Good news North American PS Now subscribers! USFIV is now available to play through the PS Now Open Beta on both PS4 and PS3. For those who might not be aware, PS Now allows you to stream games directly onto your console. So head over to PS blog for more information and stream USFIV now!
Good news, guys. The elusive PlayStation One classic action platformer Strider 2 , which includes a port of the original Strider for the arcade, is finally coming to the North American PSN Store next Tuesday, October 7th! You can, and indeed should play this jam on your PlayStation 3, PSP, or PS Vita. Spread the word!
Sony has just announced PlayStation Plus’s October lineup , and I’m happy to report that it includes Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara (PS3), the collection containing two arcade beat-’em-up classics, Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara.
Both games feature drop-in, drop-out online coop, leaderboards, customizable rules, and other extras, and set the bar for beat-’em-ups for many years. This offer begins October 7th in North America, October 8th in Europe. Don’t miss out!
As mentioned last week, Chris and Jill’s BSAA outfits are going to be part of next year’s Resident Evil. Here’s a quick trailer showing them in action…
Sadly, Chris will not be able to uppercut any boulders, armoirs or other physical objects in the game. He must use the proper keys and items to proceed. Sorry Chris.
These outfits join us thanks to your efforts in the Raccoon City contagion . While that may be wrapped up, residentevil.net has a brand new interactive timeline that needs your personal tales of horror and woe! Or, uh, things you like about the games… that might be better.
As the excitement revs up for Revs 2 and the Remastering of the Resident Evil remake, it’s a great time for RE fans. The official community site ResidentEvil.net has also announced an exciting new feature in the form of ” Resident Evil Recollections .”
Recollections will offer a handy overview of the entire RE franchise with an in-depth timeline detailing its chronological history, along with a regularly updated feed of ” official articles ” provided by the admin team. Users of the site will even be able to contribute their own articles to the hub, recounting their own experiences as Resident Evil “surivivors.” Check it out for yourself!
Two years ago we visited the Capcom Bar & Grill in Shinjuku and returned with a video of its remarkable interior and live (!) presentations of food. This year… well I took a few nice photos 😛
Be sure to watch the video first, as it does a good job of summarizing the experience. This time around many of the items were the same, but we also tried a few new additions.
First up was the delicious Ace Attorney / Gavinners themed drink, complete with iced guitar! (I assumed the guitar neck was chocolate or SOME kind of edible material, took a big bite, hurt my teeth. I am an adult.)
Later, this adorable Okami dessert graced the table and somehow sprouted flowers all around us. OK, that part didn’t happen. But in my mind, it was beautiful.
And then the best dessert in the place, an RE Licker-ish brain. That raspberry sauce is too good!
Not food related, but I was surprised to see this Capcom / AA X New Japan Pro-Wrestling shirt. Didn’t know we crossed the streams like that… but it’s pretty cool if you’re a rasslin’ fan.
So yeah – if you happen to find yourself in Tokyo / Shinjuku, swing on by!
Did you notice September had 5 Mondays this year? That means you get an edition of Monster Hunter Mondays totally free! Add that to the Throwback Thursdays livestream from two weeks ago and you get a total of 6 Monster Hunter livestreams in one month. lol
Anyways, you can catch all the monster hunting today at 3pm PT on our Twitch channel. You can also find us on Help D Lobby 10 on Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Wii U). See you there!
More Capcom PC deals this week with GamersGate’s string of Capcom 48-hour sales. Expect to see Capcom deals on their site now through October 5th, starting with the ones below.
Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara – $14.99 | $7.50
Resident Evil 6 – $39.95 | $10.00
DmC Devil May Cry – $49.95 | 24.98
Ducktales: Remastered – $14.99 | $7.50
Resident Evil 4 HD Remastered– $19.99 | $10.00
Fairy Bloom Freesia – $7.99 | $1.60
Resident Evil Revelations – $49.95 | $12.49
Remember Me – $49.95 | 24.98
Dead Rising 2 – $19.95 | $9.98
Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition – $29.99 | $7.50
Resident Evil 5 – $19.95 | $9.98
Bionic Commando: Rearmed – $9.95 | $1.99
Devil May Cry 4 – $19.95 | $4.99
Dark Void – $9.95 | $1.99
Age of Booty – $4.99 | $1.00
Dark Void Zero – $4.95 | $0.99
Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition (Four Pack) – $89.99 | $22.50
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record – $29.95 | $14.98
World Gone Sour– $4.99 | $1.00
DmC Devil May Cry Costume Pack DLC – $3.99 | $2.00
Resident Evil 6 Onslaught Mode DLC – $3.99 | $1.00
Remember Me: Combo Lab Pack DLC – $3.99 | $2.00
The Nintendo Entertainment System, guys, amirite? At age thirty I still don’t know what a “bit” is, but apparently you only need eight of them to create an infinite number of infinitely deep, dark hellscapes; vivid worlds cloaked in thick, oppressive atmospheres that creep and sprawl through your imagination like spiderwebs through a horrid countryside tunnel. Sure: the NES library in its seemingly endless vastness had its light-hearted selections. We all remember the Noid. But it had a particular knack for generating dark worlds filled with foreboding. Maybe that creeping dread wasn’t purely a product of the physical worlds depicted in the games themselves. Maybe it was because games were so hard back then. Maybe it’s because most backgrounds consisted of endlessly repeating patterns and there’s something inherently, terrifyingly, mechanically alien about that. Maybe it’s because the edge of the screen worked as though it were the merciless edge of existence—events and encounters that occurred elsewhere mere moments ago were immediately forgotten, nullified. Maybe it’s because the NES’s color palette had, like Chicago before it, so damn many blues. Maybe it’s just because I was an overimaginative kid (though that, I feel, is an oxymoron). But I have faith that I’m not the only NES player who felt and still feels this way. Just look at these foreboding NES backdrops and setpieces. There is perhaps no Capcom NES game more synonymous with “hellscape” than Street Fighter 2010, a game about warping to alien planets in an alien galaxy and doing lots of backflips. I know, I’ve been talking about this game a lot lately. I do not apologize. On quite the contrary: You’re welcome. At one point in the game, you warp into the cold, soulless lair of “Electric Tommy,” an equally cold and soulless robot-like entity equipped with an electric coil. The lair is a nonsensical maze of blinking bulbs and machinery of unimaginable function. The background sprawls beyond the traversable confines of the level, and shadowy doorways suggest this is just part of an impossibly expansive, impossibly expensive complex. It boggles the mind to ponder what this place is even for. Another stage of the game places you in a dingy, seedy dive bar confined to a single screen. Unseemly hooded creatures with beady eyes and other drunkards watch on excitedly as you battle to the death with an armored gorilla man. I wonder if that pinball machine ever really gets any play. The shoot-‘em-up Legendary Wingsswitched intermittently between overhead and side views. The gateway signifying this switch was none other the gaping robo-demon pictured above. You and your wings would have to be the stuff of legends to venture into the mouth of this thing, not just once, but once per stage. Just look at that impossibly black mouth. What lurks within, no one knows. ↑ Turns out it’s filled with an endless wall of guts and faces. One of the final encounters of Bionic Commandotreats you to what is my favorite screen in all of NES gaming. In games built out of repeating tiles, the occurrence of a unique, singular image meant you were officially experiencing Something Important. The nefarious “Master-D” awakens from his long sleep within a massive, fluid-filled chamber. The also-nefarious Generalissimo Killt stands indignantly before you. A wall of incomprehensible dots and lines extends for unknown lengths in the background. Are those lights? Pipes? Wires? Secret morse code? (Actually, I looked this up; if it is morse code, it says “AAAAAAA,” suggesting that yes, it is morse code.) All of these elements are unique to this one moment in the game. In its time, this moment was as powerful as any modern-day stinger or plot twist—arguably even more powerful, since your imagination was doing so much more work. ↑ In my head, these kinds of backgrounds always extended infinitely. Only the power of evil itself could have built a place like this. One of the reasons I love the NES version of Strider so muchis that it maintains this dark, atmospheric aesthetic with futuristic landscapes thick with blue-purple hues and laden with bizarre technology and setpieces whose abstractness stimulates the imagination. ↑ Zain is allegedly some sort of tree, but there’s a lot of twisted stuff going on in this bizarre form. Are those fallopian tubes? ↑ Yggdrasil, the final threat, is even more nightmarish than the other trees. Are those faces? Plus: more unexplained technology filling the background. ↑ I’m particularly fond of this design. This is the Blue Dragon, which, somehow, is a ship. That blob shooting out of it is Strider Hiryu himself. Which begs the question: Why does he need a ship?! You decide! Mega Man games tend to have a lighter aesthetic with their cartoony-eyed, comically impractical robot creations, but there’s still something about the implied vastness of the stages that oozes atmosphere. Each stage is a pure, undistilled, and seemingly boundless (in that you never see the boundaries) manifestation of a theme, be it electricity, gravity, or, uh, “guts.” Snake Man’s stage in Mega Man 3 is, on closer inspection (or technically, further inspection), made almost entirely out of murderous robot snakes. The larger snake whose head is in the upper right, for example, extends several screens below and on into the infinite. The background of the stage is also comprised of a repeating scaly pattern. Is this, too, the body of some unfathomably enormous snake-bot?? And what inhabits the unseen areas that the stage wraps around? You decide! ↑ The later games in the classic series introduced more distinct—though basic—setpieces in each stage. Star Man’s stage in Mega Man 5 begins with this rad shot of a pair of satellite dishes and the moon. ↑ I stitched together some screens from the stage and added the implied space in the bottom left just to see what it’d look like. Pretty epic, huh? ↑ In one of the most iconic shots in all of gaming, Mega Man surveys that which he fights to protect. There you have it. Those are just a few of my favorite foreboding backdrops and setpieces from Capcom’s stellar NES library. Your turn! Post images in the comments or just describe ‘em.
Hot on the heels of the yesterday’s release of Patch #2 for Dead Rising 3 on the PC, today saw the surprise release of Patch #3!
Patch #3 is a much more minor affair–it will increase the overall volume for the game to better match the sound output level of the Windows sound system. As an additional bonus, the dev team has included a little gift in this patch as a token of appreciation to thank the community for all their constructive and helpful feedback. Those who download Patch #3 will receive:
– Ken Masters outfit
– Battle-hardened Nick outfit
– Custom muscle car skin
For the past couple of weeks, a virus has spread through Raccoon City . To help fight this outbreak, two famous BSAA agents have been dispatched to the area. You may know these agents as Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine!
So what does that mean for you? When Resident Evil launches early next year, you’ll be able to play through the game not only with their usual lineup of outfits, but also the BSAA / RE5-era costumes!
With its improved visuals, additional costumes and long list of Achievements/Trophies, Resident Evil is lookin’ pretty nice!
Digital PC game distributor Green Man Gaming is following up this week’s Capcom Sale with