Remember Osmos? That game that simulates some form of Osmosis (get it now?) and you move a ball around the screen creating bigger balls until you have a really big ball? It is kind of like Feeding Frenzy, except with orbs of orbiness stuff.
But in all seriousness, the game was an Indiecade finalist last year, and actually has you playing as a celestial body trading off mass for movement (as you move you become smaller) and always trying to eat orbs bigger than you are (in order to become bigger again and get to move around). The game will be on sale on Games For Windows Live for $2.50 up until Wednesday of next week.
Indie Games don’t always get the coverage they deserve, and many times awesome indie games will fly right under the radar. Luckily Microsoft realizes this, and after making the huge mistake of hiding the indie marketplace they have fixed it and placed it somewhere more visible.
Now the “Indie Games Winter Uprising” is coming. A new developer-led initiative, calledIndie Games Winter Uprising, will hopefully shine even more light onto the indie marketplace and the many great games available there. According to the website (which is that link above) this timed promo will highlight many “great games” on the service with “prices as low as 80 to 400 Microsoft Points.”
This promotion will only last during the first week of December. Check it out, and hit up some of those awesome indie games.
Game Name: Faery: Legends of Avalon Platform(s): Xbox Live Arcade, PSNetwork, PC Publisher(s): Focus Home Interactive Developer(s): Spiders Studio Genre(s): Adventure, Role Playing Release Date: November 10th, 2010 (AUS) Price: 1200MSP US$15.00
It may not seem like much, but if you ever dreamt of reliving your childhood, or visiting some of those oft imagined fairy tails from some long forgotten dream, then French production house Spiders Studio may just have the game for you. Read on to find out how the legend of Avalon lives on in Faery.
GAMEPLAY
Publishers Focus Home Interactive, have a curious beast of a game on their hands with Spiders Studio breakthrough game Faery: Legends of Avalon. A gentle, charming game for the young at heart, it lends elements of role play, as well as text-adventure but also turn based combat more often seen in Japanese RPG. To be fair the whole concept is closer to the point and click adventures of days gone past, wrapped up in a loving art style and 3D animations- and yes, it is a game for girls.
I don’t think it is said often enough these days, but if there is one demographic for Faery it is young, or younger girls. Or perhaps a mother, daughter combo to help with all the reading. For reasons unknown, one can only assume budget; while the game sports some nice graphics- there is little to no voice acting or dialogue. Instead waves and waves of less than excellent English text. Playing as either an Elf or a Faery, the premise is simple as it is refreshing:
Magic has left the world(s) as man has moved outside of the realm of creatures and wishful thinking and slowly all the places that used to be full of such delight are being faded away into non-existence. The King has awoken you from your sleep to visit these worlds and find out why and how to stop the disappearance of all things magical. Played from the 3rd person view of a flying nymph, there are 5 worlds to visit, each based on a mythical or fairytale location.
The Sword in the Stone
Despite the fact that there is a lot of text to read through, and the turn based combat, while good- can be avoided entirely, Faery:Legends of Avalon does a number of unique things right. Weather or not you like the idea of playing as a pint sized creature, the perspective of the game is one of being very very small. It makes the game all the more interesting, when Seagulls can become ‘boss’ monsters and even small animals like ants are reasonably large. Playing through such imaginations as The Flying Dutchman or a giant Celtic tree of life brings new meaning, when you finally meet Humans and they are the size of the screen, trees and pirate ships come to life with the ability to literally fly to the top in between each and every leaf.
Another way, to spin it is, if you like the genre of high fantasy fiction then chances are you may just like this, but with a French twist all of it’s own. The production is obstinately European taking liberty with some of the best myths like the Flying Dutchmen, Oberon King of the forests and even Shakespeare and a number of other personality. Faery is not the longest game, padded out with some simple combat mechanics and a lot of side questing and although Spiders Studio obviously care about their IP the polish is not quite there.
Come fly with me
The constant flying, may take some getting used to, but for all intents and purpose it works well, despite an obvious lack of physics and animation. What is perhaps more dull than the tedious reading of so much text is the combat. There are 6 companions you can have at any one time, but swappable so that only 3 are ever in combat. As expected, enemies and AI take it in turn to attack each other, cause DPS and can buff with healing and magic.
Obviously, some care has been taken as there is a lot more depth than meets the eye, but Spiders have made it simple enough that everything fits into categories of Iron,fire,water,electricity and healing. Rather than actually level your character, you can assign “metamorphosis” to your character each level which includes additional wings, horns a tail or tattoos that buff and change the levels of your resistance or damage with the elements. This is not as compelling or smooth as Fable III and results in not much more than dress ups, with each enemy weaker to a different element.
Further more combat can mostly be avoided all together and this is where Spider Studios fall flat. As an arcade game, and with only 12 achievements, Faery: Legends of Avalon just doesn’t know where to sit. Each island area consists of a long list of fetch quests, reading copious amounts of poorly written English, until an area is clear and you move onto the next. Fighting has been included for those who want it, but the puzzles of combining objects to solve quests and consistently flying around can quickly become tedious for anyone over the age of 10. The levels themselves are rather small but well conceived with a beautiful art style.
GRAPHICS
You would think, that with a basic understanding of the English language and so much text, in-game the developers could have used spell check. Given the turn based nature of combat, at first glance you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a Jap-Euopean poorly translated port. Truly, within minuets of playing the spelling errors and grammar became apparent. Despite this, there is a very “cute” backwards manner in which all the creatures and magical beings speak.
The point about an adult being present, is well made though ,as not only will a youngster require someone to talk them through it, it may just be more enjoyable. The game is written like a bed time story, but hinges largely on better than average graphics.
The graphics employ cell shading over some detailed characters, with very unique and identified creatures including the half Human/Elk King and a large number of very small nymphs, gnomes, fairies, fawns and birds. As with other games that use this method though, issues arise with the cell shaded graphics and mix of low and high polygon models.
All the colours of the rainbow
Because of the nature of cell-shading; there is no brightness or contrast settings in the game. This can mean that at times the colours look either too dark or muddied as the dark outlines accent blurry or flat textures. The actual detail still exists in the models though, with uniquely crafted animals and AI partners. It may also be the first 3rd person game where you can swap your wings for butterfly, dragon fly or bird wings. Avalon is a very bright place for all intents and purposes and truly the more you play the game, the more you may fall in love with the levels. What starts out as a pretty average island level of sand and water, turns into a giant tree of mushrooms and little people living inside, where literally an intrepid explorer can fly up between each and every leaf.
Although the levels are rather small and can be traversed easily whilst flying, they stand as set pieces stereotyped into “the scary level” and “the desert level”. Again there are strong elements of Fable throughout and perhaps rightly so as the game was clearly designed in Europe. Clearly, Spiders Studio have put a lot of love into the game with well thought out levels and characters.
Further, and borrowing directly from other games like Mass Effect, all the text and dialogue can be either good (blue) or bad (red) resulting in less or more love from your friends. When they love you enough, things get awkward and then you are presented with a gift of armour or weapons. This copy and paste though of ideas is evident throughout the game, as there is never ever any incentive to say the “bad things” and at times, will result in being unable to complete missions (because the character hates you). In fact this is rather redundant and flawed gameplay mechanic smacks of Spiders trying to do too many things at once.
It would have been nice, if Spiders put some more effort into combat animation and effects for Faery, as well as cleaned up the dialogue and love/hate idea, rather than taking them on as an afterthought. Clearly it wants to be a game for young children, but tries to balance some more ‘grown up’ ideas in with mixed results.
SOUND
In a game like Faery, sound is relative, as one could argue the game is rooted squarely in either text based or point and click adventures. With that in mind, the insistent lack of dialogue or any voice acting is forgivable; however given the rest of the production perhaps music and effects, is not.
If there is particular music for combat or even a game theme tune, it is hardly remembered as the most obvious sound comes from the beating of your wings. This can in fact get rather annoying, but eventually tunes out to other noises like the birds and grunts of animals. To be fair, it is hard to fault Faery for not having ‘sound’ as this is obviously a deliberate and “artistic” choice. It works to focus the senses on reading the text and looking at all the pruurdy graphics. Anyone young enough to be interested may get bored, but may just skip all the text anyway.
VALUE
If you measure value, by the sheer size of file then Faery: Legends of Avalon is an afternoon delight. Weighing in at under 1GB there is a lot of full 3D graphical bang for your buck. On top the game lasts for anywhere between 10-15hrs, although as stated it is quite possible to get very bored long before you finish it. There are 12 achievements standard and a price point of 1200MSP which is reasonable considering the quality on offer. That said, try before you buy because the game really is not for everyone and only those who know exactly what to expect should consider purchasing. Also, sadly Spiders have not included any avatar awards: To dress up your Avatar like, well, a Faery.
CONCLUSION
When an unknown studio tries, at least tries to emulate some of the great gameplay from today: including evolving characters, cell shading, good/bad dialogue options and even turn based fighting- props to them. Inidi production crews deserve all the compliments for taking an idea and running with it. Unfortunately, the core of Faery really lies in the innocent nature of storytelling and text quests and does not need the added confusion of combat and “role playing” and romance. Someone should tell Spiders Studio that it is ok to make games for girls and ok to make games for children.
A lovingly crafted game, that is bigger than the sum of it’s own ideas, an enchanting tale but one that may ultimately- put you to sleep.
Two lousy days* is all that separates us. Two days until we can bring freedom. Two days until we bring victory. Two days for glory. Two days for unity. Two days until we can stab some corrupt villains in the back. Two days to take back Rome with some old school tanks. I ask the villians of Rome, “Is two days enough to settle your affairs? You know you won’t be taking care of anything for awhile.”
Game Name: The Shoot
Platform(s): Playstation 3, Playstation Move Required
Publisher(s): Sony Computers Entertainment
Developer(s): Cohort Studio
Genre(s): Shooter
Release Date: 28th October
Price: $59.99
Have you ever dreamt of being a real-life action movie hero? Taking down cowboys in a saloon, roughing up Mafia bosses or even mowing down hoards of Zombies just like umm… “A Movie Star” well grab that Sony Playstation MOVE controller whack in “The Shoot” and be transported to an array of Hollywood-esque themed movie sets to see if you have what it takes to shine as the brightest star in Hollywood. Lights, Camera … SHOOT’EM !!
“The Shoot” is an on-rails style shooter similar to House of the Dead, but nowhere near as intense and action packed. You have no control on where you’re going. All you have to worry about are the enemies on the screen and making sure you don’t piss off the movie director. The Shoot is fairly simple to play; all you need to do is aim at the bad guys press the trigger and blow them up into smithereens. You don’t even need to worry about reloading your weapon as I was constantly flicking the MOVE controller off the screen thinking that I had to reload.
The Shoot will not blow you away with any unforgettable moments, but it still is a fun pickup and play game that you can enjoy on your own or with a friend. As with all on-rail shooters the main point of the game is to ensure all the bad guys get shot before they shoot you. You’ll be taken through five different movie sets starting off with the classic western set where you can take down cowboys and dynamite wielding miners and save damsels in distress. You’ll also get to experience a Mafia Movie, Robot, underwater and everyone’s favourite, a zombie/monster horror movie. Each movie is broken down into four scenes with a stand-off with an end of level boss on the last scene.
You start each movie with five takes (LIVES) and the director’s happiness meter is your energy, impress him with super shooting and hit streaks and your energy meter goes up, if you perform poorly by getting shot or shoot innocent civilians the happiness meter drops; pissing off the director and forcing you to start from the last checkpoint. The Shoot focuses on accuracy and hit counts, the higher your hit streak the more points you will rack up and the more power ups you can earn.
This brings me to the Playstation Move controller, as with all on-rail shooters you’re success with taking down bad guys accurately and quickly all hangs in balance of how well the controller can handle the on-screen commands and reaction times the player throws at it. With The Shoot, even fine tuning the controller’s smoothness and sensitivity and re-calibrating it twice, I still found the on screen accuracy a little sluggish and not as quick as I’m used to with other on-rails shooters which was a little disappointing and frustrating at times.
The Shoot has a few unique little extras thrown in to help spice up the game and make it a little more interesting. Raking up a certain amount of hit streaks unlocks special moves that players can perform to gain the upper hand when the action gets a little hairy. The first special move is called Shockwave, to initiate this – the player will need to swing the MOVE controller around and perform a 360 style move in the air. If your successful this slows down time allowing you to quickly and easily take down all the enemies on the screen. The second is Showtime; to kick this bad boy off all you have to do is point the MOVE controller down towards the floor and press the trigger button, doing this will blow up nearly everything on the screen. The last move called Rampage will initiate when you point the controller into the air towards the ceiling and press the trigger button. This will let you go on a rampage with machine gun style shooting allowing you to rip into all the enemies on the screen without losing your hit streak if you miss anything. Both Showtime and Rampage are easy to pull off but the accuracy of Shockwave was a little hard to perform at times. Having to swing the controller in a 360 motion sometimes just didn’t register, if not pulled off first go and there’s a lot of enemies on the screen the feeling frustration can kick in, the director gets pissed off and you’ll certainly have to re-do that scene again.
Other motion action moves taking advantage of the MOVE controller have you side stepping left or right by moving the aim in the desired direction to move out of the way when a bad guy throws a knife at you, I found this pretty cool at first, but a waste of time as it was far easier to actually shoot the object out of the air before it got to me. You’re also able to duck by moving the MOVE controller down to avoid projectiles being thrown at you; this however is only available to perform at specific times in the game.
Video Review below takes you through The Shoot 101 class where you can see how everything fits together with the specials moves and other features.
The Shoot can be enjoyed as a single player experience or with a friend. They can either compete against you or assist you with obtaining a high score that will be posted on the online leaderboards, once you complete a Movie set the challenges and Score Attack modes open up allowing you to play each scene again to achieve high scores and obtain a five star rating, this certainly adds to the replay ability of the game.
Unfortunately The Shoot is a fairly short game, with five movie sets containing four scenes each, each movie will take you less than 30 mins. to complete. Of course like other on-rail shooters there are hidden collectibles to shoot / pickup along the way in the form of torn up poster pieces that will have you going back to find so that you can unlock the challenge modes, but if you’re not interested in collecting collectables then you’d be able to shoot yourself into stardom and complete the game in approx. three hours.
The Shoot is fun casual pick up and play on-rails shooter that can be enjoyed on your own or with friends. It hasn’t revolutionized the shooter genre in any way but it’s a nice little addition to the MOVE family and a welcomed return to the shooter style games on the PS3 that have previously only been available on the Wii.
Despite selling 5.6 million copies of the new Call of Duty: Black Ops, some have been rather upset with the PC version’s bugs online. Thankfully, those worries have been heard by Treyarch and a new patch is on the way for that version of the game. On the Community forums, JD_2020, a developer from the Treyarch team posted what to expect with the first run of fixes. Here is the post explaining the details of what should be expected in the patch. Also take note that some problems were recently patched as well, which are all listed below:
Hey PC gamers:
We are listening to you and we’ve been busy working on updates based on feedback from the community. We have already deployed a number of updates, and there will be many more to come. Stay tuned right here for all the latest info.
LIVE FIXES
11/10
* – GameServers.com has bumped sv_maxrate to 25000 across all servers to reduce lag.
* – GameServers.com continues to improve official server distribution in various worldwide regions.
11/11
* – Friends fix for join in progress and Friends tab in server browser.
* – Performance improvement for dual and quad core.
* – Improved connectivity with Black Ops Rcon tool.
IN PROGRESS
* – GPU hitching on certain graphics cards.
* – Incomplete server browser results.
* – Improvements to Quickmatch joins (results with better ping and reduced lag).
* – Zombies “The game session is no longer available” error.
Regards,
-JD
I am glad this was taken care of so soon, and I hope for the PC owners of the title’s sake that everything runs a lot better in the longrun. Hopefully, this will also be noted for future titles so problems like what when down with the PC version of Black Ops don’t happen to start with at launch time.
Eager to watch some Anime? Have you perchance already seen the first volumes of Our Home’s Fox Diety and Pandora Hearts? Then you are in luck because the concluding volumes have both been given release dates now by NIS America.
Pandora Hearts Vol. 2 will be released on January 25th with a premium edition. Our Home’s Fox Diety Vol. 2 however will be arriving a bit later on February 22nd. The premium edition of Pandora Hearts will come with a special grain effect, while Fox Diety will contain interview footage with the original Japanese voice actors of the series itself. NIS America says that this bonus footage racks up a quite long 280 minutes which is a great bonus feature.
One thing now however, with both of these series’ wrapping up at the beginning of next year, what Animes will NIS be picking up this time to localize in America? We shall see.
The Record of Agarest War series has already settled itself into a nice niche fanbase in both America and Japan. This is only more evident with the fact that Record of Agarest War Zero is making its way to American shores making it the second game of its type here. Now Compile Heart is working on yet another Record of Agarest War title and is more of a direct sequel to the first game.
They have recently released another trailer for the game, that you can see below. (NSFW) Sure it may look risque but there is nothing overly revealing inside the game itself considered that it has been given a rating equivalent to a T rating. The trailer itself doesn’t show off many of the gameplay features other than the perverted nature of parts of the game. Check out the trailer beneath that one for some actual gameplay outside of the risque parts. There hasn’t been any news of this one making its way outside of Japan, but considering the fact that the rest of the series has made its way out overseas there is a good chance of Agarest War 2 as well.
Just yesterday we talked about how UbiWorkshop, a branch of Ubisoft, had been teasing us with some information and a video about their latest project named Assassin’s Creed: Ascendance. Only a day later however Ubisoft has completely removed the fog of the unknown with new information regarding the project. As it turns out, Assassin’s Creed: Ascendance will be a short animated film that will take place during 16th century Rome.
The short itself will be available on November 16th, a few days away, and given a recommended price of $2. While we’re not sure how long the short itself is, $2 may be a bit much to ask. On the other hand Ubisoft has promised that the film will bridge the gap between AC: 2 and AC: Brotherhood. So if you are extremely curious as to what happened between when we last saw Ezio in AC: 2 and when AC: Brotherhood begins then your chance will be arriving soon.
Remember the days when Pac-Man was just a yellow guy that had a few colored ghosts chasing him around as he ate everything that sat in front of him? Well those days are gone but not forgotten. Because with Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, you will have your choice of being able to change your visual style to however you want to.
From appearances it looks as though you may be able to play as the good old classic Pac-Man, a revamped 3D looking Pac-Man, and even some psychedelic looking areas. It’s always good to spark a bit of life into good old Pac-Man with some fresh coats of paint. But that isn’t all because this new Pac-Man will feature a handful of new game modes that show sleeping ghosts that wake to your presence as you pass near them, and even a mode where quite a large number of ghosts are trying to take you out.
Unfortunately there has been no word from Namco Bandai as to when we will be seeing Pac-Man CE DX show up for purchase. One thing we do know however is that it will be available on both the XBLA and the PSN, so better get amped up for some Pac-Man fever.
