It turns out that Tom’s advice for pinball fans going into the next generation was ahead of the curve. Although Zen Studios’ Pinball FX 2 is coming to the Xbox One on July 31st, it will not support cross-platform table purchases. If you purchased a table for the Xbox 360 version, you’ll need to buy it again on the Xbox One. According to the statement in the official forum, Zen said they were unable to offer the feature.
We know this is very important to fans of the Xbox 360 version, but we are very sorry to say that this was not an option made available to us on Xbox One. We always do our best to take advantage of any platform’s features whenever possible, and if a feature like cross-platform entitlement is an option for us, we will make it an option for our players. Unfortunately in this case, it was not.
Zen’s Pinball games on PlayStation do support table cross-platform licensing. Zen’s Mel Kirk promises that if Microsoft gives them the ability to offer cross-platform licensing for Xbox, they will enable it.
If Lindsay Lohan can sue Rockstar for the alleged use of her likeness in Grand Theft Auto V, then why not let Manuel Noriega file suit against Activision for his likeness in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? The 80-year-old former dictator of Panama has filed suit based on the character “False Profit” who helps the game’s antagonist Raul Menendez fake his own death. Noriega claims his likeness was used without his consent and that his character’s portrayal damages his reputation.
“Defendants’ use of plaintiff’s image and likeness caused damage to plaintiff. Plaintiff was portrayed as an antagonist and portrayed as the culprit of numerous fictional heinous crimes, creating the false impression that defendants are authorized to use plaintiff’s image and likeness. This caused plaintiffs to receive profits they would not have otherwise received.”
Manuel Noriega was deposed in 1989 when the United States invaded Panama. He is currently serving a 20-year term in El Renacer prison for human rights violations.
Meet Guy. He’s the lamest character I could come up with in Arma III’s virtual arsenal. Look at him! He’s got a cigarette behind his ear, a bandanna that was too weak for Call of Duty: Ghosts, and he’s wearing white cowboy boots. That’s a starter pistol in his hands, so he’s useless in combat as well. I wouldn’t buy a used car from this person, yet he’s ready for (in)action in Arma III. I can’t wait to make a mission using the in-game scenario editor in which the players will have to escort Guy through a battlefield. Or maybe a hot tub sales convention.
The wardrobe and infantry testing area is part of the free Bootcamp Update that came out earlier this week. Besides the dress-up module, Bohemia Interactive added VR training missions and a prologue to the single player campaign to ease newbies into the particular style of infantry gameplay the Arma series offers. The developers have also revamped the fatigue and weapon sway mechanics as well as crushing a few bugs.
The enemies in Jason Stark’s Ninja Pizza Girl could’ve been robots or aliens with laserguns, but thanks to his teenage daughters’ input, they’re far more scary. They’re other teenagers. In the game, players take on the role of Gemma, a 16-year-old delivering pizzas in a side-scrolling race by using parkour and acrobatic skills to traverse the terrain in style. Screw up, and other teenagers make fun of her. They hurl insults and generally become jerks. If it happens enough, Gemma gets depressed and color drains out of the world ending her run. In the Kickstarter, Stark describes how his idea for a simple platforming game became something else entirely.
Despite its unusual premise, Ninja Pizza Girl’s story is based on the real-life experiences of our two eldest daughters going through High School. Being a teenager is tough. Being a teenager that’s slightly different to all the other teenagers around you is a nightmare.
Disparity Games is looking for $35,000 in pledge funding to launch Ninja Pizza Girl in March 2015 for PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Versions for consoles are being negotiated.
What happens in Don’t Starve’s cooperative multiplayer mode when your partner dies? She or he turns into a ghost, of course! Klei Entertainment’s Seth Rosen posted some details of the upcoming Don’t Starve Together update including a video demonstrating the co-op afterlife. Rosen explains the haunting mechanic.
When I haunt something, it gives me back some life force (the blue stomach meter). As long as I have some life force, my humanity (the blue heart meter) won’t drain further, which is good because my humanity level is my maximum health if and when I get revived. If I manage to get my life force meter full (through haunting enough objects, which I was actually able to do in a dense forest – though the forest also got burned down, or by haunting a resurrection object or being given a reviver by a living player), then I will get resurrected.
Rosen noted that the final ghost implementation will be adjusted to foster less griefing. Don’t Starve Together will be a free update for all owners of the base game later this year.
The advantages of early access for developers are obvious. Games offered through Steam’s early access program have allowed independent developers a way to finance their projects while leveraging community participation, and gives them the power to avoid contractual pitfalls that can come with publisher backing. High-profile games like DayZ, Rust, Planetary Annihilation, and Prison Architect are benefitting from early access. Larian Studios even attributes the success of their recently launched RPG Divinity: Original Sin to feedback gleaned from players during the early access period.
While PC players may have demonstrated their eagerness to purchase unfinished games, will console players do so as well? Sony is considering the question. In an interview with Gamasutra, Sony’s Adam Boyes says that figuring out how to do early access the right way is something his company is looking into.
That’s one of the massive conversations we have internally – that, at what point does [a game meet standards of release]? We still at some point ensure that we’re being mindful of the consumer. We don’t want somebody to stumble across that title and expect a full product, and have a negative experience.
Boyes admits that he played Rust and had a great time despite it being unfinished.
Publisher Deep Silver is polling the community to determine what keepsakes they’d like to see in a Dead Island 2 Collector’s Edition. A beach towel? Beer cooler case? A zombie arm back scratcher? There doesn’t seem to be a choice that includes a bloody dismembered bikini-clad torso like they originally planned to ship with Dead Rising: Riptide. A golden zombie “Oscar” statue just doesn’t have the same impact.
Scoff if you will at the simple gameplay and obvious free-to-play money grind mechanics, but Bloomberg reports that the financial outlook on Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is green. The mobile game is on track to make $200 million in revenue by the end of this year and developer Glu Mobile is reaping the rewards.
“It might be our biggest game of the year,” Chief Executive Officer Niccolo de Masi said in an interview. “We’re not surprised. Kim is a one-of-a-kind talent with an incredibly precise fit to the game engine that we tailored but already had in the company.”
The game encourages players to climb the social strata of Hollywood by dating celebrities, making extravagant purchases in Beverly Hills, and being seen by the right media at the right times. Players can purchase in-game currency to speed things up, or earn them the hard way by actually playing the game. If that sounds shallow, keep in mind that it’s the only program in the Apple Appstore Top 10 with a perfect 5-star rating. Fans of the game noted that the game’s appeal comes from the integrated social media aspects that keep them involved with the real-life Kim Kardashian.
It turns out that the answer, according to this Twitter exchange between a player of Skullgirls Encore and developer Lab Zero Games, is that people who see the above screen have probably not paid for the game.
“So I got this message after beating story with both Para and Cere and I have no idea what it means…”
“Oh that? It means you should probably buy the game instead of pirate it. o:)”
Bravo, Lab Zero.
Ragha is a dual kingdom of fire and ice, rage and serenity. Half of the population are Abysian descendants from the isolated colony of Tur, and half the population are Airyan refugees from Caelum.
So here’s the deal. A bunch of fire warriors get attacked by some flying ice people. But then a civil war breaks out in the homeland of the flying ice people, so the attackers aren’t sure if the war is still on. While they’re waiting on the civil war to shake out, they settle peacefully alongside the fire warriors they were attacking. Many years later, the result is the Ragha, a mixed race of fire and ice people where the rulers take turns based on whether it’s summer or winter. Bipartisan politics at its finest!
The Ragha thrive differently in either extreme of temperatures, and you can play them in Dominions 4. Some of their units can only be recruited in places where it’s really hot or really cold. “Wrong temperature” the tooltip says as you go down the line checking which units you can build.
The Ragha are available as a free update to Dominions 4.
After Microsoft Flight! crashed and burned, you could be forgiven if you thought Microsoft’s once-flagship PC flight simulation franchise was dead. If you’ve ever noticed the copious amounts of DLC in Steam for Train Simulator, you know that there’s an audience that not only buys these types of rivet-counting no-combat simulations, they buy a lot of really expensive DLC to go with them. Dovetail Games, makers of Train Simulator, think they have what it takes to transfer some of that train sim success to planes because they have secured the rights to create a new Flight Simulation game from Microsoft.
We are very proud of the strong community we have created around the Train Simulator series of products, and we are looking forward to extending our knowledge and experience into working closely with the flight simulation community. We know that they are a very knowledgeable, passionate and committed group of individuals and we welcome their feedback and involvement as we start to create the next generation of games in this area.
As part of their licensing deal, Dovetail will also be bringing Microsoft Flight X, originally released in 2006, to modern gamers with Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition later this year. It will include the Deluxe Edition and the Acceleration Expansion Pack features.
Most of the original cast of 1979 film Alien will reprise their roles in pre-order DLC missions for Sega’s Alien: Isolation. According to the announcement by the publisher, Sigourney Weaver will play Ellen Ripley in DLC missions “Crew Expendable” and “Last Survivor.” She will be joined by Tom Skerritt as Dallas, Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, and Yaphet Kotto as Parker. Ian Holm’s murderous robot will be played by another voice actor. Both segments will feature missions based on scenes from the movie. The first mission will even allow players to take the supporting character roles. Maybe you’ll do better as Dallas in the air vents?
Alien: Isolation’s main story involves Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda (as discussed in scenes from the director’s cut version of the movie) investigating her mother’s disappearance 15 years earlier. Alien: Isolation will be available on October 7th for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC. The “Nostromo Edition” featuring the DLC levels will be part of the pre-order bonus incentives.
Gearbox Software and 2K Games have announced Battleborn. It’s another MOBA. There’s a trailer that looks like it could be ripped from any of the ten thousand MOBA games in development. Wait! Before you go, would it change your mind to know that it’s in first-person view instead of the typical top-down perspective? According to the Game Informer cover preview, Gearbox took the fast-leveling and team-based gameplay of games like Dota 2 and League of Legends and combined it with the first-person combat in Team Fortress 2. I know, that’s still not intriguing. Don’t go yet! It’s not just 5v5 arena battles. There’s going to be a campaign which features five-player co-op that fuses elements of the competitive game into the story. Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford says it’s a “hobby-grade” campaign which sounds like it has more to do with radio-controlled cars than lane defense or fighting hordes of creeps. Hopefully, it’s more like Gearbox’s Borderlands and less like Duke Nukem Forever.
Battleborn will be released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
The announcement that The Sims 4 would be missing established series features like toddlers and swimming pools caused an uproar in the Sims community. Fans were disappointed. No longer would they be able to kill sims by removing the pool ladder when their virtual people were trying to impress the neighbors with a midnight skinny dip. EA Maxis has responded to the outcry by clarifying why some features won’t make the cut. Rachel Franklin, executive producer of The Sims 4 explains that implementation of new systems has required “trade-offs” that necessitated the removal of some elements. New systems like more walking animations made it in instead. Why new walks made it impossible to create pools is beyond me, but it sounds like the developers really put a lot of effort into them.
In The Sims 4, there are seven unique walk styles that you can choose from to help your Sims express themselves. To make those walk styles come to life, we had to create around 75 distinct animations. And it doesn’t stop there. Every emotion in The Sims 4 comes with a visible reaction or even another special walk style. No more looking at the UI to figure out how your Sims are feeling – just look at their faces, posture, movements. That’s where you’ll see about 320 new emotion-based animations, as well as over 600 reactions to objects.
Pimp-strut, hobble, shuffle, or skip? It’s good to know that The Sims 4 will have terrific candidates for The Ministry of Silly Walks when it launches on September 2nd.
The Simian Flu is coming to Plague Inc. Developer Ndemic Creations has announced that Plague Inc. on mobile systems and Plague Inc: Evolved on PC will be getting the 1.9 update soon that incorporates the intelligence-boosting virus from the upcoming 20th Century Fox movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. In Plague Inc.’s version of the movie events, players will try to foster the spread of the Simian Flu virus while attempting to foster the infected apes’ civilization.
Experience Planet of the Apes on a global scale – See how humanity responds as you infect the world with a lethal, artificial virus. Can they handle a global pandemic while dealing with a growing nation of genetically evolved, intelligent apes?
Control communities of intelligent apes – As well as infecting humans, evolve your disease in parallel to allow ape-to-ape transmission and improve their cognitive abilities. Ape colonies will generate DNA whilst helping apes avoid detection from humans.
For one species to rise, another must fall? – Master new gameplay mechanics and strategies to help apes become the dominant species on the planet. Decide when your apes should rampage against research labs, move apes to avoid detection from military drones and use ape migration to prevent scientists from conducting aggressive ape experiments.
It was recently revealed that Plague Inc: Evolved will be coming to the Xbox One later this year as part of the ID@Xbox program for indie games.
