While it was speculated that Square Enix’s Army Corps of Hell would also be a launch title in North America for the PlayStation Vita, the company themselves had never confirmed that fact. Until today that is, when Square Enix revealed via a press release that the title would indeed be available at the launch of the PS Vita, whenever that is exactly.
The game will be developed by Entersphere which includes Motoi Okamoto who worked on the Pikmin games which is quite ironic, considering the fact that Army Corps of Hell seems to be like a Pikmin game with demons that you will be controlling instead of little plant men. Earlier today we posted the a trailer for the title which you can find here.
While the anime for History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi otherwise known as Shijō Saikyō no Deshi Kenichi in Japan may have finished quite a few years ago, the manga has been continuing on a weekly basis. This means that there is quite a lot of content to draw form, and it seems that anime studio Brains Base is going to be doing just that.
This week’s issue of Shonen Sunday magazine revealed that an original video anime also known as an OVA will be produced by Brains Base, though at the moment no other details were released. Hopefully FUNimation will also localize the OVA like they did for the television series, though no announcement has been made at this time.
The EB Games EXPO (GAMESTOP for all you US readers out there) will be opening its doors to the public for the first time tomorrow Saturday and Sunday (15th and 16th October) at the Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition center. Originally called the EB Vendor show, this event was only accessable to EB Games managers. Here the managers from each EB Games store around Australia would get to try and test out all the latest up and coming video game titles from a large variety of different publishers / vendors.
Of course everyone was quite jelous that only the managers were allowed to go to this cool event. Early in the year there were rumors spreading that this year EB was going to open/extend its vendor show to the public and allow everyone to get some hands on with the latest up coming games. Quite a smart move if you ask me, currently Australia doesn’t have a professionally organized Game Expo similar to E3, Gamescon or Tokyo Game Show. So this was EB Games opportunity to introduce something similar down under for all the poor unappreciated Aussies that always get left in the dark.
Finally the poor unappreciated Aussies can stop their whining because over the next two days they will be abe to see and get some hands on action on some of the soon to be released blockbuster titles such as Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Batman Arkham City, Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Mario Kart 7 and The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim just to name a few.
Today, the Capsule Computers Crew picked up our media passes and were able to get a sneak peak at the the Expo floor. With approx 21 vendors / video game publishers showing their soon to be released titles, it looks like EB Games might be on a winner here. Having sold over 10,000 tickets so far and with Saturday already fully booked/sold out. It looks like the public here in Australia really do love their video games.
Check out our sneak peak of the expo floor below, feel free to leave any comments, let us know what you like or don’t like. For more information on the EB GAMES EXPO head on over to the official website here.
When Amagami SS+ was announced many people were curious as to how they could change the series much from the original release. But perhaps a new director and series script editor will change things up. The official website for Amagami SS revealed earlier today that the second season which will be airing next January will have two well known names taking over the positions.
Tomoki Kobayashi will take over as the series’ director while Noboru Kimura will take over as series script editor. While these two positions have been changed, AIC will be bringing back every other member of the cast of the original series back to create Amagami SS+.
Frogger Pinball
Developer: Konami Digital Entertainment
Genre: Arcade, Pinball
Released: 6th October 2011
Platforms: iPhone (3GS+), iPod Touch (4th Gen+) and iPad. (iOS 3.2+) BUY NOW
The pinball machines of yore have inspired video games for many years now… and the latest Frogger game, developed by Konami Digital Entertainment, brings one of their classic video game heroes to the iPhone in a colourful, cartoony pinball game. For Frogger’s 30th anniversary, Konami has been churning out a few titles reimagining the classic original gameplay and sprucing it up a little for the 21st century and adding in new features and elements to keep the ans interested. Pinball is one of these releases, available on the iOS devices from 6th October, 2011.
When his amphibian girlfriend gets kidnapped by a mysterious UFO, Frogger leaps into the air to save her, and… turns into a pinball. Or something. Okay, so if you’re playing a game called “Frogger Pinball”, you’re probably not in it for the engaging story and exploration of the frog’s tortured soul. You’re there to have fun. And this game does a good job of delivering fun… for a bit.
The beautifully rendered 3D cgi pinball tables and comic-style cutscenes go well with the not-overly-serious tone a Frogger game sets. And the music keeps everything chirpy and cheery, keeping you happy while you play the well-realised pinball action. The feel of the game is reminiscent of the old PlayStation arcade games using random IP as the basis for the generic gameplay. This game doesn’t feel like a cheap knockoff, but still… it’s Frogger not being Frogger, and therefore falls into the category of “reskin” rather than “reimagining”.
In-game you can activate a battle-type mode, where critters and machines, depending on the stage you’re playing, will float across the screen, getting in the way of, and sometimes purposely messing with, your pinball. In the first stage, for example, the baddies start off as docile flies that harmlessly obstruct the ball’s usual flow, and develop into wasps that attack the ball, losing you energy which you can try to pick up later on, and on to crocodiles which bite into the ball and spit it out towards the paddles at the bottom of the screen, giving some amount of variety to the core gameplay. You can also pick up a power-up, turning your ball into a classic-style bomb, which explodes on contact with enemies on the table, killing them instantly, giving you extra points in the process.
And then, of course, you have the staples of pinball games everywhere… the multi-balls, the combos, the bumpers, the extra paddles on harder levels, as well as the flashy lights and retro styled effects.
It has the usual amount of frustration for a pinball game, and the core gameplay is solid. The stages of the story mode take quite a while to beat and are perhaps a little too difficult, especially when you aren’t actually told what you need to do to get to each level’s end boss. And the fact that there’s no continuing from an already-played stage means you’ll either be spending hours upon hours trying to beat the game, or give up trying. There are only three tables to play in story and challenge mode, and whilst each gives the player a different and unique milleau to play with, it doesn’t hide the fact that this is a short game. Whether you love playing pinball and blast through the levels with ease, or you rage-quit in response to the inherent frustrations a pinball game has, this game just doesn’t have enough content to keep you going.
There is a challenge mode that allows you to pick from one of the three tables in the game, where you go for the high score, as well as picking up gems and energy blobs which you can use to buy more balls to play (which deplete as you play the challenge mode), or buy the pink frog “Lily”s ball with different stats, or unlock persistent power-ups such as the “Energy Magnet” or Multipliers. You can also buy more gems or energy in the store, trading real money for unlocking various items in the game.
All-in-all, this game is great fun for five minutes, but the frustration quickly rises, and you’ll find yourself having a shorter fuse on the next time you decide to give it another try.
As far as everyone can tell, the only characters who will be fighting alongside you in your party for Final Fantasy XIII-2 are Serah, Noel and a monster that changes depending on your paradigm combination. It does seem however that a few characters may make an appearance and help out occasionally, as the latest trailer also shows that Snow will join in combat, but perhaps only as a supporting role.
The trailer is seven minutes long so there is a lot to be seen in the video, including Lightning’s world and even her reunion with Serah. Perhaps there are a few spoilers below, but it is certainly a must watch for everyone, especially those curious about a number of changes from FFXIII.
Name: NBA Jam
Developer: EA
Publisher: EA
Genre: Sports
Platform: iPhone, iPad (reviewed)
Release: April 21, 2011
Price: Currently on sale for $.099 – BUY NOW
Overview
NBA Jam is probably the best NBA game to be adapted to the iOS, given that it looks like an app to begin with and the graphics don’t call for much. Still, NBA games always tend to be pretty fun so let’s see if this app lives up to the fun of the rest of them.
Gameplay
NBA Jam is fairly basic in idea, it is 2v2 transplanting players from the respective NBA teams. There are no out of bounds, no fouls, pretty much not a lot you can get in trouble for except goal tending (which I have no discovered is when you hang around the hoop and block from there). Being called up for goal tending was one of my big pet peeves, because the damn goal circle is tiny to begin with so goal tending is almost impossible to avoid. Or maybe I’m just bitter.
The controls for NBA Jam follow the standard EA sports format, which is the d-pad on the bottom left corner and the shoot-pass-sprint controls on the bottom right. These three options change if you’re in the defensive position to block-steal-sprint. The controls are easy to use, with the angle and dimension easy to handle.
You can sub in players halfway through the game if you want, although the fatigue wasn’t super noticeable and I doubt would make a huge difference. So the reason for it would probably be to get the ‘real NBA experience’.
There are only two modes of NBA Jam, ‘Play Now’ and the classic campaign. In ‘Play Now’ mode you play a game where you pick the two teams. Classic campaign has you playing one team through an entire season, which includes 37 levels. Campaign mode actually repeats the team you play, because you play within a certain are of the league. There are also 46 challenges which you can fulfil by doing things such as playing a game against the PC without shoving (gentleman award) or making a certain number of blocks/slam dunks in a row.
There are four difficulty levels, Rookie, Legend, All-Star and Veteran mode so it all depends on your skill level. Rookie level is more than suitable for a beginner and Veteran is certain to be at least a little challenging for the experienced player. As someone who started with basically negligible NBA Jam experience, it allowed me to get accustomed to the controls, learn tactics, and eventually be ready for the bigger leagues.
Now I’m not too knowledgable when it comes to NBA players or teams or whatnot, but I picked the Miami Heat (cos of all the flames, get it?) as my team and usually played with whoever was thrown at me. I don’t think the players made that much of a difference, especially since most of the time we spent slam dunking and that didn’t take too much skill on the part of my players, just capitalising on opportunity.
You unlock players as you go in the classic campaign, but for those of you who don’t want to wait for that you can always make an in-app purchase to round out your team players.
Visual
The NBA player avatars are designed as having standard bodies and giant bobble head pictures of the NBA players which have two settings – normal and crazy happy. This cartoonish quality continues to the rest of the game, the arena, and even the estimated representations of the crowd.
There were a couple of glitches with the player shoes and the ball here and there where they turned to a solid colour that the models were based on. They were small glitches and didn’t really affect the game itself, but still.
Audio
The audio has the soundtrack of an old school jam, which is kinda catchy for the first couple of minutes but gets repetitive and old after a while. I found myself turning the game to silent not only because of the soundtrack, but the commentary. Sports games are hard to have different and unique commentary going, I fully understand that, especially with iOS games. For some reason it was more noticeable with NBA Jam, maybe because there is a smaller range of plays than in other games.
Conclusion
NBA Jam is a fun little app, with the bare bones of the NBA franchise, but feels a lot more like a mini game. The gameplay is easy to adjust to, and can cater for a wide range of skills. However, the app is more for NBA fans who will take great joy in playing with their favourite characters (no suss). There isn’t a whole lot to the game, once you finish the campaign (which shouldn’t take very long), there isn’t anything else left for you to do, unless you want to make sure you finish off any challenges you haven’t already.
Developer: Reverie Worlds Publisher: 505 Games Genre: Strategy Platform: PC Price: 25.08 EUROS (Buy Here)
Imagine a game that’s a lot like Stronghold, only, it had an online component where you could build your own Strongholds and wage war on other players. You would now be imagining Dawn of Fantasy. The online component of this title is the one that is so prominently advertised, but it is the worst part of the game. In all honesty, the best part of this game is it’s offline features; which there are more of than the emphasised online components.
Story
Dawn of Fanstasy has an intricate, yet brief, story that is found predominently on their website. The story is also told, in part, through the games tooltips and menu descriptions. Other than that, it really isn’t involved too much within the game.
I would have loved to have seen the story progress in a single player campaign, but instead, we get a single player component that exists soley to train the player for multiplayer battles. I can’t really fault the game for this though, as it is the kind of game built with multiplayer in mind, so having players run through some kind of story wouldn’t have fit the game too well.
Overall, the story fits nicely into the background and does not serve to hinder gameplay by becoming an annoyance over the multiplayer component.
Gameplay
Remember how I said that this game was similar to Stronghold in the opening paragraph? Well, it’s because it is. Throughout the game, players will be conducting sieges on other players cities and towns. When this happens, one player is the attacking party, who gets a limited amount of units and what have you (whichever units they’ve put into their attacking army is what they’ll be limited to); while the other player is the defending army and they have to defend with all their availble units that they have in their stronghold at the time.
Using your units tactically in this game will give you much success during a siege, playing with a plan will guarantee success. This is where the single player skirmish modes come in handy. By playing in these skirmishes, players are able to practice various strategies to employ online without risking their actual units.
Of course, as I have stated previously, the online component of this game is probably the weakest component of this game. In contrast, the single player modes are amazing; it’s just too bad that they’re not the emphasised components. In the online mode, players are required to build their own towns/cities. Now, this would normally be a really cool aspect to a game, but, in this game, it falls flat on its own face. Towns require a ludicrously large amount of time to build, and any player will be required to invest a very, very, large amount of time to net any kind of visible reward. By reward, I mean, a decent town.
Ideally, in this game, you would build things then be able to alt-tab out and do something else while waiting. But, when alt-tabbing out of the game, you will often hear looping reminders as to the welfare of your town. Now this probably sounds like a good thing, but when you don’t really care, and are just waiting for your towns components to build, it becomes irritating, especially because its a continuous loop of the warning, as opposed to a once off thing. This means that you will often have to keep the game running in the foregroud, often for incredibly large amounts of time (a simple farm takes 15minutes to build), if you dont want to be irritated while playing. I should mention that any orders you’ve set while logged in continue to progress while you are logged out, but it seems like a hinderance to be constantly logging in and out to use your own PC.
One thing that this game does right though, are the single player components. I’ve already talked about the skirmish mode, so I would like to point out the Kingdom Wars mode. In this mode, players go on a campaign of sieges against the computer opponent. This is incredibly fun and I wish that it was developed a bit, as maybe a full-blown single player campaign with an awesome story.
The last point I want to touch is a minor one in terms of gameplay, but is still a gameplay element so therefore it needs to be tocuhed upon. And that is that there are three playable races within the game, and each have their own strengths to put into the battlefield.
Overall I felt that this games online component was fairly weak, even though it was the most marketed part of the game. For a better experience, play the single player mode.
Visuals
This game looks pretty bad, it probably wasn’t meant to, but it does. Seriously, the realistic style, coupled with the awfully un-optimised graphics engine, severly cripples even the most strongest of PC builds. You can see that the developers have used a simpler graphical engine to keep specifications as low as possible, but ultimately, it is countered by the lack of optimisation on the engines part. On my machine, I had to seriously switch a lot of settings lower than what I would normally expect my PC to run based on the visuals of the game.
Maybe over time, the game will be patched and the engine will be optimised more and more, but in the state that I played it, it did not run at all that well. Unless you have the strongest of rigs, do not expect to have this game running at maximum.
Overall, I feel that the visuals of this game are its weakest point, even over the blatantly poor online mode.
Audio
In Dawn of Fantasy, the audio is probably one of the best things. The sounds accuratly portray what it is like to be in a medieval kind of world. The music, I felt, was probably the weakest point in the audio, but in no way is it as much a hinderance to the game as the poor graphics engine is to the visuals.
Ultimately, there isn’t really much to saa about the audio; it’s a tool that does the job of setting the mood and is the best part about the game (apart from the single player components). Take whatever you will from this fact.
Overall
Dawn of Fantasy is a lot like that spyware filled game Evony, only it’s 3D and mixed with Stronghold. Unfortunately, outside of the pretty good single player component, the game is long and unrewarding. The menus are also pretty bad and I had to register twice before the game would register my account. With a patcher that likes to stop working as much as the visuals fail to deliver, I’d recommend avoiding this title, unless you would love to play a game that is incredibly long and worn out. Perhaps if you work in an office and carry around a laptop and play it between tasks, you might like this game, but most of do not have the time commitments to really give this a proper go.
Nintendo has a reason to celebrate today as the DS has now surpassed 5 million units in sales. This is quite a monumental feat for the the company that have captured the handheld market over 20 years ago with the Game Boy and held on tight to this day.
Nintendo had this to say about the landmark:
“The Nintendo DS forever changed the gaming landscape, and the fact that consumers continue to embrace the platform is a testament to its value and mass appeal,” said Scott Moffitt, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “Our hand-held story continues with the Nintendo 3DS system, which just had its second consecutive month of growth and enters its first holiday season with a monster lineup of games, including Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7.”
Passing 5 million for the DS isn’t the only thing Ninty has to cheer about though, as the company also released more achievements made during the month of October.
Nintendo sold more than 260,000 Nintendo 3DS™ portable entertainment systems, an increase of more than 10 percent from the previous month. Nintendo has sold nearly 450,000 units of Nintendo 3DS following a price reduction on Aug. 12.
The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™ 3D became the first Nintendo 3DS title to surpass 500,000 total units sold in the United States.
Nintendo sold more than 647,000 total hardware units in September, including 240,000 Wii™ systems and more than 145,000 units of the Nintendo DS family.
The 273 million software units sold for the Nintendo DS family equates to more than 107,000 games being sold per day, every day for almost seven years. More than 273 million units of software have been sold for the platform in the United States, including 24 of the top 25 and 43 of the top 50 best-selling portable games in this hand-held generation.
With over 260,000 3DS’ sold in just one month, I would say this success of the DS could easily carry over to it’s soon to be successor. Only time will tell on that, but for now we have plenty to look forward to as Nintendo leads the way into the holiday season with a ton of releases.
A while back I had brought the news that the Playstation Vita will have a 20MB download limit on its 3G service in Japan. Now it has been revealed that the same limit will affect those who purchase a 3G compatible model in the United States.
This was confirmed during a 2011 Game Developers Conference Online sponsored event. Sony Computer Entertainment America senior staff developer support engineer Chris Norden confirmed this limitation, but did reveal that it wasn’t a limit chosen by Sony. That responsibility fell to AT&T, the network provider for the Playstation Vita. However, there will be no limitations on Wi-Fi, which means that one will be able to download any game of any size. The maximum size of a Vita game will be 4GB (2GB also possible), but later in its life cycle, game cards of 8GB (and maybe 16GB) will become available for the developers.
Other mentions by Norton include putting down claims of the Vita being as powerful as the Playstation 3 due to battery life and amount of heat and revealed that all developers are free to pursue any business models as a response to a question of support for micro-transaction games.
