Despite facing a delay at the end of July, Frozenbyte’s Trine will officially make its way onto the North American Playstation Store this October 22nd.

Make note that European PS3 owners have had their hands on side scrolling platformer for almost 2 weeks now so it’s nice to see that Frozenbyte and Nobilis (publisher) are taking the woes of North American gamers into account.

No word on pricing but we’ll let you know as soon as it’s made known.

via Joystiq

I’m discovering right away that Wii games are significantly harder to discuss than, say, Xbox 360 games because Wii games don’t seem to like things like plot.  So I can’t really do a recap on that, and that’s the case with Boom Blox Bash Party.  In fact, for a game developed by Steven Spielberg, you’d think it’d have more of an actual plotline to it, but no.  Basically, in Boom Blox Bash Party, you throw things.  At other things.  And repeat until a whole bunch of things have been knocked down or blown up or you’ve run out of chances to throw things at other things.  Yeah, I know, simplistic doesn’t even begin to describe it.

But here’s where things get weird.  Inside this tiny little framework of a game (throw stuff at stuff, repeat until out of stuff one way or another), they’ve jam-packed it with things to do.  You’ll throw things to try and knock down a huge tower.  You’ll throw things to try and disassemble a fort made out of what looks like wood blocks.  You’ll throw things to destroy a robot or hunt sunken pirate treasure.  You’ll throw things to make certain kinds of blocks disappear or explode or spread a kind of virus to other blocks and make THEM disappear.  You’ll screw around with turning blocks colors and moving blocks and throwing stuff at blocks and even using a kind of slingshot to shoot other blocks at each other.  You’ll play with ramps and drops and chain reactions.  Gravity will be both your friend and your enemy.  At some points, you will get to work a cannon.

You will search for weak points and the best shot and any of a dozen other things that make me wish I’d taken better notes in my high school physics classes, and I got an A in high school physics!

I found myself absolutely baffled.  How is this simplistic little game managing to serve up this much variety and be this downright entertaining besides?   It’s utterly beyond my capacity to explain, but one thing was clear—I had a LOT of fun playing this game.  In fact, it was hard to stop playing this game long enough to write a review about it.  My elbow is still just a bit sore from all the throwing.

There’s a lot to like about this game, whether you want to explore everything it has to offer (completionists be forewarned—this game WILL consume your life if you let it) or you just want some quiet time spent throwing stuff at stuff without a lot of cleanup time or losing your damage deposit afterward.  Boom Blox Bash Party is great and unfettered fun, the kind of fun that gaming used to be.  It’s definitely not the kind of game you’re used to, and in this market, that’s a HUGE plus.

EA is all about making their sports games as realistic as possible and NHL 10 is no exception. The mega developer/publisher has recently announced that NHL 10 will bring an all new element of realism to hockey fights in the form of a first person camera angle.

The NHL 08 fighting was ridiculous, the NHL 09 fighting wasn’t much better, let’s hope that EA got it right this time around.

Other than the fighting, EA lets players know that gameplay tweaks such as glass-banging crowds, and an all new physics engine for the boards. Best of all, EA will introduce enforcers to the franchise, you know, the hockey players who are recruited just to get into fights.

NHL 10 is sure to be a hands down improvement over the previous games when its September 8th release date for the Xbox 360 and PS3 rolls around.

Read (Joystiq)

Split into episodes like a TV show, Alone in the Dark joins us once again with perennial hero Edward Carnby, who’s had a lot of different incarnations over the years. This time around, he’s plunging through the underground tunnels beneath New York’s central park, chasing down cult activity and trying to prevent nothing less than Satan himself coming to take over the planet. Apparently there’s plenty of weird stuff going on in Central Park, if the game’s website is to be believed. Everything from mutating trees to unusual bird migration patterns is going down in Central Park, so there’s plenty to figure out.

And indeed, starting the game makes it look like it’s going to be a real party, with random things bursting out of the walls and swallowing people for no clear reason. Also for no clear reason, they seem to have a problem with fire, something that’ll come back repeatedly throughout the game. The story is deep, rich and involved, with all sorts of lunacy happening on a regular basis, and a multi-branched plotline partially determined by your own choices. Good voice acting, good sounds, decent graphics–everything that should make a good game is right here.

And then some, really–for instance, there’s even a section where you have to regularly press your right stick to blink and clear your vision. When’s the last time you had to control BLINKING in a game? I can’t remember the last time I actually got to handle my own autonomic functions. Next time maybe I can do breathing, or food digestion.

But there’s one critical flaw in Alone in the Dark: Inferno’s otherwise solid profile–control. I’m not alone on this one; I’ve read several other reviews on this one and just about everyone’s with me that the control on this game is buggier than a New Jersey tenement. Trying to get Edward Carnby to move from place to place is a slow and tedious process that involves lots of camera juggling and just a little bit of sheer blind luck. I couldn’t believe it–even the ORIGINAL Edward Carnby didn’t handle this sluggishly, and that was about twenty years ago! The game also suffers from a lack of intuitive play–at one point, a chunk of the building I was in peeled away, and I went over to investigate, figuring this was the game’s way of showing me where to go next, as is so often done in these kinds of games. Imagine my surprise when, just a minute later, a large chunk of BURNING CEILING fell on my head, killing me. At that point, after I put my jaw back where it should be, I wondered…what was next? Would I go to use the restroom and a giant jack-in-the-box would pop out? Perhaps there would be bananas in my coffee. The world no longer made sense…and that was a problem for me.

Yep, when a game starts to completely divorce itself from things like Being Possible and Making Sense, I’ve got a problem. Especially when I have a hard time moving from point A to point B as it stands–it’s bad enough Edward Carnby moves like he’s wearing concrete thigh-high boots, but it gets worse when the laws of physics suddenly decide they hate me.

All this is a shame, really, as Alone in the Darkwas a wonderfully written, tautly plotted piece that controls like someone’s taken my lovely wireless controller and replaced it with a brick with decals on it. Had they taken a bit more time with it they might well have made a masterwork. But that’s one for the “what might have been” column.

Ask any game developer what sort of feature that the title in question includes, chances are the first thing they mention is the “next gen” graphics, or physics, etc; Of course, it has not taken long for people to start to ask whether features can be next gen or not. After all, all three platforms have been out for over a year. Speaking of which, what about the Wii? Is it truly a “new gen” console? What is “next gen”? What is “new gen”? These questions and more will be answered after the jump.

First order of business: why are we still using the term “next gen”? I believe that there are a few reasons for this. First, thanks to Sony’s PlayStation 2, there has been an unusual amount of overlap between the two generations. Even though the original PlayStation’s production did continue until 2006, the PlayStation 2 was relatively quick to replace it, largely due to the appeal of backwards compatibility. In this generation however, the PlayStation 2 was not replaced by the PlayStation 3 and has managed to hold its position as a current console.

This is not the only way the line separating these two generations is blurred. Looking at many past generations will show that there has often been a much larger divide between two generations. The Nintendo 64 had 3D gameplay compared to the Super Nintendo’s 2D system. Even though the SNES technically did have 3D,it was extremely rudimentary and is not comparable to the N64’s technology. Then lets look at the Fifth and Sixth generations. The graphical leap between the original PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 was immense. Now, I am not saying that there is not a big difference between last generation consoles and the graphical fidelity of today’s HD consoles, but I do not believe that graphics are the next generation feature that the seventh generation consoles (PS3, 360, and technically Wii though, it can’t do HD) have to offer. It is a feature just not the feature that differentiates them from their predecessors. I will expand on this later.

For the average consumer, this simply means that the PlayStation 2 is an old console, where as the Xbox 360, PS3, and depending on whom you talk to, the Wii are new consoles. Naturally, it makes more sense to associate an old console as being “last gen” and new consoles as “next gen”.

So where does this leave Nintendo? They have said that they are focusing on a “new generation” of game console, instead of the conventional approach of upgrading the hardware. Nintendo took an unprecedented step back in hardware power for a new platform, and as a result, blurred the line even more between what is considered old and what is new. This creates more of a need to distinguish between next generation hardware and past generation quality hardware.

This is why the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 likely be considered next gen consoles until replaced by their own successors.

What is it that makes them next gen? Many people are confused with this. In the end, a console’s power is not what separates it from its predecessor, or at least not entirely. As I pointed out before, each generation has had something that made it something entirely new, whether it is graphical prowess, or an entire new game mechanic. As if the seventh generation wasn’t confusing enough, it has several new elements that makes it unique. I already touched upon how High Definition is not what this generation will be about when all is said and done. Another feature that is being taking advantage of in this generation is online feature. Once again, while what online is being used is very innovative; it is not the distinguishing feature.

The power behind the next gen consoles opens up for far more innovative content than just good graphics. One thing that has been generally overlooked is interaction. For the first time, dynamic interaction with environments and characters can be fully realized. Assassin’s Creed was based on this idea. Grand Theft Auto 4 will also make use of Natural-Motion physics technology. In the end, this is what next gen is about. Graphics are almost at the saturation point. The next step is the slow death of animations and replacing them with technologies such as Natural-Motion, procedurally generated animations, etc. In the end, that is what makes a game truly next gen, and not simply a high-res version of a last generation game. High-definition and online are definitely a part of it. But going from Star Wars: Jedi Academy to Star Wars: Force Unleashed is a proper generation leap in the same way that going from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Super Mario 64 was. Not that this is exclusive to physics. Dynamic interaction is not exclusive to physics or even physical interaction. Fable 2 is the perfect example of the side of dynamic interaction, where a player’s actions have significant, analogue, influence on the game’s world. Another example is Spore, which uses both dynamic worlds and procedural generation at the very core of its gameplay.

The seventh generation of consoles is not just about HD or online features. The real innovation is that developers are using the power of the consoles to make the game obey real world laws and properties, rather than just simulate them on a situational level.

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