Archive for March, 2009:
Gardening Mama for Nintendo DS Released
This looks like a push for eco-friendly games but it is obviously not the actual intent. Mama steps out of the kitchen and into the great outdoors to work her magic as Majesco Entertainment Company today announced that Gardening Mama for Nintendo DS has shipped to retail stores nationwide.
Developed by Cooking Mama Limited, the team that created the award-winning Cooking Mama franchise that has sold 3.7 million units domestically, Gardening Mama stars the iconic culinary cutie in the first ever gardening game and the first brand offshoot for the series.
“Gardening is a perfect fit for the Mama brand and we believe the legions of Cooking Mama fans will love Mama’s new green thumb,” said Jesse Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Majesco. “Gardening Mama includes the same accessible gameplay mechanic as the Cooking Mama series but layers in an entirely new subject matter that all ages and genders will appreciate.”
Gardening Mama transforms the stylus into a universal gardening tool that players will use to plant, nurture and harvest 37 different varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables. Gamers can manage their garden through the seeding, blooming and maturation phases, and then produce items from the plants they’ve grown.
A robust multiplayer mode lets up to four friends compete to grow the biggest harvest and Treasure Box mode lets players share items they’ve grown with online friends. In addition, players can change Mama’s outfit to their liking while customizing the screen design to their preference.
Gardening Mama for Nintendo DS is rated E for Everyone and is available now for the suggested retail price of $29.99. Gamers anxious to get growing can download a playable demo currently in approximately 10,000 Nintendo kiosks at major retailers nationwide.
(Source) Press
Daily Battle – 3/31/09
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Trailer
EA: No DRM for Sims 3
Stormrise Game Review: Tough Times, Tough Timing, Tough Luck
Zeebo To Fail In India
Water Rocket Game Review–A Blend of Puzzle and Action
New Diablo III Screenshots, Gameplay Information
Michigan Grandfather Says Videogames Cause Deformities
Sony Cuts PS2 Price
Romeo & Juliet Get Happy Ending
Samurai Dishwasher on Xbox Live Arcade
Xbox 360 Getting Max Payne(s)
Blizzard Denies Xbox Involvement
Dead Rising 2 Multiplayer Not Confirmed Yet
Toby Keith in Rock Band
Animated Dante’s Inferno Announced
Quickpicks
HTC Touch Diamond2 Will Arrive in Europe in Mid-April
Onkyo BR-925 CD/HDD receiver system
Olympus E-450
Punisher War Zone Movie Review–Best Punisher Yet
Orange to Launch Vegas Touchscreen Phone
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Trailer
Atari has released a trailer for the new Riddick game. In case you want to give the game a try before you grab it, a demo is available on both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. The first-person-shooter will be on shelves April 7th for North America and April 24th in Europe.
EA: No DRM for Sims 3
Electronic Arts received some heavy criticism for using digital rights management software for Spore. The SecuROM software made it so that the game could only be authenticated up to a total of three times, which was later raised to five.
In response to all of the negative feedback, EA has decided to stick to the old fashioned key code authentication system for the Sims 3.
“To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed,” said executive producer Rod Humble. “We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorisation server access in the distant future.”
The Sims 3 will be out June 2, 2009 in North America, and June 5, 2009 in Europe and Australia. It will be available for the PC, Mac OS X, iPhone, and other mobile devices.
Read (Eurogamer)
Stormrise Game Review: Tough Times, Tough Timing, Tough Luck
With a name like Stormrise, you think it’s got to be a really interesting game, right? When I first heard about this one poised to invade markets literally just a few days ago, I was picturing a nice Baldur’s Gate style medievalist fantasy. Of course, if I’d read up on it in advance I likely would’ve been sorely disappointed right from the word go, but instead my disappointment had to wait until I finally got my hands on a copy of Stormrise.
Now available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, Stormrise presents an ominously possible future, as humanity faces a global catastrophe brought on by what seems to be a combination of its own willing ignorance and global warming. In response, humanity develops a kind of satellite network to counter the resulting superstorms. It works, for a while, until things get vastly worse through humanity’s meddling. The result? A hellish apocalypse unleashed on earth, and two warring factions left to fight over the ruins: the Echelon, a technologically advanced human society that sealed itself in shelters for protection, and the Sai, a race of mutants who’ve learned to live on the now-blasted surface of earth and instead depend mostly on monsters for assault where the Echelon would instead have tanks.
You play an Echelon commander who’s been out of the fight for some time, and wage war against the Sai for your own survival. You’ll be in charge of several different kinds of battle unit, including several classes of infantry, aerial units, and giant mech suits.
It’s hard to pan Stormrise directly. It’s an innovative enough idea, and the real-time strategy subgenre has been badly underappreciated, especially in these days of constant nonstop first person shooters every time I turn around. There’s even some stuff to like in how easy it is to move from one unit to the next with the right analog stick. The plot is deep and interesting with a lot of room for growth.
But there are problems here. Of course, there’s almost inevitable comparison to fellow recent release Halo Wars, and you can rest assured that, giant mechs aside, Stormrise will not even vaguely be able to compete with Halo Wars. I liked how rapidly I could switch between units in Stormrise, but I found that getting them to move anywhere was a confusing prospect. The much-vaunted 3D aspect of the game has to take an unpleasant backseat to the sheer fact that, often, you can’t see where you’re supposed to be going next around the buildings and hills and valleys and assorted whatnot that’s cluttering up your field of vision.
There seemed to be a lot of problems with unit balance—at one point, I dispatched a mech and two units of infantry to seize an energy node, while leaving the balance of my force behind to shepherd the portal from which further troops could emerge. My expeditionary force was chewed to bits by what I later discovered was a nigh-infinite flood of Sai troops, and when that happened, the game apparently decided that I just suck too hard as a commander and forced me to restart the level from the last save point.
Suffering from unpleasant control schemes and a really lousy sense of timing, Stormrise will almost inevitably wind up as second banana to the Microsoft juggernaut as presented by Halo Wars. And this is sad, as the innovative ideas and interesting storyline will inevitably be lost to bad controls and better alternatives.
Zeebo To Fail In India
Recently US-based company Qualcomm Inc. unveiled the Zeebo, essentially their plan for benefiting from burgeoning economies across the globe. It’s a home gaming console that takes the same general approach as Nintendo’s Wii; utilize less powerful yet far more affordable technology and you can get thrifty shoppers on board. One of the markets Qualcomm is hoping that the Zeebo will catch on in is India, whose relatively insular economy is doing well in the current financial crisis.
Unfortunately a writer for GamingIndians says that they’ve got pretty much no chance. He cites one of the biggest reasons as price. Though it’s relatively cheap at around $174, the PS2 is only $125 in India and Sony has just announced a price cut of $25 or so (which some are suggesting is directly in response to the Zeebo).
Another big issue is the digital distribution model. Apparently this hasn’t caught on in India; people are much more comfortable going to a store and exchanging cash for an actual physical item. An interesting offshoot of this is that part of the appeal of the PS2 is piracy. Indian gamers (I’m taking all this information from the gentleman’s blog entry, no flames please) are reluctant to buy a console that doesn’t give them the option of playing cheap, pirated copies of games. The games themselves are an issue, with the Playstation having a huge back catalog of games, more being developed currently and general recognition (all gaming consoles are called ‘Playstations’ much as many MP3 players get called iPods).
Water Rocket Game Review–A Blend of Puzzle and Action
Water Rocket, one of the newest games at Newgrounds, poses an interesting problem–how to maneuver a small rocket through a collection of obstacle traps in search of water.
That’s also the entire plot of the game–your home is running out of water at a catastrophic rate, therefore you’re off to collect it in your rocket ship, which you’ll be able to upgrade to improve shield dynamics and fuel consumption of your lateral thrusters, as well as your rate of fall when the thrusters are cut. You’ll also be able to repair any damage you’ve taken, but at the cost of not being able to upgrade rocket components, so there’s a real premium on avoiding damage.
It’s a strange mix of action and puzzle as you figure out how to negotiate levels of progressively greater difficulty , and this highly unusual combination adds up to plenty of fun for anyone willing to give it a try.
New Diablo III Screenshots, Gameplay Information
Blizzard has been fairly tight fisted for a while with Diablo III content. The launch of the website was quickly followed by a dearth of screenshots, character videos and concept art. Soon this flood of content dried to a mere trickle, but it seems that with the spring thaw more is coming our way.
In the newest BlizzCast, Diablo III community manager Bashiok had a chat with the game’s lead technical artist, Julian Love and Mike Nicholson, senior artist on UI design. They’ve put out a few screenshots, mostly having to do with what is discussed during the interview and a few of the questions posed during the Q&A section pertain to Diablo III.
There aren’t any particularly juicy details, but there are some morsels that will keep the news-starved going for a little while. Since the overall thrust of the game seems towards keeping the best aspects of randomly generated dungeons while paring away the dross, it’s interesting to note that shrines as they previously existed are being done away with. Game Director Jay Wilson said that they’re keeping the overall idea of the shrine powerups (increased stamina, temporary boost in experience gains, etc.) but integrating them into quest specific situations.
A lot of effort is being invested into monsters, specifically their deaths. Julian Love said that they realized monsters ‘really live to die in Diablo’, so the best way to invest them all with some individuality and make them all seem a little more unique than the average swarm of enemies was to make their deaths interesting. We’re not just talking a different death for each monster either, there are up to thirty five ways for each monster to “bite it” according to Love. It’s really going to be tailored to your character too from the sound of things. Blasting away with lightning magics will fry critters, while slashing at them with fiery swords will scorch and cut them.
Michigan Grandfather Says Videogames Cause Deformities
There are dozens of arguments that have been made by the anti video game camp. Some point nervous fingers at any tenuous link between video games and real world tragedies, others blame them for obesity or the short attention spans of current youth. A Michigan grandfather is accusing video game controllers of seriously warping the hands of children due to their soft bones being unable to handle the ’strong repeating forces’ inflicted upon a child’s hands while gaming.
He says that children under eight shouldn’t be allowed to play video games and that children under five shouldn’t be allowed to use crayons. As you might expect, he hasn’t gotten much support for his movement yet, possibly because in a display of incredibly paranoid thinking he accuses the government of being persuaded by the video games industry to drop a bill designating money for the study of children’s health, including the effects of video gaming.
Last I had checked the US economy was suffering and every government body was operating with lower budgets and while I’m sure billions of dollars are still being devoted to research, children’s hands likely isn’t high on the list of priorities. If there’s really an issue with children playing too many video games and injuring themselves, we should get them back out doing safe hobbies like climbing trees and playing football. Nobody ever got hurt doing that.
Sony Cuts PS2 Price
Starting tomorrow, the PS2 will cost only $99.99 in the US, down from its current price of $129.99.
The console is the longest-running in its category, having been launched back in 2000. Industry analyst EEDAR believes the price cut will help sustain PS2 software sales, which they peg at 21% of all home console software sales last quarter.
Meanwhile, Sony boasted the PS2’s game library to have over 1900 titles this year, with big titles like Guitar Hero: Metallica, MotorStorm and others scheduled for release.
Romeo & Juliet Get Happy Ending
In my humble opinion, happy endings are way overrated, and that Shakespeare was way ahead of his time when he introduced the sad ending for Romeo & Juliet, one of his most famed plays.
Family-run studio Baby Eish Games today claimed that the playwright “was an entertainer, not an academic” and would be “pretty appalled at how we teach his plays at school”, releasing their own rendition of the abovementioned play.
Dubbed Most Romantic Tales: Romeo and Juliet, the Shakespearean tragedy has undergone a contemporary translation and features interactive dialog. Most appallingly, it features a happy ending.
"They’re meant to be enjoyed, and translating his works into computer games is a great way to reach the modern audience on their own ground," said Baby Eish of Shakespeare’s plays.
If you’re one of those sensitive types who want the ending to be all sunny, the game can be bought on a whim for a mere $13. And it also features the sad ending if you want to weep silently.
Samurai Dishwasher on Xbox Live Arcade
Microsoft today announced that this week’s addition to Xbox Live Arcade will be James Silva’s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.
The 2D action game will let players control “an undead samurai dishwasher” fighting off “an evil cyborg army.”
It will be released tomorrow on the service for 800 points ($10) and will offer both online and offline two-person cooperative multiplayer.
The game won Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play contest last year. It supports a guitar peripheral to “unload electric death by playing wicked solos, perform basic movement, and use the guitar’s motion control to rip through enemies with a razor-sharp headstock.”
Sounds awesome to me.
Xbox 360 Getting Max Payne(s)
With the third game on the way, ESRB listings for Max Payne and its sequel for the Xbox 360 have cropped up on ESRB.
This points to the likely release of the games on either Xbox Live Arcade or through the downloadable Xbox Originals program, seeing as how they were both released for the Xbox. Through this, the games can be played on a Xbox 360 using backwards compatibility.
Rockstar and Take-Two are yet to confirm the report. Max Payne 3 arrives this winter on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
Blizzard Denies Xbox Involvement
Following up on word that Blizzard was somehow related to the development of the successor to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, the famed developer has officially denied the report.
"We aren’t in discussions with Microsoft regarding any future consoles," they simply stated.
The rumor originated from Blizzard executive Rob Pardo who dropped the tidbit during a “Lunch with Luminaries” discussion at GDC. Blizzard notes that Pardo merely stated: “Microsoft occasionally bounces ideas off of us, with no specific reference to any possible future consoles.”
Blizzard is currently working on Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, an unanounced MMO and yet another unannounced game.