61 Frames Per Second

Browse by Tags

• The Art of Heavy Rain

  We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are. Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling. How unsettling? Follow the jump. Read More... Posted Apr 06 2009, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, uncanny valley, sony, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, quantic dream, omikron, ps3, scea, Fahrenheit

• Getting Medieval (and Evil) on PSP: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!

  Well, Sony, it’s about time. You publish two versions of Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida for PSP in as many years and you don’t release either outside Japan? Come on, man! What could it hurt? Patapon and LocoRoco are weird, original PSP games and they’ve done okay. American nerds love RPGs and retro style. Where’s the love? WHERE IS IT?! Ah, there it is. It’s understandable if you missed Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida (You’re Pretty Cheeky For a Hero, if you prefer) when it came out back in 2007. Even amongst import gamers, it was still pretty obscure. Here’s the score: you play as the evil, world-menacing bad-guy-demon-lord from Ye Olde JRPG. You build a large maze-dungeon on a 2D plain, fill it with monsters, and then hide in it. Eventually a hero will show up to try and kill you. You, naturally, aim to avoid him. Think Tecmo’s Deception meets Dragon Quest. Here’s a trailer to get your mind rolling. Read More... Posted Mar 31 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, psp, sony, dragon quest, scea, locoroco, patapon, holy invasion of privacy badman, scej, tecmo’s deception, Yuusha no Kuse Ni Namaikida

• Trailer Review: Infamous

  The media blackout on Suckerpunch’s Infamous is finally lifting. Some very positive, extensive previews of the game have started popping up. Edge’s recent cover story got me particularly pumped. This new trailer is light on play but heavy on ambiance. Still very cool. Read More... Posted Mar 05 2009, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, trailer review, sony, scea, prototype, killzone 2, infamous, suckerpunch

• Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

  Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah. Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success? The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Read More... Posted Jan 30 2009, 04:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: playstation 3, nintendo, wii, sony, scea, wii play, Adam Rosenberg, buzz, are you smarter than a fifth grader, jeopardy

• Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

  Castlevania Chronicles, the peculiar Playstation remake of a peculiar X68000 remake of the original Castlevania, was released as a downloadable title on Playstation Network today. It ain’t the best Castlevania out there, but it’s still a swell action title. The disc release was never widely distributed either, so this will be the very first time most interested players will even get the chance to try it out. Of course, the same could be said of a lot of Playstation games. The halcyon days of 2003 when you could walk into any Blockbuster or Gamestop in the country and pick up five classic PS1 games, often times still shrinkwrapped, for ten or twenty bucks are long over, and the collector’s market is making many great games prohibitively expensive. Want to play Silent Hill? Hope you’ve got an extra sixty-five dollars lying around. How about Suikoden II, considered to be the series’ definitive installment? That’ll be $150. And what about cult classics like CyberConnect2’s Silent Bomber? Yeah, seventy smackers. You shouldn’t have to pay top dollar for these games, though, considering they could very easily be released on the Playstation Network. Read More... Posted Dec 18 2008, 06:45 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, psp, silent hill, konami, castlevania, Playstation, psn, scea, Suikoden, cyberconnect2, castlevania chronicles, silent bomber, Suikoden ii

• Where Is the PSP?

  I am a superstitious man. I throw salt over my shoulder and knock on wood. I refuse to cross paths with black cats, something that is difficult when you share an apartment with one. When wandering about Manhattan, with its many scaffolding-covered building fronts, I am occasionally paralyzed by an all-consuming fear of the literal hundreds of ladders I pass beneath every day! I also know to not buy videogame consoles on launch day. If I do, I know that I will never play that many games for that device that looked so tempting before I actually had it. It all started with the Dreamcast, a system I adored, but I maybe owned a total of ten games for before its ignoble death (almost all of them published by Sega themselves). Two years out from its release, and it looks like the same is happening with Wii, a system that I turn on to play Gamecube games for more often than actual Wii discs. And then there’s the PSP. Oh, I was excited by that little monster when it came out back in early 2005. So excited, I decided it was a good idea to wake up at 6 AM on release day to pick one up, along with copies of Lumines and Ridge Racer. I played both pretty extensively for a month and then didn’t turn on the machine again until December of 2006. Now I’m not saying there aren’t good games for the PSP. One of the six games I’ve ever purchased, Zoe Mode’s absolutely astounding Crush would make my top fifty games ever made. But it’s hard to deny that the handheld takes up almost zero space in the collective consciousness of gaming broadly. Read More... Posted Nov 25 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, wii, psp, where is, sony, sega, parasite eve, dreamcast, crush, kingdom hearts, scea, patapon 2, prinny can I really be the hero, disgaea, birth by sleep, the 3rd birthday, locoroco 2

• Sony Might Just Hate You

  Even before the company’s dramatic fall from grace, there has been a number of reasons a discerning individual might think that Sony hates them. The original Playstation had a failure rate to challenge the Xbox 360’s and the first DualShock controller didn’t become a pack-in with the system for months after its release. The Playstation 2 launched at a pricey $299 and that price held until May of 2002 when Sony suddenly and without forewarning dropped it to $199, leaving thousands of gamers out a hundred bucks when a simple press release could have saved them the trouble. The PSP launched and its screen was plagued by dead pixels and the Playstation 3 cost half a grand at the cheapest when it launched in ’06. One day, they’re committed to backwards compatibility and against rumble in controllers, and the next they’re asking you drop sixty smackers on a controller that shakes and backwards compatibility is for the birds. Yep. Sony hates you. Sony hates all of us. Well, today, Sony hates your potential creativity. Read More... Posted Nov 13 2008, 05:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, playstation 3, scee, psp, castlevania, sony, playstation 2, Playstation, psn, symphony of the night, castlevania iii, scea, alucard, dualshock

• Everyone Will be Able to Rock

  At the end of June, my concerns for the future of videogames' burgeoning rock star genre were growing by the hour. Activision was waving their new drum kit in EA’s face while Konami tried to get people to like their music games outside of Japan. The big problem? None of those companies appeared to give a damn that they were flooding a market and audience already drowning under a torrent of plastic instruments. Not to mention that none of those instruments were guaranteed to be compatible with games that didn’t come packaged with alongside them. Yeah, Guitar Hero 3 and its electronic axe might be one of the ten best selling games in the history of games but that doesn’t mean the genre bubble can’t burst. Today, another faceless company has helped to allay my fears. And, would you believe it, it’s Sony doing the allaying. The once haughty Japanese giant stated on their Playstation blog that they have reached an agreement with Activision, EA/MTV, and Konami to allow every single publisher’s rock & roll instruments will work with every publisher’s games on the Playstation 3. Bought Rock Revolution but want to get in on Rock Band 2’s killer track list? Go for it. Feel like using that gorgeous new Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit with Konami’s new opus? Fine, have fun. Not only that, but SCEA also said that, though it isn’t happening just yet, they’re working on a fix for the original Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 as well. This is the first step on the road to peripheral-based music games finally coming into their own. Guitar Hero made them an institution but this agreement will help cement the instrument set as an expandable platform that doesn’t necessitate annual hardware revisions. What else needs to happen to guarantee this glorious, melodious future? Read More... Posted Aug 18 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, ea, microsoft, xbox 360, wii, konami, sony, guitar hero, rock band, activision, rock revolution, harmonix, itunes, mtv, apple, scea, neversoft