The Last Of Us makes it 5 weeks at #1

Mario and Luigi: Dream Team Bros. enters UK chart at 2

This week’s UK number 1 is still The Last Of Us, making it five weeks on the top for Naughty Dog’s fungal adventure. If it can last six weeks it will match Call Of Duty: Black Ops II and FIFA 12.

Mario and Luigi: Dream Team Bros. was the only new entry in the top 20 this week, at number 2, but expansion pack Civilization V: Brave New World entered at 39.

UKIE Games Charts courtesy of GfK Chart-Track

Last Week	This Week	Title
1	1	The Last Of Us
4	2	Animal Crossing: New Leaf
New entry	3	Mario and Luigi: Dream Team Bros.
3	4	FIFA 13
2	5	Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
10	6	Far Cry 3
7	7	Call Of Duty: Black Ops II
5	8	Assassin’s Creed III
6	9	Tomb Raider
Re-entry	10	Aliens: Colonial Marines
15	11	The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Legendary Edition
13	12	LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes
12	13	Need For Speed Most Wanted
19	14	Luigi’s Mansion 2
8	15	The Sims 3: Island Paradise
9	16	Deadpool
Re-entry	17	Grand Theft Auto IV
16	18	God Of War: Ascension
11	19	Injustice: Gods Among Us
20	20	LEGO Lord Of The Rings

Persona 4 Golden: The Highest Rated PS Vita Game of All Time

Back before the PlayStation Vita launched in February, Persona 4 Golden was a distant dream in most gamers minds, with Uncharted: Golden Abyss,Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Resistance: Burning Skies, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified, Gravity Rush, and more getting the most attention.

Fast-forward 9 months and Persona 4 Golden is now officially the highest rated PlayStation Vita title on both Metacritic (94/100) and Gamerankings (93.70%), most likely thanks to Ryan’s amazing review of the RPG.

In case you were curious, the next closest games to Persona 4 Golden on Metacritic are Rayman Origins and Little Big Planet PS Vita at 88/100, withTales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack at 86/100. Gamerankings then has Rayman Origins at 89.59% and Little Big Planet PS Vita at 88.70%.

With our Game of the Year Awards being handed out soon, don’t be surprised if Persona 4 Golden gets some high honors from us.

How are you enjoying P4G? Let us know in the comments below.

[Via]

Call of Duty Developer Speaks About Innovation and Constantly Raising the Bar

Gaming enthusiasts (otherwise known as jaded hardcore gamers) often criticize the Call of Duty series for annual releases that don’t feature many improvements or the sort of changes that you’d expect from a new entry of a franchise. So it’s interesting to hear Treyarch’s Dave Anthony speak about just the opposite in an interview with Destructoid.

Dave Anthony contends that Treyarch could have made a rather plain sequel, but instead “innovated on a number of features that change the Call of Duty formula.” As the Head of Story at Treyarch, Anthony went onto talk about the admiration he has for the development team:

[I’m really] proud of the team. Sometimes people might get success, get a little bit complacent, and there’s none of that at Treyarch. It’s never good enough — it’s always what can we do better — no matter what we’re working on.

Dave Anthony also spoke about Treyarch’s insatiable ambition to outdo themselves after the original Black Ops:

They could have sat down after Black Ops and been like, ‘Well, you know, we’ll just — as the popular term is — reskin it and do another one.’ That’s the last thing on their minds. They would have been disgusted with themselves for doing that. The thing that I’m so proud about Treyarch is the more success they have, the more hungry they are to make things different, to change things up.

Anthony states that this drive to innovate on previous entries is a fundamental cornerstone of Treyarch that have served them well through their entire history in developing Call of Duty:

At the beginning of each new project the mantra is always, since the very first Call of Duty game we worked on – Call of Duty 2 : Big Red One – the game we work on has to be better than the last one we did. Has to be, otherwise we failed. And ever since Big Red One it has been. I think Black Ops II is no different. I think it’s better than Black Ops 1. And I think whatever we work on next will be better than Black Ops II.

What are your thoughts on this? Is Call of Duty more progressive than many give it credit for? Or is Anthony’s personal ties to Treyarch clouding his judgment?

 

Source: playstationlifestyle

How Square Enix Screwed Up Black Ops II for Japan

For years now, Square Enix has published the Call of Duty games in Japan. Square Enix honcho Yoichi Wada is apparently a big fan of the series—and Western games. His goal is apparently to make Japanese gamers more open to playing foreign titles. That’s admirable. It would be more admirable if the company didn’t keep screwing up the games.
A few years back, Japanese gamers were very upset over spotty localization for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The line “Remember, no Russian” (AKA, Don’t speak the Russian language) was written as “Kill ’em, the Russians” in Japanese.

Now it’s Black Ops II‘s turn. The Japanese language version features jarring and nonsensical localization.

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This image is supposed to say “Eliminate Enemy Players” in Japanese, but the way it’s written seems somewhat odd (敵プレイヤーをせん滅しろ). Instead of writing “elimination” as 殲滅 (senmetsu), it’s written with “sen” in hiragana script: せん滅. As jarring as it might seem to a few Japanese players, the word can be written that way. And is. So to be fair, this isn’t actually a mistake. The rest of the multiplayer localization, however, is.

Take the multiplayer welcome screen, which seems like should say “Welcome to Multiplayer” in Japanese (マルチプレイヘようこそ or “Multiplayer e Youkoso”), but it actually says “マルチプレイヤーへよ……..ｑ”. It’s unclear what “……..ｑ” refers to. It’s unclear what much of the localization refers to.

For example, there’s this image. It wants to say “Hacking” in Japanese, but they cannot even fit the Japanese word for ハッキング on the screen. It cuts out at the corners, making the “gu” character (グ) look like the character for “ku” (ク). And “hacking” (ハッキング) in Japanese isn’t even a verb by itself; it’s a noun!

Take this image. On the screen of the above handheld device, it reads “kensaku chuu” (検索中), which means “looking something up.” Like, in a dictionary. Pretty sure the latest Call of Dutymultiplayer doesn’t have you look up words or things online while playing. (If it does, that’sawesome!) Rather, the Japanese tansakuchuu (探索中) or maybe “saachichuu” (サーチ中) would be better.

Then, there are the descriptions of the different multiplayer matches and equipment, which many Japanese players are finding to be confusing.

The truly odd thing is that most of these words should be in English. Japanese people know basic English and all study it at school. Many Japanese products—especially cars and electronics—have simple English in them. So writing “hacking” or “searching” in Japanese doesn’t actually make much sense. Players would understand what they mean.

Online in Japan, people are complaining about these mistakes and bitching at the publisher. Some of the bad localizations are even becoming memes! A modern day “All your base are belong to us”, if you will.

The Black Ops II Japanese localization seems like it was done by individuals who didn’t know the context of what they were localizing and didn’t have the opportunity to get the necessary context. Localization is more than looking things up in dictionaries. So is Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is on sale today in Japan.

 

Source: Kotaku

Wii U CPU: Metro publisher clarifies developer criticisms

But Battlefield dev echoes ‘slow and horrible’ comments

A representative for THQ is seeking to clarify comments made by one of the publisher’s development partners who branded the Wii U’s CPU as “slow and horrible”.

Huw Beynon, a global communications executive at THQ, told Eurogamer that the media coverage surrounding the quote has “spun” the truth of the matter for the purpose of bolstering website traffic numbers.

 

On Tuesday, the chief technical officer at Metro: Last Light developer 4A claimed there would be difficulties with a Wii U port due to the console’s “horrible, slow CPU”.

CVG’s coverage of the story had clarified that studios, such as Ubisoft Montpellier (Assassin’s Creed 3) and Treyarch (Black Ops 2), appear to have successfully ported their high definition games to Nintendo’s new system. The report added that THQ wants 4A to finish work on Metro Last Light before April due to assurances made to investors. This could be one of a number of reasons for why the studio is not focusing its resources on a Wii U port.

Beynon said that it had become common knowledge that the CPU on Wii U “isn’t as fast as some of the other consoles out there”. He added that a port of Metro: Last Light for Wii U was feasible, though time and resource constraints were primarily preventing this.

“We could probably get Metro to run on an iPad if we wanted, or on pretty much anything,” he said.

“Just as in the same way that between PC and current console versions there are some compromises that need to be made in certain places and we strive to get the very best performance that we can from any platform we release on.

Beynon said 4A is still “a really small studio”.

“There were 50 developers for Metro 2033, there are 80 now. With Metro 2033 most of their experience was with the PC. The Xbox 360 was their first console version. We’ve now added PlayStation 3 to the mix. We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It’s certainly possible, and it’s something we thought we’d like to do.

“The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we’re trying to focus on, already adding a PlayStation 3 SKU, or we probably wouldn’t be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we’d want.”

He added that, despite the Wii U’s alleged underpowered CPU – a claim that remains ambiguous until official specs are revealed – there are solutions within the hardware.

“Lots of developers are finding ways to get around it because of other interesting parts of the platform,” Benyon said.

The Wii U carries about 1GB of memory specifically for games developers to use – twice the amount available on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Reflecting on the media coverage, Benyon added: “What it doesn’t go on to look at is to say that, you know, we could probably get around these issues. But I understand that there’s a real appetite in the media at the moment because the Wii U is a hot topic to spam some stories that are going to attract a lot of links if they present it in a certain way.”

Further criticisms

However, another developer has echoed the comments made by the chief technical officer at 4A Games.

Gustav Halling, lead designer on Battlefield 3: Armored Kill at Swedish EA studio DICE, said on Twitter that he was concerned with how the next Xbox and PlayStation will likely dwarf the Wii U hardware specs.

“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.

He continued: “GPU and RAM is nice to have shaders/textures loaded. Physics and gameplay run on CPU mostly so player count is affected etc.”

“I don’t actually know what makes it slow, but enough ‘tech’ people I trust in world are saying the same things.”

He went on to claim that the Wii U “should be a great fun platform if you are a Nintendo fan the coming years and the memory and GPU part looks good!”

 

Source: CVG