Hey you want some cheap game games this weekend? Many of our favorite publishers have some great deals going on right now.
EA Mobile is discounting Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, Plants vs. Zombies and Tetris on iOS. On Android, The Sims, Tetris, Madden NFL 12, FIFA 10 and Need for Speed: Shift are on sale.
Nearly everyone one of Namco Bandai’s iOS and Android titles is on sale, most for up to 50% off.
Direct2Drive sales include Dead Space 2 for $9.95, Borderlands for $4.95, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood for $19.95 and the Penumbra Collection for $4.95.
On GOG.com three Gabriel Knight games are $2.99 each, Sanitarium is $4.99 and Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption can be had for $2.99.
OnLive will allow anyone to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, F.E.A.R 3, Metro 2033 and Orcs Must Die! for free all weekend long.
Steam also has a huge sale on a variety of titles including Bioshock 2 and Borderlands Game of the Year for $4.99 & $7.49 respectively, among other huge discounts. Check out the Steam Sale here.
Want some new tracks to dance to in Dance Central but your on a budget? Well your in luck! Harmonix has discounted every single pack of DLC for the game until November 5, 2011. Why have they done such a thing? Not only is it the first anniversary of Dance Central but it is also a celebration of Dance Central 2’s release. Tell us: which packs will you be getting? Will you go whole hog and buy everything up?
Naughty Dog has polished multiplayer up so much in Uncharted 3 that it could be said they have almost reinvented the game type. With tons of options to take enemies out, lots of awesome gameplay mechanics and the sheer quality that the game is known for, Uncharted 3 will surely be one game to remember for a long time.
In this video for the game, we are shown how the Iron Fist works and how melee and traversal are integral strategies to the game. It will certainly be nice not having melee battles where everyone just circles each other. And picking off climbing enemies with a melee attack is absolute gold. November 1st can’t come fast enough!
The developers of Inversion are looking to flip the 3rd person shooter genre on its head. A new video from the people working on the game is now available. The producer and the community manager for the game walk us through how to use some of the weapons and features in the game while specifically focusing on defensive strategies.
Sabre Interactive has added a couple of interesting characteristics to Inversion. Besides the distinctive “You control gravity!” feature they have also added mobile cover (yep, that will be awesome!) and some other really neat things like destructible cover and a huge shockwave weapon. For an introduction to Inversion, check out this video here.
In just two short months Jedi and Sith will be battling on an epic scale. Bounty hunters and smugglers will be duking it out right alongside our favorite heroes and villains. Needless to say, we are excited and hopeful. So excited in fact that the Collectors Edition of the game shown off in the video below almost got us to get our pocketbooks out. Check it below and see if the Force lifts the wallet straight from your pocket and sends it straight to EA & Bioware. Don’t say we didn’t warn you either!
Ubisoft has revealed a new trailer for Rayman Origins as well as interviewed one of the developers on the Rayman Origins team. You can catch both awesome pieces of media below.
Q&A with Sebastien Morin, Game Director
– How many different worlds and environments will we be able to get around?
There are 5 universes and 10 different worlds to discover. Additionally, we have the Land of the Livid Dead, which is a bit hard to reach but is a whole new universe as well. At the beginning, each world is introduced one after the other. In each, you will gain a new ability and master how to use them. Then after you complete the first set of worlds, you’ve grown enough to be dropped in the wild. Just like that a whole new set of worlds are revealed and you have a lot of places to discover at your disposal.
– Will all these actions be available from the start, or will some of them be powers you unlock along the way?
At any moment, we give you enough abilities to explore exhaustively each world. So if you feel like playing a level again and again to discover every nook and cranny, it’s up to you. However, you won’t have all your abilities right away. At the beginning of the game, Rayman and his gang are still incomplete heroes. They’ll need to find and help the fairies to get all their powers back.
– Will running be an unlockable power too?
As a Game Designer, an important question is “how do you make gameplay better?”. In Rayman, it could be answered by “chain a bunch of acrobatic moves together faster and faster”. So it was natural to give this ability right away, for all the players that dare to run in a minefield.
– Will there be different “flight modes” as in previous Rayman games? (like the power to fly up?)
The best way to fly in the game would probably be riding on a mosquito. However, you’ll also learn quickly to glide. The glide ability allows you to fly in a number of different ways. At first it’s a very helpful tactic to extend a jump and land out of harm’s way. But we also put a lot of wind in the game, which can extend a glide to more of a flying action. But that’s not always a good thing. Winds are there to help or hinder you, push you to safety or towards a spikey death. Also, some enemies use the wind as traps and it should be noted that you’re not the only one who can fly!
– So many different moves must require a lot of different animations, how many are there in Origins compared to the first opus?
Way more! Rayman and his gang have a lot of new abilities, so there’s a lot more animation. Besides having all the animations for the abilities, you have to create more animations for combinations and transitions between those abilities you have. So each playable character has more than 250 animations! I can’t even begin to count the animations of the evil characters, because they can be defeated in a lot of funny ways.
Aya and the Cubes of Light Platform: Nintendo WiiWare (Reviewed) Publisher: Object Vision Software Developer: Object Vision Software Genre: 3D Platformer/Puzzler Release Date: September 22, 2011 Price: 1000 Nintendo Points
Overview
The WiiWare has unfortunately seen little attention over the last few years, receiving very few games and even fewer quality ones. There have been a few rare exceptions however, with innovative and creative titles such as World of Goo and Hydroventure/Fluidity appearing on the WiiWare service. While Aya and the Cubes of Light does not breakthrough to this point of greatness, it does stand out amongst the legions of underwhelming games that infest the WiiWare service. That being said it isn’t all that great, but if your looking for a platforming title for WiiWare that’s not from the Virtual Console this may be just the game for you!
Gameplay
Aya and the Cubes of Light is a gravity-based platformer filled with various puzzle elements. Think Mario Galaxy, except less polished, less charming, less colourful, on a 2.5D scale and with a major focus on pointless motion controls. So it’s like Mario Galaxy, but totally different. Players take control of Aya as she explores random floating cubes in space…for something to do with restoring power to the stars or whatever. The point is your in space and gravity is crazy, which makes for some interesting and creative level design and puzzles. Aya can walk up walls and such, and as you walk around a cube you will find yourself on different sides of it where gravity will point in different directions. With a new perspective on a familiar area Aya will often need to take daring leaps of faith to land on platforms or to collect items which appeared unreachable before, and this is where Object Vision Software has excelled as they have pulled this off nicely. Sure the difficulty can be pretty annoying, but it makes figuring out particular puzzles more enjoyable and makes for a rewarding experience if the player has the patience to pull through.
While the concept and level design is great however, what truly stops Aya and the Cubes of Light from reaching greatness on the most part is it’s controls. For some bizarre reason, it seems that the developers have gone with the “it’s on the Wii, so we must overuse motion controls and piss the player off” approach. Almost every aspect of the game requires motion control, and 90% of the time it’s just unnecessary. To jump, the player must flick the Wiimote. Problem? It’s a platforming game, players will need to jump a lot and doing so much can be tiresome on your wrist. Whenever this isn’t annoying you, awkward pulling motions to activate panels will. This would be fair enough if players were given the option to just simply have a button-mapping option, or a preset to choose alternatively, but it simply isn’t the case here. So while level design is for the most part rather admirable, traveling around these levels can be very frustrating and really holds back the entire game from reaching it’s true potential.
Graphics/Audio
Aya isn’t the prettiest title on the Wii, but for a WiiWare game utilising 3D character models it’s good but don’t expect to be wow-ed by anything. Textures, animations and character models are of the same standard as the music and sound effects: good enough. Nothing’s bad but little will sound or look all that impressive. The only thing that may remain memorable is the lack of colour, as the majority of all graphics are based around various shades of grey and blue, resulting in a very dull looking game. One may argue that’s the goal of the visual aspect of the game and call it ‘artistic’, but in my honest opinion it just looks bland and dull. The nicest graphic in the entire game is the space backdrop as it is the most colourful and charismatic, but it looks a little too much like a stretched out photograph and with the dull-coloured, almost lifeless 3D models in the foreground, it just simply looks out of place for the most part. Sadly due to a lack of polish, Aya and the Cubes of Light looks just decent at best, and the looping soundtrack is so easily forgettable Im literally struggling to think of anything to say about it whilst writing this review.
Conclusion
Aya and the Cubes of Light shows promise and potential but sadly never reaches it. This game could’ve easily been much more as it sports a creative concept and splendid level design, but is severely held back by it’s awkward control scheme. What doesn’t help is that due to it’s bland presentation of both visual and audio as well as a general lack of polish, there leaves very little redeeming qualities for Aya. That being said the heart of the game is still there in plain sight. This isn’t just another crappy WiiWare title,Aya and the Cubes of Light can be solid fun when you give it the chance, even if it is short lived. Still, it’s of a much higher standard compared to most of the other twelve (Yes I said Twelve!) WiiWare games us Aussies have received for download this year.
During my many adventures during the Armageddon Expo in Melbourne last weekend I had the great pleasure to listen to some of the musical covers from the band Technodrome. Doing video game music covers from Pokemon, Zelda and of course everyones favourite the Mario theme.
We sat down with the guitarist Danny Brickwel to talked about the band, how they got together and their plans for the future.
What is the musical background of the band?
Me and all the guys actually met studying a music course at Box Hill Tafe, coming from a jazz background as far as the studying went. The drummer Alex and I are complete metal heads, where our bass player Julio is into jazz, funk and Latin and our keyboard player Chris is into pop punk. It’s strange how we seem to gel extremely well together considering we come from very places, which is really cool.
How did the band form?
It started with Alex and Julio just started transcribing some Donkey Kong music just for fun and they told me about it when I was hanging out with them one time and I thought it was really cool. A little while later, this was before Mana Bar in Melbourne opened up, we had a look at their Facebook page and thought if they were having live music there, because that would be really cool. Then the two thoughts came together. We then asked Chris to join and things went from there.
Have you had a chance to play at Mana Bar?
Unfortunately no, being a small cocktail bar, there really isn’t room to fit a live band to play. Although we have some good responses from the expos such as here at Armageddon and from the EB Expo last week in Queensland.
How did you start doing the video game covers?
Well after we got together and decided to do this whole ‘band’thing, we just picked some songs and jammed together and it just worked, which we were pleasantly surprised about. From there we put some videos up on YouTube, but we are in a weird position that most of fans are from outside of Australia, mainly in the U.S and United Kingdom, so we are trying to gather more fans here, where we can actually play.
What is the process of taking music from the video games to playing it live?
It really depends on the song, there are a few songs like the Battle music from Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow that was just listening to the parts, picked which instruments did what parts and then drummer boy doing the beat. Then there are other songs like our version of Mega man 3 title music, which was a lot more interpretive and we put a lot more of our own spin on it. So it is really a song by song basis. The real challenge is that when the music was created, it wasn’t made for real instruments, so the trouble is decided what instrument plays what part.
What is the challenge in playing music that is mostly synthetic?
Again, it’s deciding what instrument is going to play what. Particularly when the guitar and keyboard is concerned, it can be hard for some songs because the keyboard would sound really good doing the melody for a song, but the guitar doesn’t sound good playing the chords behind it.
What other events have you done?
We actually haven’t been around that long, the idea of theband came at the start of the year and we started performing around March. We have been working towards is doing this kind of stuff in regards to the convention circuits. We have actually had some music ripped from out YouTube video and put on the rotation at Mana Bar, which is really cool.
Anything coming up?
Nothing live right now, we are looking more at recording a CD, or album. Hopefully next year we will be at the conventions again.
Check out the guys on their facebook, twitter and their youtube page. A must watch for any video game fans.
At the Level-5 Vision press conference earlier this month, Level-5 briefly mentioned the localisation of the Playstation 3 version of Ni No Kuni, which will be released Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. Instead of self-publishing, Level-5 had handed over the duties to famed publisher Namco Bandai for both North America and Europe. Talking to Siliconera, Carlson Choi, Vice President of Marketing at Namco Bandai, talks about the partnership and how it fits with the overall aim of the Western side of the company in terms of making partnerships with Japanese developers.
“For us, if you look at the course of what we’ve done last year, we’ve narrowed our slate to really good titles. We focused on less is more. When started talking to Level-5 — look guys we have a great opportunity. We have a great team in the States and we can maximize the potential of the game in the West. Those are the kinds of things we brought to the table because at the end of the day we want to bring the best games to the market.”
There was also a brief mention on whether this new deal will be a multi-title deal, like with the other partnerships. This is how Choi responded to the question.
“That is still in discussion.”
A multi-title deal would be the best option for both Level-5 and Namco Bandai, considering what was discussed at Vision. Games such as Fantsay Life, Youkai Watch and Time Travellers would be perfect for the niche market that exists with some Japanese games.
Level-5 joins From Software (Dark Souls, Armored Core V) and Game Republic (Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, Knights Contract) with partnership deals with the company. Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is expected to be released in early 2012 for North America and Europe.
We have just launched our monthly anime podcast, CC: Anime. Each month, thanks to our good friends at Siren Visual, we will be giving away a prize in a monthly competition held through CC: Anime, called “Who’s that Anime Character?”.
The game is simple enough, we will give a brief description of a popular anime character. Once you think you know who the character is send your answer in along with your name and address to [email protected]. At the end of the month, a winner will be randomly selected from the pool of entries that contains the correct answer. The winner will then be announced on the next podcast.
This month, we will be giving away a copy ofDennou Coil – Part 1, thanks to our good friends at Siren Visual. If you have yet to listen to CC: Anime you can do so here.
In case you missed it on the podcast, here is the description for this month’s “Who’s that Anime Character?”:
– This character wears primarily orange and blue.
– They are not from this world.
– However they have saved our world countless times.
Do you think you know who is it? Send your answer in along with your name and address to [email protected] Good Luck!
Competition only open to Australian and New Zealand residents.
