Most of the time I’m playing Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I have no idea what’s going on. Stuff just happens. Crazy colorful stuff. I may or may not have made it happen. I may or may not know who’s involved. Sometimes it’s a famous superhero or Albert Wesker. Sometimes it’s some crazy character from Japan. I feel the same way looking at screenshots. Like that up there. Jill Valentine from Resident Evil is beating up an octopus? I didn’t even realize there was an octopus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
You’ll be able to confuse yourself with the game as of February 15th. Until then, more bewildering screenshots are available here.
[THQ] CEO Brian Farrell made the announcement at an earnings call today, explaining, “In the Fall, we plan to launch the latest installment of our Saints Row franchise, which we view as a significant growth driver in fiscal 2012.
“Volition is setting a new bar for this outstanding franchise and we look forward to unveiling this game in the near future.”
Albert Wesker voice actor D.C. Douglas’ take on the Old Spice commercials by way of Resident Evil 5’s overcromulent climactic cutscene answers a question I’ve often wondered: Do voice actors know how ridiculous videogames are?
Microsoft just announced the development of Class3, the working title of a zombie survival MMO for the Xbox 360.
[Class3] is designed to let zombie fans answer the ultimate question: What would you do in the face of the zombie apocalypse? The end is here. Human civilization has been annihilated. The few, scattered survivors must band together, rebuilding civilization in a third- person action game packed with sweet guns, fast cars, hand-to-hand combat, and copious amounts of zombie gore. Players choose where to make their stand, designing and fortifying their settlements, performing daring raids for valuable stores of food and ammunition, and rescuing other playable survivors. The open world develops in real-time, shaped by player actions, with content determined by their choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat.
Developer Undead Labs has a pretty cool blog, where you can find cool artwork like the above picture and lots of theoretical discussion about the game, including the following “high level picture”:
Zombie survival. We start with an unwavering focus on bringing the whole zombie survival experience to life. It’s not just combat. It’s about meeting survival needs. Food, water, shelter, ammo…You’ll need them all.
Amazing action. Absolutely zero compromise on the moment-to-moment look, feel, and fun factor of the game. You shouldn’t have to put up with unexciting mechanics just because they’re packaged in an addictive wrapper. The game must play like a great console action game.
An evolving, dynamic world. These sound like buzzwords you’ve heard so many times before, but for us it’s a real goal: creating a game where players’ choices and ability to build have permanent impact on the world. It informs everything we do design-wise.
Player choice and empowerment. Every one of the points above is tied to this. A survival situation is about making choices. Great action gameplay is about responsiveness and feel, but it’s also about freedom, and the way to have an evolving, dynamic world is to empower players to affect that world.
No word on a release date, but given that it’s an Xbox Live Arcade game likely to have a subscription fee, I’m going to guess this is the sort of thing they wouldn’t announce until it was within a year of release.
Anyone who played Batman: Arkham Asylum is surely looking forward to Batman: Arkham City. Just look at it (pictured). You can fly around with a helicopter! As someone who’s been gliding around Gotham City for the last three weeks, I can’t wait to see developer Rocksteady’s take on this larger world.
However, it’s hard not to notice the careful language in the press release and wonder if there’s some sort of expectation management going on.
Developed by Rocksteady Studios, Batman: Arkham City builds upon the intense, atmospheric foundation of Batman: Arkham Asylum, sending players soaring into Arkham City, the new maximum security “home” for all of Gotham City’s thugs, gangsters and insane criminal masterminds. Set inside the heavily fortified walls of a sprawling district in the heart of Gotham City, this highly anticipated sequel introduces a brand-new story that draws together a new all-star cast of classic characters and murderous villains from the Batman universe, as well as a vast range of new and enhanced gameplay features to deliver the ultimate experience as the Dark Knight.
Arkham City isn’t Gotham. It’s a district. A “sprawling district”, according to that press release, but still a district. I get the feeling I’m not going to get to drive the Batmobile around after all. At least I’ll always have this.
Hey, look, it’s a Hulk movie (Incredible HULK! (FILM) by Arnieboy74). It can’t be any worse than that Ang Lee thing!
And sixty seconds later I’ve discovered that Little Big Planet is no The Movies. This might not be the best platform for machinima. All you get here is some rowdy Sack Boyz roughing up a David Banner Sack Boy, who then instantly transforms in a Hulk Sack Boy. The ne’er-do-wells run off and get in a car. The Hulk Sack Boy gives chase (pictured) and then throws the car into a wall. Cut to the thugs in jail and then David Banner Sack Boy smiles and walks off to some sort of instrumental music I’m pretty sure is from a superhero movie.
Yeah, cute, but it takes as long to download as it does to watch. However, you can then continue on to Arnieboy74’s Spiderman (FILM), which has much more action and drama. Plus it ends with a dance number. Also, I’m apparently very good at this level. With zero points, I’m tied for first place on the leaderboards.
Sybil Danning, who looks great for a 90-year-old, is running some sort of secret program to make a deadly H1N1 virus. People get kidnapped and infected to cultivate the virus, which is then studied by a crack team of scientists, who aren’t hip to the kidnapping part of the endeavor.
These scientists are played by the sorts of handsome young actors who pass for scientists these days. Remember when scientists used to look like the actors in The Thing or the original Andromeda Strain? They tended to look fifty, sleep-deprived, and intelligent.
Anyway, our young scientists are obliviously lunching in the break room when an abducted prostitute who’s been infected escapes from her cell. A freaky assassin dude with an accent and a blonde wig for no good reason* (pictured) gives chase. In an unintentionally hilarious scene, the prostitute bursts in on our young lunching scientists. When the assassin dude shows up, he shoots the escaped prostitute, which sprays blood on all the young scientists, putting them off their lunch and infecting them with a deadly strain of H1N1 virus. Oops. Sybil Danning orders the doors locked so they can be studied. Now they have three days to find a cure and hook up — there are couple of sex scenes — before they all succumb to the H1N1 virus, which apparently makes you bleed from your eyes and act kind of like a zombie.
For a far better movie about handsome young people dealing with a virus, I recommend Carriers, starring Chris Pine and Piper Perabo. No joke. That’s a great movie. Virus X, not so much.
* I blame Dan Brown for putting a deadly albino monk in DaVinci Code.
You remember Fracture, right? No? The Lucasarts shooter whose main selling point was a gun that either piled up or scooped out dirt? You remember that, don’t you? The developers at Point 1 are hard at work on Fear 3 and they’ve just released a bunch of screenshots in which…
…you will witness the evidence of what happens when a neighborhood family store is turned into a dark and twisted maze of psychically tortured homicidal maniacs.
I’m going to call it right now: the Pirates of the Caribbean Lego game will be better than the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Both will be out in May. I’m guessing one will actually be funny and charming. The other will be from a guy who mainly directs musicals.
That video is courtesy of the folks marketing Bulletstorm. Well played! But they didn’t just make a video. They made a playable parody called Duty Calls.
Duty Calls “features”:
1. Duty Vision ™ slows down the action so you can unload a storm of bullets
2. Immersive dialogue from the front lines
3. Cold, calculated realism
4. Killing animations motion captured from real actors
5. True-life reloading system allows for mistakes in putting the cartridge in the gun
6. Iconic sound effects
7. Thwart an enemy threat that could topple the country and possibly the world
8. Significant and historically accurate props
If you have it in you to play a parody game — I’ve had my fill after Matt Hazard and DeathSpank — you can download 800MBs of videogame parody here.
In the third world in the Little Big Planet 2 story levels, you save these little robots who’ve been kidnapped and hypnotized. Once you get them to the rescue point, their eyes turn red. Which is kind of weird. Why do they get evil red eyes when you bring them to safety? And now hey’re attacking me!
Oh, wait, those aren’t evil red eyes. They’re hearts! The little robots are in love with me. It’s cute overload!
My recollection of the first Little Big Planet is that the included levels — you know, the storyline — were no great shakes, particularly compared to the creative community-made stuff. But I suspect the reverse is true in Little Big Planet 2. I’m impressed with a lot of the community stuff I’ve seen, but I find myself wanting to go back to the world that came with the game. Maybe it’s just that those levels are more thematically consistent and in-depth. Maybe it’s that Little Big Planet 2 feels like a complete platformer instead of just a concept, which was my impression of the first game. I get the sense that developer Media Molecule woke up to the fact that they’re competing with Ratchet & Clank, Kirby, Donkey Kong, and so forth. Maybe it’s just that jumping into a player-made level is always going to be a bit of a crap shoot. Or maybe it’s another example of how sequels in videogaming are almost always better than their predecessors.
But for whatever reason, I think I’m done with community levels for a while. I need to save more of these robots.
Developer Relic and publisher THQ are cancelling Company of Heroes Online before it even leaves beta. This free-to-play microtransaction game, which is entirely separate from Company of Heroes, has been playable for the past five months. Players were encouraged to spend money on microtransactions with the understanding that progress would not be reset when the game went live. Which, technically, is true. Killing the entire game isn’t really the same thing as resetting the servers.
For players who spent money in Company of Heroes Online, Relic has offered, well, nothing. The pleasure of having played the game, I suppose. You can read the official announcement, followed by the wailing and gnashing of teeth, here.
I’m no fighting game aficionado, but I know what a compromise it is to play with a gamepad, particularly an Xbox 360 controller. So last year, I was delighted to get one of Mad Catz’ Tournament Edition FightSticks for a review I was writing. What a difference it makes slapping the buttons with your whole hand, and palming the ball on that stick, smacking it around as befits an arcade machine. Fighting games shouldn’t be polite fingerwork.
Well, I was mostly delighted. The problem is that you can’t have just one of these sticks. No one’s going to want to play a fighting game with you if you’ve got one of those beasts perched in your lap while you hand him a lousy gamepad.
So I ended up buying a second one. This means the Chick household has a Super Street Fighter IV branded stick and a Marvel vs. Capcom branded stick. None of us knows what we’re doing, but it sure is a tactile experience. And it forces me to play fighting games, because there’s no way I’m going to let something that costs $150 sit unused in a closet!
Now Mad Catz is releasing a stick specifically branded for Marvel vs. Capcom 3, which comes out in two weeks. I don’t want to cast any aspersions on whatever aesthetic decisions Mad Catz and Capcom made, but that’s got to be the most downbeat Tournament Edition FightStick I’ve ever seen. It’s dark and somber, without colored buttons, which is the exact opposite of the cheery sticks I’ve got here and a really poor fit with the crazy splashy bright overbearing Marvel vs. Capcom 3. But, hey, it’s an Official Branded Product and if you’re going to spend $150 on a toy like this, you might as well have the faceplate of your choice on it.
Now you can try Cities in Motion, Paradox’s upcoming strategy game about public transportation in Europe, in the demo open beta released today. Indulge your inner transport tycoon in one of the game’s four cities and one of its 12 scenarios.
The Open Beta version of Cities in Motion includes the city of Vienna in sandbox mode along with one scenario — ‘Part with Petrol’. The Beta will run until 20th February 2011.
To get into the beta, you’ll have to wade onto Fileplanet for this 300MB download. The full game is due out first quarter of this year.
I love that content is still going strong for The Quest, an epic and epically retro RPG for the iPhone. This just in for your character:
Just when you thought you could enjoy your honeymoon on the beautiful Island of Buyan, you learn its Prince has been assassinated and the artifact providing the island’s ancient defense of invisibility has been blown up. It looks like some powerful and evil force is attempting to control Buyan and enslave its people. Grab your weapons, Hero, it’s time to fight for freedom again. Your prize could be the throne of Buyan.
Man, that sucks. Dude was on his honeymoon?
The Quest – Hero of Lukomorye*, Part V: Island of Buyan is available for $3 from the iTunes store.
