LAIR

An obvious pick for a list such as this one, Lair is forever going to hold the dubious crown of being one of the most bitter disappointments in gaming. Factor 5’s excellent track record and promising pre-launch showings suggested that Lair was going to be a huge early PS3 hit, but upon its release, the game turned out to be sort of a broken mess, thanks in large part to its frustrating motion-heavy controls. Even now, close to two decades later, it’s hard to get over the disappointment that was Lair.

Haze

Haze should have had it all. It was developed by the team behind TimeSplitters, backed by a large publisher in Ubisoft and one of the key exclusives for the PlayStation 3. Lo and behold, this epic single-player shooter was simply a mess of glitches, bland visuals, terrible writing, boring gameplay, dumb AI, and so on. It’s a shame too because the premise was genuinely interesting.

Sqaure Enix has announced two new map packs for their newly released game Mindjack (which we did not like much). Both the DLCs consist of three new maps for the multiplayer mode, and both of them will be available for 560 Microsoft Points and $7.00 on Xbox Live and PSN respectively.

The first map pack is already out, and consists of the following maps-

• Airport Shootout: Defend yourself against a raid of Nerkas soldiers coming from every direction at the San Mira Airport.
• Construction Carnage: Take cover behind make-shift barricades to battle against countless waves of enemies.
• Container Maze: Survive through a maze of shipping containers and snipers waiting behind every corner.

The second map pack, which will be out on March 8, will consist the following maps:

• Neon Nightmare: Encounter waves of soldiers and enemies in a fierce battle at an old downtown alley.
• Look Up, Look Down: Defend yourself from enemies attacking you from every direction on a vertical battlefield.
• Truth at Nerkas HQ: Fight your way through a labyrinth of structures inside Nerkas Laboratories. Utilize its hidden corners to gain the most advantageous position against your enemies.

Stay tuned to GB for more info.

“You’re my mind slave now!”

Now there is one single-player campaign that you can choose to leave open for people to join on either your side or the enemies side, or close it so no one can join.  Closed or open you can forget about the pause button, that is a thing of the passed apparently which striked me as being rather odd even during a closed single-player session.  Right from the menu it is as simple as that with two modes available ‘Host Portal’ or ‘Hack Portal’.  Host Portal which you control the main characters and you can have up to five other people join on your side as well as the enemy side.  Hack Portal is where you hack into another persons game and join either then or the enemy depending on how balanced the current player situation is, for example you will become the enemy if you enter a room where it is only the Host player playing.  You can even custom search for a game but with few options to choose from.  A full room of players makes it almost like a team death-match but in reality it is the enemy trying to prevent the good guys advance in the story which can be rather annoying if you have not beaten the game yet.

You can even MindJack machines.

With the ability to have co-op in the game you would think they would make it easier to invite a friend to just play alongside you as you play the story killing AI, but it’s not that simple.  Feel Plus feels that as long as your friends are in the game it is co-op I suppose, so your friend might or might not be fighting along side of you when they hack into your game.  You can however setup Private Slots, change the clothing of the main characters and of course turn the ‘Hacker Limit'(open or closed game) on and off, but annoyingly makes you leave the game session to do so.  Searching for a custom match when using the ‘Hack Portal’ lets you choose the general level of the persons game you’re hacking into as well as the ‘Area’ and ‘Mode’ (Story or Scene Selection).

You will level up in the game by doing thing like killing people and you gain more XP for killing enemies different ways, with close combat kills giving you the most experience.  You also gain XP from making an enemy your ‘Mind Slave’ as you will level from 1 to 50 if I am not mistaken.  As you level up you will gain new plug-ins to use, which are basically like perks.  There are two types of plug-ins which are ‘Rules’ and ‘Arts’, while there are only five Rules to unlock, their are twenty Arts you unlock as you progress through rank.  For example Rules can be ‘Glide Time’ making the difficulty level easier and ‘Arbitrary Time’ which shuffles the Blue and Red teams at the end of each battle.  You may choose Arts such as ‘Stone Body which increases physical strength by 10% or ‘Effortless Profit’ which gives you XP automatically while you are in ‘Wander Mode’ (choosing a mind to hack) during game.  One Rule can be chosen while two Arts may be equipped and you don’t forget about this as it can make a big difference in gameplay even if you are playing by yourself.

Gotcha bitch!

The gameplay is actually one good thing about the game that I did not expect, as there is a cover system which you can blind-fire from and tapping the sprint button (A/X) lets you dodge away quickly as well as letting you grab cover in unique ways.  The game quite frankly reminds me of a combination of Gears of War and Resident Evil, just no zombies and you can walk and aim simultaneously.  You can grab a damaged enemy and use them as a meat shield until they either die or you kick them away and shoot which was weird that an execution button while holding an enemy.  Oddly each chapter starts you off with a pistol and a pistol only, not that it’s hard to acquire another weapon, which there is not much to choose from.  The biggest disappointment in this game were the boss battles as some of them left me feeling fucking retarded afterwords when in actuality you never really fight the bosses as they are there just for show kind of.  Don’t even bother shooting them or attacking them as all that needs to be done is fight off the re-spawning soldiers you have been fighting throughout the whole game and then the boss usually just spontaneously combusts for some unknown reason.

MindJack is not a bad game it just has a few flaws and is far from what you would expect from a third-person shooter these days.  The gameplay mechanics are all there if you don’t mind taking a few bullets while clearly behind cover.  It is kind of fun but the main problem is the story of the game, if there is one there, I would appreciate it if someone could e-mail me it cause I had no idea what was going on.  The thing is I have played games where the story is not the main center point of the game and they were great games but MindJack lacks a little more than story.  Other than that the actual concept of the game is very cool in my opinion and I even got a chance to interview the developer of the game, with his handy Japanese translator as I was really looking forward to playing this game.  All the co-op is online though so don’t bring your buddies over expecting for some split-screen action which is not a horrible thing.  It is a fun game but I feel it just fell short of a few too many things and should have been in collaboration with a person/team more experienced with third-person shooters.  You might have a blast playing this game with five other friends going up against each other, while mind hacking and on the other hand you might not.  With the games intriguing sci-fi concept I believe it could be made into a much better sequel provided things were changed.  Bottom line though is that MindJack is not worth $59.99 in this competitive market.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

More humor but, this time is comes from a promotional trailer for the game Mindjack published by Square Enix and Developed by Feel Plus.  It is interesting to see Square Enix releasing a third person shooter, but after playing the game at E3 2010 I was surprised as to how much fun it actually was, but I was under the impression this was going to be a downloadable game and it is a retail one for the usual $59.99.  In multiplayer, when you die you must choose whose mind you will jack to re-spawn.  The game comes out January 18th for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

They’ve been milking their franchises to the highest degree possible, with there being a new Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy spin off or remake announced every second month. Indeed, it is perhaps a worrying sign that some of Square Enix’s best games in the last few years have all been remakes or sometimes even direct ports from older consoles to the newer ones.

Indeed, the only franchise that has escaped unscathed from this turmoil has been Dragon Quest, which seems to be moving from strength strength, particularly upon the unexpectedly successful worldwide release of the Nintendo DS exclusive Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky. Apart from Dragon Quest, however, every other franchise has been subject to being stripped to absolute irrelevance.

You see, it appears that Square Enix is unable to handle the pressures and the costs of HD development, and that they have stretched themselves too thin, resulting in a diluted standard of quality overall.

This trend is very worrying, and is indicative of the decline of the Japanese gaming industry (barring Nintendo, of course) in general. With Square Enix, the problem is compounded, partly because of their prestige as a company, and partly because all their upcoming releases- all of them installments in revered franchises, all of them on home consoles- are languishing in development hell.

Can Square Enix do anything right now? How do they get out of the trap they’ve dug themselves?

ENTER MINDJACK

The game that is perhaps singularly representative of all of Square Enix’s woes is Final Fantasy XIII-  a long, long time in development, released to general disdain, with the company itself blaming the expenditures of HD development for everything that went wrong with the game. One notable criticism that was leveled at the game was that it was too restrictive, its level design too land, its combat system too confused, that the game, to surmise, was too much like a poorly made uninspired first person shooter in RPG guise.

It is perhaps slightly ironic then, that the one game that looks like it might actually be a good Square Enix game for a change, something refreshing that isn’t a rehash of the same tired old IPs for the umpteenth time, is also a shooter. Specifically, it is a third person shooter named MindJack, a game that, by Square’s own admission, should have released last October, but a game that in typical Square fashion, was delayed, and one that we know nothing about.

What little we do know about MindJack sounds particularly interesting, however- for instance, we know that the third person shooter is set in 2031 AD, in a dark future where all governments of the world have fallen, and a shadowy organization, with the ability to hack into any computer, machine, or even minds, and control them directly, has taken over. Whereas the basic premise might sound like the typical shooter plot in a new garb, there are some genuine new plot additions here that might turn out great if Square Enix handles them properly- specifically, the game, centered around the ability to hack into any object or mind and taking full control of it, sounds like a surreal mish mash of Transformers and Inception, and raises some exciting new possibilities, at least from the perspective of the game’s plot.

Do you realize the main potential issue with the game yet? The plotline is refreshing enough to be genuinely exciting- but whatever we see of the gameplay is worryingly generic, although fast paced (I’ll give them that). It seems to lack the strategic cover mechanics of Gears of War, or the platforming that mixes things up in Uncharted, or the many gimmicks that made Vanquish so refreshing last year. Indeed, the little gameplay footage included in the trailer looks like a sped up video of Resident Evil 5 set in a futuristic dystopia instead of Africa.

And the second potential issue could be the artstyle… dear Lord, the artstyle. Square Enix’s games have always had a general Japanese look and aesthetic to them, and more power to them for that, but they’ve become so exaggerated as of late that the artstyle has almost degenerated into caricaturing Japanese obsession with anime and manga.

Fortunately, MindJack isn’t half as bad- it’s certainly miles better than Final Fantasy XIII, and seems to have a more ‘neutral’ look than most other Square Enix titles. Still, the entire design sensibility of the game looks oddly Japanese, and again, while there is nothing particularly wrong with that, we do hope that Square’s insistence on not moving away from their visual sensibilities does not indicate that they will also not move away from their development sensibilities, the very sensibilities that have brought Square Enix so much trouble this generation.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/why-mindjack-might-be-the-game-that-turns-square-enixs-fortunes/feed 1 18004 https://gamingbolt.com/mindjack-wallpapers-in-hd https://gamingbolt.com/mindjack-wallpapers-in-hd#respond Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:18:48 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=17765 MindJack is a third-person shooter video game developed by feelplus and published by Square Enix for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. In the campaign story, the game is single-player but “transitions seamlessly” into cooperative gameplay.

MindJack HD wallpapers available in 1080p HD and 720p HD resolutions and are best suited for Desktops, wide-screen displays, ps3 backgrounds, laptops, iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch.

Also, check out MindJack2 Box Art in the gallery below.

Check below for MindJack Wallpapers in 1080p HD and 720p HD for wide-screen desktops, laptops, ps3 backgrounds and HDTVs

Square’s announced the European release date for their third-person shooter Mindhack today. It’s releasing on Jan 21.

Square Enix has earlier confirmed that the shooter would see a Jan 17 release in US and Jan 27 release in Japan.

The game’s due out for PS3 and Xbox 360.

The shooter claims to “blur the line between traditional single and multi-player gameplay, creating a experience where NPCs can at any moment take the roles of human-controlled allies or enemies.

Sounds cool innit.

Square Enix have released nine brand new Mindjack images and they fast and frentic futuristic action.
Mindjack is due out sometime in 2011 and looks rather promising so far.
The game’s coming to the Xbox 360 and PS3.

There is a single player jump in co-op system that is included in the mutliplayer aspect of the game.  You can level up and gain experience as well as unlock abilities.  The game all in all seems like a co-op combined with versus type game that actually seemed pretty intriguing after checking it out at E3 2010.  MindJack is currently set to be released this October 2010 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with a an MSRP of $59.99.