November 2011 News #2

A bit of year end news incoming. I'm trying to get my hands on some more 2011 tactics games to give out some end of year awards, but I'm sure you can already guess FFT, Disgaea, and TO won't be on the list. My playtime and writing time on games has been stalled for a couple weeks because I've also been working on a turn based tactics game with my brother. It's coming along well. I'm designing most of the levels and giving feedback on balance and gameplay issues. I'll be making a full post about it soon.

SD Gundam G Generation 3D is a new entry in the long running G Gen series. Don't think for a second that a game with this level of effort and production values will stay on the 3DS. I guarantee you they'll be porting this to Vita minus the 3D. New screenshots here.

New screenshots for Super Robot Wars: Masou Kishin II. From what I can see, it's going to play very similar to the original game, with the same low unit counts and low depth relative to other SRW games.

Super Robot Wars F/FF are now on the PSN. I recently played through F/FF and thought it was the best classic SRW. You can't speed up or skip the animations in the PSN version, unfortunately, which I don't have the patience for.

Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars announced for iOS. It looks like a straight up port with no attempt to address any of the issues I had with the game on the 3DS. Hopefully it's at least less crashy and buggy.

 

A new iPhone game by Robot Entertainment called Hero Academy has been announced. It's a PvP game with emphasis on simplicity and fast paced action. Smartphones are a great platform for mobile turn based gaming since they are always connected and you can take your turn whenever you have a spare moment.

Let's look at one of the games coming out in early 2012. Daisenryaku Perfect: Senjou no Hasha is a port of the PSP game of the same name. I tried the PSP game but it seemed to suffer from a lot of interface lag and loading time. For a little history, Daisenryaku is the only hardcore tactical level turn based military simuator still being produced for consoles. It's similar to PC military sims that most console gamers run screaming from, featuring hundreds of realistic military units, dozens of real world nations, complex combat rules, and long and difficult scenarios. The PC version of Daisenryaku Perfect will probably remain the definitive version of the series, IMO. At the very least the PS3/360 versions should have less UI lag and load times that the PSP version suffered from.