Final Fantasy XIV, Bullet Points!
Regardless of the 'cool innovations', it will still be a Japanese MMO
As Final Fantasy XIII is on sale, we can’t forget what is happening behind the scenes at Square-Enix, with the development of their Final Fantasy MMO, number XIV in the series. And fan website FFXIVCore.com has some facts about the game taken from the recent Famitsu magazine.
I’ve added the ‘More Game Info’ below, but check out the link above to view the rest of the points, talking about job classes and battles.
- Everything done in battle in FFXIV increases TP, including casting
- Defense can happen both automatically and at the will of the user
- The PC version will be able to run on PCs from a few years ago, but the alpha version will only run on high-end PCs
- Can be run on 512MB of VRAM and above
- Alpha test starts soon
- Square wants to make it possible to play with your friends from FFXI
- Character customization won’t be fully available in beta (can’t change facial features)
- There’s a mode for restoring HP while moving
- The plan is the make the maximum number of members in a party between 6 and 8, and there will also be alliances
- The important things in battle are distance, range, and direction
- There will be magic you can use while moving
- There are screenshots in the magazine of the alpha version, and it looks like there have been a lot of small changes
- “Aggro/hate” has a different name in 14 (Translates to something like how much the enemy views you as a threat)
- Enemies will not be set in one area in order for people to pull them to camps; places that enemies will appear will be scattered around
If it can be better than FFXI in terms of playability, I’m probably going to be interested in giving it a try. It’s just that high-end PC thing I may have re-consider…
South Park get Gaga on Rock Band
Getting this image proved a good reminder why searching "Lady Gaga" on Google images is a bad idea.
I’m a big South Park fan, rightly or wrongly, but less of a Lady Gaga fan, if I’m completely honest with you. Ok, well maybe not completely honest, but who doesn’t know how Poker face, Bad Romance and Just Dance go now? Guys? Oh.
Well, following Eric Cartmen’s performance of Poker Face in the South Park episode “Whale Whores” on Rock Band, it seems that Harmonix have taken the popularity of this on board, and are releasing the Lady Gaga Pack 1 as well as the special Cartmen version of Poker face, which I’ve embedded for you below
It’s always cool when developers include the more comedic or lighthearted songs as DLC, with “Still Alive” from Portal as well as a World of Warcraft tracks making it over in the past, though I may of missed a few. Obviously, Gaga fans will be going gaga (sorry) about the fact you’re going to be able to “rock” out to four tracks from Ms. Gaga’s collection, being “Poker Face”, “Just Dance”, “Monster” and “Bad Romance”.
The packs are making their way to Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 next week.
Portal 2 Details in Game Informer
Despite all the rumours of a direct cross-over, it doesn't appear that Half Life is ready for a Portal Gun just yet
Following a multitude of patches to the original Portal which added a series of radios to find and a slightly different ending, and an official announcement from Valve that Portal 2 is coming at the end of this year, we at least knew we were getting a new Portal game. However, we had no idea what it was going to be based upon, until a few images of the recent Game Informer magazine gave us some much needed facts.
The magazine says that Portal 2 is set “hundreds of years” after the events of the original, but you are still going to play as Chell, the original protagonist and don’t worry folks, GLADOS is back. Apeture science’s lab has been overgrown, but you are still going to be solving some puzzles, don’t worry about that. A two player co-op mode that promises to be ‘unique’ is also going to be there, and yes, finally, it will be coming to Mac.
Here is the bullet points taken by someone PAL Gaming Network
- Portal was a ‘trial’. Size and assets specifically kept minimal. Had no idea it would be this popular.
- Portal was a ‘test bed’, Portal 2 is a ‘game’.
- GlaDOS returns as the antagonist.
- Chell returns, and we play as her.
- Portal 2 takes place a long time after the original. Hundreds of years, in fact. The complex has overgrown.
- Those orbs seen at the end of Portal are personality orbs. They’ve cornered off sections of the labs as their own, and are concerned about the decaying state of the complex.
- Portal gun remains unchanged.
- Physics will now be part of portal puzzle solving. EG: A vent that sucks air in can be combined with a portal to ’suck’ from a different location.
- “Paint” mechanic, various liquid substances that cause some reaction. For example, in the demo shown a orange substance on the floor caused Chell to be propelled upwards. Using portals you can apply these ‘paints’ to other areas of the level for puzzle solving.
- Reflection cubes will allow Chell to reflect lazers for various puzzles.
- The co-op campaign will have you playing as two bipedal robots. The like to hold hands.
- Splitscreen for people playing on the console, and ‘picture in picture’ available for those playing remote co-op (eg: PC). This allows you to easily communicate with the other player and combine efforts for puzzle solving.
We’ll have more news when we know it.
RUSE open beta on Steam very soon
RUSE, a high strategy based title for PC and consoles that looks pretty unique, if Ubisoft can pull it off successfully. In order to do this, they have been running a closed beta for some time using Steam, but according to a twitter post by Ubisoft Community Developer Aymeric Evennou, March 9th is the day you’re going to be able get into large scale military coordination. If that is your thing.
To accompany this, the developer, Eugen Systems, have been working on fixing many of the issues that appeared in the closed beta, and as well as telling you the fixes they have been implementing, you get a lot of footage of the game itself. My feeling is it looks like a World War 2 based Supreme Commander, but with a greater focus on strategy than just as many units as possible.
So watch and enjoy a random guy in a green screen room!
RUSE is due out on June 3rd 2010 on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3
Nexuiz is on the way to consoles
It may not look amazing by today's standards, but this version at least, is completely free to play
I’ve dabbledin gaming on Linux, Ubuntu specifically. Why? Well for starters, a Windows partition has always been a click away meaning that I could access most of the games I’d actually want to play and secondly, because most of the games that were ‘easy’ so to speak (as in I just went to the package manager and pressed OK a lot). Before I get called out by the Ubuntu community for being a horrible n00b of Rory Cellan-Jones proportions, I am aware that I’m short changing what a capable operating system Ubuntu and many other linux distributions are, but gaming has never been seen as a major factor in using them, well, apart from one…
Nexuiz was originally a quake modification, that has been developed further and further by developers and Alientrap. Whilst it does have some hold overs from it’s quake routes in terms of looks, Nexuiz has been tuned, tightened up and offers a fast paced twitch shooter, brilliantly suited to PC as a platform, and as such, has had over 4 million downloads on Windows, Linux and OSX. It’s been entirely free, completely open source, and itself has been modded, with better textures and has had relatively regular updates. It also has a very unique art style, being all extra-terrestrial, with neon textures with gameplay that you don’t get very often now.
PS3 major bug, current status
If you see this, it's time to run, the Terminators are coming. Skynet was true!
In the podcast we recorded today, though will most likely be up tomorrow, we talked about the evolving issues regarding a widespread and fairly serious bug. The issue, whilst originally being seen to simply stop players connected to the Playstation Network and viewing their trophies, it soon stopped users being able to play games online, to play games with trophies, online or offline at all. Other issues, such as the calendar randomly being set back to January 2000, seems to be crippling the system. However, it is only happening to the PS3 “Fat” versions, not the slimline versions.
Well, there have been major rumours floating about, and I’m not going to speculate on what is causing it, but I do have some very good advice from the Playstation.Blog. First of all, the errors they say have been happening are:
- The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
- When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following
message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been
signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”. - When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears
on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install
trophies. Please exit your game.” - When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the
Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date
and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)” - Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the
PlayStation Store before the expiration date.
So, serious issues, but they are assuring users they are working on it and a fix should be out within 24 hours to prevent losing any functionality. We’ve kept our PS3’s off for a bit of time, until this problem is sorted, but basically, KEEP IT TURNED OFF. Even if Heavy Rain is sitting there waiting to go in.
It’s award season, and Uncharted 2 gets another
Sweeping the board at most of the nominations, Uncharted 2 has proved a runaway hit with both critics and fans
Whilst it may be indirectly rewarding on of Uncharted 2’s greatest strengths, the Writers Guild of America has given the writer of Naughty Dog’s “blockbuster” game the coveted award, Amy Hennig. I say coveted because there is actually only one award in the Video Game category. Though I suppose being a writers guild they are a tiny bit limited.
It’s nice to see actual decent writing being rewarded for a video game title, as a lot of the time the supposed snobbery of the other media industries takes over and means gaming gets stuck with very little recognition. Having said that, in the video gaming circles, Uncharted 2 hasn’t exactly done badly this year..
For example, at DICE 2010 (Annual Interactive Achievement Awards), Uncharted 2 came away with Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in game direction, Adventure Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Story- Original, Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design…That is one hell of a list. And that is just one award ceremony!
Don’t get me wrong, from playing Uncharted 2, I think that for nearly all of these which I understand it is very deserving of recognition, and games equally good at what they do were well rewarded. And their recognition by the Writers guild probably furthers their reputation even more. Someone needs to get them a bigger shelf.
Civilisation V confirmed by 2K
Whilst it tided people over for a bit, Colonisation was no revolutionary title...
Awoke to wonderful news to strategy buffs out there today. If you have fancied yourself as maniacal world leader or peaceful world leader, then the Civilisation series has usually had your back. We last got our dose of Civ with Civilisation Colonisation, a spin off based in the New World, with console players getting Civilisation Revolution, a relatively faithful conversion of the Civ formula to consoles.
I’m still a fairly regular player of Civilisation IV and minus a few gripes over simplicity, I’m not sure I really need a new Civ game. But it has been confirmed by 2K that there is a Civilisation V on the way, with, as a representative for Fireaxis studios, the developer of the series saying;
“An entirely new combat system, deeper diplomatic interactions and a cavalcade of expanded features,”
So what does that mean, well as far as we know, there is a new game engine being developed, possible combining some of the graphical features seen in Revolutions, fully animated leaders, native language, ranged bombardment and a other host of features which players have been asking for.
However, gasp, shock and horror may accompany what will no doubt be a small, but inevitably divisive change, with hexagonal tiles replacing the traditional squares, which is going to allow more realistic environments and a even more strategic approach. And of course, in accordance with nearly every PC release these days, it will ship with mod features aplenty and some sort of community component.
Needless to say, Colonisation was a lackluster use of the developers time in my view, so I’m looking forward to see what the outcome of this is. Some complained that Civ IV was far too simplified, with a greater aim towards the mainstream, so will Fireaxis respond or
Darksiders 90 minute demo coming soon
Whilst Darksiders may of casually adopted some of the best bits of gaming, they chose the best games to take them from
From what we’ve been hearing, Darksiders is supposed to be, despite it ‘borrowing’ many of the concepts from, for example, the Legend of Zelda franchise, a good, dependable gaming experience. However, because it’s not had the same exposure as you’d expect for a game that is getting pretty high ratings across the board. Well don’t fret if you ain’t too sure about whether to part with your cash for Darksiders, as you’ll soon be able to try before you buy.
Now, game demo’s are often underrated in the modern day gaming experience, seen more as promotional exercises (remember, you were only able to get a Killzone 2 demo if you pre-ordered the game), despite it being really easy to download them, as opposed to waiting for you gaming mag to come through with a custom disc that usually resembled some type of hacking tool. THQ still seem to be showing the demo some love, and possibly fueled by the drive for more sales, so will be giving you a whole 90 minutes (for the ‘average’ gamer, whoever that is) of Darksiders for you to play.
The longest demo (that wasn’t a mulitplayer one, they cheat) I’ve played was probably Bioshock 1, which allowed you to play the entire first chapter, and persuaded me I really needed to play this game. I wonder if Darksiders will do the same? Darksiders is out now, but the 90 minute demo is coming soon to XBLM and PSN.
Lego Universe Beta Sign Ups open
With beta invites going out, who will get a brick shaped ticket... Alright, I'm leaving.
Just a quick piece of news, a bit ago we featured Lego Universe, an MMO based on the Lego world and being built by NetDevil. They’ve now entered the final stages of the game’s development and you can sign up for a Lego ID, then you have to answer a really simply questionnaire and if they view you as being a good tester for game, they’ll let you in.
We’ve signed up, but our activation link is currently broken. If we get in, we’ll post the details here and hopefully will be online in Lego World…Now let me play Lego Island on Windows 7 and I’ll be a happy man.
