In a post on the PS blog Sony today revealed that from next month, the way the Playstation Plus Instant Games collection works in Europe and North America is going to change in two ways.

The first change is that starting from June there will be two free games offered to owners of the Playstation 4 per month instead of just the one. In both regions the games lined up for offer on the PS4 in June are Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate and Trine 2: The Complete Story both games with some puzzling elements to them, even if the first is a shooter and the second an adventure-puzzle game. European PS3 owners can get hold of NBA 2k14 and Lone Survivor, while North American owners can pick up NBA 2k14 as well, but the other game is Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.

The other change counters the first though by adjusting the times each free game is being offered to a shorter time period. From now on the games will be offered free starting from the first Wednesday of the month and will remain that way until the first Wednesday of the next month. A few games that have been long available in the Instant Games collection will also be cycled out. Sony have justified this change by saying that most players are getting hold of their free copies of games towards the start of the free period anyway.

The reasons behind the changes were not alluded to in the post, but some speculate it might be because of recent changes to Xbox’s Gold program. Overall, the changes mean more free content for Playstation gamers to get hold of, but a shorter time window to do so.

PS blog post is here.

Bad games happen. We know this as gamers. Be it because of poor story, badly or force-together elements that make no sense or just poor gameplay mechanics, some games can be unplayable. More recently though with the advent of Early Access and the pitfalls that come with it, games can be released that are just plain broken. Usually the people who buy these games either get refunded or just cut their losses. However, the developers of one PS4 game widely reviewed as buggy and broken have told their customers that not only are they sorry for how the game turned out, that instead of calling it quits or just releasing a patch they are going to start to remake the game from the bottom upwards. That’s right, they’re literally starting from scratch.

The game in question is called Basement Crawl, a Bomberman-esque horror game. It also has the dubious honour of having a lower overall review score than other bad games such as Duke Nukem Forever. In an interview, Bloober Team’s Marc Colhoun apologised to all those who had played the game and been let down.

“The game was a mess for both you and us.” he said, acknowledging that people had been waiting for them to fix the game. “Rather than… issuing a patch… we have decided to just come out and explain to you where we are right now and what we plan to do. We have been rebuilding the game, completely from scratch and on a new engine.” adding that amongst other things they hope to improve the AI and add new game types.

The new version of the game will be given free to those who already have the first, buggy version of the game. No ETA was given for when they could hope to see the new version out on Playstation Network though, so it remains to be seen whether the developers can actually make this right. For the sake of the people who bought the game, I hope that they will.

A multi-layered series that looks back to the formative years of Ryu and Ken as they live a traditional warrior’s life in secluded Japan. The boys are, unknowingly, the last practitioners of the ancient fighting style known as “Ansatsuken” (Assassin’s Fist). The series follows them as they learn about the mysterious past of their master, Goken, and the tragic, dark legacy of the Ansatsuken style. Can their destiny be changed, or will history repeat itself?

Well, time for our first on demand/youtube review and what a doozey of a review aswell…
Season 1 of Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist, the follow on to the Youtube short from 2010, Streetfighter: Legacy, which showed a night time fight between Ryu and Ken and got the whole of Street Fighter fandom around the world salivating for a real live action Street Fighter spectacle (especially after the travesty that was Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)

This is very much a prequel to the First Street Fighter: World Warriors game/story and the years of Ryu (Mike Moh) and Ken Master (Christian Howard) training, aswell as the young life and training of their Sensei Goken (Akira Koieyama) and his brother Goki (Gaku Space), and his betrayal of Gotetsu (Togo Igawa) to become Akuma (Joey Ansah), the Demon of the No Hado!

The first thing that strikes straight away is the choreography of the training and fight scenes.  The training is utterly wonderful to watch and the fight scenes, especially the CGI added for the ingame moves, like the Hadouken and ShoRyuKen look cool.

Filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria, the locations are stunning too, the perfect backdrop for the training of two young world warriors into the video game characters we’ve been knocking heads with for nearly 30 years now

What I WASN’T expecting, yet supremely surprised about was the introduction of Ken’s father (Mark Killeen) in Episode 4: A Rough Night,  a boxer, who spends a day training with Ryu and Ken and showing them a few of his moves.  What really stood out most in this episode was the bond and training these actors and fighters have, the moves and dialect is fluid and warm and the fighting/training is quick and beautiful to watch aswell.

But they also get a taste of street fighting at a local bar against some American GI’s (and leave them in a mess of course) in this episode, of course we see Ken in full flow offering large bets, while Ryu looks out of his depth and uncomfortable being thrown into the ring.  Everything we know about these characters is there and real.

The real stand out throughout the series though is Goken, more than just their teacher, he’s a father figure and one that is respected and loved by both teenagers, and the flashbacks to his own training and trials with his brother Goki under the training of Gotetsu is part of the Street Fighter legacy that hasn’t been deeply looked into before now and it was good to get to know.

Goki’s transformation into Akuma is good to watch aswell, almost a rocky level montage of his body falling apart under the power of the No Hado and his transformation into the demon Akuma is great to watch.

The one thing that I don’t get with this series is why its even a series.  All 12 episodes were released right away and at 9/10 minutes an episode, I have to ask why…   If this was released on DVD/BluRay as a feature length episode, like  , Then I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Here’s hoping Machinima see sense to release it as a movie.

Now, to get back into the dojo myself, this gave me a definite recharge to my No Hado!

~9.5/10  Utterly Amazing!

Earlier brought along a fine example of why you shouldn’t really believe everything that you see on the Internet…

Far Cry 4 was announced last week by Ubisoft so they could begin the ball rolling on hype for the game before E3 came along and the game’s announcement potentially got swallowed up amongst the other news that would be coming out of that event. Set in a region of the Himalayas called Kyrat, a place of breathtaking scenery and wildlife under the rule of a tyranical self-appointed king, players were going to have to use their wits and whatever they could to get through the game.

So when a trailer surfaced this morning, claiming to be Far Cry 4’s first trailer and showing a fly-over of mountains surrounded by blizzard which ended with the camera supposedly flying into the mountain before showing the game’s title, some certainly thought that it was Ubisoft releasing a little more information to follow up on the announcement of the game last week.

However that wasn’t the case. First the trailer got taken down from Youtube by their copyright infringement system, and then a little research proved that the trailer was a fake, the footage ripped from a BBC advertisement for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. What a shame.

What we do know for sure though is that Far Cry 4 is due out on November 21^st. So we should be getting some real trailers online soon.

At E3 2013, one of the bigger games demonstrated to a favourable reception was Tom Clancy’s The Division. Shown off at the event using the new Snowdrop engine the game looked good and the game was very well talked-about about after the event. The game was scheduled to be released at some unscheduled time this year, but now the word’s come through that the game has been delayed until some unscheduled time in 2015 purely so Ubisoft can work on making sure the game works.

It doesn’t really come as a surprise. There’s been little word on the game since E3 ’13 and games get delayed all the time these days, release dates pushed back to allow for games to be tweaked to a level closer to perfect due to unexpected obstacles appearing. At the very least, pushing back a release date to make sure a game is working properly is preferable to games that get released in a buggy half-finished state just to meet a deadline. Also the statement that was released says that everyone involved are ‘proud’ to be working on such a project. So the delay is going to bring a better game from a group of people who are passionate and in love with the idea of the game they’re creating. This can only be a good thing all round.

We should be seeing more footage of The Division now at E3 this year, so we should get some information about how much work has been completed since the event last week and possibly be able to estimate how close to being finished the game is and therefore maybe which quarter of 2015 we could see the game being released. Until then though, we just have to wait.