While the release of new music games has pretty much been put six feet under Harmonix has been releasing weekly content to their ever expanding library. Now, it seems, that it can fight no more.
April 2nd will be the last week of content release for the Rock Band store bringing to an end an impressive five year run that saw the release of over 4,000 songs over 275 consecutive weeks. They are currently having a sale on over 1,100 songs at 50% off so people can keep filling out their Rock Band libraries.
The company released a small statement on the Rock Band forums:
“We hope that you’ll all agree that this has been a tremendous run, and you should know it’s a ride that we at Harmonix have been thrilled to be a part of. We’re going to continue to support the forums and RockBand.com and hope to still see you rocking out online, in photos of Rock Band parties shared on Twitter and Facebook, or here on the forums. Whether you waited in line for a midnight release of Rock Band over 5 years ago, or you just joined the party with Rock Band Blitz… whether you’ve downloaded every single song we’ve ever released, or you’ve just played on disc songs until your neighbors moved away… whether you’re a metal shredder, or a bubblegum pop singer… thank you for being a part of our band.”
This past weekend Bungie, the creators of Halo, finally took the covers off of their next project, Journey. Ambitious does not begin to describe what Destiny is. Not only is this the company’s first game outside the safety of Microsoft’s umbrella, but it is an entire series of games that will involve a brand new universe and occupy the developers next ten years. Ten years!!
When they struck a deal with Activision to publish the game the documents revealed showed that Destiny is being made already sequel ready and the first game will release this fall on Xbox 360 and PS3 and also, presumably, for the next gen consoles as well. Every sequel after will be released strictly for the next generation.
Destiny’s plot revolves around the last portion of humanity to survive an apocalyptic event. The only piece of humanity left were saved when a mysterious ship, known as The Traveler, began to float above a section of Earth. It is always there, hanging as a somber protector for what reason no one knows. Humanity has put the pieces back together under The Traveler and begun to explore the galaxy again. With this comes new threats in the form of alien life that is looking to finish off the remnants of humanity. Destiny will see you play as a guardian, tasked to push back these forces and protect humanity.
Bungie is coining a new term for Destiny’s gameplay, the “shared world shooter”. Not wanting to call the game a true MMO, Destiny will be available to play completely in single player, or at any time, you can join some friends or strangers and help out in missions they are doing and decide to stick together or go do your own thing with your story. How this will work cross-platform remains to be seen. Will it be only 360 players that can match up with 360 players and vice versa or will Bungie somehow work there magic and have all consoles playing on Destiny’s world in one big sci-fi love fest?
Watching the video above also shows off that social integration will play a big part in Destiny. While the specifics are not known as to what will be the basis of the app, it would be easy to assume you would get story updates as well as messages from friends as they interact in the world. You may be able to set up party missions but that is just pure speculation on my part.
Photo courtesy dorksden.com
It looks as though you will not be stuck on Earth in Destiny. You will have the ability to go to other planets, but it is not known if the space travel will be able to be controlled or if Destiny will have space battles. Even if the first game does not, it would not surprise me to see them added in sequels, especially with the horsepower of the next-gen consoles.
This is just the opening salvo of Destiny from Bungie. Expect to see a lot more from now until its planned fall release. I would expect a massive blowout at E3 this year to truly give gamers a sense of the scale of this project.
With the Sony Playstation event coming up on Wednesday where the Playstation 4 is expected to be unveiled the rumor bin is in full overdrive. The newest one comes from The Wall Street Journal that reports that Sony will offer streaming games over their new system.
‘The new technology, to be unveiled Wednesday along with the new console, will allow users to play games delivered over the Internet, these people said. The streaming service, they added, is designed to use current PlayStation 3 titles on the new console; the new device is also expected to play new games stored on optical discs.”
This rumor should probably be filed under the section “completely likely to happen”. Sony spent $380 million dollars last year purchasing the streaming service Gaikai and I am pretty sure it wasn’t just to have no use of it.
Mortal Kombat Legacy was a big success in 2011 for director Kevin Tancharoen. Big enough that Warner Bros. not only gave him a chance for a second season of the show but also the directing job for a new Mortal Kombat feature film. Now Season 2 of Mortal Kombat Legacy is almost upon us and here is the first trailer.
A lot of new additions have been made for Season 2 both in characters and actors. Ermac, Stryker and more will be joining the series and some roles will be filled by new actors most notably Johnny Rico himself Casper Van Dien as Johnny Cage and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa reprising his role of Shang Tsung from the first Mortal Kombat film.
There will be ten episodes of Mortal Kombat Legacy Season 2 and each will average around eight minutes in length. The series can be seen on Machinima.com.
If you are evenly vaguely aware of popular culture, you’ve probably noticed that zombies are kind of a “thing” right now. You may have even heard someone talk about “The Walking Dead,” in reference to Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic published by Image; or maybe – and more likely – they meant AMC’s television adaptation of the series; or – if the someone is especially awesome – they are talking about Telltale Games’ episodic adventure series that ties in with both. Even if you hadn’t heard of it before Spike’s VGAs this year, it probably would have caught your attention when it beat a field of triple-A titles for Game of the Year.
I was certainly surprised. Since the episodes had begun in May ’12, I had purchased three of them and completed two, so I knew the game was high-quality. Still, we’re talking about an episodic adventure series that some have claimed is little more than a point-and-click progression of choose-your-own-adventure interactive cutscenes. This, at the absolute core of the game – and especially highlighted during its weakest moments – is exactly what is going on. Luckily for anyone who has played it, though, those weak moments are few and scattered throughout the most player-driven experience I may have ever had. That’s because from the very first moments of the game, the content of the aforementioned cutscenes is based almost 100% on player decisions. The system is constantly keeping track of everything you do and say, and is using that to build an experience that is exceptionally unique.
Starved For Help
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. In such a story-driven experience, I would be remiss not to talk about the story: When the game begins, your player character Lee is in the back of a police cruiser being taken to jail. An accident occurs, and by the time you wake up, the zombie outbreak is in full effect. You make your way into a neighborhood, where your life is saved by a young girl named Clementine. The two of you team up, and you eventually make your way to a location taken straight from the comics and meet some of the people who will join you on your journey.
I am being vague about things like why you were going to jail, why and where you are going with Clementine, where you meet the other characters, etc. for two reasons: Spoilers would be a massive disservice to the game, and more significantly, the answers I would give are based on my playthrough, and might not be relevant to yours. Yes, I am telling you that information as specific as “were you actually guilty of a crime” is completely up to the person you want Lee to be.
That being said, Lee is his own person, something which has more weight to it the further you progress into the episodes. While it is true that almost everything he says comes verbatim from dialogue choices, some little things like personality quirks, facial tics and body language cues are all his own. It creates an interesting dichotomy the likes of which I’ve only ever experienced in the connect / disconnect between myself and my version of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect.
Courtesy of venturebeat.com
Long Road Ahead
The end result is unique: I had times when my decisions made sense as both a player and a character, and times when I had Lee do something in-character that was totally against what I thought as a player; those times tended to deal with the survival of Lee and the others in the group. As a player, sitting safe and warm and well-fed on my couch, I can think “This is wrong, I don’t want to do this,” and still have to make the call that Lee would make in that situation. The game really shines in these instances, and juxtaposes them with moments of tension, horror, and action where I felt 100% in Lee’s shoes as he (I)(we) tried to run from a horde or fend off a walker with his (my)(our) bare hands.
The game also excels at developing the secondary and even tertiary characters, especially considering how much of their development is tied directly to the choice structure. Again without spoiling too much, not only are there characters that can live or die based on your choices, but some of those characters make choices based on your choices that can then change whole plotlines. Not only does this give the player an amazing feeling of involvement, it means that Telltale was committed enough to this mechanic that they created content that players might never see. Considering that it’s not a large studio, an investment of time and money on unseen content is nothing to overlook.
What content you will see looks and sounds amazing, and I have to give credit to the artists who worked on this title. The cel-shading was a stroke of genius, and really gives you the feeling of being inside the comic; at the same time, it never looks “cartoony,” and the moments of violence are every bit as gut-wrenching as they should be. The characters are exceptionally expressive, and the voice actors sell me on their roles in almost every case. I experienced a few minor hiccoughs like items disappearing from a characters hand now and then, but it didn’t last long and never affected gameplay.
The choice mechanic itself is exceptionally well-implemented into gameplay, whether it was during dialogue or as part of an action sequence. If you’re in a free-roam area and initiate a conversation, there’s no pressure in weighing different responses; during time-sensitive sequences, though, there is a bar under the dialogue that quickly drains while you try to respond. During action moments, the bar is replaced by a red tint that gets darker the longer you take to respond, usually by pointing the cursor at something and hitting the action button. These bits are generally pretty tense, and the need to take action occasionally leads to split-second choices concerning who lives and who dies.
Courtesy of wikipedia.org
Around Every Corner
Unfortunately, those sequences also highlight one of my two big gripes with the game, which is that this game is so PC-developed-then-ported-to-consoles it hurts; sometimes it hurts so hard that Lee and others die. I’ve been using analog sticks to point at things for a long time, and it still felt like the cursory was just too… heavy is the right word, I think. Ten game also had a strange tendency to start the cursor – which is supposed to represent where Lee is looking – in the part of the screen furthest from what you need to do. I don’t know about you, but if I’m being attacked by a walker, I’m going to be looking at the walker, not off into the corner.
My other big complaint is that the item-specific adventuring has the ability to slow and even destroy the pacing, which is an issue in a game where you’re supposed to be surviving a zombie apocalypse. I’ll openly admit that I used a FAQ a few times, and felt justified when the answers were “look in this one very specific spot in a very specific way for this very specific item.” The third episode in particular dragged so badly I had to stop playing and pick it up the next day.
These little things didn’t keep the overall experience from being phenomenal, though. I was especially lucky in having an audience for the game in the form of my girlfriend; while she didn’t use the controller, we “played” the entire story together, with her keeping an eye out for items, helping with puzzles, and weighing in on decisions. I was genuinely happy about this, considering she probably won’t ever read the comic or watch the show given her natural aversion to gore. In this case, though, her shock and horror just contributed to my own; she was also my conscience, and openly disagreed with a few things I did. One particular decision at the end of episode four got to her so much that she wouldn’t say anything to me other than “You lied to Clementine. You lied to her.”
No Time Left
Courtesy of wikipedia.org
Near the end of The Walking Dead, an antagonist confronts Lee with a laundry list of things he – and by extension, you – has done that makes him / you a “monster.” Actions like stealing food, abandoning other survivors, and even a few outright murders from over the course of the game’s five episodes are thrown at you interrogation style. During this scene, the dialogue options “You don’t know the whole story,” “There wasn’t any other choice,” and “I wish I had done that differently” sounded just as hollow and desperate coming from Lee as I felt telling him to say them.
Because we did have choices, in every one of those situations and a dozen others leading up to them; and while we had tried so very hard to do the right thing, we made mistakes and people died. The only thing stopping us from giving up right then and there was an eight-year-old girl in a dirty hoodie and a tattered ball cap. Everything Lee and I had done up to that point had been to keep “sweet pea” safe, and so long as that was seen through, I could live with the rest. If I can speak for a certain history teacher turned escaped convict turned makeshift dad from Macon, Georgia, I think he would agree.
NERD RATING – 9.0/10
Editor’s Note – I played the game on the XBox 360 as downloadable episodes. It’s also available on PC and PS3, and was recently released in [amazon_link id=”B007WQOIGW” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]retail disc form.[/amazon_link]
Not a whole lot has been shown of Star Trek: The Video Game beyond a handful of screenshots since last year, but now with the game’s April release looming Digital Extremes is beginning to take the wraps off of their licensed title.
The game looks to mix a lot of different game styles together. The shooting sequences are close behind the shoulder type run and gun like Dead Space or Resident Evil while there appears to be some small exploration element like Uncharted or Tomb Raider and you even get to control the Enterprise in space battles. Hopefully all of this can come together and deliver a good movie tie-in game (for once).
[amazon_link id=”B0081B1O5A” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Star Trek: The Video Game[/amazon_link] releases on April 23rd.
Obsidian has kind of made a career off of making sequels to highly popular games. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 may not have been the defining RPG in the galaxy far, far away that its predecessor was, but the game was well made and dang fun. Same could be said for its sequel to Bethesda’s Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas. They did a great job bringing a new story to the Fallout universe and crafting an impressive open world to play in.
Now the developers behind the upcoming [amazon_link id=”B006IOAHPK” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]South Park: The Stick of Truth[/amazon_link] may want to get back into the post-apocalyptic business if company CEO Feargus Urquhart has anything to say about it. And he did:
“Oh, we’d love to do Fallout: New Vegas 2. It would be awesome. If I think of going from Fallout 1 to Fallout 2, we tried to associate the two areas somewhat closely. It wasn’t just ‘Oh, we’re gonna do this 2,000 miles from here.’ So I think if we were to do Fallout: New Vegas 2 – or just a new Fallout – we would probably separate it from what the internal team at Bethesda’s doing. We’d keep it on the West Coast, because we’re West Coast people. They’re East Coast, so it makes sense.”
With Bethesda supposedly working on Fallout 4 would you want Obsidian to get another crack at the Fallout universe?
With only six days to go until Sony’s big press even that many people (by that I mean 100%) believe will be the official unveiling of the Playstation 4, it seems that Destructoid has found the first look at what the PS4 controller may look like.
There have been many reports that Sony was abandoning the dualshock design and including a small touch screen that will serve as the start and select buttons as well as have a share button that will let users be able to post info and videos from games they are playing directly to social media sites. Now assuming this is a prototype and not the final product what we can take away from this photo is that the reports appear to be mostly true. It may not be a complete redesign of the dualshock but it certainly has a different look and honestly looks thick as hell (again, prototype).
We only have six more days of waiting before (hopefully) we get to find out the truth. And on the bright side, at least it is not as asinine as the PS3 boomerang debacle.
One of the announcements at this morning’s Nintendo’s Direct presentation was that Donkey Kong Country Returns would be making the trip from the Wii to Nintendo’s handheld. Aptly titled Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D (didn’t see that coming did you), the game will release this summer for the 3DS. Nintendo said a trailer for the game will be put up later today on Nintendo’s eShop.
Some more good news for Playstation Network owners besides all of the free stuff you get if you are a PS Plus member. For one week only you can purchase the Twisted Metal Birthday Bundle, which has the four best Twisted Metal games available (Twisted Metal 1,2,Black and 2012’s version), for only $39.99.
I know some of you are wondering where is Twisted Metal: Small Brawl and if you are actually wondering that then we can’t be friends.
The games will be available separately to buy on PSN also.
