You may have heard that Catwoman is a playable character in Batman: Arkham City. Now we haven’t actually seen any gameplay with her, until now that is. Warner Brothers released a twelve minute video that shows off not only Catwoman fighting a bunch of Two-Face’s thugs but also Batman’s subsequent rescue of her.
The video shows off plenty of new features including Batman’s new ability to get around, interrogate enemies and his increased fluidity between attacks. The only disappointing thing about the video is the fact that there are still many months until the game is released. Because those in North America will have to wait until October 18th while those in Europe will wait until October 21st to play the title on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
In case you wanted to learn more about Call of Juarez: The Cartel from the latest batch of screenshots released by Ubisoft, then you better keep wanting because unfortunately there isn’t much shown here. In today’s batch of screenshots we see plenty of oversized looking guns and people being shot but not much else unfortunately.
We are also given a small look at the multiplayer combat, though this is still just in first person view. Hopefully they will fix the scaling of the guns a bit because at the moment it is almost comical in the multiplayer modes. Catch all of the screenshots below and see for yourself, and catch later this month for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
Fans of WWE All-Stars will be happy to know that they soon will be able to expand their playable character list because THQ has announced plenty of new downloadable wrestlers for the title in the next month or so. Currently players can download “The Million Dollar Man” Ted Dibiase and his son for 160 MSP. But on July 5th players will be able to download the “All-Time Greatest” package for 320 MSP.
This package will contain Hawk and Animal of the Legion of Doom/Road Warriors tag team, Jerry “The King” Lawler and Chris Jericho. On August 2nd players can also pick up “Southern Charisma” and download the Big Boss Man, Michael Hayes and Mark Henry for 240 MSP. But don’t worry if you have empty pockets, players will also be able to download R-Truth for free on July 5th. With a whole slew of new fighters on the way there is plenty more wrestling to be had in WWE All-Stars if have have a few more dollars to spend.
Achievements operate for people on many different levels; some are obsessive over their Gamerscore, others take an interest in it, and some couldn’t care less and play casually making sure entertainment value comes first. But achievements can add entertainment value because while there are some who go to great lengths to fulfil every task set by a game’s achievement list- no matter how ridiculous – some enjoy completing these challenges, as a result getting a feeling of satisfaction when each achievement pops up, and in some cases it encourages players to explore parts of the game they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
For those whom achievements gain a hold on, there can be alternate appealing aspects in different people’s eyes. Some prioritise a good completion percentage, ensuring that all games on their profile are complete or near complete; some favour sheer volume of score and try to obtain as high a Gamerscore as possible from anywhere; some like real awards so go for the achievements that contain added rewards such as bonus gamer pictures or avatar awards.
For me, however, completing a game 100% by obtaining all possible achievements is where I get my thrills from achievements, earning that game a place in the complete games section on the Xbox 360 Dashboard, and for the past seven months and initially without striving to, I’ve completed a game fully 100% each month. Since December, I’ve completed either a Xbox Live Arcade or full retail game each month.
As I said, I didn’t mean to do this at first but recently spotting a pattern and the opportunity to continue this trend, I’ve decided to see how long I can keep up this challenge, and also share my progress so far. Sometimes it has come close, for instance for the month of May only just completing Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime’s final achievement for online co-op on the final day of the month because, as you can imagine, the average XBLA game’s servers were hardly a hub of activity. Still, it was only after intense local co-op gaming sessions a couple of days before that I was able to complete the story mode, earning all but one of the achievements from scratch.
Even the challenge for the month of June went right down to the wire, with me completing TRON: Evolution on 30th June, the final day of that month. It involved back-to-back completions of the campaign, first on hard just to unlock the ‘insane’ difficulty mode, before completing it on insane to obtain the linked achievement worth 75 points.
Anyway, here’s my progress up until now, with each game for each month since December 2010:
December 2010 Harm’s Way 200/200
January 2011 Faery: Legends of Avalon 200/200
February 2011 Spare Parts 200/200
March 2011 Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 1000/1000
April 2011 Doritos Crash Course 200/200
May 2011 Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime 200/200
June 2011 TRON: Evolution 1000/1000
Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions of games to complete, any input on the games completed so far, donations of games you would like to see me complete, or tips and support for achievements I am currently going for. At the moment, after a steady period of unlocking Rainbow Six Vegas 2 multiplayer achievements, I have hit a brick wall in the form of ‘My Hero!’ which sets the task of rescuing both hostages in online matches on ten separate occasions, difficult considering that it’s a game-type no one plays. I am also one achievement away on Hexic HD, a great puzzle game that comes free on every Xbox 360 hard drive and close to completion on a number of other tough ones such as N+, another solid Xbox Live Arcade game. Look out for another update sometime in July/ early August documenting my further progress!
Bungie is going all out this year for their Bungie Day, 20th anniversary and July 4th celebrations. In addition to their 20th anniversary sales and special items at BungieStore.com, they are also auctioning off several concept art pieces for charity on their eBay site. The most far reaching celebration though, is buried deep within the Halo: Reach playlists. From now until July 8th, every single playlist and gametype will give you the chance to up to 30,000 cR in a Super Jackpot at the end of a match. In a tweet posted earlier today, Bungie confirmed this saying, “Halo: Reach Super Jackpots are live. Every playlist, from now until 7/8, has a chance to payout 30k Space Bucks. You’re gonna be rich!”
Zynga announced today that they would be taking their company public, or that they would be in the near future. What this means is that they will essentially put up shares of the company that can be bought and sold on the stock market for either profit or loss. The company had not been publicly traded before but with their filing of an S-1 form they soon will be.
There is currently no information as to how many shares of Zynga will be available to the public, nor how much the starting price of each share will be. Basically this means that soon you can make your own little microtransactions and possibly even get money back somewhere in the future if you pay attention to the stock market at all.
You have to hand it to the ratings board. They usually are the first people to ever see the good parts of a game, because they have to tell you whether or not you are old enough to buy the thing. But sometimes they also are the first people to ever even hear about a game or see that it exists, such is the case with Crysis.
Crysis 1 was released exclusively on the PC a few years ago but now it seems that it may be making the jump to consoles. The ESRB has rated the game as Mature and lists it for both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 as well as the original PC rating. There was no description of the title at the moment and, being as there has been no confirmation from Crytek themselves, this can only be seen as rumor at the moment, though we have reached out to Crytek for comment.
Well, if you were a huge fan of Split/Second or Pure then you will find this news very upsetting, because the company behind those titles, Black Rock Studio, is going to be closed down soon. Eurogamer received a statement from Disney that confirmed that things were not going well for the Mickey Mouse owned developer.
The statement says that Disney has not given any greenlights to the projects being worked at by Black Rock Studio and has told the employees of the company of an impending “consultation process” which is the 90-day UK law phrase of closure. The studio was struck with layoffs earlier this year which showed signs of trouble for the company but no one was expecting the studio to be shut down entirely. Let us wish those that still had jobs at Black Rock Studio the best of luck in their future.
While most countries around the world have their own Independence Days, July 4th is the United States Independence Day and what better way for an American company like EA to celebrate it than have a huge sale on many of their own titles. EA detailed today a very large sale that will be occurring on July 4th only. Some of these sales are for PC or iOS but there are also games that are going to be on sale across the consoles as well. Find the entire list below and see how much money you will be spending on games instead of fireworks this 4th of July.
Perfect World Entertainment has announced that it will showcase its latest game, Rusty Hearts, at Anime Expo, which starts tomorrow! The multiplayer online, hack n’ slash fighting game, which debuted at this year’s E3, will get its spot in the limelight at the largest anime and manga convention in the U.S. held annually at Los Angeles Convention Center.
Attendees of Anime Expo will be treated to exclusive interviews, new information on game details and game demos in a live streaming event thanks to Perfect World Entertainment’s partnership with Crunchyroll, an online website dedicated to East Asian media. They can also participate in fun activities to win great prizes! Won’t be at the convention but don’t wanna miss out? Fans can watch the event online and will even be able to submit questions they’d like to ask!
“We strongly believe in giving gamers a truly free-to-play, online experience through a high quality game like Rusty Hearts and we can’t wait to showcase all that it has to offer to anime and manga enthusiasts,” said Mark Hill, Game Producer for Rusty Hearts. “Our fans have blown us away with their continuous support and we are excited to give them an opportunity to follow us at Anime Expo through Crunchyroll’s live streaming event.”
Rusty Hearts will start Closed Beta Testing on July 27th, 2011. With Perfect World Entertainment having published successful titles such as Perfect World International, Forsaken World and Ether Saga Odyssey, we can expect that Rusty Hearts will be another blockbuster mmo that can capture the hearts of online gamers.
