We don't write a lot of text previews around here these days, because, well, the numbers don't indicate you guys are all that interested in text previews. But now we've got this shiny new site and all of its fancy editing tools to play with, and since I just swung by Capcom's latest spring fling (read: a bunch of consoles hooked up in a hotel meeting room) to see some new games, how about we kill two birds with one stone and see what this new editor can do? What do you think of that big snazzy image up there?
Yeah, me too. Please consume this information in a bulk format!
Remember Me
This is the game I was most curious about going into the event, and certainly the one we knew the least about. It seems to break into equal parts urban traversal, a la Uncharted, and timing-based group melee combat reminiscent of Arkham Asylum--but that's just a first impression from the very beginning of the game. You're a young girl making her way through the seedy underbelly of Neo-Paris, which seems to have a real class-based upper crust/under-city thing going on, only the groundlings in this case are some sort of mutated techno-zombies with computers embedded in them. You seem to have a computer planted in your head too (perhaps everyone does in the future), which seems like it will come into play later on as a tool for evaluating the environment.
The first system the game introduces is the Combo Lab, which sounds hilarious and struck me as a neat idea, since it lets you build custom combos out of individual attacks with different effects (damage boost, health recovery) as you level up and unlock them. The deeper into a combo you place a specific attack, the more amplified its effect will be, and as the game demands specific button timing, that creates a risk/reward setup where you have to nail every hit to reap the benefits of those custom attacks strings you created. The one thing holding back the Combo Lab is that it seems all the combo sequences are in fact predetermined, so you aren't truly making your own combos but rather filling them in as you earn the attacks. I need to see more of that mechanic before I'm sold on it, but it at least seems interesting.
Remember Me's aesthetic looks fresh, and it's got some personality to it; when I put down the demo, I was on my way to meet up with Headache Tommy, the proprietor of a local bar called The Leaking Brain. The menus look slick as heck, too, lots of clean lines and Helvetica all over the place. Like a future computer ought to!
DmC DLC
Hey, did you hear the new Devil May Cry was pretty great? The first DLC, Vergil's Downfall, is coming at the end of the month, and lets you take control of Vergil directly after the end of the original game's storyline, as he explores some weird mansion in limbo while his mother hollers at him a lot.
Vergil more or less plays like Dante, with some minor differences. Instead of guns, he throws ethereal sword projectiles, and you can teleport vertically up or down if you hit the dodge button without pushing the stick in any direction. This sets up some pretty tricky jumps right off the bat, since in some cases you have to leap out over a pit, do an upward dash, then immediately follow it up with a forward dash to make it over some of the wider gaps.
The menus indicate Vergil will have access to angel and demon weapons, though I don't know specifically what they'll look like since I stopped playing the DLC as soon as I had a good sense of it. I'd rather just play the final product when it comes out, which should be in the next couple of weeks. It'll run you 9 bucks, unless you preordered the game, in which case you should have a code that'll net you the add-on for free.
Resident Evil Revelations
You may have heard the 3DS Resident Evil game from last year is headed to 360 and PS3. That is still true! Capcom claims nearly every art asset in the game was reworked in some way to make the game look passable in HD, and honestly I was surprised that it translated to a television as well as it did. 50 bucks still seems kind of ridiculous for a handheld game ported up to consoles, though I guess it's still better than the last console Resident Evil game we got.
GameSpot did a video preview of Revelations in action, if you want to take a gander at how the visuals have made the transition.
Darkstalkers Resurrection
Iron Galaxy has harnessed the power of the Lang Effect to give Darkstalkers the same treatment that Street Fighter III: Third Strike and the Marvel games got. So as you're playing Darkstalkers 2 and 3, you'll get the same style of iterative challenges popping up in the sidebars, you'll be able to unlock a new vault full of bonus material, apply various graphical and cabinet filters, and so on. There will be some new character-specific tutorials on offer, and Capcom pointed out this is the first time an arcade-perfect version of Darkstalkers 3 has even been available in the home.
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate was also at the event.
