Apologies for the late Tuesday cap, had a rather unpleasant migraine the last few days that kept me away from computer screens. Ever seen that part in Casino where Joe Pesci’s character is torturing that guy with the industrial vice, that’s what my head felt like.
So the weekend was the Spike Video Game Awards. Who won? Who cares! (Skyrim won everything, yes even best sports game) All we want to know is what new games were teased and trailered during the show.
VGA Announcements
So here’s the sneak peaks in bite size form:
That secret EA/Obsidian game? It’s Command and Conquer Generals.
Alan Wake returns in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. Poor guy can’t get a break.
Tony Hawk is back and he’s in HD.
The Transformers War for Cybertron 2 blows the mind of my inner child.
Post apocalyptic survival game The Last of Us looks like keeping depressing games fun in 2012. Hopefully there’s an achievement for giving up and blowing your brains out five minutes in.
Spectacular Spiderman wants to throw down with Arkham City for best comic book adaptation (even though it’s a movie license).
Epic’s big announcement Fortnite, looks strangely adorable, almost like Junior Horde Mode.
Probably the best tease of the show, when the Joker accepted his award for best character he was holding a script with the words Arkham World on the front. Oooooh, tantalising.
Here’s all the trailers below:
The Last of Us it's like The Road only you get to play it to really immerse yourself in the hopelessness
The Amazing Spiderman even if the movie sucks the game looks pretty great
Fortnite nothings more adorable than adorable survival horror games
Transformers Fall of Cybertron, don't adjust your computer, that really is the track playing in the background
Bioshock Infinite another trailer with a weird soundtrack
Hitman Absolution oh, could be more of a story here, and a legitimate bad guy for Agent 47 to piano wire
Rainbow 6 Patriots gets even more politicy, if Fox news though The Muppets was pushing an anti american communist agenda this'll send them bonkers
Nexuiz, a downloadable game using the Cryengine
Mass Effect 3 Continues to look amazing
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, it's like normal vengeance only heated up a few days after it was made
Alan Wake Continues to poke around in dark places
Diablo 3 Opening cinematic, beautiful
Command and Conquer Generals Teaser doesn't give up much
Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD, confirmed, will have skateboards
Other Stuff
So what else happened last week?
Hideo Kojima has quite candidly admitted he passed MGS Rising to Platinum Games (developers of Bayonetta) to complete because the Konami team just weren’t delivering. Don’t be mad though, Kojima was going to CANCEL the game it was in such a bad state. Then decided to hand it over to someone who could make it great. The plot of the game was meant to be set before MGS4, but has now been rejigged to be set after those events. Oh and it’s now called Revengeance instead of Rising, which my spell checker says isn’t a word.
A new Law and Order game called ‘Legacies’ is being released in episodic instalments for iOS devices. The game revolves around investigation and prosecution, looking quite similar to the detective bits in LA Confidential. I love Law and Order, it’s so formulaic it’s hilarious; I watch the show just to guess characters lines before they speak.
Sad news for GSC Game World. The creators of PC darling and irritating game to type out the title of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. closed their doors last week. They will continue to operate their forums and online store but it looks like the sequel to... that game they made... is on indefinite hiatus.
Star Wars: The Old Republic early access opened yesterday. Remember, Sith get the girls, but Jedi’s get free bath robes and beard clippers.
Fumito Ueda, man in charge of Team ICO and some of the most beloved games ever made, is confirmed as having formally departed Sony. The Last Guardian is still to be completed under contract though.
The Xbox 360 dashboard update is probably all ready on your Xbox and its pretty swish. Personally I love the pants of the whole thing. Overseas users are complaining about changes to services like Netflix and ESPN, new controls apparently being far less intuitive than the old system. But ah ha! We don’t have any of those services in our backwoods country.
Once again proving that people who play games are normal humans capable of great things. This year’s Penny Arcade founded Childs Play charity has reached 1.5 million dollars in fundraising, over 10 million in the charities life time. That’s a pretty damn humbling achievement. Suddenly my three welfare gifts this christmas look really crap.
The creators of Fez are working on a Kinect controlled three dimensional puzzle game called Super Hypercube.
The PS Vita will be usable as a controller for certain PS3 games, so far the only one confirmed is Ultimate Marvel Versus Capcom 3.
Skyrim has become the number one game in the UK, passing Modern Warfare 3 this week. Not far behind in third place is Battlefi... Just Dance 3? Really?! Ouch, sorry Battlefield 3 fans, your game is currently in sixth. The dollars, or in this case pounds, have spoken.
Speaking of MW3, another patch dropped today, the sixth since the games launch, that addresses lag issues, so I can’t use that as an excuse for my suckage any more.
In the wake of the deafening silence in response to THQ’s UDraw peripheral, the company has decided to: "take a difficult but important step to reduce the number of employees that supported this brand," or translated from company slime speak: they sacked the UDraw team for a product that performed about as well as anyone expected it to. I applaud THQ for taking some chances with ideas, but a little more market testing wouldn’t go amiss.
In response to the massive success of the Batman Arkham games compared to previous licenses of comic properties, Warner Brothers have decided to focus on adapting their comic properties into great games rather than cheap movie tie ins. Warner Brothers Montreal Executive Producer Reid Schneider says: "It's really about make the game what it needs to be and forget the movies." I wept salty tears of joy when I read that. Could studios have finally discovered the economic advantage of making a good game instead of a rushed, tie in piece of crap?
Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock is coming soon to PC and PS3 and Vita. If you don’t like Doctor Who give yourself a big slap in the face. Actually, make it two.
Dead Rising 3 is a thing, and may be set in California and feature a new protagonist, a mechanic called Rick.
Critically acclaimed game Bastion has a new batch of DLC recently released; it’s free for every platform except Xbox Live, where it retails for $1 US or 80 MS points. Because apparently that was the cheapest Microsoft would permit them to retail it for. Nice Microsoft, real nice.
Shigeru Miyamato made an official announcement of his retirement from Nintendo in a magazine interview. Due to the subsequent shareholder flip out and stock market farting Nintendo chose to, quite rudely I thought, argue this and say, no, he isn’t going any where. The PR cluster flip eventually settled into: Nintendo is restructuring in preparation for Miyamato’s final departure from the company. What does that mean? It means he’s retiring. The guy has had little to do but sit around the office and show up at events for years. For jebus sake let him have his bow before he leaves the stage Nintendo.
Maybe this isn’t news to anyone else but Chrome now has full games that can be played ‘in browser’. And we’re not talking about Asteroids or Pong either, games like Bastion and Mini Ninjas are now up in the Chrome app store for trial and purchase. If you’ve got Chrome you can play any of these games (assuming you meet the system requirements).
Raam’s Shadow, the latest Gears of War 3 pack has just released. In addition to a few new campaign missions as Zeta squad, set during the events before the first game, you also get to play as the hulking General Raam, he of the Kryll storm and big nasty knife, both of which you can use in the game. Battlefield 3 has also had Back to Karkand released this week adding four maps and lots of vehicle combat. Off course this content was all likely complete when the games shipped, but we're going to buy it anyway.
The Wii U has been priced by EB Games Australia at $598.00. That’s a full two hundred dollars over the original Wii. Yow, not quite the casual game console purchase parents were happy to make many Christmas past.
A whole new bunch of video apps are now on the Xbox dashboard today for Australian uses including Blinkbox, MSN Video, TMZ, YouTube and SBS on Demand (awesome, geeks know the good stuff’s on SBS) to name a few.
To round out your day here’s some unrealistically proportioned women hitting each other. Also known as Dead or Alive 5 screenshots:
