2K Sports announced MLB 2K13 a short while ago. But the company is mixing things up in a rather big way.
MLB 2K13 will only land on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Unlike last year, there isn’t anything in the works for the Wii or DS. There isn’t a Wii U edition either.
No baseball on Nintendo platforms this year, then.
It’s a double dose of Japanese sales data today. Tracker Media Create took last week off, but has now reported two weeks worth of sales. All data can be found below.
12/24 – 12/30
3DS LL – 150,581
3DS – 99,624
Wii U – 69,386
PS3 – 53,222
PSP – 41,914
Vita – 20,492
Wii – 6,741
PS2 – 2,071
Xbox 360 – 1,986
DSi – 389
DSi LL – 315
12/31 – 1/6
3DS LL – 156,184
3DS – 123,075
Wii U – 67,083
PS3 – 64,352
PSP – 54,873
Vita – 33,309
Wii – 5,632
Xbox 360 – 1,893
Note that the latest batch of sales do not include data for the DS or PlayStation 2. The PS2 has gone out of production, but you should still be able to find DS units in Japan.
Nintendo has posted another round of character art and details from Fire Emblem: Awakening. The latest information covers Marth, Emmeryn, Sully, and Stahl. A rundown of each character is below, along with art.
Marth
Appearing in Fire Emblem Awakening as a masked knight, Marth carries the legendary Falchion sword and appears out of nowhere to save Chrom and the other Shepherds.
Emmeryn
Emmeryn from Fire Emblem Awakening is the holy ruler of Ylisse and Chrom’s older sister. She is gentle and kind and believes in peaceful negotiation even when her kingdom is threatened by the Plegia invasion.
Sully
Sully, a no-nonsense, capable Shepherd who is admired by the other Ylissean women for her strength.
Stahl
Stahl from Fire Emblem Awakening is a Shepherd with a big heart and a good head on his shoulders. He is very attentive and kind to others.
Felynes play a big role in Monster Hunter 4. As explained in Famitsu, two companions will join players on their adventures, one of which is customizable. You’ll be able to choose from different eyes, ears, and fur.
A sub Felyne will accompany users during quests. These creatures can change the type of union attack that is executed. Also of note: Felynes are capable of clinging to enemies, holding them in place or taking them out of the air.
Along with the Felyne details, Famitsu has a first look at a few new monsters. Rathian, a fire-breathing female, Gendrome, and Congalala are revealed in the magazine.
Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner talked up the Wii U hardware in an interview with GamesTM this month.
First, Linzner noted that the console’s development environment allowed the studio to easily create a game – Nano Assault Neo – in a short amount of time:
“The Wii U development environment allowed us to go from zero to a great, polished game in only half a year. I think we never ever got so far so fast on a new hardware, and we’ve worked on a lot of platforms in the past decades.”
Linzner went on to compliment Wii U’s overall technology. Although the studio’s game is rendered on both the television and GamePad, “even then we were still able to maintain solid 60FPS without much effort on both displays.” Linzner also said that the Wii U’s large memory allowed for complete caching and practically eliminated load times:
“We decided to add a local two-player mode where one player uses the TV and the other one the Wii U GamePad. That meant the complete game world would need to be rendered twice for the Wii U GamePad display. That nearly doubled the burden on the GPU and CPU, but even then we were still able to maintain solid 60FPS without much effort on both displays. Then on top we even added camera streaming, so that the TV player can see the face of the Wii U GamePad player, which adds a lot of fun. We expected the additional camera encoding and streaming would add noticeable strain on the Wii U, but it was almost free. All this proved the system is very well balanced and allows developers without much effort, to use all the unique features. Another benefit of the Wii U is that the system memory is so large that we never have to load an asset again. Everything can be cached and load times are almost gone.”
Thanks to joclo for the tip.
Following the commotion surrounding a possible Crash Bandicoot redesign found through Facebook, Vicarious Visions has removed the original photo from its page.
This does seem to imply that something is going on with Crash Bandicoot. If nothing was in the works, why remove the photo? Some have speculated that the new design has something to do with Skylanders – mainly due to the pedestal Crash is standing on in the image.
