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Aug 31, 2011
Street Fighter III DLC plans revealed
Eurogamer


A number of DLC packs are on their way to Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online, Capcom has announced.


According to a post on the Capcom Unity blog, the enigmatically titled Colour Pack 1 is first up, due out next week. The download adds seven (count 'em) new colours for each character. They're yours for a mere $2.99.


Slightly more appealing are two Match Packs planned for later this year, featuring footage from the recent "Fight for the Future" tournament which saw 16 high level SF3 players from around the world converge on Capcom HQ to duke it out.


One pack focuses on the tournament top eight, while the other is a "best bouts" compilation. Expect over an hour of content in each, including commentary from Street Fighter veteran James Chen.


Finally, a set of Music Packs will include classic character themes from Street Fighter III: New Generation and Street Fighter III: Second Impact. Expect that some time in the next few months.


Capcom's tweaked 1999 arcade classic launched on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade last week, picking up a 9/10 from Eurogamer's Simon Parkin. See his Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online review for more.

Aug 31, 2011
Why there's no Elder Scrolls MMO
Eurogamer


While The Elder Scrolls' enormous universe might seem a perfect fit for an MMO, its developers have so far resisted the urge to take the RPG behemoth online.


When questioned by Joystiq as to why, director Todd Howard explained that he thinks the action RPG experience works better when its tailored around a single central protagonist.


"I like this kind of game better," he admitted.


"You know, it's what most of us are into. I'm not really an MMO guy. I respect them, I look at them, but I don't play them. It feels more real to me when I'm the hero and it's crafted for that. A community aspect to it, I recognise a lot of people would want that in a game like this, but it changes the flavor for me.


"The audience we have for our kind of thing is big enough that we don't have to tone it down. We can just do our thing, and it's kind of grown with each game. So there was no pressure from anybody above me to say 'Hey, you need to change this.'"


While Howard himself seems uninterested in the MMO format, publisher Bethesda might not be quite so circumspect. Rumors circulated last year that it does indeed have an Elder Scrolls MMO in the works.


The rabidly-anticipated The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is due out this November on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Why not pop down to the Eurogamer Expo next month and check it out?

Aug 31, 2011
Modern Warfare 3 Hardened Ed. contents
Eurogamer


The contents of the Modern Warfare 3 Hardened Edition have apparently been made public, courtesy of a promotional shot leaked to Wired.


Providing the image is legit, highlights include a one year membership of Call of Duty Elite and a 100-page "field journal".


Activision declined to comment, but an official reveal is expected at this weekend's Call of Duty XP event in Los Angeles.


Here's the full list of content shown in the promo:

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game with unique disc art
  • One year of membership in Call of Duty Elite, including future MW3 DLC
  • "Founder status" on Elite with exclusive in-game emblem, player card, camouflage, clan XP boost and other exclusive benefits
  • Premium SteelBook case
  • Exclusive PlayStation Network Animated Timeline Theme
  • Exclusive Xbox 360 Special Ops Juggernaut Xbox Live Outfit
  • Limited edition "field journal" featuring more than 100 pages of "authentic military sketches, diagrams and written entries"
Aug 31, 2011
Sega announces Brick People for iOS
Eurogamer


Quirky arcade effort Brick People is coming to iOS, Sega has announced.


The original arcade machine, released back in 2009, tasked you with stacking real blocks in front of a screen to help the game's titular creatures reach food dotted around a stage. See the YouTube clip below for a closer look.


The iOS version, due out in the Autumn on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, replicates the concept, adding in touch screen controls, wi-fi multiplayer and Game Center support.


"The concept of using actual bricks to play a video game is unique, but it's instantly accessible, like handing somebody a set of blocks," commented Sega Digital VP Haruki Satomi.


"It's a timeless activity that resonates with everybody, and we know it's going to translate well to touch-screens."

Aug 31, 2011
Halo Anniversary pre-order swag detailed
Eurogamer


Pre-order Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition through Game or Gamestation and you'll get an exclusive mini art book, Microsoft has announced.


The 24 page booklet contains art charting the series' entire history, cribbed from recent coffee table tome Halo: The Art of Building World put together by Eurogamer's very own Martin Robinson.


If you've already logged your pre-order, fear not, you'll still get the book.


343 Industries' touched-up version of the original Halo launches on 15th November, sporting a (barely) budget £34.99 price tag.

Aug 31, 2011
Burnout Crash! release date announced
Eurogamer


Top-down pile-up sim Burnout Crash! hurtles onto PlayStation Network Xbox Live Arcade on 20th September, developer Criterion has announced.


According to 1Up, the downloadable Burnout spin-off will set you back 800 Microsoft Points or your local equivalent of $9.99.


Want more info? Our recent Burnout Crash! preview has all the details.

Video:

Aug 31, 2011
Japan charts: 3DS, Monster Hunter rule
Eurogamer


The 3DS continues to post impressive numbers in Japan following its recent price cut.


As reported by Andriasang, Nintendo's new handheld topped this week's hardware chart by a big margin, selling 60,781 compared to the PlayStation 3's 33,141 in second place.


However, sales of the portable are dropping quickly. It moved 105,639 last week and 196,077 the week before. Where will it bottom out?


Next came the PSP, then Wii, then DS, all suffering sizeable sales slumps. Here's the full hardware chart:

  1. 3DS: 60,781 (Last week: 105,639)
  2. PS3: 33,141 (29,666)
  3. PSP: 31,310 (40,888)
  4. Wii: 11,342 (18,256)
  5. DSi XL: 3235 (4329)
  6. DSi: 2384 (3585)
  7. PlayStation 2: 1580 (1789)
  8. Xbox 360: 1393 (1427)
  9. DS Lite: 110 (117)
  10. PSP go: 20 (13)


Capcom's HD PS3 port of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd took the software crown, followed by Image Epoch PSP RPG Black Rock Shooter: The Game.


Last week's number one, Rhythm Heaven Wii, dropped to six. The rest of the top 20 shaped up as follows:

  1. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD (Capcom, PS3): 287,829 NEW!
  2. Black Rock Shooter: The Game (Image Epoch, PSP): 105,277 NEW!
  3. Mobile Suit Gundam: New Gihren's Ambition (Namco Bandai, PSP): 75,611 NEW!
  4. Samurai Warriors 3: Empires (Tecmo Koei, PS3): 70,254 NEW!
  5. Dynasty Warriors 7: Special (Tecmo Koei, PSP): 25,308 NEW!
  6. Rhythm Heaven Wii (Nintendo, Wii): 25,063 (Life to date: 399,552)
  7. Monster Hunter Diary Poka Poka Felyne Village G (Capcom, PSP): 23,151 (162,416)
  8. Kirby Mass Attack (Nintendo, DS): 18,901 (181,224)
  9. Super Pokémon Rumble (Nintendo, 3DS): 15,764 (134,201)
  10. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (Nintendo, 3DS): 13,423 (348,964)
  11. Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo, Wii): 12,760 (515,086)
  12. Suite Pretty Cure Melody Collection (Namco Bandai, DS): 12,567 NEW!
  13. Durarara!! 3way Standoff -alley- (Ascii, PSP): 10,454 NEW!
  14. Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel: Toki to Sekai no Meikyuu (Alchemist, PSP): 10,156 NEW!
  15. Toriko Gourmet Survival! (Namco Bandai, PSP): 9662 (118,213)
  16. Let's Make a J.League Pro Soccer Club! 7 Euro Plus (Sega, PSP): 8367 (157,407)
  17. Taiko Drum Master Portable DX (Deluxe) (Namco Bandai, PSP): 8028 (187,055)
  18. Persona 3 Portable (PSP the Best) (Atlus, PSP): 7176 NEW!
  19. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PlayStation 3 the Best) (SCEJ, PS3): 6,560 NEW!
  20. Pokémon Black & White (Nintendo, DS): 6512 (5,293,428)
Aug 31, 2011
Capcom launches Resident Evil ARG
Eurogamer


A Resident Evil alternate reality game has just gone live on the web to tie in with forthcoming squad shooter Operation Raccoon City.


So far all there is is an Umbrella Sciences recruitment site that reads "Let us turn you into something incredible. Your new career starts here August 31st."


Over the next few weeks, participants will be asked to help an insider find evidence to expose Umbrella and the devastation it's about to unleash in Raccoon City.


Clues will appear on www.insertedevil.com with users then having to scour the web for the relevant materials. Once you've found an item, you'll get a code to prove you've done so.


As it's collated, the evidence will reveal new information about gameplay and playable characters.


As yet undisclosed prizes will also be up for grabs for successful sleuthing.


For more on the impending Slant Six-developed Resi spin-off, due out on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 later this year, see Eurogamer's recent Operation Raccoon City preview.

Aug 31, 2011
Tech Analysis: God of War Collection Volume II
Eurogamer


So, what to make of God of War Collection: Volume II? Developer Ready at Dawn has retooled both of Kratos' PSP outings - Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta - presenting them in full 1080p and with stereoscopic 3D support.


Based on the numbers alone, it may sound like a recipe for disaster. The PSP itself only renders at 480x272 - a mere 16 per cent of the full 1920x1080 resolution the PlayStation 3 is capable of. Ready at Dawn's original artwork, in terms of geometry, textures and cinematics would have been optimised specifically for the handheld's miniscule res - so how can the games possibly work at "full HD" without looking rather ridiculous in the way that the original Splinter Cell HD remake demonstrates quite spectacularly?


The answer is rather straightforward. Ready at Dawn has performed some proper remastering, porting across its engine to the PlayStation 3 specifically for the purposes of this project and then setting about improving art from both a geometry and texture perspective. The result is an excellent product that we'd recommend without any hesitation to any PS3 owner because the God of War Collection: Volume II has that important final ingredient: the original game still stand up well in 2011, and can only benefit from the transition to an HD console.


"We ended up going through every single character in the game and doubling or tripling polygon count by hand, as well as up-rezing and re-painting every texture across both games at 4x resolution on both characters and environments," Ready at Dawn art director Nathan Phail-Liff posted on the PlayStation Blog.


The result is a release that pays appropriate homage to the original PSP titles but doesn't look embarrassing on the PlayStation 3. The games still look old-skool, with the detail increases subtly applied, but in motion both titles in the Collection manage to impress. Over and above the artwork improvements, it's worth noting is that Ready at Dawn appears to have significantly upgraded lighting over the PSP game, which can have a very dramatic effect on many different scenes.


To get an idea of how successful the developer has been with its remastering, check out this comparison footage, taken from both Chains of Olympus and the technologically more challenging Ghost of Sparta. Here, we've captured the same clips from the PSP version, upscaled them, and put them side-by-side with the PS3 version running at 720p.

Video: Just how much of a difference does the remastering make? Here's a comparison video for you to look at. Note the increase in frame-rate as well as resolution. Use the full-screen button for 720p resolution or click the link below for a larger window.


The new God of War Collection actually has the ability to run at three different resolutions, depending on how the PlayStation 3's XMB is set. If you have 1080p engaged, both Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta will default to a full 1920x1080 framebuffer. The developer could have downscaled this for 720p users in order to provide supersampling anti-aliasing (Sacred 2 follows this approach) but instead opts for native 1280x720, resulting in a more consistent frame-rate. Finally, both games also support stereoscopic 3D, with 720p per eye packed into the usual HDMI 1.4 format.


A commonality between all rendering formats is that Ready at Dawn has elected not to implement anti-aliasing at all. This is just about the only disappointment we have with the in-game look of the new release (the last God of War Collection supported 2x multisample anti-aliasing, but there was no 1080p mode). Especially in 720p mode, the jaggies are quite pronounced - mostly down to the high contrast edges and the relatively low poly count. While anti-aliasing on a full 1080p framebuffer might have been asking a bit too much, some kind of edge-smoothing at 720p would have made a great deal of difference.


Ready at Dawn hasn't just concentrated on improving physical resolution. The comparison video above, running at 50 per cent speed, demonstrates quite clearly that the move to 60FPS is just as important as the massive boost in the amount of pixels being rendered. Both of the developer's PSP outings really pushed the hardware and this resulted in a fairly choppy update - 30FPS was targeted but as you can see from the video, there's a lot of screen-tear in there, suggesting that the game was often over budget in its rendering, and actually operating significantly below the target frame-rate in heavy scenes.


Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta are mini-miracles for the PSP, but even compared to the original PS2 titles, they do suffer from a somewhat laggier response from the controls - and this is almost certainly down to the much reduced frame-rate. In this sense, the new PlayStation 3 Collection isn't just about the venerable handheld titles looking nicer, it's about making them play better too.

Video: A montage of action from Chains of Olympus, where we play the game through in both 720p and 1080p resolutions. Aside from some fill-rate issues (mostly in cut-scenes) which are amplified at 1080p, frame-rates remain very high.


For the purist looking for the best possible gameplay experience, 720p mode is the way to go. Aside from a few frame-rate dips on cinematics, the actual in-game action is essentially running at a locked 60FPS. Similar to the first God of War Collection, the only impact to frame-rate comes from screen-filling fiery and magical effects but even here the impact to gameplay is minimal.


Switching over 1080p gives you the 2.5x resolution boost and fewer issues with jaggies (because, put simply, the edges are that much smaller) but the compromise comes in the form of more screen-tear and more noticeable dips in frame-rate. Once again, cinematics bear the brunt of it, but the full HD support can see tearing encroach into actual gameplay. There's no doubting that there's a definite visual edge in opting for 1080p, but fill-rate issues at 720p are only magnified at the higher resolution, resulting in more noticeable performance dips.


It's also worth pointing out that the later Ghost of Sparta puts quite a bit more strain on Ready at Dawn's bespoke PS3 engine than the older Chains of Olympus. The studio appears to have been on a mission to extract the best possible visuals from the PSP in its original work, and this translates into a performance impact on both PSP and PS3 versions of the game.


With 1080p in particular, the hits to frame-rate are much more noticeable - the plus point being that the improved visuals really impress. While we're not quite at the level of the original God of War Collection, Ghost of Sparta running in full HD really is quite lovely, and the improvements that Ready of Dawn made to the artwork in the remastering process appear to be that much more apparent, as you'll hopefully pick up in our comparison video.

Video: Ghost of Sparta gives Ready at Dawn's PS3 engine a bit of a workout in 1080p mode, but again, the performance at 720p is consistently excellent.









When we took a look at the original God of War Collection, just about the only gripe we had with it concerned the FMV cinematics, which were upscaled from the SD originals and looked rather rough in contrast with the pristine nature of the 720p "remix". This is a criticism that Ready at Dawn acknowledged and set out to improve with its new release.


"Between Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta we had over an hour of pre-rendered cinematics, and the gap in video resolution between our PSP source footage and full HD was so extreme that no matter how many custom video up-scale solutions we tried, there was just a glaring quality difference between the 1080p real-time gameplay and the video," Nathan Phail-Liff says.


"It was pretty demoralising for us to play the game in beautiful HD and hit a cinematic trigger where Kratos looked like he was rendered through a dirty sock, so we realised we would just have to bite the bullet and properly re-render all cinematics in full 1080p."





The solution was to re-run each scene on the new PS3 engine, capture them at 1080p, and then add in post-process effects from scratch. Phail-Liff reckons that this produces a "seamless" experience, but the drop from 60FPS gameplay to 30FPS video is a bit jarring, and the post-processing produces a very different look from the pristine in-game visuals. It's also clear from some of the videos that a few HD elements weren't available, so there is still the occasional bit of upscaling in there.


All told though, it's a massive improvement over the quality of cinematics in the original God of War Collection, and Ready at Dawn should be congratulated for the sheer effort it put into this, even if the result isn't quite as seamless as we were hoping for.


The developer should definitely get a pat on the back for making use of the gargantuan storage that the Blu-ray disc format offers. The original PSP titles were in the region of 1.5GB to 1.7GB - effectively maxing out the UMD format. The new PS3 collection uses around 18GB of space on the BD (!) and the vast majority of that is dedicated to the remastered video sequences. These appear to be using Sony's own h264-based PAMF encoding tools. This is perhaps extravagant for a mere hour's worth of video, but if you've got the space, why not use it?







The final tentpole enhancement Ready at Dawn has added to the new God of War Collection is support for stereoscopic 3D. For those with the appropriate playback tech (or indeed a pair of anaglyph glasses), you can check out the first five minutes of both Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta via YouTube's rather splendid 3D player - just make sure that you choose the 1080p versions of the videos in order to get the best picture quality.


In his PlayStation post blog, Nathan Phail-Liff discusses the 3D work and reckons that he "wouldn't want to play the games any other way after being able to experience it first-hand". He also points out some of the great work Ready at Dawn did to create an optimal 3D experience such as "gas near-screen fading on certain particles and camera focal plane compensation for a smooth and enjoyable 3D experience", and it's difficult to disagree with the conclusion that the implementation of stereoscopy has been handled well.


In common with THQ's excellent de Blob 2, which absolutely shines in 3D, it's definitely the case that the more simplistic visual style combined with intelligent use of the stereoscopic effect produces a very worthwhile experience. However, it does come at a cost: frame-rate takes a hit, dropping down from 60FPS to a consistent 30FPS. This only seems to change when cut-scenes are engaged, whereupon frame-rate appears to be unlocked, complete with very noticeable tearing, which can move from eye to eye, similar to the effect in WipEout HD's 3D mode.







The frame-rate drop might seem odd bearing in mind the relatively simplistic visuals. After all, the fill-rate requirement for two 720p images is a fair bit lower than a single 1080p framebuffer, which both games handle pretty well. Of course, the reality is that stereoscopic gameplay requires two independent viewpoints, meaning that geometry needs to be processed twice - so perhaps that turned out to be the bottleneck here. The reality is that the 3D mode can look exceptionally cool, particularly in the epic boss battles, but the elevation of the game to 60 frames per second is really what makes it feel so good to play.


In conclusion, Ready at Dawn has done some phenomenally good work here. The basic notion of PSP games designed for a miniscule 480x272 screen working well at full 1080p may well seem crazy, but the reality is that the HD remastering undertaken by the developer has resulted in exactly the kind of result we want to see from this kind of endeavour: Ghost of Sparta and Chains of Olympus have been liberated from the technical constraints of the original hardware and take on new life on the PlayStation 3. In short - a highly recommended release.

Aug 31, 2011
Sony Entertainment Network announced
Eurogamer


Sony is re-branding its digital delivery services as Sony Entertainment Network, the platform holder has announced.


Its Qriocity music and video store is to be realigned under the new banner. Video on Demand powered by Qriocity will now simply be referred to as Video Unlimited, while Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity will become Music Unlimited.


However, on PlayStation 3, Video Unlimited will still be called the Video Store of PlayStation Store.


It seems the PlayStation Store is unaffected for now, though SEN will add more content in due course, as well as branching out into a number of new markets, with Music Unlimited reaching Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, The Netherlands and Belgium by the end of the year.

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