Super Adventure Box, the 8-bit inspired April Fool’s event for Guild Wars 2, is returning to the game in a new and improved form for a Back to School celebration. An insane genius named Moto is bringing back the blocky goofiness with Super Adventure Box World 2 featuring new challenges, a “ridiculously difficult” Tribulation Mode, new cosmetic skins, and new weapons and pets can be collected.
Permanent updates to the game include a major change to magic find. It’s no longer going to be a stat given by equipment. It will be an account-wide bonus for all characters accumulated through salvaging higher-level items.
Super Adventure Box Back to School starts on September 3rd.
Killer Instinct for the Xbox One isn’t free-to-play despite how the game is being marketed in some segments. Ken Lobb, creative director of Microsoft-published Xbox One games, told Eurogamer that the option to download the next-gen fighting game and play through it as Jago is just “the world’s most generous demo.” Additional characters are $4.99 each, or you can buy the Killer Instinct Combo Breaker pack for $19.99, which comes with all six launch characters and two post-launch DLC fighters. (There’s also a $39.99 version that comes with a load of extras.) Lobb explained that the pricing scheme is meant to encourage the growth of the fighting game community.
“What we’re trying to do is get the most people possible back into fighting games,” Lobb said. “When I worked on KI1, when the Super NES and Mega Drive were at their peak, there were millions more fighting game players. The community is super robust right now, with a lot of fans, but it’s smaller than it used to be.
“I want all the people who will be like, oh yeah, KI, I loved that! But I don’t know if I can learn it again. Play Jago. See if you like it. That’s the idea.”
Microsoft plans to release Killer Instinct in two seasons. Season 1 is the launch version with six characters and two DLC additions. Season 2 is scheduled for 2014 and will include another eight characters. Additionally, like League of Legends, Killer Instinct’s free character will be swapped with another selection after a few months.
The early parts of Alyce Kills are pretty grating as pretty Alyce and her prettier friend Carroll descend into a vapid rabbit hole of partying, girl angst, faux improvised dialogue, and more partying. I don’t necessarily recommend sticking around for the twist. You’re better off watching Angela Bettis in May or Charlize Theron in Monster or Beatrice Dalle in anything. In fact, just go ahead and watch Jennifer’s Body. But soon enough, the middle act kicks in. As guilt spirals into self-destructive behavior, the movie wisely focuses on the better actress, Jade Dornfeld as Alyce, doing her level best. Some gruesome special effects make an appearance, along with a fascinating turn from an actor named Eddie Rouse as slightly more than your average drug dealer. In fact, the scenes between Alyce and this drug dealer belong in a better movie, minus the tedium, the thin but forced Alice in Wonderland angle, the caricatures that pass for other characters, and whatever political point is made by having Alyce masturbate to news of war in the Middle East. But then, about twenty minutes before it’s over, Alyce Kills comes alive with some wickedly black humor that shows off what Dornfeld and director Jay Lee could have been doing all along. Where was this movie during the other 70 minutes?
Alyce Kills is available for video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it here.
As much as I like Payday 2 — What else is any serious Payday fan going to say about this sequel? — it’s nearly criminal how badly developer Overkill has mismanaged the overall experience. I just want to play Payday 2 the way I want to play Payday 2. I just want to grind an easy mission. I just want to quickly jump into a game with other people. I just want to play a practice game to figure out how to mix methamphetamines. Do I use the caustic soda before the hydrogen chloride? I just want to be the baddest bad-ass shotgun toter I can be. But developer Overkill won’t let me.
After the jump, they did it their way. Continue reading →
The internet gave us BadgerBadgerBadger, Keyboard Cat, and twerking, but sometimes it gives us good stuff as well. Coming from two far-off corners of the internet is some news of industrious hackers from the homebrew scenes bringing great games to platforms they’ve never been on.
RetroCollect has the scoop on Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. It’s Street Fighter II on the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Now you can Hadoken in red and… More red. Getting it to work depends on a specific flash cartridge, but someone calling himself “Mr.Anon” toiled to bring Street Fighter II to all the Virtual Boy owners out there.
From another part of the internet comes the news that two fellows going by the names “smealum” and “Lobo” are bringing Portal to the Nintendo DS. According to the programmers, it’s buggy and incomplete, but they have 14 levels of Portal gun goodness and there’s even a level editor! It’s based on an original story in which you play Doug Rattman, the guy that left all the cryptic graffiti on the walls of Aperture Science. The Companion Cube is even more adorable in tiny DS form.
Thanks, internet! Sometimes you can be pretty swell.
Battlefield Play4Free is the free-to-play version of Battlefield 3. It’s the Cousin Oliver of EA’s tentpole shooter franchise. It’s smaller than Battlefield 3, the shooting isn’t as satisfying, and the grind is annoying. But, hey! It’s free. I’m sure that it must attract some people just based on the initial price barrier being $0, just as there are fans of Robbie Rist’s character in The Brady Bunch. There’s always someone willing to play a free game.
Peter Moore told Engadget that we can expect free-to-play versions of every major game EA publishes. He emphasized the success of existing F2P tie-ins to Battlefield and FIFA and said that EA will not release any games without an online component.
“We don’t ship a game at EA that is offline. It just doesn’t happen. And gamers either want to be connected so their stats and achievements reflect who they are, or you want the full multiplayer experience on top of that. We don’t deliver offline experiences anymore.”
“The ability for you to be able to interact with those franchises on a free-to-play basis is going to be part-and-parcel with every major franchise we do now.”
Moore has been a major champion of shifting EA’s focus exclusively from retail disks to games as a service.
It’s hard to narrow it down to ten. But nine simply isn’t enough and eleven would be unprofessional.
After the jump, the things you’ll hear in Steelport. Continue reading →
Square-Enix re-releases Final Fantasy XIV. In case you can’t keep the Final Fantasies straight, this is the one that’s an MMO. It’s aptly subtitled “A Realm Reborn” because the informal “version 2.0” makes it sound like something Tron. I’m a card-carrying Lost Planet 2 fanboi, but I have zero hope Lost Planet 3 is anything other than a throwaway sequel. Developer Spark Unlimited, who had nothing to do with Lost Planet 2, is known for a console port of the original Call of Duty and then two shooters you’ve never heard of. For Lost Planet 3, they apparently thought it was important that you see the character’s faces (pictured). Suda 51’s Killer is Dead is the “spiritual sequel” (i.e. published by someone who doesn’t have the rights) to Killer 7 and No More Heroes. Unfortunately, the Suda 51 brand, as it were, hasn’t been a reliable bullet point for a game since 2005. Finally, basketball fans will be delighted that Madden 2.5 is available.
Titanfall is one of the big games being shown in conjunction with the Xbox One. Have you seen it? It’s a multiplayer blend of parkour, jetpacks, giant mechs, and adrenaline. The pilots versus mechs combat is something that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Respawn Entertainment is making a splash with their debut game, and they’re doing it with Valve’s Source engine. Wait, Source? This is the same engine used for Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. I’ve played Source games. They look good, but not this good.
Titanfall producer Drew McCoy spoke to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry to explain how their background on Call of Duty gave them a leg up during the development process. He also gets into some technical reasons for using Source, what advantages Microsoft’s cloud gives them, and why framerate is king.
“The thing about the Source Engine when we got it is that we actually branched from Portal 2. It was DX9, very single-threaded and they used the way that engine worked to its best possible potential for Portal. It can’t render that much on-screen. The main thread just can’t push out enough jobs, so we’ve done a huge amount of work. We didn’t choose this engine because it was going to be 60, we chose this engine knowing that we’d be spending the next two years making it fast.”
Titanfall is aiming for a Spring 2014 launch on PC and Xbox One.
Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett knocked our socks off with this fiendishly clever horror movie! We hope you’ll see it before listening to us yammer on about how good it is. Until then, you can fast forward to the 1:02 mark, which marks the spot where we talk about our favorite maps in movies.
Next week: Closed Circuit
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Deep Silver wants to publish more games in the Metro franchise, but tweak the next installment to appeal to a broader audience. Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Deep Sliver, told Joystiq that he was pleased with the sales of Metro: Last Light and looked forward to more games in the series. While he was careful to emphasize that he wasn’t specifically announcing a sequel to the claustrophobic shooter, he did say that Deep Silver would continue to collaborate with Metro 2033 author Dmitry Glukhovsky and developer 4A Games on future endeavors.
“I’m very glad we acquired that brand. While it launched in a very dry space in the gaming calendar this year, it still got a lot of attention. Our ambition is to absolutely continue with that brand and we will also, in the next phase, look to making it more accessible for a broader gamer audience.”
Deep Silver acquired the Metro license from THQ’s bankruptcy asset auction for $5.9 million in January.
Fallen Enchantress’ latest patch, which focuses on making the AI players less passive, has just been released. Go here to read the changes in version 1.3, dubbed the “empires” patch. Or read on for an account of the AI doing things I haven’t seen before.
After the jump, cleaning up the Scrapyard Continue reading →
There’s a moment in the opening hour of Ni No Kuni that places the reality of Oliver’s journey in question. He suffers an unimaginable loss and his tears revive Mr. Drippy, Lord High Lord of the Fairies, who had been conveniently trapped in stuffed animal form all of these years. Shadar cursed Mr. Drippy to remain in doll form, the same Shadar who had taken over Mr. Drippy’s world, the same Shadar who had banished Alicia, Great Sage and soulmate to Oliver’s mom. To go with Mr. Drippy meant a chance for Oliver to not only save Mr. Drippy’s world but also do something about Oliver’s loss. As I watched this, I wondered if this was all real or if this was Oliver’s way of dealing with the tragedy.
After the jump, saying goodbye to Mr. Drippy Continue reading →
Never underestimate the effectiveness of direct mail marketing. A few days ago, I got an email from a site called Wargame Downloads. The name kind of gives it away. It’s a site that has a bunch of print-and-play games, mostly about historical subjects but not without the occasional elf or sportsman. I wrote about it a few months ago after buying a couple neat solitaire games. For a few bucks each, how can you lose? One of the games not mentioned in that article is called Baptism at Bardia. It comes in standard print-and-play format: color printer and glue stick required. But then I got the email: Baptism at Bardia has been released for PC! Straight to the site I went. It cost $12. If the Wargame Downloads guys can figure out a way to make each one of their emails turn into twelve bucks, they can probably afford to start printing and selling some of those wargames themselves.
After the jump, what twelve bucks buys these days Continue reading →
Square Enix wants to create “persistent online experiences” from its franchises. Darrell Gallagher, the newly appointed head of product development and studios, posted a statement on Gamasutra that seems to reveal the direction Square Enix may be headed with their games.
We see the opportunity for some of our games continuing beyond a traditional beginning, middle, and end. We can have them become extendable and more persistent – with an opportunity to build and grow across games. To design in a way to keep our games alive for years instead of weeks. I’m not talking about an MMORPG – although the concept is similar – I’m talking about creating persistent online experiences built on the foundations of the games we are well known for.
Gallagher calls out the fan-made Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod as one of the indicators of how much gamers want continued experiences in the worlds Square Enix has created. He says that the industry has “walked away” from some games too early and that development on tablets as well as traditional gaming devices could be a great opportunity for the company.
