Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 recently released and fans of the simple horror game series seem to like it. Jump scares! Spooky stuffed animals! Boo! Like the previous games, the fourth installment has also attracted its share of critics. It’s not scary. It’s a technical mess. The story is convoluted. All debatably fair criticisms, but creator Scott Cawthon has also become the target of personal attacks. It’s not enough, after all, to pick apart a game on Youtube. You have to make fun of it and the creator. Cawthon previously demonstrated his good guy status by donating to children’s charities, so it may come as no surprise that he has something to say to the haters.
Being good at something is something to strive for, not something to demonize. Criticisms of my games are fine, and a lot of times the criticism is valid. But there are a lot of people out there who will hate anything that becomes popular, just because it’s popular, and hate anyone who becomes successful, just because they are successful. “Haters gonna hate.” – as they say, but I want you to know that focusing on someone else’s failure or success is the wrong way to live. People who make videos bashing other people are like people who run into a public square and scream into a pillow. They’ll get attention, but they won’t change anything. If you strive to be like them, then you’ll spend your life screaming into a pillow as well, and your life won’t mean anything.
Imagine that! An indie dev comes under fire and he does not explode with insults, accusations, and threats.
Mount & Blade: Warband Viking Conquest has relaunched. When the Viking Conquest total conversion DLC launched in December of 2014, it wasn’t the Viking epic it promised to be. More like a clunky skirmish between middle school reenactors. Bad naval battles, buggy quests, and a general lack of polish hurt its reception. While the original developers of Mount & Blade work on the full sequel, the Viking Conquest team over at Brytenwalda have been toiling to make things right. The Reforged edition of Viking Conquest features a longboat’s worth of improvements. Longer quests, companion dogs, hunting, ambushes, ambient sounds, better naval encounters, and even the drudgery of peasant work (if that’s your thing) have been added to the game. The developers have even spruced up multiplayer with a new raid mode, and added a bunch of arms and armor to the package. It’s a Viking renaissance!
The Mount & Blade: Warband Viking Conquest Reforged DLC is available now. Current owners of the DLC will get the upgrade for free.
Splatoon is getting a major free update in August. Nintendo’s Ink-tastic update to their multiplayer ink-shooter on the Wii U will bring the level cap up to 50 from the current limit of 20, adds private battles for just you and your friends, a squad battle mode for easier team joining, and opens up 40 more pieces of clothing gear like a sushi-chef costume. The update will also add two new weapons to the mix. The Slosher is a bucket-like apparatus that allows players to hurl ink in big globules. The Splatling (pictured above) has a high rate of fire and has the option to charge shots for more impact. If you’re going to be spraying squid ink at people, why wouldn’t you use a Gatling gun to do it?
Splatoon’s Ink-tastic update will be released on August 5th. Nintendo promises that further updates are coming that will add more content to the base game for free.
Techland posted the puff-piece video above to crow about the level of support they’ve given their game since launch. Not only have the developers worked on patches and DLC included in the Season Pass, they’ve added freebies for all the regular owners of the game. Gold tier weapons! Special events! Costumes! New Modes! It’s all good stuff which is a nice reminder that CD Projekt RED aren’t the only guys giving away free updates to their games. The interesting part of the video comes right near the end when Techland teases what appears to be a dune buggy idling near some wilderness. Dying Light is already the best zombie parkour game ever. Can it become the best zombie parkour 4×4 game?
Whether or not mainstream media takes competitive videogame playing seriously, the world of e-sports is about to get more legitimate. Following the revelation that members of Cloud9, a high-ranked Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team, was using the drug Adderall to enhance their reflexes during tournaments, the Electronic Sports League will begin testing their players for drugs. That’s right, videogamers. Performance-enhancing drug scandals in electronic gaming are here. We’re one step closer to getting our own HBO documentary about the rise and fall of a cyber-athlete hero.
As recently as April, Michal Blicharz, managing director of the ESL denied that drug abuse in his company’s tournaments was widespread enough to warrant action despite all evidence to the contrary. Although almost all official gaming organizations ban drugs and alcohol during their competitions, the ESL will be the first to take the issue seriously enough to screen players before matches.
The Sniper: Ghost Warrior games have been largely forgettable affairs. They sit squarely in the space between modern Call of Duty games and Rebellion’s Sniper Elite franchise. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 was just a bland sort of me-too game that didn’t really stand out in any way. CI Games says they’ve taken the criticism to heart and are going full-out on the third game. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is in an open-world setting with side quests, crafting, Witcher/Batman vision, and skills to upgrade. In the E3 developer commentary video, CI stresses that they’re really going to make something special.
You play as the titular Ghost Warrior roaming the Georgian countryside making life miserable for Russian bad guys by taking out key personnel. You also get to control drone strikes. It’s an open-world RPG shooter mixed with Tom Clancy’s morality. Wait. That sounds familiar.
What’s going on with Star Citizen? That seems to be the question du jour for many. On the surface, everything seems to be fine. Cloud Imperium Games has raised over $85 million to make their everything-in-space game. The project status looks to be on-track with the largely cosmetic hangar module and ship against ship “Arena Commander” module released to backers. So where is the doubt coming from?
After the jump, an internet urban legend rises against Star Citizen.Continue reading →
If you follow soccer, (Europeans call it “footyballz”) you’ll be familiar with Alex Morgan, a forward on the Portland Thorns FC, and one of the star players on the US Women’s National Soccer Team in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Add another bullet on her resume. She’ll appear on the cover of Electronic Arts’ FIFA 16. She’ll share the coveted honor along with Lionel Messi. With EA spending so much time on getting their hair just right, it makes sense to have a female grace the cover of the long-running sports game.
Canadian soccer fans will have Christine Sinclair representing the Canada Women’s National Team on their copies of FIFA 16 instead. Australians will get Stephanie Catley on their boxes. The cover appearances of this trio will mark the first time females represent the FIFA videogame. FIFA 16 will launch on September 22nd.
That’s Tremor, the new dirt-powered fighter in Mortal Kombat X. NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment unveiled the trailer for the “kombatant” during the Evolution Championship 2015 event. If you have the Kombat Pack, you’ll be able to access him in-game today. He’ll also be available as a separate piece of DLC on July 28th. This is the first time that Tremor will be available to gamers as a playable fighter. He was previously seen in Mortal Kombat: Special Forces and the PS Vita version of Mortal Kombat.
In related news, Jamie Lee Curtis and her family went to Evo 2015 in costume. The scream queen attended the tournament as Vega from the Street Fighter series. That’s one way to rack up some fighting game fans on social media.
Female player models are coming to Rust. In an interesting twist on character creation, Facepunch Studios is not letting players determine their avatars’ gender. Like the penis size on the male models (no, that’s not a joke) whether someone will be male or female in the game will be determined by a player’s Steam ID. The player will have no input on the matter.
To clear up some confusion, when we it does go live you won’t get a choice of whether you’re female or male. We’re not “taking the choice away” from you. You never had a choice. A man’s voice coming out of a woman’s body is no more weird than an 8 year-old boy’s voice coming out of a man’s body.
Additionally, Facepunch shared their plans for Steam Workshop integration, as well as their strategy to allow trading and creation of loot. They aim to model their system on Team Fortress 2’s current implementation. People will be able to submit their creations for review, and once vetted, they could show up in random loot drops that will appear in players’ inventories after a few hours of play.
Rust is currently available in early access on Steam.
Players can now download two free Porsche cars for their collections in Forza Horizon 2. Microsoft is giving everyone the chance to own the 2012 Porsche 911 GT2 RS and the 2012 Porsche Cayenne Turbo via the Forza Hub app on the Xbox One. Although the two cars in the Porsche Bonus Pack are meant to entice racers to purchase the recently released Porsche Expansion for Forza Horizon 2, owners of that DLC may want to grab these free cars anyway since they aren’t part of that pack.
The Porsche Bonus Pack will be available until July 24th, after which it will be “gone for good.”
Dragon Age: Inquisition is now partly free-to-play. Electronic Arts has announced that they now offer a free six-hour trial of the single player portion of the PC version of the game. Per the details, if a gamer later decides to buy Dragon Age: Inquisition, his or her saved progress will carry over to the full game. The publisher has also made the multiplayer portion of the game fully free-to-play. This includes both multiplayer expansions, and special weekend events. Presumably, the purchase of microtransaction packs that are available for sale in multiplayer will support that part of the game.
According to the site, the trial is “for a limited time only” but no specifics are offered.
Publisher Deep Silver has removed the development team from Dead Island 2. In an email sent to press representatives, Deep Silver announced that Yager will no longer be working on the zombie survival sequel to Dead Island. Although no further details were given regarding the development change, the publisher promised to continue working on the game. While there haven’t been any stories of development issues, Dead Island 2 was delayed in April when the launch date was pushed back from Spring of this year to sometime in 2016. It was also a no-show at this year’s E3.
That’s the demigryph, a fantasy mount in Total War: Warhammer. One of the big questions people have about Creative Assembly’s foray into Warhammer Fantasy Battles is how their team will handle the change from realistic arms and armor to things like plague-bearing ratmen and steam-powered siege engines. Going by the renders in that video, the developers seem to be doing just fine.
The first in-engine gameplay footage for Total War: Warhammer will be released this Friday.
“You know what’s fuckin’ weird? I don’t consider this shit weird anymore.”
The reveal of the new zombie mode in Black Ops III doesn’t seem like much of a reveal. Yeah, yeah, new narrative is all well and good. But can we do something about the gameplay? I had hoped for a rework of the overall structure, in which you fail repeatedly to make any progress until you look up a walk-through online, at which point you have to balance the razor’s edge of better weapons to hold off increasingly difficult waves with unlocking the new areas you need to progress the level. All the while, dogs or zombies in exo-suits mess up the flow. Reset to zero when you fail.
At least this latest zombie mode has a new noir setting. Well, new for anyone who hasn’t been playing in Arkham Knight’s Gotham. Among the latest voice actors, Heather Graham and Jeff Goldblum are a pleasant surprise. Watch the trailer here.
