Arkwright, inventor of the world famous Fluro (mechanized-fluid automaton) is on a quest to finish his next great invention – The Device – that will alter existence in unimaginable ways.
Travel to different industrial sites that use Arkwright’s Fluro invention to run their machinery. The Fluros, thought to be lifeless machines, are somehow developing minds of their own, mutating into new forms and running amok. It is up to Arkwright to understand (and exploit) these strange evolutions, and apply what has emerged in the field back to his lab work at home. Gather these evolved Fluros and machinery and bring them back to Arkwright’s lab to finish his grand invention. Explore physically modeled worlds, solve puzzles by controlling fluid and machines, and harness the power of the mysterious ‘Fluro’ creatures that populate the land.

The first thing you will notice upon seeing the game is its really great art style, that’s completely steampunk. I had to stop a few times and just look at some of the machinery in the background. Strange Loop did a great job conveying a really Victorian feel in some places, and I’m not being sarcastic when I say we could all use more steampunk in our games. I mean I have enough zombies, that’s for certain. Not only does the game boast some pretty sexy graphics, its gameplay elements were both fun and a bit different from the norm. The puzzles I played in the demo level were not too difficult, but just enough that I had to stop and think a few times. I didn’t fly through it, but I wasn’t stumped for a half hour (as I have found myself more than a few times in a Portal test chamber).
What also really stands out about Vessel is the Fluro.  Fluro are these liquid based creatures that you can seemingly create endlessly if you have the liquid on hand to do it. Once you give life to one of these funky little critters using either water, lava, or another liquid on hand, they will automatically set out to help you for said act. I was told that later in the game they’ll do more in the way of helping you, but I mostly only saw them hold switches down to open doors for me to advance. Another thing I found to be cool was the tool you’re using to repair the machines in Vessel’s world. It’s just a tank with a hose attached, but its uses were more dynamic than you might think, like laying out water over lava so that your character can make it across, as well as creating the Fluro you’ll need to help you along your way.

So, like I said at the start, I was mostly pleased with the game, but I really look forward to seeing how the game evolves in later levels; it’s supposed to be about 6 hours roughly, and coming to PSN, XBLA, and PC later this year for $15. I strongly recommend checking this game out if you’re a fan of puzzle/platformer games. It’s not only unique, but genuinely fun.

I have to admit that when I first saw the headlines, I thought that this was just something else that was being blamed on gaming- how can playing your favourite games result in death? On closer reflection however I realised that many of us are just as guilty of planting ourselves in front of the TV and losing hours in whichever game we’re addicted to at the time. I’ve seen myself getting home from a midnight release of a game, turning on as soon as I get home and still be playing 14 hours later but are we really at risk of dying?

As Chris’s dad said, it’s being immobile that is the danger, not gaming itself and while you may think that it’ll never happen to you, I’m sure that Chris thought the same. If you’re planning an extended gaming session keep in mind that you should try to move about once in a while. My boyfriend makes sure that I keep moving by getting me to make him a cup of tea in between games in Halo Reach. There are other ways to reduce the risk of developing DVT:

Exercise your calf and foot muscles regularly:
• Every half hour or so, bend and straighten your legs, feet and toes when you are seated.
• Press the balls of your feet down hard against the floor every so often. This helps to increase the blood flow in your legs.
• Take a walk every hour or so- perfect excuse to make a cuppa.
• Don’t forget about the motion games available for Nintendo Wii, Playstation Move or my personal favourite Xbox Kinect.

I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere condolences to David Staniforth and family and wish them the best of luck in their campaign for awareness of the risks of DVT.

Put your poker faces back on folks. The new season of Texas Heat is available in the XBLA Marketplace.

For those of you unfamiliar, Texas Heat is the live tournament portion of  the game Full House Poker for XBLA. Live events are scheduled a few days a week and include several half hour tournaments within each event. Texas Heat provides each player with a set amount of chips, so you need not worry about risking your own. Winning big isn’t the only objective either. Players that earn the most experience during each tournament have a chance to earn additional bonuses. Each event has a theme like lady’s night, costume night, beginner’s night, and a few others that give players the opportunity to collect extra experience or bonus payouts at the end of the each tournament.

The price tag, just like the spring season, is free and it comes with three new achievements worth 50GS. Pretty good for a free DLC.

We can most likely expect a fall and winter season of Texas Heat to drop later this year at their respective times.

Grab your friends, grab some snacks, and party up for the summer season of Texas Heat.

Happy gaming!

Game Review: Jikandia- The Timeless Land
Release: March 15, 2011
Genre: Action Adventure
Developer: Idea Factory
Available Platforms: PlayStation Portable
Players: 1-4
MSRP: $29.99
ESRB Rating: T
Website: http://www.aksysgames.com/games/jttl

Nine children are whisked away from their bus ride home to the mysterious land of Jikandia, a world in which time is a new concept. In a race to find your friends and save your new world, you’ll tackle dungeons at your own leisure. With a unique system of setting a time limit on the dungeon, you have anywhere from three minutes to a half-hour to challenge the monstrous forces within. Players will jump, slash, and reward themselves in these dungeons to save their friends… can they also save time itself?

On it’s surface, Jikandia looks like a platformer. In fact, the core elements of gameplay are running, jumping, and attacking. Eventually, you will control three characters all at once, bounding from brick to brick in these somewhat randomized dungeons. The secondary characters on your journey will automatically follow you, and they can either attack independently with their own buttons, or follow your command with an easy mode having them all attack when you attack. Charging attacks produce longer throws, stronger hits, and the like. Throughout the levels that make up the dungeons, you’ll find treasure chests, destroy blocks to reveal power-ups, and tackle enemies on your way to the exit door. There is an ad-hoc multiplayer mode, but we did not get a chance to take this challenge.

That part of the game is the standard element, and while it’s acceptable and fun, it’s nowhere near groundbreaking. To improve upon it, the game offers almost a “time trial”-esque feature to all elements. You get to chose how long you’ll travel in the dungeon (with the last minute and a half dedicated to the boss battle), sure, but many of the treasure chests and monsters feature a timer overhead, showing that, when they’re defeated in that last second, they’ll yield superior item drops. The sooner you defeat the boss at the end of the stage, you’ll be able to stay in the bonus area longer (and start racking up points and prizes). If you don’t make it to the door at the end of each section in time, you’ll automatically be whisked away to the next section, but take a hit in your score. While you can’t die, you can be sent back to the beginning of the level, lose any items you had, and take a point hit as well.

Finally, the game adds many RPG elements to the platforming world. Players can equip their weapon (but not the weapons of their party members, meaning that you need to be smart in who you ally yourself with), sell off others, and try to balance out speed, strength, and other factors. The team will be affected by Magic Quartz, a series of jewels found in the game that, when equipped, will improve health, strength, and other bonuses. A hub village allow you to talk to any and all people, alongside the constant in-battle dialogue of the heroes, leading to a story-focused gameplay even when you’re jumping and slashing.

Jikandia is a great balance of platforming and RPG elements. It might take you a while to realize why you just can’t seem to advance, and that’s because the game requires grinding, like any J-RPG. Thankfully, do to the randomized nature of the dungeons, you’ll not run into a problem you just can’t solve; take a step back, train a little more, and tackle a different challenge when you re-enter the dungeon. The gameplay is fun and simplistic, but offers enough challenges and troubles to make it worth continuing. The graphics and dialogue are entertaining, offering an odd combination of almost storybook stylization, but Tarintino-esque dialogue.

Undoubtedly, the time factor can both help and hurt. If you’re just having trouble with the boss of a level, it’ll take you at least a minute and a half to get to him, only to fail again. The concept of the characters constantly talking during their adventures is novel and fun, until you realize you’re missing half of it because you’re actually focused on the combat. The fact that the levels are randomized mean that you’ll never get bored much, but you also never see any truly genuine level design. In fact, the game appears to be so simplistic, a level editor would be a bonus.

Jikandia offers a unique challenge to the platform world, turning a few standard tropes on their side, by either adding RPG elements to an action game or adding action game elements to an RPG. The game is solidly built and fun, but it might not be for everyone. If you find yourself with tons of free time, check it out.

• RPG elements enhance the basic platformer
• Random dungeons can be fun but generic
• Constant dialogue can both be entertaining and forgettable

Final Score
7 out of 10

“What we found in Oblivion is people would play, and even though they played for a half hour and then they picked their class, it’s still – in the scheme of the games we make - not enough time to really understand all the skills and how they work. So people would play, and the general pattern would be they’d play for like, three hours and then ‘oh I picked the wrong skills, I’m going to start over.’

“They weren’t necessarily upset about that, but to us, someone who’s making a game you’re like… ‘is there a way we can solve that? Is there a better way of doing it?’ And we think this is it.”

Personally, I was totally fine with the class system, and spent countless hours experimenting with the character and class creation systems, creating everything from a Breton ‘Lawyer’ class that focused in Hand-to-Hand combat and Illusion magic to an Orc ‘Slayer’ class, that had a fascinating ugly shirtless Orc run around stark-naked with a Battle Axe. I’ll leave my judgments at this development aside though, as I was more than satisfied with the last two installments of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Check out the screens and let us know what your thoughts are on the upcoming Elder Scrolls title that will be released on 11/11/11, a date so easy to remember that it will soon be ingrained into all of our memories.

Elder ScollsV

A little over a month until the Japanese audience gets their hands on the next soon-to-be record selling Nintendo handheld device, the 3DS, Nintendo has issued a warning concerning its younger audience, and lengthy play sessions on it.

“Vision of children under the age of six has been said [to be in the] developmental stage,” Nintendo posted on its site. According to the company, the 3DS “delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children’s eyes.”

Nintendo recommends younger kids turn off the 3D effect, and that everyone take a break every half hour when using the device.

This definitely feels more like Nintendo covering all their bases than the 3DS actually having the possibility to seriously damage some kid’s eyes. But, at the same time, it makes me just the slightest bit apprehensive. I scoffed at the “take a break every thirty minutes” statement the first time (I mean c’mon, who seriously hardcore games for only half an hour?), but now I’m worried. I don’t want headaches every time I turn the thing on. And yet, I’ll be buying it come this spring no matter what. Damn Nintendo.

via G4

So far, the only pieces of information that anyone has been able to gather is that the short will be directed by John Hillcoat, director of The Road and The Proposition, and that it will be created with in-game assets from Red Dead Redemption, hence “machinima.” The animated film will air Saturday, May 15 at 11:00pm Central.

This, I feel, is a huge step for video games. Sure, it’s going to air at or around midnight depending on your timezone, but it’s a freaking half hour machinima special on a national broadcast network. When was the last time you remember that happening? People used to wait every month by the mailbox for VHS tapes of video game trailers from Nintendo Power to get that sort of action in the 90′s. Trust me, I know.

Source from the Futon Critic via Kotaku.

Let me just start of by saying that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is not a good movie. I am, for the most part, a Michael Bay apologist. I don’t think any of his movies are quality entertainment, but they are entertaining. Michael Bay knows how to direct action–he can make a blockbuster, special effects extravaganza like nobody’s business–but Transformers 2 was any two of his old movies slammed together (like so many giant, alien robots within the film itself) and then turned up to 11.

At two and a half hours, RotF feels too long by at least a half hour, if not more. There are so many parts that could have been scrapped as they serve absolutely no purpose in the movie–well, besides earning some laughs. We get to see dogs humping, Transformers humping, a mother whacked out on pot brownies, Transformer testicles, Transformer farting, racially-stereotyped Transformers…the list goes on and on. Sure, I saw a lot of these things and smiled or even chuckled, but it was from a state of shock; I was reacting to all of the asinine imagery in the way the filmmakers wanted, but for all of the wrong reasons.

The plot is…not there? Kinda there? Maybe? I’m not sure. Long story short, Transformers have been to earth before: Transformers arrive, help humans build pyramids, and want to steal our sun’s energy even though they’re not supposed to (because humans need it). This creates the rift and, voila!, we have Autobots and Decepticons. The Fallen, the baddy who wants our sun–humanity be damned–is defeated an earth is saved…for now. Cut to present day and the Decepitcons are trying to bring the Fallen back so he can finish what he started 17,000 years ago. Oh, and the Fallen? Why, exactly, is it that he can only be defeated by a Prime (I did not realize that the “Prime” in Optimus Prime was actually a last name, passed down the ancestral tree)? Because it’s revealed to us in scene of exposition, of course.

A lot of the characters are back, but not necessarily for the better. Shia is still Shia, Megan is still hot, Turturro is still zany, but others are just…there. Josh Duhamel’s character now exists to be the guy yelling orders on the battlefield while Tyrese is there to spout one-liners and act as a wall for Josh to bounce lines off of–the end. A new hottie is introduced but, SPOILER, she’s a Decepticon in disguise. Plus, she gets run over by a Volvo in the first half. Shia has a roommate who decides to run with Shia and Megan when the fembot attacka, and thus becomes a major character in the film–and by “major character in the film” I, of course, mean that he’s in the movie only to provide comic relief in a movie that is already filled to the brim with comic relief.

The action is still big and flashy, but not all that involving; I was never really awed by any of it. Big, CGI robots bash heads and there’s sparks and explosions and fire–your typical Michael Bay fare–but there were a few points where it got so frenetic that I couldn’t tell which Transformers were in the fight. Eventually, I think everything just went so over-the-top that I stopped caring about anything; instead, I switched my brain to stand-by mode and just stared at the pretty pretties.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will make lots and lots o’ money (the Amigo here in Bemidji had it in 3 screens last night at midnight, and they were all sold out), but that doesn’t mean it’s good. No, it’s the very definition of a summer popcorn flick–and then some. It’s too long, too over-the-top–it’s just too much. Dial it back a bit, Bay. Give us a high octane special effects/action flick where we can actually respect the characters and the story, not pity them.

By the way, what is it with Michael Bay films looking like recruitment ads for the military? I understand that Bay gets to save some money because he’s got the right friends in the right places–I assume it’s one of those “make the military look badass and we’ll let you use some tanks, jets, etc”–but at some point, it just gets to be a superfluous.

This week, the Married Gamers will be bringing exclusive coverage of the forthcoming EA/Pandemic video game, Lord of the Rings: Conquest.  Today we dive into the campaign experience.  Be sure to join the Married Gamers the rest of the week for exclusive looks into the multi-player, audio from a developer panel, and several new screen shots and wallpapers.  Also, join us for our live show on Saturday for your chance to win exclusive t-shirts from the community event.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest brings the feel of the Star Wars: Battlefront to the Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Arriving next year to the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC and with a ERSB rating of T for Teen, the game takes the look and appeal of the Peter Jackson films and applies itself to competitive spirit of prior Battlefront games. There is also a Nintendo DS version of the game arriving day and date as the PC and console versions, but is being developed by another studio.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest campaign offers single player, two player co-op split screen, and network online co-op play. Co-op campaign players will not be tethered to one another as in the Pandemic game, Mercenaries 2; and are free to explore the maps apart from one another. When starting the campaign the player is dropped into a tutorial mode that teaches the player the differences between four classes: Warrior, Scout, Archer and Mage. The Warrior and Scout classes are melee classes good for close attacks. The Archer and Mage offer ranged attacks, with the Mage also able to act as a support character much like a medic or shield-bearer.

The campaign starts off following along the lines of the movie trilogy with some creative flourishes thrown in. In the three and a half hours I had to play through parts of the game, I got to see instances in which the Pandemic team is given license to expand upon things that may have only been mentioned in the film. During the campaign the single player and the online co-op felt very good without any slow downs. The campaign was a lot of fun but very challenging. There are three different skill levels in the campaign, at the start players can choose Casual or Heroic and at the completion of the campaign players unlock a much hard Legendary mode. At this stage in the game’s development I felt that there wasn’t too much difference in the Casual and the Heroic modes, both offering a challenging, sometime frustrating experience in the campaign. I did find, however, that as I became more familiar with the game mechanics of Lord of the Rings: Conquest I was able to fare better during those frustrating periods. It’s very important to take advantage of the chances to change your classes at various parts of the campaign’s objectives. Knowing when to use a ranged classes versus a melee class will often make the difference between a satisfying experience or a frustrating expletive-filled “do over” done repeatedly ad nausea.

One of the major selling points to Lord of the Rings: Conquest is the players can embrace evil and play as the forces of Mordor. This is not fulfilled until the end of the good campaign and the player gets to play a little wish-fulfillment supposing that Frodo never gets a chance to destroy the One Ring. At this juncture the armies of Mordor now take over as they try to conquer the lands of Middle Earth. The evil sides of things are exactly mirrored in class types and abilities. Again, like the good campaign some levels expand on what is hinted or merely mentioned in the Peter Jackson films but given new life in the video game.

Like the other Battlefront games, players are given chances to play as the Heroes and Villains of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I took particular delight in playing as a Balrog bent on poor Gimli’s destruction. Each level in the campaign, either good or bad has objectives and players are helped along from objective to objective with huge arrows pinpointing the location of the objectives. This was very useful in the Mines of Moria where it can become very easy to get lost. In addition to the Heroes and Villains, players also can get a chance to ride steeds or Oliphaunts or play as Cave Trolls or Ents; all of which is a tremendous amount of fun and in co-op play there was some level of competition as two who could get to these characters first. In the campaign players can attack said special characters in a series of button-press mini-games, but I had no chance to check this out.

Overall the campaign for Lord of the Rings: Conquest was a lot of fun. It does requires some amount of patience and the player becomes accustomed to the controller layout and game mechanics, but having done this the game becomes a very rewarding experience. In this build of the game I did find there were a few problems. At various instances in the campaign I found it was much too easy to accidently fall off ledges or into pits and holes. Also in this build of the game I found that it was also easy and often fatal to be caught up against walls and get trapped by the enemies. Lastly if you happened to get knocked down by the enemy AI, sometimes you would get swarmed with AI intent on making paste out of your character. Whether or not these problems are addressed in the final build will remain to be seen. Regardless I had a lot of fun playing the campaign and felt disappointed when our team had to move to multi-player…until I saw how awesome the multiplayer aspect of the game was.

Check back here tomorrow for our exclusive hands-on on the Lord of the Rings: Conquest multi-player experience.