Hitman: Absolution Message Board

Square Enix Montreal has announced it is working on a turn-based strategy Hitman game for tablets and smartphones.

People love the Hitman games for the meticulous ways you can take out a target. Wear an outrageous outfit, slide in between the shadows and NPCs and perform an assassination with meticulous stealth. Yeaaah, there's none of that in the new comic from two dudes who worked on the last game featuring Agent 47. It's pretty much "insert sword into demon, dodge attack, shoot face off, repeat," all of it drawn by an artist famous for gory action.Read more...

Hello there. Things have sounded a little unhappy at Hitman and Kane & Lynch devs IO Interactive for a while now, in the wake of 2012′s Hitman: Subtitle achieving neither the acclaim or the spondoolies it was hoped to. Last year, the Square Enix-owned Danish studio saw half its workforce removed from their jobs, along with claims that the remainder would get to do nothing but Hitman games. Yesterday, reports circulated that the next Jennifer Hitman game had been quietly garotted. That claim, despite being made on a Square Enix Montreal senior game designer’s LinkedIn profile, has now been denied.(more…)

Video games. You play them, otherwise, something tells me you wouldn’t be here. Since you’re here, you’re probably wondering what new games are going to be coming to PlayStation Plus as part of the Instant Game Collection in August. Well wonder no more, as we’re about to detail this month’s line up of games that are coming free to PS Plus members!

Hitman: Absolution brought a fine return to form for Agent 47 last year and now, this highly acclaimed title will be leading the way this month, supported by other fantastic titles like Bit.Trip Runner2, and plenty more!

In addition to the month outlook, you’ll also want to dig into the other PS Plus benefits this week. Sales on a ton of Rayman games, EscapeVektor, and more await, so read on, then let us know your thoughts in the comments.

August Preview

The following games are slated to be free to PS Plus members through the Instant Game Collection in the month of August.

Hitman Absolution (PS3)

Regular Price: $19.99, Free for PS Plus members

Hitman Absolution offers freedom of choice, unique disguise gameplay and the innovative Contracts mode that lets you create your own hits by choosing the level, targets, weapons and the rules of assassination. In Contracts mode, you play to create, which means that no contract is impossible and that you are in control of how the contract is shaped. Contracts can be shared with friends or the whole Hitman community and the money that you earn will unlock weapons, upgrades and more disguises. This digital version includes the following:

• Deus Ex Disguise DLC for use in Contracts Mode.
• Deux Ex ‘Zenith’ Handgun DLC for use in Contracts Mode.
• Discount on the digital version of Sleeping Dogs.

Bit.Trip Presents Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (PS3)

Regular Price: $14.99, Free for PS Plus members

Runner2 is a rhythm-music, auto-running platformer. Players will run through fantastic environments, using brand new moves, to amazing new soundtracks as they run, jump, slide, kick, and soar toward the goal of tracking down the Nefarious Timbletot who has un-fused CommanderVideo’s reality. Runner2 features 5 exciting worlds, 125 tantalizing levels and 5 death defying BOSS battles! Play as 8 different characters and find secret areas to unlock new and zany costumes! Zen Pinball 2: Star Wars Pinball (PS3 – PS Vita Cross Buy)

Regular Price: $9.99, Free for PS Plus members

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…. Star Wars Pinball lets you relive the greatest moments of the Star Wars universe on a set of brand new pinball tables! In Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back lead the Rebellion with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Lando Calrissian, R2-D2, and C-3PO to defeat Darth Vader and the evil Emperor. In The Clone Wars, join Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano as they battle the most dangerous Sith assassins in the galaxy. On the Boba Fett table, the player takes on the role of the most feared bounty hunter in the Star Wars galaxy, working for sinister clients such as Darth Vader and Jabba the Hutt. Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (PS Vita, Compatible with PS Vita)

Regular Price: $9.99, Free for PS Plus members

The secret power of the dark is unleashed! Fight head-to-head in a fierce and brutal battle for supremacy! Darkstalkers sets the standard for monster fantasy fighters. This fan favorite features vivid animations and unbeatable fighting combinations. This fighting phenomenon is updated, redesigned, and ready for a comeback. Machinarium (PS Vita)

Regular Price: $6.99, Free for PS Plus members

The famous point-and-click adventure is now free for PS Vita PS Plus members. Winner of several awards including IGF – Excellence in Visual Art Award, DICE Awards Finalist, and Gamasutra – Best Indie Game Of The Year.

Leaving PS Plus In August

• 8/6 – Battlefield 3
• 8/13 – Labyrinth Legends
• 8/20 – Gods Eater Burst
• 8/20 – Malicious
• 8/27 – Dokuro

Entering PS Plus in August (in no particular order)

• Hitman: Absolution (PS3)
• Zen Pinball 2: Star Wars Pinball (PS3)
• Bit.Trip Presents Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (PS3)
• Machinarium (PS Vita)
• Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (PS Vita, Compatible with PS Vita)

Remember, check back every Monday to learn when Zen Pinball 2: Star Wars Pinball (PS3), Bit.Trip Presents Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (PS3), Machinarium (PS Vita), and Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (PS Vita, Compatible with PS Vita) is arriving to PS Plus members. You’ll also find more discounts and other exclusives that we weren’t able to detail here just yet. Remember the month preview is subject to change.

August 6th PlayStation Plus Update

Hitman Absolution (PS3)

Regular Price: $19.99, Free for PS Plus members

Hitman Absolution offers freedom of choice, unique disguise gameplay and the innovative Contracts mode that lets you create your own hits by choosing the level, targets, weapons and the rules of assassination. In Contracts mode, you play to create, which means that no contract is impossible and that you are in control of how the contract is shaped. Contracts can be shared with friends or the whole Hitman community and the money that you earn will unlock weapons, upgrades and more disguises. This digital version includes the following:

• Deus Ex Disguise DLC for use in Contracts Mode.
• Deux Ex ‘Zenith’ Handgun DLC for use in Contracts Mode.
• Discount on the digital version of Sleeping Dogs.

EscapeVektor

Regular Price: $9.99, PSN Sale Price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $3.99

Vektor has been trapped inside the CPU for what feels like an eternity and you are his only hope of escape. As he travels through the CPU, help him recover his memories and destroy the different enemy types sent to hunt him. But be careful, the further Vektor gets, the more devious the CPU becomes! Wicked Monsters Blast! HD

Regular Price: $9.99, PSN Sale Price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $1.00

20 action-packed missions each with their own unique theme. Keep your students awake in Lazy Brain Attack, keep the hippos hungry in No Mercy for Hippos, and defeat Colonel Eureka in Desert Striker and many more! Superfrog (PS3 and PS Vita Cross Buy)

Regular Price: $9.99, PS Plus Price: $7.99

Superfrog HD is the classic side-scrolling, 2D platformer developed by Team17. Launching originally in 1993 to much critical acclaim, Superfrog has now been re-imagined for PlayStation 3 and PS Vita. Superfrog HD features: 24 levels with enhanced HD graphics, a Level Editor and a new endless runner mode. Rayman Sale

Various Discounts (PS3 and PS Vita)

Check out the following discounts to see if the Rayman title you might have missed is on sale!

Discounts

Game Title Normal Price Sale Price PS Plus Price Rayman Origins $19.99 $9.99 $5.00 Rayman 3 HD $9.99 $4.99 $2.50 Rayman Origins PS Vita $26.99 $13.49 $6.75 Rayman Arena $9.99 $4.99 $2.50 Rayman 2 Revolution $9.99 $4.99 $2.50 Rayman 2: The Great Escape $5.99 $2.99 $1.50 Rayman $5.99 $2.99 $1.50

Last Chance (Leaving on 8/13)

Instant Game Collection
Labyrinth Legends

Discounts
Rayman Origins
Rayman 3 HD
Rayman Origins PS Vita
Rayman Arena
Rayman 2 Revolution
Rayman 2: The Great Escape
Rayman
Pixeljunk Monsters: Ultimate HD
Ducktales Remastered (preorder)

What’s your favorite content from this week’s update? What was your favorite content from July?

Thanks for reading this week’s update along with the month outlook. Got more questions on Plus? Leave your comments below, or, if you’re looking to engage with more of the PS community, make sure you head over to the PlayStation Community Forums to discuss this week’s news more, find other topics to contribute your thoughts to, or start one for yourself. See you in the comments!

Here are a bunch of reasons to laugh at Hitman: Absolution, both intended and unintended by the game's creators.Read more...

After the gaming industry went on a dubstep-and-Dew-fueled vacation to E3 last week, it’s now back to business as usual. By “business,” I of course mean layoffs, and goodness gracious, figurative business is booming. However, literal business – the part where people make money – isn’t faring so well because, well, layoffs. This time, the sobering specter took its scythe to Hitman developer IO Interactive, reducing its workforce by “almost half”. Yeesh. The plan to get things back on track? Er, make more Hitman. Which is to say, make nothing but Hitman.

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Now you can buy clothes on your phone, just like a real contract killer. Actually, the Hitman ICA app does a lot more than that, integrating with Hitman Absolution in several interesting ways. You can browse player-designed "Contracts" on your phone and push them to your game, and you can buy weapons and disguises.

There's also an "ICA Database" with various tips and guides, achievement tracking, stats, and more. This seems like the rare mobile companion that just makes the main game a nicer experience! It's free on iPhone and Android.

It’s a bad day for Square Enix, latter-day publisher of Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex and Thief, as well as those dreary Final Fantasy things. Citing “slow sales of major console games” as well as uninspiring business from its arcade machine arm, it’s admitted that its recent monies “substantially fall below its plan” and its president Yoichi Wada has fallen on his sword as a result.(more…)

Lackluster Hitman: Ablutions sales and wider money woes at publisher Square Enix don’t seem to have deterred their interest in doing something more with old Baldy McMurderpants. Or maybe money woes is exactly why they’re happy to let a sequel to/reboot of the rather wretched 2007 Hitman movie go ahead.(more…)

New PC patch (1.0.446.0) released!

It contains the following two fixes:

- Performance enhancements on various hardware configurations.
- Audio volume can now be muted again.

#watchthis Playing Hitman: Absolution professionally requires a lot of stealth and planning. You scope out the scene, and land your kills in such a fashion that no one will notice. More »

#hitman More »

Popular 2K Games characters and misplaced, mythical creatures abound in the latest episode of IGN Strategize.

Image credit due to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who captured this thing before it got shut down.

Oh Hitman: Absolution, you are too good of a game to have been as terribly marketed as you have been. I'm sure we all remember the Agent 47 kills sexy nuns for some reason trailer debacle from earlier this year, and now Square Enix has a new poorly-thought-out campaign to make amends for, which it already began doing within hours of anyone noticing it.

The concept in question was Square Enix's delightfully death-threat-laden Hire Hitman campaign for Facebook users. In the campaign, those with Facebook accounts could essentially craft a custom death threat for any Facebook user it saw fit. Okay, so that's generally awkward enough on its own, except that it also came with a remarkably offensive series of traits one could use to identify their "targets," and reasons for elimination. You could identify targets by noting their "tiny penis" or "small tits," and then decide they should die because they have "terrible taste in music" or for cheating on their partner. Lovely.

For its part, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has already pretty well covered the emotional spectrum one might feel when first learning of such a reprehensibly ill-conceived...thing. And within a breath of their story going up, Square Enix pulled the app, releasing an apologetic, if perhaps unnecessarily punny statement that read, in part, "We were wide of the mark with the app and following feedback from the community we decided the best thing to do was remove it completely and quickly. This we’ve now done."

So, Square Enix did a stupid, offensive thing, then realized it did a stupid, offensive thing and pulled it. That's great, though I am still left bewildered and wondering how this made it past the chain of approvals in the first place. Who looks at a Facebook app where you can call people out for their regrettable genitalia (among other insulting things) and threaten them with (fictional) murder, and says, "Yes! This is the direction our marketing campaign needs!"

Someone who probably shouldn't be in charge of marketing products anymore, that's who.

#hitman Look, it's already pretty clear that the folks at IO Interactive like a particularly adolescent style of joke-making, what with the closet-humping and all. But the latest effort at promoting the Square Enix published game invites you to fling their poor taste at your Facebook friends. It's pretty tacky. More »

Square Enix aren’t having a brilliant Winter. With profits pointing downward, and Hitman a bit of a stinker, they surely must be on the phone with the Humble Bundle folks, trying to follow THQ. But surely everything’s going to improve with their latest marketing campaign for the disappointing baldie killer. “SQUARE ENIX,” says the email that’s just arrived in my inbox, “WANTS YOU TO PUT A HIT ON YOUR FRIENDS”. Ahaha! Threaten to murder your chums!

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Square Enix, IO Interactive, and Nixxes are making a first patch (1.0.438.0) available for Hitman: Absolution on PC.

This patches provides the following improvements:

- Players using the Russian language will no longer crash as soon as they use the sniper rifle.
- Various issues that have been seen on specific configurations that caused the game to not be able to start up at all have been addressed.
- Problems with the Sniper Challenge Unlocks not carrying over into Hitman: Absolution have been addressed. On first starting the patched game you will receive your unlocks.
o Note that North American users that have been provided the Sniper Challenge by Gamestop will need a separate unlock key in addition to this. Gamestop can provide these.
- Problems with negative level-scores have been fixed. Newly accomplished positive scores will be needed to erase your incorrectly remembered negative scores.
- A problem with keyboard and mouse controls where users would accidentally melee attack a person next to them when they intended to throw an item has been addressed.
- Legal and Intro movies can now be skipped immediately on startup after the game, on all launches but the very first on a machine.
- DirectX 10 hardware can now enable the simplest version of the Depth Of Field effect.
- Problems with audio occasionally being muted after ALT-TAB have been fixed.
- Various localization fixes.
- Miscellaneous other stability and general improvements based on crashes we have seen coming in.

Note that the above is really just our first set of fixes. We are continuing to monitor things and expect to provide further patches in the future.

We hope this patch will help everyone enjoy Hitman: Absolution!

You're about to assassinate a highly trained group of killing professionals and maybe a ninja or two. You have your guns, ammo, a fresh suit and quiet shoes - but you need one more thing to complete an outfit of inconspicuous stealth. A rubber-duck hat.

A new line of avatar items based on the Hitman: Absolution universe are available now on XBLM, including the aforementioned rubber-duck hat, branded shirts, a Blake Dexter suit and a chipmunk costume, all running 80 to 320 MS Points. If you ever have an assassination assignment at a county fair, consider this your avatar set.

Check out the entire lineup of new items here.

#watchthis Hitman: Absolution is, for the most part, a serious game. It's a great game. But there's definitely some lowbrow humor at work. More »

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 maintained its top spot on the UK charts, despite a sales drop of 81 percent. However, when you're the fourth largest game launch of all time in the UK, you've likely got a decent buffer. Chart-Track also noted sales are actually up 15 percent from last year's Call of Duty installment, Modern Warfare 3, during its second week.

Hitman: Absolution debuted respectably in second. Comparing premiere weeks, Absolution outsold Hitman: Blood Money, Agent 47's previous adventure from back in 2006, by almost threefold.

Other new entries further down the chart are Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale at 34, 35 and 38, respectively. Punch past the break for the UK top ten.

#hitman Hitman: Absolution begins with 47 driving an ice cream truck, so it's not that much of a stretch that one of the weirdest easter eggs in the game features the vehicle's deadly return. More »

In which Adam, who has played it all, and Alec, who has played around a third of it, gather to discuss IO Interactive’s divisive Hitman: Absolution. Devout Blood Money disciple Adam felt let down by this latest reinvention of Agent 47 – does Alec feel differently? (“No.”) They do find some positive things to say about it though, promise.

Alec: I’ve been playing some Absolution. It’s brilliant! Just kidding. It’s a nasty, grimy, uneven game.

Adam: I almost wish I had someone to debate it with, who did think it was brilliant. But I think I’d just say YOU’RE WRONG and we’d find little common ground. I have been pondering how much of my dislike does come from the ugliness of it – I don’t think it’s well designed on the whole but there are bright spots. I wonder if I’d feel more sympathetic toward those if they weren’t wrapped in grime.(more…)

With Hitman’s latest subtitle so recently creeping into public view, IO are already talking about 47′s future. Speaking to OPM, Absolution’s director Tore Blystad confirmed that the next title in the franchise will be developed at Square Enix Montreal rather than remaining in-house. Blystad reckons development will follow a similar pattern to work on the Call of Duty games, so presumably we can expect development duties to alternate between Squenix and IO as they do between Treyarch and Infinity Ward. It almost certainly means we’ll be seeing the wigless wonder more frequently in the next few years. Three weeks ago I would have said that was a good thing. If you’ve played Absolution, perhaps you’d care to compare your thoughts with mine?

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#hitman Hitman: Absolution is a game that requires a lot of sneaking around, and like most sneaking games, you'll find yourself regularly incapacitating guards and stashing their bodies. Every time you stash a guard in closet, his body will slump standing up over to the left side of the enclosure. More »

On today's Strategize, we show you two sneaky ways of taking down the King of Chinatown on both Normal and Hard modes. Sometimes your greatest weapon is...bad fish.

A Suit Only and No Detection walkthrough for the chapter A Personal Contract.

A Suit Only and No Detection walkthrough for the chapter The King of Chinatown.

A Suit Only and No Detection walkthrough for the chapter Terminus.

A Suit Only and No Detection walkthrough for the chapter Run For Your Life.

A Suit Only and No Detection walkthrough for the chapter Hunter and Hunted.