Nintendo UK just announced some new Wii U Virtual Console games, set to hit the system soon with all of the usual GamePad upgrades in tow. In the near future, UK gamers will be getting Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Super Mario Bros., Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Mega Man, Xevious, Balloon Fight, and Street Fighter II.
My guess is they'll drop in the next few weeks or so, at which point Nintendo will start to roll out some more titles. While I wish the rate of distribution could be a lot faster, I guess this is better than nothing. Keep at it, Nintendo!
The Frankenturret, as they're officially called, are the Portal 2 turrets merged with a weighted storage cube. Wheatley had fun creating them in the game, and I'm sure artist corroder666 had fun making the Frakenturret in real life. Best of all, corroder's creation actually lights up. The legs will even move too!
You can see how the Frankenturret came together here, and more of corroder's work can be seen on his deviantArt page. Pretty sweet Screaming Mantis cosplay!
Homemade Frankenturret [Ian Brooks]
Anomaly 2 is coming out on May 15 for the PC, mac, and Linux, and pre-orders have now opened up where you can get 10% off of the $14.99 retail price. Not only do you get a small discount, but you'll also be given an extra copy of Anomaly 2 for free. An extra copy that you can give to a friend, now that's a pretty sweet deal.
You know what else is sweet? This new trailer for Anomaly 2 showing off some of the weaponry you'll be using. Tanks that transform into mechs? Hell yes.
PlayStation's Spring Fever sale continues on with up to 50% off a ton of titles that are available through the PlayStation Network. This week's sale is related to PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale , as the game itself plus the franchises the guest characters appear from are all discounted. All-Stars is on sale for $27.99 on the PlayStation 3, and $24.99 on the Vita. Plus members will save a little more with the PS3 version running for $19.59, and the Vita version going for $17.49.
Several other franchises are on sale as part of this, including every Metal Gear Solid available on the PlayStation Network. Seriously, that's everything with the exception of Metal Gear Solid 4 since there's no downloadable version of that game.
What else? The first two BioShocks, all of Sly Cooper, all of LittleBigPlanet, Devil May Cry HD Collection, all of God of War (except the third one), all of inFAMOUS, a few Twisted Metal titles, and all of Ratchet & Clank.
PlayStation Blog has the full breakdown of all the discounted prices for each game, plus what games are completely free to PS Plus members.
Soul Sacrifice can be a pretty deep, rewarding experience, but it can also be a bit difficult to learn at first. The confusing menu system and large variety of spells can be extremely overwhelming. But once you've bested a few stages and start to learn the flow of the game, it's a lot easier to get into.
Everything starts to make sense, as you augment and combine spells into your desired build, learn ways around the "sacrifice" mechanic that's core to the your success, and get a grip on the pacing of the game's combat.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag hasn't come out yet, but that's not stopping the gang from Mega64 to guess what Assassin's Creed V will be all about. And Assassin's Creed VI. And even Assassin's Creed VII.
More David Cage than you can shake a stick at, brought to you by Allistair Pinsof. Pinsof: Accept no substitutes.
Elsewhere, Jim Sterling delivers a 100% proper video guide for Dark Souls; I share my impressions of the first three issues of the Sonic / Mega Man crossover "Worlds Collide"; the Dtoid staff ponders if we ought to accept that some games will be damn broken at launch; Alasdair Duncan interviews the founder of PCGamingWiki; and we review Strike Suit Infinity, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, and Don't Starve.
Destructoid Original:
Super Best Guide! Dark Souls
Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut ... in the coffee
This is not an article about David Cage
Impressions: Sonic & Mega Man: Worlds Collide #1-3
Should we expect games to fully function at launch?
Live show: The Showdown Effect and Dino D-Day
Founder Andrew Tsari on the future of PCGamingWiki
When it is acceptable to be a thoughtless bastard
Community:
Community blogs of 4/29
Forum thread of the day: "I wish ____ would make a ____ game."
Reviews:
Review: Strike Suit Infinity
Review: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Review: Don't Starve
Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has released a free online game called Drop, playable here.
Notch said on Twitter that the game was inspired by looking at the corner of a room, Super Hexagon and the Fez ending.
He released the game instead of entering a game into the Ludum Dare game creation competition.
The post Play Minecraft creator Notch’s new game, Drop appeared first on Edge Online.
Monaco has been out for nearly a week on PC, and I'm loving it. As one of the most fun four player co-op games in a while, it's just as enjoyable to play while you're screwing up a mission as it is when you're succeeding.
Sadly, Xbox Live fans will have to wait a bit before they can get in on the action, as the game has been further delayed past the initial launch issues. Pocketwatch Games' Andy Schatz stated that it was a "minor but important bug" that causes online play disconnects.
He submitted a fix, but it wasn't enough, and he's working on another one now -- the dates are out of his control due to Microsoft's patch approval process. Andy also stated that a Mac version is in the works for a potential 3-4 week target, but nothing is set in stone.
Dust 514 will be released on Tuesday May 14, CCP has confirmed.
The free to play MMOG shooter is exclusive to PlayStation 3 and takes place in the same universe as Eve Online. Events in each title are connected to the other – you can read our most recent thoughts on Dust 514 here.
CCP also confirmed on Twitter that Dust 514: Neocom, the companion app on Vita, would be available this summer.
The post Dust 514 release date confirmed appeared first on Edge Online.
2K Games won’t have a presence on E3′s show floor this year, the publisher has announced.
The Bioshock Infinite publisher confirmed that it won’t have a booth at 2013’s trade expo on its blog. The news follows Nintendo’s decision to change the way it approaches E3 last week.
“At 2K, we’re excited for the new opportunities coming with the next generation of hardware, and are hard at work preparing our announced titles for release,” said the statement. “While 2K will not have a booth on the show floor at this year’s E3 conference, we will have a lot of great news coming your way this spring.”
The post 2K won’t have a booth on the show floor at E3 2013 appeared first on Edge Online.
The Tribeca Film Festival played host to a 35-minute stretch of Beyond: Two Souls gameplay footage and a new trailer this weekend.
You can the watch in-game video below, and the new trailer below.
Free live streaming by Ustream
Trailer:
The post Beyond: Two Souls – watch 35 minutes of gameplay footage plus the new trailer here appeared first on Edge Online.
What's that? You're happy because WayForward is finally bringing the original Shantae to the Virtual Console? You were never able to play the Game Boy Color classic because you missed out on its limited run and didn't want to pay the exorbitant prices on eBay? I feel for you guys. I...
Oh... what's that!? Is that my complete-in-box copy of Shantae? Suck it, losers! BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
This weekend, Sup Holmes? gets a little bit "Krunch"-y, SEGA can't come up with good character ideas on its own anymore, Bobby Kotick is rich as sin, Grasshopper Manufacture found new work for Jessica Nigri, and the Beyond: Two Souls demo is 35 minutes of Dafoe-on-Holmes action.
Destructoid Original:
Dtoid TV Weekend: HD in the coffee
Sup Holmes crunches and shrugs with LeGrudge and Rugged
Community:
Are you going to PAX Prime 2013? Let us know!
Communitoid 012, featuring special guest JohnnyViral!
Community blogs of 4/27 & 4/28
Forum thread of the day: The Monaco thread - Dirty criminals welcome
Three years ago as of yesterday, indie dev Exploding Rabbit's Super Mario Bros. Crossover was unleashed online, and the reception couldn't have been warmer. For the benefit of the unfortunate few who haven't heard of this darling fan tribute, Crossover is a tile-for-tile remake of Super Mario Bros. but with the ability to swap Mario out for a number of NES heroes, like Link, Bill Rizer, Simon Belmont, Link, or Mega Man. The game was later expanded with more characters plus graphical skins to emulate the look of other NES, SNES, and Game Boy games.
Version 3.0, scheduled for some time in May or June, will introduce all new stages taken from Super Mario Bros. Special, an obscure Japanese exclusive for the NEC PC-8801 and Sharp X1 home computers. There will also be rearranged stage layouts depending on your selected difficulty, so what was once a leisurely bridge stroll over a crystal clear lake could now be a perilous platforming challenge across a molten pool of lava.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that Exploding Rabbit is also working on an original title called Super Retro Squad , which is essentially Crossover just with new characters directly inspired by the NES stars. Once 3.0 is out and about, development on SRC will most certainly kick into high gear.
Super Mario Crossover 3.0 Trailer [Exploding Rabbit]
“You won’t be just looking around you in Fahrenheit – you’ll also have to interact with your environment,” advises a digital David Cage in the game’s opening tutorial, as if that were something that any gamer should need to be told. A prompt shows how to open a door with the right analogue stick. “Do it slowly to really feel you’re controlling your character’s hand.” Like much of Fahrenheit, it conjures feelings of mixed affection and mild embarrassment.
Here is a game that’s trying to do something different, really trying, but it’s so painfully self-conscious that it trips over itself with heartbreaking frequency. When it does get things right, though, Fahrenheit opens our eyes to a new way of experiencing videogames – particularly, how they might deal with the troubling juxtaposition of a fixed narrative with a wilful player.
Fahrenheit was an attempt to get away from the preoccupations with guns, cars, breakneck pace and superficial emotions that Cage perceived as the medium’s constraints. It was intended to be a developed story, one that the player could bend and mould subtly, engage with and feel intertwined with on more than the base level that compels us to rescue the princess, defeat the bigger baddie or find the next checkpoint. The irony is that in trying to get away from the traditional definition of what a videogame ought to be, Quantic Dream managed to create something that was unmistakably, irredeemably a videogame – a bizarre, incongruous science-fiction tale of sentient AI, global paranormal conspiracy and slow-motion action sequences, told largely through minigames and QTEs.
Fahrenheit’s cinematic ambitions are clear from the outset, when the digital Cage guides you through its ‘first day of shooting’ in the most preposterously self-aware tutorial in gaming history, and from real-life Cage’s name dropping: Hitchcock, Lynch, Brazil, Dark Water, Jacob’s Ladder. It cloaks Start, Quit and New Game cutely but obviously as Play, Stop and New Movie. It drops token literary references too, to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Tempest (its ominous black birds might even recall Poe’s Raven), but Cage’s love affair is with cinema, and nothing else. In the context of a game that presents itself as an interactive movie, such videogame staples as button prompts and collectibles feel like awkward, frivolous toys dropped arbitrarily into an otherwise sombre setting.
From the outset, then, Fahrenheit is clearly a game at odds with itself and with its medium. The token attempt to keep the player engaged in its many, many cutscenes through button prompts that only sometimes have anything to do with what’s happening on the screen is at best mildly awkward, and at worst frustrating and disengaging.
Elsewhere, though, Fahrenheit gets us to relate to its characters in a more effective way than film is able to – by making us a part of their intimate lives. We guide Lucas, Carla and Tyler through the most ordinary everyday events – taking a shower, answering the phone, searching for keys, getting dressed, hunting for wine glasses in kitchen cupboards. Lucas can die, not from falling off a ledge or getting in the way or a bullet, but because we’ve failed to take care of him, to pay attention to the tiny little things that keep his sanity; something as simple as washing his hands and face in the morning or taking a drink in a spare moment can make the difference, later on, between success and suicide.
It’s this revelry in the mundane that defines the experience of playing Fahrenheit, that shapes its storytelling far more than its well-shot cutscenes or its occasionally snappy dialogue. It’s a story told and experienced largely through non-events. The opening murder is a dramatic set-piece, and the game’s cutscenes are hardly lacking in action, but we spend most of the game embroiled in everyday and often quite laborious tasks. It creates a palpable sense of place, too; Lucas’ lonely little flat, with its dull greys and browns, packing boxes, dank little bathroom and lone carton of milk in the fridge evokes understated sympathy for him.
Fahrenheit juxtaposes the mundane with the absurd, the out of the ordinary – it tells a story that no sane person could possibly relate through actions that are familiar to us all. The plot abandons any early semblance of authenticity the second Lucas is attacked by giant invisible computer-generated fleas in the bank and never looks back, spiralling into an increasingly insane and convoluted sequence of events – it’s as if, unable to decide which plot thread to follow, Cage simply went for everything at once, from voodoo to sentient AI to possession, invisible murderers, global conspiracy theories, Mayan mythology, reincarnation, messianic prophecy and a very confused commentary on determinism. By the end, Lucas has been chased by imaginary angels and huge bugs, developed superpowers and uncovered a counter-conspiracy for world domination masterminded by tramps.
In the face of all its achievements, not least the fantastic opening in a diner restroom in the moments immediately following a murder, the most absurd moments unfortunately prove to be Fahrenheit’s most memorable. It’s impossible to forget the unintentionally hilarious sequence in which Carla finds herself trapped in an insane asylum in the dark (evidently she has a paralysing terror of sauntering shirtless men in orange trousers), or the scene where Lucas backflips over exploding cars for two minutes, or the moment when he randomly wakes up in a forest with a Mayan priest and gets chased by a panther.
Despite all the unadulterated nonsense, though, Cage can really write a thriller. There’s just enough intrigue to push the player through even its most uncompromising moments. He can also write a good character, some of the time. At its best, Fahrenheit exemplifies some of the most natural characterisation in videogames, but also the most absurd. At one end of the spectrum we have Lucas’ believable relationship with his ex, Tiffany, whose visit early in the game to collect the few things still left in Lucas’ apartment can lead to a believably melancholy conversation and a sex scene which, though hardly touching, isn’t out of place; by contrast, his sudden, awkward and entirely inexplicable love affair with Carla is horribly jarring.
Fahrenheit’s chief triumph is the subtle layering of cause and effect that elegantly alters the flow of events. Consequences are laid almost imperceptibly on Lucas’ shoulders. The way that your decisions can come back to haunt you – a missed bloodstain, a dropped piece of paper – is subtle and quietly brilliant. It also pulls a neat trick by forcing you to work towards your own downfall, putting you in control of both fugitive and pursuers and teasing you with the power to help or hinder the investigation.
The game’s structure is prescriptive, but it manages to make the player feel like they have influence and choice, that what they do or don’t do might change something. Even if practically none of your actions can affect the ultimate outcome, you feel like they might have. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Fahrenheit’s famous opening sequence. The instinct, confronted with a dead body, is to either cover your tracks as painstakingly as possible or flee immediately, and the game not only accommodates both of these approaches, but everything in between. This, surely, is the key to natural interactive storytelling – a hint at how interactive stories might evolve, should game writers ever achieve mastery of their tools.
Fahrenheit is a story that absolutely couldn’t be told any other way. It’s strangely at home in its medium despite its milieu of incongruous elements. It didn’t weave a believable and consistent tale, it didn’t deliver a work of cinematic excellence, it didn’t propel games into a new era of brilliantly empathic narrative. But it did harness a lot of the things that make games a unique and engaging medium for fiction and, almost by accident, it succeeds at being exactly what it didn’t want to be – an example of videogames’ traditional limitations as well as their potential.
The post Time Extend: Fahrenheit appeared first on Edge Online.