2014 is the Year of Adventure here at IGN, which means that we’ve spent the year revisiting as many classic adventure games from the ‘80s and ‘90s as possible. In the most recent feature, I covered the one-two sci-fi-fuelled punches that are Space Quest III and IV, and raised a question that Space Quest fans have been curious about for years.
Were the villains in the third game – ScumSoft – named in reference to LucasArts’ famous SCUMM engine?
Though I generally do try and avoid early access offerings, I had to give World of Diving a go, as it would immediately become the very first diving simulator I'd have played on a PC. And it was. That and an utterly soothing thing of beauty.
Like all things scuba diving this is a game meant to help you relax and enjoy the many wondrous sights hiding below the sea's surface. A wonderful 3D world where you can interact with all sorts of underwater life, explore sunken ruins and photograph anything that catches your fancy while embarking on simple quest and treasure hunts.
World of Diving is still far from finished, but already looks and sounds great and is an exploration offering anyone with even a passing interest in diving should enjoy. Apparently, it also supports the Oculus Rift virtual reality thingy, but I've yet to get my hands on such a contraption.
World of Diving can be early-accessed over on Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Back in my misspent youth, my friends and I would often gather around the halved or quartered TV screen to battle it out in classic split-screen shooters like Goldeneye 64, Doom, Time Splitters or Duke Nukem 3D. Of course, whenever someone got fed up with being killed all the time, the arguments would start in earnest.
“That’s not fair, you looked at my screen!”
“I did not!”
Only you did, didn’t you? You knew it, I knew it. We all did it, secretly.
What if there was a game in which looking at your opponent’s portion of the screen was not actually cheating, but instead a vital mechanic? Step forward Screencheat, a local and online multiplayer shooter by Australian developer Samurai Punk. In this arena-based shooter, all players are invisible to their opponents which, as the name implies, makes screencheating essential in bagging those vital kills.
“I said everything I wanted to say about shooters with Far Cry 3.”
Jeffrey Yohalem is still getting questions about the story he wrote for 2012’s Far Cry 3. He recently fielded an AMA on Child of Light and still the shadow of Vaas and golden tigers wavered on the walls. And someone blamed him for UPlay. Tonight I have not asked him anything yet, but instead lamented: I’m sad you were not asked back to do Far Cry 4. I’d talked to him extensively about its precursor circa 2012 and this may be cheating, but I genuinely liked what he did there, though Far Cry 3’s myriad subtexts seem to have changed their collective final form a few times since.
PAX Prime 2014 is slowly coming to a close. Cosplay, weird animal fights, and loud noises filled the convention center.
To bring the craziness of PAX to the many people who didn't have the opportunity to go, we asked people to send us requests of what they wanted to see via Twitter. Below are our responses and our on the ground look at PAX Prime 2014.
We couldn't find Arkham Knight for you @Soccerzz5, but we did find Smash Bros. https://t.co/zjTeto4bfb
— IGN (@IGN) August 31, 2014
Earlier this month, Atari announced that it's bringing back its classic horror game series Alone in the Dark. Today, at PAX 2014, it revealed the first teaser trailer and details about the game.
Alone in the Dark: Illumination, a re-imagining of the 1992 original and one of the first survival horror games ever, will feature "the power of illumination" and a cooperative multiplayer mode. Players will be able to choose different hero characters with different abilities and weapons: Hunter, Witch, Engineer, and Priest. Together, they must fight monstrous enemies to rid an abandoned town of a mysterious curse called the Darkness.
Atari is also developing a re-imagined version of Haunted House, a 1982 Atari 2600 game. Haunted House: Cryptic Graves is a first person single-player game where players must use psychic abilities to solve puzzles and fight spirits and monsters that infest the Abbadon Grange estate. You can watch the teaser trailer for Haunted House: Cryptic Graves below.
Alone in the Dark is being developed by a new studio called Pure FPS, whose memebers worked on games like Dead Island 2, Bioshock Infinite, and Battlefield 2. Haunted House is being developed by Dreampainters, the team behind the survival horror game Anna. Both games are set to release on PC in fall 2014.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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I don’t consider myself the squeamish type, yet I couldn’t help but wince as I saw fatalities in Mortal Kombat X. The version we play at PAX is setup to showcase deadly finishing moves easily. I admit Fatalities have been my favorite part of prior MK games. They always delivered a funny dose of shock value with a trail of silliness tacked on at the same time. But this time was different. This time was gross.
When IGN editor Daemon Hatfield let the first one rip, I expected to laugh. I didn’t. In fact, for the first time ever I wondered if the developers went too far. I watched one of the new characters named Kotal Khan carve a deep cut across the chest of a bloodied Cassidy Cage’s with a blade. He then rips out her heart and holds up his new trophy before popping the juicy, still-beating muscle. The blood flows into Khan’s grotesque open mouth and drips down his lips. The visual fidelity carefully renders every second of this vicious moment.
It might take you a minute to realize it, but the video above is of a Grand Theft Auto IV mod, not Ubisoft's recently released Watch Dogs.
Created by GTA IV modders ac.amir and JulioNIB, the Watch Dogs IV script mod doesn't only make GTA IV look like Watch Dogs with an Aiden Pearce character model, it also adds many of his hacking abilities to the game. As you can see in the video, the mod allows you to hack traffic lights to cause car accidents, raise roadblocks, and tap into the Liberty City's surveillance cameras to spy on people. It even implements a similar-looking user interface.
Other Watch Dogs features the mod adds include the ability ride on top of trains, listen to police scanners, and hack ATMs to spit out cash and draw people's attention. For a full list of what the mod includes, known technical issues, and instructions on how to install it, head here.
If it's Watch Dogs itself that you're interested in modding, you should check out the final release of Frederico "TheWorse" Rojas' mod, which introduces several new changes, including tweaking rain, the bloom effect during storms, and the game's camera.
GTA IV modders have been able to do some pretty amazing things to the game on PC including significant graphical improvements. It will be exciting to see what modders come up with once GTA V launches on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 this fall.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Nintendo's upcoming competitive paint shooter, Splatoon, could have been another Mario game, the company's iconic game designer and senior managing director Shigeru Miyamoto has said.
“There were heated debates over who the main character should be [in Splatoon],” Miyamoto told Edge magazine in an interview (via MCV). “Whether it should be Mario, or the squid. When we talked about the possibility of it being Mario, of course we could think of the advantages: anybody would be willing to touch it as soon as we announced that we had a new Mario game. But at the same time, we had some worries. If it were Mario, we wouldn’t be able to create a new IP.”
Nintendo first revealed Splatoon at E3 2014. It was a surprise both because it's the first new IP Nintendo has announced a long time, and because it's a competitive shooter, not a genre the family-friendly company is known for. However, as GameSpot's Managing Editor Randolph Ramsay said in our first hands-on coverage of the game, it's exactly how you'd imagine a Nintendo-made competitive shooter would be: colorful, charming, and non-violent.
In the game, two teams of four players armed with paint guns have to try to cover the level with as much of their team's color. Players also have the ability to transform into a squid, and swim through any area splashed with their team's color.
Splatoon is set to release on Wii U in 2015.
Are you happy to see new IP from Nintendo, or do you wish Splatoon was a Mario game? Let us know in the comments below.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Four add-on packs will be released for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, along with a season pass, 2K Australia announced at PAX today.
The DLC will release on unspecified dates following Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel's release, each priced at $10 USD –– alternatively, players can purchase the season pass, which includes all four packs, for $30 USD. The add-on packs will showcase new characters and missions, 2K said in a press release.
Although no other information was given regarding the content of each pack, 2K did announce the Shock Drop Slaughter Pit bonus content, which comes with any pre-orders of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. This content will not be included with the season pass, but will be for sale at a later date.
Dead or Alive 5 is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Koei Tecmo has announced.
Koei Tecmo producer Yosuke Hayashi surprised the audience this weekend at the Japan Gamer's Live event, where he revealed the trailer above (via Esuteru) at the end of a Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate tournament.
Besides what you can see in the trailer, which shows returning fighters like Ryu Hayabusa, all we know about the game at this point is its title, Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, that it's being developed by Team Ninja, and that Koei Tecmo plans to release it in Japan during spring 2015. Koei Tecmo didn't say when or if the game will release in other regions.
The most recent Dead or Alive game, Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate, was released in 2013 for PS3 and Xbox 360.
We've reached out to Koei Tecmo for comment and will update this story when receive more information.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Double Fine's Tim Schafer said that he would love to remaster more LucasArts adventure games he worked on, though Grim Fandango Remastered will have to sell well in order for that to happen.
The news comes from the Grim Fandango: Bringing the Dead Back to Life PAX 2014 panel, where Schafer and other developers who worked on the original game talked about how they're handling various aspects of the remastered edition.
"We would love to make more of them," Schafer said in response to a fan in the audience who asked if they considered remaking or re-releasing other LucasArts adventure games. "If everyone buys 10 copies it will make it more likely that we'll make another," Schafer joked.
As to why they decided to tackle Grim Fandango first, Schafer said it was a combination of the team's passion for the game, the fact that it became hard to get only a few years after it was originally released, and the negotiations between Sony, Double Fine, and Disney, which acquired LucasArts last year.
Schafer and the panel also discussed the current state of Grim Fandango Remastered. The plan is to dig up the original assets, polish them, and use as much of them is possible in the remastered version. One exception is the game's music, which will be performed and recorded with the Melbourne orchestra just for the new version of the game. The Melbourne orchestra also worked with Double Fine on Broken Age.
At the moment, the team is still digging through the archives to see what they have, but has already begun improving textures, cutscenes, and other assets, as well as implementing new mouse and DualShock controls. A short video about the production of the game that played before the panel started also briefly showed it running on the tablet, though the game hasn't been officially announced for iOS or Android devices.
Double Fine announced that Grim Fandango will be released for PC, Mac, and Linux in addition to PS4 and Vita. A release date for the remastered version of the game has not yet been announced, but Double Fine says it will be a simultaneous launch across all platforms.
Which LucasArts game would you like to see remastered? Let us know in the comments below.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Sandbox MMO ArcheAge will launch on September 16, Trion Worlds has announced.
This will be preceded by an open beta from September 4-8, before those who purchased Founder's Packs get to jump in on September 12.
For those not in the know about ArcheAge, it's highly-anticipated among Western MMO fans as it subscribes to the sandbox model of gameplay. While games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars: The Old Republic and the like are branded "themepark" titles as you get on the ride and have a carefully orchestrated journey of fun, ArcheAge is similar to Eve Online in the sense it hands you the tools to make your own fun, only instead of spaceships there's the usual riffs on traditional fantasy tropes.
Hearthstone has been an even more exciting game to play than usual over the last month and a half. Every week during the Curse of Naxxramas expansion, new cards were being added to the pool, changing the game in interesting new ways. Now that Naxx is complete and all 30 of its cards have been out in the wild for a little over a week, I figured there’s no better time to try and rank the best of the batch.
How have I arrived at this list? Well, obviously it’s pretty subjective. After all, as the saying goes, one man’s Captain’s Parrot is another man’s Ragnaros the Firelord. (I think I might play too much Hearthstone.) The value of cards also changes as players discover new ways to utilise cards and build decks, and the shape of the meta also has a huge impact. The essential cards when players are running more aggro decks, for instance, will be pretty different than in a slower-paced, Control-heavy meta.
Dying Light has released a development diary that details the game's freerunning elements, or "Natural Movement," as developer Techland calls it.
Producer Tymon Smektała said that when the team started development on Dying Light they looked at other first-person games and felt that they lacked the ability to let the player move freely and seamlessly.
Lead Game Designer Maciej Binkowski said that, at first, they tried placing special objects in the environment that would allow the player to climb up various structures. When 50,000 objects still weren't enough, they realized that they'll have to find a different solution. Dying Light's Natural Movement, as you can see in the video above, allows you to climb almost everything you see in the game, with smooth animations reminiscent of DICE's Mirror's Edge.
Techland believes that its Natural Movement is a significant evolution in first-person games. Game Programmer Bartosz Kulon said that it might take you five or six hours to master it, but that once you do, it will feel like second nature.
Dying Light launches in February 2015 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC. Developed by Polish studio Techland (Call of Juarez, Dead Island), the game was originally expected to launch this fall, but was delayed in May so the developer could improve Natural Movement.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Harmonix announced the final tracks in the initial lineup for Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved at Pax today.
The artists were announced during the "Music Evolved –– From 8-Bit Soundtrack to Gameplay" panel. Award-winning composer Inon Zur and recording producer Eddie Kramer were present for the panel, which went behind the scenes of music production on the upcoming game. The new tracks are listed below:
• The Flaming Lips - "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1"
• Imagine Dragons - "Radioactive"
• J.S. Bach - "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor"
• Inon Zur - "Scout's Theme (ft. violinist Lindsay Stirling)"
• Jimi Hendrix - "Fire"
• Lady Gaga - "Applause"
Hyrule Warriors will get a free, day one content update, Nintendo has announced. The free download will add a new mode, a new weapon, and the option to select your own music while playing the game.
Nintendo also said that this is just the beginning of its plan to support Hyrule Warriors "for the long run with more content to help players expand their adventures even farther."
As Nintendo previously announced, if you preorder Hyrule Warriors at select retailers, you'll receive a free download code for a set of alternate in-game costumes for Link and Zelda. If you register the game with Club Nintendo you will also receive a free download code for a set of alternate costumes for Ganondorf. All of these additional costumes will also eventually become available to purchase from the Nintendo eShop. Nintendo said that it will announce timing and pricing details at a later date.
Hyrule Warriors will launch on the Wii U in Japan on August 14, Europe on September 19, Australia on September 20, and North America on September 26. For more on the game, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Indie developer Campo Santo has released the first trailer for its debut game, Firewatch, during its PAX 2014 panel.
As you can see in the video above, Firewatch is a first-person game that follows Henry, who explores the Wyoming wilderness after taking a summer job as a fire lookout. Events are sent in motion as Henry learns that a forest fire might be headed in his direction.
Details are still scarce, but Campo Santo previously said that your only human connection is over a handheld radio, which you’ll use to speak with your supervisor, Delilah, about the things you’re both experiencing.
Campo Santo’s small team has an impressive background in the games industry. Jake Rodkin, a designer and Campo Santo’s creative director, was previously at Telltale, where he worked on The Walking Dead, Puzzle Agent, Tales of Monkey Island, and Sam & Max. Other Campo Santo members previously worked at Klei, Double Fine, 2K Marin, and Maxis.
Firewatch will be published by Panic Inc., on PC, Mac, and Linux. Campo Santo said it would “love for it to come out in 2015.”
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Immediately following its reveal back in March, Firewatch commanded our attention. The first game from Campo Santo, a studio founded by former Telltale, Double Fine, Klei, and 2K Marin developers, Firewatch looked to be a gorgeous first-person adventure game with an emphasis on storytelling, evocative animations, and distinct art design by the fantastic Olly Moss.
We chronicled the evolution of the game, its influences, and what the team was really trying to accomplish with the project. But while that all sounded great on paper, it ultimately amounted to a lot of incredible-sounding promises. When the time came for the game to actually come together, would they be able to pull it off?
If you want to play The Sims 4 as soon as it's released, you can now pre-load the game on your PC, Electronic Arts has announced.
The option to download the game and have it ready to launch as soon as it's released is currently rolling out to everyone who pre-ordered a copy through Origin. When it's available in your area, simply launch Origin and hover your cursor over the game tile in your Game Library to check if it's available.
Once The Sims 4 is pre-loaded, your game will unlock when it launches in your region. If you live in the United Stated, that means 12 AM EDT on September 2, or 9 PM PDT on September 1.
Fans in other regions can find their local release schedule below:
If you want to know how your PC will handle The Sims 4, you can find the system requirements here.
For more on the game, check out GameSpot editor Zorine Te's article on how The Sims 4 will be different from The Sims 3, and the rest of our previous coverage. If you already own the The Sims 3 and its expansions, you'll get a variety of special in-game rewards in The Sims 4.
| Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg. |
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Team Meat’s peculiar teaser a fortnight ago for a game they’d called A Voyeur For September, has been revealed to in fact be a game called Super Meat Boy Forever (anagram, see?). And despite describing it as a “live action stealth game”, it is in fact a touch-based “auto-runner”, that will have a Steam release alongside phone/tablet. Confused? I think they were aiming for that.
Volition have announced a new entry in the Saints Row franchise, the curiously in-joke entitled, expandalone, Gat Out Of Hell.
After the most ugly of starts, Saints Row has gone on to be one of the series most worthy of excitement in recent years. Saints Row: The Third saw the franchise free itself of its genuinely unpleasant origins, and realise itself as a joy-filled, if somewhat problematic, alternative to GTA, rather than a clumsy clone. Last year’s Saints Row IV somehow survived both the collapse of THQ, and the conversion from add-on pack to complete sequel, to become one of the funniest, funnest games ever. So it’s with justified happy expectation that we receive the news that there’s to be a standalone expansion to part VI, Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell.
Team Meat has announced Super Meat Boy: Forever will coming to your phones, tablets, and Steam "sometime next year."
The team said their goal was to release a Super Meat Boy game designed from the ground-up with touch interface in mind, rather than try to shoehorn touch controls onto an existing game. They hoped to bring out a game with the feel of the original Super Meat Boy "without the use of multiple buttons" or analog sticks.
Super Meat Boy: Forever won't be an endless runner, according to Team Meat, but it will feature an endless mode, along with daily run challenges and online high scores. It will also have a full story, 6 chapters, and twice as many bosses as were in the original game.
British model and host of the fictional GTA V radio station Non Stop Pop FM is back in the studio with Rockstar updating the audio for the upcoming versions of the game.
Cara Delevingne tweeted the info to her followers with a link to her Instagram account. The official Rockstar Games account then retweeted her, in a social media confirmation that would seem confusing to a time traveler from just 12 years ago, when Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's licensed music soundtrack first broke onto the scene.
The updated versions of the game, coming to PC, PS4, and Xbox One, promise to have more onscreen characters, better draw distances, and updated visuals in addition to the expanded sountracks.
Capcom today released a stunning new gameplay trailer for its upcoming free-to-play PlayStation 4 exclusive Deep Down, showing off gorgeous environments, fierce dragons, and the game's four-player mode. That's the good news. The not-so-great news is that the publisher also confirmed that the game's beta has been delayed 2015, according to a translation of the video you see above by Siliconera.
Deep Down producer Kazunori Sugiura said the delay was necessary to deliver a good experience for players. He also apologized to players who have been left waiting for the beta, which was originally expected to launch this summer before being delayed multiple times. The Deep Down beta has been announced only for Japan so far.
Powered by Capcom's new Panta Rhei engine, Deep Down features dungeons that exist in a shared world, similar to that of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls. No release date for the game has been announced. Regarding the game's free-to-play business model, and the microtransactions that will be available, producer Yoshinori Ono said the game will offer a "large variety of content at reasonable prices."
Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
For all of GameSpot's news coverage, check out our hub. Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Amongst the news coming out of today's Nintendo Direct presentation, Nintendo of Europe has confirmed that over 300 staff will lose their jobs by the end of the month.
The 320 lay-offs, confirmed via statement to Kotaku earlier today, are inclusive of the 130 job cuts reported in June of this year.
The additional 190 losses are believed to be based within Nintendo of Europe’s Localisation Development (ELD) department and have been attributed to “a set of measures to better enable the European business to adapt to the rapidly changing business environment.”
More than anything else, the word I heard used to describe S2 Games’ new MOBA Strife was “accessibility.” However, since accessibility is often perceived as a negative, S2 Games’ CEO Marc DeForest was quick to point out how Strife’s design foundation is not that far from soccer. Soccer requires one ball and is probably the easiest sport to start to try and play (contributing to the fact that it’s so wildly popular), but player skill varies wildly, from children bumbling around on a street corner to the pros who represent their nations in the World Cup. Like soccer, Strife aims to be easier than its competition to get into, but also have a metagame and competitive level of play that will satisfy the hardest of the hardcore.
Cloud Chamber is a multiplayer narrative adventure, in which players discuss, theorise and contemplate. It’s a cooperative game in which everyone is anonymous and the only goal is to understand. Original live action footage is spliced together with documentary videos from the European Space Agency to create a sci-fi story that is, at least in part, a changeable thing, created by the commentary and input of human observers.
It’s FMV focus makes it seem like a portion of the past but it’s approach to multiplayer gaming feels like a slice of the future. Here’s wot I think.
Nintendo has confirmed Xenoblade Chronicles is set to be released on the new 3DS and 3DS XL consoles announced earlier today.
The company has confirmed the upgraded hardware, particularly the CPU, means its possible for Monolith's open-world RPG to be run on the new handhelds. The older models will not be able to handle the game.
At the moment, all we know for certain is that Xenoblade Chronicles will hit New 3DS in Japan next year, but there's no word on when or if it'll head West. Seeing as the new handhelds aren't expected on these shores until next year anyway, it could be a bit of a wait before we get to take it for a spin.
Dying Light is a 1-4 player cooperative first-person game set in an urban location that is full of zombies. Under development at Techland and originally conceived as a sequel to Dead Island, it contains all the expected gore and giblets, but also goes in for some of that parkour that the kids use to commute to their office jobs these days. Graham went hands-on at Gamescom and found the controls fussy, which I take to mean that he jumped off a building and landed in a zombie’s gob when he was trying to use a zipline. I’m glad to have that sprinkling of doubt because the Mirror’s Edge/Left 4 Dead mash-up is far too exciting and the brand new video below is brill. Graham keeps expectations in check, like a glum father explaining the queue sizes and fatality rates before a trip to the funfair.
Bayonetta 2’s soundtrack will be “much livelier” than the “low-key” score of the original Bayonetta game.
Writing on the official Bayonetta blog, composer Masami Ueda states that they’ve “upped the style” and experimented with new sounds, giving upcoming Wii U title Bayonetta 2 - to be released in North America on October 24 - an altogether new and different tone.
The post goes on to confirm that, owing to the commercial success of Bayonetta’s original soundtrack, the full score of Bayonetta 2 will also be available to purchase.
Warning: full episode spoilers follow.
Defiance has been taking advantage of the absence of Dominion these past two weeks. The show closed out its second season with another batch of two episodes as the running conflict with Irzu/the Kaziri came to a head and Defiance faced certain annihilation. As with last week, it's probably just as well Syfy doubled up on the show, as the two halves might not have been enough on their own.
I'm only focusing on the actual season finale in this review, which is actually a bit difficult since "All Things Must Pass" flowed so seamlessly into "I Almost Prayed." The finale opened on quite the dark note. Tommy died as a result of Irisa's stabbing, leaving Nolan distraught and all the more hellbent on stopping the Kaziri's destruction of the planet. And Irisa got her hands bloody in the opening moments as she guided the total obliteration of New York City. That scene certainly set the tone for the coming conflict.
Nintendo has today confirmed that Hyrule Warriors will launch with free downloadable content.
The day one release will add a new mode, weapon and the "option to select music".
Described as a mashup of Dynasty Warriors and The Legend of Zelda, the game will also be supported for “the long run” by Nintendo, with more content planned down the line.
There's no information yet on the details - or pricing - of further additional content, but the first DLC pack will be launched when the game is released (that's September 19, 20 and 26 in Europe, Australia and North America respectively). The game's already out for Japanese fans.
I’m eternally surprised by what modders manage to do with Grand Theft Auto IV, especially as Rockstar never released official mod tools. Modders needed to build tools before they could build mods, a bit like Minecraft–only you end up with high-fidelity murder rather than a monolithic phallus.
The latest wonder rising from GTA 4 borrows an awful lot from another open-world murder simulator: Watch Dogs. Mass-murderer-with-a-heart-of-gold Aiden Pearce is now hacking Liberty City with his magical telephone, popping barriers out the ground, riding trains, spying through cameras, screwing with traffic lights, and generally hacking the planet. It’s a remarkable feat.
Bayonetta 2, the sequel to Platinum Games' 2010's Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 title, will launch exclusively for Wii U on October 24, Nintendo announced today. If you buy the disc-based version of the game at retail, you'll also get a digital copy of the original Bayonetta.
Also included with the package are "some Nintendo cosplay options for the powerful heroine," Nintendo said.
Bayonetta 2 includes a number of features not found in the original, including a new snake transformation that lets Bayonetta move better in underwater passages. In addition, we learned at E3 in June that Bayonetta 2 will include mechs.
For more on Bayonetta 2, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.
Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
For all of GameSpot's news coverage, check out our hub. Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Microsoft has launched a new Xbox One system update worldwide that introduces a range of new features, some of which were announced earlier this month at Gamescom.
The first of these features, including a new media player app, an improved Party app, and a boot-to-TV option, are now available, while you'll have to wait a bit longer for other features, like DLNA support.
Below is a list of the new Xbox One features included with the system update, courtesy of Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb. Microsoft adds that you can have your voice heard for future updates by sharing feedback through the official Xbox Feedback site.
The Xbox One September update includes:
Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
For all of GameSpot's news coverage, check out our hub. Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Following yesterday's news that fan-favorite Halo 2 map Lockout will appear in Halo 2 Anniversary within the Halo: Master Chief Collection, developer 343 Industries has now released a gameplay video showing the map in action. Lockout joins previously confirmed Halo 2 remastered maps Ascension, Coagulation, Zanzibar, and Sanctuary.
Lockout for Halo 2 Anniversary has been updated with a number of new features, first of which is more cover at the "elbow," the walkway connecting the grav lift to the sniper tower. The new version of Lockout also includes a dynamic element that lets you shoot out snow/ice from the sniper perch to keep people from camping there.
If you're heading to PAX Prime this weekend (the show starts today!), you'll get to play the new Lockout map at Microsoft's booth on the show floor. Looking for more Lockout coverage? We have more details here, as well as side-by-side comparison shots that show off just how much work 343 Industries and Certain Affinity put into updating the new map.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection launches exclusively for Xbox One on November 11. It includes remastered versions of Halo 1-4, access to upcoming digital show Halo: Nightfall, and also gets you into the Halo 5: Guardians beta.
Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
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We missed Bravada when it initially released in May, which is a shame; it's one of those games which is hard to pin a genre on because it isn't quite like anything else. Bravada is turn based. It requires strategic thinking. And since it follows the story of a dwarf on a quest to finally grow a beard, it's also an adventure game. But these descriptors, while accurate, don't fully illustrate what makes Ukrainian developer Interbellum's first game so unique.
The player begins the game with just the hero, whose death means game over. He travels forward, away from the player, down levels that are basically straight tunnels. More units join the party as the game goes along, and the player can modify the party's formation on the fly. The whole party moves as one (be it forward, backward, left, right, or diagonally). Every grid-based move or formation change is a turn, allowing any enemies visible on the screen to move. Once all units have moved, everyone, friend and foe, attacks automatically and intelligently. Things move at a pretty quick pace if the player wants them to, but the player is also free to spend as much time deliberating as they wish.
Units gain experience points from battle. When the hero levels up, the player is given three stat upgrade options, though other units must choose from established class upgrade options which affects their range and attack patterns, or even gives them the ability to do other things like healing and buffing other characters. Along the journey, the player will also acquire items that can be equipped to the hero to modify his offensive and defensive stats as well as give him different kinds of attacks.
Although gameplay proceeds forward down a tunnel for the most part, each of the game's environments has not just aesthetic but also gameplay differences. Being chased by a roaring fire through a forest forces the player to keep moving forward rather than dallying, whereas traveling across a beach during a storm forces the player to stick to one side or lose units that get swept out to sea. It keeps the game fresh without making it overly complicated, and all of the boss fights have special mechanics, too.
Humor is not neglected in Bravada. The story itself is funny, the first level has the player fighting off slimes that are hypnotizing chickens, and the equipment and items were all designed with humor in mind.
Multiple difficulty levels, chosen at the beginning of each stage, allow players to take it easy and just enjoy the game, challenge themselves, or prove that they truly have great tactical skills. Checkpoints are frequent enough that a loss isn't a terrible thing.
All of these things come together to make an entertaining turn-based tactical gaming experience with a dash of traditional roguelike combat, but without procedural generation or permadeath. I haven't seen anything like Bravada before, and when I started playing it to review it I ended up playing it for three hours straight.
Bravada was chosen for Best RPG/Adventure in Intel's annual Level-Up competition and will be showing at Intel's booth at PAX Prime. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Steam for $9.99 or direct from Interbellum with DRM-free and soundtrack-included options.
My diaried adventures within The Forest began with my foolhardy attempt to build a log cabin. It was hubris. So following a remarkably similar plane crash into a remarkably similar – but slightly different – woodland, I’ve attempted a more modest life of brutal fights, daring cave escapes, and most of all, sharkrolling.
SEGA has announced Total War: Rome II - Emperor Edition, which it's billing as the definitive version of the game.
The Emperor Edition brings together all the strategy game's free content to date, including revisions to gameplay and features, along with a brand new Campaign Expansion called "Imperator Augustus". Anyone who already owns Rome II will have their version automatically updated to the Emperor Edition come launch day, which is planned for sometime in September.
The new features include Twitch integration, touch controls, new factions, new units and the Mac version, alongside an improved politics system, overhauled building chains, rebalanced battles and improved visuals.
Reserve your very own collection of interactive Nintendo figures, as Nintendo has revealed that the first series of Amiibo figures are now available for pre-order.
The first set of figures includes the following Nintendo characters, and the figures are planned to interact initially with the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U:
Lethal League is a multiplayer fighting game, where you can't hurt your opponents directly - instead, you have to smash a ball into them at top speed, and hope they don't manage to hit it back.
As the ball bounces around the arena, you can thwack it to add extra speed and boost your power bar. Smash the ball enough times, and you'll begin hitting it around the constraints of time and space. It's really all sorts of mental and brilliant, and there's not a lot of moments out there that are more nerve-wracking than preparing to hit back a ball that is moving faster than your eyes can follow it.
There's tons of depth that includes "dinking" the ball and then whacking it to add additional power, and double tapping to use up your power bar for a special move. It's really fantastic stuff that works both locally and online. Well worth picking up.
California, 1986. A clique of friends has found a strange artifact whose powers will make them defy the laws of Nature, allowing them to interact between two planes of reality: life and death. It's also 1985, because Crossing Souls has a bit of Back to the Future and The Goonies' flavor. And it's 1983, Wargames. These guys are about to unveil a great conspiracy, and they definitely need some thirtysomething heroes to help them.
FourAttic, the Sevilla-based developers of Crossing Souls, describes their game as a story-driven adventure with a focus on exploration and RPG overtones. "We want to prioritize exploration and puzzle solving, as well as the interaction with NPCs," said the team when inquired about the game. Their references include not only paramount examples of the 80's films, but also classic games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and well known indie games like Heart Machine's Hyper Light Drifter.
Character swapping will be another feature of Crossing Souls, as seen in the game's first alpha video. According to the developers it'll have up to five different characters with their own abilities and weapons like slingshots, custom inventions and trash can lids. Now preparing to assault Kickstarter, the team has also unveiled a first glance of their cutscenes-to-be. Oh man, that sure made me nostalgic. And I double dare you not to dance to the Timecop1983 music. That is the magic of the eighties.
I first saw Containment Protocol at Rezzed this year when the large banner showcasing its simplistic, beautiful art style immediately caught my eye. It’s difficult to describe in ordinary genre terms, but it’s close to a survival/exploration game. You remotely control a quad copter exploring an abandoned scientific facility, only able to see via its lidar scanning the surroundings. It’s atmospheric to the max–sounds echoing in empty corridors, clinical beeping coming from the automated defenses of the facility. You can explore too, as solo dev Byron Atkinson-Jones has dropped a new in-browser demo on its site (the build he’ll show at EGX, in fact).
CCP Games has lost a pair of executives, and is closing its San Francisco branch, according to a company financial report.
The EVE Online developer has suffered lower sales in 2014 compared to the same time last year, the company said in the report, which was translated by Reddit user two_step. Chief marketing officer David Reid announced that he was leaving the company because travel between the U.S. and Iceland was taking its toll –– the company is also losing CFO Joe Gallo, although it's unclear whether he was laid off or decided to leave.
Every day hundreds of new apps make their debut on the App Store, and hundreds more are updated or reduced in price. We have sifted through the noise and highlighted those select few that might be worth your attention.
Note: The prices and deals compiled below are accurate at the time we published this story, but all are subject to change.
Bioshock – ($14.99)
2007's widely praised FPS from the Xbox 360 (and later PS3), Bioshock's shocking fans for a second time by being ported over to mobile platforms – on a visual level, if nothing else. Check out this comparison we put together of the graphics in action in both the new version and the old:
id Software is making changes to Quake Live, the browser-based shooter, in an attempt to expand the game's audience when it releases on Steam, the developer said on the Quake Live blog.
The update will introduce a plethora of changes. There are new control options for players unfamiliar with the classic layout; the heavy machinegun is being introduced, along with damage tweaks to several other weapons; and item respawn times have been unified across all game modes.
One of them ore poignant changes, though, is the introduction of weapon loadouts to select modes, giving players the ability to select a primary and secondary weapon before spawning.
Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario, Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, Donkey Kong and more, is transporting the beloved Nintendo characters into real life in a bizarre way with figurines and Instagram.
Martinet is positioning the video game characters against the backdrop of real-world situations and providing voice overs as they banter within the environment. The prolific voice actor has posted at least 25 videos on Instagram as he vacations in Chile.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I sat down to play Harmonix’s new game, A City Sleeps, but I can safely say that it wasn’t a 2D side-scrolling, bullet-hell shooter with techno-anime art, and a confident hip-hop soundtrack. But sure enough, the next game from the house that built Frequency, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band is all of those things, and I’m kind of digging it.
Developed by a handful of folks who worked on the experimental FPS Chroma, A City Sleeps is a twin-stick shooter that doesn’t have any qualms with beating you senseless. Falling somewhere in the middle of games like Geometry Wars, R-Type, and Ikaruga, A City Sleeps is immediately accessible with its familiar base mechanics. Left stick moves you around, right stick fires projectiles in any given direction. You try to dodge enemy fire while shooting back at them. But once you get beyond the simplistic, A City Sleeps becomes its own unique and interesting beast.
What price a life? Specifically, what price a simian life? Specifically, what price a helper monkey trained in thievery?
… [visit site to read more]
Robert John Gorham, or Rob da Bank, as BBC Radio 1 listeners know him, has made a career of showcasing up-and-coming musical artists. He curates British festivals, hosts a weekend radio show, founded several music labels and now, for the second time, he's compiling a video game soundtrack.
Promoting artists in a video game is a far cry from the traditional radio and live venue methods, though. The sheer number of Xbox One and 360 players that will hear the soundtrack means Rob da Bank has the chance to present new music on a much larger scale. Forza Horizon 2 will have household names like The Clash and Jane's Addiction, yes, but the DJ sees a chance to bring new names to the front.
As much as I’d like to spin around inside a washing machine, I know how that ends. But lovely, lovely video games can let us do impossible things, and games like Super Hexagon offer that dream of spinning around inside a round thing filled with jagged edges and crushing surfaces. oO has been out for a while but only twirled before my eyes today. It’s a one-button dodge ‘em up about spinning around and jumping between conjoined circles filled increasingly with death.
It’s free and it’s fun and it’s difficult and it’s late in the day so let’s all dick about a bit playing it.
Apple has just sent out invitations for an event being held on September 9 in Cupertino, CA, where the company is largely expected to reveal upcoming plans for its iPhone line.
As expected, the image sent along with the invitation doesn't reveal much of anything, aside from the tagline "Wish we could say more."
Even though Apple isn't hinting at much, it's more than likely that we'll see the next-generation iPhone—or iPhones—at the event. Speculation strongly suggests that the company will announce a pair of new smartphones, one with a 4.7-inch display and the other sporting a 5.5-inch screen.