Famed publisher of Darksiders and Saints Row took a shot in the money as it’s stock tumbled 30 percent, declining to 53 cents a share, it’s lowest since July 1995.

The fall comes largely due to their risky gamble on HD versions of uDraw, a gamble which saw THQ lose roughly $30 million.

They reported a net loss of $55.9 million, 82 cents a share, for the third fiscal quarter.

THQ saw success with the title on the Wii and made HD versions for the Xbox 360 and PS3 thinking it would follow that trend but THQ had to eat it as uDraw bombed on those platforms.

Now THQ is transitioning into a smaller company, 240 staff have been cut and CEO Brian Farrell is getting half of his overall pay cut going from $718,500 to $359,250 in the next year.

Nasdaq is threatening to delist the company unless they can pull their stock above a buck a share by the end of July. That means THQ has to get their shit together and soon.

But they’re looking into the ash pile for some glimmer of hope taking the news head on saying a smaller company will make it more agile to respond to the market.

“With our focused product plan, leaner cost structure, cash balance and existing credit facility, we believe the company has adequate resources to deliver on our strong multiyear pipeline of games,” Farrell said after the news broke.

Capcom’s most recent fighting title is making its way to the Playstation Vita and it has brought a trailer just to show you how much fun you can have on Sony’s new portable console.

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is currently scheduled to launch alongside the PS Vita on February 22nd 2012 for $39.99 Cdn/US respectively with no mention of whether if the title is going to be available as a download for the same price.

The game is currently available for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.

Unstoppable Gorg puts a new spin on the tower defense genre.

It’s a mishmash that brings old school black and white sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon to real time strategy.

You are the brave Captain Adam who is fending off aliens that look like runners up at some homemade costume junket and save his hot blonde girlfriend.

Coloured trails allow you to know the path of attacking aliens

The game is an overhead tower defense game using satellites instead of towers.

Unstoppable Gorg doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, in fact, it’s more of a cross between two different types of tower defense games. The kind which allows you to have unlimited control over where your towers are placed and the kind that limits placement by giving you prescribed spots to build towers in.

Gorg isn’t letting you make a maze out of your satellites, but it will let you shimmy in a few satellites where you need them most.

It does this by letting you place satellites in orbits around the defense point. You can spin the different orbits around to put satellites near the invasion routes.

This lets you have the best of both worlds, though the spots along the orbit are limited you’re allowed to spin the orbit however you like allowing you to make the most of the space and resources you have. You can even follow routes with towers for a few extra hits if it follows your orbit.

The orbit mechanic makes this tower defense game unique, the ability to switch tower positions on the fly without having to wholesale rid yourself of the tower and buy it back in another area.

This mechanic allows for a lot of flexibility, you can place fewer more powerful satellites and divide your attention more towards positioning them, or you can place more satellites which will drain your resources faster but won’t require as much ‘shimmy work’ from the player.

The decision is compounded by the fact that you’re given goals every round to acquire a certain amount of money or research. Reaching these goals allows the player to unlock newer satellites and grant them the ability to upgrade the older satellites by distributing research points before each round.

Research is a triple threat of bad game mojo. To acquire it you need to take up one of your available satellite slots at the beginning of the round with a research centre, then place that non-attacking satellite somewhere in one of your orbits essentially taking the spot of a more useful attacking unit and if you don’t bother with it, you lose that research point for future levels making it really hard for inexperienced players to move further into the game.

Three different alien races make you have to plan for different satellite strategies in order to capitalize on their separate weaknesses but the difference don’t go far enough to force the player to think differently about the satellites they’ll have to choose before a round starts. I found much success with the few towers I stuck to throughout the game, I didn’t really feel the need to switch up drastically at any point once I found that groove.

I really wish this guy sounded like C-3PO.

The space setting makes good use of archive footage and cg to create a story that reads and feels like old school sci-fi, it’ll make you feel the nostalgia whether you’re from that time or not.

The campy 50s serial sci-fi look really drove me through this game at top speeds. Actors in knick-knack costumes play up the cheesiness with cliché serial villains and a cliché serial plot.

This all works wonderfully with inserted archive footage and model work (spliced with some CG) to create this 50s aesthetic.

But watching all of these things on a screen inside a screen is a little bit meta, it makes me wonder if Xzibit lent a hand at working on this game. (I put a monitor in your monitor so you can watch while you watch) I’m not sure but this is probably a holdover from the mobile version but it feels distinctly out of place on the PC.

She's hot and heavy, giant brain in disguise or no.

Music and sound effects are great. The cut scenes are announced by someone who sounds like the voice of out old news reels being played in the 40s.

The alien lords have voice work, though if they flubbed a few lines or sounded terrible it wouldn’t be noticeable with the chosen aesthetic of the game in mind. And they look great, one is a garbage can, the other looks like he was lifted from Mars Attacks! and the other is hot.

Unstoppable Gorg has a great in game soundtrack that’s very boombastic. It’s something you’d expect to hear out of a movie like “Mars Attacks!”

The sound effects from the weapons all have that 50s sci-fi feel.

It’s actually quite a feat to carry me into a story I care about in a tower defense game, which more often than not the ‘story’ tends to be an afterthought.

My biggest gripe about the game is reaching the top of the climb so fast. There are 21 levels in story mode and each one will take you maybe five to 10 minutes if you do it in one try.

You’ll be retrying a few levels countless times because the difficultly will spike unexpectedly. It felt less like I was making mistakes and more like the game didn’t want me to progress further a few times and often after making it through those few patches I would be back to cleaning up levels no problem again.

I reached the end in maybe four to five hours and all of those hours I really enjoyed outside of the spiking difficulty. A challenge mode and arcade mode allow you to keep playing through additional content but none of it is as strong and compelling as the main stuff, I gave both a whirl and found myself not really squeezing any more fun out of the game that way.

It’s a relatively short game but a really good tower defense experience. I hope some kind of follow up or additional content is made for this game because that core experience was a blast.

Pros

• Blends limited unit placement with unlimited field control
• Great 50s sci-fi vibe with loads of humour
• Easy to put down and pick-up again for people with limited playing time

Cons

• Difficulty spiking can leave players frustrated replaying the same levels again and again
• TV in TV view detract from the action in cut scenes
• Research satellites put undo burden newer/inexperienced players

3/5

Chris from Retrocore joins us this week as we talk about a bunch of old series with new titles, including Soul Caliber 5, Twisted Metal and Syndicate. We also further explore the Online Pass hoopla, discuss THQ’s deepening troubles, as well as Jessica Chobot’s perceived conflict of interest. Most importantly though we name our game of January after trying to decipher Jeff’s plans for the segment.

Oh and we TRY to bring the sunshine this week, but as with everything we do they are delivered with mixed results.

Also, join us in the forums to discuss games and other stuff we like.

Music in this episode:
Strike of the Devil’s Axes OC ReMix by CarboHydroM & LuIzA

E-mail comments (or questions) to perfectlysane@vagary.tv or follow us on Twitter.

Tony – iamnapoleon1066
Jeff – JustSomeDude899
Cyrus – FozioAuditore
Chris – kariyanine

Perfectly Sane Show

A long time ag….ah, screw it. The iconic Star Wars opening text is too overdone.

It’s been about three years since the rumors of Bioware developing an MMO based on the Knights of the Old Republic franchise first found their way onto the Internet. Those rumors made me ecstatic from day one. The original Knights of the Old Republic was one of my favorite games of all time, and Star Wars is definitely my favorite IP. To add nerd cred to my profile on that, I actually read the books, graphic novels, and comics. So, for anyone that knows me, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was eating up any juicy tidbits that developer Bioware and publisher EA threw my way over the past three years about the game.

Lucky for me (and an estimated two million others who picked up the game on launch day), Dec. 20, 2011 marked the end of our wait. And worth it it was.

Now, you won’t be in for any big surprises with how the game controls. Bioware did a very good job mimicking the overall feel of most modern day MMOs. Everquest, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Vanguard, and countless others all use the standard “WASD” movement with “1 through =” for your hot keys. This makes it extremely easy for any MMO veteran to dive right into the game. The movements are very fluid and combat flows very well because of it. While the user interface may seem a bit clunky at first, it’s very easy to get used to. The main aspect that bothered me was the top-of-the-screen placement of the chat box, but it’s easily moved to the bottom where it feels more comfortable.

The lack of a full customization of the overall UI, though, really does hurt the game a bit. By the time you hit level 50 you have almost too many abilities, potions, and stims to fit on the maximum number of four hot bars. According to Bioware, there is a big UI customization update coming in the near future, so I do hold out hope that this will be fixed very soon.

Another guaranteed aspect of any MMORPG these days has to be the PvP, and SWTOR performs admirably. From level 10 on, players can compete in three different Warzones, similar to World of Warcraft’s Battlegrounds. These include Alderaan, which is a capture point system similar to Arathi Basin or League of Legends’ Dominion map; Voidstar, which is a Plant the Bomb and move to different objectives map; and a very unique mode called Huttball, which is basically an updated version of Mutant League Football.

The Warzones aside, there are also two areas in the game that are strictly for open world PvP: Ilum, a planet dedicated to the insanity of PvP, and Smuggler’s Den, a Free-for-All area on Tatooine where anything goes at any time of the day. Both of these areas help fuel a fairly health Open PvP environment that hardcore players are looking for.

A very neat addition to the MMORPG genre that is found in SWTOR is the implementation of Companion Characters. These NPCs are your brothers and sisters-in-arms that join your crew as you progress through your personal story arc. They can definitely hold their own on the battlefield and they bring a whole new perspective to solo leveling and even grouping without a full party.

Crafting is also dependent on your Companions. Instead of the normal MMO crafting system where you gather materials and spend time standing in front of a forge or loom to make your gear, SWTOR has you send your companions out to gather materials and making things for you. At the end-game, you can actually have five of your six companions all out working while you go out and quest or PvP. This takes a major stressor for some people and reduces it down to a couple of button clicks instead of a giant time sinck. As a person who absolutely loathes crafting in most other MMOs, I truly enjoy the system in SWTOR.

While all of the previous systems and gameplay mechanics makeup the basics of SWTOR, the real backbone that Bioware built the entire game around is its phenomenal story system. In most MMOs, you get a quest from an NPC and go out and kill things and return for your reward – never really reading what the quest giver had to say. In SWTOR, every single dialogue sequence is fully acted out for you in a cut scene (and yes, you can skip if you choose to). This really helps to make you feel like you have an impact on the world around you, and that your story matters.

Every class in the game has their own personal story. I have played completely through the Sith Warrior and Bounty Hunter stories, and am well on my way through the Sith Inquisitor story at this point and can say that each one has blown me away. They flow so well that I want to keep playing just to see what happens next. I cannot say that about any other MMORPG that I’ve experienced. On top of that, the actual voice acting is top notch. Bioware really spared no expense.

End-game is another spot that I feel the developers really nailed. Right out of the gates they had two Raid Zones (Operations as they’re called here) in place. The first is Eternity Vault, and the second is Karagga’s Palace. Both of these offer three modes of difficulty: normal, hard, and nightmare modes. As of right now, our guild is full clearing hard mode on both, and working our way through nightmare, so I have seen most of what these have to offer. We are having a total blast clearing these out, and the difficulty scales well, allowing for new raiders and veterans alike to experience the content at their own skill levels.

Many might argue that Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t a breakthrough for the MMORPG genre. While I agree that the basic gameplay takes aspects from the other MMOs on the market, to say that it doesn’t change the way that gamers will look at MMOs from now on would be a lie. The superb story arcs, the changes to the generic crafting system, the updated PvP system,  companion characters, and voice acted questing all add new aspects to an aging subcategory in the gaming world.

SWTOR is one of my favorite games released in the past few years by far, and is definitely my favorite MMORPG since I first picked up Everquest back in 1999. There are some bugs in the game that need to be worked out (and actually lead me to lower the score of the game a bit), but the overall feel of SWTOR is that it is an MMO that is here to stay, and sets a new bar for what other companies need to aim for.

Pros

• Story that is the best of any other MMORPG
• Companion characters
• Re-worked crafting system
• Fun Ggameplay
• Great replayability with different classes
• PvP is well balanced

Cons

• Lack of UI customization
• Annoying post-launch bugs
• No guild bank
• Inexcusably clunky guild and auction house tools

Overall Score: 4/5

New DLC for Dungeon Defenders gives PC players a new character class and new levels to play around with, but players who’ve purchased the game on Live or PSN are told this content isn’t coming to consoles.

Trendy Entertainments majorly successful tower defense game introduces the Barbarian and the Assault Mission Pack to the land of Etheria.

The Barbarian pack comes with a price tag of $2.99 and adds the characters to the current roster allowing players to revel in waves of blood as he carves opponents to bit with his dual wielded weapons and his battle stances, which replace his ability to build towers.

The Assault Mission Pack offers three new assault missions, a new map and a new unicorn familiar for players who are willing to shell $1.99 for the DLC.

Now for the bad news, this DLC is not going to be for people who’ve purchased the games from Xbox Live or PSN , in fact, much of the future planned DLC is not coming to console platforms.

In a Jan. 25 news post by Philip Asher (AKA pmasher), Marketing Director for Trendy Entertainment, on the Dungeon Defenders home site, Asher broke the news to console owners that a lot of released PC-content won’t be washing up on PSN or Live, now or ever.

This erupts from a forum post by Asher that states, “After much thought and investigation, we’ve decided it’s unfeasible from both a technical and business standpoint to bring the PC-only content (Holiday DLC, New Heroes Pack, Barbarian, Assault Mission Pack, Nightmare Mode, etc.) to the console versions.”

He states how sorry the company is about the situation adding that this problem is due mainly to the patching framework on consoles.

Trendy is still releasing Parts 1 to 4 of the Lost Eternia Shards packs along with the items in those packs. The company also wants bring the weapons and pets that have come in updates for it’s PC version to the console version but they say that the small amount of RAM inside of consoles limits what they can add to the PSN and Live versions.

The first big patch for consoles was due to hit in January but it hasn’t arrived yet. It’s still in the pipeline and is supposed to address some bug-fixes and balancing changes. A street date for the patch isn’t clear at this time.

Trendy Entertainment has sold over 600-thousand units of Dungeon Defenders since its launch in mid-October.

Announced at E3? Probably not. Also, this terrible name won't be used.

Don’t listen to all of the rumors about the next generation of Microsoft and Sony home consoles being announced at E3 2012.

Cedrick Delmax, director of marketing for Microsoft France, said in an interview with Le Point that “Xbox 360′s cycle is not at all finished. The proof is that we don’t see the logic in cutting the price this year.” Referencing the presence of the Nintendo Wii U at E3 2011 and 2012, he added that “we [Microsoft] are not here to counter Nintendo and they’re not here to fight the other manufacturers.”

Delmax also said that Microsoft isn’t concerned with Sony’s supposed decision not to showcase the next Playstation console this year.

Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony, has already said that there are no “plans” to announce another Playstation at E3 of this year. In another interview with Le Point, Philippe Cardon, president of Sony France, said that Sony was the last to release a console in the current generation and “will probably be the last to announce something.”

It’s important not to misinterpret the elusiveness of the responses from both console manufacturers. That caginess is likely to serve to cover the tracks of each company with respect to how their competitors and shareholders are closely monitering them. Delmax said it best when he pointed out that Xbox 360s are still selling. Playstation 3 units are still selling as well, so any announcement of a future console will undercut current sales for both consoles.

The abysmal software sales of Wii titles, combined with the continued decline of Wii sales after it hit its stride, certainly add to the reasons for Sony and Microsoft not to be intimidated. Add that to the fact that a lot of the announced titles for the Wii U are multiplatform titles available on existing consoles and you should feel happy with the console you already own for a good while longer.

Puddle could be titled after the tears you’ll shed playing it. It’s a clever physics based platformer in which you must guide various liquids from point A to B through increasingly devious levels. The game goes from challenging to frustratingly difficult within its first set of stages and never looks back. Most gamers will move onto something less painful before they beat the game, which is too bad because the concept is interesting and the fundamental gameplay is enjoyable. It had the potential to be better.

Ironically, Puddle has the simplest of control schemes. With the left and right trigger, you tilt the level and move the liquid. Those are the only two buttons you’ll ever use. The difficulty comes from punishing trial and error level design and the fact that you don’t have direct control over the liquid. If you tilt the level too much and the liquid goes off a ramp with too much momentum, it will fly into a conveniently placed patch of fire or something that will destroy the liquid. If you don’t tilt the level enough, most of the liquid won’t make it off the ramp. You have to get each step along the way just right in order to reach the exit. This involves lots of learning and memorization, as well as a bit of luck.

The goal is to reach the exit in the shortest time possible with the most amount of liquid still left over. Liquid is lost along the way due to hazards in the environment and the liquid getting split up and some getting left behind. A meter shows the minimum amount of liquid required to beat the level. Dip below that line and you have to start over from the beginning of the level. There are no checkpoints. At the end of the level, you receive a copper, silver, or gold medal based on speed and remaining liquid.

There is no story, nor does the game need one, but there should be some coherence and sense of what’s going on. The levels are tangentially linked by simple cutscenes and a general scientific theme, but none of it makes much sense. For instance, at the end of a set of stages titled Laboratory, you mix together a liquid and there is a brief cutscene that shows a silhouette of a human drinking it. The next set of stages takes place in the human body. The lack of a story is fine, but the game often forgets to relate essential information, such as what type of liquid you’re dealing with; I didn’t know I was working with nitroglycerine in the Laboratory levels until I was told in one of the all-too-frequent loading screens that nitroglycerine makes a sound when it’s about to explode. For that matter, does nitroglycerine make a sound as it’s about to explode? And why do Venus fly traps present a danger to lava???

But these odd quirks are forgivable. Again, Puddle’s biggest sin is extreme difficulty that is amplified by inexcusable technical shortcomings and design choices. The game knows it’s hard. If you fail a level, you’re given the option to “whine and skip” it. Unfortunately, you’re only allowed to skip a level twice throughout the entire game. To earn the privilege of skipping another level, you must first go back and beat one of the levels you previously skipped. A few more skips and checkpoints and perhaps the option to tackle levels out of order would have gone a long way toward making Puddle more approachable and less frustrating.

Worse, every time you fail a level, you’re forced to sit through a loading screen. Although these loading screens are brief, you are going to fail and see them a lot. I’m no programmer, but it doesn’t seem like Puddle is so complex a game that levels should have to be reloaded every time you fail. The levels are short enough and failure is so frequent that the loading screens become annoying and disrupt the flow of the game. And if you decide to restart a level before you officially fail, you’re inexplicably kicked out to the main menu and have to restart the game completely – with a loading screen in between, of course.

There are roughly 50 levels spread across eight sets of stages with different liquids and themes and very little to extend longevity. Only the truly bored and masochistic will go back to find hidden levels and earn gold medals and Achievements. Most people will give up long before even reaching the end. There are leaderboards, but no multiplayer or other online features. There is a mode actually titled Laboratory, which allows you to change the wallpaper of the main menu. Nobody will ever use it.

For something that started as a student project and evolved into an XBLA/PSN release, Puddle is impressive, but more frustrating than fun. The fundamental gameplay is a pretty cool idea, but the developers gleefully embraced sadistic level design and neglected to make simple choices that could help alleviate the pain. Puddle could be improved in a sequel with checkpoints, fewer loading screens, and a more gradual difficulty curve. This first effort is hard to recommend, even at $10. Listen to my whining and skip it.

Pros

• Simple control scheme means anyone can play.

• Interesting concept.

Cons

• Extreme difficulty means most people won’t want to play.

• Constant, inexcusable loading screens.

2/5

Dwayne may not be bright, but he makes up for it with... no, he doesn't make up for it.

I hate Risk.  As Vagary’s resident hardcore strategy gamer, you might think that this is because it’s too simple, but that’s not actually the reason. My objection is that too often, the battles come down to luck rather than skill. If I assemble an army of 20 to attack an army of three, I should win quickly and decisively. Thankfully, Quarrel has an elegant solution to this problem: instead of rolling dice, make the winner determined by a word game.

Quarrel consists of a map, on which you and up to three other players hold a bunch of territories. Each of your armies will consist of two to eight bouncing minions, be they ninjas, Vikings, soldiers, or what have you.  The cute aesthetic is one of the game’s best attributes. Defeated troops will cry, and final victory will get you a huge victory block party.  You attack adjacent territories, in an effort to conquer them all and win the game. Battles begin with a word scramble of eight letters. For each unit in your army, you can use one letter to make a word. Different letters have different values (like in Scrabble), and the highest value word wins.

You can play with a timer or without. I recommend playing with a countdown every time, though, as with infinite time, a larger army can take its time and win every single battle. The timer also makes the battles quite frantic, as you scroll back and forth, trying to get in your words, and come up with something before the time hits zero and you auto-lose. In addition, the case of word value ties, the quicker player wins, so speed counts. Typically, I spent most matches trying to build an army of 8 (the maximum), but you have to be quick: at the end of each turn, the game system will load reinforcements onto the map through a variety of methods. Wait too long, and your enemies will grow very powerful.

Vikings are expert words smiths.

The game includes multiplayer (though no local co-op, because you  could see each other’s words). I tried the multiplayer, but I found that since I was unwilling to cheat (word unscramblers are everywhere) and I had no chat pad (the game in chat pad compatible) I was destroyed. Sticking with single player, there were a couple of different modes, but all boiled down to the same game (conquer territory by making words).  Though I enjoyed the gameplay mechanic very much, I eventually grew bored from the repetitions. It would have been nice to have letters cycle through, or disappear as time went on (use the high value Z before it vanishes!). I can’t help but thinking that the concepts here are ripe for expansion with future releases. I know I was left wanting more, not simply in terms of more play, but also more depth and variety.

Quarrel’s biggest asset is its price point. In an era where even $10 releases are becoming few and far between, $5 US at release is an absolute steal.  This game is worth far more than that (though its previous release on iOS may have forced lower pricing), providing addicting gameplay and several different game modes. There aren’t enough brand bending word games on XBLA, and this one adds strategy and conquest to that equation.  For a few evenings of wordtastic fun, it’s tough to quarrel with Quarrel.

Pros

• Interesting blend of strategy and puzzle solving
• Frantic fun
• XBL matches
• $5 price

Cons

• Occasional framerate hitches
• Could use more gameplay variety

4 / 5

Capcom posted on the Unity Blog that the price for Resident Evil: Revelations for the 3DS would be seeing a $10 price drop from the original $49.99 to $39.99 Cdn/US respectively.

The original price point of the game was due to the game being made on a 4GB 3DS card instead of a 2GB, but Capcom didn’t address why the game saw a price drop.

It’s a little bit odd to see a company like Capcom lower the price of their games without explanation. However, it puts the game at a great price point which, either way, makes it a good deal if you’re looking to expand your 3DS game library.

Resident Evil: Revelations will be available for the 3DS on February 7th 2012.