One of Namco Bandai's worst-kept secrets has been confirmed. The Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition is coming to PC. And it's bringing a lot more than just a few bosses. It has cooperative matchmaking, people! COOPERATIVE MATCHMAKING!!!
Let's face it, you haven't been dying enough in your videogames lately. Thankfully Rising Star Games is preparing to fix all that by publishing CAVE's seminal bullet hell shoot-em-up Akai Katana here in the US. To celebrate, they've released a new trailer that shows off just how hectic the action gets (and even mentions local co-op)!
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is the follow up to Steel Battalion, a mech sim best known for its ridiculous controller peripheral. It was announced way back in 2010. We haven't covered it because Capcom claimed the game did not have co-op. A Microsoft rep demoing the game even denied co-op support at last weekend's PAX East. I guess things can change in a few days. It turns out SB: HA will support four player online co-op. Great. Now I have to attempt to bring the community (myself included) up to speed.
I was skeptikcal Bioware announced that Mass Effect 3 was going to have a co-op mode. As information trickled out to the masses, I drew conclusions that it was going to be a tacked-on horde mode rip-off that was added to the game in order to fill a checkbox requirement. I was being selfish, I didn’t want anything to sour my experience thus far in my wonderful space opera that I have been journeying through for the past five years. Having the Galactic Readiness level correlate to your multiplayer progress and allowing it to alter your single player ending was an ingenious way to force me to dip into the multiplayer even before I had finished the game. Well played Bioware, well played.
At PAX East, I had the chance to be walked and talked through the upcoming D&D Online expansion, Menace of the Underdark (MotU). As would be expected of a DDO expansion, MotU is story-driven. A fissure has opened up right in the middle of the capital city in Eberron which leads to other D&D realms, including the worlds of the Underdark and the Forgotten Realms. The Spinner of Shadows, Lolth’s agent in the DDO universe, is behind all this madness. Players will travel through four huge areas (the Demonweb, the Underdark, Evening Star, and King’s Forest) as a hero from another world, trying to unravel why the drow are invading the town of Evening Star and the nature of “the thread of the weave.”
After what seems like a half dozen video game conferences, I finally got to get my hands on Firefall's PvE experience - instead of the versus gameplay that was always on display at previous events. The good news is, despite the game being in closed beta for months and months, it appears the free to play game should hit a more open beta in the coming weeks.
Formerly a Wii-exclusive title, Resident Evil Chronicles HD brings back both Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles onto one game, giving you the action packed, rail-shooter awesomeness of two for the price of one.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is getting a dose of DLC today. Players will be able to take control of the good guys in a new prologue mission. Play as the Echo Six Spec Ops team and do battle with the Umbrella Security Service, Nemesis, and a zombie filled Raccoon City.
PAX East was full of surprises, especially during the panel with the developers at Gearbox. They has just announced that Borderlands 2 will be adding a new character class to their lineup, called the "Mechromancer" (a play on the “necromancer” class; a type of spellcaster who can raise the dead to do their dirty work).
I was a huge fan of the original Orcs Must Die!, a tower defense like game from developer Robot Entertainment. It combined the unique strategy that tower defense games offer along with the action of a 3rd person shooter and splashed on a really attractive style. Sadly one thing felt missing and that was co-op play. But Robot Entertainment has heard the cries of its fans and will be including cooperative play through the game’s sequel in Orcs Must Die! 2. At PAX East Tally and I went hands on with PC version of the game, and even though the first game hit XBLA, we were told not to expect the sequel to.
In Diabolical Pitch players take the roll of a former pitcher who must battle his way through a haunted amusement park with a magical throwing arm. Sound weird? It should. It's a Grasshopper Manufacture game.
Capcom held their annual Captivate event last week in Rome, Italy. The press and community event invites various outlets to check out upcoming Capcom games and witness announcements in exotic environments. Among those games on display were Resident Evil 6, a co-op game we knew very few details about.
