Moon Diver
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Moon Diver springs into XBLA on May 4
Moon Diver will become available on Xbox Live Arcade on May 4 for 1200 MSP ($15). The four-player "Strider for the 21st century" hit the PSN last month, and was shortly followed by some DLC packs. Be sure to give the trial a go before purchase. Just sayin'. %Gallery-117024%
Moon Diver DLC live on PSN, two more packs coming
The first DLC pack for Moon Diver arrived this Tuesday along with the PSN update. The 99-cent "Silence" pack added a new playable character and a score attack mode to the Strider-esque side-scroller. Two additional DLC items were announced today, one coming next week and the other currently without a date. On April 26, two more infinitely scrolling Score Attack stages, "Orbit," and "Rage," will be available in a single 99-cent pack. Sometime in the future, the free DLC Pack #3 will include the "Chain Kill Mode," in which players attempt to kill as many enemies as possible while maintaining a combo. "A brand new world awaits if you are able to survive the attacking hordes!" If you're lucky, maybe it'll be a new horde-free world. Like the "Chain Kill" DLC, the Xbox 360 version of Moon Diver remains undated, with Square Enix saying only that "Pricing and availability for the Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360 will be announced at a later date."%Gallery-121258%
Moon Diver review: Lunar mayhem
Do you remember Strider? I'm not asking if you have a vague awareness of it or even if you've played it -- do you remember the excitement of its arrival on the Sega Genesis? It was the first game to shove eight megabits of memory into a single console cartridge, a fact loudly proclaimed by an emblem on the box art that screams "8MEGA MEMORY." It featured enemies like a giant centipede made out of people, an evil guy in a robe who (as the story goes) took out five of the seven continents without breaking a sweat, and, of course, giant robot dinosaurs. If you owned a Sega Genesis in 1990, Strider was a Big Damn Deal. 21 years later, it can be said with no great amount of equivocation that the quietly-released Moon Diver is about as far as one can get from a Big Damn Deal. What Moon Diver is, however, is as close to "Strider for the 21st century" as we may ever see. It looks like Strider, it plays like Strider, it even features a production credit from none other than Kouichi Yotsui, Strider's director. While it never explicitly references the 20-and-change-year-old classic, it is quite obviously cut from its cloth. Moon Diver's prime target audience, then, is those who do remember Strider as a Big Damn Deal. %Gallery-117024%
Moon Diver strides to PSN March 29
You might remember Moon Diver under its previous title Necromachina, or the title before that, Moon Diver. Or you might just remember it as "that game that looks like a four-player Strider." That's no coincidence, by the way -- it's actually designed by Koichi Yotsui, who was one of the leads on Strider. According to a list of upcoming releases sneaked into Sony's Spring Fever promotion announcement, Moon Diver will plunge onto the PlayStation Network on March 29. No release date has been mentioned for XBLA yet -- not that we're surprised the PlayStation Blog would refrain from volunteering that.
'Moon Diver' now called Necromachina, added to Square Enix E3 lineup
We don't think Square Enix appreciates the genuine toil that goes into producing a high-quality photoshop. That one we made yesterday, of the guy diving into the moon? It will never be relevant for anything ever again. The publisher recently announced that the Feelplus-developed, side-scrolling action title formerly known as Moon Diver will come to the U.S. PSN and XBLA under the moniker Necromachina. (How are we supposed to make a photoshop out of that? It is virtually impossible.) Accompanying the announcement was a fast-paced gameplay trailer, which is posted after the jump. It looks awfully slick, with sharp 2.5D visuals and old-school action-platforming -- but even from this very first trailer, we can already tell it's going to be punishingly difficult. We'll get a chance to test that hypothesis when we get our hands on the game at E3.
Square Enix and feelplus team up on 'Moon Diver' for XBLA
Andriasang reports that Square Enix has pulled back the curtain obscuring the identity of its next project: a 2D action game called Moon Diver, coming this year to the Japanese Xbox Live Arcade. The title, which will be developed by Lost Odyssey and Ninety-Nine Nights 2 creator feelplus, pits four-player teams of ninjas -- presumably moon ninjas, which we all know to be the coolest type of ninjas -- against waves of monsters in an attempt to protect a post-apocalyptic Earth. We still have so many questions: Is it coming to America? Can we see some screenshots? Are we expected to dive into or off of the moon? We suppose our curiosity will have to be sated by these slim, slim details for now. We'll try pestering Square Enix for answers to these pressing questions at E3.
