Considering the NGP was literally just announced 12 hours ago, any rumors that we will hear should be taken with a grain of salt. But it appears that Eurogamer has heard from an unspecified source that the NGP will only be able to last for a maximum of five hours, possibly only four. Now this isn’t something that would be too surprising as the original PSP itself had a short lifespan compared to other handhelds at the time.
Also it is easy to see why the battery life would be so low, considering the fact that the NGP will be running a lot more advanced materials as well as providing stellar looking graphics from what we have seen so far. Of course also keeping a track of where you are while supporting 3G too. So while this is just a rumor at best, it is easy to understand why the battery life is so minimal. Possibly they will sell separate rechargeable batteries to give owners a chance to use it on long trips.
It’s tough enough when Isaac already had such a hard time trying to survive the first outbreak of Necromoprhs, but now he has to do his best to survive an even worse outbreak on The Sprawl. But all is not lost anymore as players now have the ability to download a few helpful DLC packs that will make Isaac just a bit tougher and less likely to be torn apart or killed in a variety of gruesome ways.
The Hazard, Martial Law, and Supernova armor and weapon packs are available today on the XLBM and PSN for 400 MSP or $5 respectively. The full list of gear for each pack can be caught below so you can pick whichever one suits your play style the best, though I think buying all of them would be just a little overkill.
It looks like Capcom has been keeping secrets. Now those secrets are revealed in the two latest charactes that have been revealed for Marvel vs Capcom 3. First of all we see the mutant capturing robot Sentinel returning to fight once again to take his enemies down with rocket punches and screen dominating size. It is interesting to see Sentinel’s reveal after it had been mentioned that he would actually not be returning to fight again.
Now for another interesting character reveal we see Hsien-Ko of Darkstalkers fame showing up to fight for the very first time. Hsien-Ko attempted to resurrect her dead mother with her sister Lei-Lei, but when this failed she was transformed into a Chinese Vampire and her sister Lei-Lei became that piece of paper you see hanging from her forehead. Ryota Niitsuma spoke before that no more Darkstalker characters would show up in Marvel vs Capcom 3 but it appears that he was misinformed. Catch both character’s videos below.
It looks like Bethesda isn’t going to put all of their chickens in one pot as far as their game releases go. Before we only knew that The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim was releasing on November 11th, and that RAGE was releasing on September 13th and 16th for the US and Europe. This meant bad news for our wallets already as two big games from Bethesda within a few month span equals a drain in money.
But it looks like our money will be leaving even faster than we thought because with the announcement of their 2011 lineup Bethesda has revealed that the middle of the year will also cost us dearly. Brink has been announced for a May 17th and May 21st release date for the US and Europe and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is going to be released on June 1st and June 3rd respectively. So this means at least we have a few months before all of these great looking games will be hitting shelves, allowing us to save up and finish up games in our backlogs. Especially before Skyrim devours our lives.
So last night Sony had this big event to reveal the totally unknown PSP2 under codename NGP, Next Generation Portable, to a world of completely shocked gamers (laugh). Seriously though, Sony finally revealed the damn thing. After YEARS of rumors, most of which were accurate mind you (you should get on that Sony), Sony finally decided it was time to stop playing dumb and announce their next platform to dominate the portable market.
For those who aren’t in the know, the NGP (PSP2 if you don’t care about corporate buzzwords) sports a 5 inch OLED screen, 3G +Wi-Fi capability, touch panel, front + rear camera and is able to produce graphics comparable to the PS3. This should come as no surprise since Sony has always been the hardware giant of the gaming industry, proving time and time again to “set the standard” for what current gen games should look like and what the hardware should do (their support of 3rd party developers and by association adequate software remains to be seen).
So this is all fine and dandy. There’s a new portable coming to town and it can display pretty things, stalk your friends and bring about the robot apocalypse. If you haven’t heard any of this yet and are still shaking with schoolgirl excitement, get a hold of yourself because we need to talk about the price. Sony has a bit of a reputation with its hardware being…shall we say “expensive”? No, that’s a common term and sounds like it’s only going to be 10 or 15 dollars above what you are willing to pay. Let’s use exorbitantly priced. Yeah, that sounds nice. That makes it sound like you will need to sell your house just for a chance to hold the precious handheld and if Gamestop has anything to say about it, appropriately so.
For all of that modern tech and glam, you gotta expect this thing to cost you an arm and a leg. The PS3 was $600 at launch and the PSP Go was $250 at launch. This is actually a sound marketing tactic. The idea is that when you first reveal a new product to the world you want to make sure that they associate it with a high price tag, i.e. “value”. This value will stick in their head, regardless of how much it actually costs to produce and is actually worth. Early adopters will drop the cash on it which only means insane profit while the majority of the common public will wait until it is more reasonably priced. Down the road when you inevitably drop the price to a more reasonable level, consumers will think, “Oh wow, that thing used to cost SO much, but now I can afford it! I better go buy it now because I like nice things.” It essentially makes the buyer associate the product with a higher-than-actual value so that when they can afford it they are more likely to buy it. This means slow sales at the start but fairly constant and desirable sales as the product matures as opposed to the strong initial sales with waning sales as the product’s lifetime goes on.
So you are probably wondering now why this article’s headline is talking about Gamestop. Sony obviously doesn’t want to reveal the price JUST yet. They only revealed the PSP2 last night. They want consumers to continue buzzing about it for a while. If they revealed the high price tag immediately, people would lose their excitement and instead carry the disappointing feeling of anguish knowing you won’t be able/want to afford it. This didn’t stop Gamestop, however. Known for procuring as much money from you as possible while ensuring that the developers get exponentially less than they deserve a la used game sales, the corporate giant has put up a price to pre-order the handheld even though Sony hasn’t given ANY indication as to what it will cost aside from saying it won’t be $600. This means that the price is a place holder and is not indicative of the actual price when it is revealed.
You ready for it? $999. That’s NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE DOLLARS.
Actually, no it isn’t. Because we aren’t children and are able to comprehend what the marketing ploy of labeling something as “.99” or in this case “999” actually means “1.00 plus tax” or in this case “$1,000 plus tax”. I’ll let you take that all in for a moment. Done? Good. Thankfully, it is highly unlikely that this is anywhere near the appropriate price. If you are filthy rich and like just spending your money as frivolously as possible because you like making others feel bad and cry and actually decide to take Gamestop up on this offer, you can rest well knowing that once the real price is revealed Gamestop will refund you the difference of what you surely overpayed. More (or less, depending on what your views are) important is that this hilarious little stunt only serves to embed Gamestop further in the pit of corporate greed that it has so easily fallen into. A mere second or two of rational thought would have told the Gamestop employee who put up this pre-order that this will likely scare away a handful of uninformed but potential buyers and associate Gamestop with a laughable magnitude of inadequacy. But no, Gamestop decided to bravely throw caution to the wind as if to say, “The hell with it. This thing will probably be expensive so I’m just going to post some arbitrary and most likely inaccurate number that I perceive as “big””
So good for you Gamestop, you sly, sad bastards. You keep thinking this will go for $999, let’s see how that turns out for you. For the future, try and put some thought into what you do. On second though, keep doing what you are doing. I’ll give you until the next console generation until you implode in on your own incompetency.
You know, giving the exact same game the same name in two different regions doesn’t make any sense these days. You must give multiple names to the same game so. Why? Ask Platinum Games, they seem to know why.
The new multiplayer online brawling game from Platinum Games was originally announced in Japan as “Max Anarchy.” This name won’t be coming with the game as it transitions to the western regions, North America and Europe. It will still have the same gameplay but Sega announced today that the game is being released this fall as Anarchy Reigns, on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the west.
SEGA states that Anarchy Reigns “challenges the boundaries of the conventional brawler genre” with large scale online multiplayer. The announcement continues by stating that several different multiplayer modes will be available, including modes such as tag team and “Battle Royal, where players can challenge others in a full-on fight for victory.”
Sounds promising! Just remember that “Max Anarchy” and “Anarchy Reigns” are the exact same game as you peruse our site. Based on the press releases we get our naming convention may be altered from news post to news post, since we have editors based all around the world.
Spare Parts Developer: EA Bright Light
Publisher: EA
Platform: Xbox 360 (PS3) Released: 19th January
Price: 800 MSP
Spare Parts is an Xbox Live Arcade platform game in which you take on the roles of robots Mar-T and Chip while they search for the titular ‘spare parts’. After finding themselves dumped out with the rubbish on a strange planet, they meet a friendly ship’s virtual captain program known as Con-rad (voiced by Simon Pegg), who then sets them the task of collecting all the parts of the ship so that he can build it up and restore the ship to it’s former glory. They must scour their new and hostile environment for these parts, all of which are guarded by evil robotic forces, as well as encountering the rather irritable natural wildlife enemies along the way.
First and foremost, Spare Parts is a co-op platformer. EA Bright Light have ensured to sculpt the game so it heavily leans towards co-op aspect of things, to a point where it could even be said that the came discourages playing on your own. The heavy emphasis on co-op is not only present in the level structure, but further embedded in the game mechanics. For example, both you and your partner performing a double-jump whilst next to and facing each other results in a short high-five animation which fully restores both of your health meters. Or, if you are both caught in combat doing the same move at the same time, the game awards you a ‘sync bonus’. It is compatible with both local multiplayer co-op and co-op over Xbox Live, with the former offering a fairly straight-forward drop-in, drop-out – although it isn’t displayed with any HUD or set of instructions, the second player simply has to press start any time in game to jump into the action, and then pause the game and select drop-out wherever needed.
I admit, I was excited by this release. From the the things that had been said about it, it looked like it was going to be an amusing co-op outing, maybe even one of the Xbox Live Arcade greats. Sadly, the final product falls short of the mark. Employees at EA Bright Light said before Spare Parts release that they wanted to blur the line between Xbox Live Arcade games and full retail titles: they wanted people to look at Spare Parts and be unsure whether it was a downloadable title or a shop release – and at least this much is true. The graphics are fantastic for an Xbox Live Arcade game, and set a good standard on the service with it’s crisp 3-D enviroment. Unlike other games, it doesn’t conform to the generic background settings we’ve seen a thousand times (a factory level, a cave level, a lava level, a jungle level etc.). Or at least if it does, it executes it a lot better with some evident variation in each of these common zones. Such as if you’re exploring the jungle, you will notice changes to the sceney, the setting, and without wanting to talk it up too much as it’s basically just light, medium or dark, but the lighting of each region is reflected in the graphics as well.
EA Bright Light has also put in some hard work trying to add some feeling to the game, to build fondness for and a sense of attachment to the characters. The two main characters, Mar-T and Chip have been characterised and given personalities through the introduction of eyebrows to convey their facial expressions. Their movement has also been humanised in an attempt to generate empathy for the protagonists. Even narrator Con-rad, voiced to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star tries to bring some of his humour to the table, cracking the occasional joke.
But unfortunately empathy for these characters doesn’t last long. The game starts off at a lingering snail-pace. This is understandable – most games have a tutorial phase for you to get to grips with your new game. Unfortunately, you soon come to realise that Spare Parts’ tutorial phase spans the entire game. You even soon come to dislike the once likeable Simon Pegg for his constant interruptions to the flow of play, halting your progress as gameplay stops and the camera pans to some confusing angle of a part of the level as Con-rad utters a mildly useful comment. These intrusive stoppages pretty much sum up the game, as the levels adhere to this stop and start structure, with very short, basic levels which are finished almost as quickly as they were loaded.
As a bonus, when returning to levels to go back and collect all the spare parts you missed the first time around in order to 100% complete the game, the irritating narrator poses less of a strong presence mean the game can have some form of flow. But sadly, the gameplay just isn’t up to scratch: dated platforming combined with basic puzzling and average combat does not make for the outstanding game expected, all topped off with a linear level structure featuring constant invisible walls that stifle any aspect of exploration or freedom. It won’t prove remotely challenging for any gamer worth their salt, and even young children will probably still breeze through the campaign without much difficulty. That said, collecting each and every collectable and amassing enough in-game currency to buy all upgrades can inject some extra life into the title, but even so, it’s still rather short-lived.
Although the verdict may seem like one of resounding negativity, this is only because expectations were raised high through the presentation and concept of the game. In actual fact it’s not a bad game, it’s just a big disappointment. It certainly shouldn’t be played single-player and poses about as much of a challenge as starting up the game and switching on the controller to play, but segments of quality shine through on occasion. As a co-op adventure it’s definitely bearable, and with basic levels and simplicity throughout, it makes an ideal kids game, or even if you are a fairly accomplished gamer but have a son/daughter/brother/sister to play it through with, then it can provide a few laughs and a weekend’s entertainment – quite sufficient bearing in mind it is only a downloadable game.
Pros
Suitable for younger players
Good fun played on co-op
Charming graphics
Simon Pegg’s voice-work adds comedic touch
Cons
Not to be played single-player
Lacks a challenge
Interruptions at every corner spoil any sense of rhytm
Linear levels blocked off by constant invisible walls destroy feelings of exploration
In an effort to make up for all those ever so slightly later release dates, SEGA are giving Australians an exclusive Conduit 2 limited edition package. You lucky people get the opportunity to pre-order the bundle which includes a for a rather swanky figurine of Agent Ford, and a 44-page art booklet.
Also in the Limited Edition of Conduit 2 is an unlockable new armour skin (the Gold Destroyer Armour) and an unlockable improved All Seeing Eye search device (the Eye of Ra).
It can be obtained by pre-order from participating retailers GAME, JB HiFi and EB Games, although it is worth the confirming with them that the Limited Edition is in stock.
Any Australians now got their eyes on this? And furthermore, any residents of the rest of the world extremely jealous?
An unknown and very talented artist has redrawn all 493 (this is not including the ones in Pokemon Black or White as it is not yet localized for the west) pokemon as cosplaying girls. Thats quite an astounding feat that must have taken days if not weeks or months to do this, I honestly can’t imagine the amount of time and effort that went into this. I can’t even draw one of these, let alone almost FIVE HUNDRED.
Click here to see the full image, but know that it is LARGE. The artist takes on a pretty cool style, making it so that pokemon who evolve have the girls age through the evolution process, e.g. charmander=little girl, charmeleon=teenager, charizard=adult. Once again, at the time of posting this the author is unknown, though chances are they are Japanese. Hopefully somebody discovers who it is so we can see what other awesome things they have created.
The award winning Mass Effect 2 has finally made its way to the PlayStation 3, and even better than that, it has made its way to store shelves in Australia and New Zealand. Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 provides a great jump in point for those new to the Mass Effect series to enter without having to worry about missing out on much of the story line.
Stepping into the boots of Commander Shepard, players must assemble and command a crew of specialists in the hopes of saving the galaxy. The only problem is that the chances of them surviving this mission are slim to none. It helps that along with the standard game content that comes with Mass Effect 2, players will also receive all of the additional DLC completely free of charge. Kasumi – Stolen Memories, Overlord, and Lair of the Shadow Broker all come with purchase and add over six hours of extra content. I don’t know what you are waiting for, especially considering Mass Effect 2 has never looked better now that it has arrived on the PS3.
