Posted on : 25-03-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Posted on : 23-03-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Posted on : 16-03-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PC

If you’re wondering what happened to Hawken, well Adhesive Games and their publisher Meteor sold the game in a bankruptcy sale to Reloaded Games. This is the same Reloaded Games that picked up APB after it tanked. So while there is a light at the end of the tunnel for Hawken, it definitely looks like a train in this case.
The real shame is that back in 2011, Hawken could have been something amazing. The final game was decent too but the freemium model utterly ruined it. If they had released the game as a singleplayer only XBLA or PSN game, like they planned to originally, then things would have likely turned out for the better. Shifting to a freemium setup with a customisable mecha game, where you paid for parts, was never going to end well.
So here’s to good mecha games ruined by capricious and short sighted publishers. Hopefully Hawken won’t die off quite yet but it could have been so much more.


Posted on : 14-02-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Posted on : 08-02-2015 | By : Cacophanus | In : News

Wonder Festival 2015 Winter has now come to end and it was a good one. Apart from the legion of amazing garage kit figures on show and on sale, the future commercial announcements were decent this time around. The mother of which being Fewture’s transformable EX Gohkin Garland (shown above) from the first Megazone 23. Now we’ve already been graced with toys of this from Yamato back in the day but they all had serious quality issues (the joints often shattered). This will be different though as most EX Gohkins use a lot of diecast and go through rigorous quality assurance. No word on a price or release date but we want this, really quite badly. Apart from the Garland, we had a lot of cool stuff on show from Sentinel and Megahouse. The former had the amazing Metamorforce Dancouga and also showed the prototype Black Wing too, so a Final Dancouga is an option again. The latter showed off the upcoming Orguss toy and it is utterly pristine and will be a definite purchase come its release in March. Arcadia also had a good Macross showing too this year.
If you want to check out some photos then feel free to go here, here, , here, here, here and here. We will also be doing an event report for Forbes in the next few days too, so keep an eye out for that.



Over at Joystiq they have an interview with Vince McMullin, a producer at Stompy Bot. If you remember, this was the studio that was making the new Heavy Gear Assault game for PC. Despite what they term as a crowdfunding “disaster”, though we think that’s a tad melodramatic in terms of analysis, it seems the game is still being made. So much so that we have some alpha build footage available (shown below).
Now this is using Unreal Engine 4 and I don’t want to be overly unkind, as this is an alpha build, but the game looks like total arse. Art fidelity aside, games like Project HON are clearly doing more functionally than this is. Even the already available Armored Core V and Verdict Day are more engaging than what this looks to be like.
We may be jumping the gun a bit but from what we’re seeing, it doesn’t look that great to play. Though we’ll reserve judgement until the game is finally released and hopefully by then they will have pushed the engine a bit more too.



Following on from the excellent Jigoku-hen released earlier this year, Bandai Namco announced Super Robot Wars Z 3 Tengoku-hen to be released on both PS3 and Vita next April. To accompany this announcement we’ve also been graced with a nice long promo video (shown below). In it we see new series like Gargantia and Gunbuster 2 are now included in the game’s roster but we are still blown away by how crazy nice the Zeta Gundam animations still are. Orguss is also back (as seen above) and that’s just great in and of itself really. The lack of Final Dancouga is somewhat saddening though.
In addition to the main game, for those that buy Tengoku-hen at launch they will also get a separate downloadable sidestory game called Rengoku-hen. This features characters from previous Super Robot Wars Z instalments over 15 unique missions. Most importantly of all, this won’t be available as a separate download at any point.

