Given the popularity of Microsoft's Games with Gold promotion that gives out two free Xbox 360 games each month for Xbox Live Gold subscribers, the company said last month that it would be extending the initiative for an undisclosed amount of time. Microsoft's Larry Hryb has now confirmed that this promo will continue on Xbox One.
He says that more (see: actual) details are due out next year. That should hopefully give them plenty of time to examine what PlayStation Plus does well and figure out a plan to bridge the gap between the two offerings. If that means better, newer games but the inability to keep them after you cancel Xbox Live Gold, I'd be all for that. Potentially terrific news.
Larry Hryb [Twitter]
I honestly thought that we had a few more weeks until the new consoles came out. Like, I knew they were coming out in November but that always seemed like it would be "a few weeks out." I guess that means that we're going to have to do a show about all of that nonsense.
So, check out the Core today at 3pm pst on Dtoid tv! It's going to be fun, AND we'll talk about the "Next-gen" of the Core. Hit the jump for details!
Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty is a complete, from the ground up remake of the Oddworld developer's first game, Abe's Oddysee, which might be behind my difficulty in spelling "odyssey" correctly growing up.
It looks fabulous. I can't wait to hit up that odd world again. Speaking of, I should probably pick up Stranger's Wrath HD at some point. Sorry, Lorne!
New 'n' Tasty is hitting PS4, PS3, and Vita spring 2014. PC, Mac, Linux, and Wii U versions are coming sometime after.
What's the risk for being an early adopter? One very realistic concern, especially with regard to new videogame consoles, is that you'll receive a broken product. That's what a few people that have already gotten their hands on PlayStation 4s are experiencing. It hasn't even properly released to the public yet, but there are already a handful of reports of hardware failures.
The problem, as reported by CVG, seems to stem from faulty HDMI ports. Four instances of display issues have arisen on the Internet -- one from Kotaku, one from IGN, and two from contest winners. In each case, the HDMI cable couldn't fully be plugged into the unit's jack, leaving the PS4 unable to transmit picture to the television.
Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, tweeted that Sony's looking into the issue, but believes that these are isolated incidents. It's a tiny sample size right now, so it's difficult to postulate whether these are actually indicative of a greater problem. With the hours dwindling before the PlayStation 4's released to the public, I'm sure that mystery will be solved soon enough.
Sony investigating reported PS4 hardware issues [CVG]
In recent years, Zelda games have gotten a tad too flowery. What was once a true open world adventure involving a hero thrown into the great unknown with the ability to explore to his heart's content, has become something else entirely. With lengthy intros, gated content, and other trappings, there's more action then adventure in some Zelda games.
As a direct sequel to the SNES game A Link to the Past (my personal favorite Zelda), A Link Between Worlds seeks to rectify these issues by letting you get on with it as soon as possible. At the core of this concept is the "item renting" system, that lets you obtain every key item in less than an hour of playtime, opening up the world like never before.
But one great idea doesn't make a great game, and A Link Between Worlds is lacking one major ingredient -- heart.
Glad that #4theplayers seems to have run its course with this last PS4 hype video. It's almost as bad as EA's #Prepare4Battle that gave me alternative fits of laughter and uneasy pangs in my spleen when it was plastered over billboards last GDC.
Of course, the video is plenty neat, similar to the well done Expect Greatness campaign.
All I can wonder, though, is how much money these damn things cost. Presumably unfathomable amounts to my historically poor self.
Excited for the PlayStation 4 launch tomorrow? Hate the console with a blind passion? Want to see some son of a gun with a terrifying arsenal of bullet tossers blast the processing out of his pre-release PS4 in slow motion?
I think there are so many cooler, less expensive things to shoot than new video game consoles. Like watermelons or clay or Faberge eggs or home movies. I assume many of you would like to be playing that thing right now.
Zelda’s legend is destined to repeat, bringing to mind Elizabeth’s deterministic revelation in Bioshock Infinite. There’s always a boy, a girl and a pig demon. There are always three magic triangles. There’s always chicken abuse. A Link Between Worlds brings Nintendo’s cyclical ideas to their natural destination, revisiting the Hyrule purged of evil in A Link To The Past. Enough time has passed for the events of that game to enter legend – retold in a fetching castle mural – but the land is as we left it in 1992.
What role does well-trodden ground have in a series trading on the thrill of discovery? Well, Nintendo toys with your memories, sticking to ALTTP’s rough shape only to diverge in surprising ways. Within minutes, we’re back beneath the Sanctuary, dicing up rats and agonising over booby-trapped switches, only for a strange antagonist – a giggling art aficionado with a touch of Skyward Sword’s Ghirahim about him – to burst onto the scene and remind you that the world is no longer familiar. But part of the fun is seeing what’s made the cut, finding out if the creepy hobo still lurks beneath the castle bridge, for instance. And unfamiliar sights lurk in Dark World replacement Lorule, accessed via dimensional rifts torn in various surfaces that Link can enter using his new wall painting form.
Merging provides new tactical openings, such as strafing past enemies or even ducking into the brickwork so incoming projectiles clink harmlessly on the stone.
ALBW has the air of a foggy recollection, a story that, thanks to improved host hardware, becomes exaggerated in the retelling. Link now moves with an analogue grace far beyond his 16bit self, welcoming dexterity challenges that have him weaving past projectiles, or in one of the many excellent minigames, dodging a barrage of angry Cuccos. 3DS’s speakers pump out glorious orchestrations of classic themes; expect to spend a fortune on the Milk Bar buskers’ folksy covers of iconic ditties. That ALBW runs at 60fps lends it a fluid physicality, countering the simple geometry that renders it crude when seen in stills.
And then you push the depth slider up. As Skyward Sword showcased motion controls, so ALBW flaunts stereoscopic 3D as both a tool for superficial silliness – watching a plummeting beetle become a tiny speck, for example – and for helping eyes perceive height. The effect complements Link’s new ability to become living graffiti and merge into walls, allowing him to skitter along unbroken horizontal lines and then re-emerge on distant platforms. The game’s perfectly playable in 2D – wouldn’t want to alienate all those 2DS owners – but it’s far easier to grasp in 3D.
A Link Between World’s dungeons unfold like echoes of their Link To The Past forebears. The same enemy types live in them, some of the puzzle mechanics are borrowed, and many bosses take the same form, if not the attack patterns and solutions, which is sure to throw returning adventurers.
Such power awakens the deviously logical Nintendo mindset that gave us Ocarina Of Time’s Water Temple and the Eagle’s Tower in Link’s Awakening. Success relies on comprehending and commanding knotty 3D spaces: launching into a wall run at the right height, deducing the relationship between floors layered below or above each other (easier thanks to touchscreen map), or wielding items with the ability to raise sandy platforms or yank Link skyward with a spin of a propeller. This is a game of heights and distances, although ALBW’s creators are not unwilling to throw in playful riffs on light and shadow or hot and cold as well. The latter are powered by various elemental rods, items that have been noticeably absent in Link’s big-screen adventures.
As a piece of traditional Zelda design, ALBW walks the line between punchy portability and chewier fare. One-button combat and a top-down perspective lends it arcadey zip – tearing up Hyrule with the Pegasus Boots is a giddy delight – but its map is also riddled with treasure caves, a set of miniaturised dungeons designed to test your grasp of an individual item. The resulting Hyrule is more artificial playpen than fleshed-out world, though even this has its charms. Shorn of Zelda’s epic bloat, there’s a better sense of hero making, with defensive tunics and tempered blades transforming Link into a tank over 14 hours. It reminds us what a romp Zelda used to be.
Stereoscopic 3D helps Nintendo do a fine line in bottomless pits, although its habit of hiding secrets on lower levels does instil a lemminglike impulse to throw Link into every glowing ravine you happen across.
So alien is the 2D rhythm that ALBW’s potentially revolutionary idea – the option to tackle dungeons in any order – can get lost in the noise. Sequential gear gating, wherein each gauntlet of puzzles and combat offers up the item required to unlock the next, is replaced by an item rental service. Raise the rupees and Link’s entire arsenal is yours within four hours. The shop itself is a poor vehicle for the concept, however. Rentals are the cheaper option, but retrieved upon death, though such is the generosity applied to hearts that this only happened to us once. The alternative is to buy outright, but the ostensibly ‘extortionate’ prices are nothing in a world where people use bushes as banks.
Nintendo’s nervousness around punishment, for fear of putting off newcomers, continues to undermine ALBW’s attempts at novelty. Why scavenge for potion ingredients or upgrade weapons with Maiamai babies when the quest is perfectly suited to a base-level Link? Redundant ideas don’t spoil the journey, but they do cloud Nintendo’s true achievement: balancing a playerled adventure and building obstacles to satisfy an infinite variety of Links. The inability to predict what gadgets we’ll bring into every dungeon proves to be a boon, forcing their architects to drop well-rehearsed routines in favour of genuine surprises. Even the trusty old hookshot has something new to say.
But it is one voice in a game of many, an adventure that simultaneously channels nostalgia for a certain place, a taste for a perspective and an eye for harnessing Nintendo’s idiosyncratic platforms. Are there too many variables to draw valid conclusions from the game’s experiments with Zelda’s form? Perhaps not – at least the Hyrule of old acts as a safety net while Nintendo performs its fan-defying acts above.
A Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is out on November 22nd.
The post The Legend Of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds review appeared first on Edge Online.
PS Vita TV went on sale in Japan today, and we spent a couple of hours with our unit, testing the main features. The results are a mixed bag: region-locking, compatibility issues and a slightly inelegant interface detract from a well-built and well-priced device.
The unit itself feels solidly built, compact and quite sexy. About the size of a wallet, the highly pocketable device has ports for power, HDMI out, Ethernet, USB, Vita game cards and Vita memory cards, as well as Wi-Fi and 1GB of internal storage. Preorders opened in September but on launch day the device was readily available at major electronics shops in Tokyo for 9,950 yen (£62) on its own or 14,990 yen (£93) bundled with a white DualShock 3 and 8GB memory card.
As you probably know, Vita TV is designed to play Vita games on the big screen. It comes with a game card slot for retail games and a memory-card slot for downloads, and of course you can pull these straight from your Vita when you get home and continue from your last save on the telly. You can even transfer saves online via PS Plus.
Among the games we tested was God Eater 2, also released today, and displayed on an TV screen it could easily pass for a PS3 game, with very little blockiness to give it away as a handheld game up-resed to HD. (We tested at 720p, though Vita TV does go up to 1080i.) Ad-hoc co-op works just like a regular Vita.
The first problem is that many of Vita’s best games are not compatible with Vita TV. Sony released a list in September of the games that are, but missing from it were key titles such as Killzone: Mercenary, Gravity Rush and Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f. We tried to launch all of these, but after opening the Live Area screen we were faced with the error message “This application cannot be used with the PS Vita TV system”.
The reason is that Vita TV is controlled with a regular DualShock 3, and so there are no gyro controls, touchscreen, touchpad or camera, inputs that are integral to those games and many others. (Vita TV will support DualShock 4 in future, so maybe the touchpad will be used.)
Touch input can actually be simulated, though. Click L3 to activate a virtual touchscreen and a hand-shaped cursor appears on screen; click R3 for the rear touchpad and both sticks to pinch front and back. You can then tap or hold the Circle and trigger buttons to touch the screens, moving the cursors around with the sticks as you would your finger. It’s pretty rudimentary on first try – the King Of All Cosmos wasn’t too impressed with our lousy Katamari – but perhaps it’ll become more intuitive with time. It does seem weird that Sony included this workaround but still won’t let overly touchscreen-dependent games even launch.
Vita TV’s interface is almost identical to Vita’s, right down to the Android-style screens of circular icons. Message boxes fill the screen just as they do on Vita, which doesn’t look great, and the resolution is pretty chunky (the menus don’t seem to have been redrawn for Vita TV). The system was clearly designed for touch originally but navigating with the DS3 works pretty well, with the necessary menu swipes transposed to the D-pad and shoulder buttons and the PS button behaving just as it does on Vita. Vita’s on-screen keyboard is enhanced with a few PS3-style controller shortcuts. The same laid-back system music is there, and thankfully you can turn it off. Screenshots with the PS button and Start work too.
Once you’ve paired a DS3 via USB cable, the controller works wirelessly. Hold down the PS button for a basic control panel from which you can turn off the power, fiddle controller settings, toggle the touch pointer, set the brightness, access music player controls and so on. You can connect two DS3 controllers at a time – great for playing classic PSOne and PC Engine games in local multiplayer; we tested with SNK’s Samurai Shodown – as well as an external keyboard, BD controller and Bluetooth devices.
Just like on Vita, the OS is available in multiple languages, including British English. But don’t take that to mean that Vita TV is a multiregion system. Right now it works only with a Japanese PSN account and some others from around Asia; you can’t log in to an account from Europe or North America. And since Vita memory cards are tied to your PSN account, any card you’ve previously associated with an unsupported PSN region will be rejected. It’s an epic flaw, rendering the device even less import-friendly than the Vita, which at least lets you switch between accounts via an irritating but workable reset process.
Right now, there is no Remote Play app; presumably that will come after PS4′s Japan launch on 22 February. Seeing it up and running with Knack at Tokyo Game Show in September, it seemed to play at full frame rate and without lag, though the resolution took a hit.
Vita TV is also a multimedia device. A special Vita TV area of the PSN Store offers compatible apps for watching movies, TV shows and other streaming video, as well as Sony’s Music Unlimited and an e-reader for books and manga. Many of these are clearly designed for Vita, though, and so some features are slightly limited or look low-res on the big screen.
We’ll continue to go deep with Vita TV for a more considered analysis in issue 262 of Edge.
The post Vita TV: first impressions from Japan appeared first on Edge Online.
A large chunk of people are pretty upset that the PC version of Diablo III requires you to be online when you play, especially since the recent console port let's you play offline. Blizzard has been known to defend the necessity of the online requirement, but now it has gone as far as to say that it was wrong for Diablo II to let players play offline. Ugh.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun posted an interesting interview with Kevin Martens, Diablo III's lead designer, and they talked about the game's online requirement. Martens talked about how upset people were that Diablo II let some players play online, while other characters were offline only. He said that "That was the wrong choice to allow people to play offline, and we still stand by that."
I'm not sure how many of you thought that SuperMario 3D World signaled the end of the Galaxy sub-franchise, but Miyamoto has seen fit to put a stop to any rumors that may be milling about out there. In the latest Iwata asks, Miyamoto states, "Just so there is no misunderstanding, I should point out that this doesn't mean we'll never make another Super Mario Galaxy game."
Rumors may have started due to the fact the Galaxy team is handling 3D World, but Miyamoto says this is a simple matter of logistics, stating, "The same team can't make both at the same time. And we can't bring in a second party and slap the name Super Mario Galaxy on it. I suppose we could idealistically make both in Tokyo, but we want to do something new too, so there was that dilemma.
Good for him, too, for not sacrificing the quality of the series by "slapping the name on it." Mario Galaxy 2 is my favorite Mario game of all time, so I'm extremely grateful that we'll return to that formula at some point. To find out where Super Mario 3D World ranks on that list, you'll have to wait until November 22nd.
The interview itself is really worth reading for any Mario fan, especially the parts where Miyamoto thought the Galaxy series was "too blue" and "more geared towards boys," so they adapted by making 3D World brighter with a wider variety of colors, and added Peach as a playable character.
Iwata Asks [Nintendo]
