XBLIG prices can be changed every 7 days starting May 23
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 Review: Rolling in the Right Direction
One Million Fans Take a Stroll with The Walking Dead Episode 1
Kittens Spit Fire When Serious Sam Double D XXL Assaults XBLA This Fall
By at .
One of the biggest complaints in Episode One was the physics, and they’ve mostly been fixed. Sonic no longer stops on a dime in mid air if you take your thumb off the analog stick and you can no longer walk up walls like Spider-Man. The ball-rolling still seems to be slower than running when going downhill, making spin-dashing nearly useless, but hey, two out of three isn’t bad. The truth is this game controls pretty well, approaching levels folks might consider “good”.
Read more
Sega has released a new gameplay trailer for Arkedo Studio’s Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit that illustrates the sexy origin of the undead rabbit’s rage. We had a blast when we got our hands on this ultra violent Metroidvania game at PAX East, and you won’t have to wait too long to start killing monsters since the game hits XBLA, Steam, and PSN this summer.
“We’re going to kill monsters. There will be blood. We’re going to torture them.” That was the mantra behind Arkedo Studios’ Hell Yeah!, a game that would look right at home on Nickelodeon if the network turned a blind eye to the game’s ocean of blood.
Hell Yeah! isn’t a high concept, pretentious game looking to change how the world feels about games or life. Studio Head Camille Guermonprez said the bloodbath was designed around one simple question: “How fun can it be to kill a monster?” The developer is quite candid about the inspirations for his Metroidvania adventure. “We wanted to make a video game. The stuff that made us want to make games.”
Hell Yeah! is set in a cheerfully demented version of hell where Ash, the prince of the underworld who also happens to be a skeletal demon rabbit, has gone on a monster-killing rampage because the tabloids have posted risqué pictures of him. It’s an escapist fantasy born out of months of tedious contract work where Arkedo had limited freedom. It was a stifling environment for a studio designed around being creative and taking risks. “The project was based out of frustration,” Guermonprez said, recalling the doldrums of the contract days. “We’re happy to have been frustrated. It was worth it.” Read more
In 1997, a lot of things happened in the game industry. Video game legend, Gunpei Yokoi, passed away in a car accident, Final Fantasy VII redefined the RPG genre, and Sega Bass Fishing was released in Japanese arcades. Shortly after the launch of the Dreamcast in 1999, the fishing simulation title found its way to Sega’s ill-fated console. Here in 2011, Sega Bass Fishing has been released once again on XBLA and PSN for $10.
Sega Bass Fishing features an Arcade Mode and an Original Mode, both having online leaderboards. In case you’ve got fish bait for brains, the game is about catching bass. The player has a limited window of time to catch as many bass as possible, but the number of fish is not important since the collective weight of all the caught fish is what will win you competitions. The game sports tournaments, unlockable lures, and a number of different locations to put your fishing prowess to the test.
At Armless Octopus, we’re no strangers to a good shmup. What I believe turns most people off from the genre are two factors: 1) the absurd difficulty, and 2) how similar each title in the genre is. I mean it’s really just a ship shooting directly at things on screen, right? Wrong. Radiant Silvergun takes a few of the standard conventions you’ve come to expect from the genre and adds a twist. Originally released in 1998 in Japan for both the Sega Saturn and in what was then a thriving Japanese arcade scene, Radiant Silvergun has managed to stand the test of time.
That’s not to say that the steep difficulty curve gamers faced back then isn’t still present in this release, because it most certainly is. While enemies relentlessly fire upon your lightly armored vessel, you come to expect that you will die, and quite a bit at that. Your time is not spent in vain however, thanks to Radiant Silvergun’s persistent upgrade system, which carries over the experience and levels that you acquire with each progressive Story Mode playthrough. This comes as both the title’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness.
Out of all the mysteries in the world, there is one that ails me the most: when will Sega make another good Sonic game? After playing Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, I’m sad to say that now is not the time.
When a teaser trailer for Sonic 4 was posted back in February it boasted the game was “built from the ground up.” This was meant to ease the worries of cautious fans who were continually disappointed by a series of poor and mediocre titles. But when a trailer was released a few months later demonstrating the gameplay, some keen observers immediately noticed a flaw in Sonic’s movement: the momentum was off.
In my experience, arcade games come in three-and-a-half flavors. First you have your adventuring games, which increase the difficulty exponentially so as to make you die and suck up your quarters. The second are titles which move incredibly fast so as to make you die and suck up all your quarters. The third kind are the rhythm and dance titles, which are fun, but limit the number of songs you play, leading you to dump in more and more quarters.
The last flavor is, of course, deer hunting simulators. But nobody cares about those.
