Freedom Wars trailer shows PS Vita monster battles story

Freedom Wars is a multiplayer PlayStation Vita action combat game for up to eight players. And it comes with a story, according to a new trailer, released today.

The monster-battling game begins with its central characters sentenced to a million years incarceration and then proceeds to show heroes battling against a dangerous foe and his gigantic minions. Developed by Sony's Japan Studio along with Shift and Dimps, Freedom Wars was released in Japan last week and is coming to the U.S. later this year.

"My vision was to develop a PS Vita game that took advantage of the handheld system's unique features, enabling gamers to come together via ad-hoc and Wi-Fi to overcome terrifying enemies," said Japan Studio producer Junichi Yoshizawa. "PlayStation has a storied legacy of creating innovative experiences and our collective goal was to create a Vita game that brought gamers together in a socially connected, location-based, co-op experience."

Source: Polygon

The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us listed by Amazon for PS4, Xbox One in fall

Amazon is listing release dates in October and November for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version of Telltale Games' episodic series' The Walking Dead Season One, Season Two and The Wolf Among Us.

According to the listing for The Walking Dead: Game of the Year Edition — which includes the 2012 award-winning original season as well as the 400 Days DLC — and the listing for The Walking Dead Season Two, both are slated to hit on Oct. 14 for $29.99. The latter season, which debuted in Dec. 2013, still has two unreleased episodes to go in its five-episode run.

Amazon's listing for The Wolf Among Us, which launched last October and is slated to release its final episode very soon, pegs Nov. 18 as the $29.99 compilation's release date on PS4 and Xbox One, as well as on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

In May, Telltale announced that all three series would be coming to PS4 and Xbox One this year, though no specific release dates were given at the time. All three series are available to download for PS3, PS Vita, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and iOS, with The Walking Dead's first season also available at retail for PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

Polygon has reached out to Telltale to clarify these dates and will share further information.

Source: Polygon

Pokémon's own orchestral concert tour kicks off this summer

The Pokemon franchise is getting its own live concert tour featuring orchestral arrangements of well-known tracks from the games, according to announcement on the official Pokemon website.

Pokemon: Symphonic Evolutions will showcase musical arrangements of songs spanning the series' 18-year history. The tour will kick off in Washington, DC at the Warner Theater on Friday, Aug. 15, the evening before the city hosts the two-day 2014 Pokemon World Championships.

The second concert will take place in Philadelphia on Sept. 19 at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, with following concerts' dates and locations to be announced soon.

Check out our recent report on The Pokemon Company — the corporation that handles all Pokemon marketing and licensing — and what it means to the long-standing Nintendo franchise.

Source: Polygon

Blippar looks to bring augmented reality games to Google Glass

Game developers have experimented with augmented reality titles on a variety of camera-enabled platforms, including handhelds like the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita as well as mobile phones running Android and iOS. A company called Blippar is working on the next step toward the kind of augmented reality experiences we've seen in the movies: gaming with a camera on your face — namely, Google Glass.

Blippar, which was founded in 2011, is an augmented reality firm that has worked with clients such as Kraft, Coca-Cola and Justin Bieber to produce marketing tied to the physical world. Ambarish Mitra, Blippar's founder and CEO, told Polygon in a recent interview that the company boasts the "fastest image recognition platform" in the world, capable of picking up "billions of images" in under 300 milliseconds with a mobile app that weighs in at less than 6 MB.

The philosophy behind Blippar, said Mitra, is that while "we are in the middle of a digital revolution and everything's going digital," the physical world remains relevant and "will always be relevant." He added that "bridging the physical with digital will drive better relevance, because you have an element of context.

"we will create a browser of the physical world"

"So we built Blippar with the whole ambition that we will create a browser of the physical world, and anything you look at, you get either utility information out of it or you get entertainment out of it," Mitra continued.

Blippar's existing technology is available in apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The company recently began working with Google Glass: In February, Blippar was able to get its image recognition engine up and running on the platform, and now the company has been able to make it interactive.

Mitra called Glass a "very natural extension of [Blippar's] being," and a "validation of AR." But according to Mitra, Google has yet to fulfill the promise of Glass that it presented when it unveiled the first prototype at Google I/O 2012. The Glass games that Google initially showed off weren't really AR experiences in that they "had nothing to do with the physical environment." Blippar is taking advantage of a variety of Glass' hardware capabilities.

We tried an early tech demo that gave us an idea of how far Blippar's multifaceted technology is. Mitra taped a poster-size version of the image above to the wall, and then we put on Google Glass. Within a few moments, the device's camera recognized the image, and rocks began flying at our face. Our task was to avoid the rocks by moving our head. The rocks were coming at us in three dimensions, so we had to time our dodges well; it was as if we were evading bullets in Superhot.

The game was running on an Android phone and was being displayed on Glass via Bluetooth, so there was a lag between our movements and the in-game effects; Mitra attributed that to the older Android phone being used and the wireless connection. The frame rate was crawling, too, but we were able to get an idea of what's possible with Blippar's technology. And according to Mitra, the rock game is intended merely as a proof of concept for developers.

"you can have multiplayer gaming just by looking at things"

"This is proving that you can actually even start thinking about building games on Glass which are three-dimensional in nature," said Mitra. Blippar plans to release a software development kit for augmented reality Glass games in July.

According to Mitra, Blippar's technology is platform- and hardware-agnostic; even if Glass doesn't succeed as a commercial product, Mitra believes that augmented reality will continue forward. And the company has high hopes for interactive augmented reality experiences, such as the technology's power to enhance physical toys. Mitra spoke of playing with Lego minifigures, which remain popular today even though they're static pieces of plastic.

"That very character can come to life and start shooting lasers at other characters," said Mitra of Lego.
"And you can have multiplayer gaming just by looking at things," he continued. "And this is where we believe a lot of gaming companies will start thinking beyond the boundaries of a disc or just a shell of a computer."

Source: Polygon

New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game coming to 3DS this summer

A new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game based on the upcoming Michael Bay-produced film is coming to Nintendo 3DS later this summer, publisher Activision announced today.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a third-person hack-and-slash action game set in the TMNT version of New York City, where a mutant, robotic army created by mad genius Baxter Stockman and the Foot Clan's shadow army have teamed up to ransack the city. Players will be able to swap through the game's four heroes —  Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello — on the fly, utilizing each turtle's unique abilities for a variety of different situations.

As players prowl the streets and sewers taking down enemies, they will level up the turtles' power, earn new abilities, bolster stats and collect raw materials to craft more powerful weapons.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will arrive "just in time" for Bay's film, which launches in theaters worldwide on Aug. 8. The game is in development with Magic Pockets, the same studio behind the Oct. 2013 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game based on Nickelodeon's TV show. The game was part of a multi-year deal between Activision and Nickelodeon for the TMNT franchise's development rights.

One of the more recent TMNT game, Red Fly Studio's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, was received poorly for being broken at launch.

Source: Polygon

FIFA 15 video shows off upgraded weather effects, player models and more

FIFA 15's latest developer diary, released today by publisher Electronic Arts, focuses on the graphical upgrades that developer EA Canada is making in this year's game.

Chief among those improvements is in the player models, with head scans providing higher detail in faces and new animation rigs allowing for more lifelike movement. Uniforms will flutter in the breeze and get dirty over time. Items on the field will also move more realistically — players will no longer ghost through the corner flag, and the goal will move according to how the ball hits it.

The pitch itself will degrade over the course of a match, as footprints and slide tackles leave their mark on the grass. In rainy games, you'll see sprays of water as appropriate. And LED boards throughout stadiums will now animate in real time.

The aforementioned upgrades apply to the current-generation version of FIFA 15, which will be released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One in standard and Ultimate editions. The game will also be available on Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii and Xbox 360. All versions are set for release Sept. 26.

For more on FIFA 15, check out our comprehensive coverage from E3.

Source: Polygon

Ouya now selling 12-month pass to 800 games for $59.99

Ouya launched a limited deal today, the All-Access Pass, which gives customers 12 months' worth of access to almost all games on the platform for $59.99.

According to its listing on the Ouya Shop, the All-Access Pass covers more than 800 Ouya games and represents a value over $2,000. The pass is not an annual subscription — the $59.99 price is a nonrefundable one-time payment. Once a customer buys it and redeems the code, relevant content in the Shop will show up at the price of $0.00.

Ouya notes that the offer applies only to purchases under $30 of items such as full-game unlocks and add-on content; the pass does not cover "in-game purchases that enhance gameplay" or content that can be bought more than once, such as power-ups or extra lives. And Ouya reserves the right to disqualify any game or customer that the company feels "is abusing the system during the duration of this program."

In addition, the Ouya Shop page for the All-Access Pass refers to it as being available for a limited time and in a limited quantity. In an email to Ouya developers that was obtained by Gamasutra, Ouya called the All-Access Pass a "new program we're about to test" and said the offer's availability would be a "very limited test." The company also told developers that there will be "no change" to the way they get paid; if an All-Access customer "buys" a free game, the developer will still receive its standard revenue from Ouya — 70 percent of the game's full cost.

We've reached out to Ouya for more details on the All-Access Pass, and will update this article with any information we receive. For more on the Android-based micro-console, check out our interview with Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman from E3 2014.

Update: Reached for comment, an Ouya representative sent the following statement to Polygon: "Ouya All-Access is a pilot subscription program we're offering to new and existing Ouya users for a limited time only. For the price of one console game, players receive access to the entire Ouya catalog of more than 800 titles, for a full year. It's just one of many things we're exploring to give players the best value, and developers the best visibility. Results of this test will dictate if/how we proceed with an official subscription program."

Source: Polygon