A slide from Sony Computer Entertainment\’s Chris Eden at GDC 2008 outlined the Playstation store on PSP. The slide states that with the Playstation store on PSP you can \”Access native PLAYSTATION Store on PSP via wireless hotspot\” and \”Purchase and download content direct to PSP (no USB cable)\” The launch is currently TBA and Sony are promising more details in the future.
Microsoft has just shot out a big press release concering all the game related news from this years Game Developer\’s conference. Gears of War 2, Fable 2, Ninja Gaiden II and a range of indie Xbox LIVE arcade titles are all on the cards. Read the document in full inside.
Recently released Gears of War 2 temporary box art reveals that there will also be a limited edition of the game. There are currently no details about the contents of the limited edition.
Gamers have spotted that one of the Xbox Live Community Games that are available is larger than the allowed file size for Xbox Live Arcade titles. TriLinea, one of the XNA preview games available to download is 190MB which is 40MB larger than the allowed size. This has sparked rumors that the size restriction for Xbox Live Arcade titles may change. This wouldn\’t be much of a surprise considering the amount of stick the limit has been getting from developers.
Here is the first part in the \’Fable 2 GDC Developer Walkthrough\’, check out the other 2 parts in the forums.
GDC 2008: The Temple of Sacrifice video. Check out this gameplay featuring a new level, weapon and enemies!
Reuters is currently reporting that Microsoft has confirmed that it will cut the prices of the Xbox 360 in Canada in order to help its battle against the Wii and PS3. Microsoft said it would cut the price of the Xbox 360 console to C$349 from C$399, while the premium Elite model would drop to C$449 from C$499 and the arcade model will be dropping to $279 from C$299.
January closed out on a low note for fans of Sid Meier’s acclaimed world-conquering Civilization series. Though the insurgency remained a go for Civilization Revolution on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS, the Wii version of the game was indefinitely furloughed, with neither 2K Games nor developer Firaxis offering sound justification as to why.
;)
It’s that defeatist attitude, man.
One possible explanation could be 2K Games’ realization that the Wii version of the game wouldn’t hit the publisher’s desired ship date. If so, it appears that decision was taken to the wire, as 2K Games today revealed Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution would commence its world domination for the Xbox 360, PS3, and DS on June 3.
Described by the legendary Sid Meier himself as “the game I’ve always wanted to make,” Revolution offers the same style of addictive “just one more turn” gameplay that made the series famous. The game will feature 16 unique civilizations, all with a variety of famous historical figures to play as or against, as well as a more streamlined time scale to give the game a more action-based feel.
Additionally, Revolution will come packed in with online multiplayer modes that offer team battles, head-to-head battles, and free-for-all matches, as well as automatching, ranked games, leaderboards, achievements, and downloadable content. For more on Civilization Revolution, check out If Its Games’s previous coverage.
SAN FRANCISCO–Today at GDC, we finally got our hands on the DS version of Maxis’ highly anticipated game Spore. Although a DS version of spore was hinted at almost two years ago, this is the first time we’ve actually managed to see and play the portable Spore Creatures for ourselves. We also managed to wrangle Jason Haber, producer on the project for Maxis.
The first thing you’ll notice about Spore Creatures is that it’s a close graphical cousin to its PC relative. Although the models are obviously less detailed on the DS, the art design is very similar. Unfortunately, the full gamut of the PC experience won’t be coming to Spore Creatures. The PC version of Spore will feature five evolutionary phases, from tiny bacteria to spacefaring civilizations, but Spore Creatures will focus specifically on the creature phase of the game, where you take control of a dinosaurlike creature as you make your way through a storyline and attempt to evolve yourself into something fiercer and better capable of defeating your foes.
We hopped into a saved game that put us in command of an early and relatively unevolved creature who didn’t have very many distinguishing features. After navigating along a path, however, we picked up a mouth, which we were then able to tack onto our creature via the creature editor, which is accessible any time your creature is visiting a nest, which acts as something like a home base.
The creature editor is fairly straightforward. As your creature levels up (there’ll be 30 levels in all), you’ll gain more body points, which can be spent on a variety of body parts. Each body part will have a different characteristic, governing your social, attack, or defensive capabilities. You can focus on a single characteristic, if you like, or attempt to make a balance of all three. Attack and defense capabilities will obviously help your creature become more fearsome in combat, while the social characteristic will apparently help you become more appealing when dealing with other nonhostile creatures.
The creature editor gives you a pretty good number of customization options for your creature. You’re not plugging body parts into equipment slots or anything; you can drag them where you want them, rotate and scale them, and even add paint jobs to the various parts, if you like. The body parts that you’re able to apply will become more elaborate as you progress, allowing you to shift your creature from a mere blob to a more fearsome, Trogdor-esque creation. The number of body parts and customization options are fairly intense, as we saw when Jason scrolled through his saved games, which featured numerous creatures of various shapes, colors, and sizes.
Although we didn’t get a huge amount of time to explore the gameworld, we’re told that there will be a set storyline that you follow along with your creature, which apparently can involve a fair amount of creature-on-creature combat. In addition, there will definitely be an online component to the game, although it seems like this might be restricted to sending your creatures to your friends, where they will appear in their games and be controlled by artificial intelligence. It’s not head-to-head play, but at least you’ll be able to beat up on your friends’ creatures in spirit. We’re also told that some of the designers’ creatures may make their way into the Wi-Fi network, so you may find yourself befriending one of Will Wright’s creations at some point in your creature’s career.
Although Spore Creatures is still half a year away from seeing release, it already looks like it’s well on its way to being a unique gameplay experience for the DS. We’ll keep an eye on the game as it approaches its September release date, so stay tuned to If Its Games for more information.
-If Its Games
SAN FRANCISCO–Last month, we gave you a glimpse at the first three levels from the upcoming Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword, a game that aims to fill the void of intense action titles on Nintendo’s popular handheld. Jumping forward to today, we’ve been able to get an updated look at this promising demo (sans Tomonobu Itagaki guiding us along the way, unfortunately), currently found in the Nintendo booth at this year’s GDC.
The good news is that the game is looking just as pretty as ever, as any number of passersby overhead muttering, “Is that on the DS?” can attest. The demo began with Ryu training Momiji in a lush forest setting, with vibrant shades of green surrounding a rippling pond. The level of detail found in these early outdoor environments really stands out, but that artistry is also complemented by neat added effects like the fiery blaze of Ryu’s ninpo magic and the ominous beams of light erupting from the ground when new enemies appear.
It wasn’t all jungle, though, as we soon made our way into a tight indoor environment to contend with enemies in darkened corridors. Interestingly, the constricting nature of these encounters forced us to change our combat style, which to that point involved a lot of jumping high in the air and coming down hard with downward slashes (executed by swiping up with the stylus, then back down). But instead of that extravagant style, we had to adapt by using more toe-to-toe, blocking-heavy swordplay. It’s a testament to the game’s surprisingly deep control scheme that you can adapt so well to these dramatically different environments without any frustration setting in.
Though much of the gameplay we experienced in the demo was very combat-oriented, there was one particularly interesting section that added some interesting platforming. Racing up a hill, Ryu had to dodge a stream of large boulders rolling his way. If that weren’t enough, there were archers stationed on nearby rooftops raining arrows on top of us. What this meant in terms of control was the need to time the boulders, tap out a path for Ryu to follow, then use brief moments of calm to throw a few shuriken at the archers–all using the stylus.
Unfortunately, the chatter and shuffling of feet at GDC kept us from having a good listen to any updates in Dragon Sword’s audio offerings, but there were still plenty of weapon noises and ninja grunts to go around. Thankfully, the rest of the game was promising enough to stand out from these crowds. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on the game right up to its release late next month.
-If Its Games
SAN FRANCISCO–On the morning the Game Developers Conference has begun to shift into high gear, Nintendo has stolen some of the thunder surrounding anticipated announcements by Microsoft. The company has announced release dates for two of its most anticipated projects for its wildly successful Wii console–Wii Fit and WiiWare.
According to Japanese game giant’s US arm, Nintendo of America, Wii Fit will go on sale on May 19 across North America. (It will hit the UK and Europe earlier, on April 25.)
The game, which has not yet been officially priced, will have players engage in exerciselike activities–including yoga and low-impact calisthenics–via its balance board peripheral. Players can track their health and exercise progress through a new Wii Fit channel, which will launch alongside the game.
Despite some debate about exactly how much exercise the game will actually entail, Wii Fit has sold over 1.4 million units in Japan to date, much to the pleasure of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Nintendo also said that third-party publishers are already working on games which use the balance board, such as Namco Bandai’s snowsports title Family Ski. In an article printing this morning, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the game, which is already available in Japan, is coming to the US later this year.
One week before Wii Fit sparks another retail run on the still-hard-to-find console, Nintendo will launch its eagerly anticipated WiiWare channel. The channel will offer a series of all-new games developed by both independent developers, such as Frontier’s LostWinds, and major publishers, such as Square Enix’s fantasy-monarch lifestyle sim Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.
Unsurprisingly, Nintendo will be touting the development side of WiiWare during a GDC Panel devoted to the subject tomorrow. Though the WiiWare toolset has remained largely out of the public’s eye, NOA is playing up how its “combination of low development barriers and unique game experiences found only on Wii should enable developers to try new ideas with lower risk in a quicker, more creative and affordable way.”
If Its Games will have more updates from both the WiiWare and Wii Fit panels direct from the 2008 Game Developers Conference.
SAN FRANCISCO–In case you missed the news from Microsoft’s GDC keynote address this morning, there are currently playable demos for several XNA-developed games available for free download via the Xbox Live Marketplace. One of the more unusual games among them is Culture, a colorful puzzle game in which you’re tasked with getting rid of weeds and creating pictures by planting flowers. There are three very different gameplay modes available in the demo and, as you’ll see, some are more compelling than others.
The “bloom game” mode, which was shown briefly during this morning’s keynote, tasks you with getting rid of weeds that are attempting to spread across a spherical garden that looks like an empty Super Mario Galaxy level. As you rotate the garden around you’ll notice that weeds are popping up all over it (albeit very slowly in the early levels), and the only way to get rid of them is by planting flowers so that they form a circle around the offending plants. The circles can be any size and don’t really have to resemble a circle, they need to be composed of flowers of the same color, though, and you definitely can’t get away with simply drawing a ring around the entire sphere. We tried that.
The bloom game mode looks like something Mario would be happy jumping around in.
In the early bloom game levels you’ll only planting one or two different colors of flower, and you’ll get lots of one kind to work with before the seed feeder (which appears in the top right corner of the screen) forces you to use another color. Different colored flowers can’t be sown on top of each other, so as an increasingly large selection is added to your feeder you have to get a lot more careful about how you plant them. Red flowers are unique, incidentally, in that they can be planted atop weeds and instantly kill them. Don’t expect to get a whole lot of those, though.
The second mode we played, titled “paint with flowers,” was far less enjoyable than the first and, although it proved to be quite challenging on one occasion, it’s not a game that you could ever actually fail at. It’s just painting by numbers, except that you’re planting different colored flowers where you’d usually be slapping on the paint. Your seed palette is laid out in such a way that each color can be identified using a single letter and a single number, and each square on the canvas grid has a letter and a number in it. You identify which color you need, you plant the flower, and it grows there, as well as in any adjoining square of the same color. The challenge simply that, as the canvas fills with a veritable field of flowers, squares that you’ve yet to plant in get quite difficult to find, even using the trigger buttons to zoom in and out for a better look.
Even more baffling is the Culture demo’s third mode of play, “flower garden.” Even after checking out the tutorial we weren’t entirely sure what to do with this one. It’s a garden with flowers in it, and you can combine different pairs of flowers to form hybrids, which then grow in the garden. If there’s any other point to this mode it’s lost on us right now, and we’re wondering if perhaps the garden is simply a place to keep and “play” with flowers that you’ve unlocked in the other modes.
Regardless of the fact that not all of the modes we played really appealed to us, Culture is an interesting and nice-looking XNA game. It’s conceivable that the finished game might feature additional modes as well, so we’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this one going forward.
-If Its Games
SAN FRANCISCO–Generations of college students have decorated their dorm rooms with the mind-bending, perspective-shifting artwork of M.C. Escher, so it was only natural that a game would find inspiration from such thought-boggling lithographs. That game, echochrome, was available to play in Sony’s blogger’s lounge at this year’s Game Developers Conference. We eagerly sat down to see how it’s coming along, and are glad to report that it is shaping up nicely and bound to twist your brain into a pretzel.
We first played through echochrome’s tutorial, which is a good thing, considering we’ve never played a puzzle game quite like this before. The basics are relatively simple: A humanoid figure walks a restricted path on a platform, and you must guide him across various obstacles and to specific locations marked by “echoes” by rotating the entire game board. To be successful, you must understand the five mysterious laws:
1. Perspective traveling. In other words, “What you see becomes the truth.” In this case, two platforms at different heights can be meshed together by rotating the camera so that the end of one walkway lines up with the beginning of another. Using this rule, you can get your figure from one level to another, even if it looks like an impossible task when you first view the board.
2. Perspective landing. Some platforms are littered with holes that your little buddy will fall through if he crosses them. By shifting board angles, you can situate other platforms to look as though they are underneath the hole. Your figure, who would otherwise fall into oblivion, will instead land on the platform that appears to be underneath.
3. Perspective existence. If you don’t see it, that means it isn’t there. If there is a gap in the walkway, you can rotate the board to hide the gap from view, and your figure will cross right over as if the gap doesn’t exist.
4. Perspective absence. Goodness–there’s a hole in your way, and you don’t want to fall through? Like with perspective existence, all you have to do as rotate the board so that something covers it up. If you don’t see it, that means it isn’t there!
5. Perspective jump. Just as there are holes, there are trampolines. If your figure crosses one, he will fly in whichever direction he’s walking. To get to a higher level, adjust the game board so that a platform appears to be above the jump point, and he’ll land there rather than being tossed into the ether.
These five mysterious rules created some mind-numbing challenges for us, and we only played the first three levels. It’s worth pointing out that some obstacles have more than one solution. For example, in the first level we used perspective jump to get to a higher platform the first time we played. The next time, we used perspective traveling to connect the two platforms together. It only took us those two tries to complete that level, since it used the laws in fairly obvious ways.
The second level was a far different matter, since the solutions weren’t so obvious. Using perspective absence and perspective existence, we managed to get our figure to ignore the holes and jump points on the platform, but getting him to a disconnected platform proved to be a challenge. Eventually, we were able to shift the board so that a vertical column covered two gaps at once, allowing our handsomely color-free fellow to cross to the first echo. Getting him to the upper level was also a challenge, but we were able to line up two platforms next to each other to make it look like one big platform–a little more work than it should have been. Guessing where the figure was going to head in this situation was a headache, too, because he would turn even when it seemed that the path would take him straight ahead.
The third level, which featured a two-tiered platform and two disconnected subsidiary platforms, ramped up the challenge even further, since the side platforms contained both holes and trampolines. It took us a good number of tries to figure this one out, because you only have limited time before your figure drops to his knees and fades into nothingness. It was unclear just how much time we had, actually, since there was no onscreen timer to tell us how much time we had before it was game over. Eventually, though, we were able to use perspective traveling in enough ways to gather up all the echoes.
echochrome features a sparse black and white visual style that is both a nod to M.C. Escher’s black and white drawings and a design necessity that keeps players from struggling to make ends meet–literally. While we don’t yet know an exact release date, we do know that it will be available for download on the PS3 via the PlayStation Network, and on the PSP. We’ll bring you more information on this thought-provoking puzzler as it becomes available.
-If Its Games
SAN FRANCISCO–Sony showed off a new demo of Secret Agent Clank for the PlayStation Portable at GDC, and it showcased what seemed to be the game’s first level as well as some Ratchet-focused, arena minigames. The Clank level we saw took place in the Boltaire Artificial History Museum immediately following a cutscene in which Ratchet is not only apprehended sneaking into the museum, but also says some rather not-so-nice things about his erstwhile comrade.
In our earlier preview, we touched on the level, its laser-bypassing minigame, and its impressive stealth takedowns. After successfully acquiring Ratchet’s lacerator amid a sea of lasers and enemies, we completed the level and were treated to another cutscene focusing on the imprisoned Ratchet and the Southern-style warden. Evidently Ratchet doesn’t remember what landed him in the pokey, and the warden isn’t going to help. Instead, he will be treating Ratchet to something worthy of the hero of the galaxy: no protection against a prison full of henchmen he helped to incarcerate. Fortunately, Clank is a kindhearted companion who sends him a cake. Baked into the cake is just what Ratchet needs: his lacerators.
When next we found Ratchet, he was brandishing his trusty wrench on a platform making its way to the top floor of the prison. The catch was, at each floor some of the inmates would rush him in an attempt to exact their revenge. They attacked by rolling at him, swinging barbells, and shooting spines from their backs. After slaying a series of opponents with our trusty iron, we cut over to our inventory and dipped into our firearms selection. The lacerators we drew were two pistols that shot orange bolts of energy. After leveling up the lacerators and dispatching a legion of enemies, we made use of the shard gun. The weapon shot blue chunks of ice in a more shotgunlike pattern. Enemies took some damage but also suffered a chilling slowdown. This allowed us to strafe, circle, and escape the cold embrace of death until we drew our final weapon: the walloper, a glove that gives Ratchet’s fist a charge. With a button press, you power up then rush forward a few feet to deliver an electrified punch.
Once we completed the 15-floor tower of terror, we were provided with a few other options for Game of Death experiences for Ratchet. The level we completed was called Karmic Beatdown. While finishing it didn’t net us a reward, the other levels offered upgrades for completion. Past Due was a level with seven rounds and a punishing time limit that would give you the firebomb wrench mod. No Shelter was a 12-round bout populated not only by inmates, but also by a fiery, laser-shooting skull. Completing that level grants you the cool, charge-up mod for the shard gun. While these levels weren’t playable, two others were available: The Mega Challenge: Cell Block, and another level that appeared to allow only for walloper combat.
The Ratchet-focused gameplay was true to the previous installments’ shooting roots and broke up the more stealth-focused and platforming elements of Clank’s story. We look forward to seeing more of Secret Agent Clank before it’s released later this year.
-If Its Games
SAN FRANCISCO–Originally an MFA thesis project that took the form of a downloadable PC game, flOw was brought to the attention of console gamers when Sony made the PlayStation 3 version something of a showpiece for its console at various conventions. At last year’s Tokyo Game Show, an expansion pack for the PS3 game with a new playable creature was unveiled and, at the Game Developers’ Conference today, we were able to get our hands on the upcoming PSP version for the first time.
If you’ve played the PS3 version of flow, you’ll know that it made good use of the Sixaxis controller’s motion controls, which obviously isn’t possible on the PSP. You’ll play the handheld version using the analog stick (the D pad doesn’t appear to be supported) in conjunction with the X button, which affords your aquatic creature a brief speed boost when pursuing other organisms.
As far as we could tell during the 10 minutes or so that we spent with the game, the PSP version of flOw is identical to the PS3 game in almost every regard. The only difference we noticed is that the areas you’re swimming around in while on your quest to eat other organisms and evolve are smaller. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, given that after feasting on most of any particular level’s organisms on the PS3, it could sometimes take a long time to find the special red and blue creatures you need to swim toward so that you can descend a level deeper or ascend toward the surface, respectively.
The PSP version of flOw will be released on the PlayStation Store for the PC on March 6. No pricing for the game has been announced at this time. We’ll bring you more information as soon as it becomes available.
-If Its Games