I Am Alive was, once upon a time, headed to PC in addition to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Following a switch from one developer to another and a long stretch of silence about the game’s status, it’s now headed to 360 and PS3 — but not PC — as a downloadable title. The lack of a PC version is thanks in large part to piracy according to the game’s creative director, Stanislas Mettra.
“We’ve heard loud and clear that PC gamers are bitching about there being no version for them,” Mettra told IncGamers. “But are these people just making noise just because there’s no version or because it’s a game they actually want to play? Would they buy it if we made it?”
Videogame fans have plenty of sales to try taking advantage of come Friday (or even Thursday in some cases). We’ve already compiled a list of highlights from this year’s Black Friday videogame deals, a select number of which you’ll be able to take advantage of from home. PC game fans can avoid the lines and general misery altogether so long as they don’t mind shopping on Steam; Valve has just kicked off a conveniently-timed autumn sale that can save you some money and, just as importantly for some, spare you from even having to think about going to the store later this week.
The sale runs from today, November 23, through November 27. There are a great number of titles on sale in addition to a selection of games that are available at a discount for 24 hours at a time. Once that 24 hours is up another round of games will be made available.
A quick look at the highlights among the games coming out in Japan this coming week, courtesy the review pages of Famitsu magazine:
- Mario Kart 7 (10/9/9/9, 37 points): The point winner in this week’s issue was a pretty predictable one. “The game’s made so you’re always able to stage a comeback, making it approachable and enjoyable for anyone,” Famitsu wrote. “Competing for time is also exciting, and there’s more than enough room for hardcore play here. The Community feature makes netplay a lot more accessible than before, and finding opponents via Street Pass is also impressive. It’s really exciting to think how the community’s going to unfold.”
PlayStation Vita will be out in less than a month, on December 17, in Japan, and it’ll follow in North America and Europe on February 22. With Sony hosting a Vita-focused event in London today, the launch lineup for the system in PAL territories — including Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia — has been officially confirmed.
Among the titles that will be available alongside the system on February 22 are many of the usual suspects: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Little Deviants, and Super Stardust Delta. One of the surprise titles is the newly-announced MotorStorm RC, a new racing game in the works at series developer Evolution Studios.
47-year-old Koichi Nakamura is one of those guys who joined the Japanese game industry early on and never quite left it. His company Chunsoft (which will formally merge with Spike next year) has held an influential role in the business for years — it programmed all of the Dragon Quest games until the sixth; it created the “sound novel” adventure genre, and it also pioneered the randomly-generated dungeon RPG genre on consoles with titles like Shiren the Wanderer. Way back in the day, however, it was just Koichi Nakamura. And Koichi Nakamura was an abashed computer nerd.
“I was living out in the rural areas of Shikoku western Japan back in high school,” he told Famitsu magazine for their retro-gaming column. “I didn’t have anyplace to sell my games, so getting them published in magazines was the best I could do. It was over an hour by train to the nearest computer store, and that was the only one in the entire prefecture.”
After months of waiting, Microsoft has finally provided a release date for the upcoming Xbox 360 fall dashboard update: it’ll be out on December 6.
The free download adds a wide variety of features, including those we first heard about during E3 in June. The redesigned look of the dashboard allows Kinect owners to navigate it with either gestures or voice — the latter is also one way of using the new search functionality that will allow you to find content on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Zune Marketplace, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and more. As this is a Microsoft product, search is powered by Bing.
1UP editors ponder the future of Hideo Kojima’s mega-series.
By: 1UP Staff November 21, 2011
Jeremy Parish, Editor-in Chief
You know what I’d like to see for Metal Gear Solid 5? Nothing. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been following — and a fan of — the Metal Gear games since before the original game came out for NES. I love me some Metal Gear. But at this point, and MGS4 will back me up on this, the series just has too much baggage. Why not just start over with a clean slate and a new series and let Kojima and his folks work their magic without having to worry about an insanely convoluted backstory that was never meant to be concluded? Oh, right… money.
Fine. If Kojima has to go ahead with a fifth chapter, I only see two ways for it to work. One, jump way far into the future and leave behind the legacy cast. Maybe make the game about Olga’s kid Sunny, all grown up into an idiot savant secret agent who sings about eggs while she snaps necks, but leave everyone else behind. Alternately, let’s take the series way into the past and focus on The Boss (aka The Joy) and her work with Cobra Unit in World War II. Or, hell, stop the flirting and cockteasing and just let Metal Gear make out with Assassin’s Creed already. Find some way to combine the two series’ ridiculous story lines into one. (Suggestion: The Apple is nanomachines!)
Whatever the case, Metal Gear Solid 5 shouldn’t be about the Snakes. Not Solid Snake, not Liquid Snake, not Naked Snake, and definitely not Solidus. Their story is done. The Patriots’ story is done. Here’s an idea, though: Why not get back to basics and make a Metal Gear that’s about, you know, Metal Gear? The series’ big deal used to be the mad threat represented by a compact, self-contained nuclear delivery system. Before the AIs named after dead presidents and social manipulation and impossible continuity, Metal Gear was about a simple deadly threat. I’d love to see that kind of clarity of purpose in the series again.
Bob Mackey, Features Admiral
If you’d like to see the direction the Metal Gear Solid series should go, look no further than Peace Walker; though the game’s admittedly built with on-the-go play in mind, it managed to shake off most of the baggage that clung to the series for so long. Simplified controls, a dialed-back story, a nearly bottomless toy box full of weapons and gadgets, and several multi-layered RPG systems built for endless tinkering — all of these elements brought Metal Gear far above the fan-pandering torture that nearly sunk Solid 4. Given that MGS4 tied up every loose end (and turned Solid Snake into a human Hot Pocket), the series has an unprecedented amount of breathing room; and since the Metal Gear timeline stretches across 50 years, Kojima and his team now have the ability to dip in and out of this history at their leisure. So why shouldn’t they?
So, where could Metal Gear Solid go with its fifth official installment? Honestly, it’d be fantastic to see remakes of the original two Metal Gears, even if Kojima repurposed a great deal of these games’ content for the original Solid. But instead of putting the spotlight on Snake, why can’t the Metal Gear team instead show us the story of Outer Heaven through the eyes of Big Boss himself? It’d be the perfect send-off to a character they’ve been progressively developing since Metal Gear Solid 3, not to mention a fine opportunity for Metal Gear fans to experience a plotline currently trapped behind a thick mesh of outdated mechanics and primitive storytelling.
I was pleasantly surprised when I sampled Nintendo’s upcoming Wii party game Fortune Street last month at New York Comic-Con. Despite being a multiplayer title starring Mario and other game mascots in a virtual board game setting, Fortune Street is the furthest thing from Mario Party you could imagine. The few minigames it contains are generally automated affairs that play themselves in a few short seconds: no button-mashing or stick-twirling required. Rather, Fortune Street has far more in common with Hasbro’s Monopoly than with the usual minigame collections that have shown up as multiplayer releases over the past decade.
What I didn’t realize based on my NYCC hands-on is that it’s even deeper than that. Fortune Street is playable in both standard and simplified modes, and at public events Nintendo has been demoing it in the latter mode. With the training wheels taken off, Fortune Street is kind of ridiculous. Like a real “grown-ups” board game such as Risk or Monopoly, a single match can take hours. I recently played a demo with other members of the gaming press — including IGN’s Audrey Drake — and two hours wasn’t enough for us to complete a game. And that wasn’t even on one of the more complex boards!
Minecraft, one might have noticed, is kind of a big deal. If you’re the sort of person who reads about videogames on the Internet, which seems like a safe assumption, it would have taken a directed force of will to avoid hearing about it by now. So you probably already know that it’s a sandbox style game that takes place in a procedurally generated world made up of one-meter blocks that can be mined and crafted to create everything from a simple sod house to a scale replica of the starship Enterprise. Or an automated pooping butt. Or a gigantic mechanical player piano. Or a scale recreation of most of Middle Earth. Or… yeah, the sense of awe at the outrageous feats of engineering players have cobbled together is only eclipsed by the sales of the game itself and the subculture that has sprouted up around it.
Almost two years ago Minecraft went from a weird indie project with a cult following to a million-seller that’s still earning nearly $200,000 a day in sales, and that was before the game was officially released. This game that one guy slapped together has now become the nucleus of a massive fandom — one that just enjoyed its first major convention in Vegas over this past weekend. Hell, some guy made an entire concept album about the game’s iconic suicide-bombing creepers. This last Halloween you may have even encountered your first Minecraft costumes in the wild, and when you open your door to see a kid wearing a hand-painted cardboard box creeper mask making that blood curdling “SSSSSsss” sound, there’s really nothing to do other than dump the entire candy bowl into their bag while kicking yourself for not being Notch — who is one can only assume is spending his days swimming like a tophat-wearing duck in an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with Euros.
Just before this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Namco announced that in addition to their internal Project Soul development team, three external developers were helping create Soul Calibur V — CyberConnect2 on the story, and Creative Intelligence Arts/Forcewick Sound Design on the audio. And now they’re adding one more to that list, with Bayonetta character designer Mari Shimazaki contributing costumes. Namco calls her a “guest costume designer,” keeping the terminology they use for “guest characters” like Ezio in SCV.
Shimazaki told me via email she originally met SCV’s art director at a party, mentioned she was looking forward to the game, and then when she became a freelancer, found herself called in for a meeting. She has three designs in the game — the primary costume for new character Leixia, and the alternate costumes for Tira and Ivy.
