While the Call of Duty series has long been known for its epic singleplayer campaigns, that is something the Battlefield series has lacked. Enter Battlefield 3: The latest in the venerable shooter series, which also promises an epic singleplayer campaign in addition to its multiplayer components. Does Battlefield 3’s singleplayer campaign live up to the hyper? In creating a singleplayer component, did EA DICE sacrifice multiplayer quality? Find out, After the break! Read More
Electronic Arts has revealed three new screenshots from their Back to Karkand DLC pack for Battlefield 3. The Back to Karkand DLC pack will be available this December.
Bethesda Softworks has released a really cool new podcast/dev diary on their upcoming RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The piece can be found over at the game’s official website and features Bethesda Game Studios artists, Matt Carofano, Noah Berry, Christiane Meister and Dennis Mejillones and an extended video featuring the striking world art of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Rocksteady Studios have announced that the Games for Windows PC version of Batman: Arkham City will be available in North America beginning November 22, in Australia beginning November 23, in France and Benelux beginning November 24, and in other European territories beginning November 25.
Mad Catz has announced a new version of their popular R.A.T. gaming mouse – the Cyborg R.A.T.7 Contagion Gaming Mouse. Compatible with both PC and Mac computers, the R.A.T.7 Contagion features all the customization of the original mouse, with an upgraded 6400 dpi sensor to boot. The mouse is available now at the Apple Store for $99.95.
“We’re excited to introduce this special edition of our award winning gaming mouse to Apple online customers.” said Darren Richardson, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Mad Catz Interactive, Inc. “The Cyborg brand is gaining traction and we expect it to accelerate as we continue to grow the product line.”
Those who enjoy a tower defense game will find Defenders Of Ardania an addictive game with a bit of a twist on the theme, you have to take down the enemy’s castle as well as dodging enemy towers.
The towers include arrow, cannons and flame ones and their range is dependent on placement in terrain. After creating these offensive and defensive towers, you then start to create units to attack the enemy’s fortress. Timing your units release on the field by varying their speed, strength and damage aspects is where some of the greatest strategy of the game comes into play. Some units, you will send out simply as cannon fodder so that more important units can slip through the enemy fire. For the most part, after the initial setup of your towers, they are kind of placed and forgotten and you find yourself heavily concentrating on troop plans. The type of troops the enemy can throw at you do have to be considered when placing your towers but then it really is about how best to slip past you enemy’s defenses while yours go on autopilot.
This can be a bit monotonous at the lower levels but once you get to the higher ones the multiple choices of towers and units available to you and the enemy make the game far more addictive. Exact proper placement easily can determine the chances between winning and defeat early in the round and it brings the real strategists out while having the simple tower defense players moving on. Visually, the game’s graphics are really nice and the levels change up the building designs as you go so that they can get rather original.
Last Call: There is not a lot to say about this game as it is your typical strategy/tower defense type. If you like strategy games, you will probably like it. If you like tower defense games, you will probably like it. If you like both you will find Defenders Of Ardania’s price of under $15 a good deal for a on the go Steam game for the hours of play you can get out of the various scenarios. If you aren’t a fan of these types of games already you will probably want to pass as the strategy/tower defense genre is rather specialized.
Being the fan of fighting games that I am, I was pumped to find that I would be given the newest release from Bandai and Spike in the Dragon Ball Z games, named Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, for review. After playing great games like Super Street Fighter IV and the newest Mortal Kombat, I was very interested in seeing what Spike had done with the Dragon Ball Z franchise. Unfortunately, the answer is not much. While the game looks beautiful, the repetitive game play and lack of strategy really ruined the game for me and made it feel way to shallow in this age of deeper fighting games.
Story:
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi runs into its first obstacle in trying to tell the vast Dragon Ball Z saga through a video game. Developer Spike tries to do this through a few mediums, in game cut scenes, short videos and through dialogue boxes. If you are a fan of the series, then you will understand everything that is going on. For me, who has seen some of the episodes but never followed it all the way through, found the story development extremely confusing and, to be honest, really dull.
During the Story Mode of Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, the story has a brilliant way of interfering with your fight to force the outcome that the writers need. During the fight between Tian and Nappa, I was absolutely crushing Nappa to the point that I knew I was going to win, but since Tian is not supposed to win this fight, Nappa ends up just hitting me with his special and wipes out my full health bar. To have scripted events in a video game is one thing, but to have them in a fighting game just feels cheap.
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi has a few modes to play; Story Mode, Hero Mode, and Versus Mode. Story Mode follows the story of the Dragon Ball Z universe and essentially guides you through the episodes of the saga. Hero Mode allows you to create your very own hero to play with, but the hero generator is very limited, and finally you have the Versus Mode with allows players to battle another play either at home or over the internet. Here, you have your choice of many different characters from the Dragon Ball Z universe, and can even use different skins if you’ve unlocked them during Story Mode.
Ultimately, Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi fails to tell the story of the Dragon Ball Z universe in a compelling way for anyone. I felt lost most of the time and had no idea as to why certain events were even occurring. The fact that the story would force you to lose a fight is what really made this just hard to swallow.
Game Play:
With most fighting games, if the story is weak then at least you have solid and balanced game play to fall back on. Unfortunately, Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi has neither a good story nor good game play. Most of the game play in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi is based on luck rather than skill. The game uses a paper, rock, scissors mode to determine who wins what sequence of blows. Once you hit an opponent, then you have to win this sequence to continue with your combo. The opponent’s only option is to mash all of the buttons at the same time in hopes of bringing up a quick time event to stop your combo. This is flat out unnecessary and in no way fun to play. It makes every fight that you do in the game both boring and repetitive.
You do have some strategy that you can use, by moving in and out of melee range to use different tactics, but this feels superficial at best. Ultimately every fight comes down to who pushed what button faster to start an unbreakable combo. The characters also really don’t have any special moves that they can pull off during game play, until you reach a certain point in the fight where the story will allow you to use that special move.
The final nail in the coffin for Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi are the loading screens. Anytime a developer feels that they have to put in a mini game during the loading process means that your load times are intolerably way too long. In Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, they are also occur way too often. You will be in the middle of a fight, then a loading screen will occur, you will get a small cut scene, back to the loading screen, then resume the fight. That just throws off any type of immersion or enjoyment I had while fighting in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi.
Aesthetics:
Here’s where I’ve been hiding the good news for Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi. The game is great to look at and actually makes the cartoon look outdated. The character models are rendered beautifully and are very accurate to their cartoon counterparts. The world looks bright and luscious, and can be utterly destroyed during the more energetic portions of the fight, though it would be nice if this damage was more permanent on the world. The fights themselves are impressive to look at. Each character moves with blinding speed and the special maneuvers that each character uses looks amazing as well.
The battles and environments of Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi just can’t get any better looking. I really wish that the game play could match the way the game looks, then this would have been one hell of a fighting game.
The sound of Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi is adequate at best. The voices of the characters do a serviceable job in telling the story. The dialogue is cheesy in most cases and so is the voice acting, but it fits with the Dragon Ball Z show, so I can’t fault the developers for matching the show. The music is much, much worse of a villain then any bad guy in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi. The music is just plain bad during the fights and will make you do anything else other then listen to another guitar riff in game.
Final Thoughts:
Bandai and Spike could have had a top notch fighting game based on the popular television show with Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, however bad game play issues truly crippled this game. The story, while not great, was serviceable for fans of the game, but for a novice to the Dragon Ball Z world, the story was convoluted and hard to follow. The game play is the true villain of Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, with the fighting system based on a paper, rock, scissors model and having mind numbing repetition to all of the fights. Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi has tons of characters, but they all fight exactly the same way with absolutely no diversity in style or feel. The game is absolutely beautiful to look at and captures the spirit of the Dragon Ball Z cartoon perfectly, and in many times, even better then the show itself. However, the sound effects are serviceable and the music is downright just bad. In the end, the power level of Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi falls well short of the other advanced fighting games out there and should only be played by super fans of the series that need to get their hands on everything Dragon Ball Z.
GamingShogun.com had the pleasure of hanging out with cast and crew of the upcoming gamer comedy “Noobz” at a sound stage in Santa Monica, CA. Lead Actors Matt Shively (True Jackson), Zelda Williams (Don’t Look Up), Moises Arias (Love Bites), director/Actor Blake Freeman, and Jason Mewes (Mallrats, Clerks II) spoke with us about the film as well as their views on gaming in pop culture. Also, special guest Casper Van Dien (Starship Troopers) talks about, well, Casper Van Dien! Thanks so much to everyone for sitting down and chatting with us and a special thanks to Jim Redner for showing us around!
So a well known comedian once said that more than anything else a guy wanted to be in a heist. He went on to describe a scenario in which the heist from a famous movie is every guy’s dream come true. I have no proof whatsoever that someone at the software developer has ever seen the comedian, but it is the foundation for a game that is one giant homage to movie and televisions heists and I have no problem picking up an in-game gun and tying to find the van. I first got a chance to check the game out at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, as it had been quietly under-development by a company called Overkill that had been taken under Sony’s wing for distribution. As one E3-goer said to me, “… it’s kinda like Heat and kinda like The Dark Knight”.
So, when I got a chance to review it, I was thrilled. I don’t want to give away too much of the story or how many homages can be found in the game but, if you love first person shooters or heist films, this game is a blast. It encourages you to go faster through levels in a very simple manner, the enemies get meaner and there are more of them the longer the heist takes. And, by enemies I mean bank security, then patrol cops and plain clothes officers, followed by S.W.A.T. and more… If you wait around too long, it can get pretty hairy and you might find yourself close to a clean getaway only to get arrested.
Gameplay is pretty solid, the graphics look decent, and the AI isn’t stupid. In fact, the game AI often reacts the way you would expect real players would. If you shoot at the cops from one stairwell and then run around to the other one, they are caught off-guard for a moment but adjust quickly. They take cover for the most part and, though they do have very good aim, it isn’t perfect. The same can be said for your partners in crime. They aren’t slow to react to situations and if you lead the way towards an objective they are hot on your heels and covering your six – which is good because that is exactly where the AI would like to put a few rounds.
Overall, the game developers did a great job with only a couple issues I saw here and there. One minor one was that sometimes your AI teammates would try to take cover on the wrong side of an object. It looked almost like your teammates were trying to protect desks and tables or something. I found a quick withdrawal and immediate repositioning would get your team on the right side of cover. Another is, considering the complexity of the heists, some of the tools used are remarkably poorly-made. You are trying to steal millions of dollars and you can’t bring yourself to invest in a drill worth more than a garage sale freebie bin?
My last complaint is probably one that will be addressed eventually: There are only six missions. They shove a lot of homages into six missions but, in the end, it is still only six missions. Thankfully, the game costs less than $20 dollars so six well put-together missions is a pretty decent deal – it just leaves you wanting more.
Last Call: If you’re someone who likes first person shooters and heist movies this is a game for you! It is so much fun to play that though it is short is has great replay value and its multiplayer co-op gives you a chance to see how the heist would work if you had to work with real players and what happens if teamwork breaks down (hint: lots of bullet holes and hand cuffs). Time for me to throw on my plastic Payday mask and get back at it.
Recoil Games has announced that its side-scrolling platformer, Rochard, will be released on the PC platform on November 15th, 2011. The game will be available for download through Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform, for $9.99.
“Rochard is a fun, original experience designed to test players’ wits and coordination,” said Samuli Syvähuoko, Founder of Recoil Games, Ltd. “We’re incredibly excited to bring this game to PC users, since it’s a natural fit for gamers across consoles as well as on PC. We can’t wait to see PC gamers take Rochard through his adventure and watch the fun ways they use the game’s mechanics to manipulate gravity and solve all of the challenges and puzzles.”
