Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

In the back of the Los Angeles Convention Center this week, on a massive screen that seemed more suited for a movie theater than an E3 show floor, Square Enix was running a loop of video footage from their biggest games. Every ten minutes we'd see their newest and most impressive announcement: Final Fantasy XV. Whenever the fifteenth Final Fantasy appeared, people would stop what they were doing. They'd flock to the screen like moths to a flame, or like sheep that have finally found their spiky-haired shepherd. They'd stand in large crowds, heads tilted slightly upwards, eyes fixated. The Final Fantasy trance. It's been a long time since I've heard people get excited—really, genuinely, can't-stop-talking-about-this excited—when it comes to Final Fantasy, but here we are. Square's newest game, a striking contrast to E3's cacophony of shooters and cars, has created the type of buzz that only a series like Final Fantasy could. Conversations with RPG fans in Los Angeles this week have usually come around to the same topic: "Did you see that trailer? Holy shit, right?" Final Fantasy XV, once called Final Fantasy Versus XIII, was re-announced and rebranded on Monday night, with a dazzling video that leaped through CGI, action, crystals, and just about anything else you might expect from a Final Fantasy game. It was impressive not just because it looked great but because it took care of many of Square Enix's problems in one fell swoop. The name Final Fantasy Versus XIII had been tainted thanks to a troubled development cycle and the polarizing Final Fantasy XIII, and for many years Versus was a joke, a vaporware punchline on the level of Duke Nukem Forever. Tallying over seven years in development as a PS3 exclusive, Versus had been a no-show at almost every major gaming event, and the team reportedly had issues executing on the PlayStation 3's restrictive Cell processor. Now they've got a fresh start: a new name, new platforms, and a new opportunity to make sure the next Final Fantasy game is all it can be. Now they've got a fresh start: a new name, new platforms, and a new opportunity to make sure the next Final Fantasy game is all it can be. Rebranding the game was another smart decision by Square Enix, adding to what has been a disarming number of wise moves by the troubled, oft-frustrating Japanese company. Financially crippled by costly mistakes like the under-cooked Final Fantasy XIV and the under-performing Final Fantasy XIII-2, Square Enix has decided to shift direction. They're done with the type of troubled development cycles that leave half of Final Fantasy XIII's assets on the cutting room floor. They want to get their shit together. It's exciting. So, okay. With another E3 behind us, let's talk about what this week meant for the future of Final Fantasy. Five months ago, I was bummed out about Square's flagship series. I wrote that they had ran Final Fantasy into the ground, and that cash-grubbing disasters like All The Bravest were indicative of just how far they'd fallen. Today, things feel different. Maybe Square needed to hit rock bottom before it could start climbing out of the pit. Or maybe shake-ups in upper management made all the difference. Whatever happened, it was effective. Like Celes finding Locke's bandana on the shore, there's a glimmer of hope that maybe the future won't be so bad. There are three big new Final Fantasy games on the horizon: 1) Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, the FFXIV overhaul that by most accounts is shaping up to be much better than its predecessor; 2) Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, which I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did when I played it yesterday (more on that game next week); and 3) Final Fantasy XV. Go ahead and watch the trailer again. Here: It's... really cool. For a number of reasons. There are both eye-popping spectacles on the backs of giant monsters and heartfelt emotional scenes involving green soup. There are castles and airships. There's a montage of mysterious-looking characters, some of whom will inevitably betray you (and then maybe betray your enemy too, just for the hell of it). The villain in this three-minute trailer is immediately more interesting than the villains in Final Fantasy XIII, who you've probably already forgotten about. Did you remember that there are significant enemy characters in FFXIII named Jihl and Yaag? I thought not. Antagonists in Final Fantasy have always been fascinating and memorable, and it's nice to see this one getting a lot of attention. And then there's the combat. Seems actiony. Modern. Here's a closer look: Traditionalists have already come out criticizing director Tetsuya Nomura and crew for ditching turn-based combat. "Just look at that guy bouncing around the battlefield. Where are the turns? The strategic decisions? This isn't Final Fantasy!" And okay, yes, every mainline Final Fantasy game to date has featured some sort of turn-based combat. But that's not what Final Fantasy has ever been about. Final Fantasy, beyond the crystals and the summoned monsters and the increasingly beautiful hair particles, is about surprise. It's about unfamiliarity. It's about picking up a controller and entering a world and never wanting to leave. The series has lost a bit of that, and Final Fantasy XV feels like it's trying to evoke that feeling again. Square should do whatever they feel needs to be done in order to achieve that. The best part of my week wasn't seeing that FFXV trailer: it was seeing the end of that trailer. It was the "But..." It was the logo morphing from Final Fantasy Versus XIII to Final Fantasy XV. I've replayed that chunk of the video a hundred times in the past few days. I get chills every single time. We're up to the fifteenth Final Fantasy. Fifteen! I have been playing these games since as long as I've been conscious, and even the most cynical parts of my brain can't help but have an emotional reaction to the idea that the series has lasted this long. And everything we've seen about FFXV so far looks and feels like a game on the right track—hence the flocks of people surrounding Square's massive E3 booth. So bring on the crazy combat. Bring on the politics, the crystals, the drama, the magic. I want to jump into Final Fantasy XV and feel like I'm on a grand adventure again. For the first time in years, I'm excited about the future of Final Fantasy. Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET. You can reach the author at jason@kotaku.com or follow him on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

Sure, E3 is a place where you can check out the latest video games and video-game hardware. But we know what all those randy young convention-goers really want to see: The sexy, curvalicious eye-candy spicing up the booths on the expo floor. Fear not, readers! We've got you covered with our gallery of The Hottest Booth Cars of E3 2013. This cutie Pac-Man Mini and her friends lit up the Expo Hall exterior with bubblegum fun. Ouch, mistress! We've been bad! Her shining, severe grey finish just cries out "hurts so good." For a touch of the exotic, check out this bellissima number who livened up the Xbox booth. She even stole the show at Microsoft's press conference. This fun, flirty crimson kart kept the Nintendo booth saucy. Where's my blue shell? Because I wanna hit that. We couldn't get enough of this classy look we saw out in the E3 entryway. But don't think we missed that open trunk—naughty and environmentally friendly! Everyone loves a little athleticism, and we loved this sporty Nissan. Whoa, badonkadonk alert! This bad mammajamma out in the parking lot had some hot treads. Oh, yeah.

Those who picked up The Last of Us overnight and downloaded its day one patch are having significant issues. We've reached out to Sony for more info.

Here’s what’s going on Talk Among Yourselves, our reader-written blog: Monetary Value? runs down the few tidbits that have been revealed about Mirror’s Edge 2. GiantBoyDetective looks at another video game from inside a cartoon TV show, with this time’s example coming from Adventure Time. And, lastly, PyramidHeadCrab shares his personal experience in a rather poignant post regarding video games and anxiety. And you can always go join the voices talking about video games and life in TAY Classic and in the TAY: Open Forum.

Shinji Mikami's creative influence on The Evil Within is immediately apparent. Mechanically, my brief hands-off E3 demo had a lot in common with Mikami's survival horror milestone, Resident Evil 4. The over-the-shoulder camera, slow pacing and pulse-quickening enemies were all there.

That The Evil Within shares so much with Resident Evil 4 is a two-sided proposition. Resident Evil 4 was one of the greatest games of its time, but its ground has been retread many times by subsequent survival horror games over the years, and even by Mikami himself in Shadows of the Damned.

Where The Evil Within seems to stake its greatest claim is in its visual and thematic elements. The game stars a detective named Sebastian - Seb to his friends - who is sent to investigate a disturbance at a mental hospital. An unknown event has claimed the lives of several patients and possibly a few police officers.

Well, if you ignore the shark, anyway. Above is footage of the prototype version of World of Diving, a mellow Oculus Rift-enabled multiplayer diving simulator currently looking for funds on Indiegogo. Underwater fish photography never looked so appealing.

If you're familiar with Luigi's stats, you know that he can jump higher than his more famous brother. He's taller, too. Still, there's no mistaking that he's the second banana in the super-sibling pairing. But that all changes in the upcoming Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. The green-clad plumber grows to gigantic size in the new 3DS game and it's up to him stomp the bad guys into oblivion. Mario? He's tiny, compared to his bro. In the video clip above, Kotaku's Jason Schreier takes Dream Team for a spin, playing through a sequence where Luigi becomes a giant to face off against a huge enemy. The preview shows off a bit of the quirky charm that's made the Mario & Luigi games underdog favorites amongst Nintendo fans. Don't worry: the wait until you get a chance to peek at Luigi's head isn't too long.

For comic-book movies, the bigger the budget, the bigger the expectations, the bigger the letdown. Table 8 Productions, makers of "Iron Man 3 on a Budget," and "The Avengers on a Budget," know the key to exceeding expectations is to kill all hope of them in the womb. Thus this trailer for "Man of Steel" on a Budget.

The creators of Oddworld and DayZ have spoken out about why they're keener to work with Sony rather than Microsoft.

Back in February, we showed you the first trailer of the newest installment of the Ghost in the Shell franchise, Ghost in the Shell: Arise. With the Japanese theater release of the first chapter, border: 1 Ghost Pain, a week away, fans are getting a special gift: The first eight minutes of the film are now online. There are currently two versions to choose from. The first, from the Japanese PlayStation channel, has the whole clip in glorious HD (see below). Sadly it lacks subtitles. Luckily, the version found on the official Japanese Ghost in the Shell page (see the top of the page) has English and Chinese captions—though the clip is only in SD quality. Ghost in the Shell: Arise border: 1 Ghost Pain will be released in Japanese theaters on June 22, 2013. No international release date has been announced but the Japanese Blu-Rays, which include English subtitles, will be released on July 26, 2013. Ghost in the Shell Arise's 1st 8 Minutes Posted with English Subs [Anime News Network] Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am. To contact the author of this post, write to BiggestinJapan@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @BiggestinJapan.

As sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, there will always be a new Earth Defense Force game to look forward to. Blowing up everything on the screen, from giant ants to giant robots, never gets old. This is the E3 trailer for the latest game in the series, Earth Defense Force 2025. If you've never seen one of these games before, before you say it, yes, they're "budget". B-grade, even. That's half the fun.

PlayStation 4's The Witness is its most unique and unusual game. But its strangeness may also prove to be its downfall.

Ultima Forever, being made by EA for iOS platforms, has received some major tweaks to its freemium currency prices. The RPG has been available in Canada as a beta for a while now, and producer Carrie Gouskos says the biggest change - besides performance adjustments - has been to the cost of things.

In the free-to-play RPG, your character has items that will break over time. You'll need to spend keys of various qualities (that can be earned in game, or purchased with real money) to repair those items.

Gouskos says player feedback made it clear that repair costs were too high, and repairs for the highest quality items have been lowered from about 60 keys to around 8 or 10. Additionally, the cost to increase storage space in your stash was lowered, as the team found it was a mistake to charge people an increasing cost for simply wanting to collect more of the game's items.

One price went up: The cost to loot the highest quality chests was raised a bit to make up for the decreased costs elsewhere. Gouskos also says that once players had good items on their characters, they tended not to loot as much as when they first started playing.

For her part, Gouskos says she's "worked too hard to have people not play" the game, so she's striving to make sure there's a way to play that's both free and fun. The team is still considering providing an optional "buyout" fee to essentially negate the game's freemium elements, but no matter how the final product works, says Gouskos, making the game fun takes priority over the tangled monetization model. If you want to make money from a freemium game, says Gouskos, "you've got to get people to love your game first."

A skywhale flew near my house once. True story. Xavier Etchepare is a senior concept artist at Ubisoft Montréal, where he's done stuff like character art and storyboards. He's worked on games like the Just Dance series, but most of the stuff you'll see today is either personal or from old/abandoned projects. You can see more of his work at his CGHub page and CGSociety page. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

If there was one complaint about the early development kits for virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, it's that the low-res display gave everything a kind of "screen door" effect. Fixed. Newer units of the headset now feature full 1080p support, doubling the number of pixels available, which is quite the feat considering how close these screens are to your eyeballs. These improved units will be playable at "upcoming shows". Oculus At E3 [Site]

Jaxson Denno, who is 18 months old, is a huge Iron Man fan. So when his parents found out Iron Man himself Robert Downey Jr. was nearby shooting a movie, they arranged the meeting of a lifetime. Like only an 18 month year-old could, though, Denno burst into tears when introduced to Tony Stark, because...he wasn't in the suit. No suit = no Iron Man for a tiny human. Cue the tears, and the amazing photo up top. The story ends on a brighter note, though; seems once Downey Jr. started talking, Denno recognised the voice, and all was well. Robert Downey Jr. Comforts a Child Disappointed Not to Meet Iron Man [People]

That's a wrap, folks. The doors are closed and E3 2013 is done for. At least for the people actually there. For you, reading at home, good news! It'll continue for a few more days. We've still got plenty of impressions and interviews to come from the show, which we'll be posting tonight, over the weekend and into next week. So stick around! Or don't, whatever, I'm not your mother. To revisit our coverage from throughout the show, click here.

As is tradition, show organizers wished E3 attendees farewell on this final day of E3 with a banner to tell them when to come back. Mark your calendars. Please note: the excitement always begins the day before E3, on the day of the big Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft press conferences . That'll be June 9, 2014, with some sort of Nintendo event and the E3 show proper beginning on the 10th. Unless everything changes, of course. Maybe all the press conferences will be cancelled and the world will go mad.

It's called Hohokum and it'll be out on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and Vita (though what you see here is on the PS4). You control a snake-like character while you explore worlds and discover new ones. You help in-game characters and creatures locate items and other characters and creatures. Sometimes, you turn lights on for new discoveries. But I could hardly glean all of this on my own. So let the game's artist—Richard Hogg—tell you a bit about his game, which I have decreed the most confusing game I've seen at E3. Also, super sorry about the audio quality of the video. It was a noisy day. But it's worth learning more.

The future of Virtual Console? Metroid? Other Retro games? The status of Earthbound? These are things I wanted to know. Sadly, Nintendo's senior communications director, Charlie Scibetta, wasn't budging.

Check out the new action adventure game coming from Square Enix.

Ride along with us, on a typical day of E3!

Jeff catches up with Infinity Ward to talk navy seal canines, and sound design, for the next Call of Duty installment.

Avengers Alliance, the oddly-compelling Marvel-themed turn-based role-playing game that I had serious trouble tearing myself away from on Facebook, is now a free iOS game. This is not good. It's good for those of you who've avoided playing the game on Facebook or Playdom. It's really a nifty little social game, all things considered, with regular special events, tons of characters to collect and level up and limited social bugging requirements. It's bad for those of us who've only recently gotten over playing it obsessively on Facebook. Those accounts don't seem to carry over, so it's a fresh start, a chance for players to build up a new team of Avengers in the privacy of their portable devices. Dammit, dammit, dammit. You can get it here.

Look, no one’s actually expecting that more characters and critters died in this week’s Nintendo Direct broadcast than in Sony or Microsoft’ E3 presentations. But, still, the question remains: just how many folks kicked the bucket while the House of Mario showed its cuddly brand of carnage? More than you’d guess? Or less? Watch The Gameological Society’s newest Murder Report video and learn the truth that Satoru Iwata doesn’t want you to know.

We get a hold of one of the head _Dogs to see what new tricks they have to show.

If Phosphor Games Man of Steel featured some generic superhero character — if I weren't meant to be stepping into the red boots of a comic book icon with three-quarters of a century of history — I would probably love it. I don't hate it. In fact, I quite like the fighting engine, a riff on Infinity Blade-style encounter fighting. It's a lot like the Avengers Initiative game with a little added flair, like a flying sequence/mini-game where you drag your enemy along the ground to cause damage. It doesn't quite make it feel like Superman, but at least Phopshor tried. It's E3 week (you may have noticed), and time is at a premium, so instead of typing out a couple more paragraphs I decided to record, process and upload a video about the game, because somehow that made sense to me. Man of Steel Genre: BrawlerDeveloper: Phosphor Games StudioPlatform: iOS, AndroidPrice: $2.99 / $4.99 for iPad HD vesrion Get Man of Steel on iTunes — Coming Soon to Google Play

Ryan declassifies the game's online components and how to blow dudes up with your tablet.

Sure, everyone’s talking about the Xbox One this week. But it’s not the only new piece of Xbox hardware MIcrosoft showed this week. The tech giant also announced a newly-redesigned Xbox 360 e model, one that’s styled to match the Xbox One’s shiny/matte exterior. But what’s underneath the hard plastic shell? iFixit set out to find out. The website—best known for open-source, user-generated repair manuals for high-end consumer electronics—peeled the outer layers of the 360 E and discovered the same cooling system as the 360 S and a hard drive that’s easier to replace. That is, it’s easier provided you buy an official Xbox 360-branded hard drive. Click on through for the full rundown of the 360 e’s guts. Xbox 360 T Teardown [iFixit]

A black Samsonite backpack belonging to Rami Ismail, co-founder of Ridiculous Fishing and Super Crate Box developer Vlambeer, disappeared during Sony's E3 mixer at the Figueroa hotel last night. According to Joystiq the bag contains an Asus laptop, two Vitas, the iPads, power adapters — Ismail says it's "pretty much my entire company." Information on the whereabouts of the pack should be directed to Ismail's Twitter.