It seems that enough time has passed for Sony to feel that it wouldn’t offend anyone if they released MotorStorm Apocalypse. The title was struck with an indefinite delay after the events that occurred in Japan but it appears that the title now has a release date of May 3rd. The game’s urban destruction theme from earthquakes and other natural disasters struck a bad chord around the world and was delayed.
In an effort to make fans of the series not feel so let down by the delay Sony is providing a Premier Pack DLC voucher for every new copy of the game that is purchased. The Premier Pack adds two exclusive in-game vehicles so… at least there is that.
Namco Bandai have unleashed a teaser trailer for their newly announced Ridge Racer Unbounded. We’ve already had some handheld Ridge Racer this year on 3DS, but coming 2012 is Ridge Racer Unbounded, for the larger screens of PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
There’s still plenty of time until its vague 2012 release date , probably why there’s no gameplay yet, only some teaser footage that they have compiled. Either way, it looks like it will be high-octane stuff, with drivers having to weave their way between other motorists at break-neck speeds through the urban environments.
Take a gander at the trailer below and let us know what you think of it.
Topware has announced that the first DLC pack for Two Worlds II will be called Pirates of the Flying Fortress. There currently has been no price given and only a little bit of information about the title but with at least 2.5 million copies sold around the world, Antaloor has plenty of different areas to still explore to give fans more of what they love.
Flying Fortress adds a few dozen new weapons, new breeds of houses, a selection of different boss enemies, rain and thunderstorm effects to the weather patterns and of course a new single player storyline. Also added will be new multiplayer maps. Honestly this DLC sounds like a combination of added content and a patch to make the game look better than it does already. When I reviewed the game back in January it was miles apart form the other Two Worlds game and despite being buggy it was truly enjoyable so having more content is always a plus.
Well you can take this news as it is, but Nintendo has just released sales data for their 3DS as it launched around the world. The 3DS sold slightly under 400,000 units in the first week it was released in the US; which is below analysts’ expectations that sales would rise up to 500,000 or even to 750,000 according to Gamasutra.
Nintendo didn’t release a specific number unfortunately but NPD does state that the title sold 100,000 less than the original DS did during the first month of sales, making the 3DS only selling roughly 380,000. Europe saw sales of 303,000 for the first weekend it was released and Japan picked up 371,000 copies but unfortunately sales of the handheld have dropped drastically in Japan and the PSP is already outselling the handheld. Whether this can be because of price differences or something else is unseen.
Nintendo’s latest adventure into a unique gaming platform may not have made quite as big as a sales splash as analysts thought but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to bounce back. There are a number of factors that probably are holding sales down, bad press for the effects that the 3D causes as well as a poor line-up of launch titles that don’t really have the drawing power that Nintendo usually offers. Hopefully things will pick up for the handheld as more titles are released in the future.
Looks like Epic Games was happy enough with how it’s latest release, Bulletstorm performed because they are thanking fans of the series by releasing the entire Bulletstorm soundtrack for free. You can download it over at Epic’s website and get a taste of what the game will sound like if you haven’t played it yet.
While the game’s music was nothing spectacular it was composed by Michal Cielecki and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewic who have decided to keep the music free of any of the profanity that riddles the rest of the game. That doesn’t mean that this is laid back music either that you should listen to with your grandparents, unless they like today’s music that is. Let us know what think of the music if you happen to download it.
Air Penguin has bounced and glided its way onto the app store, courtesy of publishers GAMEVIL and developers Enterfly Corporation.
You guide your penguin using simple multi-directional tilt controls, made possible with the gyroscope in iPods, iPhone and iPads, pinging from platform to platform until you manage to reach the end flag. Air Penguin slides across ice to pick up extra speed to propel himself/herself further. But, bouncing from ice block to ice block doesn’t come without dangers; hazards like cracking ice mean you’ve got to move on and animals like sharks and swordfish aim to give you a hard time. The endless Survival mode will mix things up for a fresh challenge, or items can be used to help get through the 100 stages of Story mode as Air Penguin ventures to save his family from melting ice caps.
It looks like a fun casual game to kill some time on. Air Penguin is available for $0.99 from the App Store on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad – BUY IT HERE
EA’s Coconut Dodge brings the PSP minis cult hit to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Help the excellently named ‘Clawrence the crab’ dodge falling coconuts and weave through crazy airborne mazes to collect shiny treasures.
The game has multiple game modes including “Arcade” and “Maze Master” over 30 tropical themed levels that offer a multitude of fun challenges. Social support allows you to link in with Facebook and share your scores with friends, and a leaderboard extends its lifespan, with the easy to play, hard to master gameplay being practiced to reach the heights of the leaderboards.
It was released today for the price of $0.99 and can be found HERE
If you a Gears fan whatsoever, I probably don’t even have to remind you that the multi-player beta is starting just 10 short days from now on April 25th. Well I guess I just did, technically, but either way those who pre-ordered Gears 3 from EBGames/Gamestop or simply purchased Bulletstorm: Epic Edition will be heading into the multi-player beta as a reward. If you haven’t yet done either, there is still time so no reason to panic as you still have time and if it helps in your decision of just which selection to go with to get into the beta, I recommend both of course but Bulletstorm owners will get to access the beta one week earlier on April 18th.
Of course the biggest news possible that everyone should already know about Gears of War 3 is that the game will now be hosted on dedicated servers as well as new modes such as Team Deathmatch. Cliff Bleszinski and Rod Ferguson (as well as a few other lead developers) recently sat down with to discuss just how this highly anticipated follow-up was created to please all the Gears Faithful out there in a new short video documentary, Making Gears 3: Dedicated Execution. So sit back, grab a few pieces of popcorn (as the clip is only a few minutes long), and check out just how much the awesome crew at Epic Games listened to their fans to create a game that could very well be a front runner for Game of the Year. Watch that video below and don’t forget to grab a beta code while you can.
Although arguably not as popular now as in years past, trading card games still attract a pretty large crowd. Many pretenders have attempted to usurp the role that Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic: The Gathering have filled for over a decade. One card game, however, is trying something new.
Phylo, or Phylomon as its lovingly referred to by its community, is an altogether unique trading card game for several reasons. First of all, it does not revolve around fictional creatures, demons, monsters, or other fantastic creations. Instead, Phylo is a game about the very real creatures already in existence on Earth. The game explores the theme of biodiversity by incorporating tons of species form each kingdom of life and across the far reaches of the globe. The second reason that Phylo is unique is because it is an entirely open-sourced project. Each of the cards created for the game are designed by members of the Phylo community and each drawing is created by volunteer artists.
Everything about Phylo depends upon its community from the creation of the cards to drafting of the rules. Because of this, it is obviously not commercialized like the card game behemoths mentioned above and is more suited to volunteer organizations, schools, universities, or environmentally minded card game enthusiasts. Anyone is free to download a deck of cards (or build a custom deck), print them out, and play. While some people might not find the idea of a card game with regular plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms too exhilarating, it is definitely a unique take on the genre. While most trading card games task players with defeating an opponent’s creatures, Phylo requires players to build a stable ecosystem while attempting to sabotage that of the opponent. This can be done using different event cards, parasite cards, or invasive species cards which will negatively affect the opponent’s ecosystem, scoring the player points. There are also other rule sets for players who want to mix things up, and players are encouraged to create their own rules or submit other game types to the Phylo community.
In the end, however, what it really comes down to is any card game with a Bacterial Growth card (above) is alright in my book. If you’d like to give Phylo a shot, you can head over to their site, where you can print cards, learn the rules, or even contribute to the game if the mood strikes.
With the recent release of Nintendo’s 3DS, and all of the excitement and hype (mixed with some disappointment) surrounding it, the subject of today’s post seems very fitting. It almost seems like the Guardians wanted things to fall into place the way they did. Or maybe I’m just looking to much into things.
As you can plainly read in the title, this time out of the proverbial hat I drew a game for the ill-fated Virtual Boy. Most people probably wouldn’t be happy about that, but I was perfectly ok with it for two reasons. First of all, I’ve always kind of liked the Virtual Boy. I first rented it from a Blockbuster back in 1995 and had a good run with Wario Land. Sure it was awkward to use at times, but I love Wario Land and I think the system has some real charm to it. The second reason is that I only own 4 games for the thing. Seeing as how I have no interest in collecting the entire library (can you really call it a library with less than 2 dozen games?), I’ve only got the few games I like and would want to play. Therefore, I knew there couldn’t be anything disastrous about this one.
This is still what comes to mind when I think of virtual reality.
The random game I was all set to play on my prototype 3DS was Teleroboxer, an interesting little title that is essentially Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots in first-person black and red 3D. Not only have I absolutely loved Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots since the days when I still wasted my time with games that weren’t electronic, but Teleroboxer is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that is controlled with two D-pads. I hadn’t played it previously because ever since I bought a Virtual Boy a couple years ago Wario Land hasn’t been removed from its cartridge slot, but I was looking forward to it.
Remember how I said I knew there couldn’t be any disastrous consequences with my Virtual Boy games since I liked them all? Well unfortunately fate makes fools of us all, and it turns out that the Virtual Boy wasn’t going to let me get away scot free. I started by getting everything set up: dusting a thin layer of dust off of this monstrous “portable” system, hooking up the AC adapter so I wouldn’t need batteries, switching cartridges, and finding a sitting position that would enable me to look into the eye-pieces with contorting too much.
Try holding this brontosaurus pose for more than a few minutes.
As I power on the Virtual Boy, it gives me it’s usual health and safety warning (which on the Virtual Boy comes across as more of a slap in the face than a warning), the VB logo, and then Teleroboxer title screen. Oh boy, here we go. I wish I could capture an image of what exactly it looks like, because no amount of description can really do it justice. It’s not that Teleroboxer is an ugly game, but for some reason, the screen was so ridiculously garbled that it looked like I was staring at a screen of code from the Matrix, although in red. I could still make out the title for the most part. I thought, “Well, maybe I can still play and it will just look kind of glitchy”. I told you the Virtual Boy wasn’t going to make this easy on me.
From the title screen it brought me to what looked like some kind of instructions I suppose. It showed a diagram of someone punching, and some lines, and that’s about all I could make out through the distortion (the picture is somewhere below). At this point I was trying to figure out what the problem was, and as I peered through each eye-piece individually I noticed that the left was far worse than the right. A brilliant idea came to mind: just use the right eye-piece! It might ruin the 3D effects but at least I’ll be able to play it. So that’s exactly what I did, and at first it seemed to be working. While the left eye-piece just showed a scrambled grid of solid red, the right showed a pretty clear picture as I navigated through the save file menu and selected my first opponent.
After all of that trouble I was finally into the game. The Virtual Boy had tried to keep me from playing my 3D Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, perhaps even tried to keep me from writing this post. With perseverance, however, I had outsmarted the machine, which as I look at now it more and more reminds me of Wall-E’s head on a pike. Is that morbid? Anyway, I was in and it was time to start the game, or so I thought. At first it wasn’t so bad, I thought. I could really only make out the left half of the screen (possibly having something to do with the stereoscopics of the Virtual Boy and the busted left eye-piece) but I thought, well maybe I can work with this. It’s just robot boxing after all.
Imagine this little guy after a run-in with Caligula.
So far, I’d say things haven’t quite gone according to plan. I’m sitting hunched over on my bed balancing a pair of red goggles on my legs, craning my neck to see into it, squinting my left eye and straining my right eye to gaze into the eye-piece, looking at a garbled, unintelligible screen with half of a robot opponent’s body sort of visible. Yet I persevere, attempting to block and throw punches using the two D-pads. I may not have been the best at Punch Out, but I was at least decent. Let me tell you though, I don’t think I landed even a single punch. Meanwhile, even while blocking (I think I was blocking, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with less than half of a screen) my mechanical opponent was steadily dropping my health bar.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m not able to play Teleroboxer on my Virtual Boy. I suppose 15 years is all of the life this little bipedal headset is getting, but that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up. That would be too easy. My first thought was to simply borrow a Virtual Boy from someone so that I could play Teleroboxer and do this thing right. It was at this point that I realized that I don’t have any friends who own a Virtual Boy, a side effect of the system’s obscurity and low esteem.
Talk about oscure. The Adventure Vision, released in 1982, used basically the same technology as the Virtual Boy and had only 4 games.
Next I decided to try emulation. As much as I would prefer playing it on a real system with 3D effects and a controller in hand, I’m sort of down to last resorts here. I wasn’t even sure if there were any Virtual Boy emulators floating around. I mean, I know that there is pretty much an emulator for everything, but the Virtual Boy is just such a strange beast. It was pretty easy to find Red Dragon, an emulator suiting my needs, and the appropriate rom for Teleroboxer. Once I started everything up, I was greeted by the familiar screens, albeit with distorted colors, set the controls to keys I was comfortable with, and hit start.
Or at least I tried to hit start. At the title screen it clearly had written, “Press Start” right under the world Teleroboxer in huge letters, so I did. Then I hit it again. About a second later, the game went to the demo, and I watched as two robots punched each other’s lights out in super speed. So now I had two apparent problems on my hands: I couldn’t press start at the title screen, and the emulator was clearly running too fast. The first problem I solved quite easily. When the game instructed me to press start, what it really meant was to press the A button (although I don’t know why it couldn’t have just said “Press A”). As for the super speed, I decided to just live with it.
This is what the Terminator would see when watching Karate Kid.
Now would it really be as exciting if I was able to just play the game without any more issues? Of course not. This one however is an issue of a different variety. When it really comes down to it, I have absolutely no idea how to play Teleroboxer. I know you’re supposed to control your hands with the D-pads, with each one controlling the respective blocks and punches, but I can’t seem to land a single hit or successfully block anything. Within seconds I had fallen (it was only seconds because the game was running at about 2 or 3 times regular speed, but I was still a complete failure).
We’re coming up on 1,500 words that I’ve written now and I have still yet to discuss gameplay at all, mostly because I have yet to really play the game, but I hope that this has given at least a little insight into the difficulties one can encounter with retro gaming. Sometimes troubleshooting an older game is not as easy as just blowing in a cartridge. It can often take a lot of work, and in some cases a lot of money, to enjoy retro gaming as a hobby, and that’s part of the reason why I filled you in on how I encountered just about every problem that can arise in attempting to play a game, between faulty hardware, physical strain (ok, so that one is kind of specific to the Virtual Boy and Sonic Free Riders), imperfect emulation, and a lack of instructions.
I eventually found out that the reason I wasn’t landing any punches is because in order to control the game you need to use the L and R buttons in coordination with the D-pads, a point of which I was unaware. I discovered this thanks to a guide on GameFAQs.com written by BHodges (Thanks dude, but seriously? A Teleroboxer FAQ?). Without a controller, I’m pretty sure I lack the mental faculties to coordinate my fingers to manage 8 directional buttons and 2 shoulder buttons on a keyboard, so that’s not going to happen on an emulator.
Although I didn’t get to play Teleroboxer, and I probably won’t until I decide to replace my Virtual Boy, I think this was still a worthwhile experience. It definitely had its share of frustrations, but I suppose most people would have expected that from a Virtual Boy game. Perhaps I’ll revisit this one day when I find myself with working hardware, but for now I think this case is closed. I already know what the next game to be played is (I got a little antsy and rolled the dice while writing this) and I’ll give you a hint. It has a very close relation to my favorite Virtual Boy game. So I’ll see you all next time, when I’ll actually get to play a game!
Also, if you’d like to catch up on parts 1-4, you can find them at the links below:
