Crystal Dynamics is back with a new episode of Tomb Raider: Guide to Survival which focuses on Lara’s ability to find new weapons and upgrade them through scavenging for spare parts to add to your guns and bows. As we get closer and closer to the game’s release the true depth of Tomb Raider is being shown.
[amazon_link id=”B004FS8LYK” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Tomb Raider[/amazon_link] releases on March 5th
We are only one day removed from Sony’s announcement of the Playstation 4 and still months away from E3 and already the console has a modest, but very good lineup of games. Ubisoft, Sucker Punch, Guerrilla and even Square showed their future titles and it was enough to get this gamer excited for this fall when the PS4 comes home. Here are the games we know of so far:
Killzone: Shadow Fall (Guerrilla)
Infamous: Second Son (Sucker Punch)
Watch Dogs (Ubisoft)
Knack (Studio Japan)
Diablo 3 (Blizzard)
Drive Club (Evolution)
Final Fantasy (Square)
Destiny (Bungie)
The Witness (Thekla)
Deep Down (Capcom)
The Witcher 3 (CD Projekt RED)
Sony also said that a plethora of studios are already pledging support for the PS4. Instead of listing them all check out a screenshot of last night’s event and see that every major player is going to be involved with developing for the next Playstation.
If one game truly took the crowd’s attention last night it was Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs. The game already won everyone over at last year’s E3 and the demo shown last night just furthered the fact that this may be a special game on the way. The feel I got from the trailer was it is a little Minority Report mixed with Grand Theft Auto, but you appear to be doing good acts instead of killing hookers. But you never know there is always time to add in hooker killing. He does steal some cash from an ATM, but I don’t compare that to killing ladies of the night.
Watch Dogs will release this fall and should be a PS4 launch title. The only confirmed consoles so far are the PS4 and Wii U.
After Mark Cerny was finished describing all of the Playstation 4’s internal working last night he was able to show off an exclusive game he has been working on exclusively for the PS4. The game has a very Pixar animation look and focuses on a creation known as Knack, who was created to help humans in their fight against the invading goblins.
The look and small bit of gameplay have a very Ratchet or Jak to it and it looks like it could be a lot of quirky fun.
Sucker Punch had been oddly quiet over the past year and everyone was guessing they were hard at work on a Playstation 4 title and that was confirmed last night when they unveiled the next game in their Infamous series, Infamous: Second Son. The story will follow a new protagonist as humans are discovering they have powers and are being hunted down.
Here is the synopsis for the game and the trailer below.
“Surrounded by a society that fears them, superhumans are ruthlessly hunted down and caged by the Department of Unified Protection. When Delsin Rowe discovers his powers he’s forced to run, searching for other superhumans in order to save those he loves from the oppressive D.U.P. now hot on his tail. The choices he makes along the way change the future of everyone around him.”
As with the PS3 announcement Guerrilla Games was there in full force with a new Killzone game, the difference being this time I think everyone believed that this footage was real in-game stuff. The look of the game started out much brighter than other Killzone’s and that was a great way to show off what the PS4 is capable of doing. You begin to wonder is a new console can still wow you considering how good games look and then you watch the demo shown last night and realize that they still can.
After a beautiful flyover of a much brighter scene than we are used to seeing in Killzone games, an explosion goes off and cloaked Helghast soldiers begin their attack. The gunplay run smooth like Killzone 2 and 3. The demo ends with our hero hopping a ride on a hanging rope from a dropship that shows off just what Sony’s behemoth can show off. I like it…..a lot. I want it….now.
Check out the demo below.
http://youtu.be/fL2kXenfz1Q
Damn.
While we may not have seen the Playstation 4 in the flesh (or plastic) last night, one thing that we did get a good look at was the redesigned Dualshock 4 controller. It is really beautiful and looks much more refined than the leaked pictures of the dev unit version from last week. It has an integrated touch pad on the front of the controller, much like the back pad of the Vita. The start and select buttons are a thing of the past with the options and share buttons replacing them. The new share button is a major change in that the last ten minutes of any game you are playing will always be saved into the Playstation 4’s memory and at any time you can hit the share button and pick out any part of that saved gameplay and upload it instantly to Facebook or UStream.
The shape of the Dualshock 4 has been altered also. It is thicker and is more contoured which makes it more in line with an Xbox 360 controller (for me, that’s a great thing). The D-pad has been tweaked as well and you can see the analogs have been given an indentation around them for better grip. There is an LED light at the top of the controller which will identify different players I am assuming by different colors. It is noticeably more pretty than the standard red lights on the old Dualshocks.
The Dualshock 4 will be more hefty than its predecessor going from 6.77 ounces to 7.4 ounces which,again, I love because I have always enjoyed the weight of an Xbox 360 controller over the feather light feel of a Dualshock.
All in all I have to say that Sony knocked it out of the park with the Dualshock 4. Its more curved, contoured approach and sleek styling with the touchpad and LED light makes this a gorgeous looking controller.
For those of you that followed us during our live tweet of Sony’s Playstation 4 announcement we thank you greatly and now that the system is officially real we can begin getting into the guts of the matter.
Sony went into greater detail about the interior workings of the Playstation 4, more than I thought they would and under the hood it is a very, very impressive piece of hardware. So much so that I may have to change my price prediction and match up with the $429 and $529, two-sku rumors flying about.
What Sony announced is swimming around their new monster console:
-AMD 8-core 64-bit X86 Jaguar (not Atari) CPU
-Radeon GPU with 1.84 TFLOPS of processing for graphics, etc.
-6X Blu-Ray drive and 8X DVD drive
-8GB unified GDDR5 RAM
-802.11 Wi-Fi
-USB 3.0
-Bluetooth 4.1
-HDMI, optical out and analog AV
Sony was very forthcoming in saying that they wanted this console to be developer friendly. It is widely known that a lot of developers had problems working with the Cell processor in the PS3 so Sony has done them a great service by making the Playstation 4 more PC-like.
With the rumors persisting that the new Xbox will come packaged with a new version of the Kinect in every console, you have to wonder exactly how Microsoft will improve upon the motion sensor. A possible spec list has been uncovered that shows just how much the new Kinect will vary from its older sibling.
-Field view improved from 57.5 degrees horizontal by 43.5 degrees vertical to 70×60
-Resolution improved from 640×480 to 1920×1080
-Lower latency from 90ms to 60ms
The new Kinect should have not require as much room to work properly, which would be a wonderful things for gamers that don’t have the luxury of big, open living rooms where you don’t have to worry about knocking over cat scratching posts or babies.
WWE officially has a new home for video games. Take Two and the sports entertainment company finalized a new five year deal that will see 2K Sports take over the license beginning with the re-branded WWE 2K14.
The Japanese developer Yuke’s will still be handling duties on the game as they did with THQ which, to me, was the most important part of this deal. They have learned over the years and crafted an engine that works with the WWE style and to give this over to a new developer could have given us a great game, but more likely would have produced something….well bad. Yuke’s is coming off what I believe to be their best WWE game yet, WWE 13.
WWE 2K14 is still set for a fall release.