Archive for July, 2009
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Filed under: MMO
Austin-based Heatwave Interactive has been around for a couple of years now but the game developer-incubator hasn’t really reveal what projects it plans to create. That changed this week with the announcement of Platinum Life, described as a online title that’s centered around the hip-hop music culture.
Heatwave states that the game will have players start as an unsigned music artist and have them work their way to the top of the hip-hop music business. The game has already signed real life hip-hop music artist T.I. to lend his likeness to the game. Heatwave says the game is still in its early development stages and plans to sign other music artists to contribute to Platinum Life.
Heatwave Interactive announces Platinum Life originally appeared on Big Download Blog on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Reminder: The ModernMethod network will be down most of the weekend. Probably a good time to actually play those things we talk about all the time, huh?
Rev ranted, Jaffe ranted right back, Colette talked to the devs of Alan Wake, we reviewed Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Nick checked out Shadow Complex, Jim previewed Left 4 Dead 2, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is going to be amazing and more awesome happened on 07/31/09.
Destructoid Originals:
New characters in Left 4 Dead 2 a ‘terrifying’ prospect
Valve: Fight used sales by making good, supported games
RetroforceGO! episode 97: Final Fantasy VII
Rev Rant: Fun isn’t enough
Art Attack Friday: lastscionz
Interview: Majesco’s Pete Rosky talks A Boy and His Blob
Fanboy Friday: We don’t need another tard
A weekend without Destructoid – server upgrade time!
Friday Night Fights: Quake Live winners announced!
Jaffe Rant: shut the f*ck up, Anthony
Alan Wake devs talk story, gameplay, sequel possibilities
The Videogame Show What I’ve Done: Cool Spot
Community:
Off-Brand Games: Power Blazer
Community blogs of 07/31/09
Forum of the day: 360 exculsives to PS3
Reviews:
Marvel Vs Capcom 2
Previews:
Two hours into Shadow Complex and I’ve…
Left 4 Dead 2
Contests:
And our Overlord II contest winner is…
News:
Could new Squenix teaser promise a Final Fantasy VII remake?
Woman bought Live Vision camera for boy, offered ‘free show’
Price drop part duex: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled now $10
Mana Khemia 2 gets a PSP version already?
PS3 production costs down 70% (CAN I HAVE A PRICE CUT PLZ!?)
Rock Band DLC: Next week Spinal Tap is gonna rock you next week
Never say never: Yakuza 3 statement not official, says Sega
Resonance of Fate gets US/EU simultaneous 2010 release
New DSi update brings flash cart device blockery
Tony Hawk: Ride, Blur get GameStop pre-order content
Dawn of War, Company of Heroes games half price on Steam
WET to dampen your consoles on September 15
INVESTIGATIONS: Miles Edgeworth Web site is now live!
Braid gets rated for a PlayStation 3 release!
Resident Evil 4 Wii sales edge out GameCube version
Pearl Jam’s new album available in Rock Band upon release
Offbeat:
The Katamari wedding to end all geek-themed weddings
Media:
Rock out with your Avatar out in Guitar Hero 5 on Xbox 360
Introducing Darkest of Days’ stockpile of weapons
Tekken 6: Hori stick, art book, new campaign mode
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story has some videos
Come see what being abducted in Fallout 3 looks like
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Filed under: Indie, Arcade
Some games breed discussion as to whether they are an art game or just a regular game that happens to have artistic merits. The Beggar is one of these games. A browser game utilizing Shockwave, The Beggar is all about a Beggar that has been thrown out of a castle for being way too poor. He must beg his way back into the upper echelons of society, and reach the castle once more.
The Beggar can do a few things. First of all, he can beg, which will make some people give him money and other people run to alert the cops. If you beg in front of a cop or someone tells them, the cop will chase you down and take some of your hard-earned money. Don’t forget to eat as a beggar, as you can’t live forever without food. There are a total of four endings, each being particularly poignant and heartfelt for such a simple, unobtrusive game.
[Via IndieGames]
Get enough money to enter the castle in Beggar originally appeared on Big Download Blog on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Agnostic mountain climbers today don’t know how good they have it with global positioning devices, high altitude helicopter rescue parties and 457 kHz standard avalanche beacons, something I realized while playing Deep Silver’s Cursed Mountain.
Step into the shoes of Eric Simmons and his missing brother Frank if you want to know what mountaineering was really like back in the day. Or at least how it was back in the 1980s, when you still needed the blessings of a yogini to get to the summit of a fictional Tibetan mountain. If the yogini’s appeasing-the-mountain ritual failed, then all the science in the pre-Internet world couldn’t save you.
What Is It?
Cursed Mountain is a survival horror game developed by Deep Silver Vienna exclusively for the Wii. Players take the role of mountaineer Eric Simmons and scale the haunted Mount Chomolonzo in the Himalayas to search for your brother, clues to why your brother went missing and a sacred Buddhist artifact called a terma that some rich dude with a peg leg hired your brother to find.
What We Saw
I plowed through the first three levels of the game in about 90 minutes in the comfort of my own home.
How Far Along Is It?
The game ships at the end of August, but I’m playing on a preview build that’s probably a month or so old. The graphics aren’t as pretty as they could be, but everything works.
What Needs Improvement?
Game Should Come With a Wrist Brace: I wouldn’t call this game a waggle fest because the combat requires rigid motions to perform the Buddhist rituals that banish attacking ghosts. However, my wrist still hurt after one particularly ghost-filled level. Part of it was probably due to the sheer number of ghosts that need banishing and part of it was from aiming at the ghosts while in the Bardo state. You go into Bardo by pressing C and have to point with the Wii Remote both to aim at ghosts and to turn Eric, since his feet are rooted to the spot while in Bardo.
Eric Can’t Take Corners: Most of the game takes place in wide open, agoraphobia-inducing spaces; however some of the early levels force Eric to go through houses with far too many doorways and corners. I realize that mountaineering gear weighs the body down, but even in a space suit, it shouldn’t be that hard to move between rooms in a house – especially when there’s a ghost after you.
The Writing: I dig the plot, but the dialogue script and a lot of the text in documents you find throughout the game could use a Stephen King treatment. It’s the least scary part of the game.
What Should Stay The Same?
Creepy Music: The music in Cursed Mountain is subtle and eerie, just as it should be. The developer says the US-exclusive Steel Box version of the game will come with the soundtrack.
You Don’t Have To Use The Buddhist-kill: You can get rid of ghosts by melee-attacking them until they’re weak and then finishing them off with one blast from your enchanted pickaxe in the Bardo state. No motion controls necessary, except the aiming portion in Bardo.
Complex Plot: The story in Cursed Mountain is not so simple as “there’s the bad guy, go get him.” Even if you can tell who’s to blame for the mountain being cursed right from the beginning, you can’t quite fathom all of the events that happened leading up to it. This makes you suspect nearly every non-playable character you meet (though there aren’t very many of them) and at one point something so terrible was revealed that I started to wonder if my character’s brother was even worth saving.
High Anxiety: Fans of the horror genre know that there are different kinds of scary. There’s jump-out-at-you scary, psychologically disturbing scary, sad-and-eerie scary and OMG-so-violent scary. Cursed Mountain relies on the first kind of scary at the beginning of the game, but eventually, it starts to incorporate a lot of the second. By the third level, Cursed Mountain was making me downright anxious both with its setting (being alone on top of a mountain where the sky stretches out around you for miles) and with its plot (why did my brother do that?!).
Final Thoughts
Based on the reaction I got to my first impressions of Cursed Mountain with respect to religion, I’ll leave it to actual Buddhists to weigh in on how respectful the game is of Buddhism. The developer claims to have consulted several Buddhist authorities during development and I certainly didn’t see anything that raised any red flags. But I won’t go so far as to say it was a deep and thoughtful portrayal of an ancient religion. Cursed Mountain is a survival horror game, after all, not a step on the path to Enlightenment.
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
There comes a time in the week to reflect on what got into my reporter’s notebook but didn’t turn into Kotaku blog posts. Shall we?
Games I Didn’t Touch: I saw the fall line-ups for a trio of publishers in New York this past week. Majesco, Sony and Ubisoft were showing more than 30 games between them. Maybe even 50. I didn’t count. There were a lot. I’m still in the process of getting at least 10 posts out of them. When you go to these events, you size them up and decide what you think you can afford to skip. At Sony, for example, I skipped the new Buzz games in the interest of time. And I skipped Brutal Legend on PlayStation 3, because the demo covered the same content from the Xbox 360 presentation I received of the game a couple of weeks ago. At Ubi I skipped their DS games, including Cop: The Recruit. Just didn’t have the time or the expectation that it’d be worth it. I always worry that I guess wrong, but I have to guess nonetheless.
Games I Can’t Preview: There were even games that I did play at the aforementioned events that I won’t be previewing. Sometimes, I just don’t think I get enough info on them or have sufficient expertise in them to write an informative post. All I could say about the new Ubisoft Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, for example, is that it can be mistaken for a Smash Bros. clone (some of its creators worked on that last Nintendo brawler), that the Ubi rep showing me the game said its combat is more complex than Smash and that both the Ubi rep and ex-Newsweek reporter N’Gai Croal beat me in the game. At the Sony event I had a good time fighting as God of War’s Kratos against a computer-controlled Kratos on the new PSP version of Soul Calibur, but, again, I don’t have much more to write about it. The game, which is called Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny, had the best graphics I’ve seen on the PSP, but it also only had to render two characters on the machine’s screen. These observations do not a post make. There are other games I tried that I won’t be covering, but some of them don’t even make this Notebook Dump. (There are also games I played that I’m saving my coverage of until next week. I’ll let you be surprised as to which those are.)
Late To The iPhone: The other thing I didn’t address in my posts this week — because I didn’t know how to write something fresh about it — was the beginning of my experimentation with iPhone gaming. Last Saturday, on a train from New York to Philadelphia to go see this (yes, that), I decided I’d try a bunch of iPhone games. I loaded my phone with a selection of games that I based primarily on the suggestions of reporter-friend’s Patrick Klepek and John Davison as well as from Davison’s superb list of top iPhone games. (Looks like he just did another!) I feel like it’d be old hat to ask for suggestions or to run through everything I tried in a standalone post. But if you’re interested, I sampled: Drop 7 (fun), Fieldrunners (too easy), Flight Control (fun but blocked by my fingers), Galcon (fun, but I prefer similar PC game Dyson — try it!), geoDefense Lite (didn’t grab me), Trixel (good, but not my thing), Crystal Defenders Vanguard Storm (surprisingly cool), and Zenonia (ruined by its need for a virtual d-pad). Still need to try a bunch of others. I was excited to try what I understood to be the best games of an existing platform. I haven’t had the opportunity to be late to a platform since I got a PS2 in early 2002. How this will affect what I cover, I cannot say.
And that’s enough notebook-dumping for the week. Next week should be fun. But right now the weekend beckons. As does the Final Fantasy WiiWare tower defense game, My Life As A Darklord, that I was supposed to review for today. I’m late. Don’t tell anyone!
(I snapped the photo for this post in the elevator of the building where Sony was having their NYC event.)
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Filed under: Betas, FPS, MMO
One of the many retail MMO games due out in the next few weeks is CrimeCraft, the urban themed action game from Vogster Entertainment. Today the game is scheduled to let the flood gates open as they start their open beta test in preparation for the game’s retail launch next month.
You can still sign up to participate in the closed beta test by heading over to the game’s web site where you can register, create an account and download the client. There’s no word yet on an exact date for the game’s open beta test to end but the final version of CrimeCraft is scheduled to be released in Best Buy stores and online on August 25.
CrimeCraft enters open beta originally appeared on Big Download Blog on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Filed under: Downloads, Demos, Patches, Sandbox, Trailers, Strategy
The history themed trade empire building game, East India Company, released today. Marking the occasion is a playable demo and patch that fixes a number of relatively minor issues. Patch notes are shown after the jump along with the official launch trailer for the game.
“In East India Company, players will enjoy building the World’s most powerful trading empire & engaging in vigorous battles in both single player & multiplayer modes, all within a breathtaking cinematic game environment.
Players will fight, manage, and rule nations from Europe to the Far East with eight nationalities to chose from: British, Dutch, French, Danish, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish, and the Holy Roman Empire. Starting modestly, you will build your fleet, establish connections to far away countries, and keep the rivaling nations at bay. Choose from a wide array of ship classes, including a variety of transport and military vessels. Create diverse fleets and assign each of them specific trading routes. Control and upgrade well situated ports as you form your strategy for domination.”
Download East India Company Demo (793 MB)
Download HD East India Company Launch Trailer (37 MB)
Download East India Company v1.01 Patch (8 MB)
Continue reading Download: East India Company demo and patch
Download: East India Company demo and patch originally appeared on Big Download Blog on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Friday, July 31st, 2009
Would you like to work for the Gawker Media empire, slaving away on the technology that powers our informative web sites? Then have we got the job for you, tech guy or tech gal! Here’s the official description from HR!
Got a list of things you think need fixin’ on our sites? Well so do we, actually! And we’re looking for a little help with it. Gawker Media is currently seeking a QA Analyst to join our Tech team. Job responsibilities include monitoring site performance, managing bug reporting and resolution, and conducting both manual and automated site testing.
Do those activities sound oddly satisfying to you? If so, please email techjobs@gawker.com with a brief description of yourself and your relevant work experience. This job is located in New York City.
That means you might be able to rub elbows/receive abuse from Kotaku’s own Stephen Totilo! You don’t know the thrill of performing QA until you’ve been verbally thrashed by a Kotaku editor because comments are malfunctioning. But we can make that happen! Best of luck!
[Image via Dork Yearbook]
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Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is due out in a little over a month, meaning I have ample time to find my Nintendo DSi charger to give this one a spin.
