sale improvements.
Assassin’s Creed Recollection Developer: Ubisoft Publisher: Ubisoft Platforms: iPad Release Date: 01 December, 2011 Price: $2.99 – Available Here
Overview
Assassin’s Creed is a massive franchise with four retail titles to its name, some books, huge amounts of merchandise, so on and so forth. So it’s not really a surprise that there is a card-game app that is related to it. Or is it a surprise? After being exposed to many a franchise exploitation (oh Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, why?) I’m pretty jaded about the whole thing. But lets see how the card game measures up.
Gameplay
Now, I don’t know a whole lot about the Assassin’s Creed backstory and assassins and characters and all that. Given that the characters are what are on the cards I thought that a lot of it would be going over my head, but actually that didn’t happen at all. I’m sure some of them went flying over, but good deals of them were just normal. In fact, if it weren’t for the art and the constant reminders, I might just think this was a card game based in old-school Italy. Yeah that’s right, I wouldn’t even be able to narrow it down to a century, that’s how little I know about history and how malleable the gaming characters and settings are.
Recollections is based around memories, which is what the cards are meant to be. The cards can either be ‘agents’ (read: people), settings, or special actions. Seem simple enough? Well believe me, the game itself is ridiculously difficult to understand. There are so many rules and tactics to keep a hold of that this isn’t going to be one of those games you can actually play against someone else unless they do the really long tutorial first.
Yes, there is a really long tutorial, they don’t just throw you into the deep end. There are different parts to the tactics and useable cards (that is, the difference between people, settings and special actions) and you are introduced to each one gradually. The game lets you get a hang of the uses of each type in controlled environments, which I think is the best way to do it and it allows you to learn how the computer uses tactics (which you will probably depart from when you’re given free reign). Once you exit the tutorial the transition is a bit of a throw-off, it does get markedly harder once the computer plays for real.
The rules are detailed, long, and super complicated. The basic gist is that there are three regions in each game and the goal is to own each region by having influence in the region, which can either be achieved through sending people in to these regions or putting a setting in. The cards differ in their influence points and to own the region you have to reach ten first. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist.
You have a set of memories and you can buy more memories with Assassins credit, which you earn by winning games in story mode. However, I don’t know too much about this because the app decided that it was impossible for it to connect to the Ubisoft server. However, I’m assuming that this allows you to upgrade your memory set and get some better things in your deck. I did notice that at certain levels it gets quite difficult trying to get by with your intro deck when the opposition is bringing out some kickass memories.
At the beginning of each game you can look at starting hand and change your cards once, randomizing to another hand out of your sequence. I don’t really understand the whole hand/card-drawing business too much but that’s just me and the ridiculous amounts of rules that this game has.
You can also alter your sequence once you start expanding your deck. I never got around to this stage because I didn’t have a good enough handle of the tactics yet, but I’m sure it would be quite useful.
There are two different playable modes; story mode where you play through different countries and regions with little stories along the way, making your way through Europe and taking control of parts of it, and versus mode which is multiplayer online mode.
Visuals
Visually Recollections is great in the style they present it. It certainly sticks with the Assassin’s style in terms of the memories and the recollection of memories (ha, get it?). There aren’t any impressive animations or scenes that are shown, it’s mostly about the art of the memory cards and the background. Still, it’s quite a good representation of a very certainly styled game.
Audio
The soundtrack isn’t the most obvious backing track in the world, it sort of chills out in the background gently, every so often speaking up slightly but not enough that you get terribly annoyed at it. It’s not something that’s going to get stuck in your head too badly, but I did find that after playing the game for a while I got over it.
Overall
Assassin’s Creed Recollections explores a side of the game that you wouldn’t really associate with the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The tie to the franchise isn’t quite strong enough (barring the visuals that is) for me to really call it an Assassin’s Creed game. But that isn’t a bad thing, in the least. I think the game stands strongly enough completely on its own, but that the fact that it is tied to the franchise will bring the attention that this game deserves.
So if you have the time, patience and skill to give this game the time it needs to really familiarize yourself with it, you’ll definitely find yourself dedicating a lot of time to it.
Because they have a functioning brain, Viz Media have announced that they will be speeding up digital releases for the global phenomenom One Piece manga. The speed-up is in attempt to lessen the gap between the Japanese releases and the English releases.
The 59th and 60th volumes of the One Piece manga have recently been made available and to continue the trend, Viz Media will be releasing volume 61 and 62 on the 12th of December.
This all follows a continued push for digital manga releases from Viz as of late, what with the new Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha digital magazine and all. What do you think of this One Piece speed-up? Let us know your thoughts in the shoutbox and comments section.
Sega has come out and revealed that they are developing a game for the Playstation Vita. Now, it does have a title and I believe it will perk the interests of most people. The title of this game is Samurai and Dragons. Now that sounds like an epic game already.
It was revealed in the latest Famitsu via some leaks, which Andriasang got their hands on. According to the leaks, the game will offer two different modes of gameplay. One mode will be action filled with explorable dungeons. You will be joined by three friends and battle various monsters, culminating into a final boss battle on the last level of the dungeon. The second mode of gameplay involves city building. You build up a city and, slowly, take over the nation.
The screenshots of the leaks show that you and your friends may be the samurai and the monsters may be the dragons. Speaking of dragons, the producer of this game is Masayoshi Kikuchi, who has worked on the Panzer Dragoon series as well as Jet Set Radio and Yazuka. He conducted an interview, but there is no translation at the time. I will update with the info as soon as a translation comes in.
What is also great news is that there is already a playable build. It will be available at Jump Festa, so potential buyers will be able to try it out. That means a release date may not be far away, possible during 2012.
EA have released yet another trailer to promote their hotly anticipating Battlefield 3 downloadable content pack, Back to Karkand. The latest trailer features the classic Battlefield 2 map, Wake Island.
Fans of Battlefield 2, will recall the classic map as being distinctive for being set on an entire island. You can check out the new trailer for Wake Island from the Back to Karkand downloadable content pack below.
Will you be heading Back to Karkand today? The Back to Karkand DLC is now out on PSN and Xbox Live. Let us know your thoughts on the trailer and Back to Karkand in the shoutbox and comments section.
With the holidays in full swing, more and more digital titles are starting to get little price cuts to offer some relief to our dying wallets. The latest to take part in this trend is BloodRayne: Betrayal, which has been sliced down to $11.99 on the PSN for a limited time.
20% off isn’t a huge drop to be honest, but saving money on a fantastic game is still a refreshing sight to see and if you haven’t tried BloodRayne Betrayal yet, there is almost no excuse not to get in on the hack-n-slash retro greatness that WayForward crafted. If you really need help deciding on making the plunge, check out our detailed review here, but hurry, as this deal ends December 13th.
If any company has been busy releasing 3DS titles this month, it’s Majesco. We have already seen games such as The Hidden and Cooking Mama 4 hit the platform recently, and today marks yet another celebration for the publisher as Face Racers: Photo Racers is now in stores. Developed by Renegade Kid (Creators of Dementium: The Ward, Dementium 2, and ATV: Wild Ride), this title puts players in the role of..themselves as they compete in an arcadey racing experience.
The meat of Face Racers is found in the vast customization offered as players are to snap a photo of themselves and apply their own face to their 3D racer. As well as in-game avatars, players can also personalize their karts, power-ups and even billboards along the 20 varied tracks.
Other features include:
Put your face onto your very own racer!
Customize not only your racer, but also the karts and billboards with your Nintendo 3DS™ camera.
Use standard controls or try the 3DS gyroscope control scheme for a unique racing experience.
Tons of power-ups like the “In Your Face Taunt” and “Triple Missiles” give you the leg-up on the competition.
Supports single and multiplayer (for up to four players) kart racing action.
Race through 20 exotic track locations like Ghost Ship and Outer Space.
I know the timing on Face Racers is a bit off due to Mario Kart obviously overshadowing it, but I want to say I’m a bit more intrigued by this kart racer as Renegade Kid have obviously worked hard to give 3DS owners something unique in their creation. Face Racers: Photo Finish is now out everywhere for $29.99, so get yourself groomed and snag up this fast photo op today!
The new dashboard update for the Xbox 360 dropped today to a great deal of controversy. Please note that the image above is of the supposed design we were to get. What we got is the nothing like that concept shown above. With an incredibly poor design layout, over complication of previously simple features, redundancy of said previous features, and miniscule Cloud Storage space per user, the latest version of the dashboard is not a step foward, but a step in the wrong direction.
Not only has the latest update caused mass disruption of Xbox Live services, it has also made several previous features absolutely redundant and overly convoluted. By altering the previous “Invite to Game” feature into a new one called “Send a Beacon”, the new Dashboard has created unnecessary convolution of a once easy task.
That isn’t all though, to take full advantage of your avatar items, you now have to click into your avatar to see any props or accessories. Instead, you see your avatar perform a generic action until you click into him. To make matters worse, premium themes are now entirely pointless, as they are majorly covered up by an unalterable gray foreground. This gray foreground gives players no choice in order to have a bright coloured dashboard, instead they are forced to have a dark gray colour scheme. There is no way around this. If you think that is bad, most themes make the menu titles unreadable as they blend in too much with themes.
The design itself it incredibly poor, being difficult to navigate with both a controller and a kinect. The new dashboard update attempts to be simple and stylish, but instead becomes crowded and messy, with ugly mismatched colours.
If you were excited for the new features like Bing and Cloud Storage, sorry to rain on your parade, but they both are incredibly poorly concieved new features. The Cloud Storage provides users with a total of a measly 512mb. Yes you read that correctly, 512mb of storage space. Bing searching is not much better as it is highly inaccurate and struggles to fulfill the most basic of searches.
This all makes up one very big step in the wrong direction. This dashboard update evidently needed much more thought in all aspects, unfortunately now we gamers will be the ones who have to suffer the poor design and technical issues. What do you think of the new dashboard? Let us know in the shoutbox and comments section below.
Those hoping to sample a bit of Dynasty Warriors Next’s action will have a chance when the PlayStation Vita launches in Japan. But don’t think that this is going to be a pre-release demo by any means; in fact the demo for Tecmo Koei’s Dynasty Warriors Next is going to be the first PlayStation Vita demo available on the marketplace.
This has been revealed by Dengeki PlayStation and the demo itself will contain quite a large amount of playability with three stages and eight selectable characters. Unfortunately the stages and the characters have not yet been named though this is a great opportunity to test out the touch pad functions of the title. Let us hope that Tecmo Koei will do the same thing for the Western release of the Vita as well.
The hotly anticipated One Piece: Kaizoku Musou is now rumored to be released on March 1st, 2012. The PS3 brawler game is a collaboration between Namco Bandai and Tecmo Koei, mixing One Piece with Dynasty Warriors.
Earlier today the rumor broke from Andriasang that the latest issue of Jump magazine will announced One Piece: Kaizoku Musou’s release date as the 1st of March. Currently this is all speculation. However once the magazine is released, we will find out whether these rumors are indeed fact.
What do you think of a March 1st, 2012 release date for One Piece: Kaizoku Musou? Does this seem like an accurate release date for the title? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
