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The new website for Bleach: Dark Souls has launched and with its launch comes a way to get exclusive password-protected content. You just have to sign up for Sega Pass! Don’t say that Sega never gave you anything! Let’s hope Sega Pass actually works, because I heard people are having issues with it.

They had the game available to play at Sega’s Gamers Day 2008. I asked the guy what the difference was between this one and the Japanese version. He said the American version has English voice actors and doesn’t have the ability to upload your own avatar on Wi-Fi, even though the site says you can make and use your own avatar. So who knows? I asked why they didn’t include Japanese voices and he said localization troubles with Viz. So they did try. It shouldn’t be an issue since fighting games rarely talk.

[image via Sega]
[Thanks for the tip Shadiwulf]

Tags: Bleach: Dark Souls, exclusive content, website
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A week of previews reveals plenty of juicy details on upcoming Capcom shooter Dark Void.

The company is set to reveal more on the game, as well as the rest of its lineup for the year, at its CAPTIVATE08 media event next week. All this week, 1UP is offering previews and a behind-the-scenes look at the game’s developer: Airtight Games, a studio formed from people who worked on the action flight game Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.

The feature includes plenty of screenshots, hands-on impressions, and lots of commentary on the making of the game, with the final piece getting posted today in the form of a video that will include gameplay footage and interviews with the team behind the game.

A description like this can’t help but get you excited for the game:

Dark Void’s “wow” moment comes about 30 seconds into the press demonstration. After the Capcom tour guide runs the main character through a simple outdoor environment, he heads over to the ledge of a mountaintop, jumps off, watches as his limbs flail for about 20 feet, and then switches on his rocket-pack and boosts forward like a superhero. Equal parts shaky camera angles and over-the-top skydiving animations, the scene does a great job of demonstrating what the game is about — getting your feet off the ground.

I love this whole in-the-air thing, especially the fact that it’s such a huge part of the gameplay — a press release for the game promised that “Dark Void will deliver a groundbreaking combination of fast-paced vertical combat mixed with mid-air and on-foot action.”

Jet packs and first-person shooting? I’m in.

Dark Void: A week of World Exclusive coverage on Capcom’s PS3/360/PC shooter [1UP]

See also:

• First Look at Dark Void’s Sci Fi Action
• Review: Why Xbox Originals Needs a Major Overhaul
• Capcom Takes on Legendary Anime Heroes in New Fighter

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While are many people with level 70’s out there especially since the TBC expansion has been out for more than a year already, I’m sure there are lots of people who don’t or at least just did and don’t exactly know what to do. I was sitting around in Shattrath City earlier when someone asked the exact thing in trade chat, hinting that there might be a lot of people out there like this guy who don’t know what to do when you first hit 70. So what exactly do you do? After allocating your last remaining talent point an buying your level 70 skills, these are things you may want to do when you hit 70.

1. If you’ve got the gold to spend, it would be really helpful to buy your flying mount right away. This could help in your mining and herbalism while also giving you access to places like Skettis, Ogri’la, Elemental Plateau and the Tempest Keep dungeons.

2. If you don’t have the gold to spend or just want more of it, then it’s really helpful to do the Shattered Sun Offensive daily quests. Ogri’la and Skettis requires you to have a flying mount to reach while the SSO dailies don’t except for the quest Intercepting the Mana Cells, which you do in Blade’s Edge Mountains.

3. Group quests in Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley normally have great quest rewards that could add to your starting gear as a fresh 70.

4. If you’re a clothie class and a tailor, investing time to farm the mats to make your Spellfire/Frozen Shadoweave/Primal Mooncloth sets.

5. As you’re looking to gear up, PvP epics are generally a nice way to go to get yourself ready for higher content. BG and Arena gear are great at plugging those holes until you get a good PvE equivalent from Karazhan or Heroics.

6. I’m assuming that as you’ve leveled up to 70, you must have achieved honored rep with at least some of these factions: Thrallmar/Honored Hold, Cenarion Expedition, Keepers of Time, Sha’tar, and Lower City. These factions have a decent starter pvp set which could also be great for PvE.

Druid

Feral Dragonhide Battlegear

Resto Kodohide Battlegear

Balance Wyrmhide Battlegear

Hunter Stalker’s Chain Battlegear

Mage Evoker’s Silk Battlegear

Paladin

Holy Crusader’s Ornamented Battlegear

Ret/Shockadin Crusader’s Scaled Battlegear

Priest

Shadow Satin Battlegear

Holy Mooncloth Battlegear

Rogue Opportunist’s Battlegear

Shaman

Enhancement Seer’s Linked Battlegear

Restoration Seer’s Ringmail Battlegear

Elemental Seer’s Mail Battlegear

Warlock Dreadweave Battlegear

Warrior Savage Plate Battlegear

7. Of course you still have to do dungeons so that you can get nice blues to get you ready for Karazhan and heroics. Don’t forget that while it’s no longer required that every member of a Karazhan raid have the master’s key, it’s still nice to do the quests to get it. The quest chain brings you to some dungeons to get some gear and also the quest rewards afor the chain are pretty good too.

8. Rejoice and be glad that you have a level 70! To all of you guys who just got to 70, congratulations and have fun!

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Hello, it’s Dylan Cuthbert from Q-Games, the company behind PixelJunk, and I’ve decided to write another blog entry to coincide with our upcoming release of the PixelJunk Monsters Soundtrack. Yes, you heard right! We are going to be the first people ever to release a soundtrack on the PSN store and it’s because we have been inundated with requests from all the fans out there! Here’s a sample track:

So today’s blog is going to be slightly different so I can simultaneously introduce you to Otograph, who made the music, and Kentaro Yoshida, who is studio director here at Q-Games and has worked hard as Producer on all the PixelJunk titles. Yoshida has a long history, having worked as an artist on all the Panzer Dragoon games for Sega, including “Orta” (for which he was art director) and he also worked for a few years at Sony Japan during which time I met with him and we made the duck-in-a-bath PS2 tech demo together. Anyway, today I am acting simply as translator because I have persuaded him to interview Otograph for the blog, so here we go:

Yoshida: To begin with please tell us a bit about yourselves, the genre of music you make and what you have been up to recently.

Otograph: We are creative unit consisting of two people, Iura Takashi and Oshima Sachiyo. We formed in 2004 and work to express ourselves in art as well as music, without limiting ourselves to any particular medium. We are often told our music doesn’t really fit in a particular genre, and that is probably because instead of specializing in one style, we place more importance on moments of touch and visual sensation to inspire us.

From 2007 we have been involved in a young modern artist group called “small-ness” and have been holding exhibitions here in Japan. We are planning to show this exhibition outside Japan in the near future. Also, we are considering holding our own independent Otograph exhibition.

Yoshida: It’s interesting but there seem to be many artists and musicians in Kyoto, why do you think this is so?

Otograph: Well the truth is both of us just happened to have been born here and we also went to University here in Kyoto. But we do think Kyoto is a very relaxed city that lets you concentrate on being creative and this might be one of the reasons. We also have a lot of artistic friends here. To use a phrase from Buddhism, Kyoto is a city with many threads of destiny. Of course, nowadays, no matter where are you are there are many ways to get your message across to the world. We plan to expand out of Kyoto at some point but wherever we go it will always be a very important place for us.

Yoshida: Ok, so name some of your all-time favorite games!

Otograph: Well, we like different games, Iura’s favorite game is Wizardry 1 thru 4 and Oshima’s favorite is the original Game&Watch Donkey Kong!

Yoshida: You’re making me nostalgic. Tell me your favorite musician.

Iura: There are so many musicians that I greatly respect so it is very difficult to choose a favorite. However, recently I have been listening to nothing but Wes Montgomery.
Oshima: Glenn Herbert Gould. The grain and quality of the sound is really beautiful.

Yoshida: Please tell us about the experience you had making music for Monsters.

Otograph: Well, first of all we were approached by Mr. Tominaga [Dylan side note: “Tomi” is the main director of PixelJunk Eden by the way] of Q-Games who would always came to our live music performances. We were interested in collaborating so we prepared a sample track (the raw material for “bye bye Monsters” which is on the soundtrack), and Q-Games signed us up. The rest is history!

Yoshida: I think this is the first time you’ve been involved in making music for a video game. So how was it?

Otograph: We progressed quickly with the music before the design for the game was finalized. After hearing the initial description of the type of music Q-Games was looking for, we were given a lot of freedom to create whatever we liked. Then, when the game started coming together we were nicely surprised at how the music, art and the player’s movement all fit together so strangely well.

Yoshida: What did you find difficult about working on Monsters?

Otograph: Well, for games, not only is there music, but there are also sound effects and we had to design both not to conflict with each other. For example, we tried to keep the rhythm sections and tones simple because of this. We also paid attention to giving the sound effects and music a sense of unity. The stages in Monsters are basically one screen so we attempted to use the music to expand the world beyond that for the player, and with just the music, our goal was to arouse the sensation in people to create puzzles.

Yoshida: So what is your opinion of the final product - PixelJunk Monsters?

Otograph: Well actually, we only got around to buying a PS3 just a few weeks ago and now we are totally addicted to Monsters! Of course we play-tested the game a number of times during development but the final tuning that went into all of the stages is exquisite! When we close our eyes we see those pink tower level meters and gems floating before us.

Yoshida: If you have the chance again, what genre or type of game would you like to be involved in?

Otograph: Well, PixelJunk Monsters was a very fresh but at the same time somehow nostalgic-feeling game, so next we’d love to work on a game style that has never been seen before and is totally new and different. Right now, we are very interested in puzzle games, or games that make you exercise your brain.

Yoshida: I think there are probably a lot of people in the West who heard your music for the first time when they played Monsters and I’m sure you have gained many fans. So finally what would you like to say to them?

Otograph: To everyone who listened to and enjoyed our music, we are hugely grateful to you all! We will endeavor to challenge ourselves more and more so keep cheering us on!

________________________
Well, that wraps up the Q&A. Thanks to Yoshida and Otograph for taking the time to give us some detailed and thoughtful answers…I enjoyed translating them. Remember everyone, the soundtrack is available this Thursday May 22 on the US store for just $2.99. Support us and we’ll support you!

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Quem leu o livro de George Orwell, escrito em 1948, vai fazer um paralelo interessante entre o título (também nome da obra) do post e a notícia que vou citar log [leia mais]

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[’Welcome to the GameSetWatch Comic’ is, once again, a weekly comic by Jonathan “Persona” Kim about the continuing adventures of our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games.]

Next up following his intensely deconstructed Metal Gear Sold vs. Mega Man opus, Persona takes on everyone’s favorite Street Fighter wall-crawler in his brand new ‘Welcome To The…’ strip. Yay.

[Jonathan “Persona” Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not working on cute low poly models, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

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Filed under: Features

Each week Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq, a column on legal issues as they relate to video games:

Based on the comments to the last few copyright-oriented columns, it seems like everyone wants to talk about fair use. In fact, fair use is one of the most misunderstood aspects of intellectual property law, even though it’s popular to play the “fair use” card in response to alleged infringement. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that there are different fair uses of copyrights and trademarks; still, other confusion stems from the fact that many of the tests for what qualifies as fair use are not terribly clear — but I’ll be clearing much of this up for you today … hopefully.

For the most part, trademark fair use is far simpler to understand than copyright fair use, so trademarks will be our first stop. Simply put, it is fair to use a trademark nominatively or for identification. That means if you re-sell a BMW, you are allowed to refer to it as a BMW. If you’re writing a book or game dialog, you are allowed to refer to brand names. You are also allowed to refer to brand names in comparative advertising too; for example: “Our console has more games than the PlayStation 3!” or “Our hardware is more powerful than the Nintendo Wii!” or “Our system is more fun than the Xbox360!” Now that I’ve angered all the fanboys, that’s pretty much the entire universe of trademark fair use. Copyright fair use, on the other hand, is far more complicated.

Continue reading Law of the Game on Joystiq: Used to be Fair

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I’m just a few hours fresh from a really looong Karazhan run my guild did and still a bit tired. You see we went all the way to Prince Malchezaar in one night, leaving just Illhoof, Netherspite and Nightbane standing. Everything was pretty smooth sailing until we got to Prince where we wiped about 4 or 5 times before finally killing him. We also had similar problems last week when we also wiped several times on him and it came to the point where I had to leave the raid. They found a replacement for me and killed him in two more attempts. But today I was there and I really was thinking that we weren’t going to get him since we were all tired. We thought that maybe it would have been best to go back the next day and try again when we’re all alert and at 100%. But we decided to give it one last go and say “what the heck”.

Back in my old guild the Thundercats where a lot of my current guild mates actually came from, we had some kind strange stroke of luck wherein we’d wipe several times on bosses and then just when we say it’s the last attempt for the night we down the boss. Call it culmination of a learning curve (for new bosses) or just plain luck wherein everything went our way but we’d get the job done somehow and many times it was by saying it was the last attempt.

So when I realized on our last attempt that we were getting Prince down to the last few percentages with just one person down, I knew we had the fight in the bag. When I saw Prince fall, I remembered the “last attempt” scenarios that the Thundercats used to have. I immediately gave a whisper to one of my closest guild mates who was a Thundercat himself, telling him that it was like the old days. All he said was “LOL” in agreement!

I know it’s crazy but if you’re guild is having a hard time downing a boss, maybe saying it’s the last attempt for the night would turn the tides just like for us.

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Filed under: PC, Meta (about Joystiq)

Hello once again, loyal reader. The team at Big Download has had an extremely busy second week with lots of features, downloads and news to report about on the PC gaming scene. It doesn’t get much bigger than the release of Penny Arcade Adventures (and yes we have the PC, Mac and Linux demo versions available to download) and of course Age of Conan was pretty huge as well. We are still trying to iron out a few more bugs on the site but we are pretty happy with what we’ve got so far. Let’s take a quick look at the highlights for our second official week:

Exclusive Features:

• PvP vs PvE: ArenaNet on Guild Wars: We chat with game designer Isaiah Cartwright on how they develop the PvP and PvE aspects of Guild Wars.
• Epic’s Mark Rein on Chair Entertainment purchase: We chat briefly with Epic Games’ VP on their acquisition of Chair Entertainment
• Age of Conan: The pros and cons: Should you buy Funcom’s new MMO? We look at the pluses and minuses of the fantasy game.
• Big Iron: Age of Conan’s demanding tribute: Our hardware columist takes a look at what kind of PC you will need to run Age of Conan
• MODverlous Monday: Our new weekly mod column takes a look at two Half-Life 2 mods
• Freeware Friday: Our weekly look at free games takes a look at the classic title N
• Casually Speaking: Orisinal and the Zen of design: Our casual game columist checks out an impressive casual game web site
• Talkin’ Smack: Online voice chat in kids’ games: An editorial on how game designers might deal with the tricky issue of game voice chat for children
• Guide to Team Fortress 2 Medic Achievements: Check out the final two parts of our extensive look at the various achievements for the Medic class in Valve’s multiplayer shooter: Part 5; Part 6

Continue reading The Best Of Big Download: May 16-22, 2008

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We all knew it was coming, but ryne11 and sent an e-mail over (thanks!!) confirming Tomy is working on a sequel for Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution. The July issue of Shonen Jump has a sneak preview of Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2 and like each yearly installment of Naruto fighting games there will be “more” playable characters. Choji and Kiba, who were absent in Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution, will join the new roster consisting of “tons of new characters”. No promises have been made, but the Sound Five are nearly guaranteed to be in this game too.

The other “new” element is even more destructible objects. Naruto Shippuden: Gekitou Ninja Tasien EX 2 placed crates with explosive tags and chakra sealing spaces in the arenas. Since the work is already done Eighting is likely to add similar content to Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2.

Speaking of the Naruto Shippuden: Geiktou Ninja Taisen branch, Tomy hasn’t given any indication of Naruto Shippuden: Geiktou Ninja Taisen 3, but like Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2 you know it’s coming. Perhaps, after Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2 arrives in North America this fall.

Images courtesy of Tomy.

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