When Disney first gave gamers a look at its social networking service DGamer for the Nintendo DS at last year’s E3 Media and Business Summit, the House of Mouse said one of the first titles to implement the new technology would be Spectrobes II, due out sometime this year. Today, Disney officially announced the next installment in the scavenger-esque action role-playing game, saying Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is currently slated to arrive for the DS this fall.
Beyond the Portals is a direct continuation of Disney’s 2007 best-seller, and picks up again with intergalactic patrol officers Rallen and Jeena policing the universe with help from once-fossilized, now-reawakened creatures known as Spectrobes. This time out, players will be able to assume the role of both Rallen and Jeena, and puzzles that require her skills will play a more prominent role in the game.
Again developed by Jupiter, Disney is promising a number of new features for Beyond the Portals, including a 3D perspective, revamped fossil excavation and battle mechanics, additional creatures, and an online battling mode made possible by way of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. As mentioned, the game will also implement Disney’s DGamer online community hub.
According to today’s announcement, Beyond the Portals will act as a launching point for Disney to “expand the series in the coming years.”
When the Big Brain–the aptly named yet dubiously intelligent leader of a marauding band of alien brain thingys–selects Earth as his next target for conquest, he doesn’t count on facing any serious opposition to his invasion. After all, with lasers and mind control at his disposal, he is comfortably unstoppable…or so he thought. Unfortunately for him, the presence of so much exposed cerebellum has attracted a triple dose of perhaps an alien brain thingy’s worst nightmare: the zombie. With mankind all but enslaved by a veritable army of hors d’oeuvres, the fate of the world is in the fetid hands of the undead.
Eating spicy food gives Fins some powerful heartburn.
Teenage Zombies is presented like a 1950s pulp horror comic, and you’re occasionally prompted to turn your Nintendo DS on its side like a book to view hilarious comic-book cutscenes, complete with dialogue that seems to have jumped out of Invader Zim or the Spaceman Spiff strips of Calvin and Hobbes. In it, you take control of the titular team as it journeys far and wide in its search for snacks. You have three zombies at your disposal, and though they share a common health (unhealth?) meter, they each play differently and have their own unique abilities.
Finnigan “Fins” Magee, a stocky gent in bright orange shorts, has hideous purple tentacles attached to his back that let him lash out on either side and above simultaneously, as well as climb up walls or across wires. Lori “Lefty” Lopez is tall and emaciated, but she’s able to reach out with her one good arm beyond human limits to climb up and over walls and obstacles. Zack “Half-Pipe” Boyd is the smallest of the bunch, and with his skateboard (which seems permanently attached), he’s able to slide into tight crawl spaces and speed down ramps for some tricky jumps.
Switching between the three teens can be done at any time and is as easy as hitting the trigger buttons or tapping the touch screen. The trio will begin its journey in, of course, the graveyard, and make its way through a number of locations familiar to horror fans, such as an abandoned construction site and a mall. Teamwork is vital to maneuver through the maze of obstacles laid out in your path, and you’ll constantly find yourself swapping back and forth between your undead to progress.
Beyond their unique strengths, each of the teenage zombies can also find special power-ups that will temporarily give them extra abilities. For example, Fins can chomp down on rotten leftovers to belch out acid and melt grates, and Half-Pipe can piece together spare tires to pimp his ride. In addition to these power-ups, you’ll find additional limbs that you can use (once you assemble a complete body) to play a simple attach-the-parts minigame with the touch screen to restore your health.
This is what happens when you let Half-Pipe get creative.
The brain thingys themselves range in size and weaponry and all look like disembodied versions of the aliens from Mars Attacks! In the portion that we played through, we encountered tiny, floating brains armed with ray guns; larger, tank-equipped brutes; and even a few who favored the hands-off approach and used their telepathic powers to make armed security guards do their bidding. A good old-fashioned blow to their braincases is all it takes to disable them and reveal their tasty brainmeats for consumption, which refills lost health.
Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys! should be arriving on store shelves this spring. Check back for our full review shortly.
Upon its initial deployment during the first part of November, Activision and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has been peerless in the sales charts, wresting control of the top slot away from Microsoft and Bungie’s Halo 3 and never looking back. With Activision claiming the crown of best-selling game of 2007 for COD4, the publisher will be stop-lossing the modern-day shooter for another tour with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Game of the Year Edition, scheduled for release for the Xbox 360 on April 3.
As noted by leaks from UK news outlets earlier this week, COD4: GOTYE won’t include any new or upgraded features. However, it will come packed in with a redeemable token for the Modern Warfare Variety Map Pack, which will add four new multiplayer maps to the game’s lauded online component. The four new player areas are: Creek, an open village area; Broadcast, a close-quarters in-door environment; Killhouse, an abandoned warehouse; and Chinatown, a low-lit map set in the not-so-war-torn city of San Francisco. Those who already own the game will also be able to purchase the map pack on April 3 through Xbox Live for 800 Microsoft points ($10).
In anticipation of the map pack’s debut on Xbox Live, GameStop will be hosting a live, preview event at two locations in New York City and San Jose. To the first 100 attendees will go a free token to download the Variety Map Pack, and the first 250 people to arrive will have a chance to compete for various prizes, including GameStop gift certificates.
Activision did not indicate whether the COD4: GOTYE rerelease or the Variety Map Pack would also arrive for the PlayStation 3 or PC, and had not responded to requests for comment as of press time. However, Infinity Ward did say on its official Web site for the game in February that the then unnamed map pack would be available for XBL and the PlayStation Network this spring.
With little more than a week before Gran Turismo 5 Prologue finally hits Europe, anticipation for the game is reaching fever pitch. Sony has certainly pulled out all the stops for the series’ unveiling on the PlayStation 3; it’s nearly impossible to avoid the TV advertising campaign in the UK, and if you’re a car fanatic then you’ve probably heard that the first British showing of the Nissan GT-R will take place at a Gran Turismo media event on March 27. With so much excitement around, it was nice to receive a surprise email from Sony this week inviting us to download the game. Naturally, we wasted no time in doing so to report back.
Gran Turismo makes its debut on the PlayStation 3, and it looks every bit as good as we’d hoped.
As with all previous games in the series, Gran Turismo’s love of cars is obvious from the moment you load it up. If you’re a casual racing fan, you might actually find this automobile obsession almost to the game’s fault, given that it prevents you from actually racing anything before you’ve spent a good few minutes setting everything up. This isn’t helped by the car-selection setup, which doesn’t filter out the cars that you can’t actually afford. With a measly 35,000 credits to spend at the beginning of the game, your choice is quite restricted, and you have to root through the various cheaper manufacturers to find something such as a Mini to start you off.
Once you decide to lay out the credits, your reward is seeing your shiny new car parked in your rather illustrious Japanese garages (ours were in Shorenin and Shirakawa, Kyoto). Shiny really is the optimum word here; the cars have been modeled in the sort of immaculate detail that would probably make even the original CAD designers coo with excitement. The presentation of the cars is certainly helped by the fact that they don’t get damaged, but that decision is hard to argue with when the camera is tastefully panning around your new motor. You also get to appreciate it in-game with four different camera views: bonnet, in-car, windscreen, and exterior. The in-car view is both practical and attractive in that it lets you get a good view of the road while also looking around to appreciate the work that’s gone into re-creating the interior–or looking down at your wing mirror to check out those you’re leaving in your dust.
The quickest way to start racing is the arcade mode, which contains four different track circuits, a rally stage, and a city race. Each course has an alternate version, although for most this means simply going around in a reverse direction. A couple, such as Daytona, have substantially different tracks, with both the speedway and the road course available to race around. Given that it’s the hometown of If Its Games UK, we wasted no time in burning around the London circuit, and we were impressed with what we saw.
London is the only city-based circuit in the game, and we assume that Polyphony put a lot of effort into making it perfect for the prologue edition. Everything of note has been packed into the Soho loop, with famous sights such as Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square sitting alongside minor shops and businesses. In fact, it was the latter details that really impressed, particularly when individual shops and venues had made it into the game intact. The Curzon cinema is clearly noticeable and well-modeled alongside the area’s many theatres, and it’s impossible to miss the numerous Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses and Pret a Manger sandwich shops, all exactly where we expected them. Although the backgrounds still look a bit static, the amount of effort that’s gone into re-creating real-life businesses is above anything we’ve seen before. As for the spectators, they’re now animated and do the whole “cowering with fear” thing if you hit the barrier, but otherwise they’re nowhere near as impressive as the static background elements.
It’s interesting to see how Gran Turismo now adopts the Forza-esque racing-line option by default, although unlike in Turn 10’s game, you also see an optimum speed displayed above each corner. Although Gran Turismo still wears its sim badge with pride, it offers a number of concessions to make the experience easier for novices, and it also throws in a few options that make it more challenging for veterans. Active steering, active stability management, and traction control are all tweakable, and you can also switch the driving physics from standard to professional to make the game more realistic. Likewise, the opponent artificial intelligence is adjustable on a 100-point scale. Eighteen is the default setting, and turning the setting higher results in drivers that are ever more eager to block your racing line.
After finding our feet with the arcade mode, we jumped into the many events that form the bulk of the challenge. The aim is to work your way up through driving classifications, moving from C to B to A and acquiring new vehicles along the way. The more races you win, the more credits you’ll have to spend on new vehicles, which are a necessity because the cars become faster and the opponents more difficult. These events include a mix of both standard races and more mission-oriented contests, such as time trials, or having to overtake a certain number of racers within one lap of the circuit. There are also vehicle-specific cups that require you to own a certain manufacturer’s car to enter.
As expected, the graphics in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue are of the highest quality, particularly when it comes to the cars. Every single piece of the exterior designs appears to have been modeled perfectly, and the lighting and environments reflect off of the bodywork in an extremely convincing manner. It really is possible to look at the game in certain conditions and believe that you’re looking at a real video, which makes it all the more tragic that the game has no photo mode. Likewise, it’s a real shame that the game doesn’t save replays automatically, considering that this element of the game is just as addictive as ever. Though it’s difficult to see during the races themselves, the vehicles move in an extremely realistic manner, with subtle shifts in weight due to gear changes and inertia all the more noticeable on the high-resolution cars.
The Mini is one of the only cars you can afford when you start the game, but it’s fun to drive nonetheless.
The online servers were unavailable when we were looking at the game, but the menu system shows options for news, GT-TV, rankings, and online play. The GT-TV option will offer shows such as Top Gear as well as the in-game cinematics, although you’ll have to complete the game to see the end animation. (Owners who downloaded the game will also have to download the cinematics.) For those who are either without access to the Internet or just feeling like a more intimate challenge, the two-player split-screen mode works well, with no loss of detail that we could discern.
By going into the options menu, we found a few interesting technical facts about the game. If you’ve ticked both the 720p and 1080i boxes in your PlayStation 3 setup screen, then you can switch between the two in-game, and if you’re using 1080p, then it supports that display mode at 60 frames per second (although Sony states that this drops to 30 for replays). It’s also good to see that if you have a Dual Shock 3 pad, even the European version of the game will support the vibration feature. If you want to go one step further, you can invest in any number of Logitech steering wheels and customise the game’s setup. In total, the game supports five of the company’s steering wheels, from the Driving Force GT to the EX, and it also lets you customise standard wheel setups.
The full edition of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will be released in Europe on March 28th and in the US on April 15th. Check back soon for our full review.
Parents, be warned: Condemned 2: Bloodshot is not a game fit for children. At choice moments in Monolith’s gruesome and demented first-person horror adventure game, you’ll impale rioters on rebar, crush the heads of the homeless in a gigantic vise, and force the faces of far freakier foes into toilet bowls. Every one of these actions is accompanied by blood-spurting visuals, shouted epithets, and the slimy sounds of entrails splattering onto the floor and walls. Like a good slasher flick, the game makes no bones about its controversial content; it lets you decide how you want to execute each maniacal foe and then showcases the mutilation in macabre detail. If you played the game’s grisly predecessor, the gore should come as no surprise, though it’s still impressive how well Bloodshot manages to one-up the original Condemned’s violence at every turn. The volume has certainly been turned up.
Bad guy say ouch.
All of the vivid neck-breaking and throat-slashing action translates into equally intense scripted events. Condemned 2 is, at heart, a series of fantastic moments. These individual moments aren’t always connected in ways that make sense, but they’re powerful and memorable, and a testament to the ever-rewarding nature of the jump-out-of-your-seat surprise. But a surprise is only as good as its setup, and the game’s finest asset is its ability to create a thick, dreadful atmosphere, and then reward your emotional and physical investment in that dread with a shock and a scare. You’ll scour the grungiest, darkest corners of a besieged city, from a creepy bowling alley to a claustrophobic dockyard. The payoff in each scenario is proportionate to the terror the game so cunningly instills. Two separate chase scenes come to mind immediately and stand as the most unforgettable gaming moments of the year so far, though even the less-dramatic sequences can feel like a bludgeon to the brain. In the end, it doesn’t matter how a magic theater and a doll factory relate to one another. What’s important is that each level will cause you to hold your breath, only to expel it in a single gasp.
Somehow, Monolith found a way to fit Ethan Thomas’s continuing battle with his own demons into these set pieces, with mostly positive results. Ethan is as bitter and jaded as ever, and he’s used the bottle to bury the troubles of his mysterious past. In need of his services, the Serial Crime Unit pulls Ethan from the gutter and implores him to assist them in investigating the enigmatic cause behind Metro City’s unstoppable crime wave. During the course of the game, Ethan unlocks the secrets of an obscure conspiracy. Don’t be surprised if you get a Silent Hill vibe from the experience: The lines between the real world and the paranormal are confusingly blurred together, and as enjoyable as the overall story arc is, Bloodshot doesn’t answer as many questions as you’d hope. Just when you think you might come face-to-face with the truth (and just as some major story twists and a new gameplay mechanic are revealed), you’re left with a few savory hints and the promise of the inevitable sequel.
The general anxiety is further enhanced by the most decrepit and decayed visual design in recent memory. You can taste the dust in the air as you traverse Metro City’s dank environs, and the rough textures make every wall and object look gritty and run-down. The lighting is evocative and creepy, sometimes even more so when you turn on your flashlight in the darkest areas. The stylized effects that indicate a paranormal encounter are sometimes overdone, but for the most part, they set the right mood and parallel Ethan’s battle with the bottle. The sound is even better. The slams of metal against flesh are conveyed perfectly, as are the grunts and cries of your opponents. Furthermore, moments of silence contribute to the sense of fear, making the high quality of the scuffles and creaks that break up those moments even more memorable. In addition, the voice acting is fantastic, and the eerie, understated musical score sets the tone without getting in the way.
Bad guy go boom.
It all comes down to vivid imagery and shock value, and Bloodshot gives you plenty of control over how you manipulate them. There are more weapons to play around with than in the first Condemned, thanks to the inspired locales. You’ll be spending some time in dark alleys, where baseball bats, pipes, and two-by-fours are waiting to be grabbed and swung, but even better instruments of destruction are found in a deserted lodge and an abandoned bowling alley. Favorites include saws that look like lollipops, deer antlers, medieval swords, paper cutter blades, bowling pins, and locker doors. A good variety of items can be grabbed and used to bludgeon enemies with, but this isn’t the only improvement to the formula. The basic hand-to-hand combat is enhanced, and you can attack with both fists this time, using the corresponding trigger to swing. You can also string combos together for more damage, and there’s a terrific sense of impact when your fist or bludgeon finds its target.
Melee fisticuffs are rather deliberate affairs. They force you to pay close attention to every move so that you can block when necessary and throw in a combo when your enemy staggers. This isn’t always easy: Bloodshot’s artificial intelligence will challenge you. Foes run and seek cover, grab weapons off of the ground, and change up their attack patterns, which makes for some challenging fights (and some well-earned sighs of relief when they are over). As if this didn’t make for enough variety, there is also a meter that fills as your kill count rises. Filling the bar lets you unleash finishing moves on your opponents. When this happens, everything moves into slow motion and a series of contextual button presses tell you what you need to do to finish off your target. This mechanic has been overdone elsewhere, but it feels natural here because the mechanic is an offshoot of the “pull right trigger, swing right fist” controls used in basic combat.
The links above will take you to other Web sites and are provided for your reference. If Its Games does not produce or endorse the content on these sites.
Silent Hill 5
The venerable spook-out adventure franchise brings a whole new freaky game to the scene.
Alone in the Dark
This action-survival game challenges players to investigate shadowy conspiracies that surround Central Park in New York City.
Clive Barker’s Jericho
Horror writer Clive Barker is collaborating on this horror game set within a walled city in northern Africa that happens to be filled with the souls of slaughtered warriors.
Condemned 2: Bloodshot (X360)
The sequel to Condemned promises a new fighting mechanic that will allow for brutal hand-to-hand combat as the player hunts down serial killers.
Score: 8.5
Condemned: Criminal Origins (X360)
You can play as an FBI agent investigating serial killers in Condemned: Criminal Origins. Condemned: Criminal Origins is an atmospheric thriller in which you need to employ both fighting and crime-solving skills to stay alive.
Score: 8.0
;)
;)
;)
