A few weeks ago I had the glorious opportunity, to interview Trendy Entertainments very own Marketing Director Philip Asher. Trendy Entertainment, as you probably know are the masterminds behind the Tower Defence/Action RPG mash up Dungeon Defenders. During the interview we covered not only Trendy's stance on their DLC marketing, but developing and balancing the ever expanding content.
So for those of you who saunter around with your level 70 mage, destroying wave after wave of orcs, prepare for the inside scoop on this years most exciting Tower Defense title.
As of the last week, 3DS owners can connect wirelessly through over 25,000 Wi-fi zones all over the EU.
In this unprecedented action, there's no really no excuse not to connect online and kick your friend's butts on games such as Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon Rumble Blast!
Granted, you still need to locate your nearest hotspot in order to do so, which is possible through
the Nintendo Hotspot Finder, Nintendo has endeavoured to place the majority of these hotspots in airports, coffee shops, fast food outlets and various other places of business.
Although there have been complaints online about the latency experienced on these new hotspots, it's early days yet. So hopefully we can expect lower latencies with subsequent firmware updates and growing router support for the 3DS' WiFi.
On Monday Ubisoft announced a new expansion pack for their 2011 Real-Time-Strategy game Anno 2070. The expansion is titled "Deep Ocean" which aims to expand the underwater construction features of the main game much deeper (place your Inception memes here).
Some of the more notable features include being able to acquire territory without using military force, underwater globalthermal nuclear power plants and a new "Tsunami" disaster. If you want to read about the rest of the features you can head on over to the German Ubisoft forums.
The release for the Deep Ocean expansion pack is set for Autumn, 2012.
EA, publishers of Crytek's futuristic shooter Crysis, yesterday released the first gameplay trailer for the latest instalment to join the Crysis series. The trailer shows the beauty of the game's new engine, Cry Engine 3. Fans of the Crysis series will be happy to know that the super soldier shooter is looking as beautiful as ever.
The game is set to continue with the storyline of the last game taking part in New York City which has considerably changed since the last game with plants and wildlife absorbing the streets of the city. The city itself has been encased inside a "Nano Dome" created by one of the game's antagonists, the Cell Corporation. Not much else is known about the game's mechanics apart from the induction of a new weapon, the composite bow. No doubt that there will be other features to explore with the Nano suit and alien technology taking centre stage in the game's previous iterations.
After the outcry from PC Gamers over the "substandard" graphics that appeared in Crysis 2 the development team wanted to ensure that they didn't upset their primary fan base a second time. In an interview with the website Joystiq, the director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard announced that the game would be shipping with support for DirectX11 graphics cards. And admitted that "We’d be pretty stupid not to capitalize on the technology we did for that and utilizing that from the get-go."
Hopefully this will keep fans of the series safe in the knowledge that Crytek are not going to make the same mistake twice.
So, how many people managed to get into the Diablo 3 beta?
I downloaded the beta client over the course of the weekend and my every attempt to log in were met with the disheartening phrase 'Sorry, the servers are busy.'
This is to be expected, of course. But not once did I manage to get in, to be able to pass an opinion on the game itself. I personally, was left very disappointed. Still, this was but a stress-test for Blizzard to indicate the demand the servers shall have to face come May 15th, so we'll just have to wait and see if things have improved on the day.
This seems to echo how poorly handled other Blizzard beta's have been (such as Starcraft 2), with dismally low server allocations, poor communication from official sources and incredibly bugged matchmaking systems.
