Many games have been released this year onto the Xbox Live Marketplace and last week some of the best were showcased. This week, three more have made the cut as the best of the year and are worth more than the small amount of points you should shell out for them. Section 8: Prejudice, Torchlight, and Iron Brigade (formerly known as Trenched) are must buys for all gamers and here is a snippet of why.
According to Sour Patch Marketing Director Sebastion Genesio, “Sour Patch is the #1 all sour candy brand in the U.S. but there is so much more to these iconic characters than just their sour exteriors and sweet interiors.” To that end, the company have recruited video game giant Capcom to publish a game for the Xbox Live Arcade, which will put players into the role of “a lost piece of candy finding its way to its ultimate destination – the human stomach.” I genuinely wish I was joking about this, but unfortunately it’s not April yet.
The press release goes on to describe the game, entitled World Gone Sour, as a platformer which will require “a combination of jumps, twists and puzzle-solving to negotiate and overcome larger than life obstacles” and pit the player against “unusual candy enemies”. It will also feature a track by Grammy award-winning hip hop artist Method Man as part of the soundtrack, and narration by actor Creed Batton from the Office, all for just 400 Microsoft points. The game could turn out to be quirky enough for low-level success, but at this stage the available screenshots simply leave a bad taste in my mouth.
We’ve certainly seen some strange character crossovers before on certain Xbox 360 titles (the appearance of Yoda in the 360 version of Soul Calibur IV springs to mind). However, Square Enix has issued a press release with an even stranger crossover: the costume of Ezio Auditore, as seen in the recently-released Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, will be available as an optional outfit for Noel Kreiss, one of the characters in the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII-2. We don’t yet have any screenshots for how it might look, but there is a render of the costume available, which you can see below.
If there weren’t already enough hints that Final Fantasy XIII-2 might be returning to the over-the-top dress-sphere stylings of the last direct sequel in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy X-2, this seems like fairly strong proof that the game will allow players to dress up the characters in a variety of different costumes. Ordinarily, this would be fine, but the recent news of the involvement of Japanese pop singer Oshima Yuko (part of the pop group AKB48) in designing some costumes for the main character suggests that FFXIII-2 might be going down the J-pop route once again. Time will tell.
Skyrim performance patch v 1.2 details were released yesterday, and they include a number of fixes for both the most common and the rarest bugs in Bethesda’s 5th installment of the Elder Scrolls series.
Among the big fixes are the texture loading issues for the Xbox 360 version of the game as well as the Playstation 3 bug that would cause the game to chug as the save file grew. The Playstation 3 version of the patch is already available in Europe, with the Xbox 360 and PC versions expected to go live on November 30th.
There are now over four hundred XBLA games available for download, and with such a variety of downloadable games to choose from, it’s best to think carefully and check what’s best for your cash before you splash out those Microsoft points. As well as XBLA exclusives, some of the best titles available from the marketplace are re-releases of older games, allowing gamers to replay past classics or to hit up a masterpiece they never got the chance to play.
Let’s start with one of the best of those classics: Perfect Dark. Originally released on the N64, Perfect Darkfeatures secret agent Joanna Dark, thrown in the middle of a war between two different races of alien. As well as a very lengthy campaign, Perfect Dark boasts a brilliant multiplayer mode, a “combat simulator” which sees you completing a variety of different tasks in beautiful gameplay, similar to Rare’s previous FPS, Goldeneye. For the bargain price of just 800 points, Perfect Dark is one of the great pioneers in the world of FPS, and a must-have for anyone who’s an avid player of the shooters that are around now.
Xbox 360 owners are familiar with the two different SKUs available for the console, with the only major difference between them is the hard drive size. However, if the rumor mills are correct, the Xbox Next will also have two different SKUs, but each will have considerably different options. There will be two different models of the next Xbox: a stripped-down version for the entry-level market, and the other will deliver “true hardcore gaming.”
Here’s something you don’t see every
day: Free DLC! Epic Games has just released the “Versus Booster Map Pack” for Gears of War 3, which contains five
multiplayer maps. Two of the maps are actually new: Bullet Marsh and
Clocktower, while the remaining three–Azura, Rustlung and Blood Drive—have
already been released in the previous “Horde Command Pack.”
