Games Cheats and Reviews

Namco Bandai took the veils off Super Robot Taisen L in Japan today, marking the latest installment in their long-running series of robo-strategy RPGs. The new game is due out November 25 over there and is slated to cost 6090 yen.

SRTL will feature robots from a total of 17 anime properties, first and foremost no doubt being Evangelion Unit 01 from the new series of Eva flicks. Other new names making their SRT debut here include Macross F, Linebarrels of Iron, Dancouga Nova, and old-school tentacle OVA Fight!! Iczer One.

You can expect few gameplay changes with this latest SRT, though — it’s still a mixture of turn-based simulation and conversation sequences between the story’s main players.

It’s telling that the first thing you see when you hit “new game” in Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a camcorder on a tripod; more than just about any other videogame in recent memory, Dog Days looks and feels like a movie. The in medias res opening, where the titular characters get tortured by an nonchalant fellow wielding a box cutter before flashing back to “two days before,” looks as though it’s been shot and cut by a young Joe Carnahan (I’m thinking Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane or Narc — not the Carnahan behind A-Team). I’ve seen plenty of “cinematic” openings in videogames, but not many that use film editing and visual techniques to evoke the feel of specific directors.

This overall aesthetic gives Dog Days an utterly distinct feel from other modern, urban crime shooters and even from other videogames. I wouldn’t be surprised if the developers at IO Interactive simply pitched Dog Days’ style as: “Michael Mann by way of YouTube.” The scenario, story beats, sense of place, and dialogue evoke Mann’s penchant for tough and terse crime professionals making their way through a real, defined setting. Yet these tropes are visually portrayed through the same sort of handheld camera work as the average YouTube video or, at most, a faux-mentary such as The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Paranormal Activity.

It looks like we’ll know all about what EA Maxis has in store next for the Spore franchise before the end of the month, as the latest San Diego Comic-Con schedule shows a planned reveal for a new action RPG related to the Spore series.

You can find the brief description for the panel on the official Comic-Con website (via BigDownload), which calls the new game “a brand new, Sci-Fi Action-RPG based on the DNA of Spore.” There are no other details given, so there’s no saying exactly how this game relates to the Spore series (which has already included expansions for the original PC game as well as a platformer spin-off for the Wii).

One possibility is this new action-RPG could be “Darkspore,” the title EA trademarked back in May. We won’t have to wait long to find out for sure, as the EA Maxis Comic-Con panel is set to take place just two weeks from today, on July 24.

We’ve more or less known BioWare would be releasing Dragon Age 2 some time early next year — Electronic Arts practically announced as much a few months ago, and Awakening teased a new Dragon Age title for February 1, 2011. But today, EA has officially confirmed the existence of Dragon Age 2, and Game Informer has the first few details on the title as well.

The confirmation came nestled in a press release concerning EA taking over control of Warhammer Online in Europe (via VG247), which lists “Dragon Age 2, the highly anticipated sequel to 2009’s ‘RPG of the Year’ Dragon Age: Origins,” as one of the titles that BioWare currently has in development. Furthermore, Game Informer’s website is teasing an upcoming cover story for Dragon Age 2, with the tease revealing the new game will feature a “new hero, a different part of the world, and a ton of surprising improvements.”

That’s about all Game Informer is revealing right now, but the promise of a “new hero” already seems to suggests players won’t transfer their character from Dragon Age: Origins into Dragon Age 2, the way players could transfer their version of Commander Shepard from Mass Effect into Mass Effect 2. Still, that’s not entirely certain yet, so we’ll see what BioWare has to say when more details are revealed.

Nintendo made a splash with fans at E3 by unveiling new versions of their beloved franchises but revealed very little in the way of new properties. That may be about to change. According to Japan’s Sankei Newspaper, when asked about Nintendo’s “next game” at a June 29 Nintendo stockholders meeting, Shigeru Miyamoto replied, “We need new game characters soon, maybe we can move forward on that next year.”

At the same meeting, when discussing Apple and the iPad, one stockholder brought up the possibility of Nintendo producing software for the device when he asked, “Other companies are continuously bringing out interesting devices. What about supporting them with Nintendo software?”

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata responded, “Nintendo’s software and hardware are the same thing. Other companies don’t share Nintendo’s values or traditions when it comes to creating devices. We are absolutely not thinking of doing that.”

Some time ago, I launched a new tradition for myself. Every few months, I go to VG Maps, find an interesting videogame map image, crop it to fit my screen resolution precisely, and set it as my laptop’s desktop wallpaper. It’s a different way to look at pixel art, creating contiguous worlds out of images we normally see one screen at a time, and many’s the time I’ve found myself wishing I could actually play a Metroid or Castlevania game with this perspective.

Turns out Konami’s Koji Igarashi has been thinking along the same lines, too. When he introduced his new game, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, at yesterday’s E3 press conference, he spoke to this basic interest. Harmony, he said, was borne of a desire to “paint an HD screen with pixels.” To realize this ambition, he’s pulled together 2D graphics from several recent portable Castlevania games, built them into massive maps, and placed them pixel-for-pixel in standard Xbox 360 resolution. Portable Castlevanias have been designed around the DS’s 256×192 screens, so taking them into 720p resolution means that you can pack a whole lot of these screens together.

While we’re short on information about the newly revealed Kingdom Hearts 3DS, it would seem it is not a port but a new game. However, it is not “Kingdom Hearts 3.”

In an interview earlier today, we asked Nomura about the state of 3, and whether it would even be on a console, given the Kingdom Hearts series’ recent stint on handhelds.

At the Ubisoft press conference today, CEO Yves Guillemot announced Project Dust (temporary title), a new game planned for release through Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network next year. Despite being a digital release, though, it featured surprisingly large, lush, 3D environments.

As for what kind of game it actually is, we’re not quite sure — the trailer showed off a variety of somewhat stylized locations, with shots of tribal-like people performing some sort of ritual cut in between the shots of the landscapes (which included unusually shaped oceans, grassy hills and waterfalls, and spewing volcanoes). The trailer ended on an apocalyptic note, with the world seemingly falling to waste from within as if a small sink hole quickly escalated to consume the entire land.

No other details were given on the game, but if we’d have to wager a guess, it looked a bit like a strategy or simulation — but honestly, we have no clue. For now, see the trailer for yourself above and give it your best guess.

1UP member gamerfan85 was walking around the LA Staples center where the NBA Finals are going on — right next to where E3 will be held a week from now — and took video of a new game being shown on the large screens outside. Anyway, the trailer shows the word “Nerkas” at the end of it, and Destructoid checked the internet registry and found that Square-Enix owns the rights to the domain www.nerkas.com (nothing’s there yet). Whether this is the name of the game or just a name of something in the game is unclear, but we’ll certainly hear more about this one from Square-Enix at E3.

In an interview with German gaming site Gaming Media (Japanese audio with German subtitles,) Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto discussed the new Zelda game that will be announced at this year’s E3.

According to Miyamoto, when making a game, Nintendo traditionally creates a demo movie and expands upon the ideas contained therein. However, for the new Zelda, the company first created the game mechanics and then made a demo video to match. He wouldn’t elaborate on the reason for the reversal.