In the middle of last year Nintendo announced it would try out the whole free-to-play scheme with Steel Diver, to the collective sighs of relief from various Nintendo series fans. Now we have details on just how that pricing model is going to work, and it's a bit of an odd one.
I also got to play the new Steel Diver: Sub Wars, which is dramatically different from its 2D predecessor. This time around, it's fully 3D ship warfare with 4 versus 4 multiplayer.
Also, you can download it right now.
Leave it to Nintendo to make "free to play" weird.
This time, thankfully, it's my kind of weird. Rusty's Real Deal Baseball is not a baseball game. Rather, it's a compilation of baseball-themed minigames. There's a hitting minigame, for example. Perched at home with a bat, you eye a pitching machine at the slab. Then it erupts from the ground and you find that it is a man in a suit with a pitching machine for a head that pitches you the balls to hit with his man arms.
Also, there's a dog whose wife left him and you have to haggle with him to buy more minigames with real world money.
I love this game.
The Koopalings will join the otherwise familiar roster of racers in Mario Kart 8 , Nintendo announced today as a part of its livestream presentation. You'll get your first chance to go behind the wheel with Bowser's seven notorious minions when the title releases for Wii U on May 30.
Yoshi's New Island is looking much better in this new trailer from today's Nintendo Direct presentation than it did in prior videos (though that's not saying a whole lot). This time around, we get to see new mechanics like metal giant eggs which allow Yoshi to sink underwater, a hyper dash move, and wings that let Yoshi hover even more than normal.
I'm still put off by the music and the transformation sections -- they just plain don't look, well, fun -- but I have warmed up to the art style after seeing the game in 3D.
It's been a while since we've seen a Pokemon Trozei puzzle game, but Pokemon Battle Trozei is on the way to the 3DS with a March 20th release date.
Nintendo didn't give much information about the puzzle title in today's Nintendo Direct, but they did mention that it would include "over 700" Pokemon, all the way up to the current generation of X & Y.
Project Cars comes from Need for Speed: Shift developer Slightly Mad. It's their first shot at their crowd powered "World of Mass Development" portal that attempts to leap frog traditional publishing costs. It's been "crowd funding" for years, before the Kickstarter boom And it looks damn good. And it's coming to PS4, Xbox One, PC, and even Wii U. And it supports 4K and, best of all, the Oculus Rift. I've been excited for a while to try a racer with the Rift.
I'm a bit surprised at how many big new racing games are coming out. It's one thing for new Burnouts and Need for Speeds, but Drive Club (belatedly) butting against Gran Turismo 6, Next Car Game making 1M on Early Access, and Project Cars developer Slightly Mad, in a slightly mad move, is also working on a free-to-play online racing MMO, World of Speed .
Good time to be a racing fan.
Taking a cue from Dungeons & Dragons, the free Zeus DLC planned for Arma 3 in Q2 2014 will give players the opportunity to become GMs across existing game modes and a new one called Zeus Game Master. It's here that they have the real freedom to dictate objectives, spawn units, and more. And since this is Arma , the Zeus system will be open to modders.
"The best thing about Arma 3 Zeus is how naturally it fits within the game," said design lead Karel Moricky. "Dynamic combat, massive islands, and editing features -- it was all there. But now we've added an interface which gives players full control over the multiplayer experience."
This DLC is something which sounds intriguing in the unexpected context of a game like Arma III but also slightly terrifying -- I'd surely stick with being a mere pawn in the grand scheme of things. For a certain type of player, though, the role of GM will be a blast.
Whew. After releasing in the second half of 2012, Borderlands 2 has had an exceptionally long tail of downloadable content support, keeping the role-playing shooter relevant for many for more than a year and a half. After releasing the four originally planned story DLC packs, Gearbox switched gears (as it were) to creating much smaller downloadables in the Headhunter packs. All of that will finally be coming to an end on April 15, with the fifth and final piece of Headhunter content: Sir Hammerlock Versus the Son on Crawmerax .
Similarly to how the last main DLC, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep , was bigger than any of the others, publisher 2K boasts that Son of Crawmerax will be the largest of the Headhunter packs, which might alleviate one of the most common complaints about titles in the series: their short lengths relative to the earlier downloadable packs. If it goes well, it might also help to redeem Sir Hammerlock, who has the dishonor of having his name on what is widely considered to be the weakest of the original DLCs.
Veterans of the original Borderlands might remember Crawmerax as the series' first raid boss, hidden away in the Secret Armory of General Knoxx , and providing players with a challenge on a level yet unseen. For this final Headhunter pack, the Son of Crawmerax wants revenge on Lilith, Mordecai, and Brick, for having killed his father countless times.
Where the other Headhunter packs have focused on some holiday for their settings, Son of Crawmerax is a bit baffling. Releasing in April, it could have been Easter-themed, but unless we see some moai heads on that island (see what I did there?), it doesn't look like that will come up. Perhaps, since it releasing precisely on Tax Day, the Vault Hunters are all visiting the remote Wam Bam Island to seek tax shelter?
