Remember that poll that would decide the next brand new character in the Tekken franchise? Well it looks like we have a winner -- the Female Vampire. Right behind her were the "Female Tekken Force" character, and Shin Kamiya, followed by the Zombie Bride (the latter of which could have had a really cool fighting style).
The Female Vampire will being production shortly, and eventually, she'll end up in the free-to-play Tekken Revolution. I'm eager to see how she plays, so expect some sort of impressions near her release.
Harada also joked that "Muscle Pac-Man" could have been an option for the poll, but executives at Namco nixed the idea. Nuts!
While I adored the latest iteration of Dynasty Warriors 8 , it appears the Xbox 360 version was not quite as superb as the PS3 alternative. Fans have reported some real bad slowdown, severely hampering the game. Fear not, though, for a patch is inbound!
"We confirm that our development team is currently working on the patch and the patch will be released as soon as possible," writes Koei sexy boy Chin Soon Sun. "We will announce the submission date as well as the release date on all our social network channels. Sorry for the inconvenience."
The slowdown issues seem similar to those found in Warriors Orochi 2 when it first launched in the States. It seems that, when a Warriors game is PS3-only in Japan, Koei finds someone who really sucks at porting for the Western release. Bad show!
There's a new Ultra Street Fighter IV trailer in town, and it shows off a bit of the big names in the fighting game community, as well as a bit of Ultra footage with the new characters (but not the mystery character, of course).
I'm just now getting back into Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and I'm gearing up for my first local tournament in a few weeks. Re-learning an Arcade Stick is like learning how to walk again, but thanks to the generosity of the fighting game community, I'm picking it up fairly quickly.
If you've ever wanted to get into Street Fighter IV yourself, now is a great time, as the sale is still going on.
After years of waiting for a sequel, Pikmin 3 is almost here for you Europeans -- specifically, on July 26th in both physical and digital form. Remember, if you're buying it in the EU eShop you'll earn a 30% discount on the digital version of The Wonderful 101 when it comes out. In North America, we'll have to wait until August 4th to claim dominion over the Pikmin, fling them around, and steal their planet's natural resources.
Kirby's Dream Land 3 also comes to the Wii U, and since it was previously available on the Wii, you can upgrade if you have that version. The Wii U Panorama View Tour app also has a deal where if you buy three tours you get the fourth free. The Wii is still getting support, most recently with Sengoku today.
On the 3DS side, Street Gangs (River City Ransom !) is here, and comes with two player download play. Lastly, Super Black Bass 3D, I Love My Pets, and Petit Computer are available on the 3DS.
You heard the man, Microsoft. You must increase your porn capacity if you wish to succeed.
PS4 vs Xbox One: Drunk Edition [YouTube via NeoGAF]
With a sparse release schedule and thirdparty support on the wane, it’s once again down to firstparty games to revive a flagging Nintendo console. Pikmin 3 may not be a system seller akin to the two Mario games that kickstarted 3DS’s turnaround, but it does at least make convincing use of Wii U’s controller – eventually, anyway. Those familiar with the Wii re-releases of the first two Pikmin games will likely opt to play with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk at first, but Nintendo would clearly prefer that you use the GamePad.
Doing so means losing a pointer but gaining camera control with the right analogue stick, and a left trigger lock-on does much to compensate for the loss of the Remote’s finer aiming. Yet the real reason you’re better off using Wii U’s tablet controller is that you have to anyway, regardless of which control scheme you opt for: there’s a GamePad replica in the game itself. Whenever one of Pikmin 3’s trio of protagonists pulls out their so-called KopPad – which they do frequently – you’re prompted to look at yours, which feels much more natural when the GamePad’s already in your hands.
While the KopPad’s hint-dropping data files and chats with fellow crew won’t sell Wii U to the sceptical – and are visible on the big screen anyway – the map just might. It’s a delight, helping you find wayward Pikmin in the pre-sunset scramble to reassemble your squad. It marks the location of fruit and treasures, a valuable aid in singleplayer that becomes positively game-breaking in Pikmin 3’s multiplayer mode, Bingo Battle. It lets you plan routes: mark a waypoint and a colleague will trot off automatically, squad of Pikmin in tow, and let you know they’ve arrived and are awaiting further instructions. It’s a vital tool in a game in which you speedily micromanage not one but three squads. An automated helping hand is welcome indeed and, in the late game especially, frequently proves essential.
The three protagonists, while identical to control, change the pace of the game. In Pikmins past, Olimar could set a gang of Pikmin to work on one task while taking another group elsewhere, but he’d always have to make time to return once the job was finished. Now you can keep a commander close by, instantly switching between them with a button press – and as such can, in theory, get three times the amount of work done before the sun sets. Fellow crew can be thrown onto ledges or across gaps – simple stuff at first, but before long you’re dealing with seesaws and weighted platforms or flinging Pikmin and colleagues at bulbous mushroom trampolines from a lily pad. Leave a colleague near your home base, meanwhile, and they’ll automatically pluck new Pikmin from the ground when they appear.
When new Pikmin turn up they don’t just bring new puzzles, but personality too – a welcome change after two games of Olimar’s blank canvas. Setting out in search of resources to save Koppai, their starving planet, our heroes discover the verdant planet PN-404 on the edge of the solar system. Their ship, the SS Drake, breaks apart on landing, scattering the trio across the planet’s surface. You spend the early part of the game with Alph, a freckled, dopey-looking fellow who bears a passing resemblance to Olimar (who has a very different, although no less crucial, role to play here).
Alph soon links up with Brittany, a bespectacled redhead who spends her evenings fretting about the crew’s meagre food stocks. Eventually you reunite with Charlie, the rotund, mohawked captain who’s rather attached to his rubber ducky. It’s all a far cry from Olimar’s fretful logbook entries, with the team indulging in friendly banter during the day and writing their own journals at night. Alph pens clumsy poetry; Charlie stoically mourns the passing of lost Pikmin; Britanny, meanwhile, admits skewing the division of daily rations in her own favour.
Gathering enough food to keep you sustained and save your home planet is the main goal, and as such PN-404’s abundant fruit takes the role of Olimar’s missing ship parts, squirrelled away behind gates, enemies or environmental puzzles. And what fruit! This is lovingly rendered stuff: ripe, plump and brightly coloured. Good enough to eat? This is good enough to save a planet, and the best-looking thing in the game too. While the shift to HD is clearly a gigantic leap forward from the blurry GameCube originals, ground textures are flat and muddy looking. Leaves and plants in the background have been afforded the same production values as fruit, but it’s disappointing that PN-404’s one constant, the ground beneath your feet, is the worst-looking thing in a very pretty game.
Despite the increase in poly counts and protagonists, there are just five varieties of the floral-headed supporting cast in Story mode. There’s the series stalwart Reds, Yellows and Blues, plus two new types. (Pikmin 2’s Whites and Purples appear only in Mission mode.) The pink Winged Pikmin specialise in pulling things up, lifting gates and uprooting Flukeweed, rosy-hued plants that hold treats inside their tightly wound coils. Their slender forms limit their damage output but they’re handy in battle, especially against the spiders that shrug other Pikmin off their backs and straight into webs below. Bulky, angular Rock Pikmin, meanwhile, can one-shot many enemies if they strike from above, break through crystal barriers, and can’t be squashed. All five can be briefly powered up by juice from spicy berries, but the new additions don’t change the feel and flow of the game in any meaningful way – certainly not to the extent of the three protagonists.
Largely, this is a sequel that seeks to refine rather than reinvent. There’s now just the one Onion – the bulbous organism in which Pikmin are produced and spend the night – rather than one for each colour, saving you valuable seconds when assembling your squad at the start of the day. Send a small squad to strip a bunch of grapes, or to transport a pile of rubble to rebuild a broken bridge, and they’ll head back and forth automatically until the job is completed. Accidentally guiding the wrong Pikmin through water, fire or electricity no longer spells doom: instead they become panicked, and will calm down and rejoin the squad if you’re quick to your whistle. Tap left or right on the D-pad, meanwhile, and your Pikmin will roll to the side – an invaluable aid in the game’s boss fights, although losses are still inevitable. These battles punctuate the easy rhythm of daily life on PN-404, a welcome change of pace given the relative lack of challenge elsewhere. Until the end, anyway…
Pikmin 3’s final level is a sprawling, beautifully designed test of everything you’ve learned so far, and a spike, not in difficulty but in pressure. As well as the hard stop at sunset there’s a constantly encroaching threat that, if it catches you, can instantly trigger the end of the day, and the odds are further stacked against you by a subtle shift in Pikmin behaviour that slows you down. Even sterner tests await in Mission mode, in which you chase high scores and medals by collecting fruit or killing enemies to tight time limits.
As the pressure ratchets up late in the game, cracks begin to appear. The script is witty but there isn’t enough of it: the crew’s nightly reflections on the day start repeating after the 30-day mark, and frequently bear little relation to what actually happened. We could have done without Brittany fretting about the day’s failure to find any food when we had ten days’ worth saved up and had just lost 75 Pikmin in a botched boss fight, for instance. The script is diluted even further by the needless abundance of data files, some of which are curiously placed, at one point spoiling the imminent arrival of a new Pikmin type by explaining its abilities.
Yet perhaps the biggest disappointment of all is how iterative it all feels. Pikmin had one protagonist, the sequel had two, and here we have three, and while the puzzles that require all three are smartly designed, they’re few and far between and you can bumble your way through most of the game by playing it like Pikmin 1 and 2. Ultimately this is still a game of throwing a sufficient quantity of one Pikmin colour at an enemy or object and waiting until it’s either destroyed, rebuilt or transported back to your ship. Luckily, it’s a core loop that still delights. You destroy barriers so you can build bridges; you kill things to bring others to life. And when you fail, and their wispy souls vanish into the ether, there’s not a gruesome death rattle or anguished scream but a soft, plaintive sort of sigh that’s still the most heartbreaking sound effect in videogames.
Familiarity is both the worst and best thing about Pikmin 3. Twelve years after the original and nine after the sequel, little has changed – but little really needed to. It may not sell systems on its own, but it’s a fine addition to a sparse software library that brings one of Nintendo’s most vibrantly characterful series into the HD era and, critically, makes convincing use of the GamePad. And that, pending the arrival of a true system seller, is what Wii U needs most of all.
The post Pikmin 3 review appeared first on Edge Online.
Nvidia will begin shipping its Shield handheld console on July 31, the tech firm has announced.
The new Android handheld can also play PC titles, and was originally expected to launch on June 27 for $299. The console is now in full production and will begin shipping to those that have preordered on July 31, says Nvidia. The delay was blamed on a “mechanical issue.”
Shield will be available both direct through Nvidia and at retail, but we’ve yet to hear plans for a retail release in Europe.
The post Nvidia’s Shield to begin shipping on July 31 appeared first on Edge Online.
WHAT!? Manga!? On my Destructoid homepage!? What is this, Japanator!?
Checking the shelves at Barnes & Noble this weekend, I happened upon a manga I had never heard called World War Blue. It caught my interest, so I flipped it over to read the synopsis on the back. To my delight, I learned that it was an adaptation of the videogame console wars -- I'm talking the real console wars between Nintendo and Sega, not the wishy-washy excuse for competition we have in today's market. I of course bought it immediately.
The deal is, there's a war on the continent of Consume between the Ninteldo Empire and the Segua Kingdom, with the former having gained control of 90% of the land. The hero in this tale is a Seguan named Gear, a blue-haired youth with supersonic speed. He joins the Segua Army and forms a strike team with characters based off of popular games: Opal, an archer with a shoulder plate that resembles Fantasy Zone's Opa-Opa; Nel, Gear's longtime friend who wields a claw like Phantasy Star's Nei; and Tejirov, a non-Seguan mercenary with a penchant for puzzles and things in groups of four. And naturally, the enemy Ninteldo leader is Flame Emperor Marcus, a mustachioed man who rides atop a ferocious dinosaur.
