Remember that scene in the one Friday the 13th movie when the snarky counselor turned on her fellow campers, and killed them with her machete? You probably don’t because it never happened. Jason, or his mother, are the killers! (Okay, there was the one psychotic killer ambulance driver, but the less said about A New Beginning, the better.) The kids are supposed to run around in a panic, scream, hide, and end up spit-roasted on an improvised weapon. Alas, the players of Friday the 13th: The Game have no loyalty to the movies’ tropes. Team-killing is rampant, leaving the poor Jason player to wander a mostly empty map seeking out the lone enemy. Once again, players prove they can ruin any concept no matter how simple.
The developers are responding by nerfing the heck out of the weapons. In public matches, the majority of lethal hardware will no longer work on the other campers. You’ll still be able to harm other players with traps and the car, so expect a lot more vehicular homicide after the next patch.
Valve has tactical shooting, hero shooting, and a MOBA. The two things missing from their catalog would be an MMO and a deck builder. With Artifact, Valve takes their Dota property into card flopping. Run, everybody! The 800-lb gorilla is entering the CCG room!
All we know for know for now is that it’s coming in 2018.
There’s permadeath, and there’s no fooling, for reals, forever death. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice features a game over mechanic that will eventually delete your save file if you fail enough times in-game. Ninja Theory’s hardcore game may be mechanically easier than something like Dark Souls, but the failure punishment goes one further. The player character, Senua, is infected with a creeping darkness on her hands and arms which grows with every death. Die too many times and the darkness will consume Senua leading to the ultimate consequence. The game deletes your save file. There’s no cute gravestone to mark your character’s death. No silly epilogue. Your save file is gone and you get to start all the way from the beginning, fresh as the minute you started. Consider this your public service announcement.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is available on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.
Sometimes I think I have all the Pinball FX tables I’ll ever need. Then the developers at Zen Studios make announcements like this:
[In Universal Classic Pinball] players can get behind the wheel of the DeLorean time machine and travel through different eras of Hill Valley to fix the space-time continuum on the Back to the Future table, take on the terrifying great white shark on the Jaws table, and go on an adventure with Elliot as he helps E.T. contact his spaceship and return to the stars on the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial table!
I didn’t realize until I read that announcement, but I’ve gone my entire life with a hole in my soul the exact shape of a Jaws pinball table. The Universal Classics collection, which might as well be called Jaws Pinball and Two Other Things, will come out with the launch of Pinball FX3. The target date is only “this summer”.
Derek Yu of Spelunky fame is working with the creators of Downwell, Time Barons, Skorpulac, and Madhouse to create a retro anthology of games sold in one bundle. UFO 50 will feature fifty little games that will add up to over 100 hours of content. Each title will be slightly smaller than the 8-bit inspirations from the 1980’s, but the goal is to pack each experience with the creator’s unique vision to give the player a variety pack of gaming. All the games will have a single-player mode, with about a third additionally offering cooperative or competitive multiplayer.
UFO 50 will launch on PC in 2018 first. Pricing has not been announced.
One of the side activities people remember with fondness in Assassin’s Creed 2 was the tomb puzzles that could be unlocked under the game’s towns. These six puzzle areas consisted of platform timing, switch pulling, and navigation gauntlets that tested Ezio’s abilities. A little bit of Lara Croft spelunking in between the assassinating. Unfortunately, the series never really returned to that style of gameplay. Later Assassin’s Creed games would substitute the tombs with straightforward map icon collectathons or maddeningly obtuse hidden riddles that lead right back to map icons. Ubisoft is returning to the tomb idea in Assassin’s Creed Origins. Unlike the strangely out of place trap-filled tombs in Ezio’s Italy, having tombs in ancient Egypt makes sense.
“So we put a lot of effort into recreating these tombs. Everything that is actually known we’ve mapped it out, we have images, we have research that’s been done on tombs, we actually try to replicate it as close as possible. So for example, the Greek pyramid, all the chambers, all the corridors are an authentic representation. Now, of course, we have a bit of fun and go a bit further, like, what are the secret chambers that have not been discovered yet?”
Assassin’s Creed Origins will launch on October 27th.
Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians was supposed to be Playdek’s take on Final Fantasy Tactics with series helmer Yasumi Matsuno’s creative assistance. The Kickstarter ended successfully in February 2014 having raised over $660,000 in funding. It is now one of the most high-profile videogame Kickstarter failures. What started as a single player story-heavy strategy game became a player-vs-player boondoggle that consistently disappointed fans with each increasingly rare update. Now, two years past its initial release date, Playdek has sold the project off to Little Orbit.
Little Orbit CEO Matthew Scott says that they are starting from scratch on Unsung Story, and that they do not have the resources to refund dissatisfied backers. The good news is that Little Orbit is returning to the original single player direction of the game, and they are committed to delivering Kickstarter backer rewards at no additional cost. No schedule was announced, but at least someone seems to be working on something. Little Orbit does have a solid, if not unspectacular, record in the business. At this point, dependable may be more desirable than being too ambitious.
Despite fairly positive reviews, when Blizzard’s Diablo III launched in 2012, there were problems. Between server login issues, pacing hiccups, and the dreaded auction house, a lot of fans were underwhelmed. This is what Blizzard gave us after Diablo II? It had been almost nine years since the last Diablo game, and the genre had matured. Why were we slogging through three difficulties to get to the actual game? What happened to the Stones of Jordan? Why was this damn auction house even here? Jason Schreier of Kotaku has a fascinating look at how Josh Mosqueira was brought on to the development team and how his early work on the console version of Diablo III formed the basis for the way the company would eventually revamp the game into the juggernaut we know now.
“And in some ways, looking back at it… there’s a level of being very naive. We’ve been mucking around with this game for about six months, not knowing all the history behind all the decisions leading up to this moment, just walking in like kids and pushing buttons.”
The article is an excerpt from Jason Schreier’s upcoming book “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” and it’s a great reminder that what started as a bit of a disappointment to many, is now considered the genre leader.
That is Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer in “Elegy – A Visual Poem of The Long Dark.” Hinterland Studio’s frostbitten survival game The Long Dark is finally launching out of early access and the developer wanted to let everyone know that they’ve signed a development deal to turn the game into a movie. The short is a proof-of-concept vehicle to show what Hinterland thinks the movie could be like. It’s a nice idea, but there’s very little chance of a Long Dark film (if one ever gets made) being so melancholy and quiet. The script is being written by Raphael van Lierop, the writer and director of the game, but the movie is being made with the Resident Evil movie producers. The game is death by exposure, starvation, and isolation. The movie will be acrobatic knife fights with rabid wolves and cannibal mutants.
There’s a lot going on in Guild Wars 2. The final chunk of Living World Season 3 just launched, and ArenaNet have announced that a second expansion is in the works. It’s all good news for fans of the game, of which many were attracted to the world in the first place with the unique “painterly” presentation. That’s largely due to a style guide that was set by artist Daniel Dociu when he joined ArenaNet in 2003. He left the studio earlier this year to work on Amazon’s gaming initiative, but he left ArenaNet’s art direction in the hands of his son, Horia Dociu. Eurogamer looked into their story and it’s a pretty amazing tale of immigration, vision, and how the face model of Half-Life 2’s Father Grigori wound up dictating the signature look for ArenaNet’s MMO franchise.
Waypoint, VICE’s entertainment reporting arm, has a couple of reports on gaming in prison. Not like Prison Architect. We’re talking about how actual inmates play games while incarcerated. According to the guards and prisoners Waypoint talked to, Dungeons & Dragons is pretty popular in The Big House despite most facilities’ rules against contraband. Because dice is usually a no-no as they can be used for gambling, prisoners have had to get creative about random number generation.
“You don’t even need glue, just toilet paper,” he says, “The way I did it is just by folding it into very thick square, wetting it, and then shoving it into a square corner, say a window sill. You do this over and over again, applying water when it starts to dry out, alternating corners. Eventually you have nicely shaped square. You have to continue shaping it as it dries with your makeshift corner jig. It shrinks a bit and gets quite hard.”
Other techniques included creating dice out of paper templates and sticker glue, marking a piece of pencil to use as a 6-sided roller, and the perennial favorite of jail movies – soap carvings. The next time you’re annoyed by a lopsided die coming up with ones all the time, remember that someone is using dried toilet paper cubes to get his critical hits.
You can draw a direct line from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to creator Brendan Greene’s Battle Royale mod of the DayZ mod of Arma 2. From there, it’s easy to get to the Japanese novel and movie inspiration Battle Royale. To celebrate Gamescom, Bluehole is adding a special loot crate to the game that contains “movie inspired” cosmetic outfits like the one pictured above. These Gamescom Invitational Crates will be available From August 3rd to the 27th. Players will be able to open them using special keys that will be sold for $2.50 each. Proceeds from the key sales will be used to fund the Gamescom PUBG Invitational Tournament. During the same period, special Wanderer and Survivor crates will also randomly drop in the game that will be free to open.
You can check out Tom Chick and Jason McMaster partnered as the best buddy cop movie ever in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in this previously recorded stream.
Mafia III’s Sign of the Times DLC pack is out today. It’s the final chunk of the game’s promised season pass content. It’s got the usual stuff like new weapons to buy, more cars to collect, a couple of new outfits to play dress-up with, and some new story content. This time, Lincoln Clay goes up against a religious cult, as if 1960’s prejudice and the mob weren’t enough.
Beyond the normal DLC content, Sign of the Times offers players the opportunity to reverse a wrong. The DLC gives players a chance to rebuild Sammy’s bar. In the main game, the bar is mostly depicted as a burnt-out husk of tumbledown rafters and ashes, while somehow serving as Lincoln Clay’s living quarters. It’s an odd choice for a man that eventually comes to own everything in the city. He may not be able to impact racism or tear down any “No Colored Allowed” signs, but Clay can finally relax in his own pub.
He’s no Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, but Commander Jaxon in Crackdown 3 is voiced and modeled by video game fan and hobbyist Terry Crews. Although he did some voice work in Saints Row IV as Benjamin King, it was originally Michael Clarke Duncan’s character, which had to be recast after Duncan’s death in 2012. Here, finally, is Crews in all his mighty glory! How we’ve gotten this far without Terry Crews’ bombastic persona and snarling face in a game is a mystery, but Microsoft is at last rectifying the issue. Commander Jaxon is the super powered version of Crews that most people associate with the real-life person anyway.
We almost got a Terry Crews version of Doomfist in Overwatch, but according to Crews’ account of his visit with Blizzard, he just wasn’t right for the part. This, despite his famous mock audition video.
Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands has its share of issues but many people are able to look past the open-world game’s faults to get to the co-op shooting. Those that do, eventually run up against the number one player-killer in the game. A deadly, merciless foe that has the ability to wipe out a full four-man squad of online players in one go. Behold Ghost Recon Wildlands’ inscrutable helicopter controls. They’re an ungainly square dance of third-person yaw, pitch, and speed that defies sanity. Just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on them, the true horror is revealed: Armed helicopters don’t have any way of aiming their forward-facing weapons! Thankfully, Ubisoft has heard the cries of its players, and rather than laughing and walking away, they laughed and updated the controls in Title Update 6.
In related Ghost Recon news, player versus player Ghost War mode is coming soon.
