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Demon's Souls servers staying online into the 'foreseeable future'
Demon's Souls will not be denied as publisher Atlus announced today that it will support the game's online features for the "foreseeable future." Unlike players in the unforgiving RPG, the servers just refuse to die!"While it originally seemed as though it would be unfeasible for us to continue to sustain the servers, a number of developments have made it possible for us to continue to invest in and support our fans as they have continued to invest in and support us and Demon's Souls," said Tim Pivnicny, VP of Atlus marketing and sales, we imagine holding a cat o' nine tails. "For all the gamers who have yet to discover the game's amazing online experience, we're happy to say you can still log on and find out why Demon's Souls is still regarded by many as one of the finest games of all time."The entry fee for electronic sadism is a mere $20 now, as the game is part of the PlayStation 3's "Greatest Hits" collection. The game's online features were intended to end at midnight on May 31, but darkness always finds a way to stay alive.
Dark Souls sells 1.19 million copies across North America and Europe
One man's pain is another's pleasure. Never has this been more true than in the case of Dark Souls, as the sadistically difficult RPG continues a slow creep toward two million sales. As part of today's Namco Bandai financials, the company revealed sales in the United States and Europe reached 1.19 million copies.Publishing in Japan was handled by From Software, which revealed last November that the game had shipped 370,000 units in the region.Having punished console players within an inch of their sanity, Namco Bandai will launch Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC August 24.
Steel Battalion has four-player co-op, two videos and one pack of screens
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor has an intriguing array of tanks and mech-like vehicles (with gigantic guns) for you to control. You use Kinect to grab, pull and lean, and a controller to view, aim and shoot. Steel Battalion will feature four-player co-op, Capcom announced, meaning that's eight arms flailing and 40 fingers flying at a single time.This schema could get messy, but if the three-hour line to play Steel Battalion at PAX was any indication, From Software may have found the perfect balance between ergonomics and entertainment.%Gallery-152828%
Put your right hand in, put your right hand out, do the Steel Battalion
We've found that Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor offers a surprisingly refined, intuitive Kinect-controller hybrid scheme, and the above video explains in more detail how that whole thing works. Reach up and pull to do this, lean forward to do that, do the hokey pokey to... well, do the hokey pokey.
Rumor: Dark Souls PC announcement imminent
Head over to the official Dark Souls Facebook page, and you may discover a new "app" that says "an announcement is coming." The app is nothing more than a brick wall, which will seemingly be broken down once it reaches enough likes. While we'd like to think the wall hides a stack of delicious, fluffy pancakes, evidence points to the impending announcement of a PC version.And, by evidence, we mean the Australian magazine PC PowerPlay, which strongly suggests Dark Souls will be featured in its April issue. An image of the magazine has popped up on NeoGAF, revealing a page styled after Dark Souls' infamous "YOU DIED" screen. The magazine is due on shelves April 18, so we should likely know exactly what's going on by then.The possibility of a PC version of Dark Souls cropped up earlier this year when a Namco Bandai forum admin suggested users make a petition for the project. A week later, Namco took notice of the petition, with the admin telling users they had the company's attention and that "the future is in your hands."
Namco Bandai takes note of Dark Souls PC petition
We never thought we'd say this, but here goes: someone noticed an online petition. Namco Bandai threw down the gauntlet, tasking a masochistic PC audience with drumming up signatures for a potential PC port of Dark Souls. Over 64,000 of them responded. Namco Bandai community manager Tony Shoupinou dropped into the forums to say that his bosses approached him after the news broke. "If you wanted to have the attention of Namco Bandai Games, now you have it," he wrote in a post. "The future is in your hands, and I hope you will keep supporting this. I make a personal objective to make sure every relevant people in Namco Bandai Games is in touch with this formidable effort." It's hardly confirmation that a port is incoming, but at least you've gotten Namco-Bandai's attention -- and knowing is half the battle.
Armored Core 5 mechs a date with retail: March 20
If you surprised yourself by becoming a superfan of Dark Souls, here's the next ... totally different From Software-developed game for you to try. Publisher Namco Bandai announced that mech action game Armored Core 5 will be released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in North America on March 20 -- which just happens to be five years to the day after Armored Core 4 came out. A European release will follow on March 23. If you pre-order from GameStop, you'll get some extra stuff with which to outfit your giant robot: the "Heavy Assault Pack," which comes with extra weapons and parts. This stuff can be used in the competitive multiplayer, which would seem to give an advantage to GameStop buyers on release day. That hardly seems sporting.
Dark Souls admin suggests PC could happen with a petition
Petitions come and petitions go, but when an employee of Namco Bandai suggests Dark Souls could get ported to PC with a few thousand signatures, we take notice. Administrator shoupinou responded to a request for a PC version of Dark Souls with the following advice: "There is always possibilities to have games adapted on PC and the good news is that Dark Souls is not a 100% typical Console game so the adaptation is possible. Now to make things happen, let's say the demand has to be properly done. someone to make a successful petition?" There is a petition gathering steam as we speak -- 36,668 signatures as of this writing -- and if you're a PC or Dark Souls fan, we don't see any danger in adding your own to the fight. Unless the CIA is using it to compile a list of suspected terrorists or something.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Dark Souls
It's a crying shame that, for the uninitiated masses, Dark Souls will primarily be remembered for its considerable difficulty. It's an absolutely true shame, of course. To my recollection, no other game's punishment caused my brother to literally break a controller in a fit of rage, delete his save and write a chart-topping tribute song before his hatred could subside. It's not all death and discouragement, however. Though every twist and turn of Dark Souls' menacing and lovely locales plays host to a preset lineup of fiends (many of whom can kill you with a sideways glance), there is a strange progress to the proceedings. It may come after hours of un-progress, but it comes -- and when it does, it comes correct. Self-improvement in games typically comes in forms that are mechanical (you level up and gain five magic points!) or educational (now you know where the spike traps are). Dark Souls' core tenet of repetitious short-burst failure paired with a wildly open-ended RPG character progression system blends both methods perfectly. What's more, it offers an intensely terrifying risk/reward system for ever-precious Souls; fortunately, your Brains are never jeopardized.
Dark Souls patch brings lots of tweaks, plenty of nerfs
Were you able to skirt around the considerable difficulty of Dark Souls by finding potent tactical combinations, like casting Iron Flesh and Homing Soulmass in tandem to turn yourself into an invincible, automatic killing machine? Well, you can't do that anymore: Dark Souls patch 1.05 was recently released, adding a handful of new features, tweaking a few abilities and outright nerfing some spells, including the two mentioned above. The update is the same as the Japanese patch that went live some time ago. You can check out a full list of translated patch notes over on Eurogamer. Many condolences for the imminent death(s) of your poor, poor hero.
Dark Souls ships 1.5 million worldwide
Namco Bandai is expanding its captive audience for Dark Souls, the grim action-RPG that critics and fans like, loathe and then love. According to developer From Software in Japan, 1.5 million vectors for its brutal challenge have shipped to stores worldwide. North America has received the largest Stockholm Syndrome shipment of 620,000 units, followed by Europe with 470,000 and then Japan (370,000), where Dark Souls was published by From exclusively on PlayStation 3. The game's gauntlet landed in Asia last on October 18th, shipping 40,000 copies to that region. We'll be keeping an eye out for Dark Souls' commercial performance in North America once the NPD releases the next round of statistics. How effective is word of mouth, we wonder, when it's whispered seductively through prison bars?
Dark Souls speed run is a tour de force of tolerance
Generally speaking, speed runs fall into one of two categories: "That's completely nuts" and "I should feel bad for ever trying to play this game." Most speed runs can be classified as the former; incredible displays of memorization and timing that reduce hour-long sequences into minutes. They're fun to watch, and sometimes even educational. Speed runs like SexyShoiko's Dark Souls play-through, however, make us ashamed of the countless hours we've painstakingly bled into this unforgiving beast of a game. Over a series of seven YouTube videos (part 1 above, 2 through 7 after the break) SexyShoiko manages to topple the entire title in less than an hour and a half, which is completely bewildering. We'd call him/her a masochist, but that term seems inapplicable to someone who is quite clearly the master of their own domain. [Thanks, everyone who sent this in!]
Atlus continues Demon's Souls server support into 2012
In an announcement timed suspiciously closely to the release of a totally unrelated game (wink!), Atlus announced that it's going to continue operating the servers for Demon's Souls "into 2012." They had previously only been ensured operation until October of this year. Thanks to this renewal, players will still be able to leave notes for one another, show up as ghosts in others' games to warn of dangerous conditions, or just become a mean-spirited invader. And with that continued support will come new "Pure White" and "Pure Black" world tendency events for unspecified dates this holiday season. Atlus PR also just casually drops the fact that Demon's Souls has an MSRP of $19.99, making it the best bargain in From Software's two-title-strong library of hardcore action RPGs.
Rumor: Dark Souls players punished for playing early
According to Japanese gaming blog Esuteru, folks who managed to grab illicit, pre-launch copies of Dark Souls are being punished by developer From Software. The site says that members of the dev team are dropping horrifically overpowered, maximum level Black Phantoms into the environments of players who grabbed their copy of the game through a retailer that broke street date. We're having a hard time corroborating the story, but it certainly sounds like something which the characteristically cruel From Software would do. In fact, we'd be surprised if those players even picked up on the retribution. They probably assumed their constant, repeated defeat was just par for the course.
How the world of Dark Souls got so dark
Namco Bandai has broken up Dark Souls' prologue into chunks, we're guessing, because taken all at once it would be too much drama. In this excerpt, we see a war between impressive, powerful beings -- which helps to explain why the game world becomes so inhospitable to regular knight types later.
From Software profiled in latest Dark Souls vid
What's missing from this profile of From Software, developer of Dark Souls, is that we figured the studio culture would involve randomly unplugging equipment to redo hours of work. You know, get the team in touch with Demon's Souls players.
Dark Souls prologue is kind of depressing
Demon's Souls is a depressing game, not only because of its occasionally crushing difficulty, but because it's always just so damned grim. Based on this new prologue video, it appears Dark Souls intends to keep up the trend. It's hard to imagine it being much darker but, hey, this is only part one.
Dark Souls trailer hopes to lure the unwary
Look, Dark Souls is super hard. We played it, we know. You might watch this trailer, listen to its rockin' music and think, "Hey, this looks like a cool, hip new game." Now, that thought isn't wrong per se ... just make sure you're fully informed. Take a moment to slow the video down and see what you're getting into. Take the frame above, for example. You see that giant wolf? It has a giant sword in its mouth. As if a giant wolf weren't enough of a challenge, said giant wolf is also a trained swordsman. Or swordswolf. Whatever. Just look before you leap, that's all we're saying.
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor preview: Hope everything works
The Kinect-based Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is a concept that has a lot going for it, with a combination of controller and Kinect input opening up a lot of gameplay options to immerse the player into feeling like they're actually piloting a giant "Vertical Tank" (VT) mech. The only thing that could break that immersion, which we saw occur several times when we checked out the pre-alpha build at Gamescom, should be obvious: Kinect not recognizing certain gestures. It's all good and fine for a Kinect hiccup when petting your Kinectimals, but this is war! A small blessing of Steel Battalion is that it's played sitting down (for the most part). Stretching out your arms while maintaining good posture calibrates your pilot for the system. Movement, aiming and firing are handled by the controller, while the player's gestures are used to look out windows, check outside the tank by lifting the hatch (that's the standing part), look around the cockpit and to pull down or interact with several of the VT's controls. %Gallery-130736%
Armored Core V's Japanese launch pushed back to January 2012
Originally planned for an October 20 launch in Japan, From Software's Armored Core V won't meet its scheduled date. The developer has announced the game has been pushed back until January 2012, following feedback from users who participated in a closed online beta recently. We've contacted Namco for clarification and to see how this news affects the launch here in the US. The good news, though, is that mech oil doesn't ever go bad, so you don't have to throw out that stockpile you've got going in your garage.
