I’m a big fan of Naruto and Bleach so I’m excited to say that NGames has released more details of “Chapter II: Revenge of Aizen” . This update of Pockie Ninja’s Naruto/Bleach inspired MMO will include new gameplay features and improvements to the browser-based brawler.
The story continues on with Aizen still hiding away in Las Noches. Rumour has it that he has opened Las Noches’ 10 remaining levels, which means more challenges for the Ninjas! Also, an unknown gang of baddies are planning to seize the power of the Ninja! New gameplay features include: new secret ninja skills, the introduction for pets to learn skills of their own, new general and exclusive pet skills, a new pet tracing feature, increased Las Noches floors of challenges, new maps and levels and more.
Interested in seeing the new skills in action? Check out the video below!
Bethesda has released a trailer for their upcoming Fallout: New Vegas DLC. Honest Hearts will place players in Zion National Park, Utah just as the war between local tribes and the New Canaanite missionary begins to reach its peak. Among all of this warfare however a man of legend is lingering among the shadows and from the look of the trailer, he isn’t going to be staying in hiding anymore.
The Burned Man, rumored to still be alive among Legion forces is indeed still alive in Honest Hearts. Joshua Graham has been revealed and given his own screenshot to prove his existence. The DLC will be released next Tuesday on May 17th for the Xbox 360 and the PC, with the PlayStation 3 version of the DLC going to be made available as soon as they can make it available. It will run 800 MSP or $10 depending on your platform of choice.
With L.A. Noire releasing next week we can expect that the gaming community won’t have a whole lot to do besides sit there and play it like crazy. But the revelation of a new add-on for L.A. Noire revealed from the latest Xbox Live release schedule is bringing up a few questions. These questions come from the fact that there has been no word about the DLC from either Microsoft or Rockstar.
Called the Rockstar Pass it will be released the same day as the game for 800 MSP. The pass could be some form of Project Ten Dollar that has been headlined by EA but it wouldn’t really fit into the world that is L.A. Noire. It’s been speculated that it is the whole package of pre-order DLC that Rockstar mentioned would be available for separate purchase after the game comes out. This revelation is a bit confusing and we have contacted Rockstar to find out more.
Puzzle Bobble (Or Bust-a-Move in some regions) is a ball-popping puzzle adventure that has been around since the early-mid 90s. The game features cute dinosaur creatures that take control of a kind of ball-launcher used in an effort to rescue their friends and defeat boss monsters. The game features a whole lot of challenging single player levels as well as even extra fun challenges.
Bosses, when will they learn?
Gameplay
The gameplay of Puzzle Bobble Universe is quite simple; players control a cannon-like device that allows them to fire a coloured ball towards other coloured balls in an attempt to shatter them all and claim points. The main priority in the game is to match these coloured balls 3 or more times so that you score points and advance in the game. Points are primarily used for gaining high-scores to try and defeat as a personal challenge to constantly get better.
And the Lasers were fired that day.
The main puzzle mode takes you on a set path of levels set on various worlds. Each level is known by a certain name, such as “Moonbase”, and each level has a set number of 10 rounds for players to complete, including one extra boss level where they must defeat a boss monster by shooting it with these bubbles. Each level also has an additional challenge of recuing your dinosaur friend via collapsing a key bubble by matching a set of bubbles surrounding the key bubble. The challenge in this is that if you collapse the bubbles a stack behind it and cause the next few rows to collapse, you’ll lose the key because you haven’t popped that bubble.
The way the game works is that you match coloured bubbles to each other to make them pop/shatter. Any bubbles that are connected but are not of the same colour and are not connected by bubbles of another colour will fall under the gravity (I guess?). So say I have a row of green bubbles and just under them are a purple and red bubble, if I pop the green bubbles, I will lose the red and purple bubbles, but not get points for them. Though, utilising this feature in a strategy you could possibly beat a level a lot quicker by sacrificing your score.
Connect the colours to make them burst!
And in a game like this, speed is also a key element in beating a level. As time progresses, the level begins to collapse, possibly because the bubbles aren’t there to hold it up anymore. If any bubbles touch the bottom of the playing field it is game over and you must start the entire puzzle again from the beginning. So players are constantly weighing up their options, whether they should take the extra points; or whether they should sacrifice some in order to not lost the entire level. But a smart player will utilise all of their options in a level if they need to.
For a puzzle game, there are a fair few power-ups and abilities that players can utilise. The first is a kind of bullet-time like thing, where the game world slows to a halt and you can fire an assortment of bubbles onto the field to try and make some combos. The more combos you make, the more points you get. If you fail and just spam balls over the place though, don’t fret, as the balls fired in this mode pop instantly; as soon as the event finishes. Players can also use a wide range of abilities, which build as you fill a combo-meter on the side. One such ability changes all bubbles to a specific colour in a given radius, another is a laser that clears the field of all bubbles in a radius.
In some challenges players can utilise special bubbles that are on the field to do some pretty amazing stuff in their assistance. These are known as gimmick bubbles and have some pretty serious effects. These bubbles only appear in the challenge mode though.
This guy 😀
The other gameplay mode that is open to players in this game is Challenge Mode. There are three types of modes in challenge mode, 100-sec. Bubbles, 300-sec. Bubbles and Nonstop Bubbles. Each mode is pretty self-explanatory. In 100-sec. Bubbles, players go from round to round to score the highest score within 100seconds. The same thing is in 300-sec. Bubbles, players go from round to round in 300-seconds to achieve the highest score. In the last mode, Nonstop Bubbles, players go from round to round until the bubbles touch the bottom of the playing field, causing a player to lose. All of these challenges are quite fun and can suit a time-frame that players have to play in; like taking a 5-10minute dump at work.
Puzzle Bobble Universe has an inherent strategy and puzzle element, which depending on the user, may make the game incredibly challenging or just simply challenging. This is not for gamers that lack problem solving skills.
Graphics
Puzzle Bobble Universe has a very basic design, but is also graphically quite pretty. Each of the dinosaur characters are beautifully drawn and coloured, the cogs to the side of the cannon device rotate in and out of the screen when the 3D is turned on and each bubble has its own colour and symbol. In fact, this game probably has the 3D since launch.
This looks amazing when it’s popping out at you!
The 3D in this game is incredibly well done, with the 3D not appearing just in the screen, but also outside it. It’s amazing seeing one of the cute dinosaur creatures floating a few centimeters above the screen when you complete a combo or when you get a score screen after a round and it just hovers above the action. It’s so great.
Audio
Puzzle Bobble Universe features a really simple soundtrack, but this does not mean that is ugly or of low quality. It just means that the tunes themselves are slow and simple.
The simplistic nature of the background tunes creates a peaceful kind of feel to the game, despite it being based around destruction. Popping bubbles is destroying them, no? Anyways, the music seems to act in a way to calm your mind in order to have players to be bale to think out the problem and work on a solution without too many distractions. The music does not become insanity-inducing, but I dopn’t think every kind of gamer is going to enjoy the same tune being repeated ad nauseam throughout a level either.
Saving these guys is a challenge on each level.
Every time a player pops a bubble it plays a simple, yet, rewarding effect that keeps them going even more. While a game of this type has a high potential to become boring and repetitive quickly, these sound effects help to keep an addictive element within the game.
Ultimately, Puzzle Bobble features simple audio that is also elegant, but also has the potential to annoy some users, especially if they suck at some levels.
Overall
Puzzle Bobble Universe is a puzzle game that involves players popping bubbles to save their fellow dinosaur friends and defeat boss monsters. It has possibly the best 3D on the 3DS device so far, as well as some really puzzling level design as well as excellent audio. While I feel that asking full-price for this game might be stretching it a little, anybody who does buy this game will find that it is both entertaining and difficult. It also provides great amounts of nostalgia to anyone who grew up gaming in the 90s.
Genre: Documentary/Animation Produced by: American the Movie Featuring: Kevin Booth, Dwight Slade, John Farneti, Mary Hicks, Steve Hicks, Andy Huggins, David Johndrow, James Ladmirault, Lynn Hicks Running Time: 102 minutes Available for purchase at: Madman Online Store ($29.95)
Overview
Okay, okay – I’ll admit it: before I picked up this DVD, I didn’t know too much about Bill Hicks. I knew the dude was a comedian who did a lot of satirical sketches, and I had randomly seen a few of his clips on YouTube. The real complexities of his life, though, had never been a topic that piqued my interest, and (being an Australian/New Zealander who is more of a Dane Cook/Russell Peters fan, anyway) Bill Hicks had never really popped up in anything I watched.
However, when I finished watching this documentary, the first thing I did was jump straight to the Extras and watch all of the rare footage from his career. I then jumped on YouTube, desperate to find any sketches that Hicks did because I was just that fascinated by him as a comedian. I may have entered the documentary with a naïve intrigue, but I left it with a new understanding and appreciation for a man who passed well before his time.
Plot
True to form, the film details Bill Hicks’ life story and is narrated by the ten people who knew him best. While other documentaries require over-dramatization, narration, and plenty of embellishments in order to translate into a feature-length film, Bill Hicks’ life seems to be perfectly summed up by his friends in the 102 minutes they were given.
Hicks as a young adult, performing sketches.
Hicks was drawn to comedy from an early age, having been inspired by Woody Allen, and began performing stand-up comedy with his friends from the age of 17 at the Comedy Workshop in Houston. When he graduated high school, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of being a professional stand-up comedian, and became a regular at the Comedy Store where other comedians like Jay Leno have also performed. Wanting to push the boundaries of comedy, Hicks began taking drugs, smoking, and consuming alcohol but these quickly began to interfere with his act and he quit alcohol and drugs. Hicks went on to be featured in HBO’s One Night Stand, and performed in the UK, Ireland, and Australia as well. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1993 and passed away in 1994.
While Hicks’ story could have been told in any number of ways, the way that the production company American the Movie chose to narrate it showed a unique style which did the comedian justice. The film intersperses narration by Hicks’ friends and family with videos from Hicks’ stand up performances to create a blend of ‘show’ and ‘reminisce’ which is a welcome change from the standard narrator-interview-video rut a lot of directors get caught up in. The addition of his friends and family’s memories of Hicks really made me feel as though I was flipping through a scrapbook instead of watching a documentary, and certainly personalised the feel of the documentary just that little bit more.
While his story couldn’t really be written well, as such, parts of it most certainly were selected and edited together well for maximum impact and narrative charm. Nothing felt like it was just thrown in for the sake of taking up time, and it really worked together in a cohesive structure which did the man justice. At times, the photographs and the narration by Dwight Slade did seem a touch too corny, but overall it was a minor blip in an otherwise smooth ride.
Visual
The visual aspects are what really hit it home for me. While I am no stranger to documentary films, I’ve become more or less accustomed to guerrilla style docos which use handycam techniques, or corny films with slow motion shots with stereotypical “insert-moving-quote-from-subject-here” voice-overs. It’s been rare that a photo-documentary can really capture the essence of the moments it’s trying to portray, and even rarer that the animated photos can connect to and strike an emotional chord in its audience, but American: The Bill Hicks Story may have just won me over.
The film looks like a collage translated into a movie.
The key for the film’s visuals is that it’s simple, yet incredibly effective. The style is reminiscent of collage which has been turned into film: the photographs are cut out and animated in front of a background to create a kind of static movement. The photos are anything but dull though: while initially staring at a screen of photo after photo seemed dull, the animators really let their creativity run wild and explored new ways of depicting scenes that were described. In one scene where Hicks’ experience with mushrooms is being described, the animators took a photograph of him and two friends sitting on the beach and managed to translate it into an almost ethereal experience where I felt like I was being exposed to the feeling of taking mushrooms. I’ll admit, this type of creativity is often hard to find or express in documentaries, but the photo-doco was the perfect medium to describe Hicks’ life.
However, the photographs are also balanced with videos to give the viewer a break from imagining scenarios. This really works to the film’s advantage: there is plenty of footage of Hicks doing sketches and also of him both as a child and an adult. The video really brings the photos to life, and complements the photo-doco style of the film perfectly – there is a great sense of yin and yang visually and it really was a pleasure to watch.
Audio
If the photographs and the video are the yin and yang of the film, then the audio is most definitely the chi. Most of Hicks’ story is told through voice-over narration from his family and friends, which means that the audio is incredibly important in doing his life justice. The voice-over is well-edited and provides a great verbal accompaniment to the photos and videos. However, one of the pains of only using voice-over is that it can get confusing when three men are speaking in a row and their voices and accents sound the same. In standard documentary, there is an initial shot of the interviewee/narrator before the film cuts to photos or videos; American: The Bill Hicks Story doesn’t have that luxury and it really did render some parts confusing. Also, some of the audio from Hicks’ stand-up routines is not that great, but subtitles can be selected and it really doesn’t impact the overall experience of the film.
The audio is the chi to the visual’s yin and yang.
Unlike the voice-over narration, the music and sound effects was absolutely perfect and I couldn’t flaw any of it. While the use of sound effects really was minimal except for added emphasis to photos or narration, they were all appropriate and really contributed to the vibe of the scene. Going back to that mushrooms scene I mentioned earlier, the sound effects and music in that was so perfectly done that it enhanced everything the animators did. The music is also noticeable but not intrusive, which allows the story of Hicks’ life to get through to the audience with just the right degree of emotion.
DVD Extras
I’m always a sucker for the Extras on DVDs, and I pretty much had a field day with American: The Bill Hicks Story. There were actually so many extra features that I actually had to take a break from watching, get a coffee, and start again. The DVD is packed with deleted scenes, Hicks’ audio journals, animation scenes, trailer and audience reactions, featurettes, and rare/unseen footage from Hicks’ career.
The extras are definitely worth watching, especially the rare footage and animation scenes.
The best extra is, of course, the rare footage. After watching the documentary, my appetite to watch Hicks’ sketches grew and it was great to be able to move straight from the doco to some clips from his career straight away. The featurettes were also a cool little extra that had me entertained for a while, although I have to say that coming from the awesome visual style of the photo-documentary meant the standard shots were a little bit dull. The audio journals are also very hard to sit through after coming from such a visually powerful film, but the deleted and animation scenes were absolutely wonderful. The audience reactions were also a nice touch that really put the icing on the American: The Bill Hicks Story cake.
Final Comments
While I began this film clueless and blasé, I sure as hell did walk away feeling like I had truly watched a great documentary on a great comedian. There are a few tiny hiccups here and there, but the experience of the film is definitely one worth watching. You’d be forgiven for not knowing who Bill Hicks is before the documentary started, but after watching this you sure as hell won’t forget his name.
Oh, L.A. Noire, I am going to miss writing news about you and being excited about your release. Rockstar have announced the official launch trailer for their May 17 (US)/May 20 (AUS) release title will be available tomorrow morning on the L.A. Noire website.
The trailer will be made available at noon Eastern Standard Time, and will be the final trailer before the game is released in less than ten days. While the details of the launch trailer have not been revealed, judging from L.A. Noire’s previous trailers we can most certainly say it’s going to be great.
Today in the US, KONAMI announced that the latest in the portable version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5DS World Championship 2011 Over the Nexus is now available in the US region. Yu-Gi-Oh! is one of the most popular trading card game franchises in the world; with this game being set in the most recent* spin-off series, 5DS.
The game is being published on the original DS system, as opposed to the recent 3DS system. Though, this is probably because the game was released much earlier in Japan and was not built on a 3DS engine. The game features a storyline set in parallel with the hit television show and allows players to duel against the familiar characters from the program as well as new and unique characters introduced for the game.
The games story takes place in a desloate town called Crash Town. Players must make their way from here to New Domino City in time to make it into the World Racing Grand Prix, which is a giant tournament featuring duels and motorcycles.
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5DS World Championship 2011 Over the Nexus features some new and interesting features, such as:
- MULTIPLAYER: Battle anyone, anywhere, anytime via Wi-Fi connection and
compete in weekly duel championships each with new rules and live leader boards!
- REPLAY: Replay has been added, giving duelists the chance to save a
duel and review it again to see where they had the most success or lost! Even see what moves
the computer made!
- DECK DIAGNOSTICS: The Deck Diagnostics tool continues to give players
instant feedback by offering players the chance to evaluate their decks and create
better hands for dueling.
- DUEL PUZZLE EDITOR: The Duel Puzzle Editor allows players to post
questions and answers via Wi-Fi connection while gaining points and rankings.
- TUTORIALS: Beginning duelists can jump right into the game with the all
new in-game Tutorial that includes instructions in deck structuring and
coaching tools to make the best "next move."
With less than a week to go before the launch of L.A. Noire in the US on May 17, Rockstar have released yet another character dossier that will get you even more excited for the upcoming title. This time, the focus is all on Captain James Donnelly, the Officer-in-Charge of the Homicide desk.
Captain Donnelly is an Irish-born LAPD veteran, who is more concerned about cold, hard results than he is about the letter of the law. Donnelly is both respected and feared in the force, with a reputation as the pragmatic and no-nonsense officer. It is from him that Cole Phelps takes briefings and debriefings, and it is him that can make or break a man’s career in the LAPD.
Namco Bandai’s Level up 2011 event in Dubai has revealed a few things already but this is perhaps one of the more interesting current endeavor revealed tonight. Namco Bandai announced that they have been working on creating a Tekken film, a film they are calling Tekken: Blood Vengeance. The film will be entirely CG and although details are currently slim, we know that the movie will be released to theaters this Summer.
An official trailer was released alongside this announcement and you can see it below. From this trailer we can see that Dai Sato whose previous work includes Cowboy Bebop is responsible for the script while Shinji Higuchi of Evangelion fame is working on the storyboards. These two names have quite a lot of backing behind them especially with such famous animation works as Cowboy Bebop and Evangenlion, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out this Summer.
More news out of Dubai today from Namco Bandai’s Level Up event. During the event Namco Bandai showed off a brand new trailer for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon and although we can’t show you that trailer quite yet here, we can reveal that at the end of the trailer a release date for the title in the West was finally given.
Previously given no actual notification that Ace Combat: Assault Horizon would arrive in the West, this is good news for fans of the series. Now when can you expect to be flying your jet through the air and shooting down enemies into an agonizing plummet to the ground? On October 11th for North America and October 14th in Europe of course, and that will be for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The title has been touted as a reboot to the franchise so expect a lot of new changes to be revealed in the future.
