Last we heard, Devil's Third - the latest game from Ninja Gaiden mastermind and badass Tomonobu Itagaki - was on hold as publishers THQ looked to offload it. Well, now they've offloaded it, giving all rights back to the developers, Itagaki's Valhalla Studios.
"THQ confirms that the company will not be publishing Devil's Third," a THQ spokesperson told Eurogamer. "All of the game's IP rights have been returned to Itagaki-san and the Valhalla team."
Seeing as the game was so far off, and that we've barely seen anything from it, it's hard to muster many feelings one way or another on the project. But hey, Itagaki has his fans, so hopefully someone can come along and throw a little money their way, get this thing on shelves (or at least in a playable state so we can take a look at it!)
A few days after the emails first went out, Ubisoft has responded to its accidental leak of around 500 fans' email addresses with...another email.
While a "sorry" might have been appreciated, all users received was a short message that read:
Dear User,
Ubisoft takes privacy matters seriously. Recently we discovered some users' email addresses were gathered without following proper privacy guidelines and procedures. As a precaution, we are removing your email from our marketing database.
If you'd like to continue to receive updates and news on Watchdogs, update your Uplay account by clicking here.
If you would like more information on Ubisoft's stance regarding your privacy, you can check out our privacy policy here. We thank you for your interest in Watch Dogs and look forward to sharing more about the game in the future.
Best Regards,
The Ubisoft Team
Saying your email address had been "gathered without following proper privacy guidelines and procedures" sure sounds nicer than "we accidentally sent your email address to thousands of complete strangers".
That's not to degrade the rest of the game, which is due out this fall. It looks just fine. It's just a testament to how glorious Metroplex is. I mean, transforming into a fighter jet or a truck is cool, I guess, but transforming into a city? That's how you get stuff done.
This isn't the first time we've seen the Autobot's metropolitan enforcer; he first turned up in an E3 trailer last month. But it's always nice to see him again.
It's not only that Pro Controller that reminds Microsoft of its Xbox 360. The graphics do, too.
"I think their Pro Controller makes a lot of sense with the platform they've built," Microsoft's Phil Spencer told website Games Industry. "They are building a platform that is effectively a 360 when you think of graphical capability."
According to Spencer, Nintendo is probably going to use the Wii U's Xbox 360-esque controller to ensure a back catalogue of Xbox 360 ports.
"Now they are really making an on-ramp for the back catalog of games that are on 360," he added. "It is easy for those games to move over to the Wii U. They've moved the buttons around, and they've made a controller that feels familiar for 360 gamers, so I get why they are putting those pieces together."
If that is what Nintendo is doing, it'll be pretty smart at the start! It will also mean the Wii U can get ports of new games for Microsoft's and Sony's next consoles—though, those ports might not be on the same level graphically.
As with the Wii, let's see how the next generation progresses.
Long live the Nintendo DS! One of the, let's be honest, best gaming platforms ever is getting a new game: a Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters for the DS. Since Nintendo DS games can run on the 3DS and since most little Japanese kids have a DS, it's pretty smart of Namco Bandai to put this out on Nintendo's last gen handheld. The game is out this September in Japan.
Another day of Nintendo honcho blowing the gasket off of things. This time, it's Nintendo's online service, the Nintendo Network. It's supposed to be free, but that doesn't mean it will be free forever. Forever is a long time.
At a recent investors meeting, Iwata said, "We cannot promise that Nintendo will always provide you with online services free of charge no matter how deep the experiences are that it may provide."
Continuing, he added, "But at least we are not thinking of asking our consumers to pay money to just casually get access to our ordinary online services."
It sounds like Nintendo is tossing around the idea of maybe having a casual service and a premium one.
According to Iwata, Nintendo has a varied of users—from casual to hardcore. He believes that the casual players might only play online during, say, summer vacation or during Japan's end of year holidays.
"We therefore believe that services which ask our consumers to obtain paid memberships are not always the best."
If Nintendo did roll out two services (one free and one premium), gamers would probably be willing to pony up the extra fees for a "deep" online service—well, of course, if Nintendo made a premium service that gamers felt lived up to the add-on fees. And that's okay.
You do get what you pay for, there are no free lunches, and all that jazz.
I know this dance. I've been here before, I've seen this play out. I know how it's all going to end, and for that, I hate this game a little.
See, I've read The Walking Dead—I know what this world is like. I know that you can't win, that safety is an illusion, that nothing ever turns out okay. I know what these poor people are in for. But I can't turn away.
Telltale's The Walking Dead is a game about choice. In fact, the choices are more or less what make it a game—it's a point-and-click adventure, and the only area where players have any true agency is in the decisions they make. Lie or tell the truth? Side with the father or the soldier? Kill the man who wronged you, or let him live?
Don't let those choices fool you into thinking you can "win"—there are no good outcomes in The Walking Dead. The series, which just released its second episode of five, is not concerned with good outcomes. It's concerned with putting you through the ringer, and it does a magnificent job of it.
(Heads up: In this post, I'll keep the spoilers for the second episode light, but will discuss spoilers for the first episode.)
The first episode of The Walking Dead was a pleasant surprise. Many, including me, had been frustrated with many of Telltale's past games, which ride a wide quality-pendulum between "pretty bad" and "pretty fun."
We give up a piece of our soul with each choice, but the pain we feel proves that we still have a soul to give up.
But The Walking Dead game was different. It was smartly written, and unflinching in its embrace of the gritty, hopeless source material. It featured a relatable protagonist and one of the most realistic and sympathetic video game kids I've ever met.
Now that I've played the second episode, I'm more confident than ever that the full series will be excellent throughout. The Walking Dead episode 2, titled "Starved for Help," is just as good as its predecessor, and in several ways even better. It's still marred by the same rough edges, technical shortcomings, and low-budget animations. Furthermore, there are some technical issues with downloading and updating the second episode that feel buggy, unclear, and for some, borderline game-breaking. That stuff isn't really all that forgivable—I want to focus on The Walking Dead as a work and not as a product, but Telltale has got to get their quality assurance up to snuff. Come on, guys! People are buying this game, it needs to work better than this!
Back to the game. Rather than investing in cutting-edge graphics or animation systems, Telltale has wisely put their limited resources into the things that count, namely great voice acting, good writing, strong and expressive facial animations. All three things, particularly the writing, serve to make The Walking Dead a rousing success for interactive fiction.
The game starts hard and fast, more or less immediately dropping you into an intense situation that requires a quick (and ghastly) decision on your part. Doesn't matter what you choose—blood is going to spill. That damned-if-you-do/don't truth holds for the entire rest of the episode, in which I found myself regularly torn between bad options in a bad situation, wishing I could just deduce what the easiest choice would be, watching the timer tick down and sweating onto my controller.
I'd already seen the first 20 minutes in action at E3, and so I used my advance knowledge to "cheat" my way into keeping just about every party happy when it was my character Lee's turn to ration food. Hooray, for like thirty seconds, no one was actively unhappy with me! If I thought that would buy me a moment's peace in the second half of the episode, I was dead wrong.
Most of "Starved for Help" takes place at a dairy farm. The story combines a couple of narrative notes that readers of the Walking Dead comics will be familiar with. (Too familiar. Shudder.) As I said up top—I know too much. I've read the comics, I've been in this world, I know what happens to the people you care about. They die. Everyone dies, and those who survive do so by doing unspeakable things.
"Starved for Help" takes place three months after the events of the first episode, which is an interesting choice—the world has moved on, and has become more the brutal, every-man-for-himself warzone that Rick, Andrea and the gang must try to survive in the books. But the game's protagonist Lee and his group have lived a mostly sheltered live in an abandoned motor inn, living off of supplies they got from a new member named Mark.
As a result, the group is mostly unaware of just how far things have fallen. And so "Starved For Help" brings about a turn of events that coaxes them out of their secure (but food-free) home to this dairy farm, a place that is allegedly safe from zombies.
If you know anything about The Walking Dead, you know that there are no safe places—places are never as secure the people living in them wish they would be. Boasts about fortifications are just that—empty boasts. There is no phrase more damning than "We could maybe set up here long-term." Given some of the outright fortresses I've seen fall in the comics, I was laughing under my breath at the dairy farm's fortifications. But even then, nothing played out like I was quite expecting it to.
The Walking Dead's episodic structure has been an unexpected pleasure. I love how it unfolds like a TV season, and have really enjoyed getting to play each episode along with my fellow "viewers." Every time someone tells me they're waiting for the whole series to be out to play it, I tell them they're missing out—it's been very fun to play this game like I watch TV, and I think that more and more games should look to this model in the future. After every episode ends, we're all in more or less the same place for a bit. As we wait for the next episode, we'll talk and discuss and look over what happened and look forward to what's to come. It's great fun.
One piece of advice about "Starved for Help," and about the series as a whole—you're in for a real ride, and you're going to make some decisions that you won't be happy with. I urge you to go with it, to make your first playthrough your definitive one, no matter what. Do what you would do under the circumstances, and live with the consequences.
One of the running themes of The Walking Dead is that despite the awful things we must do to survive, we anguish over the atrocities we've committed, and that anguish means we're still good. We give up a piece of our soul with each choice, but the pain we feel proves that we still have a soul to give up.
The game stays true to its source material, then: With every decision I made, I felt a little bit worse. I guess that proves I'm still a good person, but it doesn't make those decisions any easier to bear.
This is not going to end well, but damned if I won't be there to see it through.
Sure, Stephen has shown us reasons to be thankful today for fireworks, but thankful is boring. I'd prefer to just spend the holiday putting the games down and watching dudes hurt themselves by doing stupid things with them.
And it's not even a holiday in Australia. That's how much I prefer it.
You might have noticed some strange trends in Apple's iTunes Store over the years. Fake Mega Man games. Fake Pokémon games. Fake everything else.
So what's up with Apple's QA process? Are they incompetent? Are they just lazy? According to a recent interview, the problem might just be plain-old understaffing. Speaking to Business Insider, former Apple engineer Mike Lee shed some light on the whole review process.
"People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews," he said. "It's just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can't get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you it's a lot smaller than you imagine."
Lee says there's a constant deluge of nonsensical apps and other such garbage. The worst problem? Dicks.
"It's a very serious problem, trying to filter out things that no one is there to see," he said to Business Insider. "Somebody has to sit there and filter out all those dicks. You can't let all those dicks get through. You have to [err] way on the side of safety. You have to have people sitting there looking at things that may or may not be dicks all day long. Apple refuses to farm stuff up to massive groups of people. They insist on having actual smart, educated, well-trained people doing the job. So that means they have to have some of their actual employees sifting through a pile of dicks."
You know what they say: can't get Angry Birds without sifting through a pile of dicks.
It's the Fourth of July, the day we here in the United States celebrate our freedom, and who fights for freedom whenever there's trouble? Sideshow Collectibles' Sixth Scale San Diego Comic-Con exclusive Lt. Falcon figure is ready to punch Zartan right in his big stupid faces.
For the past few years I've been collecting Hasbro's 3.5 inch G.I. Joe action figures, seeking to recapture a childhood filled with plastic planes, plastic guns, and cartoon wars in which a guy can get a snake through his heart and merely fall into a short coma. Getting one of those tiny five-dollar articulated men and women was the highlight of many a day for your Mike Fahey, and now that I am an adult I can buy as many as I want so nah.
With the G.I. Joe films and new cartoons, Hasbro has been ramping up the output, regularly releasing 3.5 figures of characters new and old, and I've been greedily devouring them, not knowing that just around the corner Sideshow Collectibles was making G.I. Joes for grown-ups.
Look at that soulful face. That is not a toy for children. Children have no souls. They have to earn them.
(Most) Adults have souls, however, so we're free to spend from $99 to upwards of $500 on Sideshow's Sixth Scale line, amazingly-detailed figures that count as one-sixth of an actual human being. They've got Star Wars (more on the later). They've got Marvel Comics. They've got Hot Toys Christopher Reeve Superman.
The San Diego Comic-Con exclusive Lt. Falcon you see here is the sort of toy that makes a man build his own light box out of a cardboard box, poster board and tissue paper, just to take pictures of it in action. It's the kind of figure that makes cats jump on top of said light box, not realizing the top is tissue paper, and ruining everything forever. It's the type of toy that makes me want to be a better photographer.
For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise, Lt. Falcon, AKA Vinnie Falcone, is a second-generation Green Beret. According to cartoon continuity he is the half-brother of General Hawk Duke, as well as a womanizer, a wise-ass and the boyfriend of the female ninja Jinx. Go team!
Sideshow's version of the character, which goes on sale tomorrow as part of the company's Online Comic-Con 2012 celebration, is so intense he requires two different heads to show off that intensity.
Such intensity also requires plenty of accessories.
Falcon's camo pajamas are covered with little slots to slip on these accessories. There are pouches to place additional pouches in case you like pouches in your pouches. There's a full backpack with working miniature zippers and clasps. He's got a holster for his pistol, a place on his shoulder strap to slip a grenade. He's even got a pair of pouches that hold teeny-tiny shotgun shells.
I stared at the shell pouch for minutes, fascinated by the attention to detail. I had no idea such things existed. Perhaps I would have been better off not knowing. Oh well, at least I've got my Christmas and birthday gift wish list filled out for the next several years.
Sideshow, aware of the importance of the core conflict in the G.I. Joe saga, also sent along a Cobra enemy for Falcon to play with. The $159.99 Zartan was an excellent choice. If you can only send one Cobra guy, why not send the one that can be every Cobra guy?
I prefer Zartan to Falcon, personally, but I've always been a villain kind of guy, especially when the villain comes with segmented body armor, a cloth hood, and a compound bow with indivdual arrows that fit in two of the hands that ship with the piece. He's also got a sniper rifle, a change of boots, a scupted face mask and an additional smirking head that could be Duke Nukem but is likely just Duke.
Both figures are built from Sideshow's Prometheus (no relation) bodies, specially designed to fill out clothing in a human way while providing an unsurpassed range of natural motion. This is cutting-edge toy tech right here.
And if neither of these male soldiers float your boat, check out what Sideshow is teasing on their Facebook page. Oh yes.
Last we heard, Devil's Third - the latest game from Ninja Gaiden mastermind and badass Tomonobu Itagaki - was on hold as publishers THQ looked to offload it. Well, now they've offloaded it, giving all rights back to the developers, Itagaki's Valhalla Studios.
Another day of Nintendo honcho blowing the gasket off of things. This time, it's Nintendo's online service, the 
I know this dance. I've been here before, I've seen this play out. I know how it's all going to end, and for that, I hate this game a little.
