Christophe Balestra, Co-President of Naughty Dog has revealed that Uncharted only uses 30 percent of the power of the SPU\’s. He also revealed that they are looking into Playstation Home and currently have no plans for downloadable content. Balestra stated once again that Uncharted wouldn\’t have been possible without Blu-ray.
Gamespot has completed its review on this year\’s \’must have\’ title that is Assassin\’s Creed. They comment that there are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, but the PS3 title has a better frame rate but the Xbox 360 has greater contrast in the lighting. Even still, it\’s good to hear a PS3 game being praised for its superior frame rate.
Reports have confirmed that selected K-Mart stores have honored a 20 percent off coupon even for use on the new low priced Playstation 3 40GB console. So the $399 console can be snapped up for a mere $319!
Folk from Ubisoft have confirmed that the PS3 exclusive title Haze will be released in Europe on December 14th, with a North American release date also expected next month.
Philips has announced a new $199 Blu-ray drive, but unfortunately it is designed for the PC and not designed to compete directly with the budget $99 Toshiba HD DVD player. However, the manufacturers mentioned that a PC with the drive installed could be connected up to a TV via a HDMI cable.
Here is a little video which shows the unboxing of a DualShock 3 controller as well as a comparison to the DS 2.
We have been informed of a user-created video that shows the newly released Memor 32 memory card for use on PS2/PSTwo, booting backup games thanks to the hacked firmware flash from Memento. In the video you will clearly see the backups working as a result of inserting the Memor 32 memory card. The card is available to buy from Divineo.de / Divineo.fr / Divineo.es and Divineo.it.
A few details on the Fall Xbox 360 dashboard update have been revealed. On December 4 you\’ll be able to download Xbox game Halo from marketplace. Microsoft is introducing games it has published for the original Xbox on XBL Marketplace, Ms plans to bring as much of the back catalogue across as possible. The games will cost around 1200 Microsoft points. The initial list of downloads includes Halo, Fable, Fahrenheit, Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath Of Cortex and Burnout 3. There will also be films on demand(not confirmed for December 4 th) including The Dark Knight, The Assassination of Jesse James and I Am Legend appearing eventually. Films will cost less than
Microsoft will have 100 titles available for download on Xbox Live Arcade in the US when Screwjumper and Shrek \’N Roll are released this Wednesday. Earlier this year Microsoft had predicted over 100 games and 45 million downloads by the end of 2007. UNO was the first Xbox Live Arcade game to exceed one million downloads. It remains the second most popular download worldwide.
A Georgia resident has filed a class action suit over Xbox Live fees. The respective individual claims that Microsoft improperly allowed his underage son to use his debit card in order to subscribe to the Xbox Live gaming service.
THQ has revealed that it is porting its popular PC real time strategy game Supreme Commander over to the Xbox 360. The console version will come with new multiplayer modes and updated maps to keep things fresh. And as expected, the control system and HUD will be getting a complete overhaul.
The Fire Emblem series of strategy role-playing games is best known for two things: deep, compelling stories and challenging tactical battles. War-devastated nations, subtle political machinations, and young heroes who rise to the occasion of defeating abject evil to save their people have all been hallmarks of the epic stories that take place, and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn attempts to follow this tried-and-true storytelling method but somehow gets mired along the way. This is despite the fact that it’s a direct sequel to the GameCube’s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, which had one of the strongest stories of the series. The strong tactical-combat system is thankfully intact, but the difficulty has been bumped up so high that it at times becomes infuriating, and the end result is a game suited only to hardcore fans of the series or of strategy RPGs in general. If you haven’t played a Fire Emblem before, this is not the game for you.
As previously mentioned, Radiant Dawn is a direct sequel to Path of Radiance. It takes place three years after a brutal war in which the nation of Daein and its mad king, Ashnard, attempted to throw the entire world into chaos to free an imprisoned dark god. Ironically, the game begins in the heart of Daein itself. You will take command of Micaiah, the so-called “silver-haired maiden” of the Dawn Brigade, a friendly band of Daeinish rabble-rousers who fight the oppressive Begnion Empire that now occupies their homeland. Throughout your journey, you will encounter many of the allies you met in Path of Radiance–most of whom will once again fight on your side–as well as a cast of entirely new ones. With your army, you will battle a series of villains that are for the most part so laughably one-dimensional that they might as well be cackling while tying young damsels to railroad tracks and twirling their handlebar mustaches. For a series known for its detailed backstories (particularly those of its villains), these knavish ruffians, who act like they’re evil because it’s the new black, are severely underwhelming and disappointing. To Radiant Dawn’s credit, the story and quality of villainy do improve later in the game, but chances are you wouldn’t give the story long enough to really develop if that’s why you were playing it in the first place.
The gameplay interface is as familiar as ever.
The game is divided into four parts, each of which provides a different perspective of the events unfolding–unlike the previous game, Radiant Dawn has no set main character, and it’s not uncommon for you to have a different army with a different leader from chapter to chapter. Each chapter consists of a battle or series of battles, and it is in these fights that the vast majority of your time will be invested. Battles feature a variety of goals, such as “defeat all the enemies” or “survive for x turns.” They even manage to put a new spin on traditional objectives, such as one mission where you must work alongside an artificial-intelligence-controlled ally and protect its units until they arrive at a specific spot. Like in many strategy RPGs, you will begin combat by selecting which of your units you wish to field onto a grid-based isometric arena, and then fight by taking turns moving and attacking your enemy.
However, unlike in other similar games, each of your units are unique characters that have their own stories and motivations, and they’ll die permanently if not carefully guided. To this end, Fire Emblem continues to be more strategic than its peers because you’re less likely to take risks that endanger your soldiers. That said, be prepared to restart often because your soldiers will die frequently: Radiant Dawn is easily the most difficult game in the series thus far. Where in previous games in the series the vast majority of your troops could easily take one or two blows and live to tell the tale, you will have no such luxury here as, particularly in the early parts of the game. Your soldiers are for the most part weaker than ever, and the slightest of miscalculations will end in tragedy, even on the easy setting.
Although some may see this as a boon, the difficulty ventures beyond the realm of challenging and into the bitter waters of maddening, and it will easily overwhelm even experienced tacticians. The ability to save in midbattle is a welcome new feature that helps to mitigate the punishing difficulty, but because you are essentially forced to rely on it all of the time, it cheapens the overall experience greatly–unless you like the idea of starting entire battles over again upward of seven times until you can complete them without losing precious allies. There are three difficulty settings, but as previously mentioned, even the easy setting is extremely tough.
As is standard, there are dozens of types of units that you will recruit into your ranks throughout the game, each of which has a different weapon specialty that fits into a rock-paper-scissors combat system: swords trump axes, which trump lances, which trump swords. Magic-wielding units work in a similar way. The laguz–beast-men that can shape-shift into full animal forms–make their return and are thankfully more useful than they were before, but they still play second-string to the various human warriors you will command. Between battles you will generally be able to buy and sell weapons and equipment, learn new important information, and award bonus experience earned in your missions to help level units. As in previous Fire Emblem games, you can pair up your units to earn stat bonuses when they are near one another. The big payoff has always been the often hilarious or backstory-developing conversations between support pairs, and these have unfortunately been reduced to mere battlefield chatter. But considering how uniformly awful the dialogue is, this can be seen as a mixed blessing.
In terms of presentation, if you played Path of Radiance, you’ve essentially seen everything Radiant Dawn has to offer. Though there are new and more detailed character animations, the overall quality of the game’s graphics has had little to no improvement whatsoever. The infrequently seen cel-shaded 3D cutscenes are beautiful and incredibly well done, and it’s a shame that the rest of the game didn’t look more like them. The soundtrack is good but generally not memorable, and the sound effects are fitting and appropriate. One interesting feature is the ability to port over weapon levels and support relationships from a GameCube memory card that has a Path of Radiance save on it.
Cutscenes like this are the game’s graphical high points.
The biggest problem with Radiant Dawn is that it proves just how firmly rooted Fire Emblem is in its ways; it makes absolutely no effort at all to adapt and change from its predecessors. Despite being a Wii game, it doesn’t make any attempt to use any of the system’s strengths, such as Mii support, online support, or motion controls and pointing, even though the advantages of such integration should be plainly obvious. There is almost no voice acting, save for the uncommon cutscenes and painfully terrible after-chapter narrations done by Captain Obvious, who repeats everything you just learned in a poorly imitated Movie Trailer Guy voice. Finally, the series’ chosen storytelling method–putting sometimes-animated character art over a static background and bombarding you with text–comes across as played out as well. Without any way of tying one stationary backdrop into another (given that cutscenes are so rare), events often occur inexplicably, such as one case early in the game when Micaiah is in a forest one moment and in a prison the next.
Ultimately, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is a huge disappointment. It seems that nothing was learned from the making of Path of Radiance, and as a direct follow-up, Radiant Dawn can’t even live up to its predecessor’s epic story. The walls of text and unforgiving difficulty level will do nothing but alienate and discourage newcomers and even some veterans, which makes it a game purely for the hardcore crew who are dedicated to the series or the genre–anyone else need not apply.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an ugly game, and we’re not necessarily talking about the graphics. This criminal tale is packed with a collection of completely unlikable characters with no redeeming value whatsoever. It’s impossible to even root for them as antiheroes. Once you get past the messy, meaningless story, things don’t get too much better because you’re saddled with clunky artificial intelligence on the part of your allies and your enemies, as well as a core shooting mechanic that simply doesn’t satisfy. The unfortunate part is that the game does have a few bright points and feels like it had a lot of potential that just didn’t come together as well as anyone must have hoped.
Kane and Lynch don’t get along–not in an especially interesting way either.
The story mode opens with you in the role of Kane, a death row inmate on his way to his execution, apparently convicted of being a very savage criminal as part of a notorious gang called The7. You’re on your last ride with a quirky guy named Lynch who tells you to cover your head. After an explosion, you’re both busted out and on the run. That might sound great, but it’s a fate worse than death. The surviving members of The7 have busted you out to force you to recover something they think you stole from them. They consider you a traitor and will kill Kane’s family if he doesn’t comply. Lynch is sent along for the ride to watch over Kane and report in if anything weird happens. Circumstances change over time and the back half plays out like a revenge tale, but it’s a revenge tale where you don’t actually care if anyone actually gets their revenge. Every single person you play as or encounter is despicable and wholly abrasive; thus, it’s extremely difficult to care about anything that’s happening to them. You can play through this story alone or with a friend in co-op mode, though this mode is only availably locally and takes place on a vertically split screen that makes it difficult to follow the action, even on a widescreen TV.
The core gameplay in Kane & Lynch is your standard third-person shooter with cover elements and a light dusting of squad tactics. You can fire from the hip, but it’s somewhat more accurate to fire while aiming. Unfortunately, even when you’re aiming, hitting your targets is more difficult than it should be because your automatic fire has a wide spread on it. Kane is supposedly a badass arch-criminal; he should be able to hit his targets with short, controlled bursts. You’re able to get behind cover and either blindfire or pop out for aimed shots, but there’s no easy way to stick to walls. You don’t press a button or anything; instead you sort of get up against a wall and turn sideways. Then after jiggling the controls back and forth a bit, you’ll eventually snap into place to get behind cover. It’s such a pain that you’ll rarely want to use it, and it seems like you’re always snapping into cover behind something at the most inopportune times, making the game quite frustrating. There’s no health meter, but if you go down, you don’t die immediately either. You can be revived by one of your teammates with an adrenaline shot. If you get that shot too frequently, you’ll overdose and die. If your teammates don’t reach you in time, you’ll die too. Also, if one of the guys on your crew gets dropped, you have to make sure he gets revived. If he dies, the game ends. Between your poor accuracy, the enemy’s sharp accuracy, and the boneheaded AI from your squadmates, this all adds up to you keeping your squad on a very short leash.
When you’ve got a team with you, you can order team members around individually or order the team all at once by telling it to regroup to your location, move to a specific spot, or attack specific targets. Telling team members to move to locations is the most effective move because you can keep them close and revive them when they get shot down. Sending them after targets results in your squad running around aimlessly and trying to get too close to targets. That leads to them getting dropped in the line of fire, where you probably won’t be able to rescue them. So whether you’re doing the shooting yourself or hanging back and letting your men do the dirty work, the game is a real letdown.
There’s only one multiplayer mode in Kane & Lynch, but it’s a great idea. It’s called Fragile Alliance and puts up to eight players in one team of criminals. Then, it sets the team off to steal money, cocaine, and jewels from various locations seen in the single-player game. So you might start out in front of a bank, run in, collect a bunch of cash, and then escape from in a van out back. The catch is the way the money is split up among teammates. If you all work together, the money is split evenly. But at any point, a player can go rogue and gun down one of his teammates. This brands you a traitor; thus, any money you collect and escape with is yours to keep. Of course, this also means that other players who are still part of the team will try to waste you before you escape with their hard-stolen loot. So every round is a tentative affair where you always expect the worst–you’re just never sure when someone’s going to finally turn on you. When you die, whether it’s from the AI that opposes you or another player, you respawn on the other side of the heist. Now you need to stop the heist by eliminating the other players and you earn money by collecting it before the criminals collect.
It’s a great idea that’s mucked up by a few different things. First, you’re still playing Kane & Lynch, so all of the inaccurate firing issues and poor cover tactics from the single-player still apply. But another problem is that you can see the names of the other players over their heads from a distance and through walls, even if they’re on the other side. While you can run while crouched to make your name disappear, it’s pretty stupid that you can see the names of the police team members as they head your way. There’s no element of surprise. Also, there are only a handful of different scenarios for this, and they play out the same way every single time. The security guards are always in the same positions in the bank and the cops are always waiting for you right outside, so it gets old fast.
The multiplayer mode is a really cool idea that leaves you wondering who’s going to turn traitor on you, but it isn’t strong enough to make you forget the game’s other problems.
Technically, Kane & Lynch has some good-looking player models, with Kane and Lynch both looking appropriate as over-the-hill criminals. And even though their faces don’t animate much, they still look good. Most of the animation isn’t so hot, though, and you’ll see a few ugly textures here and there too. Some of it looks a bit unfinished, like the way you see guys go through the motion of hitting you with an adrenaline shot, but their hands are actually empty.
The soundtrack is probably the best part of the whole game, delivering some tense music when the game calls for it. There’s a lot of voice acting in the game. The voices are appropriate for the characters, but the dialogue is hokey and filled with lazy cursing. The good ol’ F word is certainly appropriate, given the nature of what these guys are doing, but when it’s every third word out of every character’s mouth, it comes across as a crutch that drags down the rest of the game a bit. Lynch frequently responds to your squad orders by just shouting “F*** you!” That’s just lame.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a premise with promise, but the gameplay isn’t sound while the story and characters go nowhere. And it’s got enough random AI-based glitches to make you want to scream. Considering the nearly ridiculous number of extremely high-quality shooters available recently, there’s not much room for something like Kane & Lynch. But the multiplayer is a really great idea that’s worth seeing, even if playing it makes you wish that it was used in another, better game.
The Xbox 360 already plays a selection of original Xbox games with its backward-compatibility feature, but soon gamers won’t even need a disc to boot games like Halo, Fable, Psychonauts, and Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. In conjunction with its ongoing celebration of the fifth anniversary of Xbox Live, Microsoft today announced that it will be selling those four games, among others, for download from the Xbox Live Marketplace early next month.
Calling the program Xbox Originals, Microsoft will sell the games for 1,200 Microsoft points ($15) each, and the company is promising to expand the number of games offered over the coming year. A Microsoft representative had not responded to a request for comment on whether these games would have their original online features intact, or if Xbox Live support would be added into previously offline-only games, such as Halo. Xbox Originals will debut on December 4, and will be part of a firmware update that will also include new parental-control options.
That isn’t the only news Microsoft has to celebrate the anniversary of Xbox Live. The company has also announced that it will allow Xbox Live users worldwide to download a free game. For 48 hours beginning 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on November 15, members in Korea will be able to download Hexic 2 for free, whereas the rest of the world can grab the board game Carcassonne at no charge.
Microsoft is also offering a token of appreciation to longtime Live users. The company will deposit 500 Microsoft points ($6.25) into the account of every Xbox Live member who joined the service in 2002, the year it first launched.
Update:
Microsoft Australia has confirmed that although the Xbox Originals service will launch in Australia at the same 1,200 Microsoft point cost on December 4, gamers down under will not receive the bonus 500 points being given away to active Xbox Live subscribers. A representative for the company explained this was due to the later launch date of the Xbox console in Australia, meaning the five year anniversary will not coincide with the North American promotion. The representative was unable to confirm whether the promotion would be offered when the fifth anniversary does occur in Australia in late April next year.
You’ve got to hand it to EA Sports–whatever the platform, the developer knows how to take advantage of the hardware. FIFA 08 for the PlayStation Portable offers pretty much everything you could ask of a handheld football game, with local and online multiplayer, multiple game modes, and the ability to transfer data to and from the PlayStation 2. It also plays a solid game of football, and while it’s not up to the standard of the home console versions, it’s definitely fun to play.
The PSP version of FIFA 08 packs an impressive 12,600 players onto its UMD.
EA Sports has crammed a lot into the game this year, and much of the content is exclusive to the PSP. While there are the usual quick match and tournament options, the supplementary modes really add a lot of longevity to the game. Take the football IQ mode, for example: It’s a football quiz where you answer questions to score goals. If you correctly answer successive questions, your team dribbles the ball toward the goal, and if you answer incorrectly it comes back toward your own. Reach the goal and you have to answer two difficult questions in order to score, and if the other team is in a similar position you must give the right answer to save it. The game begins with easy questions about your favourite team and league, then moves on to other leagues and countries as you progress.
The football IQ mode won’t last too long, but there are plenty of other games on offer. Like the other console versions, the PSP now offers interactive leagues, allowing you to head online and represent your favourite team against people from all around the world. Fixtures occur at around the same time as the real-world matches themselves, and the overall results are fed into a central database that tracks all the versions of the game. Every result has an effect on the virtual standing of your team, and for fans it’s a nice accompaniment to the real football season. You’ll find that there are a lot more people who want to play as popular teams such as Manchester United, but you can play as many matches as you like as long as you can find opponents.
In fact, the interactive league is just one part of a very accomplished online mode. If you have a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet, you can create an EA account and log in for various game modes and live ESPN score updates. The simplest is the “play now” option, which automatically pairs you up with someone else who’s looking for a game, but there’s also a lobby system if you want to type messages to people before you begin. It’s a sophisticated system when compared to other PSP football offerings, and the only downside we saw was the limited number of people playing when we looked for a game. While the general online performance was good, with relatively little lag, we did encounter a high number of disconnections during the game. It was difficult to determine whether that was from users quitting or from a technical problem, but it did sour the experience.
The 38 stadiums are all authentic, although they’re not particularly detailed.
Even if you don’t have an Internet connection, there’s plenty to keep you occupied in FIFA 08. Many features have been carried over from last year, including the challenge and manager modes, but both have been tweaked and expanded for this outing. The challenge mode now offers 61 matches with preset criteria, so you might be starting the match 10–or even 45–minutes in with the aim of winning the game by two goals. The manager mode gives you a much more hands-on role at your club, with player training and transfers as well as the board and the media to deal with. You get e-mails from the board of directors and scouts and receive actual newspapers such as The Sun with headlines from your league. It’s not as deep as the dedicated management sims, which really let you get into the nitty-gritty of formations and tactics, but it offers probably the deepest challenge in the game. The new addition this year is the opportunity to arrange up to four preseason friendly matches. It’s not a big change, but it lets you better adapt your training and final player lineup ahead of the main season.
As well as the above modes, FIFA 08 has a couple of neat minigames. The first is juggling, which is very similar to the one featured in the Wii version of the game. Playing as any of the 12,600 players in the game, you have to play the old training game of keepy-uppy by tapping out the commands shown onscreen. The longer you keep the ball in the air, the more your player levels up. Wall attack is another minigame where you have to volley balls at a large wall, knocking bricks down to score points. Bricks with symbols give you point multipliers and bonuses, and you can adjust the power of your shot to hit different heights by using pass, cross, or kick.
While FIFA 08 is a feature-rich package, the game itself isn’t quite as solid as we’d like. The controls feel imprecise, partly because of the PSP’s hardware design, but mostly because of some patchy player animations. It looks as though frames of animation are missing, most noticeably when players make a sliding tackle, and that all-important feeling of fluidity is missing as a result. Perhaps the animation was simplified to keep the game running smoothly, but player and stadium details are still quite low. It’s actually difficult to pick out individual player likenesses or distinguish stadiums from the default camera angle.
The graphics are a bit rough around the edges, and the player animation isn’t quite smooth enough.
Other versions of FIFA have offered a slower, more thoughtful game of football this year, whereas the PSP version feels closer to last year’s game. There’s certainly little evidence of improved artificial intelligence, as you’ll find you can still cut through the defence with a single man. The result is that while FIFA 08 is relatively easy to get into, it has less long-term appeal in its core modes than we’d have hoped. It’s also worth mentioning that the trick system is unchanged and still quite difficult to employ using the L button. This gives little for advanced players to take advantage of, and games can feel scrappier as a result.
FIFA 08 is an officially licensed game, and the overall presentation is exemplary. There are 50 licensed music tracks from artists as varied as Cansei de ser Sexy and Bodyrox, but they all fit the game’s tone. In addition, any music on your memory stick is automatically imported to play alongside the default tracks. The EA Media Center lets you mix and match your favourite songs, as well as listen to them alongside a rather nice onscreen visualisation. The in-game audio also deserves a mention, as the crowds chant team-specific names and the commentary is provided by Martin Tyler and Andy Gray. The commentary sounds low-quality in terms of bit rate, but the pundits provide plenty of natural-sounding banter. There are also 110 extra kits, balls, stadiums, and teams that you can buy in the EA store with points earned by playing through the different modes in the game.
FIFA 08 does pretty much everything that you could ask of a PSP football game. It boasts mountains of varied features, takes advantage of the console’s hardware features, and is a fun game to play, too. Sure, there are modes from the other versions of FIFA 08 that could be added–notably, be a pro–but that’s compensated for by plenty of PSP-specific offerings. The gameplay and AI could definitely be tightened up, but otherwise, this is a good portable version of a solid football game.