Tearaway, the Vita platformer from Little Big Planet developer Media Molecule, features some pretty silly gimmicks with the camera, the touchpad, and even the microphone. But as I got my lazy ass off the couch to go find the cat, I had to concede that silly doesn’t mean not effective.
After the jump, what happened to the cat? Continue reading →
Dominions 4, the bonkers strategy game from Illwinter, is now available on Steam. If you purchased the game already through Desura or GamersGate, then congratulations! You’re a good person that deserves applause and maybe worship. You’re also now able unlock the game from Steam by using your game’s serial key.
If you haven’t purchased Dominions 4 yet because you won’t buy PC games unless they’re on Steam, or because you thought it looked like a low-budget indie game with no gameplay, then a pox on you for being a terrible person. You can purchase the game at the introductory price of $29.74 and save a few dollars off the normal cost. You can also start reading the nicely written manual which is 295 pages long and growing!
No, really. You need to read the manual to play this game.
Ashley Burch, the voice of Tina Tina from Borderlands 2 and international Youtube superstar, is coming to Saints Row IV. The Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’ Pack adds Ms. Burch, Anthony Burch, and their father to the already outrageous open-world game because why not?
“Volition’s writers wrote all our dialog, and it’s really funny, and the ‘look out shorty, hit that dinosaur with your dildo laser’ line from one of our episodes is actually in the game now and ahhhh nothing makes sense anymore.”
Corporate synergy!
The Mountains of Madness is a free expansion for Minor Key Games’ Eldritch. The DLC will add new weapons, tools, enemies, and 10 more levels of randomly generated Lovecraftian spelunking. Giant penguins! Awww. Everything is so dang cute!
Mountains of Madness will launch on December 19th.
Rob Harvey and Scott Dobrosielsky join Jason to discuss playing games on the crapper, with the clapper and maybe even a zapper. Rob gets in the zone, the Killzone, Scott ruins Forza and Jason gets high tech on the high seas. Tune in or perish, mortals!
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Arma III’s second free campaign DLC, Adapt, will be released on January 21st of next year. Bohemia Interactive’s announcement for the episode explained that the DLC will feature less traditional modern warfare scenarios. Jaroslav Kasny, the content lead for Arma III, said the developers are trying to use more features of the game’s sandbox design.
“Players will find more open and unorthodox scenarios, and with the help of guerrilla warfare, set out to defeat a much stronger enemy.”
Along with the campaign release, Bohmeia revealed that the independent faction (that is totally not a future game version of the Greek army) will be getting a major force upgrade. A new main battle tank, infantry fighting vehicle, and reconnaissance helicopter will be added to the Altis Armed Forces. These assets will be available for use by all scenario makers in the sandbox editor on December 11th. Courageous soldiers can get the new military assets now by signing into the dev branch of the game on Steam.
Bohemia promised to release three free DLC updates for Arma III when it was announced during the beta that the game would launch without a traditional story campaign.
What’s up Battlefield 4? Why are you so crash-prone? Why does every few online matches end with a hard crash or a failure? It’s been over a month since EA’s shooter launched and it’s still struggling with basic issues like stability. DICE released a patch for the PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 ahead of the China Rising map pack but even they admitted that it was only partly successful in addressing critical fixes.
It could be worse, I suppose. On the PlayStation 4, DICE hasn’t even been able to push out a partial fix yet. The PS4 patch, which was originally supposed to be published yesterday, has been pushed back to a later date due to technical issues.
Why do you make it so hard for me to love you Battlefield 4?
A handful of Zen Pinball 2 tables will be available for the Playstation 4 on December 17. There are even a couple of classics alongside the usual Star Wars and Marvel stuff (should we just start calling these “Disney” tables?). Who can complain about any selection of Zen Pinball tables that includes Paranormal and Earth Defense? Not me.
However, here’s the big news for those of you who already have collections on the Playstation 3.
If you own any of these on PS3, we invite you to download them on PS4 at no charge. This is our way of saying thank you to all of the players who have supported Zen Studios on PlayStation platforms over the years.
It’s a new platform, so you won’t be able to carry over your high scores. I can’t help but feel this is almost — almost! — a good thing. Nothing kills a table for me like having a really high high score that I know I’ll never be able to beat.
Zen Studios will announce details of their collaboration with Microsoft on the Xbox One sometime early next year.
The zombie apocalypse isn’t all bad. It’s mostly bad. But it’s not all bad. State of Decay, a brilliant rendition of the zombie apocalypse, encompasses both the good and bad.
After the jump, the real triumph and tragedy of the dead walking the earth. Continue reading →
There are a lot of things I really like about NBA 2K14. It’s such a gorgeous game and is very tight in content and design. I discover new things that fascinate me about the game at a pretty steady pace. I just added a new skill to my player and the announcers pick up on it and mention it in appropriate places. That’s pretty awesome.
However, my favorite thing about the game so far is rather superficial. I chose to be referred to as “The Dude.” During these awesome halftime shows and commentary during the game, whenever I do something, good or bad, it comes out like “The Dude nailed that one from downtown,” or “The Dude isn’t on his game today.” I want every game to call me The Dude.
In 1976, a Spanish director named Narciso Serrador made a movie called Who Can Kill A Child?, but with the words in Spanish. It opens with ten minutes of newsreel footage about the atrocities visited on children in the 20th century, from the Holocaust, to starvation in Africa, to the then ongoing conflicts in Southeast Asia. ‘What the heck kind of movie is this?,’ you might wonder. Then the movie proper starts and you’re watching a moody mystery/horror thriller about an English couple vacationing in Spain who happens upon a mysteriously depopulated island. It turns out the children have slaughtered all the adults. Basically, a Children of the Corn before there were any Children of the Corn.
So what was the point of all that newsreel footage? Serrador suggests that these homicidal children are an evolutionary response to the atrocities of the modern era. Children suffer the worst during war, famine, and upheaval. So the children on this island have developed a preemptive homicidal tendency as a survival measure. And because people who don’t commit atrocities have a built-in reluctance to kill children — as per the title of a movie — the children can get away with it. The movie ends with the English couple successfully dispatched (the pregnant wife is actually killed from within by her unborn baby). The children appropriate a Coast Guard boat and sail to the mainland to infect the children there. It’s the end of the world! Roll credits.
After the jump, it’s been long enough! Let’s remake this thing! Continue reading →
The mutiplayer mod for Just Cause 2 is coming to Steam. The developers of the unofficial multiplayer mod for Avalanche Studios’ open world explosion simulator, Just Cause 2, announced that their project will be getting a shot of legitimacy by becoming a Steam supported title.
“On release, you’ll be able to download the client and server from Steam, just like a normal game. This means complete Steam integration, including joining on your friends and more. Imagine the chaos of normal Just Cause 2, then extending it out to dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of players.”
The Steam page is already up, but the application won’t go live until December 16th. The mod made news last year when tests featuring hundreds of players online in the same game of Just Cause 2 were successfully conducted.
Microsoft cautions consumers against turning on the development mode on their Xbox One retail units. In a statement to Engadget, Microsoft advised against following guides that show how to enable the dev-only mode because the special sequence of button presses and menu prompts will not actually turn the console into a fully usable kit.
Changing the settings in this menu is only intended for developers for Xbox One, and this alone does not turn the console into a development kit. We strongly advise consumers against changing these settings as it could result in their Xbox One becoming unusable. Customers who have put their consoles into this developer setting can revert by restoring factory defaults under Settings / System, select Restore Factory Defaults.
The instructions to enable the hidden mode of operation were originally published by GameTuts and were quickly propagated throughout the web. Microsoft had announced the ability to turn any retail Xbox One into a development unit via a special software download in July.
Sega and Creative Assembly have announced the Caesar in Gaul campaign pack for Total War: Rome II. The standalone campaign will feature Caesar’s war against Gaul with a shorter, more focused strategic experience in comparison to the main game. Players will be able to take control of Gallic Arverni, the Germanic Suebi, the Belgic Nervii, or Rome and fight in the 18 provinces of Gaul. With the more compact strategic map comes a tighter timeline.
As Caesar in Gaul deals with a considerably shorter time-span (58-51BC) than the grand sweep of the ROME II campaign, each turn represents two weeks rather than a year. This means seasons make a return. The gameplay effects of these aren’t always predictable however, and may vary from province to province. A late autumn may bring a good harvest for example, but a long, dry summer may damage your food production.
It remains to be seen if the standalone Caesar in Gaul campaign will fix many of the issues Tom had in his review of Total War: Rome II.
This week we see Spike Lee’s remake of a Korean revenge movie, which is not unlike trying to choke down a live octopus. From the 43-minute mark on, we span the topic of our favorite bridges in movies for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: Inside Llewyn Davis
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