Tom and I really liked Bethesda and id Software’s 2016 re-imagining of Doom. One of the few wrinkles was it’s bog-standard forgettable multiplayer. It was a weird retro mish-mash of arena shooting with flavorless modern concessions like random unlocks and map pack DLC. Most gamers rejected Doom’s multiplayer quickly moving on to something else once the exquisite single player campaign was done. With Update 6.66 (get it?) the developers hope they can turn the general opinion around on Doom’s multiplayer.
First, the season pass and DLC map packs have been made free for everyone that owns the game. Second, the developer is revamping the progression system. Instead of waiting for random cosmetic unlocks in the old system, players need to achieve clearly defined milestones to unlock specific items. Everyone is being reset to level 0, but vets will have the option of retaining all previously unlocked items. New multiplayer Runes replace the old Hack Modules and are persistent player abilities that are equipped in your loadout. Finally, the HUD and kill cameras have been adjusted to give players more information.
Bethesda is rolling out a temporary price cut to $14.99 during this weekend’s free tryout period.
American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns struck a chord with gamers. Years before Tim Burton was given Disney’s backing to create twisted 3D movie versions of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy books, American McGee was arming Alice with a butcher’s knife and setting her loose in Hot Topic levels filled with crooked doorways. Years later, people are still pestering American McGee about a third go-around in goth Wonderland. In a firm blog post American McGee answers the question once and for all. It’s not up to him, so stop directing questions his way. It’s all up to the license holder, in this case, Electronic Arts.
“I HAVE NO CONTROL over the Alice rights, EA’s decision-making process, or anything at all related to Alice, Alice merchandise, Alice adaptations, etc, etc.”
McGee thinks there may be another Alice game someday, but interested fans should tweet the publisher instead of wasting his time. The good news is that every other fable in existence is up for grabs and American McGee’s latest game in development is Out of the Woods which combines a book and a card game with “dark” fairy tales.
The site may not have much on it, but here’s the first complete image of the Ataribox. First teased in early June, the Ataribox will come in two editions, the retro-inspired faux wood-faced one above, and one with a more modern silver and red front. The only specifications mentioned by Atari are “an array of new ports” including HDMI, four USB ports, and an SD card slot. While they haven’t released any game information, the company noted that savvy gamers may have figured out what’s up.
As you can guess, those ports suggest modern internal specs. It also means that while we will be delivering classic gaming content, we will also be delivering current gaming content.
Atari states that they have months of “milestones, challenges and decision points” prior to launch. So why announce anything when they don’t have much nailed down for public release? One could guess that they aspire to end up as an eBay hot-seller like some other retro consoles.
That’s the latest music video from Nine Inch Nails. The song is “Less Than” from the upcoming album ADD VIOLENCE. But hey! That game in the video looks familiar. It’s Polybius from Jeff Minter’s Llamasoft. Thanks to Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor’s love of Llamasoft, there’s at least one non-PlayStation 4 build out in the wild. To have the game work for the video, Minter had to create an exclusive PC build of Polybius and give that to Reznor.
“Of course I was super chuffed to hear he’d liked our work, as I’ve enjoyed his a lot over the years too!”
Jeff Minter hopes to have a PC version of Polybius available for purchase in November when his exclusivity deal with PlayStation ends.
Hitman’s final scheduled time-limited assassination, The Entertainer, will go live this Friday. Elusive Target 26 begins on July 14th and lasts for ten days. Everyone will get one chance to eliminate “Mr. Giggles” and steal a client list in the Marrakesh level, then Season One of Hitman’s live support ends. If it’s your first successful elusive target in Marrakesh, you’ll unlock the summer suit with gloves, a snappy cosmetic outfit for Agent 47. If you’ve attained a few of the previous elusive targets, you may unlock other outfits based on your progression.
What comes next for Hitman is anyone’s guess. Originally, IO Interactive had planned to create a Season Two of content for Hitman with new levels and targets as paid DLC, but that was back when the franchise and the studio were owned by Square Enix. Now that IO Interactive is an independent company, things are a bit dicey. Although they haven’t officially confirmed a Season Two for Hitman, the studio’s July update notes mentioned new content for August, indicating that they would be continuing to work on the game. Whether that means wholly new DLC content and not just live targets in the same maps remains to be seen.
Shakedown: Hawaii, the next top-down open world action parody from Vblank Entertainment, is not Retro City Rampage 2. The developers want to make that distinction quite clear. You may still be crashing cars, killing folks, and generally acting like the nightmare Grand Theft Auto player Jack Thompson was trying to warn everyone about, but Shakedown: Hawaii puts a different spin on things by skewering millennial culture and the kinds of business decisions that made Juicero possible. One can only wonder just how topical the game will get based on this bit regarding the player character’s background.
Our anti-hero’s decision to spend more time on reality TV as a “CEO” personality, than as the actual CEO of his company didn’t help matters.
While there’s no release date yet for Shakedown: Hawaii, the game will be launching on Nintendo Switch, 3DS, PlayStation 4, PS Vita, and Steam when it does go live.
Valve just updated Half-Life. The small patch addresses a couple of longstanding crash issues, and absolutely does not hide a clue about Half-Life 3 in the game. If you shimmy along the cliff level in Half-Life and look near the third stubby rock just before the helicopter fight, you will not find a hidden number code that leads to a web site with tantalizing clues embedded in a scrambled image of the G-Man. Just because Valve patched an almost twenty year old game does not mean anything fishy is going on. Do not bother looking for the reversed audio file of Gabe Newell ordering the next chapter of Gordon Freeman’s journey. It doesn’t exist.
If anyone finds anything suspicious, please contact your nearest Black Mesa Communications Liaison.
Digital Extremes has announced Landscapes for Warframe, hand-crafted open world instances with an MMO-style hub town with NPC quests and a day and night cycle. The first such area to be added to the game, Plains of Eidolon, features the village of Cetus where up to 50 players can freely roam, team-up, and take on Ostron scavenger quests in the surrounding countryside.
Players will be able to fly and fight from their Archwings and battle normal enemies in the wilderness during the day, but at night the colossal Eidolons rise from the ground to destroy Warframes. These giant baddies ape MMO boss monsters in that they will require coordinated groups of folks plinking away at their bodies to defeat them. Hit the giant enemy crabs in their weak spots!
Remember how much Grixsnak the Slayer wanted to kill you in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor? Or how badly Turg Rattlebreak desired your head on a pike? Thanks to the free Nemesis Forge update for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, those dirty rotten scoundrels can follow you to the upcoming sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Man, you must’ve really pissed off Hoog the Undying for him to travel all the way over to another game just to deal with you.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is currently on sale for $4 on Steam, Xbox, and the PlayStation digital stores. Middle-earth: Shadow of War will launch on October 10th.
The latest patch for Horizon Zero Dawn adds New Game+, an Ultra Hard difficulty, face paint, and new gear. The 1.30 update allows players to repeat their open-world adventures with Aloy, but retain their inventory and character level. It’s the perfect way to experience that story again! Although the level cap of 50 remains in place, the New Game+ option gives players the ability to challenge themselves against tougher enemies with the Ultra Hard difficulty option that players can enable before embarking on their quest. Guerrilla Games also announced that the 1.30 update adds new face paint for Aloy as well as more expensive versions of existing weapons and outfits. Sashay away Aloy!
Creative Assembly has announced Total War Saga, a spin-off series for more focused games about specific conflicts. Total War Saga games won’t cover new eras. Instead, the games will use assets featured in past titles like Rome or Empire, but they will drill down to an historical campaign. You’ll still have the grand strategic map and the real-time tactical battles. You’ll just be chasing a goal. Director Jack Lusted pointed to the Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai standalone expansion and its depiction of the Boshin War as an example.
They’re what I like to call table-flip moments in history, where events are in the balance and could go any number of interesting and unique ways. This makes them a perfect fit for Total War games, where we give players the freedom to depart from the actual historical events and explore what might have happened had things gone differently.
While the campaign hasn’t been revealed yet, Creative Assembly revealed that the first Total war Saga game will be a “spiritual follow-up” to Total War: Rome II.
Everyone is looking forward to Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PlayStation 4 from Insomniac Games. It’s got web-slinging, flip-kicks, zipping between skyscrapers, and most importantly, it has the quips you’d expect from Peter Parker. The only problem is that 2018 is a long way off. The good news is that there’s a new Spider-Man game available right now, and it’s free! The bad news is that you need a VR system to play it.
Spider-Man: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience may sound like a dubious edutainment attraction at Disney’s EPCOT Center, but its actually a VR game. Well, it’s less a game and more a 5-minute target practice tutorial and advertisement for the movie Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it’s free and you do get to swing a couple of disembodied hands around. Zap balloons! Pick up rooftop garbage and sling it around! Clumsily grab your mask and jostle it onto your VR head. It’s just like being a superhero!
Spider-Man: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience is available for PlayStation VR and PC VR through Steam.
If you want to see Terminator 2 again, you’ve got a couple of options. You can wait for this:
Director James Camerons 4K 3D conversion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been booked for an Aug. 25 domestic release by AMC Theatres.
Terminator 2 has stood the test of time and is still hailed by critics as one of the best sci-fi movies in film history, said Elizabeth Frank, exec VP at AMC Theatres. Now, the newly restored version of the classic will take the already extraordinary special effects to a new level, and AMC is honored to give fans a newly immersive experience of a legendary film, as well as introduce the blockbuster to a new generation.
Or you can just click that video up there until it gets pulled for copyright infringement, since it’s virtually indistinguishable from the release version. It uniquely captures the stoicism with which Schwarzenegger played his role, not to mention a certain je ne sais quoi exuded by Edward Furlong. I’m not sure that stuff will come through so well in 4K 3D.
There have been 329,970 returns of Facepunch Studios’ survival crafting game Rust since it launched in early access on Steam. Developer Garry Newman told PCGamesN that despite the over $4 million in returns, he’s okay with the lost revenue. According to Newman, the returns equate to about 6% of Rust’s overall sales, which matches the return rate other developers he’s spoken to have seen.
“I put that down to people using the refund system as a demo. I think in the long run, people knowing the refund system is there probably gained us more sales than it lost us.”
Why do people return Rust? Newman said “no fun” and “bad performance” were the top two refund request reasons given by players.
The latest update for Ghost Recon Wildlands adds an optional Tier 1 mode that increases difficulty and rewards player progression in the later stages of the game. Upon enabling the endgame option, players will start at Tier 50 and accrue experience towards Tier 1. It’s like golf. The lower your number, the better. Except along the way, enemies will grow tougher. At the same time they move down the tiers, players can level up their weapons, increasing the damage output. Got all that? In Ghost Recon Wildlands, your character level now goes from 1 to 30, (35 in the Fallen Angels DLC) then it jumps to Tier 50, then it inches back down to Tier 1. Meanwhile, your rifle goes up to 30.
The Tier 1 update for Ghost Recon Wildlands is available today.
