Posted 3/20/13 1:40 pm EST by MTV Video Games in 3DS / DS, News
By Joseph Leray
Atlus did their best to release a new gameplay trailer for “Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers” today, leading up to the game’s impending release in April. It’s hard to gussy up a complex series of menus for an action-packed trailer, but Atlus it’s a valiant effort: “Megami Tensei” devotees already know that they’re in for a fair bit of cyberpunk dungeon-crawling, first-person turn-based combat, and complex demon fusion when they step into Amami City.
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Posted 3/19/13 4:15 pm EST by MTV Video Games in gears of war: judgment, Reviews, Xbox 360
by Joseph Leray
[This is a thorough runthrough of the campaign portion for "Gears of War: Judgment." Stay tuned as we'll be covering the multiplayer side of "Judgment" later!]
“Gears of War” has always felt heavy.
Soldiers slam into cover, carried by the momentum of their weighty armor. Bodies explode in huge, chunky bits when tagged with a frag grenade, and the sawed-off shotgun kicks mightily when fired, more like a turn-of-the-century blunderbuss than the lightweight lasers that so frequently arm the heroes of other science fiction. The way Damon Baird clean-and-jerks the Mulcher onto a piece of waist-high concrete -- giving the Gatling Gun a little heave as he spins to face whatever oncoming monstrosity has crawled from the ground -- makes me feel tired.
At one point near the end of “Gears of War: Judgment,” the normally rambunctious Augustus Cole remarks that he’s running out of energy, that he can’t take much more abuse from the Locust storm troopers. The same might be said for the series as a whole: humankind’s inexorable march to victory over the enemy Locust reached its apex in “Gears of War 3,” and there’s nothing left to do but lay down one’s burdens.
It’s no coincidence that “Judgment” feels so stripped down, then. The heavy machinery of “Gears of War” has been dismantled and reconstructed by developers People Can Fly into something lighter, sleeker, more efficient, and more principled.
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Posted 3/18/13 6:00 pm EST by MTV Video Games in News, PC
By Joseph Leray
Daedalic Entertainment announced today that they’re working “Memoria,” the studio’s sequel to last year’s “Chains of Satinav.”
If none of that sounds familiar, fear not! Daedalic are a German studio that specializes in point-and-click adventure games. “Chains of Satinav” and “Memoria” are based on a fantasy role-playing franchise called “The Dark Eye.”
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Posted 3/18/13 2:20 pm EST by MTV Video Games in News, PC, PS3, tomb raider, Xbox 360
By Joseph Leray
Here’s a confession: I think stats about videogames are really interesting.
I like knowing, for example, that “over half” of the people that played “Gears of War 3” never played the first one (which is why the upcoming “Judgment” includes a free code for the original “Gears”). More people played as soldiers in “Mass Effect 2” than all other classes combined, and Engineer was the least-used class. Only 16% of “Borderlands 2” players have hit level 50.
It’s kind of weird that I know all that off the top of my head, and it’s kind of weird to be an outlier at every turn: I’ve played “Gears of War,” I was a Vanguard in all three “Mass Effect” games, and I have two maxed out characters in “Borderlands 2.” Don’t worry, these facts and figures are a hit at cocktail parties.
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Posted 3/18/13 1:30 pm EST by MTV Video Games in News
By Joseph Leray
On December 12, 1982, a “Missile Command” player named Victor Ali scored over 80 million points in a single game, claiming a world record that stood uncontested for 30 years. Over the weekend, after a 56-hour marathon, another player named Victor Sandberg usurped the throne on his Twitch.tv channel.
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Posted 3/18/13 12:40 pm EST by MTV Video Games in News, PC
By Joseph Leray
It seems impossible to write about “Thief,” the upcoming Eidos Montreal-developed reboot of the long-running series, without mentioning a bit of its history. The original “Thief,” subtitled “The Dark Project,” was released in 1998, by Looking Glass Studios, at a time when the most acclaimed projects featured a bevy of interlocking systems and mechanics: if you were careful and a bit tricksy, you could play most games however you wanted.
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Posted 3/14/13 3:15 pm EST by MTV Video Games in Op-Ed, PS3, Wii U, Xbox 360
By Joseph Leray
Way back in the forgotten yesteryear, I played and enjoyed (for the most part) “Ninja Gaiden 2.” The evolution of the series has been troubled since then, to say the least: in 2008, series mastermind and Team Ninja lead Tomonobu Itagaki resigned from the company he helped found and sued publisher Tecmo-Koei.
With Itagaki gone, Team Ninja soldiered on with new design leads and eventually released “Ninja Gaiden 3,” with middling results. A Wii U-exclusive follow-up, “Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge,” included new characters, extra weapons, and all of the previously-released downloadable content. Porting a “Ninja Gaiden” game to a different platform with a few added bells and whistles isn’t a new one: “Ninja Gaiden Sigma” is a series of PlayStation 3 updates for games originally on the Xbox 360.
Posted 3/12/13 4:18 pm EST by MTV Video Games in Borderlands 2, News, PC, PS3, Xbox 360
By Joseph Leray
Gearbox revealed that a sixth playable character will be added to “Borderlands 2” when the game receives its fourth pack of downloadable content, Polygon is reporting.
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Posted 3/12/13 12:37 pm EST by MTV Video Games in kickstarter, News
By Joseph Leray
What happens when a Kickstarter campaign for a new game fails?
After Chris Taylor unceremoniously cancelled Gas-Powered Games’ “Wildman” fundraising effort, for example, his crippled, employee-less company was bought by Wargaming. Last week, two more promising Kickstarters failed to meet their goals: Ambient Studios’ “Death, Inc.” fell well short of its £300,000 goal, and Phosphor Games’ “Project Awakened” came a bit closer to raising the $500,000 it needed but still just missed out.
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Posted 3/9/13 9:56 am EST by MTV Video Games in grand theft auto, News
By Joseph Leray
The games industry -- and the media that covers it -- is kind of predicated on the idea that the people that play videogames will just keep buying them indefinitely. It’s part of the reason store shelves are filled with sequels, spin-offs, and reboots.
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