August 2010 Archives

Shank is a game you play with beer, chips and a dumb grin on your face, the kind of grin you get when the hero's sole responsibility is leaving a trail of kicked asses in his wake.

Such is the simple, barbaric pleasure in Klei Entertainment's short offering to the beat-em-up genre.

It's an artistic, bloody and whimsical exploration of the art of thug killing, carrying hints of films like "Desperado" or "Kill Bill" and merging them with the essence of side-scrolling attack-a-thons like the 8-bit Ninja Gaiden. It's simple, brutal and joyfully un-epic fun.

I kind of had a feeling that this would eventually happen.

The more successful Xbox Live has gotten over the past year had also made me think that maintaining all of that fancy hardware was going to eventually get very expensive. What I didn't like was how laissez faire Major Nelson was in announcing this change.

I think he's done a great job as a community face that we can look up to for the latest Live news, but I wish he was allowed to say more than this on why the change is necessary before we simply pay up. But this part struck me as particularly funny as if it were a concession to the rest of the world:

This price increase only affects Xbox LIVE Members in Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom or the United States.

Only? Considering that the countries named also happen to be within the largest regional markets for Live in the first place, that's kind of like saying the common cold only affects people with a pulse. Having little other than the usual boilerplate that "Xbox LIVE Gold membership will continue to offer the best value in the industry" to work with, I can understand the fury from the posts in his announcement thread.

If you need an idea of where the prices are headed, here's the chart that's expected to go into effect on November 1st of this year:

So how is this going to affect you? For regular subscribers, probably not too much other than the queasy feeling of not knowing just why its going to be more expensive. And with attacks on the used gaming market by EA and THQ, it's going to be an expensive hobby for those of us that want to keep playing while watching our wallets at the same time.

By Brittany Vincent
Contributing Writer

Scott Pilgrim did more than meet the girl of his dreams. He met her in them. Ramona Flowers, a delivery girl for Amazon, is beautiful, mysterious, and changes her hair color weekly.

Unfortunately, there are seven major problems standing in the way of their happiness together: Seven evil exes.

These are failed suitors who want to keep Scott from dating her, all of them organized under the greatest ex of all, Gideon Graves. It's up to Scott to finally find the power of love within himself in order to conquer Ramona's jilted partners and nab a "good" ending for the both of them.

In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, an adaptation of the comic series and feature film, you'll take up the mantle of Scott, Ramona, or one of the members of fledgling band Sex Bob-omb on a raucous and thoroughly retro-licious journey to take out six evil ex-boyfriends and one evil ex-girlfriend.

Like the comics and movie from where this violent rainbow sugar rush of a side-scrolling beat-em-up came, this release relies on old-school gaming sensibilities and cheeky gaming references to create one of the better and more enjoyable book/movie tie-ins of all time.

Unfortunately, it's not one of the best video games you'll get your hands on. While this 8-bit brawler practically oozes style and classic gaming goodness, it doesn't quite make up for its plentiful problems.

My problem with Kane and Lynch's first outing was its heavy handed and clumsy take on making these two guys reprehensible bastards at nearly every turn.

There's the kind of cool badness that Robert DeNiro can deliver onscreen, and then there's the annoyingly preachy kind that has to remind you with every line of dialogue just why a character has had a maladjusted life after making that point several scenes earlier. Both Kane and Lynch fell into the latter category.

That, along with a lame boss fight against a giant dump truck, trashing its gritty start with a sudden about-face as a jungle shooter, and its weak multiplayer, Kane & Lynch felt squandered like so much loose change at the toll booth. So now we have the sequel, but while it improves a few things, it also manages to commit new criminal acts along the way.

Pro football and the Madden game franchise have been part of the same sports/pop culture fabric for more than two decades. You don't spend that kind of time together without learning how to evolve.

The real thing has witnessed the growth of ideas like the West Coast Offense, spread formation and defensive schemes. The games have withstood everything from passing windows to passing cones to the ProTak animation system.

But in the end, it's still about how good the football is, and in the case of "Madden NFL 11," some of it's better than it's been in years.

The next Terminator feature might not be live action, but a 3D, PG-13 rated animated feature called Terminator 3000. A number of sites are reporting that distribution company Hannover House had allied itself with Red Bear Entertainment to produce the movie budgeted at $70 million.

Story details are under wraps as usual, but they are also thinking about reducing the violence to keep it under PG-13. How soon we forget the last stab at making Terminator a PG-13 feature with the sleep inducing Salvation. I'm still trying to forget the ending.

But seeing it as an animated feature? It's different, but it could work. In the right hands and with the right story, it could get past that PG-13 stigma and give us something great. The Secret of NIMH is rated G, but watch it today, and you might think twice about that.

Then there's G.I. Joe Resolute which managed to be a mature update to the franchise that turned out to be a fantastic move. With examples like these, there's some hope for this fan that it could turn out better than I expect. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on this one, especially if it has the potential to bring an animated Governator onscreen.

UPDATE (8.14.10): According to Deadline, there's a future war brewing over the film. Pacificor, the outfit that owns the rights to the Terminator franchise, apparently didn't know about this until the announcement by Hannover House and so have sent a cease and desist letter. Hannover House, in turn, claim to have certain rights that allow them to make an animated film outside of a live feature. Who is right? I guess we'll just have to see what happens next.

Today, the wraps come off of Irrational Games' next big project, something that has been cloaked in secrecy on the official site, whatisicarus.com with a countdown clock locking it away until now. Bioshock Infinite is on its way.

That it's another Bioshock title wasn't too surprising. That it takes place in 1912 in a floating city was, turning the "Bioshock" brand into more than something that takes place underwater. According to the main site, the story (set in 1912) goes something like this:

"Former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt has been sent to rescue Elizabeth, a young woman imprisoned in Columbia since childhood. Booker develops a relationship with Elizabeth, augmenting his abilities with hers so the pair may escape from a city that is literally falling from the sky. DeWitt must learn to fight foes in high-speed Sky-Line battles, engage in combat both indoors and amongst the clouds, and harness the power of dozens of new weapons and abilities."

But looking further ahead, what Irrational seem to be hinting at with this change of venue is that the series could be extended into other interesting historical periods where aberrations in technical know-how embrace the social strata of each in surprising extremes.

We had a taste of the 1950's with Andrew Ryan's Rapture. Now we'll get to see what Ken Levine and his crew have planned for the year that the Titanic sank, Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and which stood at the beginning of a decade that would change a world where the spirit of discovery remained stronger than ever.

I'm already psyched over steampunkish take shown off in the first trailer below. Weird science and psychic powers? Irrational is such a tease. The only thing that would probably make it better is a cameo by Edgar Cayce. Or an actual release date.

Folks, here's a look at the Bioshock Infinite trailer. Enjoy.

They also think that Kazuma Kiryu walking around and getting into as many fights as he does is just bad for business.

Boing Boing has a piece by Jake Adelstein and fellow writer, Lisa Katayama, asking actual Yakuza to sit down with Sega's beat 'em up and share their thoughts on it.

Jake Adelstein is the author of Tokyo Vice which covers the time he spent as a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun after he had passed their entrance exam, surprising himself as well as his employers when he showed up. It's a great book that gives an inside, and deeply personal, look on his twelve year journey into Japan's underworld as a Westerner working the crime beat in Japan's largest newspaper. Today, he works as a consultant on the yakuza and does his part in Polaris Project Japan to help fight human trafficking.

His career had also put him in touch with a wide variety of colorful people who prove that truth is stranger than fiction. People like the yakuza who were willing to play the game and call Kazuma Kiryu a guy who dresses like a punk.

The article is both interesting and hilarious at the same time, especially on what was said on the fighting and the look of Kazuma Kiryu, and well worth a read especially if you're a fan of the series.

Risen sets the player loose to die at their own peril in their quest to save the world. That is, if the bugs don't eat them alive first.

I'm not talking about the giant bugs that can kill you in seconds. I'm talking about the kind that can turn your screen yellow, make the ground invisible, or respawn you in the ceiling of a big room after reloading a save forcing you to drop to your death. I hope you save often.

EVE, if you haven't heard of it, is a space-based MMO run almost exclusively by the players. The economy, wars, and conflicts within the game are mostly against corporate empires run by and filled with real people piloting and building ships making it a place where anything can (and has) happened.

MMO site, Massively, has the goods on this latest collision between real-life and what should have been a relaxing evening for one trader in the game.

In short, the main currency used in EVE is called ISK and, like gold farming, has its own shady cottage industry where people with money can "buy" ISK instead of earning it the old fashioned way. It's not legal according to the game's rules, so as one way to fight this, EVE's developers created the 30-day Pilot License Extension. Players can buy these with real cash to extend their membership.

Now here's the rub: it's also represented as an item in the game which can then be traded for ISK. Thus, people can buy a PLEX (as the Extensions are called) and trade it to other players for massive loads of ISK if they want to. We're talking billions. Later, they made it so that PLEX could be carried on ships for transport. You can see where this is going.

One player apparently had 74 of these things in their ship when two raiders came by and attempted to seize it...only to end up destroying the ship and its cargo. Real world value? $1,294 USD. And in EVE, since this was technically within the rules of how it is played where risk is everything, I don't expect any of that to be coming back to the owner.

Ouch.

Armchair aces can rejoice: Namco Bandai announced today that they're coming out with a new Ace Combat for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 due out next year. According to Gamespot, the game will again sport single and multiplayer modes just as Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation did in '07. It also marks the first Ace Combat to debut on the PS3, though the series has come out on the PSP.

The trailer suggests that this is going to be a rebirth for the series, a "game changer" as another hint points out at the start and it looks to this fan that it's going to follow the cue of Joint Assault, Ace Combat's upcoming entry for the PSP. Previous Ace Combats on consoles and portables had taken place in a fictional world analogous to our own with licensed jets. This time, as you can hear the pilot mention Miami in the trailer after the global graphic, it sounds like it's going to take place in our own backyard.

The Ace Combat series has always prided itself on being an arcade flier's fantasy with lead rounds and gobs of missiles writing explosive poetry against impossible odds that only Michael Bay could dream of. The series might not have the kind of hardcore realism that IL-Sturmovik had brought to the table with its console debut, but it can always be just as fun sending multimillion dollars' worth of scrap to the ground by the squadron, Hollywood-style.

Can't wait to see more. For now, here's the trailer below.

Remember the Ghostbusters teaser from Zootfly? Though Zootfly didn't get to actually develop their own Ghostbusters game because they couldn't get the rights, the video showing off their concept work in 2006 created a huge, happy buzz on the 'net as if pink slime had bubbled up from everyone's screen in seeing it.

It also helped to convince Sony that there was an audience out there hungry for Ghostbusting. When Terminal Reality, who was already working on their own project pitch, were waiting to hear the good news, Sony was ready to believe them. Atari published the game in 2009 with a multiplatform release.

So what do London and robots have to do with the Ghostbusters? According to Destructoid, a pitch video created by former Ubisoft artist, Fanny Vergne, and a few others at Ubisoft Montpelier had been leaked into the wild and it's not half bad. It might not be based on a well known IP involving spirits, but it's still an amazing, if short, piece of digital fantasy. Since they broke the news, however, Fanny Vergne requested that the art and clip be removed from their site, but not before they had already hit other sites that decided to follow the story.

Now here's where it gets weird. Depending on where you read the news from, the video has also had something of a strange trail to follow with some sites stating that Ubisoft canceled the game when it wasn't a game cancellation at all. The video link below on Youtube even says that it's a canceled Ubisoft game (along with others that have uploaded the clip under their own accounts), but it's not according to Destructoid. Kind of hard to cancel a game when it hasn't even gotten past the pitch meeting.

But the footage is already out there in the wild along with a few pieces of neat concept art, under whatever header the articles they are featured in want to call them. It certainly looks creative, flashy, and is one of those things that we had gotten a taste of but will probably never get to see as a game.

Unlike Ghostbusters. But who knows?

Remember the Alec Baldwin superhero flick, The Shadow? Wait, you don't remember Alec Baldwin as a superhero, period?

It's not too surprising considering the drubbing the film was given when it came out in '94, but I liked it enough for its stab at the 1930's radio show and pulp series it was based on. Even if you haven't heard of The Shadow, you've probably seen his modus operandi of working at night as a costumed detective fighting crime in the big city influencing certain other heroes elsewhere...such as Batman. For the film, the costumes, set pieces, the soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith, and the end credits sung by Taylor Dane certainly made its big screen debut impressionable.

It's too bad that its plot based on a psychic descendant of Genghis Khan and a superhero who could control men's minds were forced to wither in the shadows cast by Tim Burton's Batman duet, even with Tim Curry as a slobbering madman. It even had the beat 'em up tie-in by Ocean on the SNES pitting the player in a Streets of Rage like battle against street thugs and Mongol warriors.

But the rumor mill is spinning its wheels on whispers that Quentin Tarantino might be attached to a reboot of what was supposed to be the first film of an ongoing series. Fox has picked the rights up and there's talk that David Slade is on board to direct. On one hand, I'd love to see what Tarantino can do with this kind of material.

On the other, if it ever does come out, I hope that the game doesn't suck.

... you could do worse than this one.

(Via Valleywag)

Ever wonder what Halo would have been like if it came out in the early 80s on the Atari 2600? Would it be better than Pac-Man?

Ed Fries, the former VP of Microsoft's game publishing division, cobbled Halo 2600 together while doing a little retro research into learning how to program for Atari's classic console. It debuted at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas and he even went as far as to create a hundred 2600-style carts complete with label art.

In case you happen to be like me and now have the urge to pull your Atari 2600 out of mothballs, but no RF connector on your LCD TV, no worries. You can use your browser to play the game instead. Clicking on "Reset Game" starts it up, arrow keys handle movement and the spacebar is for shooting...once you find a gun, that is. You can also only shoot left or right it seems. Fortunately, there are shields that can protect you from one hit if you can find them.

It plays partly like a mix between Swordquest, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and maybe even a little Wizard of Wor. And it's definitely all fun.

Try it out here.

By Brittany Vincent
Contributing Writer

The Dragon Quest series' relationship with gamers outside of Japan hasn't exactly been a stable one, especially out West.

It's certainly not because of quality. Memorable characters, heartwarming adventures, and artwork from Akira Toriyama create experiences just as worthy of your time and attention as any Final Fantasy title.

This is further proven in the series' latest iteration, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies. It not only echoes what has made the Dragon Quest saga memorable, but is also the first numbered installment to receive a handheld-only release.