Mongo Nation

Once again, Capcom targets our nostalgia with another pitch-perfect NES throwback.

In anticipation for Dark Void, the jetpack flying, zero gravity action adventure title that we’ve been waiting so long for, Capcom has unveiled a supplemental title exclusively for the Nintendo DSi. Dark Void Zero is a vintage throwback title in the vein of Mega Man 9, and looks to capture the spirit of the early days of gaming beautifully. Of course, Capcom is playing this off as if the game had existed all along, sort of a “lost” game from the Capcom vault of history.

Official press release:

“As the ‘80s were drawing to a close, the developers at Capcom began work on a top secret project that aimed to set new standards for the platformer genre.  That game was called “Dark Rift”, and it blended the intense shooting action of Section Z™ with the latest innovations in platform jumping from Mega Man.  In order to properly fulfill the producer’s vision for Dark Rift (later renamed Dark Void), the hardware engineering team at Capcom was enlisted to design and produce an all-new chipset that would be included in every cartridge, enabling huge numbers of sprites and never-before-seen special effects to be displayed on the aging NES® platform and the PlayChoice-10 NES arcade cabinet.

Alas, time waits for no man and game developers are no exception. The dawn of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System® made the additional hardware requirements for Dark Void redundant. Capcom suspended development on Dark Void as it began to evaluate the SNES. Before long, the game was shelved and drifted into the annals of gaming history. Even the internal tape-based archives were lost due to an unfortunate magnet incident which even today is best left un-discussed. Dark Void became a legendary “lost project” at Capcom…until now.

Nearly twenty years later the next gen version of the game, Dark Void, is back on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC!  But to commemorate the game’s humble origins, Capcom has commissioned this recreation of the original 8-bit classic, now re-titled “Dark Void Zero,” on the DSi platform.  You play Rusty, the first human born in the Void, who must take on the Watchers in a quest to stop their domination of Earth. With the aid of Nikola Tesla, and his state-of-the-art rocket pack, Rusty must take down the Watchers and their minions across three intense levels of action and intrigue.”

Check out the trailer and all the screens below!

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Sorta like Event Horizon: The Video Game

By Jeremy Azevedo

The latest installment of the popular Shin Megami Tensei series is on it’s way to the states! Like it’s predecessors, it involves making pacts with demons to combat a plague of otherworldly monsters from another dimension.

Unlike its predecessors, it takes place not in a Japanese prep school or a fantasy setting, nor even a steam punk utopia. Instead, it takes place in space (sort of).

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is, stylistically, kind of a cross between Persona and Dead Space. You play as an elite space explorer tasked with investigating a disturbance at the planet’s South Pole. It soon becomes apparent that this disturbance is actually a black hole that opens into a universe of demons. Some of the demons can be negotiated with, while others have a bad attitude for which the only cure is a hail of bullets. This is where you come in.

Strange Journey plays like a first-person dungeon crawler, which, as many of you know, the Nintendo DS was practically made for. All the action takes place on the top screen, while the bottom screen is reserved for maps and stats. While many DS RPGs have been using really shitty, bubble headed 3D graphics that look like a bad PS1 game for some reason, SMT: Strange Journey instead opts to stick with traditional, hand-drawn 2D sprites. A wise decision.

Check out some of the pics here:

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS is currently scheduled for release in Spring 2010.

This month, there will be blood. And also hedgehogs.

Just about every system is getting at least one bad-ass exclusive title this month… Even the Wii! Not only that, but we’re finally getting the long awaited Resident Evil sequel most of us have been waiting years for, as well as a single-band Guitar Hero game that we actually want to play. For those of you turned off by all of these violent, blood-soaked Grand Theft Auto and Resistance titles, don’t worry, there’s always Grey’s Anatomy for you to play while you’re knitting sweaters for your dog or whatever.

Halo Wars

System: Xbox 360
Release Date: 3/3/2009

Halo Wars is perhaps the first-ever Real Time Strategy game built from the ground up specifically for consoles. Set in the Halo universe we all know and love, Halo Wars pits entire UNSC armies against the covenant forces in large-scale battles that don’t end until the enemy is reduced to a smoking pile of ashes. It seems a bit limited to have only two classes of characters to choose from, as most RTS games have several. But then again, most RTS games play like crap on a console so maybe it’s a fair trade in this case.

MLB 2K9

System: Multi-Platform
Release Date: 3/3/2009

MLB 2K9 improves on its predecessor by simplifying the pitching and batting mechanic, as well as deepening the simulation aspect of the game. Luckily, you can automate the micromanagement if you’d rather just get right out on the field and skip the egghead stuff. Best of all, the “Living Roster” feature of NBA 2K9 makes its MLB debut here, regularly updating the game with real-life stat, injury and trade tracking. It’s likely to be the closest thing to real baseball that you can experience without getting the hell off of your own fat ass and going outside for once. Read the rest of this entry →

New official trailer and pics!

The new official trailer for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is in, and it’s looking great! It’s even got original music by Ghostface Killah and MF Doom, which is pretty cool. It appears as if the game will retain the same art style and gameplay while scaling back the look to something that more closely resembles the first couple of PC GTA games from back in the day.

Also check out these new screens from the game, which show some of the on-foot shooting and driving action, as well as some of the DS specific touchscreen puzzles that will be implemented:

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My first rodeo in the world of Chrono Trigger

By Jeremy Azevedo

I may have my nerd card revoked for this, but I have never actually played Square’s essential classic, Chrono Trigger, before this week.

As a young dork, I had a Nintendo Power subscription long enough to have read all about it, but somehow never got my hands on Chrono Trigger. I even tried the original Playstation game that came after it, “Chrono Cross”, but it didn’t really seem to have the same character that the original supposedly held. Thirteen or so years and hundreds of best-games-of-all-time chart listings later, it was finally time for me to see what all the goddamn hollering was about.

It’s hard to weigh the expectations against the comparatively primitive graphical and sound technology utilized in the game, but it isn’t difficult to see what it is about the game that was always so appealing to cosplay geeks and RPG enthusiasts the world over. Chrono Trigger is as excellent as they say it is.

The graphical sprites are clean and colorful, with energetic animation and supremely memorable character design. If you don’t think that the robot and the frog dude and the cave chick are totally sweet, than you are probably some kind of retard or whatever, and should probably be playing ball-in-a-cup instead. And the sound, while from a simpler time in video game music production, embodies everything that was great about that time by invoking vast orchestral scores that not only fit the mood, but do it with only like twelve sound effects. The gameplay is fast and intuitive as well, but what’s really great about Chrono Trigger is the surprisingly engaging story.

Chrono Trigger features multiple ways to play, as every action can have serious ramifications later in the game that affect how things ultimately turn out. I think there are like, 20 different possible endings in this game. It’s like in “Back to the Future” when Doc is telling Marty not to dick around with anything too much when time traveling, for fear of causing ripples in time that may disrupt the current timestream. Everything in this game works according to these principles, which is pretty impressive even now, let alone in 1995.

New DS enhancements basically come down to having your map, inventory and action commands on the bottom screen, as well as a couple of fun but inconsequential new dungeons… Really though, all that was required of this game was that it be a faithful port of the original, which I’m assuming it is, though I wouldn’t really be the one to ask about that. What I do know is that Chrono Trigger is fun, whether you’ve played (or even heard of) the original or not.

Score: 9 out of 10
+1 if you are enough of an RPG gamer to understand the significance of being able to see your enemies on the map rather than just have them appear out of nowhere, and how much more awesome it is when that is the case
-1 if you are used to saving anywhere, because in this game, you can’t