I went in head first for Skullgirls. When I started playing it I decided to go as deep as I could, opting to buy a fighting pad, downloading a document with all the characters and movesets, training and writing down combos I discover as a kind of ‘cheat sheet’, I even went so far as to watch people play online to see if I could pick up a few things.
To be honest, I haven’t played a lot of fighting games as of late. But Skullgirls appealed to me, probably because the hyper comic stylized and sexy girls who’s styles straddled the line of gothic and horror lunacy reminded me a lot of the classic Darkstalkers Capcom video games of old. For those not in the know, Darkstalkers is where the iconic succubus Morrigan and cute little cat lady Felicia come from, two characters that have made a come back in the Marvel vs Capcom style fighting games.
To be honest, because of my unfamiliarity with a lot of the newer style fighting franchises, I was preparing myself to be punished mercilessly by this game and I wasn’t disappointed.
Skullgirls has to be one of the most beautiful, fluid and absolutely frustrating fighting games I’ve ever played. It’s visuals pop with an undeniable flourish on the screen and as gorgeous as it all looks, it’ll deliver you your ass, priority mail, Cash On Delivery.
The first thing people will probably notice when booting up the game the first time is the small roster, as compared to the legions of characters which seem to be on offer in other fighting games these days. Eight choose-able characters seems like a really small selection, for example Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 has a starting roster of 48 characters, last year’s Mortal Kombat had 27 characters and even the lesser known BlazBlue Continuum Shift Extended has about 24 characters. However, Reverge Labs says there will be downloadable characters coming about soon enough.
So at first glance the roster of Skullgirls is going to feel skimpy, however, it’s worth noting that every character has a very distinct style of play. Whereas in some other games characters can feel somewhat interchangeable, every Skullgirl feels like she was crafted for a very specific reason.
Cerebella with her huge biceped hat is a beat stick with more muscle than mobility, Peacock can spam the heck out of projectiles and keep an opponent at a distance. The game is working on an economy of characters that are built to the very rigid molds they were designed for, it means a lot more thought as to the kind of characters you will want to utilize and how.
The cool thing about this kind of specialization of characters is the game allows you to go for the tag moding of a lot of other games right now or to keep it to a single character. The developers balanced this out by making it so that at the three character cap you’ll be weaker and take more damage than usual but will have more tag attacking options. On the other end, if you choose a single character you’ll be very powerful and have a lot of endurance but have no tagging options, this allows players to spring for a singular specialty while learning the ins and outs of a character or to mix it up with two or three characters in any given match.
There’s a nice tutorial included in the game to allow players to become familiar with everything from hit confirmation, canceling to just learning to set up ground to air combos and push blocking. This was really helpful to me as a bit of a novice because it taught me the techniques I would have to learn in order to really play the game. There’s also a training mode, like the ones in other games except for it has a lot of advanced options for the skilled fighting game player like hit-box mode, which allows a player to see the hit boxes of himself and the opponent in play.
So after picking up my fighting pad, working all the way through the tutorials and spending time in the training room, I thought I was good to go. I boot up my first game on Normal and get beaten easily by the AI in my first match. I did this several times and failed to beat my first opponent, so I exited and started again this time on Easy, same result. Then again, this time in Sleepwalk (thank goodness five difficulty settings) and I finally got somewhere, I still struggled a bit but I was pulling myself up slowly.
This game is certainly not easy. It’s a steep climb for a newb like me and despite feeling like I’d learned a lot through the tutorial mode, finishing it was difficult. At first I was gripping the controller with the muscle tension I’d imagine a viking used to grip a battleaxe in the throes of war. This game is anti-button mash, it’s very much about the way you approach, your ability to block in a split second when needed and how to follow your hits with intricate combos. When I eventually loosened up and started picking up more combos and blocks, I started taking to the game a lot better. But the first few days were filled with game over screens that I can still see etched into the backs of my eyelids when I sleep.
The controller layout in Skullgirls has three strengths of kicks and punches with two buttons that you can assign multi-button presses to. It’s much more complex than UMvC3, which is streamlining fighting games with three attacking buttons, two tags and a ‘special’ button for launching.
With tag attack you can customize the kind of attack you want the tagged character to do when they get in. This allows you to perform a nearly limitless amount of tag attacks from special moves to simple forward + strong punches.
Also, to pause the game you have to hold down the Start button for a few seconds. This feature is meant for people who like to take their fighting skills on the tournament circuit because if you accidentally pause the game in a tournament you are automatically disqualified.
Games online feel lagless, largely due to the GGPO netcode. I let people pound the tar out of me for a couple of hours and only noticed any lag for about three seconds.
This is a game that has been designed for core fighting game enthusiasts. Everything about this game really feels like it requires you to dig down to it’s core to really understand what’s going on on screen beyond the flashy characters and bouncy visuals. I have fun playing this game until I start turning up the difficulty, at that point I feel like a kid left at the controls of a nuclear reactor, all these shiny buttons and levers but I am completely out of my depth and I know nothing good can come of this.
It’s a steep climb and I’m certainly up for the challenge but I don’t know how many other people would be in my shoes. If you can come to this game with a little bit of humility and meet it at the table on it’s terms, the depth of the gameplay and the precision design will keep you wrapped up in it for a very long time. But if you’re the kind of person who idles near the fighting games watching others play because you’re afraid of embarrassing yourself in front of them, this might be one to steer clear of.
Pros
Cons
4/5
It seems everything is not awesome as Awesomenauts release reels around this week.
The publisher for the digital only game DTP Entertainment filed for bankruptcy this sent other game news sites to speculate the game wouldn’t see release for either PSN or XBLA as first planned this week (or possibly ever according to some sites).
Luckily the developers for Awesomenauts stepped in to clear up the confusion.
“We have just confirmed that the game is coming this week. We cannot comment on the exact situation any further right now, but rest assured that you can all play Awesomenauts this week!” said Joost, a Ronimo Team Member on their Awesomenaut forums.
This probably comes as double relief for Sony seeing as they won’t have to scramble to find a replacement free game for PS plus users.
How DTP’s insolvency has effected any post launch updates for the game remains to be seen, but for now at least the game is coming out on schedule.
Crowd-funding has become a hot topic within the video game industry since Tim Schafer or Double Fine gathered more than $3 million for a point-and-click adventure a couple of months ago through Kickstarter.com.
An estimated $9 million was donated in March alone by the salivating salvo of fans looking to give a hand up to those projects they wanted to see released into the market, according to Kotaku.com.
Hell, Kickstarter.com is set to triple the amount of money it garners for projects this year and video game Kickstarter projects are becoming more popular.
A lot of these Kickstarter projects rely on a reward system to goad donators into parting with some of their hard earned cash. Additional content, t-shirts, soundtracks and a whole barrel of different things have been offered to gamers as exclusive rewards for helping the team by backing them financially.
But Gambitious is debuting a crowd-funding platform that will act something like a ‘video game stock market.’ People will not only put their money on a game they want to see, but also a game they believe will be a commercial success, meaning they will see returns on their initial investment.
“A developer decides what percentage of the required funding people can buy. Someone who invests money in a project, becomes a shareholder and is entitled to dividends,” said Gambitious CEO Korstiaan Zandvliet.
The company is launching it’s platform at E3 this year. The crowd-funding platform will first be launched in Europe but the company wants to go international with it once they get the legal kinks worked out.
Vocal gamers who complained to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) have gotten Capcom’s rating of “A+” downgraded to a “B”.
Since Street Fight X Tekken came out in early March, Capcom has logged 33 complaints, 28 classified as “advertising/sales issues” and five as “problems with product/service” with the BBB.
Before Street Fight X Tekken, Capcom had only logged nine complaints in the last three years.
This is because of the 12 non-playable characters locked on-disc which Capcom says will be available at some later date with pay-as-you unlock through DLC.
Capcom has come out in defense of the practice stating that they have delivered an enormous amount of content for the asking price of the game and they’ve continued to defend themselves in the face of this downgrade with the same token.
The backlash for the on-disc DLC debacle as already pushed the company to remove the 12 pay-to-play characters from the PC version of the game.
Capcom has also stated that storing the characters on-disc also allows people to access those characters later without having heavy downloads taking up storage space on their hard drive. But it also saves Capcom fees associated in dealing with Microsoft and Sony when they have to upload to their digital storage spaces for users of their respective services.
It all started with Sony’s announcement that they would layoff 10,000 workers globally which accounts for six per cent of their global workforce.
The “One Sony” initiative, is Sony’s attempt to reorganize the company and bring it back into good standings with its investors.
Part of that plan lead them to basically lop off the gangrenous arm of the ailing company by cutting back on chemical and small to mid sized LCD production.
Sony was essentially bracing for the end of a terrible fiscal year in which the company expected a $6.4 billion dollar loss, the biggest in the company’s history.
“We consider the current situation to be very serious,” said Masaru Kato, chief financial officer for Sony Corp. “We will take resolute measures to transform our business without protecting any sacred cows.”
A surprise announcement of the cancelling of Qore, a digital Playstation magazine with a four year run had people scratching their heads on what might be on the chopping block.
This was followed by Kaz Hirai who had recently ascended to CEO and Executive Deputy President came out and said that the company was refocusing on it’s mobile, digital imaging and video game businesses.
Sony is hoping that the profitability of it’s video game businesses will help to dig it out of the rut the company is currently in.
This also means Sony is putting more money in technology development so it can offer more downloadable titles for PSN, as well as more Playstation Suite compatible devices.
EA has been receiving bags upon bags of angry letters calling the publisher out on including same-sex relationships in some of their games mainly Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic, according to gamesindustry.biz.
Many of the letters are threatening to boycott EA if it refuses to remove same-sex content from its video games because the letters claim it hoists LGBT content on children.
EA is taking a stand and not going to censor it’s content to appease the letter writers despite the threats being posed.
Jeff Brown, VP of communications for EA says the letters add up to little more than harassment.
The letters also claim that EA has been pressured by LGBT groups to include the content in order to force it upon young players. EA has denied any such pressures from interest groups maintaining that the content is designed to give different players more options, not push content on children.
Both Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic hold ESRB ratings preventing them from falling into the hands of young children and the content being spoken of is optional and dependent on player choice.
The majority of these letters are from Florida and thought to be part of letter writing campaigns being hosted by Family Associations.
Shoot Many Robots is my favorite painful pleasure this year and will probably be the reason I destroy both my monitor and controller sometime in the near future. This game is both completely wonderful and utterly frustrating in the same breath, but it’s nothing that video gaming’s ‘old guard’ hasn’t seen before.
Developer Demiurge wants to take you on a plunge into a dystopian future where robots have run amok, causing a robot apocalypse or ‘robotcalypse.’ You take on the role of P. Walter Tugnut, a beer swilling, nut tugging son of a gun with a penchant for robo-pistol whippery as you go out to, well, Shoot Many Robots.
This game feels a lot like old school side scrolling shooters Metal Slug, Contra, and even Ghosts n Goblins, but it also adds in the ability to fully customize your character with custom load outs like a lot of the more modern shooter genre games. You also level up your character which adds to the damage you do and your overall health.
The coolest thing about Shoot Many Robots is that it’s an online 4-player co-operative game, allowing you to throw three of your beer swilling compatriots into the trailer to take on the robot infested terrain together.
My advice is to get some friends in on the mix, because when I used the matchmaking feature I didn’t have much luck finding partners to blaze down the dusty trails with.
Shoot Many Robots is pretty basic; is it moving? Shoot it! Do you think it will move? You should probably shoot it! Sounds simple enough but make no mistake, this game is a steep climb.
This game starts out pretty easy but the difficulty shoots up significantly as you progress. I’ve got a character that’s level 42, quickly ascending to the 50 cap and though I’ve finished the game on normal, on hard I’m quickly grinding to a halt, I don’t even want to think about what this game will be like on insane. Shoot Many Robots was obviously made to accomodate people playing co-op to clear out hordes in later levels, but if you want to play this one solo you’re going to find the need to grind through old levels in order to be able to get the gear and experience you need to move on.
The gear is an awesome addition to this kind of game, it allows you to really tune your character to your preference. You can go in with all guns blazing or you can take a more defensive tact; this allows players to vary their team setup for the different situations they’ll encounter.
The grinding aspect of the game isn’t too bad though. Considering the source material for this kind of game, spending a few extra playthroughs on a couple of older levels isn’t quite as bad as being sent back to the start to play everything all over again. Grinding can also yield unlocks for new weapons and more ‘nuts’ (the game’s currency) to spend on new equipment.
Speaking of nuts, as you play the game you’ll find a meter in the top of the screen which fills as you kill enemies. It peaks at 5x and acts as a multiplier for the nuts you’ll pick up of of defeated enemies. In order to keep the meter from depleting and knocking you back down to lower multipliers, you have to continuously defeat enemies. This acts as incentive to keep moving forward and to take chances against more difficult enemies.
There’s a good amount of enemy variety. You’ll mostly see these tiny robots with chainsaw on their backs throughout the game, these generally come in large groups and attack you Zerg style. They’re easy to deal with one on one but they can easily swarm you as you progress, often pouring out of every opening in the scenery like a clown pulling handkerchiefs from its sleeve.
This can be grating at times, as the game simply wants to overwhelm you. Often time I found myself bouncing above scores of enemies shooting down. This can be quite frustrating, especially if you spend four minutes in a level jumping around like an idiot only to die. When the enemies become that thick you either outmaneuver them or you go back to earlier stages in a hope to grind to a level up or get newer more powerful gear. This really cuts into the flow of the game, but for an old school side scrolling shooter like this it’s nothing new. I’d just grab a water, come back and keep playing.
Other enemies will become more tricky and diabolical as you move through the game, requiring you to knock back their bullets with your melee attack or shoot their missiles out of the sky before they home in on you and obliterate your health bar. It can become downright enraging as you get to a point in the level where you’re fending off several shooting robots while swarms of chainsaw wielding bots carpet the ground beneath you, forcing you to constantly jump and shoot or use an ability for crowd control.
There are two special abilities that allow you to crowd control these zerging bots if you aren’t hitting them with your gun. You can equip a slide maneuver which allows you to damage and knock down foes who you collide with, or you can equip a slam which acts much like the ground pound in Mario games. Both are fairly effective but risky a lot of the time, and either really aren’t dedicated to your character as you have to equip items which allow you to use them.
One of my favorite parts of the game is the rocking guitar in the background that plays during your rampage. It goes from a somewhat light solo during the lighter battles to really heavy when you are in the thick of battle. It’s like whoever has the guitar suddenly gets a pang of inspiration whenever he sees blood drenched robots pouring in from every corner of the screen and it really suits the tone of this game well.
This game is pretty funny. The entire game is a riff on the idea of the robotcalypse idea. The in game text is drenched in humorous one liners including false statistics like boosts to patriotism for every flag bearing weapon you can buy. There are also references to the nuts sacks you collect and even the less-than-subtle toilet flush when you exit your inventory will draw a chuckle every so often. The gear will allow you to dress P. Walter Tugnut in any crazy way you want, you can make him a ballerina in a tutu and fairy wings or you can just have the “Fruit Fucker” of Penny Arcade fame make sweet love to his balding head as you play. You’ll also get ridiculous items, like a cat carrier that shoots giant bombs, or a baby carrier which gives you, well, “plus one babies.”
It even fits the slightly cel-shaded look of the game which was an excellent choice for this downloadable title.
This game delivers a lot of content for its price tag. It asks 10 bucks for a game that I think has delivered a lot more than most downloadable titles I’ve seen recently at a higher price of admission. Even if you go in on nostalgia for those older games alone, there’s not much to regret taking the plunge on this game.
Note: The Playstation Network version of this game was played for review. Shoot Many Robots is also available on the Xbox Live Marketplace on Xbox 360
Pros
Cons
4/5
Sony has pulled Hot Shots Tennis and MotorStorm Arctic Rift in order to stop the two games from being used as exploits to hack into the Vita core functions.
Hackers have indicated that these titles might be used to gain access to the core functions in order to run their own programs.
Sony had a hard time with the piracy rates on it’s previous handheld system, the PSP. Sony’s trying to do everything it can to thwart a repeat performance by pirates on it’s Vita platform.
However, the only programs that the exploits would allow users to run are homebrew titles and not full Vita or PSP games but the scare was enough to prompt the discontinuation of the titles on PSN until Sony finds a way to patch the exploits.
Congressmen Joe Baca of California and Frank Wolf of Virginia want to put warning labels on games to caution families about potentially damaging material within.
The bill introduced Monday called the ‘Violence in Video Games Act’ will label video games, “WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.’’
According to the bill, games rated from “E” for everyone through “A” for adults would have to carry the label. This means the only games that would avoid the label would be EC or early childhood games.
The bill war introduced is apparently a product of recent increasing scientific evidence linking violent video games to aggressive behavior according to Wolf.
The bill is unlikely to see much traction however, since games have been declared under protection of the first amendment since last June. This means games are a protected form of free speech like music or movies, two forms of entertainment that have also undergone their time in the spotlight of congress.
This isn’t Baca’s first attempt to apply warning labels to video games, he helped introduce a very similar bill in 2009 and again last January.
CBS Interactive has inked a deal to buy Giant Bomb, a video game review/news site run by Jeff Gerstmann.
The acquisition is a strange one considering CBS Interactive is the parent company of GameSpot and GameSpot is the former employer of much of the staff at Giant Bomb.
The two will be sharing office space under the terms of the new deal.
Giant Bomb was started in 2008 after Jeff Gerstmann, founder of Giant Bomb, was fired from his previous job at GameSpot. Many believed the termination had something to do with a controversial review he did about Eidos’ Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, GameSpot was promoting the title on it’s website at the time. Other editors walked out the door in protest after he was fired. Gerstmann has since made it clear his termination at GameSpot had nothing to do with the negative review.
Giant Bomb is telling people what’s happening with premium memberships in a FAQ on www.giantbomb.com, they will also be interviewing John Davison from GameSpot at 4pm PST.
UPDATE: This is a link to the video.
http://www.justin.tv/giantbomb/b/311753835
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