While Godzilla won’t hit North America until next year, the game is releasing for the PlayStation 3 in Japan this month.
Bandai-Namco has a demo available via the Japanese PSN Store, and we’ve got some new video equipment to test out, so why not sit back, relax, hit play and watch me try to kill two birds with one stone in the most awkward way possible?
Out now is the first episode of Telltale’s latest game series, Game of Thrones: Episode I – Iron from Ice. I have a track record with Telltale games that might be described as criminal; frankly, I have a tendency not to finish them. It’s not a matter of quality or even interest; I commend the storytelling of the titles, and the properties portrayed fall right into my realm of interest. I suppose the problem is merely that I have distinct times where I sit down to play games, and when I sit down to watch television—and a Telltale game exists in some unknown third state my rigid leisure time finds difficult to accommodate.
Telltale’s Game of Thrones, however, is a pairing that transcends such considerations. For the uninitiated, the title brings the dangerous, nuanced world of HBO’s Game of Thrones television series to life through Telltale’s (virtually trademarked, at this point) style of the choice-driven episodic point-and-click adventure.
Out today is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, developed by Lucid Games and published under Activision’s revitalized Sierra banner. Like past entries, Dimensions is a score-driven twin-stick shooter that revolves around the player ship blasting apart geometric shapes and collecting “geoms” to drive up score multipliers.
The appeal of this entry is largely the same as it has ever been: designed as a kaleidoscope of flashing lights, bright colours, and energizing music, it compels players to edge closer to the flow state, where the barrier between thinking and doing breaks down and they’re able to go further and faster to achieve the higher score.
In this respect, it is expertly tooled; even the menus are practically begging to simply get out of the way and release the player into the field. Upon failure, one need not even wait for the explosive burst of their dying ship to fade away before beginning the next round; Lucid Games clearly knows that every second spent not playing is going to pull the player further away from the state of mind needed to play the game at a high level.
Namco-Bandai’s bite-sized taste of the overdue RPG joint between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli comes up rather short given the size of the PS3 download. The demo offers two small assignments, racing to the top of a volcano to tackle a lava beast, and fighting a forest guardian in order to help a wise old tree and gain access to the Kingdom of the Cat King.
It’s a little depressing that the demo ends before giving us a glimpse of the fat old Cat King, but you can’t win them all I suppose. It’s a shame the demo doesn’t share some more of the animation I spied via the E3 demo earlier this year as well, because it was rather fantastic.
Despite the lack of a hand holding tutorial, combat comes across rather easy, with players able to swap between using Oliver to cast magic or controlling his tiny critter familiars to issue more standard attacks against enemies.
The demo’s emphasis is on teaching players to switch between offense and defense when larger enemies are powering up for more devastating attacks, and moving around said foes to discover critical weak points – for the lava beast this is the tail, while the forest guardian seems to have weak knees.
The rather simple combat could leave this feeling a bit like baby’s first JRPG, but it’s several shades refreshing to my fingers – I’ve been long for an RPG that was this easy to fall into in an age where one of my favorite childhood genres has a habit of putting me to sleep with increasingly complex designs and endless explanations.
Since the PS3 owners in the room can check the demo out for themselves, I’d encourage you to do that rather than listen to me ramble on, assuming you haven’t already.
Two things in particular worth basking in while visiting the other world are the world map itself, which reminds me a bit of the romantic aerial views of the landscape offered in Ghibli’s film Porco Rosso, and the character designs of smaller enemies encountered – these designs are rather simple, and capture something Pokémon-like while still resembling the primary bestiary known to Ghibli fans. My instant favorite is the colorful Ouroboros, which you can find on the road to Ding Dong Dell.
The other point of interest is for your ears. Joe Hisaishi’s fingerprints instantly bring back memories of the feature films, and discovering how the theme for the game expands is as high on my list as unraveling the story of Oliver’s quest to bring his mother back from the dead.
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch hits the PlayStation 3 exclusively on January 22nd, 2013 in North America and Europe on January 25th.
If you need more of a Level-5 fix, Namco-Bandai has also served up a behind the scenes tour of the developer, which you can catch below.
When PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was announced it immediately drew comparisons to another popular game series, and it’s not hard to see why. All-Stars practically begs to be measured against Nintendo’s Smash Bros. franchise.
Normally I would try to avoid a point-for-point comparison of two titles, but All-Stars pulls so much from the Smash Bros. games—without even a hint of subtlety—that I think it’s only fair to compare the two, mercilessly. You can expect to find many such comparisons ahead.
After five entries I imagine it’s easy to overlook the level of craft in the Assassin’s Creed series. Meticulously rendered locations and historical accuracy is par for the course at this point, but thankfully Assassin’s Creed III brings these elements back to the forefront by leveraging the most interesting setting, backstory, and secondary characters in the entire series.
The American Revolution is explored with a balanced perspective, and historical information is poured on in such a way that even the most oblivious player will be compelled to think critically about the stage and the motivations of the actors.
This is not Assassin’s Creed: SUPER PATRIOT EDITION. Bad people and bad choices are everywhere; compromise is ubiquitous. The game begs you to look deeper into the conflict, and it works. That most players will have a stronger working knowledge of the history here than in previous entries is a massive boon to the story being told; it’s easier to grasp opposing viewpoints when the nature of the disagreement is easily understood, allowing the game to more deftly elaborate on the moral struggles the series has always tried to illuminate.
I’m reasonably sure Dead Souls is the only game about the zombie apocalypse where I’ve spent ten minutes at an arcade trying to win a toy Chihuahua from a claw-game. There was absolutely no reason for doing so, except that I really wanted it.
As a zombie epidemic spreads through the streets, large barricades are quickly deployed to seal off the infected area of the city, and the result is two very different realities – one in which life appears to carry on, and another where the infected are eager to feast on your delicious brains. The ability to walk the safer of these two streets while still enjoying the mini-game distractions and other interactions Yakuza has to offer probably makes this deviation the videogame most in line with the political commentary of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and more recent Land of the Dead.
Players will find themselves in Akiyama’s shoes as the outbreak begins, the chaos quickly engulfing the streets around Sky Finance while he works to keep his faithful assistant safe and absorb the events unfolding. After a brief bout of linear direction, Dead Souls cuts players loose to pursue the main narrative or slip into the infected areas of the city to tackle side-quests that involve clearing areas and rescuing survivors. This creates two zombie filled environments in the same setting, with players combating zombies while working toward a narrative goal, or using entry points to simply run around and fill the endless hordes full of lead.
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