Destructoid exclusively revealed a pair of cute variant covers for Part 9 of Archie's upcoming Sonic / Mega Man event "Worlds Collide." Archie distributed similar exclusives around the web, and I'm here to round 'em up and throw 'em in yo' faces.
Comic Book Resources shared the regular newsstand cover for Part 9 (Sonic the Hedgehog #250), a lovely wraparound featuring decidedly non-chibi versions of our heroes and villains. Comics Alliance took a step back to deliver Part 8 (Sonic Universe #53), which finds Sonic and Mega Man battling the Chaos Devil, a fusion of the Sonic Adventure water spirit Chaos and the Wily death machine Yellow Devil. Finally, Newsarama has the skinny on Part 10 (Mega Man #27), where the not skinny Dr. Eggman is ready to lay the hurt down on the equally husky Dr. Light.
But that's not all! iFanboy premiered an "Evil Friends Forever" variant of Part 8, starring Wily and Eggman getting their fighting game on with the "EggsBox." Look at those two, acting like they are 10 years old! It's almost as good as the cover featuring the duo riding a tandem bicycle. Their unholy friendship is seriously the best thing to come out of this crossover, even more so than the heroes' team-up.
[via The Mega Man Network]
The rare act of generosity aside, support for WiiWare has been reduced to almost nothing, leaving the platform to shuffle along until the earth swallows it up. How fitting then that one of its few releases in recent months would revolve around vampires hunting zombies -- the undead preying upon one another is the perfect visual metaphor for WiiWare's current status.
Vampire Crystals is but a modest twin-stick shooter in the vein of Smash TV. It actually does one better than the arcade classic by allowing up to four people to play cooperatively or competitively. Fun in small bursts for anyone who wants to shoot up rotting corpses on a Sunday morning.
And after about an hour or so, it becomes both painful and painfully boring.
EA's SimCity saga has provided no shortage of comedy. Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw just yesterday proudly announced that the company is "hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality." Surely EA must be receiving a mountain of complaints as well, unless it somehow found a way to prevent customers from even contacting the support team. Hmmm...
As EA forum member LeLedg and others have accidentally discovered in a thread about customers trying to make a legitimate SimCity complaints, EA is preventing the customer assistance hotline number from even appearing in the forums. When you type out the number 866-543-5435, it is replaced by an asterisk, a common message board function typically used to block course language. Just to be safe, the forum-goers typed other permutations of the number in addition to completely different phone numbers -- it's only EA's number that's censored.
There is a likelihood that this is a big misunderstanding, that this function was implemented well before the SimCity debacle to prevent people from spamming the number in the forums. Yeah, about as likely as being able to reach EA via any other means, so not very. A handful of customers have already noted that speaking to a rep via live chat session is ineffective, instead insisting on phone calls. Actually tracking down the number on EA's site is a fruitless endeavor, but the fact that EA is blocking said number from visibly appearing in the forums makes it seem like EA wants to pretend that everything is hunky-dory in Sim Land.
Just in case EA decides to delete these posts, LeLedg decided to share screen grabs of the hilarity in action. Check those in the gallery below.
Simcity forum censors EA customer care phone number. [reddit] (Thanks, David!)
On 9 March, independent game developers from across Japan decamped to the historic city of Kyoto for BitSummit, a conference designed to unite the scattered indie scene and present options for small devs to get their software into the hands of gamers across the world.
One of the highlights for most of the developers I spoke to was a presentation by Al Farnsworth and Dan Berger from Valve on the merits of the Steam platform. While Steam is ubiquitous in Europe and North America, it has yet to catch on in Japan, where PC gaming is niche and the language barrier a formidable hurdle.
But even if no gamer in Japan touches Steam, the opportunity it presents Japanese developers to take their games overseas – without any publisher to kowtow to – is obvious.
“I’m considering Steam for my next game,” said Yohei Kataoka of Crispy’s, the young loon behind PS3 cult hit Tokyo Jungle. “I was delighted Steam came to present at BitSummit. I felt like I was at E3 or Gamescom.”
“I think it’s interesting,” said Masaya Matsuura, creator of PaRappa The Rapper and top dog at NanaOn-Sha. “A lot of people are using a platform like Steam to play games – but not many Japanese people yet. Watching that presentation, I thought it might hold some possibilities for (independent developers) like us.
“Steam is more indie-friendly than the big console makers. Also, the PC environment is changing, with Windows 8 on Intel’s Ultrabook, lots of new products like that. It’s somewhere between an iPad and an Alienware-style graphics-heavy computer, and it looks like a gamer-friendly setup.”
PaRappa The Rapper creator and NanaOn-Sha boss Masaya Matsuura.
One developer at BitSummit who has firsthand experience of Steam was Takumi Naramura of Nigori, whose game La-Mulana did the rounds on Windows and WiiWare for a few years before Japanese game aggregator Playism helped to get it onto Greenlight, where Steam users vote on which games will be allowed to be sold on Steam. Developers cannot put their game on Steam without first clearing Greenlight; with Playism’s help, La-Mulana got through and is now being prepared for sale.
“Now Playism is able to offer that route for Japanese developers onto Steam, and if things go well then it could mean access to the West for Japanese developers,” said Naramura. “But the problem is that it’s very difficult to get Japanese gamers to support a campaign on Greenlight, as Steam is still not that popular among those who don’t speak English.”
Indeed, the Greenlight system is not ideal for Japanese devs: There is a risk of public failure, and Japanese companies and individuals are generally averse to losing face. Also, getting one game past Greenlight does not give a developer a fastrack route with their next game – each title must be voted through on its own merits, which makes it difficult to plan ahead.
“It would be a lot easier if Japanese publishers could make a deal to sell on Steam directly,” said Naramura. “Greenlight is problematic. La-Mulana already had a fan base overseas, and that helped us to progress to Steam. But I don’t think it’s the case that all the games that get past Greenlight are necessarily the most interesting ones.”
The post Something About Japan: the indie verdict after Valve pitches Steam at BitSummit appeared first on Edge Online.