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New Releases: Persona Q, Geometry Wars 3, Akiba’s Trip PS4, More
Black Friday (and the more-or-less unofficial end to the Fall game rush) is just a few days away, but there’s still a handful of new releases to talk about this week.
For example, Atlus will bring its popular Persona series of RPGs to the 3DS with Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. The quirky Japanese publisher will also release Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed, a brawler where teenagers strip down to battle vampires in the heart of Tokyo, for the PS4 this week.
But this week’s biggest new release (in my opinion, anyway) is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions. Activision and Lucid Games will release the twin-stick shooter for the PC, as well as the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
Finally this week, the Penguins of Madagascar will waddle over to the 3DS, Wii, and Wii U and IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, the latest game in the dogfighting sim series, will be released for the PC.
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS4, Wii, Wii U
Tagged Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
Insert Quarter: Video Game Titles Have Gotten Ridiculous
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Video game titles have gotten ridiculous. I think I really noticed it earlier this year when Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix decided use Rise of the Tomb Raider as the title of the next game in the series. I’d gotten my fill of the word “rise” (and its variants) after being subjected to The Dark Knight Rises, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Hannibal Rising, and many others at the movie theater. Especially because very few of the people or groups who are supposed to rise in those movies actually do!
Destructoid’s Steven Hansen shares my pain and has put together his own list of words that need to be stricken from game titles. Unsurprisingly, it all loops back to Call of Duty:
Lords of the Fallen and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare just came out and they should be laughed out the damn building for their horrible, generic videogames names.
I originally typed “Armored Warfare” and was confused when Google failed to bring up results for our “Call of Duty: Armored Warfare” review. Then I realized it was “Advanced Warfare” after remembering I kept getting it confused with Advance Wars originally.
DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?
You can read the rest of the article at Destructoid.
NBA 2K15 smashes to the top of Oct 2014 best-seller list (yes, even over Smash Bros 3DS)
Even though the month of October saw the release of a new Borderlands game and the first Smash Bros. title for a handheld, NBA 2K15 emerged victorious in The NPD Group’s recounting of the best-selling games of October 2014.
The basketball sim managed to hold off a pair of new releases as well as the continued sales success of Super Smash Bros. For 3DS (which landed at #2). A trio of new releases, The Evil Within (#3), Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (#4), Skylanders: Trap Team (#6), were close behind.
And believe it or not, but Minecraft continues to hold a spot in the top ten as the retail release of the PlayStation 4 Edition propelled it into #10 on the list. Sunset Overdrive, Microsoft’s big Xbox One exclusive for the Fall, did not make the top ten though Joystiq is reporting that it was the ninth best-selling game among individual titles.
This month’s top ten can be found in a handy list format after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, Mobile, News, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Destiny, FIFA 15, Madden NFL 15, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Minecraft, NBA 2K15, NPD, Skylanders: Trap Team, Super Smash Bros. For 3DS, The Evil Within
Insert Quarter: A History of (Video Game) Violence
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
The video game industry’s fiercest critics will always say that games have never been more violent and that it is doing horrible damage to our children. But the game industry’s fiercest critics have always been saying that. In fact, many of them were children themselves when the first round of panic gripped parents during Death Race‘s 1976 heyday.
Vice’s Mike Diver examines this legacy of violence, citing everything from the obvious (Mortal Kombat and Carmageddon) to the obscure (Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior and Battle Chess). I never thought of Battle Chess as particularly gruesome, but your primer on pixelated gore awaits:
If you came to games fresh during the previous console generation, where once-grainy graphics made the switch to full HD, you don’t know how easy you’ve had it. There was a time, long before the gushes of crimson coloring contemporary offerings of extreme violence–Gears and God of War, Dead Rising, and the more recent Resident Evils, Max Payne 3, the Dead Space series, Bulletstorm, and BioShock (to name but a few)–where you had to lean on your imagination to bring scenes of disgusting dismemberment to life.
You can read the rest of the article at Vice.
Retro City Rampage: DX will be available on nearly every platform imaginable next week
Vblank Entertainment has announced that Retro City Rampage: DX, the expanded version of 2012’s Retro City Rampage, will be available on nearly every video game platform beginning next week.
Retro City Rampage: DX will be available on November 11 for the PS4, PS3, and Vita as a Cross-Buy title. The game will be a separate download from the original PS3/Vita version and will priced at $9.99 ($7.99 for PlayStation Plus subscribers).
If you’ve already purchased Retro City Rampage on the other previously available platforms, the DX version will be available as a free update. The game will be available through the WiiWare Shop for Nintendo’s Wii console on Thursday, November 13. The PC/Mac version will launch sometime next week, though the date is still to be determined. Finally, Retro City Rampage: DX is expected to be available for Xbox 360 next week through the Xbox Live Arcade, barring any last minute certification problems.
The DX version of Retro City Rampage was originally released for the 3DS earlier this year. This new version of the game fine-tuned everything about the Retro City Rampage experience including rebalanced missions, more checkpoints, tweaked controls, a complete graphical overhaul, and many more updates. A full rundown of the changes made to the DX version of the game can be found at Vblank’s official website.
If this wasn’t enough Retro City Rampage news for one day, stay tuned, because Vblank has promised “pretty big” RCR news will be announced later this month.
New Releases: CoD: Advanced Warfare, Wolf Among Us, Harvest Moon: Lost Valley, More
It’s the first full week of November, so you know what that means, don’t you? Activision is rolling out the latest entry in their Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Starring Kevin Spacey as Jonathan Irons, the head of a massive Private Military Contractor, the near-future shooter will be released for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
Naturally, this also means that all of the other publishers are ducking Advanced Warfare and holding their big November games until later in the month. Sometimes Nintendo bucks the trend with a big game, but not this year. Instead, we get the 3DS game Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley (the first in the series to be developed in-house at Natsume) and Telltale’s collected edition of The Wolf Among Us (PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One). And speaking of collections, 2K Games bundled together BioShock Infinite: The Complete Edition for the PS3 and Xbox 360 this week.
The full list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged BioShock Infinite, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley, The Wolf Among Us
Insert Quarter: A Profile of the Video Game Archivists at the Library of Congress
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
With more than 6,000 titles, the Library of Congress is home to one of the largest video game archives in the world. But the curation and management of the collection is in the hands of just four part-time employees. BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein reached out to these four men to learn how the Library of Congress is attempting to preserve America’s gaming heritage and how much more still needs to be done:
No, the work of game copyrighting and archiving at our country’s signal institution for cultural preservation is not done by a dedicated full-time staff. Instead, it’s the passion project of a handful of archivists who want to be the new standard-bearers in the preservation of video games. Indeed, the state of video game collection at the Library is something of an expression of the liminal state of video games in American popular culture writ large. The Library recognizes the cultural importance of video games, but only devotes four people part-time to their archiving; Game companies insist that their products are the medium of the future, but don’t trust archives with their source code; Collectors sell their troves on Craigslist and eBay rather than considering donation.
Even to get to this point, though, has been a journey in and of itself.
You can read the rest of the article at BuzzFeed.
Insert Quarter: The History of Music Games
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Almost 50 years ago, Paul and Art Garfunkel asked, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” in their hit song, “Mrs. Robinson.” DiMaggio would later tell Simon that he hadn’t gone anywhere, even though his playing days were long behind him. Likewise, today’s gamers have probably asked themselves, what happened to all the music games? The conventional wisdom says that they just don’t sell anymore, but who can turn down an invitation to rock out with your plastic guitar out?
IGN’s Chris Reed dug in to the history of the music from its humble roots (1996’s PaRappa the Rapper) all the way through the Guitar Here/Rock Band rivalry and into the future of the genre:
Music/rhythm games have run a surprisingly dynamic path through gaming history. Some genres drift into popularity and gradually fade out as technology and popular taste change. You might not even realize it’s happened until one day you look around and wonder, for instance, where all the 3D platformers went. Music games, on the other hand, moseyed along under the radar for the better part of a decade before taking off like a shot, attaining meteoric success before drying up nearly all at once.
You can read the rest of the article at IGN.