If you had been waiting on Sony to restore PSN services, you’ll be happy to know that the Playstation Network is now working again. The Playstation Twitter account tweeted out the following about 6 hours ago: “PSN update: If you encountered issues logging in today, try logging in now. Apologies for the inconvenience!” No reason for the outage was mentioned. Sony’s most recent firmware update to the system promised to improve network stability. Hopefully this outage will be the last for awhile.
So, what is the first game you’ll be hitting now that service has been restored?
Paramount Home Entertainment has announced the debut of a DVD and Triple Play pack for hit movie Super 8. The Academy Award winning movie breaks the usual movie genre boundaries, and dares to use a primarily young cast to bring a unique and enthralling story to the screen.
The Super 8 Triple Play edition is up for $49.95, which includes the DVD, Blu-ray and Digital copy. As well as these three versions you get numerous behind the scenes documentaries, deleted scenes and commentary from writer/director J. J. Abrams and producer Bryan Burk. Additionally, there is a DVD that has the feature, commentary and two of the behind-the-scenes documentaries for $39.95. These are both coming out for release on November 17.
For those of you who haven’t seen Super 8 yet, this would be a great purchase, this movie is really worth it. Keep an eye out for an upcoming review on the Triple Play release.
Got a point and click adventure itch? Well Wadjet Eye Games are on hand with a new entry in their Blackwell series – The Blackwell Deception. The studio is the same one behind the sci-fi noir themed Gemini Rue, which picked up a lot of critical praise for it’s gripping storyline, truly smart puzzles and entertaining characters (see here for CC’s own review).
Like previous entries in the Blackwell series, Deception follows the exploits of Rosa, a psychic medium with her own personal ghost in the form of the sardonic Joey Mallone, a spirit pulled straight out of 1930’s New York. When the victims of charlatan street psychics start turning up as confused ghosts, it’s up to Joey and Rosa to delve into the mysterious underground world of the street psychics to clean up the mess.
The game will be available as a $14.99 PC download from October 12, but if you pre-order you have the chance to pick up a special DVD edition for $24.99. The on disc version is chock full of content for that extra $10, throwing in all four games from the series (with developer commentary), an MP3 soundtrack, animated shorts and more. To keep you going until the disc arrives in October there’s even a download copy of Blackwell Convergence available immediately after checkout, as well as the new game when it’s released on October 12.
If you want to try before you buy Wadjet Eye are currently offering a free demo of the new title on their website, which can be found here, along with a great little trailer that shows off the game’s voice acting and story quality. So that’s October 12 point and click fans, keep an eye out for the review!
Last month Natsume Inc. revealed that they were expecting to have Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny out on store shelves on September 27th for both the PlayStation 3 version and the Wii version. However it seems that there have been some sort of production difficulties which are preventing the title from being made next week, and as such has been delayed until mid-October.
Natsume Inc. revealed this news by their twitter deckhere. Their full statement says that “Currently Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny Wii & PS3 are in production. They will not be available at retail on the 27th of September, however they will arrive October 11th. Unfortunately this is the busy time of year when a lot of companies are producing titles; we have to wait our turn.”
There are indeed plenty of titles being released next week with four 360 titles and eight for the PS3, though some of these are multiplatform. That means that not only are store shelves being filled up with tons of new releases, but the factories that make the game cases and discs and all that jazz are probably working on overload. Still, it is unfortunate to see a game many have been waiting to play for the first time on an HD console be delayed due to the flooding game market.
Those who have been watching the current anime season should know that one of the shows airing at the moment is called Natsume Yuujinchou San. That San there at the end signifies that it is the third season for that anime. Now while the third season is ending next week, fans of the series should be glad to know that the show is actually getting a fourth season, and better yet it will they will only need to wait until January to see it.
Revealed in the November issue of LaLa magazine, the series will continue to follow the storyline of Natsume, a boy that has been able to see demons all of his life and inherited a “Book of Friends” from his grandmother which contains the names of various demons. Natsume then must deal with these various demons that show up to retrieve their name either through honesty or through vengeance.
XSEED is currently playing a dangerous game with their fans’ hearts at the moment because they have just recently announced that big news will be coming soon. To help get their followers hyped up for this news they revealed that it is indeed a new game for localization and have provided a clue through one of their tweets.
The tweet simply stated “[???CLUE???] : A RAVELING NOON SOUL” which could mean any number of things. Currently there has been confirmation that the game won’t be a digital title but that is all. You can follow XSEED at their twitter account here and take your best guesses as to what the game could possibly be! My guess is for a certain 3DS game involving ninja girls.
For Nintendo fans, Smash Brother games may as well be their holy grail. The company throws all of their biggest characters into one game and lets them fight it out. Plus there are a few cameo characters from other companies of course and every Nintendo home console since the N64 has had a Smash Brothers title made for it.
Of course with the Wii U in development (despite there being no news of the thing), people have been talking about a possible Wii U version of Smash Bros. However series director Masahiro Sakurai has squashed any rumors by saying that nothing is going to happen until Kid Icarus: Uprising on the 3DS is completed. He stated that he is “I’m currently concentrating on one title, Kid Icarus. Until this wraps up, Smash Bros. will not progress. Of course, characters have not been decided at all.” This news comes from Masahiro Sakurai’s twitter account, so it seems despite fans’ hopes for a sequel, nothing is currently being made.
Fix-it-up: Kate’s Adventure
Platform: iPhone & iPad
Publisher: G5 Entertainment
Developer: G5 Entertainment
Genre: Casual, Time Management
Buy Now – iPhone & iPad
Kate’s Adventure is a casual game published by G5 Entertainment. It follows in the wake of the ever popular Time Management genre with titles like Farmville storming the internet and gobbling up players time around the world.
Fix-it-up: Kate’s Adventure was originally developed for the PC by World-Loom, along with a in-browser flash demo, but has now been remade for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad by G5 Entertainment. Having tried out the flash demo, I could see how the iPhone version could be very compelling.
The gameplay involves buying cars, fixing painting tuning engine-replacing and waxing it to perfection, and then selling or renting them to bring in the dough. You need to keep track of how much rent you’re bringing in, as well as your stock of spare parts, which are required for pretty much everything. You also have to make one-off payments to employ more workers, which are in turn required to do things with the cars, and so can hold you up if you don’t have enough people on staff.
The basic controls consist of dragging cars to and from parking spots to the different buildings. Once you have hold of a car, it pops up above your finger, and then you drag and drop it on a building to begin work. However, because it’s actually above your finger, there’s a bit of a learning curve to it. Instead of dragging car-to-building, you need to drag car-to-below-building, instead. It isn’t much, but it does take some getting used to, and just means you’re unable to do things quite as quickly.
The game gives you missions related to the plot progression, which keep things interesting and gives you some good challenges throughout the game. One thing to be aware of, though, is when it says “$x,xxx RENT” it means you have to be earning that much using your parked cars. They earn rent every so often, and this cumulative amount needs to reach that amount.
Once you achieve a goal, it disappears from the list on-screen, but you need to bear in mind that they are still active. If you build up your rentals, and complete the mission, but then sell them all, you’ll have to re-do that mission.
Because there’s so much stuff they had to cram onto the screen, it all seems a little too small for comfort. Each car is displayed slightly differently depending on it’s state (if it’s clean or dirty, fixed or broken, etc.), but as they are so small, it’s difficult to figure out which cars need what doing to them. And so you end up continuously tapping on each of them, glancing down at the details of the car at the bottom of the screen, which shows a greyed out icon for something yet to be done, which lights up once it is.
The plot makes sense in general. People helping you find a new shop to do up and make profitable, or giving you specialized business from time to time. In between each new stage, when you’re moving to a new place, you are presented with a cut scene in the form of a 2D comic. Unfortunately you’ll need to manually zoom in and pan the image around to read all the dialogue, which is a little awkward.
The writing also could use a little work. At times there are little grammatical errors, but at other times there are sentences that just plain don’t make sense. An unfortunate problem which stops the flow of the otherwise kinda-sorta engaging plot.
All-in-all, the game could use some polish. The core gameplay works well, and pushed the right buttons for a casual game of the Time Management genre. But the cumulative effect of the issues peppered throughout make this game difficult to get into, and some players may find themselves giving up after a few levels. That said, if you persevere with it, and push through it’s issues, this game does have a few hours of engaging gameplay to offer.
The game is scheduled for release on iPhone 22 September 2011.
Although it was widely assumed and all but confirmed that Dance Central 2 would allow importing of tracks from the first game, Microsoft and Harmonix today definitely made it clear that THIS WOULD be possible, for a $5 fee. For 400 Microsoft Points, you can dance along to all of your favorite tracks from Dance Central while Dance Central 2 is spinning in the disc tray.
There are some things to watch out for though. Freestyle sections in the imported tracks are still part of the experience when you play these songs in DC2, even if the Freestyle option is turned off in Dance Central 2. You should also be aware that many stores are offering 400 MS point cards when you preorder Dance Central 2, so be sure to pick the best preorder deal possible so you won’t have to shell out some extra dough just to import a game you already own.
You know, maybe when you let TV station bring fancy recording cameras to your studio, perhaps it would be the best time to hide things that you don’t want them to see. Or y’know not let game announcements be leaked right from under your own nose. Well it seems Visceral Studios forgot about that, because they let an Israeli TV news station broadcast a video tour of their studio and it seems that the news crew managed to catch a Dead Space 3 logo and sign on the ceiling as found by IGN.
There is of course nothing confirmed at this time and it could always be something that Visceral put up there to tease their fans with but the end of Dead Space 2 did leave things open for a third game, and perhaps it is time to announce that title. Then again EA is not admitting to anything and has denied to make any comments besides saying they have no news about the franchise.
