Entertainment Electronics Blog

A universal problem with canon — whether for a video game, a television series, a saga in either graphic or prose novel form — is that it takes commitment and following to fully enjoy. A property with a deep canon rewards those who have followed from the beginning and can pick up on all the jokes, references, “previously ons”, and so forth. But if you haven’t been actively following said property, then such a thing might appear daunting; which leads to, “nah, I didn’t play the others, so I’ll skip this one.” One solution that other media has provided is the standalone special: a frivolous holiday themed adventure that requires little knowledge and has no bearing on the story. Think Star Wars: Holiday Special or It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. inFamous: Festival of Blood presents itself as a video game equivalent of such.

Festival of Blood has no particular time or place — it simply chronicles a tall tale told from faithful sidekick Zeke to a prospective woman at a bar. In an attempt to snare her, Zeke goes off about Pyre Night, a local festival in New Marais, and Cole MacGrath’s solitary crappy night celebrating it. That is, how Cole gets bitten by Bloody Mary, a local vampire queen, and spends the whole night trying to figure out how to break free from turning into her vampire thrall.

EA’s digital PC game distribution service, Origin, is already home to more than 100 games you can purchase and download immediately. Of course, every single one of those games is an Electronic Arts product. That will soon change, as EA plans to make good on its promise to offer third-party games starting next month.

Chief financial officer Eric Brown said last month that Origin would offer third-party content “very soon.” That could have meant days or months; in this case, ‘very soon’ equates to the month of November, as starting then games from THQ, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and Capcom will be sold through Origin. And it’s not just smaller games, either; Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row: The Third, two big November PC releases, were each mentioned by name in today’s announcement.

Being a fan of the PixelJunk Shooter games, I found it an odd but mostly pleasant surprise that developer Q-Games was branching out with PixelJunk SideScroller — it’s definitely not the free-moving planetary spelunking game that Shooter is, but instead a much more cramped shoot-em-up from back in the day. You may think that’s a step back, but it’s really a step sideways — making a pretty good complement to two great games.

From looking at SideScroller, it has a decidedly retro look to it in more ways than one: First, there’s the vector-inspired look that makes the game seem like it’s being played on the world’s most bad-ass oscilloscope — complete with monitor curvature effect. And it’s also, duh, a side-scrolling shooter, as familiar as classics like the beloved Gradius — though in this one you can’t die by touching walls. That said, SideScroller is not some direct parody/tribute/homage to any one game: The boss fights may likely remind you of a boss in so-and-so game that had a similar attack or something, but otherwise, this is an original piece of bullety mayhem.

A quick look at the highlights among the games coming out in Japan this coming week, courtesy the review pages of Famitsu magazine:

- Super Mario 3D Land (9/9/10/10, 38 points): The top scorer of the week seems to fulfill all of Shigeru Miyamoto’s stated goals for a 3DS Mario game, if Famitsu’s editors are any indication. “From the length of the stages to the placement of enemies and tricks to the difficulty, everything seems just right here, making for a really comfortable play experience,” one wrote. “The bits of the game that take advantage of 3D depth are a lot of fun, inspiring you to hunt around for all of the hidden stuff. There’s a wealth of helper functionality for beginners, and there’s also a lot of cute little touches to the game that will bring up twinges of nostalgia.”

No matter how good a game may look or sound, it can never fully succeed if it doesn’t have the confidence in itself and in its audience. It’s this lack of grit that keeps Okabu from standing out in a sea of charming PSN titles. The game places you in the role of a pair of whale-shaped clouds called, creatively enough, cloud whales who are tasked with defending the peaceful inhabitants of the land from industrial creatures known as Doza. The story has equal shades Fern Gully and Avatar, but thankfully, it never becomes too preachy. There are frustrating moments where the narrative is presented by slow moving and unskippable blocks of text, but thankfully the story is mostly told passively, and avoids ever becoming too cumbersome.

As a cloud whale, you have the ability to absorb liquids and dispense them at your will, carry passengers with unique abilities, and fire projectiles at specific targets. You float around each area using your powers to cleanse the land of the mechanical menaces that seek to defile the otherwise peaceful world. However, you can only choose between a single power at a time, so switching between the pair of floating nimbi on the fly becomes an integral part of the game. There is a two-player co-op mode, but in all honesty solving puzzles becomes a frustrating shouting match if you aren’t in complete control of both characters.

No matter how good a game may look or sound, it can never fully succeed if it doesn’t have the confidence in itself and in its audience. It’s this lack of grit that keeps Okabu from standing out in a sea of charming PSN titles. The game places you in the role of a pair of whale-shaped clouds called, creatively enough, cloud whales who are tasked with defending the peaceful inhabitants of the land from industrial creatures known as Doza. The story has equal shades Fern Gully and Avatar, but thankfully, it never becomes too preachy. There are frustrating moments where the narrative is presented by slow moving and unskippable blocks of text, but thankfully the story is mostly told passively, and avoids ever becoming too cumbersome.

As a cloud whale, you have the ability to absorb liquids and dispense them at your will, carry passengers with unique abilities, and fire projectiles at specific targets. You float around each area using your powers to cleanse the land of the mechanical menaces that seek to defile the otherwise peaceful world. However, you can only choose between a single power at a time, so switching between the pair of floating nimbi on the fly becomes an integral part of the game. There is a two-player co-op mode, but in all honesty solving puzzles becomes a frustrating shouting match if you aren’t in complete control of both characters.

While there is a constant flow of interesting mods being released for PC games, it’s not every day you see one that can really turn some heads (and make console gamers jealous in the process). Hyrule: Total War looks like one of those mods.

As the name implies, this is a conversion mod for a Total War game (Medieval II: Total War, specifically) which brings the races of the Zelda universe into The Creative Assembly’s 2006 RTS. It’s yet to be completed, but a demo is currently available that contains 16 different Zelda factions including the kingdom of Hyrule, Gorons, Zora, Deku tribes, Sheikah, Kokiri, and more.

While there is a constant flow of interesting mods being released for PC games, it’s not every day you see one that can really turn some heads (and make console gamers jealous in the process). Hyrule: Total War looks like one of those mods.

As the name implies, this is a conversion mod for a Total War game (Medieval II: Total War, specifically) which brings the races of the Zelda universe into The Creative Assembly’s 2006 RTS. It’s yet to be completed, but a demo is currently available that contains 16 different Zelda factions including the kingdom of Hyrule, Gorons, Zora, Deku tribes, Sheikah, Kokiri, and more.

Out of nowhere, Rockstar Games today confirmed the existence of Grand Theft Auto V.

We had long suspected it was in the works, with analyst Michael Pachter pegging its release as possibly coming as soon as 2011 due to the contracts for several key Rockstar employees set to end next year. (We’d also heard reports its release was expected to fall within 2012.) When those contracts were extended earlier this year, the rush to get the game out (from publisher Take-Two’s perspective) was no longer there and so it seemed as if we could be waiting longer to hear about the game, particularly with Rockstar suddenly interested in talking about Max Payne 3.