Titillating Tidings...

I have some pants-wettingly exciting news for you all; gamergirltalk will soon be coming to facebook. You’ll be able to catch up on any noteworthy titbits in between posts and let me know your thoughts on current affairs in the gaming universe. Suggestions for posts and reviews will also be taken on board so please feel free to be as vocal as you like!

In the interim, here are some tasty little morsels to sustain you:

 

Beyond Good & Evil coming to XBLA & PSN...in HD

I played Michel Ancel’s cult classic years ago on my PS2  and absolutely loved it; the graphics were mouth-watering and the sound track was incredible. What could be better than sauntering into the Akuda bar and letting the hypnotic Propaganda wash over you– good times. I can recall playing this game through the night after finishing work at the pub and not realising how long I’d been gaming until the morning sunlight started to peek through the curtain; truly the mark of a great game. Now it’s being released in HD there’s no excuse to miss it second time around!

Double Trouble at Double Fine

 

Tim Schafer has been joined by Ron Gilbert at Double Fine to work on a new project. Two of the three Monkey Island creators united once again! Can’t wait to see what’s in store! More to follow…

BT Infinity

Many of you may have seen the new advert. Yes, Adam has finally moved back in with Jane! In addition to this news, BT are rolling out fibre optic broadband and actively contacting eligible customer regarding an upgrade. Methinks this could be in preparation for OnLive next year…

Trick or Treat...

Ah, October…the month of magic and mayhem. And my birthday! But let us forget this auspicious occasion for a moment; let us instead put it to the back of our minds to recall at a later date. Perhaps when you’re out shopping…

I am of course referring to the enchanting event that is Halloween and the delightful, frightful fascination we Homo sapiens have with it. One group of Homo sapiens in particular, at Double Fine Productions (founded by the legendary Tim Schafer of Monkey Island fame) have created an aesthetically charming, downloadable game available on XBLA and PSN, dubbed Costume Quest, with a Halloween release date.

Double Fine attribute the game to Tasha Harris, lead animator. The inception took place during a time known as “Amnesia Fortnights”, when Double Fine was without a publisher. During this period, the team diverged into four groups, each working on their own projects. Once development resumed on Brutal Legend however, the projects weren’t pursued. When it later came to light that EA had not authorised a sequel, Tim Schafer once again turned his attention to the fantastic four with a view to developing these into smaller games. Schafer succeeded and THQ opted to publish two of the games as downloadable titles; Costume Quest being the first of these.

Costume Quest is an action RPG that takes place on Halloween. A brother and sister (twins called Wren and Reynold) are off for a spooky night of trick-or-treating. One of them is allocated the responsibility of looking after their twin by their mother; the choice is up to the player, as this is the character you’ll subsequently play through the game with. And so the evening begins….

Things very quickly take a darker turn as your sibling is kidnapped! And all because of their provocative outfit…But fear not! This isn’t a discourse on the seedy underbelly of the society in which we live today. The perpetrator is a gluttonous ghoul with a sweet tooth, who mistakes your other half for a giant piece of candy.

The task at hand is clear. You must navigate your way around the neighbourhood, battling monsters, witches and bullies, scouring the streets for clues to your sisters (or brothers) whereabouts. Along the way, you’ll encounter NPC characters you can befriend to help you in your endeavours as you collect candy, points and quests to rescue your twin and save Halloween!

This all sounds very pleasant. But scuttling about in a cardboard robot costume yo’ mama made isn’t necessarily going to make you feel like Mister Big Balls. But an interesting twist awaits you…When Reynold engages in battle, he morphs into a gargantuan beast, not dissimilar to Optimus Prime, bestowing the feeling of being a bit of a bad ass upon you. So once again, all is right with the world. The costume related super powers extend to all of the characters and the morphing cut scenes put He-man to shame!

Costume Quest looks set to be a super sweet downloadable game. The juxtaposition of the cutesy cartoon style of the RPG portion of the game works superbly with the action segments, with an animation style reminiscent of a Japanese Manga. You genuinely will be in for a treat this Halloween.

Watch the trailer at http://www.costumequestgame.com/

 

Find GOD in the Clouds

No I haven’t gone all evangelical on you. A Games On Demand service has been launched in the US by OnLive; a company with a vision of a future that will see HD games being streamed to…well, pretty much anything you care to think of.

OnLive will eliminate the need for expensive hardware by streaming video games to your choice of media, be it a laptop, netbook or even your television. The cloud, a plethora of high powered servers, will deal with the nitty gritty of the games graphics and stream the resultant in-game action back to you in real time. OnLive are also offering a control pad and MicroConsole, similar to a SlingBox, which will link the service to your TV, doing away with the need for a console all together.

The current games available to play include Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassins Creed 2, so EA and Ubisoft clearly have their derrières firmly rooted to the bandwagon. OnLive is currently scheduled to make its debut in the UK in late 2011 by BT, who have a small stake in the company, so all’s well, that ends well. But before you abandon your consoles by the wayside, there’s just one more thing….yes, like Columbo, super detective extraordinaire, let’s take a closer look at this promise of a gamers arcadia…

Firstly, the choice of games will be limited dependant upon which games publishers elect to work with OnLive. In addition to EA and Ubisoft, Eidos, Atari, THQ, Take-Two and Codemasters have also counted themselves in, so thankfully we might all one day be able to play 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand via the Cloud. Hallelujah!

Secondly, problem number 2…It’s big. It is a number 2 of huge proportions. A number 2 that may well clog the U-bend of OnLive’s vision and turn their pipe dream into a messy nightmare. OnLive was successfully showcased at the 2009 Games Developers Conference in San Francisco. Word on the street is that the reaction times weren’t quite fast enough to satisfy everyone, which begs the question as to what sort of lag could be experienced when transitioning to a wider audience. The conference in San Francisco debuted servers running a handful of games at a time, but how will they cope in terms of resolution and speed, when faced with the immense volume of users that OnLive are aiming for? Then there’s the hardware perspective; to maintain a basic standard of quality as promised, a lot of high end hardware is going to be required to a low ratio of users. An increase in users would dictate a necessity for an increase in the amount of aforementioned expensive hardware in order to maintain a level of consistency with the service and presumably this cost is going to be passed onto the consumer via the subscription charge. So potentially we’re already looking at a fairly costly subscription when OnLive finally wings its way to the UK, which will factor in future expenses, as OnLive would surely have the business acumen to avoid a lower initial cost which would constantly have to be increased as they expand. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. Throw in the cost of the games and things are starting to look mighty expensive…perhaps a cheaper, more feasible alternative would be some sort of device you could purchase outright which had the facility to play any compatible video games you purchased and the only subscription charge applicable would be when playing with other people online…multiplayer gaming if you will. It could be called a PlayBox or XStation… alas, we can but dream…

Addressing the issue of performance and lag; apparently the slower reaction time is imperceptible. The norm is 35-40 milliseconds between pushing a button and watching the reaction occur on screen. This increases to 80 milliseconds with OnLive, due to the information being relayed to the server first and then back down the server again to your screen with the appropriate in game action. This can nonetheless cause problems based on your proximity to an OnLive data centre. There are (or soon will be) six OnLive data centres in the US. So if you were a user based anywhere outside of the US, you would have some serious problems in terms of game response as you wait for the input from the button you’ve just bashed to travel across the ocean, pop into the data centre, retrieve the relevant response and make its journey back to your screen. However, Steve Perlman, founder of OnLive, like some omniscient messiah, has pronounced that his critics are just plain ignorant and that the service will work. Well that’s my mind put to rest then…

It’s safe to assume that rolling out OnLive in the US is akin to a giant beta, as they haven’t announced any plans for overseas data centres at present. If their business model succeeds, perhaps global expansion will follow shortly afterwards.

This delay may be a costly one though, as Sony and Microsoft are already working on their own Cloud gaming services. Sony’s Remote Play utilises the PS3, thus eliminating the need for a subscription cost. As long as you have access to Wi-Fi, any PS3 game would be playable via your netbook or laptop for example. Microsoft’s contribution is Xbox Live. Following the announcement of the Windows Phone 7, the potential would be the capability to play your game of choice on your PC, Xbox and Windows Phone 7 but this would require the games to have been installed on all platforms first.

So apart from a handful of some rather daunting potential problems and the budding competition already snapping at it’s heels, OnLive, in all its glory, will be arriving at your doorsteps in 2011. I don’t know about you, but I might just be hiding behind the sofa when it comes a-knockin’…

Consoles: the next generation

Almost four years after the release of the Playstation 3 and five years after the unveiling of the Xbox 360, we are still no closer to getting our hands on the 8th generation of consoles. Sure we’ve been given the slim versions to placate our voracious appetite for something new and shiny (or new and matte if you’re a PS3 owner) but beauty is more than skin deep after all; yes my Xbox may have been on a diet and is flaunting its slick new contours about town for all the boys to see, but inside, it’s the same dowdy old processor.

Both consoles were cosmetically redesigned, slimmed down and hushed up, with increased storage capacity and a few extra USB ports thrown in for good measure. And now; silence descends…and it’s not down to the new whisper quiet fans. As we stand squinting, facing the horizon, waiting for the dawn of a new era of super consoles, Microsoft and Sony lurk just out of sight, making no mention of their next gen plans. It looks like we’re in for a long wait…

But what exactly are we waiting for? Both consoles, particularly the Xbox 360, would benefit immensely from a much needed upgrade to their innards. 5 years is a healthy lifespan for a console. However, with the announcement of the slim versions, we could be looking at another 2 or 3 years tacked on to their life cycles.

With the wave of developers bashing our bargain bin games and the recent influx of titles requiring online passes in order to access the online content (EA being the biggest culprit), it might be reasonable to assume that we are being steered towards a more download exclusive market. And what could be better than a console designed specifically for this purpose.

Money, money, money, money...Mooooooney!

Could it be that the tact being adopted by such avaricious developers such as EA, THQ, Activision and very possibly Ubisoft, which is spreading like bed bugs in a “Beds! Beds! Beds!” depot, is casting its golden hued spell on the console Gods? The colour of money can be very persuasive.

There is already a wealth of games available on the Xbox Live Marketplace to download and with just a few clicks of a button, any one of these titles can be yours, conveniently installed right to your hard drive and all at full price no less. Incidentally, I bought my used copy of Mass Effect about a year ago for £8. It’s currently on the Marketplace for £19.99. That’s incentive for you. Pay over the odds and wait an eternity for the game to download and eat up all of the space on your hard drive when it’s finally installed. Of course, at this juncture, your gnarled old hands will already be at the mercy of arthritis and the grandkids will probably be heading over on their hover-scooters so the game will have to wait until after dinner. But then you’ll be free to crack open a beer, take a journey into the past and play that crazy Mass Effect game with its antiquated genre of space travel. Yes, it takes that a long to download a full game…well almost.

There’s no real cost saving for the consumer when purchasing a download only title and not everyone will have the broadband speed required to make this a viable option. This problem would become even more pertinent on release dates, with the huge numbers of people simultaneously wanting to download the same title. Then there’s the problem of hard drive space, which Microsoft have only exacerbated, as an upgrade to your hard drive means having to purchase an Xbox HDD which is very much over priced, unlike the PS3 which allows the use of any external hard drive with the console. And should you download a game, you’d pretty much have to delete it once completed to make space for your new titles…but what if you want to reminisce and play it again at some point in the future? You’d have to download it all over again and we know how long that takes. It’ll be the great grand kids coming over for dinner before it’s installed.

Conspiracy theories are rife; proclaiming the console of the future will be released sans disc drive. But consumers would need to be offered a reasonable price for downloadable games and cheaper, larger capacity hard drives before even contemplating purchasing such a console. And the issue of broadband speeds isn’t a problem that can be resolved by Microsoft or Sony. Are these concerns going to be seriously addressed over the next few years before releasing the 8th gen console as envisioned? Or will we be coerced down this path against our will, with all developers eventually adopting EA’s strategum and making chargeable DLC and online passes the status quo; before hammering the final nail into our coffins and making the games themselves download only, with no cost incentives, enormous strains on our hard drives and broadband speeds becoming the bane of our gaming existence?

If this is the vision of the future, making the used game market a relic of the past, frustrated consumers could consider donning thier pirate hats and actually start cutting into the developers profit margins; they would stand to lose a lot more through potential piracy than they could possibly be losing now as a result of the buying and selling of used games. More often than not, I’ll buy a used game that I would never have even considered purchasing at full price, find I enjoy it and buy the DLC. That’s a fiscal transaction which wouldn’t have occurred without the likes of CEX or Gamestation selling discounted second hand games.

In the face of boycotting and piracy, maybe the likes of EA will regret the position they’re inevitably sailing towards. Arrr mateys! Maybe the used game market wasn’t so bad after all…

Xbox Live Summer of Arcade

The Xbox Live Summer of Arcade is now well under way with 3 of the 5 titles having already been released; the first two of which were Limbo and Hydro Thunder Hurricane. Microsoft couldn’t have chosen a more starkly contrasted pair to release within the space of a week with the juxtaposition of a new art house style offering and a revived retro classic.

Limbo presents an eerie world of subdued charcoal tones. No sound other than the hushed whisper of the wind rustling through the leaves can be heard. Stumbling upon macabre scenes of corpses swinging from nooses or floating, bloated, face down in the water is the norm. You truly feel a sense of isolation as you navigate your character (a silhouette of a small boy with glowing eye sockets) around this world, deciphering puzzles and avoiding the sadistic traps set by the natives. “Company!” I hear you cry. But alas, finding a friendly face in this piece is not to be; dark, silent figures watching you expire at their hands offers little comfort…no surprise there.

The game play is very simplistic and pared down, in line with the aesthetic style of the game. In addition to the basic movement, your character can jump and hold on to objects to push or pull them as needed. The puzzles increase in difficulty as you progress and you really have to get your timing nailed on some of them in order to succeed. But whilst the puzzles are challenging, they’re not impossible; it’s certainly no Braid (sadly I was not a part of the elite set that actually managed to complete that game!).

Limbo is a game noir that presents a bit of a puzzler but not to those of you who relish a challenge! The opening act of the Summer of Arcade is a tough act to follow.

Hydro Thunder Hurricane on the other hand…this is the sequel to the arcade classic Hydro Thunder which later debuted on the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. The testosterone fuelled adrenaline fest with its garish colours, raucous soundtrack and the over-enthusiastic-verging-on-aggressive voice of the announcer booming the words “Hydro! Thunder! Hurricane!”at you, all combine perfectly to transport you back to a simpler time of nineties arcade racers. All that’s required to complete the experience in its entirety is a gaggle of pre-pubescent kids doing some back seat driving over your shoulder, waiting for their turn at the wheel.


The handling is very similar to Wipeout; the futuristic anti-gravity racer. This is probably due to the fact that your boat spends a lot of time airborne, skimming from peak to peak of the turbulent waves. The aim of the game is to accumulate credits to unlock the further content and the way to do this is very simple…win; poll in the top three and they’re yours.

The four race events are Race, Gauntlet, Ring Master and Championship. Speed is of the essence in all of these modes and they’ve given you a sweet looking choice of power boats to facilitate this. Race is a simple race to the finish, Gauntlet is a race to the finish in a given time limit with a smattering of exploding barrels bobbing around the track, Ring Master is (that’s right!) a race to the finish in a given time limit, guiding your boat through rings which will earn you a boost. Missing rings means no boost and seconds added to your time. And lastly, Championship; all of the above modes played in either novice, pro or expert.

The controls are simple enough; acceleration, boost and jump. But a certain amount of skill is required to utilise these at precisely the right moment to reap the most reward. Power-ups aplenty also litter the tracks along with a few random surprises that will have your pit crew at a loss for words. This isn’t all bad as they don’t hold back vocally if you place outside of the top three!

Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a trip down memory lane...on acid. Enjoy the ride!

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

Konami’s flagship series returns to the Xbox a second time following the release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in 2007, originally released on the Sony Playstation in 1997.

Instead of once again releasing a previous title on a different console, Konami have taken it one step further and gone all Frankenstein on us, creating a monster mash-up of what is essentially a 30 minute time attack mode.

No new characters, no new graphics; instead, we have an amalgamation of graphics, bosses and characters dragged from their platforms on the Game Boy Advance, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo DS to face off in 6 co-op levels, slaying the monsters standing in their way on the path to defeating Dracula.

The fan base is going to be split on this one. Whilst there’s no story and no RPG elements, we do finally have a multiplayer Castlevania game, with up to six player co-op. Whilst you can play single player, it’s pretty much a given that the game has been optimised for the multiplayer format, as trying to navigate your way through a level solo proves to be quite a challenge and this isn’t just down to the various levers and lift arrangements that require two characters to manoeuvre in order to progress; there are no save rooms! If you’re playing single player and take one hit too many, its game over and you’re back at the beginning. If you’re enjoying a co-op game however, your fellow vampire hunters can resurrect you with the Water of Life potion when you’ve been killed, as your character takes the form of a skeleton with a golden halo marker above its head upon your untimely demise. And its even armed…with a bone; a pitiful bone to throw at the multitude of enemies baying for your blood. But that should keep them off you until help arrives. And if it doesn’t, running away usually does the trick.

Whilst one might argue that Konami have churned out a multiplayer game which cannibalises previous Castlevania titles in order to make a quick profit, I think that in this instance, it’s a means to test the waters before they invest in creating a brand new multiplayer experience. This is the first time Castlevania has had the option of multiplayer after all and the reception it receives will surely dictate if this is to be incorporated in the future.

Konami’s motives aside; whether you’re a long time fan or a newcomer to the Castlevania games, accept it for what it is; a multiplayer offering from one of the most popular long-standing series of games of all time that’s a hell of a lot of fun to play.