Blizzard is considering announcer packs for Starcraft II. In a survey sent to selected Starcraft 2 players, celebrity announcer packs are proposed for $3.99 each, along with other DLC options like premium chat emoticons, and cosmetic unit skins. Proposed celebrity voices included Morgan Freeman, Snoop Dogg, and the Hearthstone Innkeeper. Similar voice packs have been a staple DLC for games like Dota 2 and League of Legends for years, but this would be a first for the Starcraft franchise. A Blizzard community manager responded to the original leak with a good-natured chide.
Surprisingly, this would not be the first such gig for Snoop Dogg. His voice talent was featured in an announcer pack DLC for Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2014.
From Blue Valentine to A Place Beyond the Pines to this. Okay, Derek Cianfrance, it’s time for a pivot. At the 1:05-mark, this week’s 3×3 is a casting call for our own weird casting choices.
Morgan is why I don’t watch trailers or even read cast lists if I can help it. All I knew going in was that Morgan was some kind of thriller directed by Ridley Scott’s son. The title is written in a vaguely sci-fi font. The poster has someone in a hoodie just standing there. Is that Morgan? He’s gotta be a hacker, wearing a hoodie like that, right? Is Morgan a good guy? Does he have superpowers? Is Morgan even a dude or a chick?
The price I pay for this sort of ignorance is occasionally stumbling into junk like Bad Moms, Don’t Breathe, and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. But the reward is an occasional gem like Morgan, a broadly derivative thriller and a cavalcade of wonderful actors. A cast like this probably happens when you’re Ridley Scott’s son. From beginning to end, Morgan is all, “And guess who else is in this!” Then it opens a door. “Ta-daa!” It’s like a 90-minute advent calendar for people who enjoy watching good actors. So I’m not going to tell you who’s in this. In case you don’t know the cast yet, I don’t want to spoil the fun.
The script is nothing if not familiar, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with formula. Formula is formula because it works. So Morgan merrily draws from slasher movies, rogue AI yarns, Frankenstein stories, little girl assassin tropes, and even a touch of CITOKSA when Kate Mara falls into a lake during a fight scene and her smart pants suit gets titillatingly clingy. But director Luke Scott keeps things moving so you’re not dwelling on the obvious similarities to better movies. Okay, here are the characters. Now here is a terrible thing that could happen. Now here is the terrible thing happening. Now here is the ensuing chaos. Now here is the resolution, with the twist that you could see coming a mile away, so it’s not so much a twist as an acknowledgement that, hey, you sure did figure it out. Snappy, satisfying, stylish, and littered with capable celebrities. It turns out Luke Scott is more Tony than Ridley.
Itinerant Brit Alex Chapman talks about an early rogue-like, a flight simulator, and the unfortunately named Faery Tale Adventure as the games of choice growing up with an Amiga in the house. We also clash so dramatically over his dietary advice that I barely manage to stop myself before comparing him to anti-vaxxers.
Player made mods for Fallout 4 are awesome. That’s something most people can agree on. The ability to change things like graphical effects, or add new assets, or just shut Preston Garvey up is possible through the extensive modding community. While PC players have been enjoying mods on Bethesda roleplaying games for years, Fallout 4 is the first one that’s offered mods on a console. Mods through the Bethesda.net portal have been available on the Xbox One since May 31st, and the developer had said they were working on mods for the PlayStation 4. Since that time, we’ve been given repeated assurances that Fallout 4 mods on PlayStation 4 were coming. That dream ends today. Bethesda has announced that mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition will not be available on the PlayStation 4.
Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive. We consider this an important initiative and we hope to find other ways user mods can be available for our PlayStation audience. However, until Sony will allow us to offer proper mod support for PS4, that content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on PlayStation 4 will not be available.
What happened? There are no specifics as to where the breakdown occurred, but as early as July, Bethesda’s Pete Hines expressed frustration on Twitter when asked about the delay. In a more recent interview with Metro UK, Hines declined to blame Sony, but did say that mods for Fallout 4 on PlayStation 4 was “undergoing an evaluation process” outside of his control.
Frost is an indie deck-building game with superlative atmosphere, clever gameplay, and some unfortunate interface issues (see the video above). It’s also got excellent post-release support, as you can see in the latest update, which adds new cards, characters, and scenarios, as well as a new mechanic for temperature. What does temperature do?
It affects the size of your hand
After a couple of quick playthroughs, I haven’t seen its effect yet, so I presume I haven’t unlocked any temperature cards (a lot of Frost’s content is locked behind how much you’ve played). But I can plainly see a slider in the upper left hand corner showing how warm I am alongside a count of how many cards I can hold. The colder you are, the fewer cards you get to play. In other words, as we all know, being cold shrinks appendages.
Look, you don’t have to take my word for it. This weekend only, the developers of Homefront: The Revolution will let you get a first-hand look for the price of a 42GB download.
Okay, maybe you already bought it on Steam and got a refund because it had serious performance problems when it was released. Maybe you got a refund because you didn’t realize from the first bits that you’re going to be playing a spirited “hey, get out there with some AI buddies and shoot bad guys to take back territory!” game. Both perfectly valid complaints. But with a passel of patches since release, and without having to worry about exceeding the play time for a refund, you can play Homefront: The Revolution free from now until Sunday afternoon.
“Female or male?” This question has plagued Mass Effect players since the start of the series. Which gender should a player make their Commander Shepard? Which is correct? For a long time, the official marketing materials from BioWare featured only the male Shepard, so it was assumed that he was the default. Female Shepard fans rejoiced once the studio began using their favored option in pre-sale imagery. All along, the argument has raged. FemShip is too bossy. MaleShep is too generic. Thankfully, Mass Effect: Andromeda presents a solution. In the latest PlayStation Access, BioWare’s Mac Walters revealed that the male and female versions of the new player avatar, Ryder, are both canonically correct. In fact, they are siblings.
“What a lot of people don’t know – little surprise here – is that these two are brother and sister and they both exist in the game world at the same time. If you’re playing as the sister Ryder – female Ryder – your brother is somewhere in the universe.”
You can watch the full gameplay demo of Mass Effect: Andromeda from the PlayStation Meeting here.
Sony has announced the PlayStation 4 Pro. It’s the incremental upgrade to the PlayStation 4 that was code-named “Neo” before it went all pro on us. According to Sony, it’s all about 4K visuals and high dynamic range support. That’s fancy talk for “It makes games look better.” While exact specifications aren’t available yet, Sony’s presentation at the PlayStation Meeting in New York did mention a 1TB drive and an upgraded graphics processor. Sony representatives say the new-ish console will play all current PlayStation 4 games, but it will be up to developers to decide how to best support the Pro’s strengths.
At launch, games that will support the PlayStation 4 Pro’s upgraded graphics capability will be Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Watch Dogs 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Battlefield 1, For Honor, and the new Spider-Man game from Insomniac. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will get an update later this year for the Pro console.
The PlayStation 4 Pro launches on November 10th for $399.
The Trail is the newest game from Peter Molyneux’s studio 22Cans and publisher Kongregate. The latest creation from the developer of Godus is available on iTunes in the Philippines only for now. You can check out the iTunes page here. Players move their avatar down a trail, encountering quirky characters, gathering crafting materials, and trying to build up a fortune on the way to their eventual destination. In the gameplay video from IGV, it looks a bit like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s art style crossed with Fable: the Journey.
The practice of “soft launching” a mobile game in a less active territory is a well-known way for developers to test their applications out with a smaller live audience of players. There’s no word on when The Trail will launch for the rest of the world, but perhaps we’ll see it when Godus is finished?
The greatest thing about Star Ruler 2, a superlative space 4X strategy game, is also the most confounding thing about it: it’s nothing like Civilization. Sid Meier’s Civilization is the template for so many grand strategy games, including ones set in space. Cities are planets, armies are spaceship fleets, mountains are asteroid belts, tech trees are tech trees, voila! Space! That familiar gameplay is one of the reasons Master of Orion was so successful. It’s also one of the reasons the latest Master of Orion reboot is so rote.
But Star Ruler 2 ignored the template and did its own thing. It has its own economy, its own diplomacy, its own population model, its own alien races, its own ship design (or lack thereof, if that’s not your thing). The price it pays for being unique? It can be hard to learn, and therefore appreciate.
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary Edition World Tour is coming. It’s another version of Duke Nukem 3D. This new remastered version of the shooter features slightly upgraded graphics, an improved framerate, re-recorded voice acting by Jon St. John as Duke, five new levels, and some new weapons and enemies. Much like the Halo remasters, players will be able to toggle between the original graphics and the new renderer on the fly, although Gearbox Software cautions that other than some cleaner textures and a “true 3D” presentation, the game will look the same as you remember it. Producer Scott Warr emphasized that keeping the game’s original feel was important even in the new episodes, despite the old tools being somewhat of a headache for the level builders.
As far as jumping in and using all the tools, I remember some of the complaints of like, “Ah, crap. Now I remember this,” or, “Oh, I forgot the trick that I was supposed to do to make this work.” That was awesome to watch because me being a fan, I was sitting there like, “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Multiplayer has also gotten a thorough overhaul to work on modern systems. There’s eight-player multiplayer, eight-player co-op, and one-player bot matches. Bot matches! Now you can jetpack around the maps, shrinking and stomping on outclassed enemy bots until you’re all out of gum.
Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary Edition World Tour is coming for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on October 11th for $20.
Is Richard Linklater’s love letter to 1980, baseball, and college just Dazed and Confused Redux? Or do we indeed want some? At the 1:47 mark, we lock down the podcast for a discussion of the best guards in movies.
Blood Father is at its best if you think of it as Mel “Sugar Tits” Gibson’s extension of his character from Lethal Weapon. Riggs gone to seed, still living in a trailer, but now in the high desert instead of on the coast, slightly racist but not too racist to be the lead character in a movie about an ex-con biker tattoo artist reconciling with his estranged daughter. Gibson is weathered and surprisingly beefy. There’s a lot of real estate on his arms for the fake tattoos. He’s a recovering alcoholic whose sponsor is William H. Macy. Macy’s character is a “trailer park poet” who has a trenchant analogy about sticking his thumb up his buddy’s ass. Then an action movie happens and Gisbon’s trailer gets shot up again. Oh, it’s on.
At one point the wildly bearded Gibson reconnects with his erstwhile biker pals who are still too racist to be anything but villains. The wonderful Michael Parks is the leader of the still racist bikers. Parks has a great monologue about culture co-opting subversive movements. “It happened to Hell’s Angels, it’s happening to rap,” he explains. It’s a pretty shrewd insight for a neo-Nazi biker. Who is this guy?
Then Gibson and Parks yell at each other, each wild-eyed and weathered in their own way. It should have been a golden spike between Donner and Tarantino. But Blood Father’s director, whose main claim to fame is a stylish remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, doesn’t quite appreciate what he’s got. Shortly thereafter, Gibson will shave, put on a suit, and reprise the role he sanitized when he seized Brian Helgeland’s Payback and recut it to assidiously scrub out the antihero. “Give me back my daughter,” he screams into the phone. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much where Blood Father goes. Exactly where you’d expect a Mel Gibson movie to go.
Elite was amazing back in the day. I mean the original wireframe one. The one out now is pretty good, too, I guess. But it hasn’t been back in the day for, oh, I don’t know, at least ten years? Maybe twenty? Vast, open, and mostly empty universes aren’t so amazing anymore. Open universes need stuff in them. They need content. They need gameplay. They need interlocking gameplay systems. They probably need to compress time and distance with some hoo-ha about hyperlight warp subspace drives. They also probably need trading, combat, faction rep, upgrades, and a story. And, these days, a game can’t very well be a game without crafting.
