Post-apocalyptic survival adventure I Am Alive arrives on PlayStation Network from 4th April, Ubisoft has announced.
PlayStation Plus members get a 20 per cent discount during the game's first fortnight on sale - though a standard price has not yet been confirmed.
The game originally launched on Xbox Live Arcade earlier this month, picking up a solid 8/10 from Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell. See his I Am Alive review for details.
The OnLive version of Rockstar's detective epic LA Noire has been updated to support touch controls for Android devices.
The cloud gaming service's boss, Steve Perlman, reckons that makes it "the highest-performance console video game developed specifically for touch-enabled play via mobile cloud gaming. Ever."
If you already own the game for OnLive, the game should automatically update to incorporate the new control option.
The game, whose marathon seven-year development recently sunk developer Team Bondi, launched last May to measured acclaim.
"L.A. Noire is slow but quietly engrossing; its mechanics are suspect, but you can't fault the ambition, attention to detail and commitment that went into its making," read Eurogamer's 8/10 LA Noire review.
Last June, Irrational Games boss Ken Levine climbed on stage during Sony's E3 presentation to reveal that his BioShock franchise is coming to Vita.
With precious little information released on the game since, last week Eurogamer asked Levine why he announced the project before development had even begun. The answer? Because he wanted to help Sony out.
"Look, generally when I announce something... like with BioShock Infinite we had a whole video to show and it was all fully-formed," he explained.
"[With the Vita announcement], it was part of something else obviously. Sony was launching this platform and it was important that they had a show of support from people no matter what stage of development they were at.
"Sony has been such a good partner to us, and I'm not just blowing smoke," he continued.
"Not just on a professional level, but on a personal level they've been really good to us. Every time we see them they take really good care of us. So they asked me to do that and I said okay, even though that's not what I normally do.
"And I tried not to oversell it when I went out there. I just said 'we're doing this'. I didn't want to present something that I didn't have a lot of clarity on at that point."
When asked for some idea of what direction the game is heading in, Levine called for patience.
"I'm not ready to talk about it until I have something to show you," he said.
Still, fans of the franchise have plenty to look forward to in the short term - BioShock Infinite is due out this October, complete with PlayStation Move support. See below for a brand new trailer.
The Resident Evil series is not generally known for its spin-offs, and with good reason. Promising concepts like Outbreak (eight-player co-op in an infested city!) end up as lukewarm compromises, and even the Wii's on-rails shooters topped out at decent. With Operation Raccoon City, a co-op run-and-gunner set during the events of Resident Evil 2 and 3, the time has surely come for something better.
Keep on dreaming. Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there. Its campaign is played in teams of four online (AIs fill gaps, but never revive players and rarely kill stuff) and, over seven missions, takes this forgettable clean-up crew of spec ops soldiers on a whistle-stop tour of Raccoon City 'highlights'.
Both of the original games this setting draws from, Resident Evil 2 in particular, show how spectacular Capcom's early 3D environmental design was. In Resi 2, almost every room has a story implied by its details. Operation Raccoon City handles this kind of example with careless hands; even the environments it recreates directly are shorn of the little touches that brought them alive.
You can take zombies hostage, which doesn't seem like the kind of tactic likely to deter other zombies from attacking you.
Most of the locations are more loosely inspired, and here, there are some winners. An all-too-brief section fighting in the streets against mercenaries and B.O.W.s dropping from the sky can be horribly frustrating, but its scattered wrecks, dead bodies and battered shop fronts make it feel like a no man's land. Too few of the other levels have anything like this sense of place, and the vast majority just feel like generic designs with 'Raccoon City' and 'Umbrella' logos slapped up every so often.
You spend this much time thinking about environments when you're bored. Operation Raccoon City is a boring game, even for those of us into Resi big style. The most surprising thing is that, having all of the long-established visual and narrative elements it does, it never feels like Resident Evil. You associate that series with a certain level of polish, great visuals and gory monsters. Operation Raccoon City is so bland it feels like a copy rather than a Capcom production.
As for the action, it can only be described as attrition. Though zombies are easy enough to down, the lickers and hunters that soon start turning up have been blessed with huge reserves of health. This is developer Slant Six Games dealing with multiple players through the simple expedient of nerfing gunplay. The shooting is fine, inasmuch as the bullets go where the aiming reticule is - but when you pump six shotgun blasts into a hunter and the thing doesn't flinch, it feels pointless.
God knows what Capcom has done to these screenshots, but Birkin is about half as detailed in-game. You can see the lousy art direction clear as day, though.
So much of Operation Raccoon City's combat involves pouring bullets into big targets and nothing else. Sure, they go down eventually, but by that stage everyone's lost interest - and the bigger they get, like a late elevator battle with a Tyrant, the more embarrassingly easy and tedious everything becomes. Opposition mercenaries pose more of a threat; by the late game, they are witheringly accurate and have to be fought using a cover system.
It's not a classic of the genre. The most unusual feature is that when strafing horizontally, you move out rather than sticking to the end of whatever cover you're using, leading to plenty of accidental damage. Luckily, most mercs will either die in the first salvo of fire from your team or pick a spot and stay there until shot.
Two mechanics are intended to spice this up. The first is that the bioweapons and the mercenaries fight with each other as well as your own band. Though you do see examples of this throughout the campaign, it often feels highly stage-managed rather than being of any consequence. In one hilarious sequence, you'll enter one room after another where mercs and zombies have been living together in harmony - until you appear and they suddenly decide to start fighting.
360 owners can play an exclusive multiplayer mode built around playing as the Nemesis. PS3 owners can only curse the lure of filthy lucre.
The second mechanic is the risk of infection, but this is implemented in such a cack-handed way that it rarely has a meaningful impact. When bitten by the undead, there's a risk of becoming infected: this causes your health to ebb away, and if it reaches zero your character turns into a zombie and starts attacking things (which, unbelievably, is not controllable by the player). Plentiful immunisation sprays cancel this out.
But why bother when you could just use a bullet? If a mate gets infected in Operation Raccoon City, it often makes more sense to kill and then immediately resurrect them, because they'll respawn almost instantly with full ammo and more health. You'd think it wouldn't be possible to do this mid-fight, but it is. Just a little trick every spec ops soldier should know.
There are so many problems. Whole sections can be sprinted through, enemies flailing ineffectually in your wake. Returning enemies and bosses look like slightly melted action figures of the originals, while new creations like the scuttling parasite are poor copies of ideas from other games (in this case, Dead Space). Enemy squads enter the battlefield and take cover behind exploding barrels. The data-gathering and camera-shooting side missions are pointless. The special equipment is piss-poor. The whole thing feels half-baked.
Operation Raccoon City's competitive multiplayer has a lot to make up for, then, but it at least manages to wring something more from the B.O.W.s. Even an average shooter is made so much better with friends, and this makes the dreadful campaign somewhat bearable. But when it's player-on-player with monsters in the middle, you get occasional glimpses of why this game seemed like a good idea.
Who do you get to voice Hunk, the silent mystery man that has always moved in the series' shadows? Why, Bruce Campbell!
Though the shooting remains fundamentally unsatisfying, monsters are a great way to liven up deathmatches. Operation Raccoon City sets teams of four against one another in an environment crawling with zombies and small clutches of bigger nasties. You quickly learn that even though the enemies can be danced around, they'll occasionally make a grab - and during a firefight with another player, these lost seconds make all the difference.
It's still deathmatch-by-numbers, but this little bit of gambling occasionally sparks it to life: an opponent delivering the final shot gets clocked by a hunter before they can squeeze the trigger. A sniper clips an enemy and makes them bleed, sending a small horde of zombies rushing towards the enemy team's position just as you start tossing the grenades. These are great moments, and Operation Raccoon City should have had many more of them.
Instead it has modes that offer nothing you haven't seen before, a terribly long results screen after every match, a levelling system (running in parallel to that of the single-player) of no consequence other than unlocking kit, and kit that isn't worth unlocking. There are no long-term prospects here because it's not a game built for the long term. Its matchmaking may be relatively speedy, but the infrastructure around online play is simply inadequate.
Operation Raccoon City is the latest product of Capcom's experiment in working with western developers. Previous games like Bionic Commando, Dark Void and Dead Rising 2 are a mixed bag at best, but this is the poorest result yet, with a show-stopping franchise in the hands of a studio that's clearly not up to it. The brand on Operation Raccoon City guarantees it many sales - perhaps millions. And for every one of those buyers, the name Resident Evil will lose a little of its lustre.
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Hard-to-put-down PopCap timewaster Zuma's Revenge arrives on Xbox Live Arcade some time this Summer, the developer has announced.
There are new Boss Rush and Weekly Challenge game modes included, as well as Achievements, remastered HD visuals and a new Spirit Animal progression system.
It also incorporates recent updates to other versions of the game, which remove lives and checkpoints.
There's no firm release date yet, but when it does eventually launch it will set you back 800 Microsoft Points.
"With well over 20 million game units sold to date, and following the successful launch of four new Zuma titles this year on several leading mobile and handheld devices, the franchise has never been more in demand," commented PopCap marketing chap Van Riker.
"The PopCap team has done an amazing job of enhancing the level of challenge, game features and customisations with this latest version of Zuma's Revenge, which we believe make it a must for Xbox players."
Capcom is hoping to sell 10 million copies of forthcoming fantasy RPG Dragon's Dogma, according to producer Hideaki Itsuno.
Speaking to Videogamer, Itsuno insisted that figure was ambitious but attainable, and is emblematic of Capcom's desire to chase success on a global stage and not just in Japan.
"I don't know if other Japanese developers are trying to become more global, but I know we definitely are," he said.
"It's difficult, because we really want this game to sell 10 million units worldwide. We want to sell a lot, and that's just something that we think we can do. We're not positive [it will be a success]. Of course it's a risk, but that's what we want - a challenge."
Itsuno added that Capcom believes the game will almost certainly break the million barrier in its homeland.
"But in Japan, we can absolutely sell a million units. We know that's attainable, it's absolutely do-able. We have a kind of assurance that that will happen, but for worldwide that's not so much the case, and I think that's why a lot of Japanese developers are hesitant about going global. It's because they don't have that assurance that it'll be successful."
The game, which Capcom claims is one of its largest productions ever, is due out on 25th May for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
"This is Capcom's first attempt at anything like it, and they'll have to deliver something special if it's to dislodge the genre's front-runners," read Eurogamer's recent Dragon's Dogma preview.
"We're still yet to discover much of the story, or learn of anything of the politics of this universe. Still, the signs are promising."
Konami has made the leaked Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition official.
It launches on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare in the spring.
Hyper Arcade Edition updates the core mechanics of the series' famed run-and-dodge gameplay, and features classic and new game modes, including Tile Capture, Battle Royale, Freak Out and more. You can play against others or the computer in up to four-player matches.
You can customise with different skins, including Hyper Arcade's modern neon and the original Frogger's 8-bit sprite design. There are even classic Castlevania and Contra skins.
As the Australian Classification website revealed last month, Frogger is made by Zombie Studios, the developer of F2P online shooter Blacklight: Retribution.
Title Update 4 will be rolled out today for Gears of War 3.
Epic Games announced the roll-out time as 2am PT (9am GMT) on its website. So it should be out. Can you see it?
Improvements
Bug Fixes
It all started with an acorn. Project Ego, the game that would eventually grow into Fable and then further flourish into one of the enduring series of the last decade, was built upon a promise of choice, of being able to craft your own journey in the fantasy land of Albion across your hero's entire lifespan. That acorn was an embodiment of that promise: something you'd be able to plant and then return to, after digital decades had passed, to see an oak in bloom.
That acorn was also an embodiment of the whimsy of Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios and, throughout the entirety of the Fable series to date, its figurehead. When that acorn failed to materialize in the very first Fable, to a vocal bunch it came to symbolize what they felt about Molyneux - that he was a snake oil salesman, a purveyor of empty promises and hollow rhetoric.
If you're ever lucky enough to witness the Molyneux show in person, it's hard not to come away thinking he's one of the industry's finest showmen, the kind of character you'd expect to find down one of Albion's alleyways, enchanting a small gathered crowd with his sleight of hand and abundance of charisma.
In San Francisco earlier this month, it's a magic that he's weaving for a final time in his capacity as creative head of Microsoft Studios Europe. A handful of days after this last performance, he'll announce that he's leaving to pursue a smaller, more independent life at Guildford upstart 22 Cans.
It's been a long day. The presentation comes after a steady succession of others, yet that hasn't dimmed the spectacle of the show. Through the jetlag and the fatigue, Molyneux remains in absolute wonder at what his team at Lionhead has created, displaying a wide-eyed amazement that proves incredibly infectious.
We're all here to see Fable: The Journey, an offshoot of the now long-running series that's built around Kinect, a device that's proved extremely divisive amongst the Xbox 360's core audience. It's a fact that Molyneux himself is quick to acknowledge.
Crystal Dynamics, the developer behind the new Tomb Raider game, is making a Soul Reaver reboot, according to a new report.
VG247 described the game as a "full reworking", with a new art direction.
Cult classic 1999 PSone game Soul Reaver was the sequel to vampire adventure Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. It was written and directed by Amy Hennig, who would go on to helm the Uncharted series at Naughty Dog.
Soul Reaver stood out for being dark, gothic and atmospheric. But it was the ability to step into the spirit world, and thus change the environment, that ensured lasting appeal.
The Legacy of Kain series has been dormant in terms of new releases since 2003 multiplatform game Legacy of Kain: Defiance. Soul Reaver, though, was recently reissued on PlayStation Network.
Last year IP holder Square Enix reportedly surveyed gamers on various names for a potential Legacy of Kain game.
The four names put forward were Obsidian Blood, Obsidian Sun, Dead Sun, and Revenant, either standalone or tagged with names previously used in the series.
Earlier this month Cory Barlog, who was writer/director for God of War 2, creative director on Chains of Olympus and story creator for Ghost of Sparta, joined Crystal Dynamics.
Barlog joined to help the studio with the in-development Tomb Raider reboot, due out some time this year, and a "yet to be announced new title".
The Soul Reaver reboot?