News Snatch: TWDSI, PSABR, DMC, XCOM

“It’s going to continue to get better,” says The Walking Dead: Survival Instincts producer, Glenn Gamble. He is of course referring to fan made trailer that did the rounds last week, the one that many sites (and myself) incorrectly labelled an official trailer.

The mistake was then picked up by our very own Alex who rather than sending me an email suggesting an apology in the next News Snatch, wrote a full article about how much of a twat I had been. At least we can laugh at ourselves!

“Essentially it was old footage, it was yes, from The Walking Dead and it was from another interview I had done, but the game’s in development,” Gamble clarified. “A game is constantly in development, time is the ultimate enemy of any game. If we had huge budgets and four years to run, games would look a lot better and visually more stunning.”

Like proverbial Hare and Tortoise, slow and steady wins the race as a new report from the International Data Commission suggests that sales of the PlayStation 3 have now overtaken the Xbox 360. The report finds that the PS3 has sold 77 million consoles worldwide compared to 76 million for the Xbox 360. Of course, there’s the usual ambiguity about what “sold” and “shipped” might really mean but either way, it’s a nice figure to be able to quote.

The console version of Painkiller Hell & Damnation has been delayed until April. “We have been working around the clock to bring the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game in line with the quality and standard of the PC game,” said Reinhard Pollice from Nordic Games.

The new additions to PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Gravity Rush’s Kat and Starhawk’s Emmett have been explained in detail by Superbot.

Kat

  • She’s] mainly a rush-down character [who] specializes in mobility. She probably has the best mobility [out] of all the cast due to the different ways in which she can get around.
  • Her square attacks are her usual kick attacks.
  • Triangles are “gravity” themed moves, including her slide and gravity kicks!
  • Circle is “other” stuff, including gravity pull/push moves.
  • She’s a combo character! I like to compare her to a simpler Dante in terms of her combo ability. She has simple combos that build a decent amount of AP and more advanced combos that allow her to AP burst.
  • She has a really cool move with neutral circle. She summons 3 pieces of random debris around her that she can hurl at opponents. The hurling has no start-up, but she is extremely vulnerable while summoning [it.] This move unlocks her advanced combos, as you can throw debris between attacks. For any of you MvC2 / COTA players, think Spiral’s swords.
  • Her level 2 super is sick. It’s kind of like a reverse Sir Daniel’s level 2, except she fires downwards instead of upwards. She also has a bit of control over when and where she fires the stalagmites.

Emmet

  • The point of Emmett is to bring his build and battle style to PASBR. He can utilize different weapon load-outs which he summons with triangle.
  • He can summon a turret to fire at opponents for extra AP. The turret is destructible, though.
  • He can also summon a Rift Extractor that generates AP, similar to PaRappa’s boombox.
  • His default weapon load-out is a standard rifle. He also uses a pistol in this load-out.
  • For close range battles his shotgun load-out is [the] best. [It] fires quickly, [he earns] 30 AP per hit, and you can fire in multiple directions.
  • Long range battles are best fought with the rocket launcher load-out. The rockets don’t travel super fast, but they’re aim-able and will travel the entire length of the screen.
  • Different load-outs will also have different grenades and mines to use.
  • His square attacks are melee based attacks that don’t change. They’re a bit limited, but rightfully so considering his other tools.
  • His level 1 super will change depending on which load-out you have, effectively giving him 5 supers total.
  • His level 3 is a transform super similar to Sweet Tooth. He jumps in his Hawk and goes to town! The Hawk has a machine gun, aerial mines, and melee attacks. What’s interesting is that circle will activate flight mode in which the Hawk flies off the screen and goes for a quick bombing run.
  • Flight Mode will immediately end his level 3. Why wouldn’t you try to get some kills first before activating Flight Mode, you ask?! Well, the amount of “bombing” that the Hawk does will depend on how many kills you’ve gotten so far. So, if you’ve already scored 3 kills with the Hawk’s other moves, the bombing run won’t be as effective as it would have been if you activated at only 1 or 2 kills.

Sega have released a new video for the perpetually-delayed-but-almost-here Aliens: Colonial Marines. The ‘Concept to Game’ feature shows what happened to the Sulaco after the events of Aliens.

ITV4 is to televise this year’s GT Academy contest in a series of six programs that will be begin February. “The programme discovers who has the winning mentality and who will crack under the intense pressure,” the broadcaster said.

DmC: Devil May Cry will be getting a free piece of DLC, “Bloody Palace Mode” which can be accessed once the main story has been completed. “For newcomers, the mode takes Dante and players through a survival gauntlet of more than 100 levels of demon-crushing, boss-rushing action,” said Capcom.

The small town in Connecticut that was to allow players to trade in their violent games for gift certificates has scrapped the plan. “We succeeded in our program,” spokesman Dick Fortunato told Polygon, “Our mission was to create strong awareness in Southington for parents and families and citizens and children. And we accomplished that. Our other objective was to promote discussion of violent video games and media with children and with the families at the home. And we’ve accomplished that in spades.”

A patch for XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now live on both PC and consoles which fixes “a couple major issues including the AI teleport bug and the defeat screen when beating the game.”


And finally, Sly goes Feudal in the latest trailer for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. It has also been announced that, in the U.S. at least, the game will be released at a bargain price of $39.99 and $29.99 for the PS3 and the Vita versions respectively. The game is also part of Sony’s cross-buy deal so purchasing the PS3 version gets you the Vita game for free.

14 Comments

  1. Upset with Xcom at the moment.
    I’ve been playing a few other things since christmas and hadn’t played Xcom since Boxing day. Put it in yesterday only to discover it won’t read the save file, or the one off the cloud. Damn shame.

    • I had a similar issue with it – did you notice that the default for the autosave was set to “off”? Most unhelpful.

      • I didn’t. That *is* unhelpful! You, however, very helpful. Now back to Xcom. Let’s see if the alien hordes consider my unique brand of population control helpful.

  2. Very much looking forward to Sly but I’ve got the awkward problem of wanting the PS3 version for the cross buy but I’ve no room left on my vita (and several games still not transferred on it. There’s loads of space on my PS3s though. Shame that cross-buy doesn’t work both ways.

  3. After reading your article, as punishment for the Walking Dead Palaver I think Alex should change your name to Twatcub for a week. :)

    • You horrid man. *Goes and cries in a corner*

    • It appears that a very, very select few magazines have seen TWDSI in action. NOT a hands on mind you, just small portion played by the developer.

      OPSM says “it’s clear that a lack of polish and sub-top tier design is likely to hold this back. For starters, it looks decaying corpse ugly. Brown, blocky, with poor textures, even for the end of days this is a grim place to visit. It’s also gltichy and messy at times – I saw several melee attacks supposedly connect when actually they missed their mark – and lazy: objects are seemingly picked up and put down via telekinesis rather than the use of hands, and the voice acting (which is actually solid) in no way matches up to the characters’ facial animations.”

      So its still shit.

      • Stil shit and out in 2 months :)

      • Well, what did you expect from the guys that gave us star wars kinect?

      • That’s better… That’s more of the reaction I expected! Are you a bear or a mouse?! :)

    • Old.

    • But thank you for pointing it out :)

      • Lol! I remember TSA posting that the EU version of Infinite wouldn’t be getting the first Bioshock game, like the US version, but hadn’t seen anything about this Rapture bundle.

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