NewsFactor - Game consoles are one of the fastest growing segments of the electronics industry, so reducing the level of toxic components in the machines should be a top priority of manufacturers, the environmental group Greenpeace charged in a report released this week.
TechWeb - InformationWeek - The software giant remains optimistic in the face of the latest obstacle to adoption of its portable media player.
The Wii Homebrew Channel has launched which will allow the launching of Wii homebrew applications without the need to run the Twilight Hack first. Read more in the forums.
Below is a video interview about SIREN: Blood Curse. The game is also playing in the background and is looking pretty impressive. Video description:Story, gameplay, and features info revealed.
According to rumors in the latest issue of EGM, Rare is currently developing a Killer Instinct game for the Xbox 360. The game is apparently titled Killer Instinct 3D: Death, Destruction, and Doom. The graphics for the game will be in 3D and promises a more refined combat system.
On May 26th Japanese mobile phone provider NTT DoCoMo will launch a service that will let people pay for Microsoft points or Live subscriptions. The cost of the transaction will be added to the users cell phone bill.
GameStop has listed \’Gears of War with Maps\’ for $39.99 with a release date of 6/24/2008. It is believed that this will replace the Gears of War version now available, but it will also include all the previously released Xbox Live DLC and maybe stuff from the PC version.
Kevin VanOrd discusses his first week adventuring in Hyboria.
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Funcom’s newest massively multiplayer online role-playing game makes quite a first impression. Even the avatar creation scene is dramatic, featuring your character standing below the deck of a slave ship as it gets rocked by violent waves. It’s an appropriate introduction to this mature and bloody game, and it sets the stage for the initial questing, which starts on a lonely beach after the ship has wrecked, and gives your character a chance to break free of his or her prison shackles and start life anew.
Your first step is to choose a race. There are three races at your disposal culled from Conan lore: Cimmerian, Aquilonian, and Stygian. Each race is in turn associated with a particular set of classes, so not every class is available to all races. Classes are grouped into archetypes, like soldier and mage, which helps give an overall feel for your class type and then lets you further choose based on specific class characteristics. We chose the Stygian race, because it gave us access to a mage/soldier amalgam called a Herald of Xotli. Not only does this class offer access to two-handed swords, daggers, and some ranged weaponry, but it gives you access to a number of powerful-looking spells.
Every conversation initiates a cutscene complete with full voice acting.
You won’t even encounter other players for the first hour of the game. The initial levels function as a tutorial and introduce you to the basics of combat and questing. You’ll note right off the bat that initiating a conversation with a non-player character pulls you into a cutscene, where you are presented with multiple dialogue choices. The initial quest introduced us to Casilda, a healthily proportioned vixen kept captive nearby. Your mission? Free her from her iron bonds and escort her to the nearby city of Tortage. During our travels, we encountered several enemies, such as members of the Pict tribe and chest-pounding gorillas, as well as some bosses, like a slave trader named Saddur, who had other ideas regarding Casilda’s destiny.
The combat is interesting, real-time–and quite brutal. To swing your weapons, you press a number key that corresponds to one of three directions (apparently you earn two more later in the game). Conversely, your enemies can shield themselves, which is depicted on the screen by three arcs surrounding them. To do the most damage, you need to land your blow on the side that is least shielded, and because your foes can switch up the shielding, basic combat is more engaging than in a standard MMOG. You can also land combo blows, which involves first swinging your weapon using that combo ability and then swinging your weapon again to correspond with a contextual button press. To be effective in combat, you must pay attention to these contextual swings and to your adversary’s shield. The most successful moves result in a cringe-worthy thud and a large gusher of blood. You can also dodge attacks by double tapping the movement keys, or block by holding X, though we didn’t find much use for these abilities in the early hours.
Combat feels meaty and looks spectacular.
Eventually, you will make your way to Tortage, where you will encounter other players and find more quests than you can shake a scimitar at. You’ll also meet some of the seedier characters of the Hyborian underbelly. Several quests involve the local house of prostitution and its illustrious madam, and her tart dialogue leaves little to the imagination. Even the newly freed Casilda offers you her questionable services, so between that aspect and plenty of salty writing, it’s obvious that Age of Conan earned its M rating. You aren’t limited to assisting the local riffraff, however. Early missions involve collecting thread, offing pirates, exacting revenge, and poisoning guards. Some require you to roam through Tortage’s violent corners, while others send you into the local ruins or other instanced areas. However, to get the most out of your initial questing, you’ll want to finish the single-player mission assigned to you. This mission sends you to an instanced, nighttime version of Tortage, and once you’re finished and reached level 20, you can leave the city and finally enter the game proper, where a ton of possibilities await.
Funcom’s first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Anarchy Online, suffered from an infamously buggy launch, so early Age of Conan adopters were appropriately concerned about the stability of the developer’s newest entry into the genre. While there has been some server downtime, our experience has been smooth and lag-free. A few issues, such as one in which some players found themselves stuck in a particular area, have been fixed, while some others seem relatively minor, such as placeholder text still popping up in a few descriptions. There are also some slight visual glitches, like texture pop-in and some odd animations during the game’s in-engine cutscenes.
The early single-player quest pits you against some tough enemies.
Yet these small flaws are easy to overlook in light of Age of Conan’s extreme beauty. From both a technical and an artistic level, Tortage and its environs look absolutely stunning, from the gleaming harbor to the lush jungle areas. There is a striking amount of detail no matter what your surroundings, and aspects like the animations of the aforementioned apes and the spectacle of the most powerful spells are well done. There’s a lovely contrast between the goriness of the combat proper and the splendor of the world itself, so expect several “ooh, aah” moments. To get the greatest impact, you will need a pretty beefy system, but the game looks nice and runs decently even at lower settings. The soundtrack and sound effects also impart a lot of atmosphere, from the thumping beats of combat music to the grunts of your own character as he swings his heavy blade.
So far, we’re impressed by what we’ve played of Age of Conan, but there’s a lot more to see and do before we’re ready to issue a final verdict. Until that time, we’ll be updating Under Review, If Its Games’s reviews blog, with quest logs and media to tide you over. However, we can at least say for now that Age of Conan looks and sounds great, the questing is involving, and the blood-splattering combat feels nice and weighty. Look for a review in the coming weeks.
-If Its Games
FiReaNGeL commends to us a study by Penn State researchers looking at the effect of video game play on creativity. “[Subjects] were asked to play a popular video game, Dance Dance Revolution, at various levels of complexity. The students took a standard creativity test after playing. The researchers also took readings of the players’ skin conductance and asked players if they were feeling either positive or negative after the game… [T]he study appears to indicate that after playing the game, happy or sad people are most creative, while angry or relaxed people are not. The findings suggest that either high or low arousal is key to creativity. In other words, medium amounts of arousal are not conducive to creativity.”.
General manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten, has said that Microsoft is finally going to be putting their money where their mouth is by opening a new fully funded 1st party studio dedicated to brining high quality digital content to Xbox Live. \”stay tuned on this, as we have some very exciting things in the works including some big original XBLA games we will be announcing soon.\” said Whitten.
Bender from Futurama partakes in a GOW2 chainsaw battle.
When we last had a look at Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, it was in an effort to make sense of the Japanese import. It didn’t take long to learn that Japanese is a tough language to learn on the fly–especially in the text-heavy realm of tactical role-playing games. So it’s with no small sigh of relief that we recently came across a nearly complete version of the North American release. We’ve spent the past few days trekking through the world of Ivalice, collecting impressions of what to expect from the final version to go along with all those ability points. The short and sweet of it is that battles have retained that same charming mix of strategy and accessibility while a supporting cast of new features looks like it should add plenty of optional depth for those willing to take the plunge.
You
Pop is the dark avenue through which to unleash your completely justified hatred of bubbles. As hundreds of spherical globules float across the screen, it’s your job to wield your Wii Remote like a pointy stick and, using the A or B button, pop those fragile suckers good. It’s a basic concept, and you’ll certainly be able to get a decent score by blowing up everything at random, but there is actually a method to the bubble-popping madness. Pop lacks the depth to suck you in like better puzzle games do, but the tranquility of flowing bubbles combined with the savagery of nonstop popping gives it an unexpected charm. For a little while.
The only enemy in this serene world is the clock counting down the seconds to your doom. The depth comes from trying to balance your need for a higher score with the clock’s need to end your fun prematurely. Stringing together a run of same-shaped bubbles will earn you a combo bonus, making your score soar while the clock continually winds down. The only way to add time to that unrelenting beast is to destroy bubbles with reckless abandon. Once you learn to deftly shift your focus between chaining combos for a high score and adding precious seconds to the clock, you’ll work your way quickly up the leaderboard.
That bubble looks like a rhombus.
That balance of score-striving and time conservation is the only real trick to mastering Pop. Though levels flow in different directions and at varying speeds, you’ll never have to adjust your strategy. As long as you don’t miss the bubbles completely while attempting to pop one, you’ll be able to continue playing long after the fun has dissipated. High scores are more a matter of hardheaded determination than skill. Even with a few power-up bubbles thrown in for diversity, the repetitive action makes Pop tedious once you get the hang of the balancing act.
The multiplayer mode follows a similar path, but it adds a dose of pure viciousness. The benign power-ups from the single-player campaign have learned a few new tricks that will make stricken players scream with fury. Most upsetting is the lightning bolt, which makes your cursor completely worthless. There is something unsettling about not being able to pop bubbles when they flow mockingly past you. Another cruel charm will blanket the battlefield in black, except for a tiny area immediately surrounding the person who activated this power. Crafty players will bob and weave at random, ensuring no one else is able to steal their precious light source. This mode isn’t very deep. And because the focus is more on tormenting your friends than reaching for a high score, matches will end quickly, with no real satisfaction coming from conquering your foes. It’s still more fun than popping bubbles should ever be, but don’t expect the joy to last.
Pop may be a simple game, but it has a frantic single-player mode and a cheerfully chaotic multiplayer mess. Unfortunately, the mechanics are ultimately too limited to keep you entertained for long. The single-player mode is simply a high-score race with different goals to reach depending on the difficulty level. Without a variety of modes to tool around in, you will quickly tire of the monotonous string of bubbles that must be popped. The multiplayer serves as a wild diversion rather than a consistently engaging competition because there aren’t any techniques that need mastering. Though Pop can be fun in short bursts, it isn’t worth 700 Wii points ($7). Your cat will love it, though.
Critter Round-Up is a cute, colorful puzzle game with a slightly misleading title. The eponymous critters have already been rounded up and fenced in by someone who thinks nothing of penning wolves in with sheep and goats. As a concerned citizen and prolific fence builder, your job is to separate the different species of animals into even smaller fenced-in areas. This simple task is complicated by your character’s fragility and the presence of some feisty predators, but it never proves to be a very difficult challenge. This light, albeit limited, puzzle action, combined with a handful of simple and absurdly entertaining multiplayer minigames makes Critter Round-Up another reasonably fun item in the WiiWare catalog.
Each of the 50 levels in the Adventure mode presents you with a field full of animals. The cartoony beasts wander around aimlessly, waiting to be fenced in to smaller and smaller spaces. Once partitioned off by themselves or with other members of their species, they celebrate their confinement with a wacky dance. There are five different environments (farm, forest, savannah, outback, arctic), and each environment hosts a number of ecologically appropriate animals.
2 alligators + 2 koala bears + 1 manic builder = 1 dangerous construction project.
You play as man who firmly believes in bestial segregation and implements his new regime with fence-building skills that make John Henry seem lazy. Complicating things a bit is the fact that coming in contact with any animal–even chickens and meerkats–will cost you one of your few lives. Holding the remote sideways, you maneuver around with the D pad and press the 1 button to begin building. Once begun, you can only stop your mad building by connecting to another fence or by perishing. If you win by fencing all the animals off from each other, you’ll see your score for that round, which you can maximize by completing the level quickly, using fences economically and penning all the animals of one type together in one enclosure.
If you don’t like where you’ve laid a fence, you can destroy it by shaking the remote. This could be handy if you accidentally fence diverse animals in together, but it’s usually easier to just build another fence inside the area. Or if you get lucky, one of them will be a predator and will soon eat the other animal, which won’t affect your score much at all. Be careful, though, because predators are much more eager to eat you than other animals, and will often pursue you around the paddock. For all your quasimythical construction skill, you still move slower when fence building, so you’ll have to be careful around the chompier critters. Even after mastering the art of quickly squaring off a fence in progress and jumping frantically, you’ll still suffer from more than your fair share of mauling. Occasionally, wrapped gifts will descend from the heavens and provide you with a helpful item, such as speed shoes or an extra life. Adventure mode imposes no penalty for losing all your lives (you can just retry the level), but Marathon mode does not allow such do-overs and, as such, is your best bet for finding anything resembling difficulty.
There is a co-op challenge mode for two-player partitioning, but the real multiplayer fun is in the critter games. These are supersimple games that, when played with a couple of friends, can become enormously entertaining. In Snowball Soccer, you run around a field trying to maneuver snowballs into your own goal. The rudimentary controls only enable you to move, kick, and jump, which results in delightful chaotic imprecision. Predator Rampage challenges you to be the last one standing in a pen filled with lions, wolves, and the like. In Fence Trap, you are constantly moving and building fences while avoiding your opponents’ fences, similar to the light cycles game in Tron. Only Chicken Catch fails to provide entertainment.
The art style, difficulty, and depth of Critter Round-Up is definitely aimed toward the younger set, so folks looking for a mature puzzler are advised to look elsewhere. If you have four Wii Remotes and a few friends to play with, the co-op challenges will provide at least as much entertainment as the main Adventure mode. At 1,000 Wii points ($10), Critter Round-Up is a good choice for light puzzle action and wacky multiplayer fun.
You’ve got a four-top that’s been waiting far too long, three tickets on the rack, and rats invading your kitchen. On top of all that, you’re running low on spices and your sous chef just fell asleep on the job. Welcome to the hectic world of Order Up, an upcoming cooking game for the Nintendo Wii from developer SuperVillain Studios. While the immediate comparison to the Cooking Mama series is obvious, Order Up takes the idea of virtual cooking to the next level: Here, you’re not just preparing meals, you’re running a restaurant. We’ve had a chance to spend the last couple of days with this lighthearted look at the food business to see how it’s coming along ahead of its July release.
Cooking requires fresh ingredients, delicate timing, and a little spice to top it off in Order Up.
You play an up-and-coming chef in Order Up, looking to make your name in Port Abello, an island town that is home to a bunch of foodies. Your ultimate aim in the game is to win the “Fortified Chef Competition,” the ultimate contest for local chefs that takes place on a cruise ship and serves as the game’s final stage. Before you get there, however, you’ll walk the long, uphill road toward establishing yourself in the business. Your first stop will be at a fast food joint called Burger Face, which serves as the game’s tutorial.
A pimply-faced kid with a puberty-broken voice serves as your host (and boss) at Burger Face, teaching you the basics of cooking such simple meals as a hamburger. As you might expect from a Wii game, all of the cooking in Order Up is controlled by specific motions with the Wii Remote. For example, when peeling lettuce for the burger, you’ll need to grab the head of the lettuce with the B button then peel the leaves back individually. To chop the tomatoes, you simply make a chopping motion with the controller. To cook the fries, you dump the fries in the fryer, grab the basket with the B button, and make a downward motion to put them in the grease. Once they’re done, you pull them out of the grease and then serve them up. Cooking the burger requires you to place the beef patty on the grill then pay attention to a heat meter that will tell you when your burger is ready to serve. If you wait too long, you might overcook the meat (though, as you’ll discover later in the game, some customers will prefer to have their meal slightly overcooked).
After you’ve finished the tutorial, you’ll move on to your very own first restaurant, Gravy Chug, an old-fashioned, straightforward diner. The menu will open up a bit, with everything from the aforementioned burgers to country fried steak and French onion soup to steak and eggs. You’ll be able to unlock new menu items as you go; the game will have a total of 80 recipes available to you across the five restaurants that you can unlock.
All of these recipes will require different motions of the Wii Remote, and all of them are relatively simple–though we had trouble folding burritos for some reason. The challenge in Order Up comes from balancing multiple meal tickets at the same time. As your day’s service begins, customers will begin to file into your restaurant and choose a table. You can only work on four tickets at a time (the maximum number of patrons that can sit at a table in the game), but you’ll quickly discover that four tickets requires some delicate balancing to get everything out at the same time. After all, if the food sits on the staging area too long, it will gradually cool off, which means less money for you once the food is delivered.
Once the tickets come into the kitchen, you start on the basic ingredients, making sure to pay attention to any special requests for spices from regular customers. If you get those spice requests correct, you’ll earn a larger tip once the food is served. As the tickets pile up, you’ll be thankful for your assistant chefs, who can help you with almost any task in the kitchen. To pass off a task to your assistant, you just drag the ingredient to the top of the assistant you wish to help you. You start off with a single assistant but can hire a second chef, as well as replace any assistant you wish. Different assistant chefs have different skills; one might be skilled with a knife, while another might be adept at serving the specials to customers. With some experience, you’ll have your kitchen running like a well-tuned sports car.
And then, inevitably, disaster will strike. Whether it’s a health inspector who unexpectedly shows up, a rat infestation, or one of your chefs falling asleep behind the grill, you’ll need to take special action to make sure these problems don’t bring your restaurant down. To do so, you’ll have to take part in some minigames, such as washing dishes to prove to the health inspector you run a tidy ship, flicking scurrying rats off of your kitchen equipment, or shaking your employee to wake him up.
Pleasing your oddly shaped customers is job number one in the town of Port Abello.
To get ahead in Order Up, you’ll want to open up additional restaurants in Port Abello. To do so, you’ll first need to turn your current gig into a five-star restaurant by completing a number of preset requirements, such as unlocking your entire menu or pleasing the local food critic. When cooking for the critic, you’ll want to make sure you handle all of the steps yourself because while your assistants might be fast, they’re not always that accurate. In order to ensure that the food is as perfectly prepared as possible, it’s best to handle each step yourself.
Though the majority of the game is spent in the kitchen, Order Up will also let you take the occasional trip to the market to replenish your stock of spices or purchase special recipes for each of your restaurants. There are five total restaurants to unlock, featuring a variety of cuisines, such as Mexican, Italian, and French.
So far, Order Up is proving to be a fun little twist on the traditional cooking game. We haven’t gotten very far in the game, but we figure the heat will only turn up in the kitchen the further along you get in your Port Abello career. The game is due for release on July 22, and we’ll have more on the game in the coming weeks.
-If Its Games