New Sequel of Metal Gear ! Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

In Konami’s followup to Metal Gear Solid 4, you play as Raiden, the snow-haired cyborg everyone wishes had been playable in the last game. Where past installments mixed stealth and action elements, Revengeance is strictly hack-and-slash, though word is you can slice and dice anything you see in the game. Yep, I think “Revengeance” sounds like a dumb name, too, but that’s what we’re stuck with, though it’s really no worse than “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” or “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” and look how those turned out.

Source : http://techland.time.com/2011/12/13/the-10-games-i-want-to-play-most-in-2012/?slide=uncharted-golden-abyss#metal-gear-rising-revengeance

Players assume control of cyborg ninja Raiden, the katana-wielding ally of series mainstay Solid Snake. Unlike previous titles in the Metal Gear Series, Revengeance is strictly an action game, focusing on swordfighting and a sophisticated cutting system. The game's cutting system allows players to engage in third person melee combat, as well as precisely slash enemies and objects "at will" along a geometrical plane using a "free slicing" mode. Virtually any object in the game can be cut, including vehicles and enemies, though elements of the environment were intentionally limited to structures such as pillars and walls to better facilitate gameplay. The free slicing mode is similar to other aiming modes in previous Metal Gear Solid titles, but produces a special targeting reticule in the form of a transparent blue plane which can be rotated and moved, tracing orange lines across the surfaces of objects to indicate exactly where they will be cut; it can also be used to enter a bullet time state, giving players the opportunity to precisely slash targets during moments of action, such as slicing through a falling target from multiple angles before it hits the ground. These features can be employed strategically, for example disabling opponents, finding weak points and gaps in armor, severing support columns to collapse ceilings or walls onto enemies, deflecting enemy fire, or cutting through objects to remove enemy cover. Human soldiers from the game were removed to avoid censorship issues in Japan. Raiden will have the ability to parry attacks even when his back is turned
Although Raiden's main weapon will be his high-frequency blade, he will also have "sub-weapons", None of them are guns as they are to be used by enemies. Instead, Raiden can wield solely blades such as a dagger. In the debut trailer for the rebooted title, Raiden was also seen grappling and throwing large robotic enemies, and dramatically increasing his running speed for short bursts.
A key gameplay feature initially announced for game was titled zan-datsu (斬奪 lit. "cut and take"^?), and would have involved "cutting" through enemies and "taking" parts, energy, ammunition, items, and information from the bodies of dismembered cyborgs and robots. For example, in the E3 2010 trailer, Raiden tears a battery — in the form of a glowing mechanical spine — from a dismembered cyborg enemy, which he then crushes after absorbing energy from it to heal himself. This gameplay element will not remain as the focus of the game, but will still be optional as of the move to Platinum Games, dialogue in the most recent trailer discusses such extracting of fluids from enemy cyborgs in order to obtain electrolytes.
The game's original director, Mineshi Kimura, stated that Rising would carry on the series tradition of encouraging players to progress through the game without killing, noting that there is a moral difference between attacking cyborgs or robots and attacking human beings, and that there's a "certain virtue to simply disabling your enemies instead of killing them." While it was considered important to give the players freedom to do what they want, the game's original producer Shigenobu Matsuyama, indicated that players would never be rewarded for killing human opponents, and that the game would be designed so that players would never be forced to do so

Sony PlayStation Vita Review: Beautiful, Expensive and Worth It

The PlayStation Vita is Sony’s biggest gamble yet — a pricey, piano-black, hockey-rink-shaped gaming handheld tricked out with dual joysticks, motion and touch controls and a gorgeous widescreen aimed unapologetically at serious gamers. It’s Sony’s defiant stand against the rising tide of all-in-one smartphones and tablets — the company’s bet that dedicated gaming devices with the DNA of set-top consoles like the Xbox 360 and Sony’s own PlayStation 3 can coexist alongside Apple’s iPhone and iPad or Google’s assortment of Android phones and tablets.

Much of its allure thus lies in its souped-up hardware: Where Nintendo’s 3DS and most phones lock your eyes to middling 3.5- or 4-inch LCD displays, the Vita offers a capacious 5-inch touchscreen with cutting-edge OLED (organic light-emitting diode) visuals. That screen outputs visuals produced by powerful quad-core processors that can supply games with dazzling PlayStation 3-like graphics. And instead of inviting your fingers to crowd the view as they do when manipulating clumsy, 2D controls on smartphone flat-screens, the Vita offers two raised thumb-sticks for an authentic console-style experience — they’ll let you play triple-A launch titles like Uncharted: Golden Abyss (an adventure/shooter) or Wipeout 2048 (a futuristic anti-grav racer) with the sort of control finesse a touchscreen can’t deliver.

(MORE: Everything You Need to Know About Sony’s PlayStation Vita Launch)

Pick up the Vita and you’re greeted by a “crystal black” oval face framed in metallic silver, the controls — a robust d-pad, small but stable twin joysticks and four face buttons — resting comfortably beneath your thumbs on either side. It looks a lot like the PlayStation Portable, in other words, though about half an inch wider and taller, and a tenth of an inch thicker. You’ll probably be surprised by how light it feels, weighing just 260 grams, a little more than an 8 oz. bottle of water and on par with the original PSP.

The handheld’s most striking feature out of the box is the 5-inch touchscreen, which runs at 960 x 544 pixels and can display up to 16.7 million colors, furnishing the Vita with the prettiest visuals on the block. Colors snap during videos or gameplay without a trace of ghosting, and even the smallest letters in menus or game tutorials are crisp and easily legible from several feet away, whether you’re looking at the screen head-on or tilted sideways 45-degrees. Fire up a game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and it’s like playing Uncharted on the PS3, every tropical palm frond, torchlit temple and sun-kissed mountain vista rendered exquisitely.

You won’t find “stereoscopic 3D” in the Vita’s dossier, but you probably won’t miss it, either. Instead, Sony’s “shake up” angle involves a touchpad on the Vita’s underside, where you’d normally place your fingertips. This allows you to tap or slide your fingers in concert with the front touchscreen (a pair of framing “grips” help your fingers feel where the touchpad begins and ends). During activities that require simple tapping to trigger actions like “fire a weapon,” it’s intuitive and flawless, though in others where you have to slide your fingertips on the touchpad to rotate objects, it can be disorienting, like trying to use a touchpad on a laptop’s underside. Most of the launch games either use it conservatively or offer button alternatives, so it doesn’t feel like a standout feature at this point. I’d give it some time before developers release an “oh that’s what it’s for” app.

For navigation, Sony’s actually devised a more intuitive way to move between open applications than either Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS. Like those two, apps are situated on screens you swipe to switch between (here, up or down). Launch an app, and it lives in what Sony calls a “LiveArea” that you can leave or return to by simply swiping left or right, which is Sony’s way of folding in the PS3′s Emmy-winning crossbar (x and y) approach. This allows you to suspend a game while checking in on friends, flipping through photos or browsing Sony’s PlayStation Store, and closing an app’s as simple as peeling it back with your finger, like tearing a page off a sticky notepad.

(MORE: The 7 Most Promising PlayStation Vita Launch Games)

You won’t be disappointed with the native apps lineup: “Welcome Park” may be the smartest introduction to a mobile system ever, five touch-based mini-games so compulsive I spent my first evening with the unit battling to unlock every bronze, silver and gold trophy. Speaking of, Sony’s included both trophies as well as cross-game text messaging here, a coup for gamers accustomed to game achievements and meta-communication options when playing on a console. Other features include photo, music and video organizers, a web browser (though alas, without Flash or HTML5 support), a “remote play” option that lets you tackle PS3 games on your Vita using screen-sharing technology, a version of Google Maps and “Near,” a GPS app that optionally broadcasts what you’re doing to nearby Vita owners, in turn letting you know what they’re up to. The only thing the Vita’s missing at launch: social networking apps like Facebook, Twitter and Skype, all of which Sony promises are coming (along with Flickr and Foursquare) as free downloads “in early 2012.”

Canvassing the remaining bits and bobs, the system’s front and rear facing VGA (640 x 480) 1.3-megapixel cameras are clearly low-end, but they’re mostly for gameplay or throwaway snaps — the Vita’s not intended for serious photo or videophiles. The stereo speakers sound decent enough for a handheld, with predictable bass and volume limitations — you’ll definitely want headphones if playing somewhere noisy. And the power cable terminates in a USB plug that either connects to the included AC adapter, your computer, or your PlayStation 3 (the latter two allow you to backup or restore the Vita’s volatile data).

(MORE: How Vita-PSP Game Compatibility Works, Launch Support List Available Now)

Battery life, while a trifle disappointing, is easily within Sony’s projected range of “3 to 5 hours” for gaming (the most processor-intensive activity). I was able to play Uncharted: Golden Abyss for about three-and-a-half hours before the display cut out (fortunately, it only took a little over an hour to fully recharge). The good news: The Vita easily beats Nintendo’s power-hungry 3DS here, but the bad is that it falls far short of the on-average nine hours PSP owners are accustomed to. Plan to play plugged-in as often as not.

The complaints you’re most likely to hear about the Vita will be: It’s expensive, and the standalone memory cards are ridiculously expensive. The Vita costs $249.99 in its standard Wi-Fi configuration — $299.99 if you really want 3G data service, but since you can’t play most games over a 3G connection and have to pay AT&T a monthly fee to use it ($15 for 250MB, $30 for 3GB), I can’t recommend it. But the $249.99 Vita actually seems like a terrific deal given what it offers. The seven-year-old PSP costs $129.99 today, sure, while Nintendo 3DS, which launched in March 2010 for $249.99, now goes for $169.99, but the Vita’s actually far closer, hardware-wise, to a device like Apple’s iPhone 4S — a smartphone that retails, unsubsidized, for between $650 and $850. You’ve heard the adage “you get what you pay for,” and in the Vita’s case, it’s true.

Sony’s memory card prices are tougher to justify. The Vita has no built-in storage, so the cards are all but required. But $20 for 4GB? $60 for 16GB? $100 for 32GB? Most 4GB memory cards go for less than $5, and you can find 32GB cards for just over $30. Sony’s unfortunately borrowed a page from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 here, making storage proprietary, then charging exorbitant prices. Sure, $20 isn’t much, but neither is 4GB, which you’ll quickly fill if you plan to download full PSP or Vita games direct from the PlayStation Store (the PS Store version of Uncharted: Golden Abyss alone uses a whopping 3.2GB). Thus while I can’t countenance the system price complaint, it’s clear Sony needs to either reduce its memory card prices or open the format to third-party manufacturers.

Why buy a Vita in what’s quickly become a smartphone/tablet world? Because you want to play serious, console-style games (with console-style controls) on the go. That’s the Vita’s exclusive promise at launch, anyway — a souped-up, dedicated games handheld that’s as comfortable letting you tap out rhythm-cued dance moves in something like Michael Jackson: The Experience as it is handing you a weapon, requiring you operate it with ballistic sophistication, then chucking you at the bad guys in the inevitable BioShocks, Battlefields and Call of Duties to come.

Source : http://techland.time.com/2012/02/13/sony-playstation-vita-review-beautiful-expensive-and-worth-it/2/

Diablo III Review: Drop By for the Grind, Stay for the Achievements

If all you play of Diablo III is its no-cutting-in-line “normal” mode, you haven’t played the better game Blizzard wants you to. That one involves epic boss fights, crafting killer gear, questing for legendary item sets and plying your wares on a stock market-like auction house. It’s like World of Warcraft stripped to the frame — just the pruning and dress-up parts. You’ll get there shortly after Blizzard unlocks “nightmare” mode, blinking you back to the starting line with all of your skills and loot intact.

But until then — it’ll take most players a dozen hours their first time to finish all four story acts — you’ll have to slog through a functionally dull, much-too-easy game, schlepping impotent gear and whacking away at stuff that arrows toward you like the robots in Stern Electronics’ 1980 coin-op Berzerk. For all the talk about games like Moria and Angband, that’s Diablo’s pedigree, and the nitty-gritty hasn’t changed much three decades on (it’s alternately like Asteroids, only you can build a better ship and the stuff barreling toward you doesn’t break into smaller chunks). And when you die, you don’t really, your gear just loses a fraction of its durability, which if you biff it often (you won’t) only means you have to teleport back to town and pay a craftsman pennies on the dollar to insta-fix everything. It’s a polite little slap on the hand, a not-really penalty Blizzard asks you to pay as if to wink and say “Remember when games used to be hard?”

(MORE: Diablo III: So Far, So Rolling a Boulder Downhill)

Asking non-Diablo-wonks to spam mouse buttons for a dozen hours is, given Blizzard’s reputation for exhaustively over-thinking everything it does, an exhaustively over-thought mistake, and apologists won’t win arguments dismissing complaints about the game’s start-up simplicity as “playing the game wrong” (maybe if we use the house rule “play with both eyes closed”?). Even the learning curve is like riding a golf cart down a 10-degree incline. Clearing a path through each of the acts and taking out the area and final bosses, whether playing as a tank, nuke or hybrid class (you can pick from five total, as in Diablo II), is all but effortless the first time around. It doesn’t help that at the outset, Blizzard picks your skills for you each time you level, and the only optional buffs — runes and passive skills — unlock at the speed of a ride line at Disneyworld.

Stick with Diablo III, however, and you’ll discover it’s morphed into another game around the time you hit level 40, after you’ve unlocked most of the skills and runes and the game’s enemies are actually trying to kill you in tactically interesting ways. In fact that’s one of the most important iterative wrinkles: Enemies don’t just spawn with more health points on the higher difficulty settings, they also manifest more devastating abilities. For instance, taking out Dune Stingers — desert bugs that spit mini-wasp projectiles — is a snap the first time through, but when they’re elite-spawning at level 31 or higher and combining random traits like “Vampiric” (converts damage to you into health for them) and “Fire Chains” (ropes of fire linking multiple enemies that do heavy damage if you get near), they can be incredibly hard to put down. Sussing higher-level enemies like these, whether on your own or playing with others, is where Diablo III starts to become the tactical game it should have been from the start.

The same principle applies to cooperative play, where skill restrictions at first forces parties to follow near/far role conventions. Thirty or 40 levels in, however, you’re playing a completely different game — one that’s much more WoW-like — as characters swap roles on the fly, bringing specializations to bear on random-spawned creatures with surprise ability combos. Blizzard also wisely tossed old-school roleplaying cliches to increase character build flexibility, so you’ll spy Wizards wearing plate armor and Monks wielding swords. Only class-specific items like the Witch Doctor’s masks, the Monk’s fist weapons and the Wizard’s wands are restricted. It’s hard to say which class works best for a given play-style — hardcore players already disagree about this vigorously, which is probably a sign Blizzard got that much right.

(MORE: Diablo III Battles Battle.net Blues as Players Slam the Game in Reviews)

Once the loot game picks up toward the first run-through’s end, Diablo III becomes like any other vanity game, where you’re tweaking your character’s prowess by whittling away at equipment slots. As in WoW, you’ll be focused on building the best character, looting the best equipment set, and eventually unlocking all the game’s achievements (a daunting list). The latter’s why I plan to keep playing the game long after I’ve soloed “Hell” mode or stormed the final act on “Inferno,” to see if I can do stuff like complete each act in under an hour, or kill the final boss on “Nightmare” difficulty without using health globes or healing wells, or make it to level 60 on “Hardcore” mode, where character death and equipment loss are irrevocable.

But it’s not as simple as calling Diablo III a mediocre action-RPG that eventually turns into a good and sometimes even great one. There’s the always-on requirement to consider, which – never mind the glitchy launch — sometimes “teleports” my character back a dozen yards as whatever client-server algorithm struggles behind the scenes to sort some lag issue. Or take level randomization, one of the Blizzard’s ballyhooed features designed to make repeat play less repetitive — in actuality, areas and locales are far less pliable than Diablo II‘s, give or take a few mutable mini-dungeons (finding them all requires tediously reloading a chapter until you get what you need to check off an achievement list). And the item economy feels off-kilter at this point: Good luck rolling “legendary” items that aren’t routinely outclassed by less expensive “rare” or even “magic” ones.

You can wave some of that off to “work in progress” (with all the tweaks Blizzard makes to its games, the phrase could be the company’s tagline) and this review may have little to do with what the game becomes in a year or five. Consider how much both Diablo II and World of Warcraft changed over the past decade, and if you haven’t already picked up the game, factor that into your buying decision. At this point, Diablo III is clearly a mixed bag of a game, but with PvP and the real money auction house in the offing, player feedback-based fine-tuning and all the expansions and downloadable content you can pretty much bet the farm on happening, Diablo III stands a more-than-average chance of becoming the better-than-average game so many hoped it would.

Score: 4 out of 5

Source : http://techland.time.com/2012/05/29/diablo-iii-review-drop-by-for-the-grind-stay-for-the-achievements/?iid=tl-main-feature

Lady Gaga Sends Love to Indonesian Fans

Lady Gaga told fans she was “devastated” at having to cancel her sold-out show in Indonesia following threats by Islamic hard-liners, who called her a “devil worshipper.”

Controversy over the concert is a blow to the predominantly Muslim country’s reputation as a tolerant, pluralist society that respects freedom of expression.

Some fans accused police — who refused to issue a permit over concerns about security — of buckling to the will of a small group of thugs.

“We had to cancel the concert in Indonesia,” the 26-year-old pop diva tweeted to her followers Sunday night after promoters acknowledged concerns about her own safety and that of her “Little Monster” fans if the show went ahead.

“I’m so very sorry to the fans & just as devastated as you if not more,” she wrote. “You are everything to me.”

Indonesia, a secular nation of 240 million, is often held up by the US and others an example of how democracy and Islam and can coexist. In many ways they are right. Since emerging from dictatorship just over a decade ago, sweeping reforms have resulted in direct elections, while vastly improving human rights and freeing up the media.

But a small extremist fringe has become more vocal — and violent — in recent years, attacking Christians and members of other religious minorities, transvestites, atheists and anyone else deemed immoral.

The most notorious, the Islamic Defenders Front, said Lady Gaga’s sexy clothes and provocative dance moves would corrupt the youth. They vowed to turn out at the airport by the thousands if Lady Gaga arrived. Others said they bought tickets so they could wreak havoc from inside the 52,000-seat stadium in the capital, Jakarta.

Police responded by denying the necessary permits. Then, after public outcry, they said they’d reconsider — but only if Lady Gaga agreed to tone down her act.

Instead, she pulled the plug on what was supposed to be the biggest stop on her Asian tour.

Michael Rusli, head of Big Daddy, promised “Little Monster” fans full refunds.

But that provided little consolation to people like 25-year-old Johnny Purba.

“This only shows to the world how weak security forces are in this country, how police are afraid of a bunch of hard-liners,” he said.

“Gaga’s two-hour show will not hurt Indonesian Muslims. For God’s sake, she is not a terrorist!”

Hard-liners, however, were ecstatic.

“This is a victory for Indonesian Muslims,” said Salim Alatas, one of the leaders of the Islamic Defenders Front. “Thanks to God for protecting us from a kind of devil.”

Associated Press

Source : http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/jakarta/lady-gaga-sends-love-to-indonesian-fans/520591