Can’t get enough of Okami for the Wii? Then you are in luck because Okamiden has finally been announced for western release. Though we still have to wait until next year, Capcom has set the release dates as March 15th for the US and March 18th everywhere else. Though the good news doesn’t stop there.
If you happen to pre-order Okamiden in the United States from a GameStop store you wil be recieving a stylus shaped like a paintbrush and a screen cleaner that features Okamiden artwork showing Chibiterasu and Kuni. Unfortunately this means that there won’t be any cute baby wolf-god plushies but at least there is some sort of bonus coming this time around for fans. There have only been 20,000 of these packages made, though so far the only place to get this bonus is from GameStop. You can catch some gameplay from the game itself below:
Title Name: Blacklight: Tango Down
Platform: PS3
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Developer: Zombie VR Studios Genre: First Person Shooter
Release Date: October 26th 2010
ESRB Rating: T(Teen)
Price: $14.99 (US)
Normally when games come out on multiple consoles one review will suffice. When one is delayed and changes have been made though, different reviews are often necessary. This is the case with Blacklight: Tango Down, coming out almost 3 months later on the Playstation 3. Xbox 360 players may laugh because they got it first, but Zombie VR and Ignition saved the best for last.
Story
Not much of a story here, but they tried. Blacklight is a hush hush secret ops unit that uses the most advanced technology in the world and puts them in the hands of soldiers. Blacklight was on a mission to search for a missing team and that is when the battle against The Order (the bad guys) came into full escalation. The Order are former spec ops and militia that have joined the “cause” and use advanced technology to fight against Blacklight. The story does not come into the game unless you are playing Black Ops.
Features
I should first bring out this is an online only game. You can not play any game mode without being connected to the Playstation Network. There are three modes to play. Quick match, Private match, and Black Ops. Quick match is the online multiplayer matchmaking mode. It has a few sub modes to choose from;
Deathmatch: standard every man for himself
Team Deathmatch: standard unit vs unit fight to the death
Retrieval: a capture the flag like mode using data canisters
Detonate: a one flag mode where there is one bomb on a map and you must bring it to the enemy base and defend to blow the base to kingdom come
Domination: capture points to get points. the more places you capture the more points you rack up
Last man standing: deathmatch with NO respawns. Makes you think before you go out guns blazing. Multiple rounds
Last team standing: team death match with NO respawns. Makes you think tactical to pull out the win. Multiple rounds
Private match is a private game where it is invite only. You can use all the maps and modes of Quick match. Sadly there is no splitscreen option for Private match or Black Ops. An addition of this feature would have helped a lot.
Last is Black Ops mode. 1-4 players can take on 4 missions in a fight against The Order. Quite fun by yourself and with friends to hone the skills for online play. Often you have to hack things, but you get no instruction on how to do it. You are left scratching your head and pressing buttons to figure it out. Once you do though, it is not hard hack through the levels.
Gameplay
In first person shooters this is what it is all about, the gameplay. If this is not solid the game is broken. Thankfully most of it is good. The controls feel good and I got the hang of them pretty fast. A big downside is they do not explain the controls to you when you first start playing. They just drop you in the game saying “here it is, play it”. There is control button in the option menu, but it just is not the same as the game showing you how to play. Another big hinderance to the game is there being no hit marker. It feels like there is no aim assist even when aim assist is turned on. Personally, I love the way this is made because that means you need skill to kill, but if you do not know your hitting the person it makes it harder than it should be. One thing I do love is the quite extensive customization options. You have four slots to make custom classes. You can choose from the default Assault rifle, Submachine gun, Sniper rifle, Heavy machine gun, and Shotgun as your main gun. You can put Red dots, Scopes, Different barrels, Different stocks and much much more. Once you get into the higher levels, you can make the guns your own and unique. You can also put different kinds of armor onto your character, like improving defense or putting different camo on.
The actual game itself can get a bit laggy even when your connection is perfect. Invisible walls and corners are quite frequent in matchmaking but I have yet to see a game do perfect on visuals and multiplayer. There are some changes from the Xbox 360 version. A new map called Crossover was added and “join in progress” have been added to multiplayer. In the Xbox version it took at least 10 to 15 minutes to find a game and begin to play. PS3 it takes about 5 minutes and your in a match. It was a really nice improvement.
Overview
This is my final verdict. This is the part where I decide if it is worth your 15 hard earned dollars. My answer is yes. I had quite a blast playing online. It feels like a 40 dollar retail game; a great core experience. I have not ran in to any glitches like shooting through walls or anything so that says something good about the developers. If your deciding on a Downloadable game you can not go wrong with Blacklight.
You can get the Blacklight trial and game on Playstation Network.
With Activision releasing Call of Duty: Black Ops being released next week, Activision is already settled in for the long haul when it comes to huge game releases. Though today they are also releasing a game that has passed mostly under the radar. Blood Drive has just been released today for the PS3 and the Xbox 360.
Blood Drive appears at heart to be a mix of Twisted Metal and Carmageddon with some zombies thrown in the middle. Players will be placed inside of an arena with a car fully equipped for a post-apocalyptic war and filled with zombies. Inside of this players will deal out damage to other cars with their weaponry all the while running down zombies like they were nothing.
Compared to what else Activision is bringing to the table this may seem like a smaller release that barely makes a blip on the radar, but take a look at this release trailer and tell me that you wouldn’t want to get in on some of that action, if nothing more to kill time until Black Ops.
Nintendo have put up a new Donkey Kong Country Returns trailer, showcasing just over a minutes worth of solid chest-bashing, vine-swinging, banana-grabbing gameplay. As you will see the game is looking absolutely fantastic, seemingly possessing the fluid gameplay of its predecessors that many gamers fell in love with in the past. It looks like the game will be accessible to all (like most of Nintendo’s games in recent years) with the vibrant graphical style and simple platforming, while still offering the challenging aspects of the SNES-era games that more dedicated players thoroughly covet.
The trailers crams in a variety of sections of the game, giving you a well-rounded impression of what to expect when it releases: Rambi the Rhino, Diddy Kong, Mine Cart antics and the game’s first boss. It all gets a look-in.
Nintendo has announced that Wii owners will be able to download demos of selected WiiWare titles starting this Friday. This is brilliant news as it bridges the gap between the long-standing option on other systems to trial demos.
A while back Nintendo tested the idea, offering a number of titles like World of Goo and Final Fantasy: My Life As A Darklord available to download in demo form. However, the service slowly faded out with only a limited number of titles to download. Hopefully Nintendo has more drive to maintain the demo service this time round, and fingers crossed it doesn’t go the same way as last time.
The WiiWare demo service kicks off with tasters of Furry Legends, Jett Rocket, ThruSpace and Zombie: Panic In Wonderland. They plan for each WiiWare demo will be available for a limited time from the Wii Shop Channel, with the line-up set to be refreshed on a regular basis.
For those hardcore Pokémaniacs out there (yes, you know who you are), Nintendo has released a launch trailer for PokéPark Wii: Pikachu’s Adventure that will be of course releasing on the Nintendo Wii. In this title, players take part in mini-games and other activities as Pikachu tries to find all of the Sky Prism pieces and protect the PokéPark and all of it’s inhabitants from danger.
The music in this trailer is very happy and upbeat so I expect that the game will play out the same way. I am a fan of some of the Poké-spinoff titles and I will be trying this one out as well soon even though I am still holding out hope for a Pokémon Snap 2. Anyway, check out the launch trailer below and you can now find PokéPark Wii: Pikachu’s Adventure in stores everywhere.
Last week the gaming/nerd culture channel, G4, was dropped from satellite TV provider, DirecTV. On the outside, this may seem like a dire blow to the gaming community, but interestingly enough, this is not so.
G4 had originally started out as a more “indie” and “true” nerd channel, named TechTV, previously being hosted by internet legend Kevin Rose, creator of popular news and pop culture aggregating website, Digg. When it started out, the channel had shows like ScreenSavers and the Electric Playground, with Kevin Rose giving real tech advice (often for the more tech savvy viewer) on day to day problems for the former and game making legend, Tommy Tallarico, weighing in on the various games that were being made and coming out for the latter.
As the channel’s popularity grew, so did it’s need to break out of the “niche” audience and attract the less tech savvy, everyday person, more on the order of what Spike TV does. Using TV “celebrities” like Kristin Holt and Olivia Munn, G4 became moderately popular, building shows around funny videos from Youtube and doling out the periodic tidbit of news that would be relevant to the channel’s new demographic. Unfortunately, amongst all of this, the constant and monotonous rerunning of the show, Cops, (and various variations such as Campus PD) have become synonymous with the channel. Nowadays if you turn on the channel, you can bet that some form of Cops will be on for several hours at a time.
A DirecTV rep was quoted today saying, “At this time we are no longer negotiating and we have no plans to put G4 back up…Since G4 is among the lowest rated networks based on the latest Nielsen data, we decided that it made sense to focus on preserving programming that is more relevant to our larger customer base.”. Sadly, this isn’t that surprising. I, personally, loved the channel back in the day and even for a bit of its newer lifestyle, but I honestly haven’t watched the channel in at least 2 years, due to a combination of now having seen every Cops episode at least 4 times and generally not caring about the uninspired cashing in on today’s pop culture that the channel thrives on. G4 was quoted saying, “We have been trying to engage DirecTV in fair and reasonable discussions to continue to carry G4. G4 offered DirecTV the same basic deal we have had for the past three years. However they still plan to drop the network and deny G4 fans the only network that focuses on the popular gaming lifestyle.” While this may not be a dire blow to the general gaming community, it surely is for G4. Barring my opinions on the channel’s quality, the fact that G4 is owned by Comcast, a huge rival to DirecTV, MAY have a hand in all of this. Just sayin’.
November 16, 2010. Remember that date. On that day, DO NOT leave your car unattended or with a valet. Especially if you own a Lamborghini. You do own a Lamborghini, right? This is fair warning from EA then, as most valets will be too busy playing Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit to worry about a lousy car. After all, why bother driving one Lamborghini when you can drive any car of your dreams, even cop cars? Exactly, there is no point.
The video embedded is the first in a series of trailers detailing exactly whats gonna happen to that fancy sports car on November 16.
Back when Dynasty Warriors 7 was first announced by Koei the game was listed as a PS3 exclusive inside of Japan. That will not be the case however as Koei announed today that once the game travels overseas to the US and Europe there will be two versions, one for the Xbox 360 and another for the PS3.
This version of Dynasty Warriors will bring the storyline beyond it’s usual limits and include the Jin Dynasty and introduce even more new warriors to the already huge roster. There will also be PS Move support and 3D support, though there has yet to be any news of Kinect support if any. No real news yet about an exact release date for the game beyond Spring 2011, but those who love hack and slash and killing thousands of enemies on one battlefield should be excited to hear that it will not be an exclusive anymore.
Today Major Nelson and Microsoft revealed the Xbox 360 Holiday Bundle. The bundle includes a 250 GB console, a copy of Forza 3 and a token for downloading Alan Wake. It will retail for $299.99. This console bundle is in addition to the 250 GB and 4 GB Kinect packages. In other news, Alan Wake will be downloadable soon. Read the Major’s full post.
