PS Vita launched in North America about 6 months back with a pretty solid software launch lineup. Since that launch date, however, we haven’t gotten much of anything in terms of new games. Vita has also suffered from poor hardware sales, probably due to lack of games. The problem is, who is gonna want to develop games for a platform that has poor hardware sales? It’s a vicious cycle, and one that the Vita has been stuck in for nearly 6 months.

Everybody thought that this year’s E3 was gonna be Sony’s chance to talk about what they’re doing to improve upon Vita’s sales and software lineup. However, the Vita seemed like more of an afterthought at the show. Other than showing a new game or two and announcing a new bundle, the Vita was almost completely ignored. Thankfully, Sony heard our concerns. At their Gamecom 2012 press conference, PS Vita was the star of the show.

Sony showed a variety of games for Vita, including some brand new titles and some previously-announced ones. We already knew about LittleBigPlanet Vita, Assassin’s Creed Liberation and Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified, but they had very strong showings at the conference. They also announced a Vita bundle for Call of Duty, which will help with getting some of the COD gamers to pick up the system.

Check out the trailers that were shown during the conference.

Now, for the brand new games. LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule took the stage to announce their new IP called Tearaway, coming exclusively to PS Vita. Guerrilla game also came out of their period of silence to announce a new Killzone game being developed specifically for PS Vita called Killzone: Mercenary. This is exactly what the Vita needed – some 1st party support.

Here are the trailers for the two new 1st party games.

Sony also announced Cross Buy, a system they seemed to have started with Sound Shapes. The idea of Cross Buy is that if you buy a PS3 game that has a Vita version, you get both versions of the game for one purchase. In addition to announcing 4 new All-stars, Playstation All-stars Battle Royale has been confirmed to support Cross Buy. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time and Ratchet and Clank: Full Frontal Assault have also been confirmed to support Cross Buy. Lets hope this trend continues, because I think it’s a fantastic system. Buy the PS3 version of a game and get the Vita version for free, or vice versa.

The Four New All-stars.

The last bit of Vita news to come out of Gamescom was the fact that PS Plus was coming to Vita, as well as PSone Classics. PS Plus support for Vita is pretty awesome, as it will allow gamers to get their hands on some of the great new games coming to the platform at a reduced cost, or even for free. Also, PSone Classics will undoubtedly give people more of a reason to carry their Vita around with them everyday. There are tons of great games from the PSone, and having them on a portable system is awesome.

Gamescom 2012 is exactly what the Vita needed. I think Sony proved that it has what it takes to get the Vita back on track.

For some reason it’s always seemed like developers are been afraid to create a realistic zombie survival game, instead relying on goofy zombie kills and silly weapon crafting. I don’t want to see how many zombies I can kill, I want to see how long I can survive. I don’t want to craft an electric chainsaw that zaps zombies to death. I want a game that forces me to scavenge for supplies that are essential for my survival. DayZ is that game– well, mod technically. Created for the game Arma 2, DayZ is a mod that puts the player in a massive open environment full of zombies and other players. Arma 2 being a realistic military simulator, naturally it turned out to be the perfect game for a hardcore zombie survival mod.

The entire point of DayZ is to scavenge supplies and to survive at all cost. What’s the number one way to make death feel important in a game? Make it permanent. That’s right, when you die, that character is dead for good. You respawn with next to no items in the middle of nowhere. When you’ve spent a week playing the same character and stocking up on supplies, generally you’re going to want to avoid losing it all. Hunger, thirst, temperature and blood loss are all things that you need to account for. There’s a large variety of items to find on the map. From a broad arsenal of guns, to a plethora of medical supplies. You can also find bikes and a number of vehicles including cars, buses, boats.

Your best bet for survival is to bring as little attention to yourself as possible. Stealth is your friend. If a zombie notices you, they will essentially chase you forever, but there a couple of ways to lose them. You can shoot them, obviously, and you can run through buildings and lose them around corners.There are also some areas that they just won’t enter, such as piers (I guess they hate water?) Firing your weapon for an insignificant reason is usually a bad idea, as the sound will more than likely attract more zombies, so you’re going to be doing a lot of running away. Often times when getting hit by a zombie, you’ll start bleeding. This will not go away over time, and you will bleed to death unless you can manage to bandage yourself. Keeping your distance is recommended.

Some might say that the other players on the server are more dangerous than the zombies themselves, and this can definitely be true. When you run into another human player with a gun, you have to decide if it’s worth taking the time to see if they’re friendly and risk giving them the opportunity to kill you, or take the initiative and gun their ass down and score some free supplies. Your average player will most likely do the latter, but you occasionally encounter friendly individuals. If you do have a group of friends to play with, your odds of survival go up exponentially. There are few problems that can’t be fixed with a friendly player at your side. The downside is you have to split the supplies you find with a group of people.

DayZ is not without flaws, however. The mod is still technically in Alpha, so saying it’s clunky would be an understatement. The game can be incredibly unforgiving for new players. Menus are confusing, some of the default key bindings are really wonky, and load times are incredibly long. Most of this is understandable and will most likely be polished out as the game continues to be updated. I for one can’t wait until the game gets a standalone release that’s more polished and streamlined, because they’re really onto something great with DayZ.

While Drinkbox studios is hard at work on their next title, Guacamelee, I thought I’d take the time to review their previous PS Vita game, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack! I’m just gonna come out and say that if you own a Vita, Mutant Blobs Attack is a must buy. One part Katamari, and two parts platformer, this game has you rolling around as a mutant blob, completing puzzles, clearing obstacles and eating everything in sight. Its biggest downside is the length of the game, which sits at no more than 4 hours on your first playthrough, but the price is set at a reasonable $7.99

Yes.. that box does say Hipster Juice.

Your main goal? Eat as much as possible. The more you eat, the bigger you get. As you grow in size, new areas become available and you get to devour larger things. To put it into perspective, you start out eating spare change and peanuts under a couch of a college dorm room, but eventually get to the size that you’re devouring crowds of people, helicopters and tanks.

At its heart, Mutant Blobs Attack is a 2D Platformer, but it’s complemented by its Katamari-esque concept. Thankfully, the platforming mechanics to be found here are very solid. The game actually controls quite well. Wall jumping feels natural, and they did a great job of making you feel like a  squishy blob as you squeeze through cracks and bounce up and down. You’ll encounter various abilities throughout the game that mix things up, such as being able to magnetize yourself to metal objects. The mechanics are interesting and most of all, fun. It’s not the hardest platformer out there by any means, but there’s enough of a challenge to keep you engaged.

You’ll also find a number of creative puzzles that require the use of touch control. These are great for the most part, and again, while not super challenging, are still a lot of fun. In terms of replay value, there are two blob friends hidden in every level to go back and collect. You’ll often find puzzles that block your way from rescuing them. There’s leaderboards to compete on for scores in individual levels, so you know, standard platformer stuff. There’s also a couple of optional bonus levels that rely on tilt control. I wasn’t a huge fan of these, and aside from the extra hidden blob friends, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to play through them.

Mutant Blobs Attack won’t blow you away with its graphics, but its colors are vibrant, animations for the blob are silky smooth, and the music is great. However, the best thing that Mutant Blobs has going for it in terms of presentation is humor. Drinkbox did a great job of filling the backdrop with tons of things to laugh at. You’ll find internet memes, references from other games, and ridiculous puns scattered across the various billboards and buildings that you encounter throughout the game.

It’s a small game and there’s not a whole lot of ground to cover, so I’ll keep it short.

Overall Score: 90
Cool concept, interesting and fun mechanics, humor, great music, and a modest price tag. What’s not to love?

Genre Score (2D Platformer): 83
While not super challenging, Mutant Blobs Attack sports some very unique and fun platforming mechanics, and the Katamari concept sets apart from other games in the same vein.

The Mass Effect trilogy is one of the most memorable and character-driven experiences in gaming today. The first game came with massive potential, with developer Bioware promising an epic sci-fi tale with lasting choices that would carry over from game to game. This kind of thing had never really been done before in games. However, the ending to Mass Effect 3 left most people feeling short-changed. In response to an overwhelming number of people asking for clarification on the events of the game’s ending, Bioware has released the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut.

If you don’t want the ending spoiled or just don’t feel like reading the article, know that the extended cut fixes some problems, but not all. It takes the ending from abysmal to acceptable.

[SPOILER WARNING]

Many of the complaints about ME3’s ending revolved around the fact that none of your previous choices seemed to matter whatsoever in determining your ending, and that this was simply not what the developer had promised. There’s also an argument to be made that the endings weren’t nearly different enough and were riddled with unanswered questions that left the audience scratching their heads. So, do we think the extended cut fixes all of these problems? Not really, but it does provide some extra clarification on some of the more glaring plot holes from the original ending.

Bioware was pretty intent on not changing anything; they had a specific story in mind and they didn’t want to change it just because the fans said so. Everything from the original ending is still here, they’ve just added onto it. Whether you loved them or hated them (actually, nobody loved them), the original events are here to stay. Most of the additions are very welcomed and needed, such as additional dialogue choices for Shepard’s conversation with the “star child.”

Everybody’s expectations for the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy were enormous. We were ecstatic to see how all of our choices up to this point would influence how we left the Mass Effect universe. Bioware simply did not deliver. Not only did we get pigeon holded into three final choices with endings attached to them (essentially making all of your previous choices nonconsequential), but all three endings were almost identical. While the Extended Cut doesn’t do much to include your previous choices in the ending, it at least succeeds in making the three endings quite distinct from each other (and even adds a fourth.)

The extended cut adds quite a few extra cutscenes that really focus on giving the player that gratifying feeling that was just missing from the original ending. Things like images of the united races of the galaxy left you feeling like you’d changed everyone’s lives for the better. It was also a  relief to see Joker struggling to leave Shepard behind, rather than just running for his life. The added cutscenes show the aftermath of Shepard’s choice (singular), and we’re left with more than just various colours and minor aesthetic differences in cutscenes.

Bioware has stated that Commander Shepard’s story is over, but what’s next? They’ve put so much time and energy into building this fantastically deep universe, it seems silly to think that we’re done with Mass Effect. It’ll probably be a long time before we get another full game set in the Mass Effect universe, but a prequel seems likely.

All in all, the extended cut was good. It focused on clarification above all else, but that still leaves out one of the biggest problems it had originally, which is making our previous choices matter. The new endings are acceptable, but the fact of the matter is that you could look up each of the three (now four) endings on youtube and get almost the exact same cutscenes as you would if you were to use your own save file, and that’s simply not what Mass Effect deserves.

-Micah Messer

In response to the fan outrage at the ending of the acclaimed Mass Effect trilogy, Bioware released Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut today. You can expect our thoughts on this potential “fix” of the ending of this remarkable series within the next few days.

I don’t play a lot of horror games, but Amnesia: The Dark Descent is, far and away, the scariest game I have ever played. It’s not hard to tell that true survival-horror games are hard to come by these days. After this year’s E3, which showed off Resident Evil 6’s explosion tsunami and some of Dead Space 3’s more action-centric gameplay, triple A survival-horror games seem to be on their way out. So what is a true survival-horror enthusiast supposed to do? Well, you can turn to a small indie developer named Frictional Games. Amnesia focuses so much on scaring the crap out of you and immersing you in its world that, for better or worse, there’s little else to the game at all.

The story here is actually pretty decent and well told. You play as Daniel, a man who wakes up on the floor of a room in the absurdly creepy Castle Brennenburg, with no memory of past events. The story revolves heavily on you recovering your memories, usually through notes written by your past-self, or conversations that come back to you after visiting certain areas. As I said, the story is pretty well told, albeit somewhat reliant on you finding and reading the majority of the notes scattered throughout the castle. But as long as you’re opening drawers and searching desks (which you’re going to want to be doing anyway) you’ll find enough of them to keep you in the loop.

Get used to this level of vision.

Amnesia’s sound design is some of the best I have ever heard in a video game. It’s ultimately a big contributor to what makes this game so scary. Although the visuals are great, the sound alone makes for a crazy immersive survival-horror experience. You constantly hear footsteps,  clicking, scratching, chains rattling, debris tumbling and all types of other strange sounds just to hint at you that you’re not alone, and there might be something around the next corner or through the next door. I couldn’t play this game for more than about an hour at a time. I would typically complete an area, move onto the next and hear a terrible sound that made me decide I needed to take a break.

While most horror games rely heavily on jump scare scenes and startling tactics to scare players, Amnesia does it through immersion and the feeling of vulnerability. If you encounter an enemy, you have to run and hide. There’s absolutely no way to fight them. Enemy encounters are truly terrifying experiences. You’re going to have to get rid of any light source, barricade yourself in a room and hide in the dark, hopefully not for too long. Staying in the dark for an extended period of time will drain your sanity, making it hard to function at all. You can avoid this by finding tinderboxes scattered throughout the castle that let you light torches and candles, but you also find a lantern pretty early in the game that, provided you have oil to fuel it, acts as a mobile light source.

The pacing can be a bit wonky at times, as you won’t encounter any hostile enemies for a pretty long time when you start the game, yet there are some areas near the middle that seem to have something deadly around every other corner. It evens out by the end, but I wish they would have spread out the enemies a bit more in the first half of the game.

Amnesia nails atmosphere and focuses on immersion so much that some of its other gameplay elements can feel a bit dry at times. You spend a lot of your time solving environment-based puzzles. These range from great to somewhat lackluster.  While most of them are pretty straightforward, there were a couple where I simply couldn’t figure out what to do, and the solution seemed so obscure that I probably never would have thought of it. You can find the answer to most of the puzzles by just searching the environment for items or points of interest, but this can be challenging with the constant threat of terrifying enemies and being on the verge of running out of fuel for your light source. While this feeling is probably intentional, it can still be a bit frustrating when you simply can’t find the item you’re missing to solve a puzzle.

I wonder what’s around that corner…

Although the game does have multiple endings, there’s little reason to play through it more than once. There are no collectables from what I’ve found, and things are no doubt a little less frightening on a second time through. The game length can vary from about 6 to 12 hours, depending on how quickly you move through environments and solve puzzles. One player might rush through each area, dashing for the finish line, while another might explore, search for notes and supplies and take their time. I landed somewhere in the middle of this, at about 9 hours.

Overall Score: 80
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an incredibly memorable experience that warrants your attention. Its atmosphere and immersion are almost unmatched in gaming today. Even though its gameplay and puzzle solving aren’t super exciting, its other elements are more than strong enough to make this something truly special. Just keep in mind that this game is in no way shape or form, or in any possible sense of the word, “fun”.

Genre Score (Survival-Horror): 95
In a world where survival-horror is slowly turning into cinematic action, Amnesia: The Dark Descent stands tall as a truly terrifying experience. It absolutely excels at what it does– that is, scaring the ever-loving shit out of you. If you’re a horror fan that’s been looking for a game to play in a room by yourself with the lights off, look no further.

In exciting news, Nintendo has announced a super sized 3DS system to be released this year, on August 19th. It will retail for a mere $30 more than the regular sized 3DS, at the price of $199.99. The screens will be 90% bigger, making your 3D experience even more immersive and impressive.

Every Blizzard release is one of the most hotly-anticipated games of the year, and Diablo III certainly was no exception. Blizzard didn’t even need to promise a lot for the expectations of gamers worldwide to be through the roof- the teasers, trailers, and beta leaks were more than enough to whet the appetites of Diablo fans and new players alike. We here at IPGR simply couldn’t wait to see what kind of pointer-finger-tiring fun we could get into- and it turns out, it’s quite a bit.

The gameplay is no surprise to anyone who played Diablo II (or, realistically, even Torchlight, or other point-and-click action RPGs). You click to move your character around, you have a variety of spells and abilities at your disposal based on your class that you can bind to your mouse buttons and keyboard, and you use them against vast hordes of monsters to turn them into delicious monster jelly. Monsters drop gold and loot, you equip what you like, disenchant what you don’t, craft more loot, kill more monsters, lather, rinse, and repeat ad nauseam. Diablo III is, like its fellows in the genre and its previous installments, not much more than a loot grinder at its core, but there’s still quite a bit of fun to be had reducing thousands of demons to a fine red paste. As far as visuals, Diablo III definitely has its ups and downs. The environments are downright gorgeous and stylistically engaging and the spell and ability effects are solid, but the character models tend to be a bit lackluster, which is certainly a disappointment in such a cool-factor-centric game. Of special note is the loving and disturbing detail paid to the death animations for various enemies, some of which are more than mildly stomach-churning and horrific. Larger enemies often explode when they die, and powerful physical hits have a tendency to punch all the flesh off an enemy’s bones.

Where Diablo III really shines is when playing cooperatively. Grinding content alone is a bit of a chore- it’s lonely drudge work against generally small packs of enemies that melt quickly even at higher difficulties (though not later Hell and Inferno). However, add even one more person to support you and the fun factor goes up by five. It’s a blast chainsawing vast swathes through enemies with a friend or three. You can share your loot around and create builds to play to your comrades’ strengths. Speaking of builds, the number of fun and playable builds for most classes is almost mind-boggling. Wizards, for example, can tailor-make builds that rely on projecting themselves into groups of enemies and then becoming living bombs that detonate and kill whole waves, or slow massive groups of enemies to a crawl while whittling away their health with chunks of ice, or simply disintegrating them with mighty death beams. Monks can fulfill a variety of different roles. From a beefy front line tank, to a quick, deadly single target assassin, or just adjusting your abilities to give yourself massive spirit regeneration and becoming an AoE nuker, the Monk is a very versatile class. Demon Hunters are the masters of mobility and traps. They have a large number of gadgets and abilities that let them slow their enemies and kite them around. Witch Doctors do most of their fighting via proxy. They control armies of pets that consist of giant spiders, zombie dogs, and even plagued toads. Barbarians can become area of effect sweepers or single-target stun-lockers, and so on, and the best part is that each individual player can experiment with many different builds in the course of a few minutes.

The rune system for abilities is creative and interesting and gives your character new and exciting things to ponder over every time you level up. The difficulty of Diablo is, frankly, almost schizophrenic. Normal is laughably easy for competent gamers, particularly if you play through it with friends, and Nightmare occasionally throws a tricky curve ball, but Hell’s difficulty ramps up very swiftly, and Inferno is maddeningly tough. This presents a problem for the solo player, as the average gamer certainly can’t solo clear the hardest content, forcing people to group up or miss out on the most challenging difficulty levels. The hostility of Diablo III towards the solo player continues with the requirement of an active internet connection to play the game, whether you’re doing multiplayer or not. This, quite honestly, is pretty inexcusable on Blizzard’s part. It causes people playing a single-player game to disconnect and be unable to play when Blizzard’s servers go down, or there is a connection issue, or in a multitude of other circumstances. Blizzard’s rights-management zealotry here is not only completely unwelcome within the gaming community (we here at IPGR included), but is compounded with tinfoil-hat levels of paranoia, as Blizzard certainly isn’t hurting for resources. Requiring an active internet connection makes perfect sense for features such as multiplayer and the auction house, but the constant connection requirement for the game as a whole has had everyone scratching their heads since launch.

Diablo III also suffers from mindless clicking syndrome. Once you and your friends have effective builds, you can clear waves of content pretty much reflexively. The plot is not especially engaging, though some characters are memorable and fun (The Stranger and Covetous Shen in particular come to mind here) and Blizzard’s sense of humor is rampant throughout. The only thing that drives you forward while playing it is the promise of more gold and better gear, and isn’t that what dungeon crawlers have always been about anyway?

The bosses, though, are hard as hell. Pun intended.

Overall Score: 87

Diablo III is certainly a fun diversion. Be prepared for it to eat up your time like a starving wolverine when you first get into it, but its lasting power is lacking for the solo gamer, and the more you play, the more the minor flaws in Blizzard’s long-awaited release compound themselves. The multiplayer experience is almost too enjoyable, but playing through chapters alone can be a real drag. In short, Diablo III is a heavily polished, smooth-playing Blizzard game that is a lot of fun, but it has some issues that keep it from being one of their greatest.

Genre Score (Action-RPG): 98

Diablo III is without a doubt the best point-and-click dungeon crawler ever made, but the term “Action-RPG” encompasses way too many games to call Diablo III the best among them all. Still, within the genre, Diablo III offers a polished experience chock-full of character options and customization and plenty of great loot.

Playstation Vita launched with a pretty fantastic lineup, consisting of over 20 physical and downloadable titles. Escape Plan, made by some of the minds behind the PSN title, Fat Princess, is definitely one of the most promising games among that group. A puzzler that makes full use of the Vita’s front and back touch pads to the extent that buttons aren’t used at all. It takes a bit to get used to, but this game is well worth it. Its presentation is undeniably unique and filled with charm, and the game itself is a joy to play. Oh, and it’s only $15 on the PSN.

The best way to describe Escape Plan’s appearance would be to say it’s a mixture of Limbo and LittleBigPlanet. Limbo, for its eerie, black and white tone– LBP for its fun, light-hearted main characters, Lil and Laarg. In addition to Escape Plan’s excellent visual style, it also has fantastic sound design. The game features a classical score including the likes of In the Hall of the Mountain King, and Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. There’s also some jazzy tunes thrown in that fit the black and white art style perfectly. The game also uses the classic laugh, gasp and clap tracks as if there were a live studio audience watching Lil and Laarg stumble their way through Bakuki’s Lair.

I’ll bet you can guess who’s who.

See those numbers on their chests? Yeah, that’s the number of times that they’ve died. That screenshot is pretty early in the game, so rest assured, you will die a lot, often in highly comical fashions. The antagonist of the game is a short masked fellow named Bakuki. Like any good villain, he has a lair filled with horrible death contraptions that will kill you if you take the slightest step out of line. You begin the game by waking up right in middle of this hell hole. Well, obviously the next step is to escape. To do this, you have to lead Lil and Laarg through 78 puzzles, up and out to safety. Sounds easy right?

As I mentioned earlier, the game controls entirely through touch controls, with some gyroscope sequences thrown in for good measure. This may turn some people off, but they actually pull it off quite well. This is mainly due to the clever implementation of the control scheme. If you swipe Lil or Laarg in a direction, then they start automatically walking that way until given further instruction. Usually, you then have to manipulate your environment in order to get your varying-sized buddies to safety. This involves pushing obstacles out of the way, tricking enemies into triggering their own traps ect.

The puzzle solving itself is most likely different from what you’ve come to expect from a game like this. Compare it to something like Portal, where the difficulty comes from figuring out how to solve the puzzle at hand, and performing the actions is usually a breeze. In Escape Plan, it’s the opposite. Usually it’s pretty apparent from the get-go exactly what you’re supposed to do, but the difficulty comes from the execution. It requires perfect timing and precise touch control to get through the puzzles. It’s a nice, refreshing take on the genre as a whole.

It’s hard to explain just exactly how Escape Plan works or how it looks, so check out this trailer.

If you’re not quite sold on Escape Plan yet, on April 10th, developer Fun Bits Interactive decided to sweeten the deal. They released a piece of free DLC titled “Bakuki’s Lair” that includes 19 prequel puzzles, as well as adding “more pin-point accuracy on tap blocks, in addition to an adjustment to the game’s star rating system.” They also recently released the Asylum DLC that includes even more puzzles, and you can pick it up for $0.25 for the next two weeks.  After June 26 however, Asylum will revert back to its normal price of $5.00. This is an obvious sign that the developer respects its community and plans on supporting the game post-release.

Overall Score: 83
One of the best things Escape Plan has going for it is its unique presentation, but that’s not all it does right. Its innovative use of the Vita’s touchpad functionality, and fun game play make this a great title that exudes charm.

Genre Score (Puzzle): 79
Escape Plan’s puzzles are not very complex or hard to crack, but its unique take on puzzle solving almost includes some elements of platforming, despite there being no jumping involved. For only $15, it’s hard not to give my recommendation for any puzzle solver on-the-go.