No, that’s not a typo. Metal Gear Solid: Piece Walker is Kojima Productions’ promotional, web-based Flash game for the upcoming release of Peace Walker. It even has competitive multiplayer.
If you just can’t wait for the impending release of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, you can kill some time right now with Kojima Productions’ decidedly clever web-based, online Flash jigsaw game, cutely titled Piece Walker. The game has you matching tiles by placing them on top of the franchise’s iconic boxes, and then walking them to the appropriate place on a board to construct an image from the upcoming game. It’s a decidedly fun game, and you don’t even have to register in order to play. There’s even a competitive multiplayer mode to try.
Chaos Rising is the first expansion for real time strategy game Dawn of War II. We get a look at the new faction and a new multiplayer mode that redefines the meaning of “chaos.”
Fans of real time strategy (RTS) games like me are no strangers to expansions. The reason I never got into the first Dawn of War is because it had three heavy-hitter expansions that I needed to buy in order to keep up with my friends online — and this was even before developer Relic Entertainment announced a proper sequel. Now that DoW II’s been out for almost a year, though, I guess it’s high time for the sequels to start and Chaos Rising leads off.
I expected the usual laundry list of new maps, units, and campaign sections, but I was pleased to see that Chaos Rising adds a little pizzazz to DoW II in the form of the gruesome Chaos faction. These guys were Space Marines, but after a trip through something called the Warp, they’ve become something else – something corrupted and bloodthirsty (seriously, one of their faction heroes wears the skin of a Space Marine’s face as a banner — sick). The story behind the expansion campaign is that a planet lost in the Warp reappears a year after the events of the base game. As the Space Marine faction, you explore this icy, strange planet to find clues about where it’s been and what happened to the Space Marines who held it. The campaign introduces players to the Corruption System where certain events in the game corrupt units under your command depending on the player’s choices (which in turn changes their skill set and personal attacks). Presumably this is what happened to the Space Marines who held the missing planet after they went into the Warp, and this is where we get the flashy Chaos faction from.
Continue reading »
Much as we may have wanted it, we’ve never been able to play against PlayStation owners from our Xboxes when it comes to games with the same name. On mobile platforms, it’s quite different though.
We’re going to see this kind of thing a lot more in the coming months. With numerous mobile game studios working on both iPhone and Android applications, it makes perfect sense that the games would be able to talk to each other. One of the first to market is Com2Us Homerun Battle 3D (iTunes link), a new variation of a previous iPhone game called Baseball Slugger. Though a well-regarded baseball game in its own right, the fact that you can play multiplayer games between iDevices and Android devices through an online connection without any fuss is the kind of thing that we wish console manufactures would have allowed with their online services from the beginning. Check out the video below from Touch Arcade to see it in action.
Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma told Japanese video game magazine Famitsu that he’d like to have something on the new Zelda game for Wii in playable form at E3 in June. This follows reports last month that the game will probably be released before the end of this year.
While it’s by no means a confirmation that the game will actually be shown, Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma, the producer on the still unnamed Zelda sequel for Wii has said that he’d “like to show something playable” at E3 this year. He stated that “we’re doing everything we can to have people play the game as soon as possible.”
Nintendo remains cagey about release dates and any confirmed details on the game. In January, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime had said that, “right now it’s still in development, but the key message that Mr. Aonuma and Mr. Miyamoto are telling us is that it really has to be perfect when it launches. That is what fans are expecting.” Around the same time Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata confirmed to Japanese newspaper the Ashi Shimnun that the game will release “by the end of the year,” though gave no further details.
Update: According to Japanese gaming news site Andriasang, the game will be Wii MotionPlus exclusive. “After making it compatible,” the site notes Aonuma saying, “it just feels so natural. Link’s sword and the controller that you’re holding become one.”
The E3 expo runs from June 15-17 in Los Angeles this year.
Upcoming downloadable pack dubbed the “Trials of St. Lucia” to include a co-op mode, fully customizable level editor, and online community to share creations for Visceral’s upcoming hack ‘n slash action game.
Thanks to a apparently leaked video appearing on French video game site Playscope, details of a planned downloadable content pack for Dante’s Inferno have emerged, revealing cooperative multiplayer and customizable content creation for the game, set for release on April 29. According to senior producer Hans ten Cate in the video, “you can custom create trials adding waves of enemies from the core game as well as enemies like The Summoner which are exclusive to the Trials of St. Lucia.” These levels will then exist on the game’s servers and will be able to be shared with other players who can rate and rank the creations.
The co-op play allows players to play as Dante or St. Lucia. So…who is St. Lucia? “St. Lucia of Syracuse is a third century Christian martyr who has her eyes plucked out because she refuses to marry her pagan suitor,” says Jonathan Knight, the executive producer on the game. “She’s mentioned in The Divine Comedy a couple of times, including at the beginning of Inferno and she’s kind of Dante’s guardian angel.”
The United States Air Force Research Laboratory has ordered 2,000 PlayStation 3s, with the intention of creating a supercomputer by harnessing the processing power of the collective group.
1UP has come across a report from the US Department of Defense-owned news source Stars and Stripes stating that the US Air Force has commissioned a supercomputer comprised of 2,000 PlayStation 3s. The $2 million project will also utilize an “off-the-shelf” graphics processor to create a supercomputer “nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today,” according to Stars and Stripes.
This isn’t the first time that a Sony video game console has been linked to a military power. About ten years ago, Sony’s PlayStation 2 was rumored to have been purchased en masse by the Iraq in order to build a supercomputer for military purposes. And you wonder why we couldn’t find “weapons of mass destruction” over there…
Over the years it has become a common practice for people to sell their virtual accounts online to other players. Most of the time people do this for MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, Runescape and Aion Online to name a few. Today people can sell Aion accounts on sites like MMOBay.net, a auction site where people can buy or sell their online characters. Not only can people sell or buy Aion accounts, but users can also trade their account with other gamers.
MMOBay.net is free to use after an initial signup fee which is used to validate the users account, making it a safe place for members to buy, sell and trade accounts. There have been over 200,000 listed auctions and currently has 43,000+ members. The practice of buying online characters will continue and if you are going to do it, you should do it in a safe place like MMOBay.net.
Apple’s big announcement today was certainly significant in terms of asserting the company’s dominance in the mobile space, but what does it really mean for gamers? We look at what was shown today, and ask Ngmoco founder and CEO Neil Young for his perspective.
This morning we spent some time with Apple’s new iPad tablet device at the company’s press conference and hands-on demonstration at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. Given the ballyhoo and speculation, there was virtually nothing that Apple could have revealed that would have matched the hype, so it’s understandable that there has been some cynicism from observers.
Outside of the questions regarding the challenges Apple faces in introducing it’s “third pillar” (to borrow a term from Nintendo) it’s worth addressing a few questions and observations regarding the device’s strengths and weaknesses as a game platform. Truthfully, the game demonstrations at this morning’s press conference were arguably the least impressive of any of the products shown. Several groups were invited to test Apple’s new software development kit two weeks ago to see what they could do, and both Gameloft and Electronic Arts showed their results. Gameloft had spent some time adapting its online first person shooter N.O.V.A. to the device, while Electronic Arts made some tweaks to Need for Speed: SHIFT, it’s fast, tilt-controlled adaptation of the popular console game. Both titles are powered by the Open GL 2.0 graphics engine, so they scaled up nicely to the iPad’s larger screen, but they also exposed some aspects of iPad development that studios will have to adapt to quickly. For N.O.V.A., which uses and on-screen d-pad and fire button to simulate a console controller, there were definitely some physical issues to overcome. The iPad is not just a larger iPod Touch…it is actually a slightly different form factor because the screen doesn’t sit flush with edge of the device. As you can see in the photographs, there is a black frame around the edge of the screen. For games with on-screen d-pads, you now have to reach over the frame in order to place your thumbs on the screen – which is much more uncomfortable than playing on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Interestingly, the Gameloft team had started putting some thought into new multi-touch controls, including a novel way of targeting multiple enemies at once by drawing a box around targets.
Continue reading »
PlayStation 3-owning fans of the Tales series will be sad to hear that currently Namco Bandai has no plans to release the PS3 port of the 2008 Japanese role-playing game in the US. The port hit shelves in Japan last September and is about to get a combination anime/downloadable content Blu-Ray this May.
Siliconera reports today that a Tales of Vesperia anime movie called The First Strike is being bundled with downloadable content in Blu-Ray, DVD, and UMD form for a May 28 release. We asked Namco Bandai about a possible US release and were told that currently the company has no plans to bring the PlayStation 3 port stateside.
“As for First Strike, it is possible that an anime publisher in the US may pick up the license as there have been Tales anime releases in the US,” a Namco Bandai America publicist told GamePro, “but NBGA have no details regarding this issue at the moment.”
Namco Bandai previously released a PS3 port of the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata in the US which included new story content and playable characters. Similarly, the PS3 Tales of Vesperia features new content and a new character named Patty Fleur.
The First Strike anime serves as a prequel of the game’s story, covering the years main character Yuri Lowell spent as a knight. Siliconera warns hardcore fans who want to import the anime that “PSP/PS3 games are region free, but not Blu-ray discs or UMD movies. You’ll need a Japanese PS3 or PSP to play these.”
Lost in Nightmares, Capcom’s first of two new episodes for Resident Evil 5 takes the series back to its survival-horror roots. Along with a crazed, anchor-wielding enemy, the game takes on the look and feel of past titles of the series.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that it felt like Resident Evil’s “pure horror” roots were ripped out of Resident Evil 5. To be fair, the game was a lot of fun and the series’ dramatic transformation into a more Gears of War-style cooperative action shooter worked for the most part. But as a fan of horror movies and Resident Evil’s survival-horror origins, I felt oddly betrayed by the game’s emphasis on explosions over suspense. When I sat down to play the first of the two new episodes coming soon for Resident Evil 5, titled Lost in Nightmares, Capcom explained that the return to horror in the episode is a direct response to fans’ reactions to RE5’s departure from the genre.
“A lot of fans thought Resident Evil 5 was too much action and not enough survival horror,” admits Capcom’s product marketing manager Matt Dahlgren. “And Lost in Nightmares (the first new episode available) is our response to that. After the original game shipped, we took a lot of fan feedback into account before creating the new episodes. There are two main ways people play Resident Evil: there’s the slow and suspenseful way, which is the more traditional Resident Evil experience, and there’s the more action-packed experience, which was featured in Resident Evil 5.”
Continue reading »