Arc System Works is bringing another dose of elaborately costumed female fighting to home consoles in Japan with Arcana Heart 3 hitting the 360 and PS3 there on January 13th.
I rather enjoyed the one dose available on the PlayStation 2 here, and at no extra charge gained an anecdote involving an gamestore employee convinced that surely Kingdom Hearts was what we meant to say, but no in fact, Hearts differ from Highlanders in that there can be more than one.
Sony sent a reminder that many, many games are currently on sale via PSN, including the must own Afterburner Climax, which shifted to $4.99.
Assuming you aren’t concerned about clutching a UMD in your hands, it’s also definitely worth a mention that Valkyria Chronicles 2 is on sale for $15.99, the same price you can currently snag Phantasy Star Portable 2 for.
There’s a pretty thick list of other bargains of varying interest, so check it out.
Alongside other heavy hitters like Dead Space 2 and LittleBigPlanet 2, yesterday saw the release of the Mass Effect 2 demo on PSN. As the resident Mass Effect addict, I took it upon myself to acquire this mystifying new software package and convert its contents into a convenient text delivery for your purposes.
The demo provides PS3 players with a short video explaining the basic premise of the original game, and then moves on to the opening scenes of Mass Effect 2. From there you’ll enter the character creation suite, where you can fully customize your demo Shepard. It probably would have been easier to simply offer the default appearance for Shepard in the demo, but including the entire creation process is a smart choice; customization is a huge part of Mass Effect 2, and this feature goes a long way towards communicating that to potential PS3 players.
There are few things I enjoy more than girly JRPGs filled to the brim with bubbly techno music and anime inspired character designs. Sakura Wars: So Long My Love most recently filled that cotton candy-shaped hole in my heart, but now Hyperdimension Neptunia is finally on the way and we have NIS America, the patron saint of Japanese quirk to thank for bringing it to the West.
If this newly released trailer is any indication, Neptunia should satisfy all of my aforementioned prerequisites for a delightful time sink. On top of that, there’s a battle system that utilizes game consoles personified as goddesses, the ability to summon pictures and even game characters from your PS3’s HDD, and in-game use of your own images all on an epic journey through a world called Gamindustri (“Game Industry”, in case the subtlety isn’t smashing you in the face hard enough).
The game is slated for release in February 2011.
The demo for Dead Space 2 hits XBL and PSN today, and with it comes the opportunity to step back into the shoes of mentally imbalanced and hyper-lethal space engineer Isaac Clarke.
The demo opens with a few minutes of video covering the events of Dead Space: Extraction and Dead Space (Don’t play it if you haven’t finished Dead Space, it spoils the ending!) before dropping you onto the Sprawl, a massive space station. If you’re familiar with Dead Space, what follows is very much familiar: you’ll slink through the corridors warily, and sooner or later some monsters will explode from the walls to attack you. The dismemberment mechanic from the original is, of course, still present; careful aim can mean the difference between felling an enemy with two shots or six. Never fear, though: the demo isn’t all routine.
Nintendo’s apparently all about announcing games tied in with Square-Enix this week, the latest update being that the Square-Enix developed Sports Mix will see Mario and company bringing hockey, basketball, volleyball and dodgeball to a single Wii disc on February 7, 2011.
The game offers 4-player trash talk opportunities both locally and online, and that’s pretty much the gist of the announcement for today.
Though if you are craving more you can catch the trailer and some art after the break.
I recently came to a conclusion: I don’t think I have what it takes to be a survivor. My wife and I were discussing what would happen if a zombie apocalypse actually fell upon mankind, and we both decided we would rather become zombies than deal with the stress of struggling to live on. Neither of us possesses the types of aggressive personalities that would be necessary to cope with the rigors that such a grueling, exhausting existence would bring.
Perhaps the largest and scariest threat of all in any survival scenario comes in the form of other survivors. With zombies, for instance, at least you have an idea of what to expect. They may be relentless, but they all follow similar patterns of behavior. Not so with humans. You never know when your so-called allies might turn on you in order to get a leg up and boost their own chances of living to see another day.
With this in mind, I think it’s safe to say that should I find myself in the situation of protagonist Junpei from 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, I probably wouldn’t even make it through the first challenge he faces.
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