The Onechanbara series is always one that has stood out from other zombie games mostly due to its protagonist. I mean any game could have a sword wielding duo fight mobs of zombies, and many of them do. But Onechanbara is the only one that takes the protagonists and throw them in skimpy bikinis or schoolgirl uniforms. As you can see in the above and below screenshots, the two sisters Kagura and Saaya are dressed similar to the protagonists of past games, namely Kagura (above) looking similar to Aya and Saaya (below) similar to Saki.
Today D3Publisher announced that Onechanbara Z: Kagura would be released January 19th next year in Japan exclusively for the Xbox 360 which is a strange move for a country which doesn’t see much support for the console. This of course brings hopes that the title will see some form of localization like past Onechanbara games have received.
Yesterday it was revealed that Marvelous AQL is currently working on a new Harvest Moon title. This title is being developed exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS, making it the first Harvest Moon title catered directly to the new Nintendo handheld. The soon to be released Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns was not designed specifically for the 3DS, but ported after being released on the DS in Japan.
This new Harvest Moon is named Harvest Moon: The Land of Origin and gamers will be able to do something they have never been able to do before in a Harvest Moon game. They will be able to completely change up their character’s look and gender, place furniture wherever they want and design their own ranch. You can see a few of these features in the handful of screenshots below. Harvest Moon: The Land of Origin is currently set for a release next year in Japan, and hopefully an eventual localization by Natsume for North America.
It seems that Sega is indeed bringing Yakuza of the End out of Japan to Western shores as today the company has announced that they will be localizing the title for PlayStation 3 release under the name of Yakuza: Dead Souls. Dead Souls is currently set to be released sometime in March of next year and they have even released a trailer for the game which you can catch below a handful of screenshots released.
Yakuza: Dead Souls won’t be your typical Yakuza title, as Kamurocho is now infected with zombies and players will have to do their best to fight off the zombies and try to survive. There apparently will also be DLC localized from Japan, but they did not mention whether or not it would be released on disc as a bonus or as a piece of English DLC.
Remember last week how Sony was promising some sort of reveal on October 5th? Well today is that day and we have now seen that the big reveal was actually a video advertisement for their new Long Live Play slogan. The video can be seen below and you know what? The video is absolutely amazing.
In the video we see many PlayStation 3 exclusive characters as well as a few multiplatform characters dressed as they would look like in real life all mention their past journeys about how one man helped them make it through alive, a man named Michael. Or y’know, you could always pretend they are saying your name instead.
If you thought that Keiji Inafune would just disappear from memory now that he is no longer Capcom’s production chief then you must be crazy. Because today he announced today that he is working on a new project named King of Pirates, and you can see the announcement trailer below. The title is going to be published by Marvelous AQL in Japan, which usually handles Harvest Moon titles.
Supposedly this is the first game in a trilogy of titles as well as contain multiplayer. Anyone who has played any of the Dynasty Warrior games or knows about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms stories should recognize a number of the characters they are seeing here. Though these characters are all going to be animals. See how many characters you can name out of this trailer!
Developer: Upside Down Games Publisher: Upside Down Games Genre: Arcade Game Platform: iPhone (reviewed)/iPad/iPod Touch Release: September 15, 2011 Price: $0.99 (Buy Now)
Overview
Space Junk is a game which is a one-hundred percent throwback to the arcade games of old. It was imagined and created by Upise Down Game’s two-person team: Greg Michael, lead programmer on Alien Trilogy and Forsaken back on the original Playstation, and Ned Langman, artist for Silkworm and Rodlan on the Amiga. The game’s visual style and game design is clearly meant to evoke a newer, more modern version of Asteroids. The question is, does the game succeed?
Gameplay
The game plays simply and intuitively. Essentially, you are placed into the floaty suit of a glorified space-janitor. There’s a lot of junk floating around up there, and someone needs to fly through the darkness, blasting it away. You push one button to jet-pack your way around as you attempt to avoid the junk and use the other to shoot at big bits of debris into progressively smaller bits of debris until there’s nothing left on the stage to blow up.
The premise sounds simple, and beyond power-ups and the occasional UFO attempting to blast you into oblivion, there isn’t really much depth in the game’s systems. It does however provide 25 levels, each progressively more difficult as the debris becomes faster, smaller, and harder to destroy. Between these levels are 3 “bonus”levels in which you try and accrue points by dodging asteroids for 25 seconds without use of your blaster, or shooting incoming missiles as you float without a jet-pack in the middle of the screen. You shouldn’t just go blasting bullets pell-mell either, as your score is rewarded for accuracy rather than stage completion.
And now we reach the game’s main issue. It is all about your high score. Emphasis on the your.
Space Junk does not connect to the Apple Games Center, so you’ll never find yourself comparing your high scores to anyone else’s. You merely play the game to beat your own past high-scores.
And, much like classic arcade games, if you die, that’s it. There’s no option to start back at a level you’ve already completed, you start all the way back at level one, monotonously blasting through the simple first ten levels of the game over and over again.
If a game’s only incentive for playing levels repeatedly is self-competition, then there needs to be a serious check of the lead designer’s priorities. Gaming in an arcade was brutally difficult, but you were able to compare your scores with your friends and the local gaming community. Here it’s just you… the lonely journey of a debris blasting space-janitor.
Visual
The game truly shines when it comes to visual design, however. The neon, vector designed look of everything from your spaceman to the attacking UFOs feels like something out of an 80’s sci-fi flick, very reminiscent of Tron. The backgrounds are gloriously detailed and change from level to level as your space-janitor floats deeper and deeper into space. And the entire design of stages and debris is full of referential nerdy in-jokes.
One stage has you blasting away at Sputnik and Laika, the first dog in space, while another involves blowing up replicas of the 2001: A Space Odyssey space station (sadly, no HAL). Perhaps my favorite was the “Murdoch Belt” stage, where I knew every satellite I destroyed meant one less television with access to Fox News.
The game also allows you to play it anyway you want, whether landscape or portrait. You can even flip your phone upside-down and it works that way.
There was the occasional frame-rate stutter when things started colliding all over the screen, but it didn’t happen terribly often, nor did it really impact the gameplay.
All in all, the game’s visuals truly shine, giving off the retro-arcade vibe, while still feeling modern and fresh.
Audio
The sounds of debris being blasted to bits and the thrust of a jet-pack are wonderfully captured, presentation once again being where this game truly stands out, and the main menu synth theme helps evoke the cheesy 80’s sci-fi feel the game is going for.
The only issue audio wise is that once you are actually playing the game, the background music is limited to simple beeps and boops; not the most riveting or exciting soundtrack to go with the quest of a lone space-janitor.
Conclusion
There are two ways this game could turn out for its players: Those who loved arcade games and the “old-school” should go out and get this immediately (after all it is just 99 cents). To those who, like me, never were into that stuff, I can only say, approach the game with caution. While Space Junk’s presentation is outstanding, it’s entire premise is reliant upon you caring about and wanting to beat your previous high-scores. I don’t, and therefore much of the game is lost on me.
We Sing UK Hits Developer: Wired Productions Publisher: Nordic Games Genre: Music/Karaoke Platform: Wii Released: 30th September
What better embodies the UK than the Union Jack, a British bulldog and Big Ben? In the eyes of Nordic Games, not even cups of tea, fish and chips or the Monarchy were needed to get across just how British We Sing UK Hits is. It’s a game that compiles 40 of the UK’s home-grown artists and their popular songs, spanning six decades of British music in the process with contemporary tracks recently in the charts and that old one your mum likes, as you can see from the full tracklist:
1 Adele – Chasing Pavements
2 Amy Winehouse – Rehab
3 The Animals – The House of the Rising Sun
4 Bananarama – Venus
5 The Beautiful South – A Little Time
6 Blur – Girls and Boys
7 Bucks Fizz – Making Your Mind Up
8 Coldplay – Speed of Sound
9 David Bowie – Let’s Dance
10 Dido – White Flag
11 Dusty Springfield – Son Of A Preacher Man
12 East 17 – Stay Another Day
13 Eliza Doolittle – Pack Up
14 Elton John – Candle In The Wind
15 Example – Kickstarts
16 Florence + The Machine – You’ve Got The Love
17 Gabrielle – Dreams
18 Happy Mondays – Step On
19 James Blunt – You’re Beautiful
20 Jay Sean feat. Lil Wayne – Down
21 Jessie J – Do It Like A Dude
22 Kim Wilde – Kids in America
23 Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love
24 Lulu & The Luvvers – Shout
25 Madness – It Must Be Love
26 McFly – 5 Colours In Her Hair
27 Plan B – She Said
28 Pulp – Common People
29 Queen – Don’t Stop Me Now
30 Queen & David Bowie – Under Pressure
31 Radiohead – Creep
32 Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up
33 The Saturdays – Missing You
34 Spice Girls – Who Do You Think You Are
35 Sugababes – Push The Button
36 Texas – I Don’t Want A Lover
37 Tinchy Stryder Ft. N-Dubz – Number 1
38 The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name
39 Tinie Tempah – Pass Out
40 Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
It’s clear from the ‘We’ in ‘We Sing’ that first and foremost We Sing UK Hits is designed with multiplayer in mind, much as all karaoke games are. I think analysts must have found that deluded talent show hopefuls and people who can sing but always need onscreen lyrics to guide them are something of a niche market, so in supporting up to four players with four microphones (although this scenario would involve a USB hub as the Wii only has two USB ports), We Sing UK Hits has clearly been produced as a party game and promotes togetherness.
This is even evident on the main menu in which the central icon1 is ‘Party’, the multiplayer mode of the game. But as well as making an ideal party game with its varied set of play modes, the set list is diverse enough to please most members of the family. In addition to the We Sing mode which has you working together and singing in a group in a non-competitive way, there are standard versus battles and many fun-orientated alternate modes. For example, there’s ‘Blind’ in which lyrics disappear, testing your knowledge of the song; ‘Marathon’ compares scores after an entire play list of songs; and ‘First to X’, where you play on until hitting a set score to become the victors. Of the multiplayer modes, only one is playable with a single mic, ‘Pass the Mic’, but provided you pick up the pack with two Logitech USB microphones this won’t affect you. This only really comes into play if you buy the game solus and are using a lone USB mic you have lying around.
Should you want to play alone, there are options for single player, too. This includes a set of 30 lessons which try to teach you the musical scale, complete with ‘Do’s, ‘Re’s and ‘Mi’s. Songs which are duets give you a choice of the two roles, or the option of singing both parts.
One of the areas that makes or breaks any karaoke game is the pitch recognition, and fortunately, We Sing UK Hits is an accurate measure of tone, scoring you according to how well you hit the pitch bars as you sing and your timing with the lyrics. The booklet makes the rather large claim that ‘anti-cheat technology’ is present in the microphone, but whistling and particularly humming can both work in place of singing should you not want to sing.
There are three levels of difficulty – easy, medium and hard – with each increase making it more challenging by narrowing the pitch bars to decrease the tolerance, meaning you have to be more accurate with your tone. Expert mode even makes an appearance in multiplayer mode for a bit of a laugh, as if ‘hard’ wasn’t testing enough already. The option of singing along to a shortened song as opposed to a full-length one are also present, as is the ability to create play lists of up to 8 of your favourite songs from the list of 40. Customisation is also available in the form of editing some aspects of the user interface, like colours of the various icons and menu music, and more important things like adjusting the balance of the in-game audio if you feel the instrumentals could be more balanced sound-wise.
Just as this particular version focuses on the British music, the We Sing franchise is aimed specifically towards a multiplayer market, the environment in which karaoke is best played. The options are there if you do want to play alone, but the wider variety of multiplayer options make it a much better experience when played amongst friends and family. As far as karaoke games go, there’s no problems with this if you’re looking to do a bit of singing, but there’s no reason why you should pick this up over an older ‘We Sing’ game or instead of waiting for the upcoming ‘We Sing Rock!’. It all comes down to song choice, because if We Sing UK Hit’s set list appeals to you, then it could be worth it, but if you only like less than half of the songs, the 40-strong jukebox instantly drops to a meagre 20 or lower.
Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere Episode 1 – “Those before the Horizon”
It is not often that a series comes along that leaves you completely awestruck after watching it. Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere left me awestruck, but not because I was amazed by how good it was, more because I was shocked by how utterly chaotic and bi-polar the whole thing was. In order to properly explain my sheer confusion about everything that happened in this 22 minutes of anime, I need to trace back to the way it all began.
The episode starts with a mysterious woman singing a haunting song, with what are surely foreboding lyrics whilst gazing at a tombstone in some fancy futuristic graveyard. We pan up to a smarmy looking pretty boy with a smug look on his face. We then go to the opening theme (which I will get to later). Following that we are presented with some interesting shots of the world of the series giving us an idea that this is somewhere in the future, then suddenly we are hit with about 15 characters who are apparently going to be the focus of the episode.
It turns out it a class from some kind of magic school. Half of the class is buxom fan-service girls (one of whom’s breasts can not stay still) and the other half ninjas or some bizaare creature. Their teacher (another fan-service character) then tasks them with chasing her about town in order to lay one hit on her. Next thing you know there is an elaborate an elaborate chase scene with the class destroying a large portion of the town, apparently not bothering people too much.
We finally end up with the class at their final location, no one managed to get a hit in on the Teacher. The Teacher then beats the crap out of some kind of demon that kicked her out of her apartment. But wait it gets even more crazier, the smug looking guy from the start of the episode reappears, tells everyone he bought porn and then gropes his Teachers breasts for some reaso and concludes by announcing he will ask out a girl who has been dead for 10 years.
The episode literally ends there. Well at least you’d think so. Suddenly some intense monologue revealing the incredibly unnecessarily complex history of the world in this series. From what I gather, humans went away from Earth, came back and realised the world wasn’t inhabitable anymore, decided to live on-top of giant air-crafts in the sky and start history all over again. But I am probably wrong… To me it was just complete nonsense thrown in at the end for some reason.
Now while this may seem like a random collection of events, which it is, I have to say I did kind of enjoy the nonsensical chaos of Horizon. There is something about the way this series plays with it’s obvious nonsense. It is clearly aware, but wears it with pride. That is why I couldn’t bring myself to not enjoy this anime. After watching all 22 minutes of the first episode, I was at the very least interested to watch it again.
I mean any show that can have some unnecessarily complex world history, unidentifiable main character, fan-service girls aplenty as well as random monsters and ninjas in some kind of horribly good mash-up deserves at least a few viewings.
There were some other things I enjoyed about the first episode, particularly the portayal of the Teacher character. Of all the random character’s thrown together here she stood out as the most interesting, not to mention her voice actress was on absolute fire here, eating up those lines like they were going to go cold. I have to give her credit where credit is due, she atleast had fun with this series, even though she probably knew how ridiculous it is.
Another thing I liked was the series soundtrack. The opening theme was relatively catchy and featured a nice little video along-side it. I won’t say it suited the series perfectly, but it was wildly out of place, like everything else on display here so in a way it kind of does fit. That isn’t the only music I thought was good here, the entire episodes background music was like it was on drugs. It would just rapidly change from one genre to another with little sense of rhythm or flow, but it worked with the craziness of everything.
Not surprisingly the animation and art were great here as well, as you’d expect from Sunrise. The most visually impressive scene was the huge chase scene with the Teacher, which featured some very fluid attacks that looked stunning. The art style of the series is quite unique but gave me a Code Geass vibe, but that may just be my subconscious thinking about Sunrise animating this.
In the end, Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere’s first episode was a collection of nothing but random ideas, characters and settings thrown together, because they can. It is simply a wildly energetic anime that seems to have no idea what it wants to be or even if it wants to be anything other than pure nonsense. I guess we will find out over the horizon.
Are your Spidey senses tingling? I’m sure they are, but ignoring the overused but timeless reference to our web-swinging hero, we have the launch trailer for Activision’s launch of Spider-Man: Edge of Time.
In this game, players defy the laws of science and travel back in time, putting players in the suits of our beloved Peter Parker but also Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O’Hara.
“Activision and Beenox have managed to pack more fun, excitement and challenge into this game than their previous hit Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions; and we’re eager for fans – both new and old – to dive into Spidey’s latest pulse-pounding adventure.” said TQ Jefferson, Vice President of Games Production, Marvel Entertainment.
The game is now out in America and will be released on the 14th of October everywhere else for 360, PS3, Wii, 3DS and DS.
In the latest chapter of Hunter x Hunter, a new story arc begun, that arc being the Chairman Election arc. Several new characters were introduced as part of the Hunter Associations 12 elite hunter group, The Hunter Jyuunishin (12 Zodiac Animals). Each of the new characters represent an animal of the zodiac, excluding one, that being none other than Gon’s father, Ging Freecss.
In Ging’s first physical appearance, he announces his candidacy to replace former and late Chairman Netero. That is were the complication arrises. The end-point of this series, is Gon finding his father Ging. However if Ging becomes the Chairman of the Hunter Association, which at this point is honestly very likely, Ging would be out in the open for Gon to find him, but unless you take into account the final conditioning for how the election is to be held, he may not be the only candidate possible to be elected as the new Chairman.
The way it was decided the election should be held with every Hunter in the world being both a candidate and a voter. This essentially could mean that anyone could become the next Chairman. This opens things up to several possibilities if you take into account that it would obviously (if being anyone besides Ging) be a previously introduced character. The possibilities that first spring to mind are characters such as Chrollo, Satotz and Killua’s father. In my opinion besides Ging they are the next immediate choices. However since Ging taking the part of Chairman would mean revealing himself to Gon, leaves me thinking that Chrollo may find a way to be elected, thus bring Kurapika back into the mix and causing a stir with the Hunter Association.
But where does the series go once the next Chairman is decided and what will happen with Gon in emergency care?
Well taking into account that whoever takes over as Chairman is bound to cause a stir and would perhaps set off a chain of events that would bring our main cast back together. I am guessing the Chairman will be a former antagonist in order to create a reason for the main characters to get involved in some manner.
As for Gon in critical condition, I suspect Leorio will make his long awaited return, finally having learn Nen. What will his Nen be? I am suspecting it will be a type of healing based Nen. Afterall he wanted to become a doctor. Who better to heal Gon? I highly suspect Killua was calling Leorio.
To be bring this back to the Chairman Election, some people believe that if Ging is elected, that Hunter x Hunter may be nearing it’s end. I however think there is far too much left unresolved for the manga to be even close to it’s end. For instance, there are several hanging plotlines right now, such as: Kurapika’s vendetta against the Phantom Troupe, Killua’s desire to take vengeance upon his family for his brutal torture since birth, Hisoka and Gon’s rematch, Leorio opening his free medical clinic, Chrollo breaking Kurapika’s Nen binding curse and of course Gon finally finding his Father Ging.
There is simply too much currently unresolved for Hunter x Hunter to be even close to it’s end. Which leads me to the conclusion that we still have a long road ahead of us before this manga’s final page is turned. What do you think of the future of Hunter x Hunter? Let us know in the shout box or comments section below.
