Dcubed

DLC is up! Snagged the FF2 Battle Theme, The Final Battle (FF4), Fighters of the Crystal (FFXI), Cosmo Canyon and Ride On. Really wish there was a cart. So annoying having to buy them all one by one. Edit: LOL! "purchased 5/8 songs" Nice to see them tapping into the OCD tendencies of their fanbase! Clever bastards

GODDAMN! Amazing! Shame I already own all of these (anything else catch your eye?)

Wizarbox is making it (and it looks like a piece of shit) Really though, NOE should have their own dev studios. There's a ton of talent floating around with nowhere else to go right now (cough, Grant Kirkhope, Chris Seavor /cough)

Well to be fair, not everyone is interested in every big game. If you bought your 3DS for MK7 and SM3DL and you weren't interested in Resident Evil Revelations, KIU or Mario Tennis then the last few months would've been rough for you. I've got plenty to play, no lack of games here! The gaps still piss me off though when there are plenty of games that could be localised and released within those gaps...

True! 2012 is looking to be a mediocre year all round really, but the 3DS' lineup isn't bad when taken as a whole. It's the gaps that bother me the most really and the lack of obvious 3DS titles (I'm looking at you MonHun 3G!)

Oh no it doesn't. You only get one colour per message with this update. THE RAINBOW PEN LIVES ON!!! (but only if you're in the know ) There's a couple of other new bits I've noticed. The Streetpass icon animates now (WHOOO!) and the text is now clearer when the S3D is turned up to the maximum setting. Also I hear rumblings that it now automatically deletes letters when you try to write one when your box is full. Anything else still eludes me however (as does the ability to send multiple replies to a letter )

I wouldn't say that. Sure you've got New Art Academy and Freakyforms deluxe this month and NSMB2 next month, but there's nothing slated for September. Then you've got the trio of LMDM, PMSS and Layton MoM that'll no doubt get released during October-December and then you're back to square one again with nothing to follow on from that (other than Fire Emblem Awakening and Demon Training, which are coming out lord knows when in 2013) Quality 3rd party titles are far and few inbetween (with two big ones out this month and then absolutely nothing in the pipeline for us in EU/US other than Castlevania MoF, Scribblenauts Unlimited and Epic Mickey POI) I wouldn't say that's a healthy lineup at all. It still features 2 month waits between quality titles (Jan: RE:Revelations, Mar: Kid Icarus Uprising, May: Mario Tennis Open, July: Theathythm, New Art Academy, Freakyforms DX & KHDDD, Aug: NSMB2, October & November: LMDM, PMSS, Layton MoM, Scribblenauts, Epic Mickey POI, Castlvania MoF, then nothing for December-2013). They've pushed more games into each month and October/November looks good but the gaps are still there and 2013 is a big fat blank.

For me I think the 3DS has had a much better start than either the DS or the GBA. Anyone else remember the 7-8 month long gruelling wait that we had to endure for the 2nd wave of DS software after launch? (Mario Kart DS, Advance Wars DS, Kirby Power Paintbrush) or the gruelling first year of the GBA where absolutely nothing of note came out after launch until Wario Land 4 in November and Advance Wars in January 2002! (and nobody expected that one to be as good as it was!) By comparison, the 3DS has had a (mostly) constant stream of quality titles. Some perhaps sliding too far on the scale towards brevity (Steel Diver, Pilotwings Resort and Mario Tennis Open spring to mind), but they all have really solid core gameplay and that's what ultimately matters most. My first year library for 3DS absolutely dwarfs the DS and GBA's first years! Still, the underlined point is also my problem with the 3DS thus far; Its lineup is far too sequel heavy. Where are the new and fresh IPs that blindside you out of nowhere? Where are the unexpected gems that go on to define the console? (Rhythm Thief is good, but it's no Advance Wars, Rhythm Heaven, TWERY or Golden Sun and Steel Diver isn't actually even designed for 3DS - it was originally a DS game!) The only one I'd really count that fits that description is Pullblox/Pushmo - though Dillon's Rolling Western is really good as well. I suppose that Kid Icarus Uprising and Theathythm might as well count as well (since they are in all practicality new IPs), but I fully expected them to be awesome; I want something to come out of nowhere! That plus a huge chunk of the console's library is seemingly trapped in Japan. It's a fucking crime against nature that we're not getting Monster Hunter 3G or 4!

It feels closer to the original REs yes, but it does still feature plenty of action (arguably still too much, but it's a clear step back away from RE5 and even 4 in that regard). Also it features the return of the non-linear structure, complete with helmet shaped keys and ridiculous layouts (though it's not as open as RE1-CV), as well as more puzzles than what you got in RE4, although they are still lacking in complexity. One other bit that's really cool is that the game is almost entirely seamless! Think Luigi's Mansion in how you can navigate the entire environment without any loading (outside of a few moments in RE:R's case). Revelations will satisfy you then, that's exactly what it does well. One thing I should also mention is that the higher difficulties do much more than just increase enemy health and damage, they also act as an arrange mode for the entire game! Enemy encounters and item locations change dramatically and the game prays on your familiarity with the earlier difficulties. It does a great job of making the familiar tense and unsettling again! Ammo and health is also scarce (as it should be). The controls without the CPP are the same as RE4, with a few extra bits. You can hold down R and L to shoot while strafing in all directions, you have a dedicated healing button, you can reload while running and the inventory is controlled entirely in real-time using the touch screen (unlike RE5 however, this works superbly well! Makes RE6 and RE5's inventory look like a joke in comparison!). Also there are some cool underwater sections that control perhaps most similarly to Monster Hunter Tri or Zelda Twilight Princess. Works very well. Having used the CPP, I actually prefer the game without it. It's no better or worse, it's just sort of there. RE4 & RE5 never needed dual analog and neither does this game.

Nintendo have already laid out their plans for DD of retail titles. They'll sell on the eShop for their full RRP, but B&M retailers will carry download cards that they are free to set for whatever price they want (unlike your normal PSN/XBLA cards, where the price is set in stone). The idea is that you are encouraged to buy your DD cards from retail, who will sell it for a cheaper price than the physical copy.

They did say that simultaneous multiplayer would come as part of the update to the release version back when they announced the ambassador program. Seems they decided to wait until there was a game that absolutely required wireless multi to work (i.e, wasn't a turn based multiplayer game like SMB) Nice to see they made good on their promise. Hopefully they'll add wireless multiplayer to their GB VC games, which they'll have to do if they want to release the Pokemon games on the VC! Seriously, no excuses here. The NES Classics series on GBA had wireless (and single pak!) multiplayer and now the NES VC games are getting it. Why the hell can't we play multiplayer with the GB VC games!? (if anything, they should be easier to get working over wireless than NES games since they are designed for LAN play! - Oh and before anyone asks, the 3DS' NiFi connection has a low enough latency to emulate the link cable so that's not a problem)

That's the same with all rhythm games and it'll always be the case since there's actual dev work that goes into making each song (making scores that match up with each tune - 3 in Theathythm's case) unlike on iTunes where they literally just copy and paste an MP3 file with no cost involved at all. Relative to other rhythm games, and indeed the JPN version of Theatrhythm, 90p is actually a very good price! Also some songs come with new 3D backgrounds while you're playing, so you're not just paying for the song.

Does that mean that Luigi gets a cheapo downgraded coin when he hits something?

Got it, came today, it's AWESOME! (as expected) There are a couple of things that disappoint me though. All the FMVs are unchanged from the Japanese version (seriously S-E!? You're too lazy to swap them out for videos of the English versions!?) and they inexplicably use the Japanese version of Melodies of Life instead of the English one (lazy bastards ) The gameplay is rock solid for the stages except for one thing - The Intro and Ending songs. They cheaped out with them and have you just tapping along with the music - kinda boring in comparison to the rest of the stages (which are all awesome!) Also, I was hoping for a few more series history bits that you'd be able to browse and unlock. The collectable cards are nice, but I was hoping that they might detail the series history a bit more. Nitpicky yes, but it would've been nice. The co-op mode is fun for unlocking stuff together, nothing earthshattering but it's always funny when someone else messes up and doesn't get any rare items while you do I hope they have some DLC music from some of the spinoffs as well, like FF:CC and Mystic Quest! I don't know if you get an extended version on higher difficulties but some songs are cut short (cough One Winged Angel/cough) Congrats on choosing the best version of FF5 BTW!

An utter disgrace. Not even speaking of the series' shift towards action over horror, it isn't even a good action game! Ok, let's speak of the good first. Leon's scenario showcased some promising atmosphere at the start, with no action to speak of until towards the end. However, this scenario falls apart at the seams when you realise how predictable it all is, with "scares" relegated to camera shifts and a hackneyed "twist" involving a predictable zombie transformation - culminating in an end scene that honestly made me think I was playing House of the Dead 4 (that's not a good thing considering that this isn't meant to be campy horror! ) Overall, not much gameplay to speak of and a tension that quickly falls apart when you start to see its puppet strings that hold it up. Now, Chris' Scenario. Oh boy... It's a straight up Gears of War clone (forget any sense of horror or tension at all) and not a very good one! Awkward doesn't begin to describe the controls, with a million different actions that serve little purpose and an aiming system that doesn't even accurately reflect where you're aiming! (oh and did I mention that Chris takes up half the fucking screen? Cause seeing Chris' roided out arse is more important than being able to see your environment!) The shooting is unsatisfying, with it feeling like you're shooting humanoid meringue rather than fleshy targets. OH GOD THE INVENTORY SYSTEM WHY!? OH GOD WHY!?!? If you hated RE5's clunky inventory system, you'll have a brain anurism and want to throw your controller at the TV with this game. It's unbelievably messy and complicated and makes no fucking sense! Took my about 10 mins just to work out how to use herbs! It's just simply trying to do too much in real-time with a limited display and input system (maybe a hypothetical Wii U version would be better suited to this kind of setup - Revelations did the real-time inventory right, this is a complete disaster!) - Oh and as an added bonus there is no way to pause the game at all, not even the Xbox guide pauses the game! That's just fucking rude to the player! Of course none of that really matters thanks to a "wonderful" innovation. Remember the kick command that would sometimes pop up in RE4 & RE5 where you could finish off some foes with a melee attack? Well now you can do it any time you want thanks to a new dedicated melee button! Who needs to aim when you can just mash the Right Trigger and have the game play itself for you! And in the case that you run out of stamina (the game has a Monster Hunter style stamina meter to act as a bandaid solution), the new quick shot command auto aims your bullets at enemies around you on the ground, removing the need for aiming at all while your stamina meter (very quickly) recharges Oh and as an added bonus, the level design is fucking awful. With the level laid out without rhime nor reason, the developers added a Call of Duty style distance marker that takes care of the navigation part of the game for you! How kind of them to hold your hand and prevent you from getting lost thanks to the dark and confusing layouts (not helped by the masses of tearing that the game suffers from) that RE6 has to offer! So with that mess out of the way, let's move on to Vin Diesel Jake's scenario. Starting off with an action scene involving masses of "awesome" action movie oneliners, you are dumped into a chase sequence where you are running from an Elgigante reject and are given no indication of how to run (resulting in an immediate You are Dead screen that reminds me of Another World's famous intro - though it's not a good thing here considering what they're going for here!). Following this, you are plonked into a warehouse of sorts that vaguely resembles an RE4 environment, only with super agile zombie ninjas that wield katanas and sub machine guns Finally you climax with a boss battle where you fight said Elgigante reject, by running around and repeatedly shooting it. He pretty much just charges back and forth in a predictable and boring manner And that's RE6, a sad shadow of the series former self that feels like it was designed by a market research powered AI. One of the best examples of corporate meddling this generation. From COD's distance markers and level design, to Jake's character design, to Gears of War's scripted camera tracking and gameplay (done poorly) to every generic shooter and action game this gen and even a ripoff of God of War's finisher animations! (You can actually make Chris rip the head off a zombie on the ground in a roid rage, yes I shit you not), you can see where the game has stolen its ideas and concepts from. Mind you though, there is one good thing about it. Try switching between weapons and items really quickly with Chris. It's just about the most hilarious thing you've ever seen

Not really. They already had these prototypes in production and simply slapped on whatever franchise best suited the game (Chase Mii/AC Sweet Day, Battle Mii/The Metroid game and the ninja star/Takamaru's Ninja Castle tech demos from E3 2011 all became their respective Nintendoland attractions.) Actually that's typically how Nintendo operate anyway. They come up with prototypes and slap on the characters that best fit the gameplay concept. Kid Icarus Uprising is a good example of this; if you've ever read the Iwata Asks, Sakurai mentions how he came up with the flying and land battle prototypes and then considered putting the Starfox characters/universe into the game, before settling on making it a revival of Kid Icarus.

Does not compute!!! FF4 DS raised the difficulty past the point of fun and well into the realm of frustration. It's also slow as hell, the music arrangements aren't as good as their originals (thankfully the PSP version lets you choose between the DS and SNES OSTs!) and the game has been turned into a ridiculous grindfest! Fundamentally though it's a different game thanks to the Augment system and the other gameplay changes, so I wouldn't even count it amongst the other versions of FF4. There's also something to be said about them ditching the beautiful charming sprites for slow and clunky 3D (oh and with only a max of 4 enemies in each encounter too thanks to the DS' hardware limitations!) Edit: Yay! Shopto have packed and dispatched my copy

Yeah me too. It's not unlike Zelda in that respect! For the record, FF4 (non DS, hate that version!) is the best game in the series. Here's my grand order (Not bothering with spinoffs or different versions because that would take forever! ) FF4>FF6>>>FF7>>>FF9>>FF3>>>FF1>>>>FF10>FF12>>FF2>>FF5>>FF10-2>>FF13-2>>Poop>>>>>>>>>>>>FF13>>>Garbage in it's purest form>>>FF8 If you're gonna start with the FF series from scratch, then FF4 is the very best place to start. Not because it's my favourite, but because it's the most friendly to newcomers and also the perfect summarisation of what the series is (or well used to be) all about. As for the whole version question, for FF4 go with the PSP one if you can (but just pretend that The After Years doesn't exist). If not, go with the SNES original on the VC (while the GBA one features the original JPN difficulty, it also suffers from some nasty bugs and it's pretty hard to get your hands on the somewhat fixed, though still somewhat flawed, EU GBA version) Preferred versions for each game can be seen below (PS1=PSN, there's nothing really wrong with the emulation on PS3, so feel free to pick it up from PSN if you have a PS3) FF1: PS1 FF2: PS1 FF3: DS (unless you understand Japanese, in which case Famicom!) FF4: PSP or SNES/VC (PSP one is purer to the original JPN version, SNES VC one is easier) FF5: GBA FF6: SNES/VC FF7: PS1 FF8: PS1 FF9: PS1 FF10: PS2 (though you might want to hold out for the upcoming HD remaster) FF10-2: PS2 FF12: PS2 FF13: PS3 FF13-2: PS3

If not a new IP, then could we be looking at a Tomato Adventure sequel? That doesn't look like a new M&L game...

GOTY so far is Kid Icarus Uprising. Utter insanity, a rollicking great ride and a surprise hit multiplayer mode that is far deeper than I ever expected it to be! Rhythm Heaven Fever is a close second. You're insane if you don't pick up that gem! Outside of that and a few other select releases (namely RE: Revelations, Tales of Graces F, NSMB2, Theatrhythm, LMDM, PMSS, Pikmin 3, PKMN B&W2, Layton MoM, Nintendoland, NSMBU, Wii Fit U and hopefully Castlevania MoF) I suspect that this year will be a pretty disappointing one overall (very sequel heavy )

It is more than just that though...

So after all that faffing nonsense and misdirection, the obvious turns out to be true anyway! Welcome to PS4 people! Playstation Plus is about to get a lot more expensive and valuable! http://www.industrygamers.com/news/the-state-of-the-games-industry-consoles-are-in-trouble/ It'll start with PS1,2,3 games being made available via the Gaikai cloud (free with PS+ subscription - probably a new tier) and then evolve to PS4. Maybe even erasing the "need" for PS4 hardware altogether! ("You already own our next generation console! No new hardware required!") Perhaps this also explains why the PS4 dev kits are using an x86 processor? (A bloated architecture that isn't fully utilised in a game console) I doubt that this is just a kneejerk reaction to Microsoft's Xbox roadmap document leak.

You're right about Manzai Birds (that's been replaced with Mr Upbeat - which was also the first unlockable minigame in Rhythm Tengoku GBA) but the detective game is still in (at least it is my US copy) Now imagine getting a perfect on that one! (I did :p). Channel those Lockstep skills! You guys are in for a treat with this one. Don't miss out on it! (oh and play in English before trying out Japanese. US English dub >>>>>> JPN version in this case!)

I think he's referring to the cliffhanger ending. Supposedly the 3 episodes were combined into the one game, but there were apparently quite a few bits planned that didn't appear in the final game...

Soo my US copy arrived today... and it's a bit of a weird case of regionality here. It works on my US DSi (big surprise), doesn't work on my EU DSiXl and does work on my EU 3DS Before anyone asks, yes it is running in DSi mode on the 3DS (You get the animating icon that you only get with DSi games) Weird. So it seems that some DSi enhanced games are only region free on the 3DS then!? (EXCLUSIVE 3DS CONTENT!!!11!!)