Everybody’s favourite Sony man David Reeves hosted a press conference today at Leipzig games convention. The key announcements are that the 160gb PS3 will be coming to Europe in “the peak season” priced at €449, no news on a price in Pounds. The announcement comes on the week the 80gb PlayStation 3 gets it’s release this Friday priced at €399. The 160gb console will apparently come with €70 of content pre-loaded making it a better value for money purchase over the 80gb before the bigger HDD is even taken into account. It’s not clear if the pack also comes with a Dual Shock 3 controller.
Also announced was a new model of PSP which offers a more colourful clearer screen over it’s predecessor. Released in Europe in October priced at €199. Again no news on a price in good old English Pounds.
Another hardware announcement was the release of an Xbox 360 style chatpad which appears to fit in a strange position above the pad rather than below in between the sticks. The pad apparently also doubles up as a laptop style thumbpad, allowing you to control a mouse pointer easier on screen when using the web browser for example.
Lots of other stuff was said too but we won’t bother going into it.
EA obviously held off releasing any proper footage of FIFA 09 until this weeks Leipzig games convention. Today sees the release of the official unrealistic footage trailer along with a video showing actual gameplay. Find the trailer and gameplay footage below. A demo of FIFA 09 will released on the usual platforms on September 11th. If anyone is planning on cashing in on this video by renting it out or selling it on then think again. You have been warned!
Let me start off by saying that I am usually too skint to go buying millions of games every month even X-Box Live Arcade ones. In fact it’s rare I buy one game per season. I’m saying this to put into context how much I enjoyed the demo of this game and now the full game as well. Braid is so well put together that it becomes overwhelmingly charming. It’s gameplay mechanics are complimented by it’s presentation and this is a must play.
Braid is a 2D puzzle platformer that uses another dimension of time. So really it’s 3D. There are numerous worlds each with levels containing puzzles based around your ability to rewind time. Solve the puzzle element and you get a piece of a jigsaw that you later put together. It sounds like it should get messy but it doesn’t. The game has an appropriate learning curve and doesn’t throw you in the deep end too quickly. The way the world’s are constructed you could just run through each level ignoring the puzzles and jigsaws and just carry on straight to the end, but then of course, you’re missing the game. This isn’t a survive the level platformer, this is a solve the level platformer. And there are bosses too. Cool.
EDIT (19/08/08):After careful consideration the site will continue on but not quite as before. posts will be less frequent but hopefully more interesting. i.e Focusing more on random quirky stories, reviews, videos and the odd preview , rather than just posting up the same news everyone else is running with.
As you may have noticed, updates on the site over the last few weeks have slowed to a crawl. While visitor numbers have been better than I ever thought possible, it’s just not possible to keep the site fresh with decent content without it eating into far to much time than should be the case. So… for this site at least it’s time to call it a day.
A new site is planned which will centre around one part of the new Xbox 360 Dashboard with a forum being it’s main focus. Details of the new site will be revealed here in the next month or two, possibly sooner if the dashboard update appears quicker than anticipated. Thanks to all the visitors over the last few months as well as to all the sites that linked to our stories including Joystiq, Kotaku, and Eurogamer. I never thought we would make the headlines on the big commercial sites but somehow we managed to and on more than one occasion.
Finally a big thank you goes to the games companies that actually replied to our emails and didn’t ignore us, particulary SEGA and Codemasters who have been incredibly supportive. Not forgetting of course Play.comwho invited us as press to their Play.com Live event, allowing us to get some fantastic coverage and interviews. Bye for now and look out for the new site coming soon when it get’s announced on here.
WALL-E is a game that despite it’s success in the sales charts has been met with mixed reviews ranging from two out of ten all the way up to eight out of ten. There’s a single player and local multiplayer modes as well as bonus sections and hidden extras to tinker with. The game is obviously a tie-in with the movie but is somehow more fun than it ever deserves to be. Now we all know the rule right? Movie-tie-in=rubbish game, there are however a few exceptions and this may be one of them.
The single player is a platform game with your usual collectables and action sections. You play as Wall-E or Eve throughout the game, or sometimes both depending on the level. The game follows very closely to the movie and resembles the atmosphere of the film extremely well. If you’ve seen the film you’ll notice that there are not many sections in the game that didn’t appear on the big screen and yet the level design ties it all together nicely so the levels don’t feel disjointed, which is quite pleasing.
Some direct feed footage of FIFA 09 has popped up on Youtube showing Barcelona v Man Utd. The quality is not great with it being youtube but at seven minutes long the video gives us a first look at what to expect from FIFA 09. For some reason official video footage of the game is lacking, meanwhile EA’s American sports games have an abundance of gameplay and feature reveals doing the rounds. FIFA 09 is due to be released on October 3rd. A demo is rumoured to be be scheduled for release during the last week of August.
Gamescampus open up the beta test to their new game Asda Story on the 5th of August and are to pay players $30 if having played for 30 days they don’t feel they have enjoyed the experience. Gamescampus marketing man David Chang says “We are just asking you to invest your time in playing our game, and if after playing for 30 days you don’t feel it has been the great game experience we feel it to be, we want to hear your feedback and we’ll give you $30.00. It is as simple as that”.
British readers will no doubt be confused as to what the game is all about. It’s a anime 3D MMO fantasy RPG and not the story of supermarket giant ASDA Wal-Mart. The game is said to offer a unique party system which allows two players the ability to align to become ’soul mates’, wear unique costumes and use special skills. Asda story also features a “‘Real Costume System” which Gamescampus say is responsible for the high female game player base of more than 20% in Korea and Japan. Click here for more information about the game and to sign up for the free guaranteed fun beta should you so choose. The terms and conditions of the offer state players must have exactly a level 40 character by September 4th and that only the first 1,500 players to put in a claim will be paid the $30, meaning a pay out of a maximum $45,000 across all players.
Everyone’s favourite Sony exec David Reeves managed to make some more comments to annoy European/ PAL PlayStation 3 owners recently. We will refrain from comment and let David do all the Talking.
Commenting on the delay in bringing the recently launched film download service to parts of the world other than the US, David said:
We are a PAL market and we are going to do it in PAL and we are going to do it properly….You can wait for it and you can have it in good quality. You know, you can get the stuff from BitTorrent if you want to and download PSP games, it’s up to you.
Commenting on the delays on releasing games and services in PAL territories David said:
well, the New Zealand office could ask to report to the US instead of Europe, and if you report to the US office, you’ll become an even smaller fish in a big pond… I think you sometimes have to put up with it
Eurogamer is running and article on the pricing of video downloads within Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. For the first two weeks, videos will be charged at 50p a download, rising to £1 per download after this period.
This is the first we have heard here at ButtonBandits HQ that the content was going to be pay per view in the first place. The fact that you can watch numerous Top Gear episodes for free most of the time on DAVE on the FREEVIEW terrestrial TV platform kind of defeats the point of the service. Add to this that Top Gear is a BBC program and so everyone with a TV has already paid for it via the TV licence anyway makes charging for the content quite hard to justify.
You may have noticed the lack of updates recently to the site. This is due to some technical problems we are experiencing following a software upgrade. In order to resolve the problems, podcasts have had to be temporarily disabled. They will not be able to return until the technical issues have been resolved. Disabling podcasts will allow us to update the site without running into technical issues, resulting in more posts than have been possible over the last few weeks.
Everybody’s favourite Sony man David Reeves hosted a press conference today at Leipzig games convention. The key announcements are that the 160gb PS3 will be coming to Europe in “the peak season” priced at €449, no news on a price in Pounds. The announcement comes on the week the 80gb PlayStation 3 gets it’s release this Friday priced at €399. The 160gb console will apparently come with €70 of content pre-loaded making it a better value for money purchase over the 80gb before the bigger HDD is even taken into account. It’s not clear if the pack also comes with a Dual Shock 3 controller.
