Here’s the trailer for The Mummy Demastered, the upcoming licensed movie game from WayForward Games. That’s the latest The Mummy starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella. Not the Brendan Fraser series, or even the Boris Karloff film. It’s got that side-scrolling retro pixel indie vibe, so props to WayForward for making frugal use of the license. It isn’t the first time WayForward has made a pixel-art game for The Mummy franchise. They made 2002’s The Scorpion King: Sword of Osiris. That’s the one with Dwayne Johnson’s computerized head and torso grafted onto a giant scorpion’s body.
The Mummy Demastered is launching later this year on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. You can check out how much Quarter to Three liked The Mummy here.
Bluehole, the publisher of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is not pleased with Epic’s foray into the same arena. While Fortnite Battle Royale is going free-to-play, Bluehole is pondering their relationship with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. In an interview with GamesIndustry, Bluehole’s Chang Han Kim pointed out that while they pay Epic for their UE4 engine license, Epic has suddenly become a competitor, including the use of Battlegrounds in their marketing.
“We have also noticed that Epic Games references PUBG in the promotion of Fortnite to their community and in communications with the press. This was never discussed with us and we don’t feel that it’s right.”
Whatever the outcome, it’s likely that Fortnite won’t be the last copycat of Battlegrounds. To date, Bluehole’s multiplayer phenomenon has sold over 11 million units on PC alone.
There is a new Planet of the Apes game coming from Imaginati Studios, in partnership with Andy Serkis’ The Imaginarium. Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a storytelling adventure game set between the last two movies. It’s reminiscent of Heavy Rain or Until Dawn, but there’s a multiplayer twist. Up to four people can play together and vote on the outcomes for the game’s choices. But it’s not just a straight majority vote all the time. There are crucial choices that will allow players to spend limited override tokens that will give their votes more weight, adding a bit of a competitive component to the proceedings. What better way to recreate the feel of the apes versus humans war, than with contentious committee voting?
On the PlayStation 4, the voting is done through Sony’s PlayLink system, allowing everyone to sit together and cast their votes via their mobile devices. Imaginati CEO Martin Alltimes hopes the feature marks a return to family couch co-op.
“We can have a social experience around the television that used to be part of console gaming and has now largely gone away with online.”
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier will launch later this year on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
There’s nothing like seeing pitchforks and torches held aloft while a mob clicks a thumbs down button. Review-bombing is an issue that has been plaguing Valve’s digital store since user reviews were enabled. A developer says something controversial, or a popular streamer goes all in on a game, and the result can be thousands of negative reviews that drop the average score. Valve acknowledged that users will sometimes score a game based on factors outside of the game content. In the case of review-bombing, this skewed average score can mislead potential buyers if the issues at hand aren’t pertinent to their buying decision. Valve now thinks it might have a solution. Starting today, Steam will display a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews for each game. Consumers will be able to easily see if reviews suddenly took a drastic downturn for a temporary condition, and then click to see a sample review of the time period.
Xbox 360 controllers are being used to control the periscopes on Virginia-class nuclear submarines. Originally, the “photonic mast” periscopes were controlled with a $38,000 specially-designed joystick, but based on cost-cutting directives and complaints from testers that the controls were not intuitive and clunky, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Navy conscripted the ubiquitous console game controller to meet their needs. It’s a choice that’s proven popular with the personnel tasked with using the systems, and with the procurement officers on the project.
“I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.”
The Xbox 360 controller will be bundled as part of the Virginia-class submarine packages starting in November, just in time for the holidays! Hopefully, the Lockheed Martin warranties on submarines will be just as good as Microsoft’s red ring support.
The macaroni rule is a lie. Richard Berg, the designer of the infamously detailed The Campaign For North Africa, admits that one of the much-beloved and odder rules of his World War II board game was not based on reality. In The Campaign for North Africa, the Italian forces have to account for extra water rations for their soldiers to boil pasta. If the pasta points aren’t properly managed, Italian troops may desert, reflecting the inability to feed hungry soldiers in the field. It’s a fiddly rule for a fiddly wargame. Unfortunately, in an epic board game brimming with technical detail, this one rule has nothing to do with history. In fact, it was a joke that Richard Berg included to lampoon the absurdity of his creation.
“The reality is that the Italians cooked their pasta with the tomato sauce that came with the cans,” he says. “But I didn’t want to do a rule on that.”
To add insult to injury, Berg has never completed a playthrough of his own game.
The latest developer update from Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan is all about Overwatch’s toxic community. Despite adding a crucial feature to the console version of the game that gives players a way to report bad behavior, Blizzard is fighting a growing tide of cheaters, griefers, and generally terrible people in their game. The problem is bad enough that Kaplan admits that the team is spending a “tremendous” amount of resources chasing bad actors instead of working on adding content to the game. Blizzard is working on solutions, and warns that it will be an ongoing process that will require the community’s cooperation.
Online toxicity is a problem for any online game, especially if the game is competitive and popular. Overwatch easily qualifies as a magnet for unpleasantness and adds a few more wrinkles by leaning hard into its community’s fascination with the character lore. Take the normally aggressive and immature online multiplayer behavior and amp it up a few notches with a dose of social media politicizing, and the results can be breathtaking. But now you know why it takes Blizzard so long to release new heroes and maps.
The early treatment for Fallout: New Vegas included race selections for the player character that offered ghouls and super-mutants as viable choices. Speaking to Eurogamer, Obsidian’s CEO Feargus Urquhart spoke about some of the decisions they made during the 2010 open-world role-playing game’s development. Originally intended as a large expansion for Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios and Obsidian expanded the scope of the project so it became essentially a sequel in size and complexity. “Fallout: Sin City” would eventually become the Fallout: New Vegas we all know and love. That three playable races idea? It was nixed due to technical issues.
“It really had to do with how all the weapons and armour worked. Trying to have them all work with ghouls and super-mutants was just going to be – [Bethesda] felt like it was going to be a nightmare. It wasn’t like they said no but it was a very strongly worded, ‘We would really suggest that you not try to do that.'”
Feargus Urquhart and Obsidian co-owner Chris Parker also addressed the now-infamous Metacritic contract clause that made the studio miss a bonus payment by one point.
“You can’t get mad at somebody for a contract you signed. We signed a contract, it had very clear terms in it. ‘Oh we were really close…’ We didn’t hit it.”
Fallout: New Vegas may not have allowed you to play a ghoul or mutant, but it did give us iron sights on guns.
Speaking to the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, Electronic Arts’ vice president of investor relations Chris Evenden, was bullish on the game-streaming concept. According to GamesIndustry‘s report, Evenden said cloud technology has been catching up to everyone’s ambition over the past few years with the infrastructure barrier shrinking rapidly. He cited a recent demonstration given to a major internet company for streaming Battlefield. The publisher has slowly been enticing customers to its services like Origin on PC and EA Access on consoles, and expects the transition to full-blown cloud gaming will happen someday.
“I think it’s inevitable that the gaming entertainment world will move in much the same way that the music and video entertainment worlds have already moved, in the sense that people have moved from an ownership model to an access model. And you’ll see that in gaming, just as you’ve seen it with Spotify and Netflix in other media businesses.”
Previous cloud gaming services like OnLive jumped the gun and got ahead of the technology curve, ending in failure. More recent services like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and PlayStation’s Gaikai have found success with modest growth and investments in technology.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has some advice for fans preparing to pay outrageous amounts for the SNES Classic Edition. Relax and don’t pay more than the $79.99 list price. Speaking to the Financial Times, Reggie Fils-Aime said the company has “dramatically increased” production and that despite issues with pre-orders at retailers, there should be no shortage of stock.
“I would strongly urge you not to over-bid on an SNES Classic on any of the auction sites.”
Nintendo hasn’t actually said how many of the mini-consoles it will manufacture, but the company says it will be ship product from September 29th through the end of the year. Hopefully, we won’t see a repeat of the inflated prices the NES Classic saw during the holidays along with the abrupt stock sellout.
Activision and Sledgehammer Games have announced details of Call of Duty: WWII’s preorder program. The preorder “multiplayer upgrade” features a token to unlock one weapon of your choice when you start playing, instead of unlocking it eventually in the normal progression scheme. You’ll also get a 2x experience multiplier good for four hours, and a collection of five gear sets that correspond to the Divisions system.
Previous Call of Duty games have been criticized by fans for offering exclusive multiplayer maps, (such as variations of Nuketown) or locking away cooperative zombie campaigns behind preorder bonuses. Some gamers are now criticizing the publisher for not making WWII preorders worthwhile because the incentives aren’t good enough.
Hey, Call of Duty players! Chill out. Activision could make your weapon and player camo skins consumable like Shaders in Destiny 2.
If you’re one of the lucky owners of 2004’s The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, you may know that there’s a fan-run outfit that stepped in to supply multiplayer capability to the game after publisher Electronic Arts shut down the servers in 2010. That’s all well and good, but the pre-HD textures and models haven’t aged well. Blowing up what looked good in 2004 onto a 2017 monitor is a quick way to reassess the rose-colored glasses you were wearing. Thanks to a couple of dedicated modders, there is now a way to get the game to look as good as Peter Jackson’s green-screen adventures. The HD Edition mod from “RiderOfRohan” and “Mathijs” gives every blocky low-poly model a sharp upgrade. No longer will Aragorn look like he missed second breakfast.
Are you one of the 10 million people playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? Despite still being in early access on Steam, the Battle Royale multiplayer game from independent developer Bluehole is a sales hit. It’s a darling of streamers and YouTube gaming. In fact, Battlegrounds recently surpassed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 as the most played games on Steam. It is a growth phenomenon. One can only wonder how much more it will sell when it launches on Xbox One by the end of the year.
If you want to watch Tom Chick and Jason McMaster help others get their chicken dinner, you can check out their play here.
Star Wars Empire at War is a complete game once again. The real-time strategy game has been hobbled since 2014 when the online service Gamespy was shuttered effectively ending all multiplayer capability. Thanks to a new update from Petroglyph, multiplayer has been restored via Steamworks! The Gold Pack version of the game on Steam now even includes Workshop support for mods. That’s good news for everyone that wanted to play out those Galactica versus Star Destroyer versus TARDIS fights against other humans.
2K Games is sunsetting Sid Meier’s Pirates! on Apple iOS. Because of 64-bit compatibility issues with the release of iOS 11, 2K Games announced changes to their App Store catalog. While Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution 2 and XCOM: Enemy Within are being temporarily pulled from sale so the developers can update them to 64-bit executables, a handful of games are being taken off the store permanently. While there probably won’t be many tears shed for the loss of the Duke Nukem Forever Soundboard, fans of ballroom dancing and broadsides may be concerned that Pirates! will no longer be purchased, and the game will not be supported going forward.
Early reports are that the retired games are completely inoperable on iOS 11, so updating the system dooms the titles to forever taunt you as useless icons on your screen.
