Phew, that was close. It’s still Friday, at least somewhere in the world. So, WRUP… yeah…WRUP. What should we talk about? Oh, right, quick update on the whole Twinstiq thing. The site will continue, but you will see a dial back in news. We can’t keep up with big sites and it’s just sucking too much energy and time from everyone. There was the idea floating around that we could make news collection posts, which basically consist of headlines and links.
Do you like the idea, or have an alternative? Tell us in the comments.
So, what’s everybody playing over the weekend?
Andrew J Amideo (@Andoro36): BioShock Infinite. Riptide GP2.
Billy Colley (@Amuntoth): I'll finally have some free time this weekend so I plan to get a few Let's Plays up, a video review, and if I have time after all that I'll play a little bit of Dragonball Xenoverse, which I finally picked up and am thoroughly enjoying.
Cody Hall (@Yoda0VGs): If I manage to break free of life's heartless grasp, I will be finishing up Batman: Arkham (We all knew who it is) Knight. And expect another totally nessarilly lengthy review to follow.
Dante:Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Fire Emblem: Awakening.
Greywolfe (@lostwolfe, YouTube): i picked up and am in the throes of playing tengami from the weekly "eye candy" humble bundle. so far, i'm quite liking it, but the desktop port HAS PROBLEMS[tm] - larry 5 will prroooobbably actually have gameplay, this week. i'm also coming to a spot in kyrandia that i detest: the magic altar. [but then, a lot of that game has very hit and miss qualities] and i'm currently sortakinda enjoying the spider brawl in hearthstone. we've seen it before, which makes it bad, and the meta's a little face-y, but it's at least a change from mech mage.
Jimmy Vegas (@JimmyPhantom17): Dead Rising 3 DLC and if I finish it, some Tales of Symphonia
John Rausch (@visitzebes): I might play more Yoshi's New Island. I didn't quite attain my goal last weekend.
Thomas Ortsik (@Dr_Strangethumb): Maybe New Game+ Arkham Knight. Could use some more material for a possible upcoming review.
Trisha Baumgartner (twitch): Work work, Zug Zug. Finished Saints Row 4, now I'm going to play Gat out of Hell finally
Mike Suszek (@mikesuszek): I'm playing FREEDOM: THE GAME.
Anthony John Agnello (@ajohnagnello, Twitch): Cursing the dumb open worldy stuff in Arkham Knight, loving the rest. 243 riddles to face Riddler? All those mines and towers? Shut up, game.
Aww, yeah! Ocarina of Time is now available on the Wii U! (Via the Nintendo 64 Virtual Console.) I may already own it on GameCube and 3DS, but now I can finally play it the way God intended...on Nintendo 64! (Virtually, that is.) Whatever, close enough. I can't wait to finish this post so I can go get to downloading!Also new this week, another Samurai Warriors game for the 3DS (yawn), an intriguing multiplayer platform game where you start at the end and have to backtrack to the beginning, and an interesting looking Japanese strategy RPG. Dust off your virtual cartridge, fire up your virtual console, then jump past the break to see this list of new releases.
Gah! I've no words. Prediction: KickStarter later this year. It seems like everything dead is now alive and new. Or it's a new anime and I can dig back into my hole.
In the above teaser is a logo for Studio 4°C, a Japanese animation company. I smell another transmedia property coming along. To be fair though, Mega Man Legends was little more than a playable anime.I hate to say it but as a big fan of Mega Man Legends, this didn't really hit me the way I imagined it. I could have sworn I predicted this some time around Bloodstained's debut but I never imagined I'd see the concept emerge so soon. I'm not enamored with Comcept's track record either. They seem to work much in the same fashion as Mistwalker, acting more as consultants and not purely as developers. To that end, I'm not even sure I'd consider them a "developer". Guess their name Comcept really fits them. I've never played Soul Sacrifice (no Vita) or Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, and their Zak and Wiki-ish game, Kaio, never made it to fruition. So, whatever this is might never see the light of day either. I guess Fallout 4 really spoiled me but I don't want to know about things until they are a bit more viable. Console or ridicule me below. Also, Bugs vs. Tanks was kinda weak.
One of the blips on every gamers’ radar is the annual E3 conference. Usually, we get to see upcoming games or we get to hear about projects that are in the pipeline for the future. Occasionally, there’s some hardware reveals too. It’s like Christmas for our industry, except, you know, in June.
The problem – and the problem I have had – historically – with all of these conferences is that there’s a surprising lack of diversity at show. Everyone’s bringing a new iteration of a shooter [and this is a particular problem, in fact. There are so many shooters that it’s difficult to get invested/interested in them] or a new version of a sports game or a slightly updated driving game. To me, this feels pretty bland.
The bright spot – at least for me – is almost always the indie games, because the indie developers are often trying something different. So, I’d like to propose that E3 have an “indie conference” in the style of the Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft conferences.
And now, your host, Morph!
We Know It Can Be Done
First, let’s start with the obvious: can it actually happen? The answer is yes. One of the most awesome things to come out of E3 2015 was the PC Gaming Show.
PC is not really a “unified platform” – not in the same way that Xbox One, Playstation 4 and the Wii U are “unified platforms” – as such, there should not have been a way to make a conference for PC, but this was a solvable problem with a sponsor that stepped in [in the form of AMD] who probably under-wrote the whole PC Gaming Show for the sake of advertising. While I wouldn’t want indies to be in that sort of debt to someone like AMD, at least we know that it is possible to host something like this.
We can also see that there are a host of games that would benefit from such a platform: during their conferences, Microsoft and Sony essentially skated right across their indie offerings, barely giving us glimpses at each title.
A dedicated conference would allow those indies to stand up in front of an actual audience and do a little more than just a tech demo.
Cloud Imperium made a "little movie" of their showing at E3 - this could be a template for indies.
But How Might It Work?
The biggest problem with having indies at E3 is the cost: most developers who are in this particular boat probably don’t have the money to fly out to an expensive convention just so that they can show off their game in a public space.
This, too, is a solvable problem: at this year’s show, Cloud Imperium [the folks behind Star Citizen] were not actually on the show floor, instead, they sent video to the actual PC Gaming Show that they put up on large screens for folks to follow.
In this same way, developers could set up “booths” with their own computers at their own workplaces where they could demonstrate their games through – for example – Twitch streams, Skype calls or various other methods.
The other – quite large problem – is financing. I thought that having AMD as a sponsor was not a bad idea, but I didn’t like the implementation of their sponsorship in that particular program. Instead, I feel that indie incubators should help out in this respect – with – perhaps – slightly longer spots for the actual developers that they are helping along. [this would be a twofold win – it would keep the show on point and it wouldn’t be obtrusive – which was one of the biggest issues I had with the AMD sponsorship of the PC Gaming Show.]
Finally – and as for the line-up, I would hope for a diverse set of developers showing a diverse set of games. As I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, part of the reason I’m a little jaded when it comes to E3 in general is that it seems to be a haven for me-too-ness. There are a lot of people showing off a lot of games, but they all seem to boil down to “here’s a sports game” or “here’s our shooter we just made” or “here’s a new driving game in our present franchise” – and while I applaud that those games exist for people who are into them, I have long since contended that gaming could be about many and varied things.
Games like Tacoma are interesting, to me. Games like Beyond Eyes have a story – and a vision – that very few AAA games can match. I loved the presentation that the developer of Unravel gave – that was more heartfelt than any of the quite scripted jokes that happened at this year’s show.
One other large problem I had with the PC Game Show was that it was too long. Two and a half hours – particularly given how it played out – made it by far the longest conference there was. I didn’t mind the format so much – Day[9] was an excellent host – but there was too much talking and not enough showing.
Instead, what I propose is that each developer gets five or so minutes to show their wares – and I do mean show. None of this “we’ll talk for ten minutes and show a two minute trailer of what we just talked about.”
This particular method – of having a developer come up and show something to the crowd, while talking to a host such as Day[9] should happen for about an hour. At that point, the conference should end for that day. On day two, the same thing should happen again and so on for each day of E3. This way, there’s news every day about indie games – again, making this a bit of a win, since they will be part of the round up that news sites do and keeping the idea of indie visible to the public.
Conclusion
I strongly believe that there needs to be a real indie space for developers at E3. My ideas may not – entirely – be the best, but, hopefully, this is a platform that gets people talking about the way it might be done. I certainly hope to see something like this next year, when I’m sure I’ll be following the conferences again.
This week, BlazBlue has come to the PlayStation 4 with the release of Chrono Phantasma Extend. No word yet on whether or not the game is compatible with PlayStation 3 arcade sticks (so, I'm guessing not), but it seems that Japanese peripheral maker Hori was nice enough to create a limited edition Chrono Phantasma stick that works with both systems. Could be a good investment, if you've got the scratch (and are able to find one). Also new this week, an ancient Konami arcade shmup, a Shonen Jump fighting game mash-up, and a Kickstarter horror/adventure game that just happens to have a file size of 666 megabytes. Crazy, right? Acquire a compatible fight stick, select your character, then jump past the break to see more of this week's new releases.
Warhammer: Storm of Magic has been announced, and it looks extremely similar to Hearthstone. Granted, the actual card gameplay could be very different, but you're still talking about a card game on the PC with great looking animations. Still, as a lover of all things Warhammer I can't help but be excited about it. I think they should have gone with Warhammer 40,000 in order to help differentiate the game from Hearthstone, but I still like Warhammer Fantasy so for me it's not a total loss. Continue past the break for the video and my thoughts.
This has got to be at least the fifth Games Workshop game announced this year if I recall correctly, which is really a double edged sword. When Relic had the license I really enjoyed Dawn of War 1 and 2, and I couldn't get enough of Space Marine as well. There's something about killing Orks in the far future that really gets my gears going. Still, Relic was relatively reserved with the license, only putting out of a few games in the years that they had the rights to it.Now there are dozens of Warhammer Fantasy and 40,000 games that have recently come out or are coming out soon, and it's starting to worry me. The overall quality has gone down a bit to be sure, more like triple B quality games than the triple A that I felt the Dawn of War games were. That doesn't mean the games are bad, but they are focusing on smaller games with shorter development times and this begs the question: are they flooding the market?
Not Total Warhammer? Seriously?
That's the worry isn't it? It's great that I'm getting more games in my favorite settings, but if they continue to focus on more simple games will I ever see a Dawn of War 3 or equivalent? I know we're getting Total War: Warhammer sometime in the near future, but Creative Assembly don't exactly have the greatest track record and adding all of the fantasy stuff could mean that the first Total War of this type could be a buggy mess. I think most of us still remember the disaster that was Empire: Total War. Combine that with lackluster games like Space Hulk (which I still enjoyed), and the horribly ported Kill Team (a game that could have been amazing but was so poorly ported as to be nearly unplayable), and you have to start worrying that people will begin associating Warhammer with mediocre, buggy and unfun games.
Still, with games like Total War: Warhammer, Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, and Mordheim: City of the Damned on the way with the potential to really be amazing, things aren't entirely hopeless yet.
If Games Workshop can continue to walk this tightrope of allowing smaller developers to develop more simple, cheaper games, while also allowing more experienced devs to build larger and more intriguing games, then things could work out very well for me and the other Warhammer fans out there.
What do you think? Are you already a fan of Warhammer Fantasy or 40,000? Are you excited about all of these games coming out, or the ones which recently came out? Are you just as worried as I am that they might be watering down the brand with less than stellar games? Let us know in the comments down below.
The above video is our look at the Wild Season beta from last month, and it looks like its already a bit outdated. I suppose that's bound to happen with betas, so continue past the break to see what they've added.
It looks like the developers have addressed some of the crippling issues I ran into during my attempted playthrough. You can now play until Summer 18 Firefly event, which means you can continue the story longer than you could in the earlier beta. They've improved the camera, increased run speed, updated the sound FX (I hope that means they HAVE sound FX now), added animal raising and fixed purchasing of items and animals! They've also fixed the shipping bin, which means you can finally make money now that you also have the ability to spend it!I haven't had a chance to give the new beta a go yet, but I am excited about it. Why? Because I want a Harvest Moon game on PC, simple as that. Or at least it was until the newest Harvest Moon was announced for PC as well, which better light a fire under Wild Season's developers because that has got to be a pretty painful announcement for them.
In case you're curious about what's changed, I have included the patch notes, below.
Have you played Wild Season? Are you excited about the upcoming release, or are you more excited for the Harvest Moon release on PC? Let us know in the comments below.
Patch Notes NEW FEATURES
- Story until Summer 18 Firefly event. (this event’s a whooper!)
- Windowed Mode (still has some issues)
- Added "leave blank for default" text in text input window.
- New camera positioning
- Added gift giving
- Faster movement (the developers are eager for your feedback on this)
- Added star quality logic. (back end only)
- Updated SFX.
- Animal shop now works
- Female intro video when starting a new game TOTAL IMPLEMENTED FEATURES SO FAR
Farming
Mining
Fishing (old rod is in your chest. Buy bait fromt the general store)
Animal Care
Story up to Summer 18
Horse Betting
Minimap
Worldmap
Full mouse support
Gift Giving BUG FIXES
- Fixed Shipping bin (You can now make money!)
- Fixed minimap.
- Selecting female is now less buggy
- Animals can now be carried (just farm ones not town ones)
- Consumables can now be consumed (effects/mileage may vary)
- Fixed missing item quantity in inventory.
- Fixed in inventory when selecting stacked items.
- Fixed quantity display bug when buying more than 1 item from general store.
- Fixed missing seed and deed in quick start option.
- Fixed getting stuck in plateau entrance
- Fixed couldn’t input anything in the main menu
- Fixed music in game scene is muted on start when you started a new game. (can be fixed by adjusting the volume on the pause menu)
- Control are now remappable in options and in game pause
- Fixed visual bug in the HUD of the season icon
- Fixed cats and dogs movement
- Fixed camera sometimes won’t follow the main character
- Fixed Volume so it’s not SUPER Loud when you start
- More feature fixes.
Game Changers is a semi-regular column featuring games which have had a significant impact on me over the years. Games that were so incredibly stunning and awe-inspiring, they changed my conception of what a game could be at the time. Previously, I have written about Out Run and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. This time, I decided to highlight my all-time favorite fighting game.
My first experience with the Street Fighter series was Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, on the Super Nintendo. The game had come out only a few months earlier and a buddy of mine had just gotten his hands on a copy. He invited me and another friend to a sleepover at his house, and the three of us stayed up all night playing it obsessively. We were all new to fighting games, so we spent hours passing the controllers around, taking turns battling it out in order to learn the basics and familiarize ourselves with the characters. It was a lot of fun.
Over the next several years, I played a few different versions of Street Fighter II (Hyper, Arcade). Eventually, I even picked up a copy of Super Street Fighter II (The New Challengers) for my Sega Genesis. I loved being able to play with the newer characters, especially Dee Jay and Cammy. Even though I enjoyed spending a lot of time with all of the various iterations of Street Fighter II, I eventually grew weary of game's limitations and moved on to other, better fighting games (Virtua Fighter 1 & 2, SoulCalibur, etc).
Fast forward to December of 2000. I was home from college for the holidays and browsing around the local Media Play store for Christmas gift ideas. My brother and I had spent most of that summer playing the hell out of his new Sega Dreamcast (I picked one up for myself by the end of summer break); I decided to hit the games section to see if I could find any potential presents there. I happened across a marked-down copy of Street Fighter Alpha 3. My brother and I had both gotten a good amount of entertainment out of my aforementioned Super Street Fighter II cartridge a few years earlier, so I decided that he might like to give Alpha a try (neither of us had owned a PlayStation or Saturn so we weren't very familiar with that series).
When he unwrapped the gift on Christmas morning, I explained to him that I had picked it out because of our prior shared enthusiasm for Street Fighter II. He looked at it approvingly and agreed to give it a shot. Later that day, we fired it up and inadvertently ignited what would become a life-long passion for all things Street Fighter.
The Difference Was Dramatic
As fun as Street Fighter II had been, it was nothing compared to Alpha 3. The beautiful graphics, depth of gameplay, insane number of characters, wealth of content and features, excellent soundtrack...all of it was incredible. My brother and I were instantly hooked. We played the game more or less constantly over the next several months (separately and together). A few months later, I picked up my own copy to play on my Dreamcast up at school.
Each of us beat the game dozens of times, on various difficulty levels, and with a number of different characters. Every time I came home for a break or a long weekend, we would test our newly developed skills against each other to see who had improved more. Sometimes it was him, sometimes me. Either way, whoever held the slight advantage, never held it for long. Every session we had, after playing enough matches to determine superiority, we would always close it out with an obligatory round of the brilliant co-op mode, Dramatic Battle.
Dramatic Battle is one of my favorite features of Alpha 3 (really, one of my favorite features from any fighting game). I honestly think that every fighting game would be vastly improved by including it. There are two different options for Dramatic Battle, plain and Versus. In the Versus version, you can have three players face off in a lopsided 2 v 1 match-up. Unfortunately, we usually only had two working controllers at any given time, so we always just stuck with the regular version.
Standard Dramatic Battle is like a shorter version of arcade mode, but with co-op. Two players fight together, 2 v 1, against a series of six AI-controlled opponents. You can pick any two characters from the roster to play as and you have to fight, in order, Adon, Akuma, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and finally, M Bison. The opponents in this mode are much tougher than in the regular Arcade mode, but what's cool about it is that you and your teammate each have separate health bars. That means that even if one of you gets knocked out mid-round, the other can continue fighting until either both of you, or the enemy, has been defeated. Just like Arcade mode, if you both lose a match, you can continue right where you left off and try again. After defeating M Bison, you are treated to a staff roll (credits) and some victory music.
Dramatic Battle goes a long way towards breathing some additional life into the standard player vs player/player vs AI fighting game. It's a lot of fun to be able to switch things up and form a team with somebody after having pounded on them (or having been pounded on by them) for a while. There's also something satisfying about having a teammate for support/sympathy whilst taking on occasionally frustrating AI opponents (much more so than having to go it alone). Again, it's just a shame that more game developers don't think to add such a fantastic mode to their fighting games.
Showing a Lot of Character
The number of characters in Alpha 3 is staggering. All sixteen playable fighters return from Super Street Fighter II (and Akuma). Then you've got Gen, Birdie, and Adon, from the original Street Fighter, and Cody, Guy, Sodom, and Rolento from Final Fight. If that weren't already more than enough to satisfy any fighting game fan's needs, Capcom decided to go ahead and add some brand new characters to the mix. Over the course of the Alpha series, these included Charlie, Rose, Dan, Sakura, Karen, R Mika, Juni, and Juli. Finally, they also decided to throw in two alternate versions of characters, Evil Ryu and Shin Akuma.
In case you weren't keeping track, that's a total of 34 different characters. For a (mostly) one-on-one fighting game, that is an incredibly substantial number of fighters! For comparison, the original Marvel Vs Capcom (which came out around the same time) only had sixteen playable characters, and that was a two-on-two fighting game!
What is even crazier is that, not only are there 34 different characters in the game, but each one has their own unique story, mid-story match-up, semifinal match-up, and ending. Some of them even have unique pre-fight interactions as well (a la King of Fighters). Nearly every single character also has their own unique stage and music. The only exceptions, stage-wise, are Evil Ryu, Shin Akuma, and Juni and Juli (and only Juni and Juli share music). Even the successors to the Alpha series, Street Fighter III and IV, had way fewer stages and characters (IV did eventually surpass Alpha 3's character count, but only by the third version).
With 35 different stage themes in the game (including the training theme and an additional unique battle stage theme), you might expect some of the music to be repetitious or forgettable. But every song in the game stands apart. Each one is upbeat, catchy, and/or appropriately dramatic. Many of them, you just can't help bobbing your head along to (my personal favorites are the ones from Sakura's and Dan's stages). I actually enjoyed the music so much that I recorded it all to create my own soundtrack to listen to whenever I wasn't constantly playing the game. Even now, years later, I still enjoy listening to that music from time to time (I have since purchased an official copy when it became available though).
A World Worth Fighting For
As I mentioned earlier, I had been somewhat of a fan of Street Fighter with II, but Alpha 3 managed to hook me for life. My obsession with the game transformed into an obsession with all things Street Fighter (and Capcom as well, to a slightly lesser extent). I began to collect and play, not only the latest Street Fighter titles, but any games I could find with even a slight connection to Street Fighter. This led me to discover the brilliant Final Fight series (which I had somehow missed), as well as other phenomenal Street Fighter related games, such as Super Puzzle Fighter II and the Capcom Vs SNK series.
I even went so far as to seek out Street Fighter in other mediums, such as the brilliant Street Fighter II animated movie (by which the Alpha series was inspired), as well as the incredibly well-done Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist web series. If you aren't familiar with either of those, do yourself a favor and check them out. Unfortunately, I also discovered the abysmal Legend Of Chun-Li movie, but we can just pretend that cinematic abomination never happened.
For as many great fighting games as I have played since first discovering Street Fighter II all those years ago, none of them have been able to hold my attention like Street Fighter Alpha 3. SoulCalibur 1 & 2, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, and Capcom Vs SNK 2 all came close. I still play those from time to time, along with the most current version of Street Fighter IV, but Alpha 3 will always by my weapon of choice.
Taking everything that Street Fighter Alpha 3 offers into consideration, the beautiful graphics, great music, exceptional content and features (I didn't even mention the incredible World Tour mode), there's really no other fighting game quite like it. It's the first thing I want to bust out whenever I'm visiting with my brother, it's the first game that springs to mind whenever I hear about the latest Street Fighter news (I really wish they would make a Steam version, by the way), and I am always, always down for a couple rounds of Dramatic Battle (just in case anyone's interested).
That's right, in honor of the Fallout 4 announcement and hype I've decided to go back and play through the original Fallout. It's been a long time since I played the game, but if you'd like to watch me make a fool of myself and die repeatedly, then continue past the break and watch the first episode.
By now, many of you have probably heard about the numerous issues that this week's Steam release of Batman: Arkham Knight was suffering from. I was originally planning to make that game the highlight of this article. (I had a cool image picked out and everything!) But, owing to the fact that the game was receiving quite a lot of not-so-favorable customer reviews, as well as the fact that Steam has opted to suspend sales of the game altogether, I decided to go with my second choice.
For those of you who are unaware (or too young to remember), Metal Slug was a 1996 Neo Geo Arcade release. It's a side-scrolling run and gun action game similar to Contra (especially in terms of difficulty), except bigger, faster, and with a more comical style. It has spawned multiple sequels, and some of the characters have even appeared in other Neo Geo and SNK games. Both Metal Slug X (a rerelease of Metal Slug 2) and Metal Slug 3 have already been available on the Steam store since last year. And now everyone can try the game that started it all! (Personally, I love all of 'em.)Also released this week (and not suspended due to poor reviews) was the newly updated Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, the previously Nintendo-only puzzle platformer, Mighty Switch Force, and a pair of classic Total War titles (the first two games of the series, in fact). Insert two quarters, hit the start button, then jump past the break to see more of this week's new releases.
Metal Slug (SNK Playmore, Single & Multi-player, $7.99) (Controller Support, Steam Achievements)