Ah, the ever-venerable Jazz Jackrabbit: PC platforming hero, nostalgia magnet and all-round good times with gaming. We already covered the series in a lengthy retrospective, but I’m pleased to report that today we’ll be looking at a modification for the original game. That’s right, kids: people are still creating content for a DOS game that’s over 20 years old. Yet another in a long line of testaments to the power of community and fandom.
Valkyria Chronicles, the exclusive squad-based turned-based third-person tactical RPG, made a bit of a splash when it landed on the PS3. For those that aren’t aware, Valkyria Chronicles is set in an alternate history Europe, in which WWII-era technology and weaponry is mixed with a bit of mysticism. As nations come to blows over a precious resource, Ragnite, the small independent nation of Gallia is thrust into the the fray.
The game mixes turn-based movement with third-person shooter mechanics and relies heavily on positioning and ensuring the correct use of your troops, all who improve over time and have several characteristics, throughout the course of the campaign.
Critically acclaimed for both its unique artistic presentation and putting a spin on the turned-based RPG genre, the game nevertheless failed to sell well in its initial launch window, only picking up thanks to a significant price drop. Well, Valkyria Chronicles is getting second call to arms; a sharp-eyed NeoGAF scout marked the position of a PC rating on the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) website, the European rating body for video games, with a release date of the 16th October. Wait, what?
Total War: Attila is the next chapter in Creative Assembly’s long-running strategy series. The game was announced late yesterday in a video featuring a particularly grumpy Hun divulging his intentions to decimate the Roman Empire. So while you may have spent dozens of hours building the Roman Empire in the previous Total War title, Rome II, you now get to play through the Hun invasion from both sides.
You’ll be able to pick between the established and vast Roman Empire, or the invading Hun army led by Attila. Playing as Rome, you’ll have a massive amount of territory to begin with, but you’ll be dogged by internal politics and betrayal.
New to the game’s mechanics will be a new raze ability, which will allow you to eradicate cities from the game map. You’ll also be able to make extensive use of fire to aid in the destruction of to-scale towns and cities. Creative Assembly is promising a more streamlined UI and greater graphical fidelity.
Sega and Creative Assembly have announced a new Survivor Mode for next month’s Alien: Isolation. The mode will be made available via a five-part downloadable content offering. This is in addition to the pre-order bonus content that was revealed some months ago.
The Survivor Mode will be made available piece-by-piece during the six months following the game’s release. In Survivor Mode, players will take on the role of a new character in each of the five pieces of content. You’ll have to complete a series of mode-specific challenges all while being hunted by the game’s various enemies. Yes, it sounds like certain pieces of the DLC will include enemies other than the vanilla Alien, but so far Sega hasn’t revealed anything.
Yep, this is STILL going on. Publisher Sega and developer Gearbox Software were hit with a class-action lawsuit in response to the horrendously bad Aliens: Colonial Marines. That lawsuit was based off the claim that Sega and Gearbox used fake marketing materials in the build-up towards the game’s release last year. That lawsuit was filed in April 2013, a mere two months after the game released.
In August of this year, the class-action lawsuit reached a tentative agreement that proposed Sega pay out $1.25 million to those who filed the lawsuit. Interestingly, Gearbox filed a motion to have itself removed from this lawsuit, claiming that all marketing matters were up to publisher Sega and that they just developed the game. They also went as far as saying that they used their own money to fund development and they didn’t receive any royalty payments from sales.
Sega, however, thinks otherwise and has filed ANOTHER lawsuit against Gearbox for refuting any responsibility for the marketing of Colonial Marines. This new lawsuit digs up loads of internal Sega and Gearbox emails as evidence that Gearbox was completely involved in marketing the game, and that at times they went way beyond what Sega had authorised.