Due to some cheating, Sega has decided to reset Sonic 4’s leaderboards to get rid of all the highly impossible 0’00″00 times. Instead of finding an actual fix for the broken leaderboards they have just decided to wipe them and make everyone do everything all over again. Don’t think that is depressing enough? They still don’t have a fix, so don’t get too attached to all those awesome times that you redo, once the cheaters come back to play the leaderboards will probably be wiped again.
This is a fair warning to everyone. If you are actually still playing the game, just assume all those awesome times you are making don’t actually exist.
In most RPGs if a party member dies it isn’t a permanent thing, most of the time the game doesn’t even call it death. They are either knocked unconscious or pass out or fall, but most games rarely mention the fact that your characters may have just kicked the bucket. But that won’t be true when it comes to Tale of the Last Promise.
In the developer’s blog for the game, Producer Yosuke Uda explained that when any character in your party dies, they will be gone for good. This will create a high tension game that forces players to make tough decisions and play cautiously or risk losing fighters forever. The game itself will be focusing on the war between the magic kingdom of Yggdra against the armored Savi Shantie soldiers trying to destroy them.
While this type of gameplay element is rare, it is not unheard of as the hit series Fire Emblem often has this factored in. If a character is to lose all of his health in the middle of a battle then they will disappear, and afterwords have a short conversation with the main character saying that they are two wounded to continue and must leave the group. We are currently unsure of how the permanent loss of the characters will be handled quite yet but it looks to definitely raise the difficulty of the battles when it comes to health and losing fighters.
Feel like getting something for free? Well what if you have to work for it along with 999,999 others? Still interested? Good, because Criterion is planning to release a free DLC pack that will contain the Bentley Continental Supersports Convertible, the Lamborghini Murcielago LP 650-4 Roadster, and the Dodge Viper SRT10 Convertible Final Edition if they happen to get 1 million views on their trailer by December 12th 2010.
What this means is that while the viewer list is currently only in the 150,000 range there are still two weeks left to go to get this pack of cars for free. There hasn’t been any word if the cars will be released for a price if the 1 million mark isn’t reached so better watch the trailer. We’ve placed it below so it will be even easier for you to watch the trailer. Anyways whoever said that free things are truly free? Then again all you need to do is click one button and spend a minute and a half of your time and you could be getting something in a few weeks.
So you have braved the cold weather and probably spent more than you should have on all of the different deals that happened at the retail stores today. Then you turn on your Xbox 360 only to find out that there are even more deals happening right on the XBLA. Yep that is right, for today only Xbox Live members are going to be getting some pretty severe deals on a handful of different games. There is even one deal that isn’t a game at all.
The full list of deals can be seen below; I do believe that these deals are for the United States only unfortunately as a warning stated that these deals may not be available in all regions.
It’s always nice to know who you may meet on any journey especially one that will place the fate of the world in your hands. Thankfully Bioware has been willing to give us this information with character reveals and have just revealed a brand new party member named Aveline Vallen.
From the looks of her character bio on Bioware’s website she will be filing the roll of soldier and taking the place of Alistair from the first game. You can read her full bio below:
Aveline Vallen is a soldier, a master of sword and shield, and a tireless guardian… to a point. The daughter of an exiled chevalier, Aveline is not the knight her father wished her to be. Although fully trained in chivalrous combat, she was raised in the shadow of a lost life and will not lose another for the sake of honor. Protecting her adopted home of Kirkwall becomes a chosen duty, not a privileged calling. The people she stands for will not be wasted on lost causes or protecting the foolish from themselves. Pride can be bandaged like any other wound—when threats are dead and everyone is safely home.
There is no news if she will be one of the characters that players will be able to pursue a romance with like in the first game, but we will see when Dragon Age II comes out on March 8th on the PC, PS3, and 360.
Need for Speed Nitro-X (DSiWare: Electronic Arts, 800 Nintendo DSiPoints)
DodoGo! Challenge (DSiWare: Neko Entertainment, 500 Nintendo DSi Points)
Frenzic (DSiWare: Two Tribes, 200 Nintendo DSi Points)
Music on: Electric Guitar (DSiWare: Abylight, 200 Nintendo DSi Points)
As you can see, there are quite a lot of releases this week. To avoid the DSiWare missing out on the frenzy of ‘Hot Pursuits’ that has come amid the release of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit on consoles, EA have provided a Need for Speed offering on the DSi. Some of you may want to check it out. It is only 800 points which shouldn’t break the bank.
The Virtual Console upload this week is Faxanadu which is an action-RPG, originally published by Nintendo and developed by Hudson on the NES.
Chillingo, a sub-division of Electronic Arts, has just launched two new games on the App Store just in time for Thanksgiving. (Now you have more games to purchase to spend your Thanksgiving night :P). They are one of the leading publishers that have various chart-topping games at their disposal, including Cut the Rope and Angry Birds. Doodle Invasion, a doodle defense game and Agents!, a puzzle adventure game are now available on the App Store for $0.99 and $1.99 respectively. There is also a lite version for Doodle Invasion, available for testing purposes. Check them out at an App Store near you, and purchase them if you like it!
Doodle Invasion (BUY NOW!): Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a gigantic space ship and it’s dropping a big green DoodleInvader into the ocean…oh great. Use your doodling skills to create breakers to stop the evil spawn of the giant green alien from reaching Doodle Bay in this addictive and challenging doodle defense game! You’ll need to use your brains as well as your fingers. Draw the breaker across the screen to catch as many aliens as you can, once you do you have to steer them into the paths of the ships that helpfully suck them up. Be careful though, you can only draw one breaker at a time and there are going to be a LOT of Invaders.
Agents! (BUY NOW!):Infiltrate, investigate, and escape. Step into the world of a super sleuth in this espionage puzzle-adventure. You have accepted a mission to save the world from the threat of a top secret super weapon. An engrossing single player campaign and ultra competitive multiplayer gameplay await you in Agents! Explore offices and secluded country estates to find hidden information about the nature of your enemies…or even your friends. Leave no stone unturned and no filing cabinet unchecked as you work your way around the map. Find the documents, then find the exit-but be careful, you may not be the only spy on a mission. Will you complete your mission and remain undetected?
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World’s ‘Knives Chau Add-On Pack’ DLC is arriving later this week. Since only friday is left, probably tomorrow… or they meant next week; it doesn’t really matter. The DLC brings drop-in, drop-out co-op beat ’em up action, dodge ball and Battle Royale mode. You can also play as the new character Knives Chau (duh…).
Keep an eye out for the Knives Chau Add-On Pack on the Xbox Live Marketplace and PSN soon and check out the trailer below if you want to see the extras in action.
Steam is having a big “Give and Get” sale happening this weekend, with a few daily deals thrown into the mix. As of 11PM EST, you have 14 hours left before you can no longer grab these sweet deals. So grab them while you can.
So you want to make your own game; maybe the next Gears of War or Unreal Tournament. Youv’e just downloaded Epic Games Developer Kit for Unreal Engine 3.0 and now you’re stuck, staring at a blank bunch of windows and some test maps. How the heck do you do anything!
The first thing I noticed when you open the editor/ which is separate to the player, is just how similar the tools are to Unreal Engine 2.0 editor. More or less identical in fact. This makes it incredibly easy and intuitive for previous modders but still a bit backwards for the novice user. Below is a compile of many useful videos to check out BEFORE heading into the edtior, just to see if it’s for you. As well some n00b pro tips that may seem obvious at first but are also easy to miss when considering the possibility of making maps.
I for one was overwhelmed with a wave of nostalgia, I havn’t felt in years from my time teaching game design and level editing back in 2004. That’s right, I was employed ie payed to go into class every day and teach students how to make maps and levels: and trust me when I say, it takes time and patients.
– Building maps takes time. Obvious, but you must be willing to spend weeks if not months perfecting that ideal map
– The UDK will crash! Unreal 2.0 was notoriously buggy (many projects were lost) and on top of that, a decent rig is recommended to test the designs to their optimum- some features you use may not appear if the settings for graphics are not good enough or correct.
– This is NOT Gears of War. From the install the assesstts provided are for Unreal 3 only as with previous editors. So expect to make maps and arenas for Unreal using the weapons and default characters of the game.
–Making anything other than a level or map takes time, but also more advanced and higher levels of coding and tools. Making anything other than Unreal Maps and Mods, means importing from other programs and finding other asset’s or making them from scratch.
–You want that sweet Lancer gun from Gears, you may just have to model it yourself. Programs like 3D Studio Max or Maya support the Unreal Engine, and are required to make models, textures or other assets. Photoshop is the most useful for materials and skins.
–The Unreal Engine does not do everything! Game Engins are complex and made up of many 3rd party software for physics, video and lighting. This one Unreal 3.0 editor does not have them all. New updates include better surface mapping, materials and water reflections, lighting and shadows and dynamic physics, tree generation.
–Tutorials are your friend! If you can’t find the right software to do the job, there is usually a free alternative such as GIMP 2.0 instead of Photoshop. There is no shame in using tutorials to learn how to do something harder to basic. It has probably already been done before.
–Draw and write your ideas down. It all starts on paper young Jedis. Draw your maps and plan them in 2D from the top before trying to model them in 3D across the XYZ axis.
The Unreal Engine works on subtractive modelling; that is, you carve out levels from inside a box rather than additive modeling (think lego blocks), although seemingly backwards at first it allows for a solid foundation to build your map inside. Just remember what you are looking at is a 2D representation of 3D enviroment. You screen is flat! 3D is just an illusion (depth) it doesn’t really exist and if you want to see the back of objects, be prepared to rotate them from all angles.
Here is some light reading for starters:
The file format is MP4. No other codecs are required.
Each compressed archive contains one or more videos:
