Information Update // Noticias Nuevas - Nintendo 3DS & PSVita

Information Update - Nintendo 3DS


1.- Batman Arkham City, which is due to be released this year for Wii U, will be receiving some form of downloadable content in the not too distant future. Arkham City director Sefton Hill spoke with Geoff Keighley about the subject and was told “There’s still some more announcements coming. There are more exciting things to come.” Who knows, maybe the DLC will be released with the main game when it arrives sometime later this year on Wii U.

 

More After the Break...

Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has revealed that the company plans to show off its next generation Unreal Engine “hopefully later this year”. Many people were expecting a showing of the Unreal Engine 4 at GDC, which has been taking place this week. Maybe we will finally see something at E3 in June.

 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim managed to win the coveted game of the year award at this years Game Developers Choice Awards which took place at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. Sadly, the incredible The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sworddidn’t even get a look-in, and failed to scoop up any awards. Here’s the list of winners:

• Best Audio - Portal 2 (Valve)
• Best Debut - Bastion (Supergiant Games)
• Best Narrative - Portal 2 (Valve)
• Best Visual Arts - Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (Naughty Dog)
• Best Downloadable Game - Bastion (Supergiant Games)
• Best Game Design - Portal 2 (Valve)
• Best Technology - Battlefield 3 (DICE)
• Best Handheld/Mobile Game - Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Capy Games)
• Innovation Award - Johann Sebastian Joust (Die Gute Fabrik)
• Game Of The Year - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)
• Lifetime Achievement – Warren Spector
• Pioneer Award – Dave Theurer
• Ambassador Award – Ken Doroshow and Paul M Smith

2.- Epic Games has released a video to showcase forthcoming games which will utilise the company’s Unreal 3 Engine. Among the games on show is Aliens Colonial Marines, which is running on the Wii U. The footage for Aliens Colonial Marines for Wii U starts at 0.34.

2K Games Ken Levine, as well as art director Nate Wells and lead artist Shawn Robertson, feature in the latest Bioshock Infinite trailer to discuss the game’s heavy hitting enemies, the Motorized Patriot. We heard earlier this week from Nintendo Gamermagazine that Bioshock creator Ken Levine is working on a Wii U game, which they assume is Bioshock Infinite. We should hear more about the game at E3 in June.

Nintendo of Japan has released a brand new Kid Icarus: Uprising trailer that poses as an introduction to the game. The footage is in Japanese, as you would expect, but it gives a great look at how the game plays. Kid Icarus: Uprising launches on March 23rd in North America and Europe, and comes bundled with a free Nintendo 3DS stand and six AR Cards.

3.- Two Tribes, after releasing a glimpse of the opening sequence from Toki Tori 2, have shared two minutes worth of footage from the dev build which you can find after the break. This is a dev build, so it is far from being done, but it’s adorable-ness is already shining through, so that’s good to see.

 

Stephen Totilo of Kotaku has been roaming the floor of the Game Developer’s Conference and, from his log of the event’s second day, he shared that chatter surrounding the Wii U was “mixed”. He also mentioned that:

A financial analyst told me Nintendo is screwed… A developer told me their fortunes are mixed. Good ambition on Nintendo’s part, but, well… it’s Nintendo, everyone says it’s on Nintendo for the thing to succeed. Same as it ever was. It’s almost all on them.

As for that analyst, is sounds like something Pachter would say, although we can’t be sure it’s him, so do hold back with the fire and pitch-forks. But this does feel very same-y. No matter what Nintendo does, it’s the end for them, apparently. They can’t make any move that isn’t “wrong”, despite making a lot of smart decisions.

That’s not to say the Wii U is a guaranteed success. There will be challenges, but we did just come off eight months of 3DS-bashing because it had apparently failed, and as soon as it started selling well, it’s not like the critics stated as such. They just jumped onto their next target.

 

Dragon Quest X was confirmed for the Wii U, while the screenshots after the break are from the Wii version, there are details about the job system that have been shared which are relevant to both versions of the game.

To take on a job within the game, you register at the Guild House. This allows you to make items associated with the job you’ve chosen (and you have the option to either use those items, or sell them), along with taking job-specific quests. To make an item though, you need a recipe. These can be purchased at vendors, but the rarer recipes will “have to be found in treasure boxes and other secret areas”.

Once you have a job and begin making items (which involves completing a mini-game for each item), the experience in your chosen field increases. This allows you to “learn job-specific skills which can be used to more easily make valuable items”.

If you want to know everything about Darksiders 2 before it’s released later this year as a launch title for the Wii U, there’s a massive fact sheet from Vigil Games that you can click here to read. I made it into a PDF for your reading pleasure, because I’m cool like that.

4.- Aliens: Colonial Marines was confirmed for the Wii U and a promotional video fro Unreal Engine 3 has shown off a tiny amount of footage from the game. You can check it out after the break. The footage begins at 0:35, although it ends almost as soon as it begins.

derStandard.at is reporting that Medal of Honor: Warfighter is coming to the Wii U and, for other platforms at least, will be released on October 23rd. There is speculation floating around that this date might indicate the release of the console itself. I don’t believe this to be the case. I still think the Wii U will be released with a similar time frame as the Wii, so I’d expect it during November and no earlier. I do hope I’m wrong though.

 

There is a part of me that is wary of one-hundred percent confirming that the game is on its way, as the source of this information is an Austrian newspaper. It’s the sort of detail they could easily have made a mistake with. But Electronic Arts is working on this game, and I don’t think they’d shy away from multi-platform support, especially if that support can be scheduled for the launch of a platform.

Other than that, you may be happy to hear the game is running on Frostbite 2.0, the same engine that was used to build Battlefield 3, and while that does make the game look a little same-y as you’ll see in the trailer after the break, it is gorgeous. Hopefully we do get total confirmation of the game on the Wii U soon enough.

There are new scans for Kingdom Hearts 3D

There are new screenshots and artwork from Etrian Odyssey IV

 

There are new scans from Fire Emblem: Awakening 

Ketzal’s Corridors is Nintendo’s next, original game for release on the eShop in North America. As describedby Siliconera, it “looks like a third-person on-rails Tetris”. And while that sounds like an odd description, you’ll see that it’s the best way to explain it when you check out the trailer and screenshots after the break. There’s no release date (although it was already released in Japan in October), but Nintendo says it’s coming “soon’. 

Koichi Hayashida, the director of Super Mario 3D Land, will be speaking at a GDC session, “Thinking in 3D: The Development of Super Mario 3D Land”. Don’t expect any big reveals, but if you’re interested in behind-the-scenes sort of stuff, Nintendo will be tweeting about the panel, so you may like to follow along. You can click here to find Nintendo on Twitter. It starts at 3:30 PM PT, which I believe is in less than 30 minutes.

Capcom, SEGA and Namco Bandai are working together on a mystery project for the 3DS. The teaser website was updated with chromosomes associated with each company, and these chromosomes appear to be related to individual characters from each company (one of them could be connected with Bayonetta, for instance). In the past few hours, the website was updated again with two new chromosomes attached to each company.

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Mister Gaga