Resident Evil 6 dated for November 20

The writing's been on the wall for a new flagship installment in Capcom's Resident Evil franchise for some time now, and today, the publisher pulled the trigger on that announcement. Resident Evil 6 will be available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on November 20.

Resident Evil 6 will feature a split plotline, though bioterrorism remains the motif. In the US, Leon S. Kennedy joins the president of the United States 10 years after the events that defined Raccoon City, ostensibly to offer the truth on what actually happened there. However, in the midst of this revelation, bioterrorists attack, converting the president into a lurching undead.

On the other side of the world, Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance member Chris Redfield touches down in China, which is in the midst of its own bioterrorism outbreak. Resident Evil 6 will be the first installment in the franchise to feature both Redfield and Kennedy, and Capcom noted that new characters will also be introduced in the game.

Development on Resident Evil 6 is being led by Hiroyuki Kobayashi. The developer has previously received producer credits for a number of Capcom's titles, including Resident Evil 4, Killer7, and Dragon's Dogma.

Prior to today's announcement, Capcom had posted to a countdown teaser site for the game, NoHopeLeft.com. That site now directs to a YouTube page featuring Resident Evil 6's first trailer, which can be found below.

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SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny Review

Up until now, Tekken has been the only massive 3D fighter to arrive on the PSP. Years ago when Tekken: Dark Resurrection arrived on the PSP, I praised it for being a superb game that brought the very same console experience into the portable world, complete with a story mode, endings, and all. So with SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on the way, I expected to see that same kind of treatment. And while Broken Destiny delivers in many areas, it fails in one critical aspect...

...That aspect is a proper story mode that comes complete with individual endings. A mission-based mode called The Gauntlet serves as this game's core experience and quite frankly it's pretty terrible. Essentially the game pits you against numerous rivals, but instead of full fledged fights, you have to carry out specific tasks/requirements that are displayed on the screen in order to progress. Now, each one of these "missions" lasts, on average, about five seconds, with a select few going as much as 20. These "missions" will often require you to dodge an attack, block an attack, block then counter an attack, or dodge then counter an attack. Needless to say, these mission requirements are pretty repetitive and tire quick. Sure there's a mildly amusing story behind The Gauntlet, but it's not nearly amusing enough to play the mode for.

Now, as far the gameplay transition from console to handheld goes, SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny does everything just right. Just like how Tekken: Dark Resurrection found its way flawlessly onto the PSP, you can expect that same level of quality from Broken Destiny's battles, complete with its superb fluidity. In total, over 30 fighters are found in the game, one of which is Kratos, in addition to an all new fighter Dampierre. Kratos is one of the heavier pushes for Broken Destiny, as he is actually the most prominent figure on the game's box art.

Of course, naturally, Kratos was my first pick to fight with, and it felt absolutely fantastic to kick some ass with him. He retains all of his signature attacks from the game, and they're particularly awesome to pull-off, too. Also, thanks to Sony, Namco-Bandai had the proper help when integrating Kratos into the SC universe. In fact, from what I was told by a Namco rep, the Kratos model in the game is actually the same one found in God of War: Chains of Olympus, which is very cool.

Character customization has been largely carried over from SoulCalibur IV, which means you'll be able to put your creativity to good use in the game, so feel free to create an all new fighter, or edit an existing one to your liking. But another complaint to address here is that Broken Destiny doesn't offer nearly as many unlockables as SCIV did, beyond extra items for the character customization. And while I understand this is a UMD game, it's not like Broken Destiny comes loaded with CG endings and cut-scenes for every character. And it's not like unlockables take up that much space anyways.

I will say this much, for the general Quickplay matches, SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny is fantastic. The fighting mechanics are still some of the most polished out there, and it really does make for a terrific fighter. But if you're looking for rich gameplay modes that you can play over and over to unlock cinematics and such, this isn't your game. Modes include Quickplay, Trials, The Gauntlet and Multiplayer, which is limited to two-player Ad-hoc, so no online gameplay here like you'd get with the console games.

Now, in my hands-on preview of the game last month, I had to rant about a certain aesthetic choice that Namco has veered towards, and I will regurgitate what it was I said...You see, it seems like ever since the apparent demise of the Dead or Alive franchise, Namco-Bandai have felt the need to fill in an overly-exaggerated-bouncing-breasts void that this industry most certainly did not need in the first place. I'm no morale God. Hell, I love me a curvy woman...I just prefer that woman to be real. I just feel extremely embarrassed to be playing a videogame where nearly half of the polygonal count on nearly half of the characters is in their chests. It continues to perpetuate a stereotype that this industry needs to get rid of; a stereotype that calls gamers lonely, geeky, virgin losers. Forgive my bluntness, but that's just simply the perception a majority of people still have of us.

With that rant out of the way, at least when you're playing on the PSP, you don't have to feel so embarrassed, because chances are nobody's going to notice the ridiculous details put into the female fighters, thanks to the screen size, unless they're standing and watching right over your shoulders. So you can enjoy the game for what it is, a great fighter. Yes, even though I just went on a quasi-diatribe, there's still no denying that SoulCalibur games are terrific playing fighters that have kept many coming back for years. And beyond the questionable aesthetic choices, Broken Destiny is actually a damn fine looking PSP game, boasting great character detail, beautiful backgrounds, fluid animations, a great framerate and other sharp visual touches.

If you've been playing SoulCalibur games for a while, you know precisely what to expect from the sound. The audio consists of the following SC franchise necessities: the battle announcer, fighters with voice actors who boast quickly before the fight, and a soundtrack that closely resembles the tunes of past SC games. Broken Destiny does all of this with ease, as you'd expect, and also gives you the ability to use Japanese voices. There's nothing really monumental to the sound of the game, as I've pretty much covered all there is to it.

In all honesty, if you're looking for a fighter and don't have a copy of Tekken: Dark Resurrection for PSP, I'd just go and buy that instead of Broken Destiny, especially since Tekken can be had for cheap. SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny isn't a bad game, it just feels extremely barebones in many areas, despite boasting one of the all time best mechanics for a 3D fighter. Once this hits the $20 mark, I'd spring for it - otherwise, leave this one alone for now, there are other fighters out there for the PSP.

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Premier Manager 2012 (After 1.01 Update)

Football loving PC gamers don’t realise how lucky they are. For the past 20 years they’ve had access to a series of consistently brilliant management games, allowing them to experience the challenges, joys and frustrations of managing a top-level football club. But what about console gamers? Sure there have been attempts in the past, and pretty good ones, but there’s also been a lot of yawnsome toss. So up steps Premier Manager 2012, aiming for the top corner.

But early reviews were fairly negative, pointing out that the time each game took ruined the flow of the game. Well, we held fire on our review, gave it some extras hours and waited for the inevitable update. And sure enough, version 1.01 has arrived with a key change that might just rescue Premier Manager from an embarrassing early cup exit at the hands of Burton Albion.

Your first sessions with the game don’t give you much hope. The menus themselves are similar in design to the PS3′s XMB and finding the options you need can be tricky while you learn your way around. It’s also sometimes difficult to work out how to do various things; even advancing to the next day took 5 minutes to figure out after the first time I ventured away from the home screen. The controls are oddly mapped as well, with the circle button advancing the game and R1 bringing up the main menu – when we’re used to circle taking you back, it’s weird having to use it to advance the game.

But once you’ve taken the time to work out how everything works, it’s easy enough to zip through the menus, setting your team up and hunting for players to improve your squad. The transfers themselves are easy enough to carry out, although the searching options and transfer process is extremely streamlined, giving you only the basic options. Match tactics are a similar story, with a few options easy to change (formations, attacking bias, passing style) but impossible to fine tune, but this in itself isn’t a huge issue. Console gamers generally aren’t after the same experience as PC fans, and if you’re used to playing games in bursts of an hour or so then this slimmer structure will suit you perfectly.

Something that makes life harder is the background music. It’s bad. Really bad. Not in the same way as being forced into a 24 hour Robbie Williams-athon, just in a very repetitive, boring “please stop” way (actually that is the same thing…). If the option was there to listen to your own background music from the XMB then it would make Premier Manager a very relaxing experience, combining laid back and casual management with some music time, but there isn’t. You can turn the music off totally (phew) but it’s not the ideal solution, especially considering there must be plenty of system resources available while the game is running. The rest of the game’s sounds are functional bongs, swooshes and more bongs that do a job but will hardly pick up awards, so it’s probably worth just turning the sound off completely and putting the radio on.

But what of the matches themselves? Well, they’re slow. Even with the match speed set to “Fast” you’ll be watching each one for good couple of minutes, and the engine used to watch each game isn’t exactly flushed with detail. The pitch view is too small to be helpful, and the commentary is just a list of shots, bookings and goals. Hardly enough to judge how the match is going. They’re a bit of a waste of time really, and apart from making the odd substitution you might as well use the saving grace that 1.01 offers: the “Result Only” option.

After updating, you can now head into the menu and turn on an option that allows you to skip the match completely and just see the result. You still get to see stats of the game and player ratings, so you can see if your new signing is performing or if the new formation worked out well. You just don’t need to sit and watch a game play out that you can’t, in any way, speed up sufficiently or have much control over.

It’s a game changer. Instead of sitting down and playing a few matches you can now rattle through half a season easily in one sitting. The limitation of the game are still there; they haven’t changed the music, added more depth or found any official licenses hiding down the back of the sofa, but the flow of the game has increased considerably, even if it detaches you a little from the action.

But then there’s the issue of the price. If Premier Manager 2012 had a bargain price tag it would be easy to recommend to people after a bit of light-hearted, accessible managing, but it’s £13.99 which, by PSN standards, is a chunky request. And is there really enough here to spend that much money on? I’m not sure. It’s not a bad game by any means, but if you’ve got access to a reasonable PC then there shouldn’t be any competition on which way to look. It’s one of those games where someone asks you if it’s any good, and you just shrug and say “yeah it’s alright, not bad, not great…”. Worth looking into if you really fancy some management on your PS3 (especially with the new update) but it’s a lot of cash if you’re just a bit intrigued.

So Premier Manager 2012 got past the tricky 1st round tie, but ended up losing on penalties to Walsall. Maybe next year, eh?

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Start the Party: Save the World

Adding the word “party” into the title of a game is generally not a good omen. Trying to aim a game at the whole family is a harder task than opening a walnut with nothing but your forehead, so when Supermassive Games came up with Start the Party: Save the World they had a sizable task in making sure it didn’t fall into the oh-so-regular family trap of turning into something totally pointless. Did they manage it? Well… no. Not really.

When the Move was announced, a lot of people were concerned that the market would be flooded with shallow games, mimicking the Wii’s huge library of titles with no objective other than to flap your hands about the place for a few minutes at a time. Save the World takes a few steps to make its mini games a little more skillful, but there’s still nowhere near enough here to warrant rushing out and handing over your hard earned cash. It doesn’t really fare too well from the start, where you’re greeted with a main menu that gives you the choice of Options, and Solo or Group Play. There’s no difficulty settings or extra bonus items to aim for, but if the games are great fun then we could look over that happily enough.

But jumping into the games doesn’t really help much due to just how mixed the results are. With the general theme of Dr Terrible (steady with the imagination…) and his cronies doing everything to get in the way of the World and its day to day running, the mini games generally follow the theme of saving people from nasty situations. There’s no specific order to play them in, and each game is given a voiceover by a cheesy American guy to explain what’s going on and how you can help, so you don’t need to memorise how each game works. From here you’ll be drawing clouds, controlling a helicopter, repairing robots and several other tasks using your trusty Move controller. And while some of the mini-games are really well made, others are just a bit random and frustrating.

A couple of games have you using the Move as a drawing tool, by doing such things as drawing clouds to bounce falling cavemen into caves, or drawing huge laser circles around aliens to blow them up. These games work very well indeed, with the accuracy of the Move helping to make it a quite skillful set of games. Another favourite of mine was the ambulance game, whereby you balance an injured person on a big hand sticking out of an ambulance as it goes up and down hills and over speed bumps. You’ll need to collect first aid kits as you go, and doing so means you sometimes need to throw your casualty around and catch it carefully. It’s good fun at first, but it’s not hard to get the hang of it and once the challenge is gone, it loses its appeal.

This is a problem with many of the games. A few are fun for a while, but the challenge just doesn’t last. Others are just plain repetitive – having to clean, repair and extinguish robots on a production line is interesting until you’ve played it a couple of times, then you won’t go back to it. A second player can make things a bit more enjoyable; using the Sixaxis controller you can generally control something else within the game to make life trickier for the main player, which makes flicking fish into a boat slightly harder when player 2 is moving the boat around the place. But this isn’t all of the multiplayer action you can expect.

So, it’s a party game. Many of the games aren’t great on your own, but surely with a few friends it all picks up? Sadly that’s not really the case. There are a couple of game modes to play with your fellow gamers – Group Play and Quick Fire. They’re both pretty similar; Group Play just lets you play a few games, hand the Move over to someone else and see who gets the highest score. Quick Fire is basically the same, but you only get a short time on each game before it quickly moves on to the next which, for parties, is probably the best bet to stop your viewers waiting for too long. It’s the same set of 20 games you’ve got available in single player, and there isn’t really much of a party element other than taking it in turns.

So Start the Party: Save the World falls into that trap that so many have fallen into before. It’s not really a party game, although it is a game that kids might find entertaining for a couple of weekends. Considering you can pick it up for a touch over £10 it might not be a terrible bet for the kids, but it’s disappointing that Supermassive didn’t do more here, especially considering it’s the second game in the series. Yes a handful of mini-games are entertaining, but it’s not enough to recommend.

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