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 Aside from Capcom's own JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I can't think of a fighting game series with a more cracked-out cast than Darkstalkers. Sadly, besides having a few characters present in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, this funky bunch has been warming the bench for around a decade now. Much to the elation of hardcore fighting fans everywhere, Capcom's decided to put them back into play with Darkstalkers Resurrection, an HD re-release handled by Iron Galaxy Studios, the same folks who did such a fine job with Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online and Marvel vs. Capcom Origins.

Similar to the latter, Darkstalkers Resurrection delivers not one, but two
games in one package: Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge and Darkstalkers 3. Having already done a bang-up job on three other Capcom classics, Iron Galaxy has this down to a science at this point. The menus, options, and presentation are all in line with their past works, which is a very good thing.


In a lot of ways, these remakes are more fully featured and functional than Capcom's current flagship fighters. Sure, the games are old and the visuals are dated, but everything else is aces. GGPO netcode is always a plus, as is the sequential button configuration screen. You get full replay functionality, with the ability to save and watch replays with friends online (including chat support so you can talk it over), and the ability to upload matches directly to your personal Youtube account. Training mode is also completely decked out, with dummy recording and even save states so you can efficiently prepare for any situation you might face. Then there are 8-player lobbies, spectator mode, online tournament support... when's Capcom gonna start incorporating all this into their main games again?

That's a lot of good news for the nuts who live and die by fighting games, but Iron Galaxy wants to teach newbies the ropes while they're at it. I mean real
teaching, not just combo trials. Every character gets a five-part detailed tutorial explaining effective move applications, overall strategies, and practical combos. The only other game I've seen do this is Skullgirls, and in my opinion, this needs to become a standard practice if fighting games are going to continue to grow. Mashing buttons and getting crushed only stays fun for so long after all.


As for the games themselves, they're both straight ports of the arcade versions. When Darkstalkers hit the scene, it established many new mechanics that would go onto become mainstays of Capcom's fighters. Zany as it looks, it's still quite tame compared to the non-stop bug-out that is Marvel vs. Capcom, but it's still distinct enough from Street Fighter to stand on its own. With any luck, this package will make a new set of fans fall in love with Demitri, Talbain, Jedah, and company, hopefully paving the way for a true Darkstalkers sequel in the process. Hey, a man can dream, can't he?

Darkstalkers Resurrection will be available March 12th on PSN for $14.99, and the day after on XBLA.

At least NIS America isn't making us wait that long.
When I first saw Time and Eternity in action, I admit that I first thought, "These devs played Dragon's Lair and finally figured out how to bring good animation to a full environment."  The idea of using traditional styles of animation in games has been around for years now, but up until now those games have only ended up cel-shaded experiences… until now.

Not much information was given for the story, but here's what we know so far. The marriage of a knight and his would-be princess is interrupted by some kind of assassin squad, where the knight is mortally wounded. His princess, Toki, soon thereafter finds herself with two distinct personalities: her normal red-headed self and a blonde alter-ego, Towa.  Each of them has a unique set of skills at her disposal, with Toki preferring a long-range battle strategy with a rifle and Towa becoming the classic hand-to-hand berzerker-type. Together—'cuz hey, they're sharing a body already—they set out to do… something. Maybe save the hubby. I dunno, it wasn't clear.



TaE is a fully-animated RPG, and when I say "fully animated" I genuinely mean that every cel of character animation is done by hand. The landscapes are in 3D, but everyone from Toki/Towa to the baddies littered throughout are everything expected from a medieval-looking animé. It's a unique choice of presentation I admit, with characters looking like cutouts taped to the screen instead of involved in the game itself. It's a striking visual style, unlike anything I've seen (since Don Bluth's masterpieces in the 1980s).

Battles are almost traditional JRPG fare. Gone are the standard menu systems, since these are active battles instead of passive fare. The left stick can charge an enemy, jump back to avoid close-range attacks, or jump to either side to avoid incoming fire. SP/Magic Points are charged up throughout a battle so special attacks can be unleashed, which gives every fight a mix of strategic RPG and traditional fighting game vibe. It's a mix with one additional twist: Every time your princess levels up, she turns into the other personality. Without one item called the "Pepper" (bringing to mind Launch, the alternating sweetheart/gun-toting lunatic from the Dragonball
universe), a character can't swap between Toki and Towa, but beyond the name we don't know how that works yet.


The last bit of info we do know is when to expect Time and Eternity to see store shelves, and that's this summer in both a physical and digital release. Then we just might find out if a fiery redhead's gun is best, or if blondes do indeed have more fun (with knives, of course).

 Throughout DmC: Devil May Cry, I felt like Vergil bossed me around a bit too much. I suppose that's why I'm not surprised that Dante is getting a little revenge on his brother in the form of lots of time in Limbo. Vergil's Downfall picks up where the main game ends, but with Vergil's own brand of swordplay, you might have to learn how to walk all over again.

At least I did. I got comfortable with the way Rebellion and Dante's dual pistols, Ebony and Ivory, felt. Vergil's ranged attack seemingly does a bit more damage than Dante's pistols, but even pounding out a standard combo encouraged a more deliberate, measured approach.

That's fitting of Vergil's character, as he's now trapped in Limbo by a very angry Dante. Unhappy that Vergil would use the humans to his own end, Dante sends Vergil to many of the locales you've seen in the main game, but with plenty of paths and combat scenarios reworked to keep things from getting boring.
Longtime fans of the series will be pleased to find that many of Vergil's combat maneuvers are pulled straight from Devil May Cry 3, including the Slash Dimension, Air Trick, Summoned Swords, and a host of other new abilities. What's more, Vergil can activate Devil Trigger to summon a shadow of himself to aid in combat.

I'm relatively new to the series thanks to the HD collection and the latest offering from Ninja Theory, but thinking back and recalling the muscle memory of my favorite combinations got me through the trials on hand. I pulled enemies to me and launched them into the air with relative ease.


As the combat quickened, I had to wrestle with Vergil's pace and weapons. Still, that satisfying rhythm that pervades through DmC came back to me in flashes and left me wanting more. If Capcom can expand on the existing combat systems while throwing curves at cocky SSS
rank players, Vergil's Downfall will be the kind of DLC we like.
What's more, players who preordered at GameStop get this expansion for free, meaning you should hold onto your disc. I was stopped short of continuing to the second mission, and what I played was short on narrative, but keeping things secret means I don't get anything spoiled prematurely either.

With every level complete with hidden collectibles and DmC's scaling difficulties, Vergil's Downfall appears set to expand on the wicked sense of speed and vicious combat established in Ninja Theory's reboot. The DLC pack will arrive on Xbox 360 and PS3 for 720MSP or $8.99 later this month.

 When I was much younger, one of the most magical things was seeing more and more subtleties of real life show up in the virtual ones I was living. To me, that was always a clear indicator that gaming was moving forward. So when The Sims came out while I was in college, it completely enthralled me. I was hopeless against its power.

It was the ultimate expression of art imitating life, an attempt to make the act of living and growing into a game. At a certain point, though, the expansions started to feel gimmicky to me—incremental improvements with a few new items thrown in simply wasn't enough to keep me coming back. Having gotten my few hundred hours of enjoyment from it, I decided to move on, and besides a brief stint with The Sims 2, I never really felt like coming back.



Sims 3: University Life may actually change that for me. The ninth expansion for The Sims 3 is far more than a different backdrop with a few new interactive doodads to toy with. In fact, it's almost an entirely new game. The minute-to-minute gameplay is just what you've come to expect, but it now sits within a framework of new systems and mechanics that make it feel as different from the core game as college life feels from everything that comes after.

With so much crammed in, it's hard to know where to start, but the main focuses of University Life are the same as those of any real-world college experience: to enrich your life and your person through education and socialization. Once enrolled, you get to pick from one of six different majors, at which point you receive a unique, interactive item to complement it. Using these is one of many ways to improve your academic performance, which appears as a new meter on the lower right of the screen. Not only does this move you along your path to a degree, but depending on the item, it can have different effects on your needs as well as certain skills. In this way, what you major in doesn't only affect the degree you'll have, but what kind of person you'll be.

Of course, who you are isn't only about what you do, but who you do it with. To this end, University Life introduces a new mechanic called social circles. The social landscape is split up between nerds, jocks, and rebels, with each having distinct hangouts, likes, and dislikes. It's not as segregated as it sounds, though. The different groups don't have any predisposed attitudes towards one another, and you can gain influence with all three without any negative impacts. Just as in real life, some people will choose to stick with one clique, while others will be happy to hang with everyone.



As you rise through the social ranks, whole new conversation options and interactions start to open up. If you aren't sure how to go about getting in with each distinct crowd, just pull out your smartphone, another new gameplay mechanic. Using your phone, you can check your status with each social circle, find out what impresses each the most, and a whole lot more. Send text messages of all kinds from naughty to nice, take and send pictures, or send an anonymous admirer text to that special someone. Every time you use your smartphone, it levels the new social networking skill, allowing you to create blogs and gain followers to aid you in a variety of ways. You can even monetize your blog or have it bought out by a big corporation.

In real life, the choices you make leading up to college impact your academic career, which then affects your post-collegiate life in turn. The same concepts apply in University Life. High school grades, work experience, and aptitude test scores all impact how many credits you'll need to earn a degree, as well as your academic performance. Completing your education will result in a better chance at scoring jobs in related fields, better base pay, and more frequent promotions, with your grades impacting the severity of each bonus. Performing well enough socially can result in new career opportunities as well, as several entirely new careers that can only be accessed by having notoriety within certain social circles have been added. Finally, to represent the way the college experience fundamentally changes you, getting a degree and maxing out your social influence each net you an additional trait slot.

I've already covered a lot, but truthfully, it's just the tip of the iceberg that is University Life. Study groups, herbal supplements, comic shops, bowling alley's, keggers, streakers, protests, parties, and a slew of other activities all await you. So go ahead. Be a nerd who up and joins a fraternity, then plants a “heat of the moment” kiss on the girl you've been crushing on without any notice just to see if she's into you. After all, it's your virtual life, and you're only young once.

A whole new world?
I've played quite a few MMOs in my time, but most of them only in passing. Of the many I've sampled, only a scarce few have managed to hold my attention for more than a month or two. World of Warcraft wasn't one of them. Final Fantasy XI, however, was. I come from a background of Everquest, the first MMO to truly garner wildfire success and one that had a very different philosophy than the games of today. They were rough, open worlds, offering little in the way of guidance or respite. WoW more or less turned the entire genre into a guided tour at a theme park, but FFXI made some concessions to accessibility without neutering the experience, which is why I came to love it.

So it was with a heavy heart that I read all the nasty feedback on FFXIV when it launched in 2010. From all that I've heard, it was more or less a broken game: Slow, criminally boring, and at times, simply uncontrollable. Unwilling to give up on a numbered entry in what is still, according to Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida, the publisher's most important global franchise, an entirely new team was brought on to completely reforge the FFXIV experience. The result is Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, and so far, it look quite promising.



It would almost be easier to name the parts of FFXIV that haven't been redone from the ground up for A Realm Reborn (ARR). The graphics engine, battle system, server structure, map system, and user interface are all new for starters, meaning that in a very real way, ARR is an entirely new game. Combat is much faster than before, as evidenced by multiple side-by-side videos shown to me at my recent preview. Looking at how long it took to down a single mob before, I can only imagine how painful the grind in the original FFXIV must have gotten. Cooldown timers have also been added to the ability bar, in line with current MMO standards.

In general, that's what most of this top-to-bottom rework seems to be about: retaining the unique flavor of  a Final Fantasy MMO, while getting the baseline experience to the caliber that fans of the genre have come to expect. An easier-to-read map, the ability to jump, a more helpful quest-tracking interface, a tool to find parties seamlessly, public quests, raids—all of that is here, along with a complete re-imagining of nearly every zone in the game. Granted, none of this breaks the MMO mold, but it represents a massive effort on Sqeenix's part to make FFXIV a viable title.

And I'm really excited about that, because from what I played of the early game, it really does nail the elements I enjoyed about XI. It feels like a world you can get lost in, as opposed to a digital playground, and while it bears clear fantasy influence, it has a mythology and aesthetic that keep it from being just another universe about elves, orcs, and goblins. It's a game where you can't solo to max level in a week or a couple of days if you know where to go. You have to quest, you have to form a group, and you have to experience the content and allow yourself to be immersed. At least, that's how it felt from the first few hours. From adorable mail moogles to visually lavish, familiar-looking spells, it feels like an MMO made for people who grew up playing Final Fantasy IV and VI instead of X and X-2.



It's also worth noting that plans for a PS3 version are quite alive, and console players will be able to quest alongside their PC brethren on the very same servers at launch
. A lot of thought has gone into crafting an interface that works on gamepad, though I wasn't able to try it out for myself. PC still seems like the ideal way to play ARR, but at least the many console fans Square has will finally be able to have the experience too.
In talking to him, Yoshida-san clearly has a great deal of confidence in what his team is putting forth, a confidence backed by what appears to be genuine enthusiasm and love for the franchise. When asked about the decision to go with a subscription-based model instead of free-to-play, his reasoning was simply a business one. Sustaining a free-to-play model requires lots of microtransactions, and thus, tons of extra content to provide on a consistent basis. He just doesn't feel it will offer the kind of reliable revenue, and hence, the sustainability of a subscription-based system, in which you only need maintain a certain number of players to be guaranteed success, was the choice his team made. It's a bold statement given that even a big dev like Bioware had to give up the ghost on Star Wars: The Old Republic and titans like World of Warcraft continue to bleed users.

For my part, I think there's still a place for subscription models, even if only as a way to keep the player base invested and playing. People who pay $12.99 per month (ARR's standard fee) to be in the world are going to log on regularly, and will tend to treat the game and its players more respectfully than if it were a free ride. And as far as I'm concerned, if you can justify paying for WoW or SWTOR before it went FTP, I don't see why you can't justify paying for ARR. Whether it will have the breadth of content to make it worthwhile in the long run is impossible to tell from a few hours. But what I can say is that it's a beautiful world that I found immediately more interesting to inhabit than Azeroth, and with closely guarded optimism, I'm looking forward to returning to it.

 I was slightly skeptical about Resident Evil: Revelations for the 3DS handheld when the high review scores came in, even the 4.5 stars in GR's review. But after purchasing a copy of my own, I understand the praises for what is the best Resident Evil title since Resident Evil 4 (some would argue even further back than that). Likewise, I was slightly skeptical when I crept over to the station with the Xbox 360 port of this 3DS handheld title at a Capcom preview event. But after sitting down with the game for 20 minutes, my lingering doubts were justifiably shot in the face like the monsters that they are.



As you might suspect, the major gameplay elements of the original title have not been changed - not even the Gemini scanner sequences - though the graphics have made an incredible leap forward. From the small screen of the 3DS, the environments and character models have expanded to full 720p HD resolution. It essentially looks like a genuine main entry in the series, as if no one knew that it was missing and was found by surprise.

Most of the alterations are minor but will be significant for fans of the original title. The Hell difficulty mode, the hardest of them all, has been swapped with Infernal, which just by the sound of it is even more difficult. Enemies won't just have more health points and deal more damage, but they will come scrambling out at every corner and overwhelm you with numbers. Even if you succeed to dispatch them, your ammo will likely be drained. Of course, this is exactly the kind of challenge that Resident Evil experts love.



Raid mode has also been transferred with upgrades. There are new customized options for parts, new costumes for the primary cast, and the addition of new characters (Hunk is the only one to be revealed so far). As usual, you and a partner can go through a stage gathering better equipment, earn experience to level up for improved stats, and purchase new parts using BP earned by completing mission. Playing through the regular campaign eventually unlocks new stages for Raid Mode, notably more difficult stages where more BP and EXP can be earned.

Resident Evil: Revelations will arrive on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U, and PC for $49.99 on May 21. Minor DLC has been planned, but there will be no on-disc DLC. (The rep said that they learned their lesson.)

 While I know the opinion won't be popular, I believe the Assassin's Creed series boasts quite possibly the most ambitious narrative in our medium. It's not merely a sandbox stealth game, but a work of historical science fiction whose many key events and characters entwine intimately with those which have shaped our world over the last millennium. Whether you like what it does or not, it's clear that its creators see video games as an ideal place to tell grand, serialized stories. That very same belief is the driving force behind The Tyranny of King Washington, the soon to be released DLC add-on for Assassin's Creed III.

It's difficult to explain the concept behind King Washington without ruining its plot or giving away bits of Assassin's Creed III, but I'll give it the old college try. Connor awakes from a deep slumber to discover a world turned upside-down. In fact, Connor isn't even called by his adopted name anymore, but by his Native American one, Ratonhnhaké:ton. Without spoiling anything, all I'll say is that it plays out much like a lucid dream. Connor seems to remember his life as Connor, including all the events of AC3, but the people and circumstances surrounding him make it quite clear that this isn't the world or life he remembers.



In this world, George Washington has comes to obtain the Apple of Eden, and with it, absolute power. As we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and even Washington proves vulnerable to its allure—in fact, it's driven him stark raving mad. Innocent people are being corralled into churches and burned alive by the dozens to be made examples of, while rebellions are rising up as the people look for a way to end his nightmarish reign. One such person, someone dear to Ratonhnhaké:ton, has brashly attempted to steal the apple from the self-proclaimed King Washington, who in return looks to seek revenge on the entirety of the Native American people. No sooner than you've awoken, you and your newfound ally begin desperately scrambling to warn your village of the coming attack while fighting off Washington's forces.

Things happen very quickly in Tyranny, especially when compared to the core game. You run breathlessly from set piece to set piece, fighting packs of soldiers at a time. This heightened pace is for the best, seeing as the story is split into three two-and-a-half-hour episodes, each of which will be released separately. The director admitted that he was inspired by the TV show Lost
, whose cliffhanger endings and mind-bending mythology seemed like a perfect fit for Assassin's Creed. Having been a fan of the show, I can see the comparison.
Tyranny is overflowing with mysteries, and like Lost
, the real answers only come to those who look hard enough. Each episode has three “lucid dream artifacts," which once found, unlock a short video giving you a glimpse into what this alternate world is, and how you've arrived in it. Unlock all three videos and you should be able to piece together what's really happened.


Each new episode also introduces an entirely new ability for Ratonhnhaké:ton that steps beyond anything we've seen in Assassin's Creed before. By ingesting tea made from the boughs of the sacred red willow tree, you set out on a sky journey, during which you gain the spiritual power of one of three animals. The first is the wolf, who allows you to summon wolf allies in combat and turn invisible at the touch of a button. The next is the eagle, who grants you the ability to transform into, well, an eagle
 and soar to distant points, assassinating an enemy upon arrival. The last is the bear, who grants you the strength to overwhelm your enemies with area effect stun attacks. Having these powers really changes the overall feel of the gameplay, further nailing home the sense that this world is wildly different than the one Connor came from.
Each episode will cost $9.99 individually, while the season pass costs $29.99 and features all three episodes as well as the already released multiplayer map pack, a collection of all the vendor exclusive pre-order bonuses, and a digital copy of the new score recorded for the add-on. Be sure to look out for our review of Episode 1: The Infamy shortly after it releases on February 19th, then look for episodes two and three on March 19th and April 23rd respectively.