Is anyone doin' a new Dune? Commenter Nameloi thinks it's about time we revisited the sands of Arrakis once more as the video game players of Dune in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Watching the 1984 Dune movie based on Frank Herbert's novel I suddenly felt like there hasn't been a proper game for this amazing work of science fiction.
Yes we can count on Westwood's Dune RTS games, but they focused more on open warfare between the houses rather than invest their time telling the story of Paul Atreides, the main character in the novel.
There also was a PC game that did focus more on the novel's story in 2001, but it was a commercial failure and likely most people didn't know about its release.
So in a post-Mass Effect era, could there ever be a well-done Dune game?
I think it's time we get one.
Team Fortress 2 figures and one hell of a Portal gun help round out this video we shot at the NECA booth during New York Toy Fair this week.
You might have seen our teaser screenshots last night, but the video is much cooler, if only because you get to see real-life footage of Assassin's Creed bobbleheads bobbling (among other things).
Coolest thing there? A replica of Ezio Auditore's hidden blade, perfect for all you would-be assassins out there.
Let's take a break from the fire-scarred fields of battle, put our differences aside, and focus on talking about video games in the official Kotaku forum, Talk Amongst Yourselves.
Today's TAYpic from Jimmy_Jazz serves the dual purpose of reminding us which website we are writing or reading while also making us imagine a sweet little cherub spurting fire from its crotch, granting entirely new meaning to the term 'nether regions'.
Want to see your own TAYpic atop a future forum post? Monkey around with the base image to create your own TAYpic and share your own riffs on our February image in our #TAYpics thread. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of Talk Amongst Yourselves glory. Grab the base image here. The best ones will be featured in future installments of Talk Amongst Yourselves.
The best physical attributes of the PlayStation Vita are the machine's big screen and twin analog sticks.
They are conveniently what Super Stardust Delta uses best to make one of the cheapest launch games for Sony's new gaming portable one of its best.
Super Stardust Delta is a twin-stick shooter of spaceship vs. aliens and asteroids. It's a descendant of everything from Spacewar and Space Invaders to the Xbox 360's own great launch game, Geometry Wars Retro Evolved.
It is, more specifically, the latest in a lineage of Stardust games from Finnish development studio Housemarque, who appear to operate with the twin mandates of producing games that make gaming hardware blaze and making sure their download-only games show up their physically-bought, more expensive counterparts.
Delta is dazzling. The $10 download-only game plays similarly to Housemarque's PlayStation 3 game Super Stardust HD. It places the player as a spaceship that can fly around a planet while using that ship to blast apart a cosmic bucket dump of meteors and aliens. The player can switch at any time from lashing its torrent of troubles with a fiery whip to blasting them with ice bullets. (The rock-crusher third option from the PS3 game is gone here.) Enemies tend to be weak only to one or the other, so much of your strategy involves flipping from one weapon the the other.
Developer: Housemarque
Platforms: PS Vita
Released: February 8 (download only)
Type of game: Twin-stick shooter.
What I played: Fueled by dozens of hours of playing its PS3 big brother, played to the end of the first three of its five planets on increasingly scorching medium difficulty; unlocked two of five mini-games.
My Two Favorite Things
My Two Least-Favorite Things
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
Delta's defining element is the nearly constant chaos of its battlefield. On the PS3, HD was as stunning a fireworks display as the machine has ever seen. On the Vita, Delta is just as remarkable. Massive meteors fracture into uncountable pieces. Dozens of enemies swarm toward your ship. Piles of score bonuses litter the surface, as do power-ups that frequently but gradually enhance the potency of your guns.
The developers get a minor demerit for mapping the game's new black-hole bombs to taps on the rear of the Vita. I accidentally triggered these things too many times, when all I thought I was doing was shifting my hands to comfortably hold the system. Touch-screen missiles are better. You don't accidentally touch the front screen. Thankfully, you can re-map all of these inputs to buttons. Hooray!
It's not as if the game's terrain is visually boring to compensate. While the planetary playing fields are smooth, they are simply a transparent spherical shell around extraordinary planetary cores that are detailed with massive cities and land formations. And if that's not enough, the playing field is frequently clouded with several hundred motes of green stardust that must be collected to trigger drops of super weapons and increase in the game's score multipliers.
You play the game for high scores, elevating the multiplier until you die and advancing through the planetary levels one increasingly frantic fight against the space blitz at a time. Bosses are tough and, as with the rest of this thing, happily not recycled from the PS3 game. The Vita effectively pulls in rival PlayStation friends' scores to give you new goals.
The bad parts of Super Stardust Delta are left to the margins as mini-games. There reside quick, timed mini-modes that make the twin-stick controls look all the better by forcing you to play via touch screen. In the first mode of the two I unlocked in time for review, you have to pinch meteors into oblivion by pinching the Vita's front and back touchscreen/panels where the meteors are. This is about as comfortable as using one hand to massaging the top and bottom of your foot at the same time. The second mini-game, which involves flicking discs on the touch screen, makes me uninterested in unlocking the next three.
There are other launch games more awkwardly designed to show off the Vita tech. Super Stardust Delta, by sticking to the most important Vita elements in its main mode, shows Sony's handheld off the best.
More than 13,000 fans voted for their favorite video game ending of all time for the Guinness Book of World Records 2012 Gamer Edition, and this is what they came up with? Call of Duty: Black Ops is the greatest video game ending of all time? Maybe I need to go play it again. Oh wait, BioShock made the list, it's obviously complete BS.
"Conducted for the new Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer's Edition book, the list will cause heated debate among passionate gamers and provide further evidence of the growing sophistication and popularity of video games." So reads the official announcement that accompanied this list which, upon further scrutiny, is indeed a list of 50 video game names placed in some sort of order.
Just how accurate that order is remains up in the air.
Some of these make perfect sense. Metal Gear Solid 4? I'm not that much of a fan, but that ending was some powerful stuff. And who can forget the sweeping cinematic ending of Sonic the Hedgehog. Wait, are thy talking 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog? Oh god, I hope not.
Check out the full list below and wonder with me where they found the 13,000 gamers that helped vote it into existence. Sounds like one or two of them might have misunderstood and just voted for their favorite game.
50. Resident Evil 4
49. Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic
48. Ratchet & Clank: a Crack in Time
47. Crysis 2
46. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
45. Call of Duty: World at War
44. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
43. Half-Life 2: Episode Tow
42. Super Metroid
41. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
40. New Super Mario Bros. Wii
39. inFamous
38. Fallout 3
37. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
36. Gears of War 2
35. Bioshock
34. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
33. Sonic Adventures 2
32. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
31. Kingdom Hearts II
30. Mass Effect
29. Super Mario Galaxy
28. Sonic the Hedgehog
27. Metal Gear Solid
26. Assassin's Creed II
25. Assassin's Creed
24. Shadow of the Colossus
23. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
22. Kingdom Hearts
21. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
20. Super Mario Galaxy 2
19. Mass Effect 2
18. Grand Theft Auto IV
17. Portal 2
16. Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
15. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
14. Halo: Combat Evolved
13. Halo 3
12. Pokémon Black and White
11. Super Mario Bros
10. Heavy Rain
9. Final Fantasy VII
8. Metal Gear Solid 4
7. Portal
6. Red Dead Redemption
5. God of War
4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
2. Halo: Reach
1. Call of Duty: Black Ops
Mobiclip, the Paris, France-based company responsible for the codec that allows Nintendo handhelds to run high-quality video with little power consumption, quietly became Nintendo's property last October. Now we'll never be without video on a Nintendo device again. [Gamasutra]
If you're in a hurry, you simply need to know that the PlayStation Vita is a very good portable video game machine that excels in ways that Sony hasn't bothered to hype.
If you've got time, well… let's start with a true story:
I recently had the opportunity to look over the shoulder of a teenage boy who was playing some poor man's unauthorized version of Rockstar's hit Western, Red Dead Redemption, on an iPad.
He was struggling to get his cowboy's horse unstuck from a man-sized bullseye target it had trotted into. The target had been propped up in some orange and brown canyon for part of a shooting challenge that had clearly gone awry.
The boy's problem was that he couldn't get the horse to back up.
It appeared that the game's controls were malfunctioning. The game was on an iPad, so its controls were, of course, all touch-screen. There was no back-up-the-horse-button. There were, since this was an iPad game, no buttons or control sticks at al. The game's developers had done what many people who make iPad games do: they had created virtual buttons and sticks. They required the player to put their fingers on parts of the iPad's glass screen and slide them around as if they were touching things that weren't there, simulating the presence of one, maybe two analog sticks. In this Western, the simulation was clumsy.
The boy's thumbs twiddled on the virtual sticks. The horse stayed stuck. So the boy had to restart his mission.
I watched this happen on flight from Las Vegas to New York. The boy was in an aisle seat, across and one row up from my own aisle seat. He had an iPad. Everyone had an iPad. To my left, in a sign of the machine's borderless ubiquity, there sat a man whose iPad was in Chinese. He played soccer games and virtual card games during the flight. To his left was another man who also used his iPad in Chinese. He played games on his, too.
I kept my iPad in my bag during that flight.
I had a PlayStation Vita to play.
When you have a PlayStation Vita to play, you look at people like the boy with the badly controlling wannabe Western and you just… well, you pity them.
The PlayStation Vita is Sony's second portable gaming system and easily its better one. It arrives here in North America as well as Europe and Australia on something of a timer, as the rise of gaming on iOS and Android devices threatens the relevance of dedicated handhelds much the way Sony itself threatened the dominance of Nintendo's near-monopoly on dedicated handhelds more than half a decade ago.
It was no surprise that I was outnumbered by iPad gamers 3:1 on my flight from Vegas, and not much of a surprise that there was nary a Nintendo 3DS nor PlayStation Portable-that first Sony handheld-in sight. Those of us who choose to play games on machines made for playing games are discovering themselves to be a minority.
If the Vita is going to be an argument for the worth of dedicated handhelds, then it is a nearly perfect argument. This new machine is an extraordinarily capable device—for gaming. It already rivals its handheld peers and even home consoles in terms of quality gaming experience. It sparkles not just because of its hardware but because of its services, which even on Launch Day Minus 1, are already some of the best-engineered in the medium's history.
Let's start with the hardware. We've got a beautiful five-inch screen and two analog sticks. The former is almost too generous. It makes games look beautiful but also renders the machine too large to fit comfortably in any pocket but an inside jacket pocket. The sticks are squat enough not to get snagged or snapped when you tuck the system in a bag but have enough range for deep analog control. This combo, along with four face buttons, a d-pad and two shoulder buttons gives the Vita most of the gear it would need to run any console gaming genre—from sports, to first-person shooters, to RPGs.
The Vita is light and quiet. It may initially give the impression of being inconvenient due to its size, but its low weight and lack of a disc drive lower the machine's profile. It effectively melts away while you're playing it.
Games run off of thumbnail-sized cards that are so physically insubstantial that I already had to rescue one from the laundry, since I forgot I'd put it in a shirt pocket. Most games can be downloaded to the machine, if you prefer. Games and any other downloaded content are primarily saved on a memory stick, available in various many-Gigabyte sizes. The memory cards are the Vita's most notable hidden cost.
The build of the hardware feels solid and less fragile than I'd feared. I've had a succession of two Vitas since December, first a demo unit and then a real unit, and I've been fairly rough with both of them, tossing both into my bag, carrying one frequently in a jacket pocket. I've never paired them with car keys nor dropped them, but I've also not coddled them or encased them. So far, they're holding up.
The Vita's battery life will be a problem for forgetful people. The machine is holding only about 4-5 hours of battery for me, with Wi-Fi enabled though not always active. The machine is so well-networked through online services that you wouldn't want to deactivate Wi-Fi, to the extent that that saves power. But the battery life in this thing should be fine for the average commutes or non-plugged-in-session as long as you plug the thing in to charge when you get where you're going. Don't forget!
The Vita has a Swiss Army Knife's worth of other entertainment features, which all go in the category of Nice to Have, I Guess.
There is nothing terribly impressive about the Vita's front and rear cameras nor its mic and mediocre stereo speakers. Its front touch screen is better than the laughable stylus-preferred one on the Nintendo 3DS but simply on par with the multi-touch of most modern smartphones and tablets. Its unusual rear touch panel is used widely by game developers, often poorly. It works, but it has not yet proved its excellence. (Good execution: in FIFA the back panel simulates the frame of a soccer goal, and wherever you tap on it with your forefinger is where your soccer player aims his shot at the goal. Bad execution: in Super Stardust Delta you will repeatedly, accidentally activate precious black-hole bombs, because your fingers are gripping the back of the Vita wrong. (At launch the bad examples I could cite outnumber the good.))
It's striking how little a description of the Vita's hardware conveys the actual, positive experience of playing games on the thing. Not since the launch of the Xbox 360 with its Achievements system and revision of Xbox Live has a gaming device been bolstered so much by well-implemented services. The Vita cribs from some of the smart things done with Nintendo's evolving 3DS networking systems. It blows away the primitive iOS Game Center (if not the App Store). Most significantly, it outshines Sony's own services on the PlayStation 3. In fact, the Vita's services and online implementation is so slick, it has finally made my PlayStation Network friends list matter to me.
Before I get too breathless about the gaming and online experience with the Vita—and I can't really separate the two—I should qualify things by mentioning that I almost bricked my Vita the day before I wrote this review. All that my Kotaku colleague Kirk Hamilton and I were doing was participating in some cross-game Vita chat (yes, on a PlayStation device, PS3 owners!), then trying to both launch WipEout 2048. Bad move. Our systems both black-screened and appeared to freeze. For a few nervous minutes I had my Vita in possibly-permanent shutdown until I held the power button down for many seconds and it did some sort of emergency reboot. We repeated our steps and, on the second try, everything worked. Take that as a word of warning. Back to the breathlessness…
Who you are and who everyone else is matters when you're using the Vita, because playing the Vita is designed to feel like a perpetually social experience. The Vita supports the same PlayStation Network ID you might also have for a PlayStation 3. With my ID entered, I can go to a program called Near which will scan a several-mile radius and show me icons that represent various people who have played games near my physical location. I can friend these people, check out the games they're playing and even leave them gifts for unlocking stuff in games (they can do the same for and to me). I have a few friends who already have Vitas and live within a few miles of me, so their icons show up. When I was in Vegas for a gaming conference, I could check out the gaming habits of developers and a Sony executive, who were keeping themselves amused with their new Vitas.
Your PlayStation ID also gets you into the system's online shop, which is remarkably easy to access and, like all the apps on the Vita, surprisingly fast. Content on the shop loads quickly, and what a great array of content it is. You can download any first-party (Sony-published) Vita games already, all of them meant to be available, going forward, on the same day as retail launch. You can also download a few dozen PSP games, some smaller games called Minis, as well as movies and TV shows. The games can be huge, easily over a Gigabyte, but they can be downloaded in the background while you do other things on the system. The Vita screen may be larger than it needs to be for games, but for navigating an online shop, it's wonderful.
As you're using the Vita, you get lots of notifications. All of them reside in a list that springs up if you tap the upper right corner of the screen. During my typical sessions with the Vita, I'd get notifications about PlayStation friends who had just signed on, games that had just finished downloading, Trophies I'd unlock and messages I'd received. Notifications popped up quickly and clearly. Maybe this sounds annoying, but it wasn't. It felt like I was part of a machine that was connected in all the right ways to the rest of the PlayStation gaming and entertainment world.
You can use the Vita as a video player, which it does a fine job as. You can also use it as a music player, which, honestly, I haven't even bothered to try, as that feature seems meaningless to me and my music mostly remains locked to iTunes (which isn't supported here). The Vita is no more likely to be your music player of choice than it is your camera, which gives me a good segue for warning you to not use this thing as a go-to camera. It can shoot stills and videos, but not as well as my iPhone 4. The camera is fine for augmented-reality games that make game characters appear to float through the real world, but as a thing to take beautiful pictures, it's not up to snuff.
The better apps in the Vita are things like Near as well as a convenient text-messaging system for PlayStation Network users and a Party system that enables cross-game chat through the system's speakers and mic.
The best thing about the Vita's apps is that you can have many of them going at once—even while you're playing a game. When I tested the system's Party feature by chatting with the afore-mentioned Kirk Hamilton, we were (eventually) able to also both run a full Vita game, WipEout simultaneously. When the game notified me that I had to redeem a code on the PlayStation Store in order to play the game online, I was able to leave WipEout without quitting it, keep the Party chat going, jump into the store, redeem a code and go back to the game. Not only did the apps all run, but I had others idling in the background and nothing stuttered. Nothing slowed down. The Vita had the horsepower to juggle all of this.
This the experience I'm breathless about: the Vita isn't just providing attractive, high-end gaming on a beautiful screen but it's able to do that while running several other applications that are useful to a gamer at the same time.
The appeal of the network features only goes as far as your network connection extends. I have a Sony-supplied 3G Vita, but I do not have a SIM card for it. So I'm playing this $300 machine as a $250 Wi-Fi unit. At home, I get the full experience I've described so far. But on the go, or on a plane from Vegas, I only get the benefit of asynchronous networked experiences. I get the unlocks earned by connecting to Near. I get the most recent friendly game-score challenges that were sucked into my system the last time I was online. This might make you think the 3G unit's ability to be perpetually connected beyond Wi-Fi hotspots would be preferable. But for a subway commuter like me, 3G wouldn't help much.
I'm likely to use the Vita a lot at home on Wi-Fi, which will, of course, put it in competition with my home consoles. Or, at least, I'll probably spend a lot of time setting up my Vita at home before my next commute, downloading games, syncing stats with friends and so on.
So, what of the games? They're the typical mixed bag you get when a system launches. There's no Halo or Super Mario 64 among them. There is no instant classic. We will review several major Vita games, and I'll let those write-ups sift the winners from the losers. I will say here, however, that games such as WipEout, Super Stardust: Delta and Uncharted: Golden Abyss attest to the Vita's horsepower. This machine is a beast. It can run games at smooth framerates with the kind of visual detail that, at worst, matches the best of the iPad and comfortably surpasses older home systems such as the PlayStation 2 or Wii. The games look Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3-esque, though the more you gaze at them, the more you can tell they're not quite at that level.
I've found myself gravitating toward an odd collection of games on my Vita that suggest I'll use this machine differently than I'd thought. Specifically: I thought I was going to be using my Vita to play Vita games. Its excellent online store, however, has made it a cinch for me to stock up on PSP games, and now I've got that older system's Patapon 2 and Tactics Ogre—downloaded legitimately—just waiting to become my main Vita games. Wait. Not so fast! I never got a chance to play much of last year's well-regarded Rayman: Origins, a gorgeous side-scroller I have for my PS3. I now have it for Vita, and it seems to look exactly as good on my Vita as it did running on my TV through the PS3.
What we've got here in the Vita is a system that is reaching into the domains of other Sony gaming devices and repurposing that content into a format that is much more convenient for a commuter like me. This is what you get when you have a gaming machine that is both powerful and well-connected to an online store stocked full of substantial games.
There are valid reasons to worry if the Vita would be a good investment:
There are reasons, however, to decide to take this plunge, which is what I recommend:
For all the raving here, there's another way to put things. There's another way to recommend the Vita that I think will click with many people, including teenagers who take Vegas-NYC flights:
If there was a Western on the Vita, and if your character in the game found himself on horseback deep in a canyon, walking into a target, you'd be able to back that horse up.
Or turn it.
Or something.
The Vita has the sticks for it, and the Sony people making games for it? They have that kind of sense.
The PlayStation Vita will be available widely in North America on February 22. The 3G unit costs $299.99 and can be purchased early on the 15th. The Wi-Fi unit runs $249.99. The essentially-mandatory memory cards run from $20-$100.
I've not played any of Sega's upcoming sci-fi shooter Binary Domain, so it could be the best game ever created by human humans for all I know. I'm having an incredibly difficult time mustering any excitement at all for the title, and this new multiplayer trailer isn't helping at all.
I blame Square Enix. Remember last year's MindJack? The futuristic shooter with the amazing body-hopping concept that fell completely flat and is now available new at many retailers for under $10? Probably not.
Now we've got another futurist shooter with an interesting hidden robots living among us concept, and there is no enthusiasm in me whatsoever. I'm all cold inside. Oh so cold.
Perhaps I'm just feeling it wrong. Maybe MindJack has ruined me for other sci-fi shooters. Maybe I'll pick up a copy on February 28 just to prove my gut wrong.
STICHED | THE INTERNETS: Via tipster Jinah comes these photos. (Photo: Marie-Emilie Lanteigne | Facebook)
Music wasn't what brought singer Emi Evans to Japan. But it's what made her stay-and what is making her famous. With her work on Dark Souls and Nier, the British-born singer is quickly creating a name for herself. More »
Over the course of the Chinese New Year, a young girl took China's internet population by storm. Unlike other previous net celebrities, this lady didn't do it by showing off skin, being outrageous, or destroying public goodwill towards the red cross, instead she did it through cosplay.
She became... More »
If you've ever spent any time in Japan, you've seen them: big black buses blaring right-wing propaganda. And today, you're going to see an entire fleet of them. More »
This was once, in a former life, an entire army of Warhammer 40K miniatures. It is now one of the greatest tributes to id's classic Doom I've ever seen.
There are the obvious conversions. More »
Dear Esther is a terrible video game.
Which would be a problem if Dear Esther was a video game.
What began in 2008 as a mod for Half-Life 2 has, after years of picking up first buzz and then critical acclaim, transformed in 2012 into a full-blown commercial release, with all the updated visuals... More »
Halo 4 will be the first game in the main series to have not been developed by Bungie. If you think that means the new studio at the helm would want to tinker with the design of the game's hero, you are dead right.
McFarlane toys have released the first images of their Halo 4 action figures, and... More »
Mike Sorrentino, aka The Situation from MTV's Jersey Shore, doesn't just fancy himself as a man who struts about a reality show doing...stuff. He also fancies himself as, of all things, a video game developer. More »
The Wonder Festival isn't only about cosplay. Rather, the event is dedicated to figurines and models. So of them are production models, which are mass-produced, while other pieces are limited edition or even one-off pieces.
This year's Wonder Festival was held at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. Sister site Kotaku Japan and figure site Moeyo.com were both on hand to check it out. Their photos are viewable in the above gallery. More in the links below.
台湾から来たサークル, 冬フェスでこそ輝く「雪ミク」スマイル, モンハンリボルテックがサンプル展示, 小悪魔キャサリンの大胆フィギュア [Kotaku Japan
T'sのミクさん、リボルテック「リオレウス」などなど, GSC、マックス、アルター、アゾンなどなど [Moeyo.com]