BitSnark

In a news tidbit thats either going to be labelled totally cool or totally dumb, Namco Bandai showed a new trailer of Soul Calibur IV depicting Darth Vader and Yoda as secret characters at CES.

Apparently, it will be a similar situation to Soul Calibur II whereby each format (PS3&360) will have a character exclusive to their respective machine – 360 owners get the wise green turd whereas PS3 owners get the hard breathing armored goth. While i’m sure the ironic colour coordination of those two characters to their respective consoles didn’t escape Lucasarts when they brokered the deal, logic instead seems to have, I mean the trailer depicts Mitsurugi blocking a lightsaber strike with his sword.

A lightsaber would cut through a sodding piece of metal any day of the week, anyways, with pedantic Star Wars fanboy hat firmly taken off, I can see how this will be kinda cool (just to see their endings will be worth a chuckle in all probability) but I can also see how sales of the PS3 SKU would be bigger as everyone thinks Darth Vader is cooler right?

Right?

Linkage below for the trailer if you lot want to take a look:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/29550.html

In what has to be a hellish announcement for HD-DVD owners and relief for everyobody else, Warner has finally announced that they will be solely supporting the Blu-Ray format from May this year.

To be brutally honest, I am sick and tired of having to choose between two formats, of which there is little superficial difference, with shows and movies that I enjoy being released on one and not the other. Esepcially now that Warner has jumped on board, this means that the previously annnouced Appleseed: Ex Machina will now be heading to the Blu-Ray format, along with the Matrix sequels too.

This is now officially awesome, as I dont now have to justify a £100 purchase, for just four or five films that I thought would never make it to Blu-Ray in the first place.

With Warner now backing Blu-Ray, I can only hope that brings us closer to having a single HD format in the market and that other HD-DVD ‘die hards’ switch to Blu-Ray too, as the current format ‘war’ isn’t benefitting anyone.

Review – PSN Game – Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online (PS3)

From the launch of the original Playstation through to this latest downloadable only title, Namco’s Tekken series has been present on every piece of Sony gaming hardware. However, while the hardware may have evolved, the series arguably has only received incremental improvements and adjustments since the leap that Tekken 2 provided over its predecessor.

In terms of just the fighting mechanics, Tekken 5: DR is the pinnacle of the Tekken IP. The finely honed fighting engine from the original Tekken 5 game, is present here, yet tightened up even more and more precisely balanced than ever before. Tekken 5 vets who plough into the title, will notice that the timings for many of their characters moves have been altered and extra moves and have been afforded to many of the fighters that are present.

Also being a conversion of the Tekken 5: DR arcade game, this home conversion brings with it not just Armor King and Eddy Gordo as separate characters but also two newcomers, Lili, a spoilt rich kid who employs a deadly variation of ballet as her fighting style, and the scarred mute Russian soldier Dragunov, who specialises in the brutal fighting style of Sambo. Thankfully, both of the characters are just as balanced as the older characters in the game and bring new styles to the table, which in a game where the styles have been very similar and predictable for the last ten years, is a good thing indeed.

Currently, for all the lucky PS3 owners out there Tekken 5: DR provides the most compelling reason yet to plonk down some cash at the Playstation Store. For just £14.99, the game is an absolute steal, with the Ghost and Ranking modes lasting a long time, especially with all the extra costumes and clothing that can be unlocked for each of the combatants. There are however a couple of problems with this downloadable title.

Firstly, there is no story mode, so wave goodbye to character prologues, epilogues and cool CG endings. Secondly, (and more crucially to the gameplay) the much touted online mode suffers from jarring lag issues that make it unresponsive at best and downright unplayable when its at its worst.

Still, it’s hard to grumble considering that £14.99 gets you all the fighters (including the extremely silly powerful end boss Jinpachi as a playable character exclusive to the PS3 version), a massively exhaustive Ghost collectable mode and of course the versus mode for endless multiplayer fun with willing friends. In addition, Tekken 5: DR for the PS3 has joined the HD era, so you crank it up to 1080p and enjoy the razor sharp visuals while you are pummelling away, even though doing so exposes the age of some of the textures, but otherwise its still a very nice game to look at.

All in all, Tekken 5: DR represents a great buy for both fans of the Tekken series and also beat-em up lovers in general. Even given the games relative aforementioned failings, the game resolutely retains the essence of Tekken, which is the great fighting mechanics and awesome versus mode. Go on, splash out while it’s still £14.99, there are many, many worse things to spend that kind of money on.

Overall Score: 8.5

Review – Gears Of War (XB360)

Few games have the kind of hyperbole and weight of expectation behind it that Gears does. I mean, hell, this is the game that is meant to make, to define a console and also the game which will debut Epic’s brand new spanky Unreal Engine 3. It’s as much the poster boy for Epic’s new tech as it is the XBOX 360 in much the same way the original Halo was back in 2001/2002, and as such there are a lot of folk out there who want to see if it stands up to scrutiny now that it’s finished and out there.

Aside from a few minor niggles, Gears comes off admirably as perhaps the finest third person action adventure we have seen in recent times, with both an astounding, if a little short single player campaign and an extremely robust multiplayer mode. The single player campaign revolves around a loosely knit story going something like this: Man has pretty much depleted every natural resource on the planet Sera, a planet not too dissimilar from our own, until they stumble across a renewable energy source called Imulsion. Of course man being man, this triggers much struggle and conflict until a mysterious race called the Locust Horde, boil up from the Earth’s crust and begin wreaking havoc on the populace at large.

So there you have it, your classic humans vs. monsters premise, and rather than add any over dramatic weight to the storyline or indeed any of the characters, the plot and the charcaters that feature in them are unapologetically cookie-cutter to the extreme. You control Marcus Fenix, a true man’s man, gruff, scarred up, loud and up for some serious ultra-violence. Marcus and his gang of ultra macho misfits are basically Gears equivalent of the marines from James Cameron’s Aliens film, dumb, gruff and ready to blast anything that moves.

Thankfully, Gears’ campaign mode triumphs not in it’s story or characters but quite simply in the robust game mechanics that it has and the sense of epic scale it gives during its many frantic battles. The gameplay in Gears is set in the third person and follows a cover and shoot based approach, whereby as the enemy approach you need to find cover where you can fire and manoeuvre from. Whilst in cover there are a number of moves that are available to you such as blind firing, leaning over walls, jumping over cover, diving out of cover or performing SWAT moves to get you from one piece of cover to the next. On the first two difficulty levels staying out of cover for extended periods doesn’t really the punish the player a huge amount, try this on the appropriately named ‘Insane’ difficulty level however, and prepare to find yourself severely punished for just being out of cover more than a couple of seconds.

All of this interaction with cover is triggered by the ‘A’ button which pretty much does everything in this game. Besides all the aforementioned cover interaction, the A button makes you evasively roll, dive and also when depressed, makes your character go into a ‘Roadie Run’ whereby you holster your weapon close to your stomach and basically do a commando sprint, complete with a nice graphical effect whereby the view is concaved slightly and you get a nice shaky ‘war cam’ look. This is all well and good but it presents a problem because when you are roadie running, you tend to get stuck to various pieces of cover that you really don’t want to, because the system sees that you are pressing A and assumes that you want be behind whatever cover you are running past. More often than not this isn’t an issue, but sometimes it can cost you your life when you are trying to dash past an enemy, but then you end up behind cover with them.

Whilst the cover and shoot mechanic my initially appear to lend itself to uninspiring and perhaps even pedestrian gameplay situations, Gears spices things up sufficiently in the campaign with a number of cool, well thought out missions that the feeling of repetition is the last thing to compromise your enjoyment of the game. Even the mechanic of just reloading itself, is deeper than one would originally perceive due to the ‘Active Reload’ system. This works with a bar with a white sweet spot, and as you reload using the right bumper button, you need to get the reload pointer in that sweet spot for an optimum reload with more powerful ammo. Failure to do this results in reloading taking twice as long and potentially leaving you vulnerable. As such I feel this stands as a nice little innovation to help polish the veneer of what could otherwise be a very repetitive combat system.

Besides the long pitched cover battles with automatic weaponary and sniper rifles, Gears revels in it’s ultra violent nature with a number of gleefully nasty weaponry. The basic Shotgun for example, will quite happily sunder a foe’s body in many different directions if they are unlucky enough to take a blast at close range, creating a mess of squelchy body parts that can be kicked around the ground in the aftermath. The Hammer of Dawn is the next weapon on the list – a hugely powerful satellite laser that can be used only where there is clear sky, and is basically a pillar of light that is dragged around by an infra red laser marker which basically turns anything it touches into gooey chunks. And finally, my personal favourite, the chainsaw. Built onto the underside of the ‘Lancer’ weapon that Marcus and his gang have, you hold ‘B’ to rev up this thing for roughly two seconds and then depress the right trigger to bury it into the anatomy of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in front of you at the time. Cue the most satisfying moment in videogame history, where there is a disturbing sense of resistance as the chainsaw gets stuck in parts of your victim before fully splitting them asunder, scattering their anatomy across the camera. I’m not sure if it’s the noise of the motor or just the carnage it causes, but using the chainsaw never gets old.

Gears biggest asset remains in it’s aesthetics. Gears is quite simply a staggering visual achievement. The European influenced architecture looks so vivid, vibrant and detailed thanks to the extremely high quality of textures and HDR lighting which are used throughout. Everything looks polished to the absolute nines, from the character models (check out the skin on both the locust and the humans), to the explosions, fire, water and particle effects, Gears Of War is quite simply the best looking game I have seen to date, and amply demonstrates Epic’s much touted Unreal Engine 3 technology as a great piece of middleware tech. Even the sound, stands out as being truly exceptional with a stirring epic score, great sound effects and of course lots of testosterone charged macho voice acting.

Another of Gears’ biggest assets is it’s multiplayer and in particular just how thoroughly robust and comprehensive it is. Gears offers two players the chance to tackle the main campaign in co-op mode, either over split screen, system link or XBOX Live, with little degradation to visual quality in split screen and a pleasingly lag free experience over XBOX Live. Even better, the way the co-op mechanic works is by utilising a drop-in/drop-out system, whereby a human player can take the role of the other character at any point during any mission in the campaign. For those with a competitive streak Gears caters you too, with a number of different game types. What game types you have on offer for competitive play over split screen, system link or Xbox Live, are Warzone, Assassination or Execution.

Warzone is basically your run-of-the-mill team deathmatch mode whereby teams of opposing COG (marine) and Locust Horde players face off until the other team is dead and then move onto the next round, with the team having the most rounds won, winning the game. In Assassination, each team has a captain and the game is over as soon as that captain is killed, with the player holding the lowest score becoming the captain in the next round. Thus this creates an interesting need for strategic play to keep the captain alive. Interestingly, only the captain can pick up the larger weapons such as the torque bow or the longshot rocket launcher, but they can drop them for other players to use too making the captain a weapon carrier as well as a protectable objective. And finally, in Execution, the idea is similar to Warzone where each team has to destroy members of the other team, the difference lies in the way this is achieved. In this gametype unless a team member is eviscerated by a chainsaw or by a shotgun blast, they now have to be put out of their misery with an execution resulting in a particularly horrific curb stomp. If this execution is not done in time, the player may revive themselves by tapping ‘A’ or be revived by a fellow player in a very similar manner to how another player would revive their partner in co-op mode.

If it wasn’t for the quality of Gears’ multiplayer maps, the gameplay modes would get old quick, as truth be told there simply isn’t enough variety between just three different modes. Nevertheless, the tight design of the maps, along with the promise of additional maps (two of which have arrived as of writing) and the robust, tactical nature of the cover and shoot gameplay, ensure that Gears will be top of Xbox Live user lists for a good while to come yet.

Gears of War is simply a fantastically well thought out shooter, that strips bare what people expect from third person shooters and builds from the ground up a staggeringly epic display of what we should expect from this genre in the Next-Generation. Minor niggles aside, Epic have created a game that is more than just a standard bearer for new technology and graphical benchmarks but one whose role is equally important in it’s reinvigoration of a genre.

Overall Score: 9.2