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Wizardry Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls - now available on PC

Reinhardt

Arcane
Joined
Sep 4, 2015
Messages
29,236

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
As a compensation, XSEED will bring boing-boing simulators on PC: http://www.xseedgames.com/2019/05/2...ey-bouquet-of-game-announcements-and-updates/

SENRAN KAGURA Reflexions
(Windows PC; June 24)

The game that redefined how fans can interact with their favorite SENRAN KAGURA girl is coming to Windows PC! Get hands on with Asuka and help massage away her stress by employing the art of reflexology, deepening the relationship formed with her while progressing through a narrative experience with multiple endings. Controls have been adapted to allow PC players to melt away Asuka’s worries and stresses by “hand” or through a variety of useful tools, with updated HD visuals running at 60 FPS. The game will launch on Windows PC on June 24 via Steam for $9.99, €9.99, and £8.99. A bundle containing Asuka and the four other girls’ DLC stories, which each sells for $9.99, €9.99, and £8.99, will be value-priced at $29.99, €29.99, and £24.99, while a “Heart’s Desire” bundle, which includes all girls and all other DLC, will be available for $59.99, €59.99, and £49.99.

SENRAN KAGURA Peach Ball
(Nintendo Switch™; July 9, Windows PC; Summer)

The latest entry in the genre-spanning SENRAN KAGURA franchise will bring frantic pinball and playful fun to Nintendo Switch™ owners this summer. One of Haruka’s experiments has turned some of her fellow shinobi into animals, at least mentally, and the only way to reverse the effect is the mystical Peach Ball—which happens to fit perfectly into a pinball machine! Plunge into this new adventure and flip, bump, spin, or ricochet the Peach Ball to return the shinobi to their normal selves. This will be one of the hottest pinball games yet, with customizable tables, special minigames, a story mode, and fan-favorite additional modes including Diorama Mode and the Dressing Room. SENRAN KAGURA Peach Ball will launch for Nintendo Switch™ in North America on July 9 with the Accessories Galore set included as part of the base game, adding 30 bonus accessories for free! The title will be available digitally on the Nintendo eShop for $39.99, while a limited physical release with an exclusive new box illustration will contain previously unannounced bonus stickers featuring the girls in their animal form. The physical release also has a suggested retail price of $39.99, and is available for pre-order at the XSEED Games online store and select retailers.

XSEED Games has also confirmed a PC version is in the works for release later this summer. More details on the PC version will be announced at a later date.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
Yay...Dynasty Warriors with boobies and a lamer setting, because who wants Wizardry or a game where you are an one-man army in a game inspired by The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and where you fight in China, which isn't that common in western games, when you can play another game full of young anime girls with bodies that pretty much scream "Hey, perverts, your action game is here!".
 

maidsoft

Novice
Joined
May 26, 2019
Messages
5
At the very least it looks like they are still intent on releasing it. I really don't want to pull my PS3 out of storage to play it.
 

Zed

Codex Staff
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2002
Messages
17,068
Codex USB, 2014
Man too bad, hope it's not delayed for too long. Was looking forward to it.
 
Joined
Mar 14, 2019
Messages
64
Shame there's not much in the way of DRM-free alternatives, aside from whatever DRM-free titles Humble happens to get. I'm not aware of any other store that actively works to secure DRM-free releases of games like GOG does - Humble simply offers the option to devs/pubs. Makes GOG's decline all the more tragic.

There is Fireflower Games, but it seems to be run by single person (who seems a bit fixated on the environment). It looks like a very young site (since around 2017?), so it may or may not exist long term (remember Indievania?). But with the games being DRM-free, as long as you keep your own copies that shouldn't be a problem.

FWIW, it seems to be the only place to get Venetica DRM-free.

Thanks for bringing Venetica to my attention - I bought it from Fireflower. The game looks interesting, and I wanted to put the store to the test.

Fireflower is okay. Downloads are about 1/13 the speed of GOG for me (2 MB/s with Fireflower and Chrono for Chrome vs. 26 MB/s with GOG Galaxy).

Also lacks bittorrent as a download option and MD5 hashes for error-checking (both of which Humble has).

Still, I'm glad to be able to get Venetica DRM-free. :)
 

Martyr

Arcane
Joined
Jan 28, 2018
Messages
1,099
Location
Bavaria
Shame there's not much in the way of DRM-free alternatives, aside from whatever DRM-free titles Humble happens to get. I'm not aware of any other store that actively works to secure DRM-free releases of games like GOG does - Humble simply offers the option to devs/pubs. Makes GOG's decline all the more tragic.

There is Fireflower Games, but it seems to be run by single person (who seems a bit fixated on the environment). It looks like a very young site (since around 2017?), so it may or may not exist long term (remember Indievania?). But with the games being DRM-free, as long as you keep your own copies that shouldn't be a problem.

FWIW, it seems to be the only place to get Venetica DRM-free.

Thanks for bringing Venetica to my attention - I bought it from Fireflower. The game looks interesting, and I wanted to put the store to the test.

Fireflower is okay. Downloads are about 1/13 the speed of GOG for me (2 MB/s with Fireflower and Chrono for Chrome vs. 26 MB/s with GOG Galaxy).

Also lacks bittorrent as a download option and MD5 hashes for error-checking (both of which Humble has).

Still, I'm glad to be able to get Venetica DRM-free. :)

Venetica is also DRM free on gamersgate, that's where I bought it.
but nice to get some feedback on fireflower bc I also wanted to try that shop sometime.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Venetica is also DRM free on gamersgate, that's where I bought it.

Are you sure it is DRM-free? Gamersgate says "Other DRM", but doesn't specify details and there is a this comment:

I am a bit concerned by the DRM. It used an usual web based system. How do I know this will work later when I reinstall ? this is the only concern I have with the game.

The comment is from 2013 though, perhaps things changed since then?
 

turkishronin

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2018
Messages
1,730
Location
where the best is like the worst
0ts7_bnl.jpg


niggas who played Wizardry 8 for 15 minutes be like:
OMG what happened to the great series ;(
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,973
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Yay...Dynasty Warriors with boobies and a lamer setting, because who wants Wizardry or a game where you are an one-man army in a game inspired by The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and where you fight in China, which isn't that common in western games, when you can play another game full of young anime girls with bodies that pretty much scream "Hey, perverts, your action game is here!".

What's wrong with being a pervert? :?
 

samuraigaiden

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2018
Messages
1,954
Location
Harare
RPG Wokedex
The Wizardry Series’ Return To America Has Hit Another Snag

Tony Carnevale

Last Wednesday, in the early afternoon, at least one obsessive Wizardry fan (me) was eagerly reloading the Steam Store page for Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls, the 2009 Japanese Wizardry spinoff whose Windows port was scheduled to finally launch at 1:00 PM Eastern. When the launch time arrived and the game did not, this fan grew concerned. At 1:05 PM, a surprising announcement appeared on the game’s Steam page:


“Due to an unforeseen issue involving IP licensing, the game cannot launch today as previously intended. We apologize for the sudden delay, and will inform you of a new release date once it’s confirmed.”


This statement raised questions. Was it really possible for the publisher not to foresee a licensing issue until the very moment of a game’s release? Who even owns the Wizardry license now? Is there any chance that the issue might fail to be resolved, and the Windows port might be cancelled altogether?

A rep for the game’s publisher XSEED tells Kotaku that the problem should be resolved easily, though they didn’t say how soon. “This should be a simple formality that’s being worked through right now as the game is done and ready for release anytime,” they said.

This is nevertheless yet another twist in one of gaming’s longest-running franchises. Licensing issues are familiar to fans of Wizardry, which began as an American computer role-playing game series in 1981, and whose influence is still felt today in first-person, party-based dungeon crawls. When original Wizardry publisher Sir-Tech failed to pay royalties to the creators, Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, the duo sued Sir-Tech in 1992. “The lawsuit took twenty years,” Greenberg, who went on to work as an attorney, told me. “It was one of the longest-running cases in New York state.”

The suit ended with a settlement, and Sir-Tech bought the rights to Wizardryfrom Greenberg and Woodhead. “Losing control of the franchise was sad for me,” said Greenberg, but “we were quite satisfied” with the terms of the settlement. “It had been long after the last big [Wizardry hit], so it was unlikely that we’d see a lot of money in the long term [if we hadn’t settled].”

Sir-Tech had already been making deals with Japanese developers to extend the Wizardry franchise, and new Wizardry titles still come out in Japan all the time (featuring the same logo that appeared on the very first box cover in 1981). For the most part, Japanese Wizardry games resemble the early-’80s American titles. You assemble a D&D-style adventuring party in a medieval-inspired town, then journey into a dungeon laid out in a grid, and engage in turn-based combat with monsters from a first-person perspective. Those Japanese games rarely get released in America. When they do, it’s typically on a console. (Labyrinth of Lost Souls has been available in the United States for PlayStation 3 since 2011.) Other than WizRogue, an erstwhile mobile game that bears almost no resemblance to the original series, there has never been an official English-language PC port of a Japanese Wizardry game before. That’s why it was such a big deal that Labyrinth of Lost Souls, which embraces the style of Greenberg’s and Woodhead’s originals, was about to come out on Steam, a full decade after its Japanese debut.

I reached out to XSEED, the Western publisher of Labyrinth of Lost Souls, and they offered an encouraging statement over email. “GMO is the company who owns the Wizardry IP now,” they said. “[Acquire, the developer of Labyrinth of Lost Souls,] got GMO’s approval... but their contract with GMO wasn’t prepared before the release date and we were told to postpone it.” They said that getting the contract sorted should “be a simple formality.”

As for the last-minute timing of the delay, the XSEED rep said, “Acquire got the message from GMO’s legal department the day of our scheduled release, 5/29, Japan time, which they immediately relayed to us close to midnight, 5/28, US time. That was the first that we heard the contract between them was still in progress or that it would prevent us from launching the game, so we had to postpone the release an hour before the scheduled [1 PM Eastern] time.”

If and when Labyrinth of Lost Souls finally launches on Steam, it just might signal a new era in which the Japanese branch of the series could return to American home computers, the platform where it all began. “Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”

American Wizardry fans can look forward to that future, but for now, we’ll just have to keep waiting.

https://kotaku.com/the-wizardry-series-return-to-america-has-hit-another-1835245618
 
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Self-Ejected

aweigh

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
17,978
Location
Florida
Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”

YESS!!
 

MuscleSpark

Augur
Patron
Joined
Apr 12, 2011
Messages
369
I don't understand. If the game was ready to release, why is IP licensing delaying it until next year? Did the licensee decide the game needed extra work? Voice acting? Micro-transactions?
It would be nice if they shared more specifics right now.
 

samuraigaiden

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2018
Messages
1,954
Location
Harare
RPG Wokedex
Sounds like a general time table in which they hope to get the mess sorted out. Early next year is a 5-6 month window of time depending who you ask.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
Better not futher delays this time.
And hope that's not another one of these terrible PC ports from Japan.
 
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