News: Masou Kishin III Pride of Justice Update
4Gamer has a nice big update on Masou Kishin III, showing off the main mecha and characters. The special Valsione from the anime series, that we covered previously, also...
Toys: Metal Gear RAY Revealed
Over at Hideo Kojima's Twitter feed, he recently posted some photos of Yoji Shinkawa posing with a large prototype of ThreeA's new Metal Gear RAY toy. This is a follow...
Kits: Shizuoka Hobby Show 2013
This year's Shizuoka Hobby Show is under way and as always it has a huge amount of new model kits on display. With Hasegawa's new Myzr Eta kit (shown above) from Virtual...
News: Gundam Breaker Beta Reaches Half Million Downloads
The beta for Gundam Breaker has passed half million downloads since its launch. That's not at all shabby for basically a glorified demo. In addition, save data from the...
News: Masou Kishin III Valsione Bonus
In the upcoming Masou Kishin III players will be given a special bonus code in the initial run of the game. This will give a different version of Valsione as seen in the...
Whilst it’s been a tad quiet on the Battle Robot Damashii front, we now have a new trailer (shown below). Almost entirely gameplay footage it looks like a cross between From Software’s Another Century’s Episode Portable and a slew of Artdink’s Macross and Gundam games. As we suspected, the mecha haven’t retained their anime scales but have instead been treated in the same way the Robot Damashii toys have. In addition, the footage primarily shows a lot of quite rigid melee combat. To be fair this is more likely down to the editing, as the Gundam Extreme Versus trailers offer suffer the same fate (maybe Bamco should get another trailer guy?). Finally, the trailer hints that a lot more shows will be included along with the ones that have already been announced. Let the guessing games begin!
For those that saw the reveal of the Hatsune Mike Fei-Yen in the upcoming Super Robot Wars UX announcement and thought this was done without the consent of the team behind Virtual On, then you were very wrong. So wrong in fact that Juro Watari, the father of Virtual On, openly welcomed Miku and even wrote her lines to be used in UX (apparently she’ll sing too). Personally, we think this is a resoundingly good thing and half hope that the next proper Virtual On game gets the Miku treatment too. In addition, there’s a new advert for the game (shown below). Don’t forget the game will be released on March 14th and you can pre-order it here, though you’ll need a Japanese 3DS to play the game as all 3DS games are region locked (thanks a fucking bunch Nintendo for that one!).
Albeit brief, we now have a new advert for Macross 30 (shown below). It only shows a few more seconds of gameplay and emphasises how smooth the game appears to be running. Not to mention that we’ll obviously be getting a lot of new animated footage for the game. Hopefully that will mean some kind of high fiving from Basara and the other classic Macross characters. Don’t forget you can pre-order it here
Over the past few years, realising that the current generation has decayed due to excessive functional standardisation, we’ve had a few “classics” resurrected into HD to stem the tide of mediocrity. Whilst many of these games were originally rather noteworthy, their updated HD versions have often been very disappointing. This is mainly down to the fact that these ports are in fact outsourced in their entirety.
The worst offender thus far has been that of Konami, with a variety of HD re-releases suffering from all manner of grievous problems (many of which the original games never suffered from). So what has happened to the Zone of the Enders HD edition then? Well, firstly it was ported by High Voltage Software (not internally by Konami, as we were led to believe) and they’ve done a pretty poor job. Now, we’ve never thought the Zone of the Enders games were bad but they are functionally flawed. Though the issue here is entirely down to the fidelity of the port itself.
We’ve somewhat held off talking about Chikyuu Boueigun 4 (aka EDF4) for a while now but this news seemed worthy. Considering that this game series was birthed from Sandlot’s nerdy love of classic mecha anime and the tech it produced during the PS2 era, the mecha lineage is a notable one. So when they added mecha to the third game we were pretty excited. However, it wasn’t very useful in-game if we’re honest. This new mecha looks more the part though, almost out of VOTOMS with a nice Shinji Aramaki twist from MADOX-01. Anyway, we’ll be buying this when it’s finally released next year and it should be better than the dire Insect Armageddon as Sandlot are working on this again (yay!).
A new patch and DLC for Gundam Extreme Versus has gone live today. As we previously mentioned, this DLC includes the RX-105 Xi Gundam and RX-78GP03S Gundam Dendrobium priced at 500 yen a piece. The patch is also a pretty sizeable one, at 244 MB, and it lacks new Trial Missions too. That aside, the new units are pretty awesome (especially the Xi). In addition, the game itself is now available at a drastically reduced price as part of a Best re-release. You can buy that version here.
We now finally have a decent promo for the upcoming Macross 30 (shown below). It shows a fair bit of gameplay and it’s clear that this game is slower paced than the PSP counterparts, almost languid. That said it does look fine and the framerate is pretty high and consistent throughout. So at least that won’t make controlling your variable fighter too arduous. Bar that we (briefly) also get to see the new YF-30 in fighter mode, so that’s something at least. The game is still set for its February 28th release year and you can pre-order it here.
The brand new Super Robot Wars UX has been announced for release next year on the 3DS. This will be the first Super Robot Wars game to grace the system and it has a pretty interesting roster of series in it. From the return of Dunbine, which we’re very happy about, we’ll also be getting Wings of Rean too. The last time this series was featured was during the last two Another Century’s Episode games on the PS2. We love the anime dearly, as well as the novels that semi-birthed it. So to have these wonderful and unique aura battlers in a new game is just great. Following on from that we also have Mazinkaiser SKL and Heroman included, along with the Hatsune Miku Fei-Yen. The latter being interesting as she’s not really part of the Virtual On canon (yet). There is also an official PV (shown below) that’s been released. On the latter, it’s clear that the game is still using the engine, sprites and many of the animations from the GBA and DS era. This is a big shame, as the recent PSP games looked amazing and the 3DS is a more powerful system (so would be able to handle the same thing with relative ease). That aside, the game will also feature DLC, full voice over audio and receive its own special limited edition 3DS LL. The game will be released March 14th next year and cost 7,140 yen.
The much anticipated open beta for Hawken starts today. We’ve been playing the game since the closed test phases and it’s truly an impressive and fun mecha game. So there’s no excuse whatsoever to not check this game out, especially if you regard yourself as a discerning mecha gaming connoisseur. Make sure you have an account set-up for when the game goes live to the public later today. The new trailer below is a fair representation of what the game looks like when running, minus the dubstep and slow motion stuff obviously.
Over the past few years, realising that the current generation has decayed due to excessive functional standardisation, we’ve had a few “classics” resurrected into HD to stem the tide of mediocrity. Whilst many of these games were originally rather noteworthy, their updated HD versions have often been very disappointing. This is mainly down to the fact that these ports are in fact outsourced in their entirety.
