Sunday, July 12, 2015

Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed


Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed is a 3rd person action RPG set in the city of Akihabara and puts players in the shoes of a person who's been turned into a "synthizer," which is basically a vampire, and tasks you with hunting down others of your kind along with a CPU-controlled partner. The main gimmick of the game is that you defeat the so-called synthizers by beating them silly until they are weakened, and then exposing them to the sunlight by stripping items of their clothing.

Despite the seemingly mature premise of the game, kids and parents shouldn't worry because there is no actual nudity. The enemies that get stripped still have their underwear (and in cases that they don't, the naughty bits are conveniently hidden by lens flare) and there are no hyper-sexualized body types - the females have no exaggerated breast sizes or accented curves and in most cases the females and males have similar body shapes.


The biggest point of contention in Akiba's Trip will be the combat. If you're just starting out, you'll find the combat to be sluggish and clunky, but once you find the weapon that suits your playstyle and adjust to the proper timings, the combat system will open up and provide you with a workable - if not decent - gameplay (if you're used to conventional hack and slash games, you'll be at home with sword or glove-type weapons.)

The PC port of Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed is available via Steam, and it's a pretty solid port job. The game is pretty well optimized and will run on hardware that doesn't even meet the minimum system requirements (although don't attempt to try and run it on onboard graphics.) There are no specific gamebreaking bugs or glitches outside of edge cases that are pretty much expected on the PC platform.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Pre-orders for One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 Steam Version is Now Open

Bandai Namco Games' PC port of One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 won't be released until August 25, but pre-orders are now open on Steam.  There's no pre-order discount and the bonuses are a little bit on the thin side (four costumes and a pack of additional costumes.) but if you really want a truck-ton of content, you can get the gold edition for a few bucks more in order to get 8 more mission packs and 20 more bonus costumes.

I have preordered the base package, so you can expect a review to appear on this site, but given that it's just a port and the game's console versions were already reviewed by countless others, I'll be focusing on the quality of the PC port - whether it takes advantage of the extra hardware power afforded by the platform or if it's going to be a basic port.

Hopefully, it's not going to be a Batman: Arkham Knight thing. Bandai Namco is known for decent, if not solid, ports when it comes to popular and lucrative properties (like One Piece is), and the developers Koei Tecmo also does fine with their ports - they get panned for crippled content and ridiculous DLC schemes, but in terms of code optimization they're pretty good at their job - in some cases releasing games that can run well even on hardware that doesn't meet their specified minimum requirements.