There are certain concepts, or genres that just seem cool to me.
Wild West themes, assassination missions, air combats… And finally, real sport simulation games. Because it’s so hard to put real-world physics into the virtual 3D world, it’s a very challenging task to make such games, and I think of it as an art form that requires mathematical precision.

That’s why when I heard about Hustle Kings for PSN (for PS3), I was really excited because I saw the word “physics engine” while reading about it. Though I’m not an avid pool table game player, I do love the game, and I usually I to play a game or two whenever I spot one.

Look at those details my friends. It looks amazing.
We can’t wait until we get our hands on it, all over those cues and tables.

It’s available now on PSN for $9.99. You can also check out the game details page for more information. – http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Games/Hustle_Kings

If you’re a console gamer, you probably heard about the independently developed game called “Braid.”

It was a big hit on XBLA, and finally PS3 owners get to play this famous platformer.

• Untraditional platforming. You can never die and never lose, but challenge is always present and focused on solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to play and replay tricky jumps.
• Puzzle-rich environment. Travel through a series of worlds, searching for puzzle pieces and solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes and setting up pockets of dilated time. The game play is always fresh and new and the puzzles inspire new ways of thinking.
• Aesthetic design. A painterly art style and lush, organic soundtrack complement the unique game play.
• Nonlinear story. A nonlinear fiction links the various worlds and provides real-world metaphors for your time manipulations; act out these themes at your own pace, exploring playful “what if” universes.
• Forgiving game play. The game doesn’t force you to solve puzzles in order to proceed. If you can’t figure something out, just play onward and return to that puzzle later.

The game will be running at smooth 60FPS, and will cost you $14.99. The title will be available on November 12th for North America audience, and shortafter for Europe.

Hwaaachaaa!

That’s the best kung-fu impression I can do in writing. I wouldn’t say I’m a die-hard kung-fu flick fan, but I do enjoy them occasionally. And like others, the kung-fu genre has gotten its share of video game incarnations. Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao is one of them, albeit not the most successful one.

Invincible Tiger is an Arcade title by Namco Bandai Games America for the X360 and PS3. Like any quality kung-fu flick from the 70s, the story is fairly linear: There’s an ancient artifact known as the Star of Destiny that gives its user control over an army of immortal warriors, and the Evil Overlord has come to claim it. It is up to the former Legendary Warrior, Han Tao to recover the Star of Destiny from the Evil Overlord.

The gameplay is your basic 2D brawler. You have the punch, kick and jump buttons for your basic maneuvers. With a combination of the punch and kick buttons you can string three hit combos. Pressing the () button allows you to interact with glowing objects, which I’ll explain later.

There’s no side-scrolling in Invincible Tiger; all of the action takes place in a single area. Theses areas are fairly large with multiple tiers. For example, the first stage puts you in front of an old chinese house. You can fight on the ground, the second floor balcony, or you can take your brawl on to the roof a la Croughing Tiger. The glowing objects I mentioned earlier can be vines hanging down, or doors you can go into to access another tier. You can also pick up barrels, pots, and somtimes weapons that enemies have dropped. Once you have cleared the area of all the enemies, you move onto a boss.

As you fight off hordes of thugs, thieves and ninjas, your Yin Yang gauge fills up. The circular gauge can fill up in two different ways; the white bar fills up with offensive actions like attacking, and the black bar fills up with defensive maneuvers, like dodging, or even getting hit. This gauge does a couple of different things. You can use it to heal yourself when you’ve taken damage by meditating. Or, you can fill it up to unleash Hyperstate, where Han’s attacks do more damage with speed increase. The more balanced your gauge is, the longer your hyperstate lasts (hence the Yin Yang).  This gauge also serves yet another purpose. If you keep the gauge filled, it acts as a point multiplier. Speaking of points, you get different multipliers for meeting different requirements, such as varying you attacks, keeping your Yin Yang meter balanced, and killing as many enemies as possible without taking a hit.

This game also provides a multiplayer mode both offline and online, where you can team up with a friend (or stanger) to take on the Evil Overlord and his goons. In a co-op game, you have separate health bars, but share the same lives and the same Yin Yang gauge, calling for some stratgey and planning.

So, first the good. It’s well presented. The backgrounds look cool and are very reminiscent of a kung-fu flick, with barrels and pots that the hero can use to wreck havoc or make his escape. You seen vertical lines run across the screen at times that really recreate the feel of an old flick. A cool visual feature the title offers is the ability to set 3D settings. Through the Main and Pause menus you can choose from two different 3D settings: Anaglyph 3D that functions on all TVs and Digital 3D that requires a compatible TV and possibly an emitter. This definitely adds to the visual experience.

However, no matter how sweet a game looks, unless it has a good story or plays really well, it’s just NOT enjoyable. Obviously, the storyline is a falls a bit short in carrying the game through. So it’s gotta be in the gameplay. Unfortunately, the gameplay in Invincible Tiger doesn’t quite cut it either. But its not the concepts that I mentioned earlier that fall short; it’s the execution.

The biggest issue I had with this title is the controls. They feel really sloppy. In the initial stages, the waves of enemies are smaller, and don’t provide too much of a problem. But as you progress, enemies become tougher and more in number, and that’s when you really start to have out-of-body experiences. Here’s what I mean: Like any good ol’ hardcore beat-em ups, enemies try to trap you between them. And like any hardcore beat-em up character, Han has a combo that attacks both sides. But that attack only comes out on the third strike of a combo. As I’m pressing the right combination of buttons, Han is sometimes caught in an animation (or sometimes he’s just standing there), and the first input doesn’t register. So while I’m trying to do one combo, Han starts doing another combo, the result of which is him being beaten silly. After awhile, you just start to give up on strategically using combos, and just mashing. This can get old pretty quick. After a bout an hour or two of gameplay, the action just started getting repetitive, and frustrating.

But the boss fights are another story. You actually need to strategically dodge and attack at the right moments to inflict damage. There are a total of five bosses in the game, and each challenge you with a unique strategy that you must employ to defeat them. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get frustrating at times. But the frustration doesn’t get in the way of the fun and satisfaction you gain from defeating the boss.

Now let me set it straight that I love beat-em up games. I really do. Even though I get seriously frustrated at times, it all seems worth it at the end. But with Invincible Tiger, the satisfaction didn’t quite even out with the frustration. The game looks great and has some great sound effects. But the gameplay gets repetitive quick, and the sloppy controls result in a lot of frustration. The online co-op capabilities are pretty sweet, but again, you encounter the same issues you would in single player.

If you’re a die hard kung-fu junkie and want a video game fix, or you like that drop of frustration in your beat-em ups, this game may suit you well. This game had a lot of potential, but could not quite tap into it all in its execution.

Our Score: 6.5 /10

Great potential, not so great execution.

*Although I did write about multiplayer co-op, I was not able to play it. I didnt’ have anybody to play it with on my console, and after about 45 min in a lobby, I decided to give up. We’ll update the article as soon as I get some multiplayer actions.

It’s official now.

ZEN Pinball for PSN, made by ZEN Studios, is now making (or already in progress) a pinball table for Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. It is scheduled to be released on October 2009.

ZEN Studios hinted us that it’ll have a Sky City Tokyo themed. And they promised that just like the original Ninja Gaiden series, it’ll be fast-paced combos, ball slicing effects, lots of flashy contents with tricky platform jumps.

As we mentioned it on our review, ZEN Pinball for PSN is one of the most accurate pinball machine simulators we’ve ever seen, and most importantly, very fun to play. If you want more information, visit the official ZEN Pinball website.

One of the best pinball machine simulator so far, ZEN Pinball, will finally have its first DLC. And better yet, it’ll be a Street Fighter II Tribute table! This very first DLC for ZEN Pinball be available through PSN in August 2oth.

ZEN Pinball Street Fighter II Tribute Table features:

• Enter the World Warrior Championship fighting as Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Guile and battle against Sagat, Evil Ryu, Vega, and Balrog, then win the final round of the championship against M. Bison!
• Discover combo shots, animated punches, kicks and special moves as you fight against opponents using ramps and a variety of orbit shot
• Multiple in-game challenges featuring objects, art and memorable items from Street Fighter™ II
• Table soundtrack, sound effects and voices from the original Street Fighter II

If you have a PS3 but didn’t know about this game, youcan always visit www.zenpinball.com, or you can check our review for more information.

Before we talk about The Punisher: No Mercy, I want to say this first. I had high hopes for this title. Yes, the game originates from the renowned comic series, The Punisher, but that wasn’t the only reason. The game was being developed by Zen Studio. If you followed our reviews since the start of our website, you might remember Zen Studio as the developer of Zen Pinball, one of the most sophisticated pinball machine simulator so far. That’s why we were more excited than usual when we heard that Zen Studio is in charge of The Punisher: No Mercy project. Let’s take a quick look at the gameplay.

The game itself isn’t in such a bad shape, but sadly, it doesn’t take too long before the players begin to spot problems. To put it as simple as we can, it’s a “M for mature 17+” rated game that has multiplayer aspects even in single player mode. Nothing more, nothing less. No matter how many different ways we’ve tried to experience the game, it’s safe to say that this game is definitely designed for online multiplayer sessions.

The single player experience follows the story of The Punisher (of course), and the comic-style presentation looks cool. That doesn’t mean the story telling is good though; it wasn’t easy for us to understand what the game was trying to tell us. Fortunately(or unfortunately), miscommunication between the game and the player doesn’t matter much because every single level is pretty much the same. The player kill a certain number of bots within a certain amount of time. You kill, die, respawn then kill some more before you die again for another respawn. It’s basically a series of arenas with bots, like Unreal Tournament back in the day. It gets old rather quickly unless you’re a die-hard fan of the genre.

Talking about Unreal series, this game is based on the Unreal Engine 3, and it also utilizes the PhySX engine from nVidia. The graphics is sharp and very well detailed. But this isn’t going to really impress many gamers though due to the lack of good design. What’s the use of shiny, high quality textures if the enemies look like background thugs from 80’s movies? The main characters do look good, but you don’t get to even see them while you’re playing unless you fight them in the boss battles. And you hardly find any amazing in-game physics in the game. Yes, it’s a budget priced title, but I did want to see more from the UE3 and the PhySX engine. The audio is alright, and surround sound is a welcomed addition to such a genre where spotting your enemy by sound can be crucial. But for some reason the default audio settings were set to have loud sound effects and 50% BGM volume, making it hard to feel the dynamic sound until we tweaked a few audio volumes here and there. We came across a small audio bug where after the player dies in single player, the moment before you respawn, the BGM disapears and you hear nothing but silence. Weird.

The overall online gameplay experience wasn’t too bad though. You can use items you’ve unlocked in single player mode in your multiplayer sessions, and special skills called “mods” will also add another layer of strategy to the game. It might not be as deep into gameplay as some of the popular titles out today, but this kind of gameplay kind of takes me back, and reminds me of the good ol’ Unreal days.

Personally, I would actually prefer 60 frames per second with a bit lower texture quality or less polygon numbers, especially in online FPS multiplayer sesesions. Many gamers do own LCD HDTV that has about 6ms responsive time, and with 30 frames per second, it could make sensitive eyes a bit tiring. I also think that the cussing with F and S words between characters wasn’t worth the M rating from ESRB, but these are my personal preferences so it may not matter much to you.

So, will this game be for you? We can’t say for sure. I mean, I’m not a hardcore FPS gamer that beats every FPS out there, but when I play, I do stay on the top of the scoreboards in online matches. I couldn’t decide if The Punisher: No Mercy is a good buy or not for the price. This PSN title cost $10 which isn’t too expensive, but there are many good FPS games out there for PS3 already. I guess if you’re really a fan of the comic series, or if you played all the other good FPS games out there for the PS3 and are looking for more, this can be a fun title. But if you’re used to high quality FPS, this can be a turn off for your fragging needs.

Our Score: 7.5 /10

This old-fashioned FPS might bring some satisfactions to the hardcore FPS gamers, but that’s where it stops.

Capcom  sent us an interesting screenshots of their upcoming title (jointly developed with Marvel), Marvel vs Capcom 2. It’s a fight between Hulk and Zangief.

It’s a very interesting fight indeed.
Just in case you missed our news about this title, here are some of the key features of this game:

• Over 50 characters from the Marvel and Capcom Universes!
• 3 on 3 tag-team matches
• New online matching mode, including Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix’s “Quarter Match” mode ; enjoy the arcade experience from your console
• New optional visual filter smoothes out the game’s graphics
• Four button controls introduce new players to fighting games; compatible with the Mad Catz Street Fighter IV joysticks and Fight Pad
• Available for the first time via digital distribution on Xbox LIVE Arcade and the PlayStation Network

If we remember correctly, this was one of the hard-to-find, rare title that people paid around $100 just to get hands on PS2 version. But it’ll be re-released on a digital form (Xbox LIVE Arcade and PSN) so consider yourself lucky if you wanted but couldn’t afford one until now.

While I may not fully agree with the recent “casual games” terminology that has emerged as of late, I do acknowledge the fact that there are some games with widespread, general appeal. I am here to tell you that Droplitz is one such game. While it was merely one of many games available for hands-on play at the Atlus booth and most people were spending more time gazing upon their Trauma Center nurses more than any piece of software, I can guarantee that many iPhones will be spinning with leaky pipe pieces before too long.

The concept behind Droplitz is simple–there are several sources along the top of the screen, and several collectors along the bottom of the screen. Using various pipe pieces, the player must create connections between the two groups. After establishing a connection, a purple (red on the iPhone?) droplitz begins to traverse the path spawned by the player. It’s at this point that the real fun begins.

Connections between the top and bottom of the screen can be stacked in combos. As long as the purple droplitz has yet to reach the collector, you have time to create more links–and every link created brings along another purple droplitz to traverse the path. Making use of those windows of opportunity, massive combos can be chained up and these combos can be carried over with “Chain Reactions.” Each time all the purple droplitz have reached the bottom, all the pipes used evaporate, the speed increases slightly and new pipes drop in to repeat the process.

With a fitting soundtrack that suggests the degree of urgency necessary to really get into a puzzle game, the game will easily call you back time and time again to test your ability on a variety of difficulties and board sizes. Coming out on Xbox LIVE Arcade, PlayStation Network, Microsoft Windows and iPhone later this year, puzzle game enthusiasts owe it to themselves to give this one a second look.

Power-ups, "Infection" mode, and themed levels all add diversity to the mix.