Pokemon Sun and Moon Unused Walking Animations Uncovered

Back in 2009, Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver contained the technology to allow Pokemon to follow player characters around the overworld, and to be used for puzzle solving. That technology was seemingly lost to time, given that every Pokemon game released since has lacked the feature.

However, it looks like developer Game Freak has been working on reintroducing the feature, based on a series of Tweets from user @KazoWAR, reported Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez.

Having delved into the game files, KazoWAR and others have found unused low-poly meshes and animations that depict many Pokemon simply idling and walking – animations that are not used in the battles found in Pokemon Sun and Moon.

At this stage it isn’t clear why the follow feature wasn’t included in Pokemon Sun and Moon, despite the presence of the assets within the game files. Assumedly it was simply an issue of time, priority, or performance. Or, perhaps they were built in preparation for its inclusion in the rumored third version of the game coming to Nintendo Switch?

Given that sales for this latest Pokemon title have skyrocketed, here’s hoping more time can be given to including following Pokemon in future titles.

Source : tripeaks card games

Space Hulk: Deathwing Gets a New 17 Minute Gameplay Trailer

AS STATED PREVIOUSLY, VENGEANCE GUIDES OUR WEAPONS.

Space Hulk: Deathwing is an upcoming first-person-shooter from Streum On Studio, which promises to put players into the huge Terminator power-armor of a Dark Angels Librarian.

The 17-minute chunk of gameplay footage released this week shows the player delving into the cramped and creaking corridors of a Space Hulk, teeming with Genestealers and various other enemies from Warhammer 40k lore.

This early gameplay footage looks great, though it’s not without its faults. The ambient chatter from the player character and his pair of squadmates is repetitive and limited, and the locations shown in the trailer don’t show much variety, though that does make sense in fiction if the entire game is set on the remains of a destroyed and infested starship.

Fans of the series will recognize the iconic armor and weapons available to the player, as well as a brace of Psyker powers employed by the Librarian.

Source : solitaire scorpion

Watch Dishonored 2 Speedrunner Beat Game in 32 Minutes

It took me two hours to beat the first mission.

Dishonored 2 lets you play the game however you want to, whether that's killing every enemy in sight or stealthily slipping by them unnoticed. For speedrunner Voetiem, however, it's to get through the game as quickly as possible, and he's done so in just over 30 minutes.

As PC Gamer reports, Voetiem's run lasts for about 38 minutes, but without load times, it brings their total down to 32 minutes and 17 seconds. According to Speedrun.com, it's also a world record, with the next fastest time being 35 minutes and 59 seconds. You can check out the full run for yourself in the video below.

As for the strategies, Voetiem employs several that are quite funny to watch. It's already the type of game that benefits from hilarious moments of physics and AI clashing, but some of the ways Voetiem proceeds through the game's chapters are pure gold. It's definitely worth a watch.

Dishonored 2 received a score of 8/10 in GameSpot's review. Critic Scott Butterworth concluded, "Dishonored 2 might lack challenge in its later levels, but the basic tools are a joy to play with regardless. And with two characters and two basic play styles to choose from--both of which noticeably impact the story and the world as you go--there's a lot of longevity to be wrung from the campaign."

Source : Freecell 

World of Final Fantasy Review

World of Final Fantasy feels like a game that celebrates the series’ massive legacy while also making it friendlier to a younger audience. Unfortunately, it stumbles in a few key places, making it more of an awkward mixer than the all-encompassing RPG party players might be anticipating.

Things don't exactly get off to a rollicking start. After a cryptic initial cutscene, you’re treated to a too-long set of introductory cinematics that offer little in the way of actual introduction. You meet fraternal twins Lann and Reynn, who apparently have been living a normal life in a city working at a coffee shop--until a mysterious woman and a strange creature give them surprising news. The twins learn that they--and their mother--were once important figures in a world named Grymoire filled with monsters and tiny people known as Lilikin. It’s a pretty head-scratching introduction--and not in a good way. It doesn’t help that Enna vanishes while calling herself “god.” The duo are left with Tama as their guide, who has a speech the-pattern that will very quickly start to drive you the-bonkers.

When the twins get to Grymoire, they discover they can change from tiny to normal size to get around and interact with the populace. They also can “imprism” the Mirage monsters that roam Grymoire, turning them into battling companions. Bad things are afoot in Grymoire, however--a group of armor-clad figures called the Bahamutian Army have annexed numerous territories in the realm under the guise of benevolence, though their true goal is to enact a complex prophecy involving plenty of good old fashioned chaos and destruction.

Grymoire is a beautiful place filled with otherworldly environments that, combined with the cute monsters that lurk within, capture a whimsical, storybook feel. When they’re not traversing the wilderness, Lann and Reynn wind up in towns based on locations from previous Final Fantasy games, such as Nibelheim from Final Fantasy VII. It’s here that the duo will usually encounter familiar (but cuter) Final Fantasy characters who harbor the souls of “champions” and use their abilities to help Lann and Reynn defeat the Bahamutian Army’s evil machinations.

Despite its chibi-sized Final Fantasy heroes and focus on monster collecting, you won't be summoning an army of adorable Final Fantasy characters to do battle for you. Most of your battling companions are of the monstrous variety--you can only summon famous Final Fantasy characters to battle after dealing and accruing enough damage, and only after meeting them in the story and acquiring their Champion Medal. They don’t show up for long--they just unleash a special attack and then peace out, acting much like summoned monsters would in a traditional Final Fantasy game.

That isn’t to say that combat is a completely by-the-numbers affair. Lann and Reynn can have up to four monsters accompany them in fights. Every monster is assigned a size--small, medium, or large--and you can “stack” the twins and monsters into a cute critter column to fight with. Stacks offer a lot of benefits: characters in a stack pool their health, ability points, attack and defense power, skills, and elemental resistances together to create a powerful entity that can withstand heavy hits and deal more damage than the characters would individually--at the cost of the turns each individual character would get in battle.

Characters in a stack can also combine certain skills and turn them into more powerful techniques. For example, if two stacked characters have water magic, you’ll get access to a higher-level water spell. Enemies can also stack up for similar benefits, so sometimes you’ll want to use attacks that can topple a stack of characters. When a stack collapses, everyone in the tower winds up stunned for a turn, giving you free rein to smack them around. Naturally, your towers are just as vulnerable to collapsing, so you need to be careful when you see signs of wobbling.

Of course, before you can stack up critters like a pile of pancakes, you’ll need to capture them. While many monsters become catchable after a few simple attacks, others require very specific actions before you can imprism them: You may have to hit them with a particular status ailment, give them an item, or use a particular style of attack. While this helps make the game’s monster-catching element a bit more dynamic, it can be extremely annoying in practice. You may run into some one-time-encounter monster in the field, only to discover that you don't have the skills in your current party necessary to capture them. You can't run from these fights, nor can you swap out monsters in battle, leaving you no choice but to beat the rare monster normally and cry over the missed opportunity.

That’s only one of a pile of little annoyances that drag down the World of Final Fantasy experience. The battles, even at max speed, move at a glacial pace, making it almost necessary to hold R1 to fast forward through them at all times (and tiring your index finger in the process). Every monster has a “Mirage Board” similar to the Sphere Grid and Crystarium from Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII, respectively; these unlock various skills and abilities by using points earned from leveling up. These kinds of skill-up grids work nicely in role-playing games with limited character sets, but they become a royal pain to manage when you’re juggling numerous creatures in and out of your party. Most monsters in the game have alternate forms that you can access when they reach a certain level, but these variations don’t retain many of the skills of their previous incarnations, and the new forms have their own Mirage Boards to futz around with.

Dungeons tend to be very linear (and they’re less fun to explore than they are to look at), and you’ll sometimes come to a puzzle or obstacle that requires a specific monster skill or set of properties in order to progress. If you don’t have the right monsters in your current party you must either use an expensive item or go back to a teleport/save point to swap in the correct monsters or capture some new beasts with the properties you need (and perhaps grind them up to unlock the necessary skill to progress).

At least there’s some reward for suffering through these aggravations: The dialogue and character writing are both incredibly charming, filled with lots of peppy exchanges between the twins and the assorted NPCs they encounter (the aforementioned Tama excepted). A little bit into the game, you get the ability to participate in various character vignettes starring the Final Fantasy characters.These segments are ridiculously adorable and tons of fun to watch. The further I advanced in World of Final Fantasy, the more it felt like I was just playing to see the little interactions among the twins and the other characters--the overarching story, exploration, and monster collecting didn’t interest me nearly as much as seeing which Final Fantasy character I might encounter next. The game is ultimately worse when it stops being cute and goofy and tries to tell a serious story.

Unfortunately, you have to put up with a fair amount of frustration and filler before you get to enjoy the best of what World of Final Fantasy has to offer, namely charming writing and Final Fantasy fan service. If you’re willing to put up with some of the game’s mundane sequences, you’ll get some enjoyment out of it, but if you’re not a Final Fantasy fanatic, the magic in these moments may be lost altogether.

The Silver Case Review

If Suda 51 represents one of a scant few auteur game designers, The Silver Case, finally released on Western shores in this remastered form, is basically his student film, a statement of intent and trajectory rather than its own cohesive masterwork. As such, The Silver Case has a few of the elements that fans have come to recognize in a legitimate "Suda 51 Joint", but those elements are obscured by convoluted point-and-click gameplay, and a story that meanders, rants, and rambles getting where it needs to go.

The overarching narrative involves the return of an infamous serial killer named Kamui Uehara to a futuristic Japanese city known as the 24 Wards--and the efforts of a small investigative team to take him down. The game features two scenarios: In the first, Transmitter, you play as a mute detective who is somehow spared by the killer Kamui on the night he first reappears. In the other scenario, Placebo, you take on the role of a freelance reporter whose tale runs parallel to the first mode, as you sort through the mess after the cops are done.

The Silver Case's gameplay uses bog-standard adventure game mechanics. You can walk around your environment from one specified point to another by just turning, looking, and pushing up on the keyboard/gamepad. Once at a specific point, noted with a technicolor star indicator, you can use the Check option to get more details or activate the next scene. Some moments and puzzles require special tools in the Implements menu, but these moments are rare. For the most part, you're basically just following the dialogue around a room to get to the next scene. It's always when it's least expected or necessary that the game finally cottons to the fact that you might want to play it, and then it has the player knocking on doors, asking witnesses questions, wandering aimlessly around an environment to find the trigger for the next scene, or, in some cases, solving tricky little ciphers to open a door. Still, you can go long stretches without ever getting a button tap in. Some scenes literally have the protagonist walk two steps ahead, then trigger a long dialogue that may not let up for 10 minutes.

The game is framed like episodes of a television show, with each taking maybe an hour and a half to two hours to complete each--assuming you don't get tripped up by an obtuse puzzle or have to re-check every door and contact point looking for the one action prompt you missed; or assuming you don’t get confused by the controls altogether, where just getting to the point of moving forward through the first-person space is a three-step process instead of just pressing forward. The same goes for looking up, down, investigating an object, or talking to someone in the room, all which involve an overly convoluted, clunky menu.

Even if you gain some sort of finesse with the controls, the game's length remains a sticking point due to some terrible pacing and difficulty parsing new story details. Bad controls in a '90s point-and-click adventure can be tolerated if the stories are well paced and brilliantly executed, but each Silver Case episode is padded with filler. Every detective seems to have a philosophical ramble on every small decision they have to make in the field, and none of these characters are interesting or layered enough to make this stuff compelling. Most fall into the category of thinking that their job is dumb, and anybody putting in effort is a loser.

This, of course, is one of the hallmarks of Suda 51's work: apathetic heroes treating a completely insane, terrifying scenario as a nuisance keeping them from a good nap. The main issue with The Silver Case, however, is that--some bizarre minor details aside--the scenarios here are grounded in reality more than anything Suda made afterward. The usual fuzzy logic and unnatural human interactions that add to the “playable dreamscape” feeling of most of his games is an ill fit here. These are plausible scenarios, worked on by implausible characters.

When the game does get to the business of actually presenting the gory details of each case, it fares better. The overarching narrative of the Kamui case is the glowing red seed of abstract madness that has come to define Suda's work, and the horrors presented whenever the plot progresses are chilling and effective. Some of the other scenarios, including a hilariously dated (yet sadly, still prescient) case based around cyberbullying are just dead-weight slogs to get through. Others, however, such as a case that revolves around a man held for ransom while his businesses are completely dismantled by a mute terrorist, are breezy and captivating-- that one employs a beautiful black-and-white noir-ish art style.

The Placebo scenario as a whole gets some points for having an active, talkative, interesting protagonist to tag along with. Even the good cases are sometimes hard to get a solid grasp on, however, and the fact that so many different art styles--CG, anime, live action, still manga panels--are employed willy-nilly to tell the tales doesn't help. While some of the varieties in art direction are compelling, there are often too many to get a firm grasp on what the game aims for as a whole. For this remaster, Suda enlisted his longtime collaborator Akira Yamaoka to help remix the score, and while the music by itself is a fun, jazzy throwback most of the time, it, too, flies in the face of whatever of import is happening onscreen.

More than anything, The Silver Case is more interesting in the context of Suda 51's career than it is as a standalone game. It shows an ambitious floating of new ideas past the player, and much of how the story is presented would later find a more welcome home when surrounded by much weirder, wilder worlds. Stranded in the framework of a police procedural, however, the game fails its best concepts. The Silver Case's unusual take on human conversations, its indecision about whether it wants to be just a visual novel or an adventure game where the player is a full participant, and its lack of focus in tying up any sort of cohesive plot, all add up to a mess of a game.

Company of Heroes Turns 10 With a $10-for-Everything Humble Bundle

Get a whole bunch of WWII RTS action for a few bucks.

The Company of Heroes series turns 10 years old this year, and to celebrate, a Humble Bundle is available right now that gets you most of what the franchise has to offer.

By paying at least a dollar, you can get the original game and its expansion packs, as well as one of the armies from Company of Heroes 2 (which can be played as a standalone version of CoH 2). Beating the average, which is a paltry $4.39 as of this writing, gets you the full version of Company of Heroes 2, as well as an additional army for it and some mission packs.

Bump your price up to at least $10, and you then get even more CoH 2 content, including the very fun British Forces army and the Ardennes Assault campaign. There's also an exclusive shirt available for $30, which also gets you everything included.

You can see the full list of what's in the Humble Bundle below. As always, you can choose to allocate your money between Sega, Humble, and several different charities: Code Club, Special Effect, WDC (Vancouver Orcas), and WaterAid.

Pay $1 or more:

• Company of Heroes
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
• Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
• Company of Heroes 2: The Western Front Armies - Oberkommando West

Pay more than the average:

• Company of Heroes 2
• Company of Heroes 2: The Western Front Armies - US Forces
• Company of Heroes 2: Case Blue Mission Pack
• Company of Heroes 2: Southern Fronts Mission Pack
• Company of Heroes 2: Victory at Stalingrad Mission Pack
• Company of Heroes 2 soundtrack
• Everything above

Pay $10 or more:

• Company of Heroes 2: The British Forces
• Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault
• Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault - Fox Company Rangers
• Company of Heroes 2 Humble-exclusive skins pack
• Company of Heroes digital art book

Epic Card Game Review

Epic

• Developer: White Wizard Games
• Format: Card Game
• Playing Time: 20-30 Minutes
• MSRP: $15.00

If you play Magic: the Gathering, imagine playing in a sealed tournament where every card in the set is as strong as the Power 9. That’s Epic in a nutshell.   For those of you who have no idea what I just said, let me explain.

Epic is a card game that plays kind of like a beginner’s version of Magic: the Gathering. A lot of the complexity has been stripped away, leaving players with a straightforward slugfest. There is only one resource to worry about: gold. At the start of each turn, the turn player loses any gold he or she had, then generates one gold to spend on a card. In simplified terms, this means that you get one gold per turn and you can’t save it for a bigger play later. Some cards have a cost of zero and are free to play, but most of the impressive ones cost a gold.

Now, when I say impressive, I mean it. After all, if you only get to spend one gold per turn, you’d better spend it on something good. What you get out of this one gold can range from destroying all Champions (creatures) on the field, giving all of your Champions a power boost, giving one of your Champions a major boost, or summoning any of a wide array of absurdly powerful Champions to your side of the field. The first time I played, my reaction to almost every card that I saw was, “Wow, that’s totally broken.”

Playing this game really does feel epic. When at any given time you might be holding three different cards that could each devastate your opponent’s army, or you’re looking at a combo that’s going to take away half of your opponent’s life points in one go, you feel like you’re on top of the world. Just remember, the other guy has cards that are just as powerful as yours. During my first game I came to realize that when everything is overpowered, nothing is.

What I’m trying to say is, despite the crazy abilities of each individual card, it all balances out pretty well.

Despite how much I’m comparing this to a well known trading card game, it should be noted that Epic itself is not a trading card game. It’s what is called a living card game, meaning that new sets do come out to expand the card pool, but the packs are not randomized. As with Netrunner or Malifaux, when you buy a pack, you know exactly what you’re getting. No trading involved.

There are a couple of other major differences between Epic and Magic as well, differences that go beyond how it’s played and seemingly into what the game itself is meant to be. Epic, overall, seems geared to a more casual audience than Magic. This shows in the fact that the packs are not randomized, which means that even the most hardcore player can only spend so much money before running out of new things to get. It also shows in the rules.

While you could, of course, look through and construct your ideal deck out of the cards you have, that’s actually not how the rulebook says to do it. You’ll find that game setup involves giving each player a deck of 30 random (yes, random!) cards, and going from there. This random deckbuilding makes Epic quick to start and accessible for new players, since they don’t need to worry about making a deck for themselves before they get started. According to White Wizard Games’s website, Epic is meant to simulate the experience of going to a draft or sealed tournament without the need to pay $10-$30 each time. That should also make it clear how important it is that each card is strong enough to stand on its own, yet balanced with all of the other cards. Luckily, White Wizard Games has done an excellent job of that.

As I mentioned, there is also an option for “constructed,” where you build a deck using your Epic collection to play against others who have done the same thing.

I’ve said it in other articles, but let me reiterate that “casual” does not mean “bad.”

On the subject of unusual rules, there’s one more thing I need to point out. Any card game veteran knows that running out of cards in your deck means that you lose. In fact, most games have entire decks and strategies that are devoted to burning through your opponent’s cards until they have to draw and can’t, making them lose by deckout. In Epic, when you’re supposed to draw and can’t, you win. Weird, right?

This actually works very well in Epic, as a lot of cards give you the choice to use their effect or draw two more cards. It seems to be a balancing mechanic, since the randomized decks mean you won’t always have a use for an effect like “Your Good champions get +2 attack this turn.” It also serves to put the game on a timer, since life totals and control of the field tend to swing wildly. It’s possible that you’ll end the game in a few turns, but on the other hand it’s possible that you and your opponent will get stuck in a deadlock. In that case, Epic’s “draw to win” mechanic gives you another path to victory.

At a glance, Epic definitely seems like Baby’s First Magic. However, it makes a lot more sense once you realize the intention behind it. Epic is meant to be a cheap and easily accessible game that gives the experience of a more traditional trading card game, but without the need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to stay competitive. They’ve done a good job of creating something that is easy to start, fun to play, and fairly well balanced even when playing with randomized decks. With an entry point of just $15, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a new card game.