Attention all mothers, lock up your little girls… Victorious has a video game coming out! Nickelodeon’s new hit franchise has a video game coming out and every little girl with a pulse is going to have to have it. Victorious: Time to Shine is a game that fuses dance and performance elements to into a music video creator. Fans of the show will recognize the familiar pubescent cast’s voices as they roam the halls of the high school. When it comes time to “rock the mic” the rating system is quite similar to Rock Band with exploding stage and score faithfully borrowed. We only got to see an early build of the game so the physics and graphics were a little unpolished. What we did see was a decent attempt at combining genres and making good use of the Kinect’s controls. While an official release wasn’t announced you can probably expect this title out early next year for Xbox Kinect and Nintendo DS. Happy moshing kiddies!
Preview: Nickelodeon’s VicTORIous: Time to Shine
Preview: Ben 10 Galactic Racing
Publisher D3 is coming out with a new Ben 10 racing game. This Mario Kart inspired racer puts a lot of variety to a proven formula to keep it interesting. If you squint you can almost see the turtle shells. The graphics/art direction is pretty stock (no Forza here) but considering the cartoon source material it fits pretty well. The designers also copied a few elements from Mario Kart where you can perform aerial tricks to gain power/speed, and if you power slide your vehicle it rewards you with a power charge. These are all good attempts at stirring the pot, but the characters and racetrack are animated in such a way that it can become a little hard to see the turn ahead as the road sometimes blends into the walls a little too well. As far as multiplayer is concerned you and three “Ben 10ites” can play together, locally only. Given the prevalence of online gaming, this has to have been a corporate funding call. Shortcomings aside they are including an all new character that will have his first appearance in an upcoming episode. That plus all the unlockables (25 tracks, 15 characters) this game will surely keep you busy. Obviously fans of the series will have a more vested interest in this galactic grand prix, but there’s still a solid game here for average gamers.
Sony Announces Another Bundle For PSP
The football season is safe this year, with that said why not do a little celebrating? How you ask? By buying a Sony PSP bundled with Madden 12 and Need For Speed Shift that’s how! Sony announced that they are offering a bundle of a PSP-3000, Madden 12, Need For Speed Shift, and a 2GB Memory Stick PRO Duo that will run for $160. Not too shabby I must say, but you have to think how well will it sell with the PS Vita on the horizon and the Nintendo 3DS selling for only $10 more. Which will you pick up? The PSP Bundle with two games, a new 3DS with no games, or just save up for a PS Vita?
Madden 12 Attempts to Eager Football Fans With New Demo
With the release of Madden 12 around the corner, football fans have found their fix by milking all that they can out of Madden 11 or playing NCAA Football 12 until Madden’s release. EA Sports did as they said they would, and released the demo on August 9. Compared to Madden 11, 12 feels very solid. First and foremost, when the demo is started, one can easily tell even the start-up screens have been revamped. With colorful splash animations on all angles, it’s safe to say the game looks pretty before any actual football is played.
The camera angles have been changed to represent real NFL games, and they did a good job with it. The cameras feel real, including the proverbial cameraman’s unsteady arm while watching the coin toss. The tackling system is clear that it has been changed. If your running back is going full speed and comes into contact with a stationary defender, he will end up trucking through him or knocking him down due to his momentum and their lack thereof.
There were a couple of things tweaked this year that may or may not bowl over too well with longtime Madden fans. For example calling an audible, has been changed to an up and down selection as opposed to last year’s left and right, bottom of the screen audible selection. The hot routes buttons have completely changed, this is if the final version of Madden plays like this. To select hot routes, up needs to be pressed on the d-pad, from there you can change what you want your receiver to do. This makes hot routes easier to locate and execute, and, overall, feels better.
The kicking system has also been altered. Rather than 2010’s right analog stick flick or 2011’s bar on the bottom of the screen, a new semi-circle kicking system has been incorporated. This new fangled kicking systems takes a bit to get used to. When the arrow reaches the top, it takes timing in order to figure out how to get it up to 100%. That might affect long-time players.
Little things I noticed while playing the demo is the fact that jerseys get dirty with grass stains or line stains. The players even get paint or chalk on their arms. Pretty cool details if you ask me. Overall, I would say that if there were any Madden game to buy, this would be it. Some may argue that it still isn’t better than 2K Sports’ NFL 2k5, but it sure has improved.
Walmart Continues to “Roll-back Prices” with the 3DS Price Drop
Nintendo scheduled a marketwide $80 price drop beginning August 12. The idea is to reward those who purchase the system before the price drop and provide those people with 20 free NES and GBA games. Users who purchase the system before August 12 can log on to the eShop and be automatically entered into the, now dubbed, Ambassador program.
Now that Walmart has dropped the price early, customers can reap both benefits by getting the $80 price drop in addition to the free games so long as they’re online with the system by August 11 at 11:59pm. Now, it’s time to stop reading this post and go get a system! Hopefully they’re not sold out at a Walmart near you.
Gamefly Soon to Offer Unlimited Gameplay on PC’s
Since the purchase of IGN’s Direct 2 Drive, we were all wondering how Gamefly would integrate this into their services. Finally news has surfaced on what Gamefly has planned, and I gotta admit it’s pretty damn good. Come this holiday season, Gamefly will be offering unlimited PC gaming through their subscription service. Gamefly has been working hard to sign more publishers up, and come September 8, they plan to have over a hundred publishers for their Beta program. This holiday season seems like the best season to give a Gamefly subscription!
3D-Bee 2D to 3D converter Review
Ever since the release of Avatar it seems like every big budget title needs to be released in 3D. 3D in the home has also been climbing since the demand for 3D enabled televisions are on the rise and the decrease in price over the last two years. Whether you like it or not 3D is becoming somewhat of a standard in production and will soon see it being offered on some of your favorite television programming. For now however not much is offered and the question is what if you wanted to watch your existing 2D programming in 3D? 3D-Bee Home unit looks to be owners solution for enabling any of their 2D programming directly to 3D especially for gaming. So does it work? We’ve tested many of its features especially for gaming on a Panasonic GT-30 and here are our thoughts.
Hardware:
3D-Bee Unit: Has four 3D enabled HDMI ins and one out.
Remote: Has two 3D depth settings.
3D-Bee is a 2D to 3D real-time video conversion unit . Essentially it’ll make anything your watching in 2D into 3D. You maybe asking the question “well my tv already has a 2D-3D feature” but it is not like this. The unit knows how to correctly bring objects seen closer or solely in nature to the foreground while the rest appears in the background but that is just a quick example. Most if not all built in TV’s 2D-3D conversion mode has some deformity in the picture since the process of making it is not manual, it is automatic. The 3D-Bee while not processing anything either is using a estimation technology for the unit itself to produce a high quality 3D image.
Our testing began with some television programming. We watched True Blood, talk shows and sports. The unit has a great way of keeping things in line and giving you clarity in 3D from a picture that was originally 2D. Even golf which gets tricky with the TV’s built in converter since the grass pans across the entire screen, it seems to do well on the 3D-Bee.
Movies tested well for the unit. We tested Iron Man, Transformers and Kick Ass all on Blu-ray. These seem to do better in object separation and had moments of really coming together as a 3D image when converted. An example is when Iron Man was trying to outrun the jet fighters half way in the movie you can clearly see him as the foreground object while the jets were in the background.
Now our most important test was for gaming and the unit did fairly well as some did better then others. Since there are barely any games in 3D period this would seem like the perfect product to take advantage of. The games we tested were Split/Second, Halo Reach, L.A. Noire and Mortal Kombat. Split/Second and Halo Reach seemed to add depth in areas where you wouldn’t think of but in a good way, while Mortal Kombat added little depth with no real advantage of playing it converter.
The biggest advantage you can get from gaming with the unit is since it’s automatically converting to 3D none of the quality is being sacrificed as all the games that are 3D enabled do. That is because those games need to produce a left and right image for the 3D which is essentially processing the game twice and the 3D-Bee doesn’t actually process anything. Play with your Television’s 3D settings along with the 3D-Bee’s two setting to achieve a depth that suits you.
The unit isn’t without its faults and in most cases things that we would have liked to see in it. First thing to mention is that this is not going to replace content that is native to 3D as it does not compare well to the depth of watching something that is already in 3D. The unit seems to merely give you some depth and while there are two settings to add we wished there were even experimental modes of sorts to play around with. What you would want to pop forward or back for different content.
Since there is different forms of content you would be possibly using it for, it would have been great to see modes complement such. A TV, Movie and Game mode would have been great since they would act different. Gaming for example most the time has a fixed object in the center of the screen like racing and FSP’s. A mode where it would know or ask what it was to really pull forward could rival some things that were actually produced in 3D.
We’ve also found that the set-up for the unit should be done in a particular matter. When plugged in to our 3D enabled receiver it would not transfer all the audio sound from the content? So the best solution was to plug it in after the receiver then into the TV. The sound would also cut out on some of the TV content after you enabled the 3D on the unit but this wasn’t all the time. Since this is a new product some of this can actually be avoided in future models or updates.
3D-Bee is for alot of different people that want to enjoy 3D content they either can’t or that are looking for the best way that isn’t natively supported. I have already played some games and watched some movies in full with the unit on and am pleased with the results I get. The unit is currently priced at $399 which may be steep for those wanting 3D that is better then Tv’s built in 2D-3D converter but not near native 3D content. If your into 3D and have alot of content you would like to see that has no 3D options then this unit might be up your ally. I personally am impressed with it as 2D comes to life with the 3D-Bee like never before. I see myself using the unit for quite sometime and hope more options and features become available soon. For more information go to their official website here.
PSN Play!
Sony has announced a new program called PSN Play, which is similar if not a rip off of Xbox’s Summer of Arcade. Sony will be offering four games this summer of… er… For PSN’s Play, Street Fighter III Third Strike Online Edition which will be available on August 23 for $15; the latest DeathSpank adventure The Baconing available August 30 for $15; BloodRayne: Betrayal, available for $15 on September 6; and Renegade Ops, available on September 15 for $15. If you purchase all four titles you’ll be gifted Payday: The Heist when the game releases later on in the summer or you can pick it up separately for $20. Some differences from XBLA’s Summer of Arcade and PSN’s Play is that you’re able to pre-order games, and with the pre-order of each game comes DLC like a free PS3 theme, a DLC fighter for Street Fighter III, a bonus co-op character for The Baconing, a PlayStation Home goodie for Bloodrayne: Betrayal, and some extra vehicles and weapons for Renegade Ops. PlayStation Plus subscribers get 20% off every Play program purchase.
Have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch? Like free games?
Bethesda Softworks is using social media in an attempt to get people riled up for the release of their upcoming game, Rage. They are allowing the mobile games, Rage/Rage HD, to be available for free, normally $0.99 and $1.99, respectively, for an entire week after their fan page reaches 100,000 unique likes. The mobile game is well-received by those who play it, receiving four out of five stars in the reviews. As of the time this post was written their fan page was at 41,515 likes, so there’s still quite a ways to go. The platform version of Rage is scheduled to be released October 4, 2011.
Vita Looking Toward a Early 2012 Release
Sony’s Kaz Hirai has confirmed that the will be no holiday release for the Vita in the US and Europe, but possibly for Japan. We all have look forward to the release of the Vita and it’s touchy goodness, but with the limited release titles available at launch it might have been a good idea to delay the system. Learning from the mistakes of the Nintendo 3DS (why does this seem so familiar? PS Move Maybe?), an early launch with a weak library of games available could possibly leave a bad taste in consumer’s mouths. There has been no change of pricing for the PS Vita, the wifi only is still priced at $249, and the 3G+wifi at $299.
