One of Titanfall’s most popular additions for multiplayer shooters were Burn Cards, limited use power-ups that tied into the game’s progression system. A player could use them to unlock special abilities like a force shield, a better weapon, or faster sprinting until their next death. While they aped the look of collectible card game pieces, Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment wisely resisted making them available for purchase as microtransactions.
DOOM from Bethesda and id Software will have its own version of the concept in Hack Modules – limited use multiplayer power-ups tied to player progression. (Bethesda says they are also not tied to microtransactions.) Think of them as developer-approved cheats. Unlike Titanfall’s implementation, DOOM’s Hack Modules are centered around control, or as id’s Marty Stratton explained, giving a leg up to less experienced players.
Stratton likens Hack Modules to the proverbial “court vision” that the very best athletes seem to innately have. “Think of Hack Modules as an emphasized awareness of your surroundings that may, if you utilize it well, make you more effective,” Stratton says. “Good players ‘see’ these things inherently. But none of these affect the game’s balance by changing how powerful your gun is or anything like that.”
DOOM is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC on May 13th.
When Heroes of Normandie was released for the PC last October, it was supposedly a port of the lively boardgame. With its Nazi zombies, sexy spies, and over-the-top heroic G.I. Joes, the boardgame was a fanciful comic book version of Squad Leader, with just enough crunchy tactics to invoke Squad Leader but not enough brain-busting minutiae to invoke Squad Leader. Squad Leader for dummies who want big colorful tiles with their boardgames and artwork that wouldn’t look out of place on a Topps card.
Slitherine’s PC port added plenty of the stuff you’d expect in a good boardgame port. A clear above-the-board expression of the mechanics! Campaigns! High score lists! Support for online play! Unlockables! Even a rogue-like mode with an economy and persistent units! It looked great. But then you played it and realized something was missing.
The Heroes of Normandie boardgame includes cards that each player can use for unexpected gotchas, helpful boosts, and rules tweaks. Your hand of four cards is just as much a part of the gameplay as the dice, unit stats, and game board. But Sliterine’s port simply pretended the cards didn’t exist. Imagine Chess without the rooks. Monopoly without Park Place. Settlers of Catan without sheep. The Avengers without Iron Man. A fellowship of the Ring without Legolas. Two and a Half Men without Charlie Sheen. A Republican debate without Donald Trump. The Oscars without any black nominees. I can do this all night.
But it’s all moot as of today. The cards have finally been added. It’s technically a beta for now, but as near as I can tell, it works just fine. Which means this is finally a port of Heroes of Normandie and not just a halfway measure.
Ubisoft could do this in their sleep. Sometimes it feels like they have. Far Cry’s evolution over the last three games has been, uh, glacial. Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, and Far Cry Primal consist of the same gameplay verbs applied to mostly different nouns. Upgrade your guns (bows and spears). Throw grenades (beehives). Clear out bases (bonfires) to capture fast travel points. Tag enemies with your camera (owl). Ride an elephant (woolly mammoth) into battle. Wreak havoc when you release wild animals (wild animals). Unlock the grappling hook (grappling hook).
We had the outstanding Time cover shot of Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey floating sans footwear over a badly faked beach scene, but thanks to the Mobile World Conference, we now have Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg striding confidently into a future full of VR enthusiasts. The moment caught in the image was when Samsung was sneaking Zuckerberg onto the stage for his surprise entrance, walking right past an audience of tech journalists. It’s a nice reminder of how VR can connect and disconnect users at the same time.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have a lot of investment in VR technology, being the owners of Oculus. His presence at the show was used to announce his company’s partnership with Samsung and their Gear VR project. Samsung then revealed that they would include a free Gear VR unit for anyone that pre-ordered the Galaxy S7 phone.
HTC finally published the price for their Vive VR system. It’s $799 for the consumer kit that includes the headset, two wireless controllers, a pair of base stations, a Vive Link Box, and a pair of ear buds. That’s $200 more than the previous sticker-shock reveal for the Oculus Rift, but HTC asserted that the expense was due to all the extra hardware. The HTC Vive will come with Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption VR games. Job Simulator sounds like a real escape from the humdrum daily grind of life. Valve in partnership with HTC, has made a VR Performance Test application available for free on Steam to see if your PC is up to VR’s hardware demands.
This week, we see some minor Coen (movie poster here). Then we dispense with a 3×3 about words of wisdom at the 59-minute mark. Then we determine the winner of the 2016 Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fundraiserpalooza, which was hugely successful! Our heartfelt thanks to all of you. You’re awesome and a podcast couldn’t hope for more generous, enthusiastic, and supportive listeners.
Next week: well, listen to our drawing at the 1:45 mark to find out!
The Witch is not the stuff of horror movies; it is the stuff of folklore. Stolen children. Hovels in the woods. Familiars. Poison apples. Cursed wilderness. Here the civilizing influence of Christianity and American exceptionalism are no match for ancient pagan things in the woods. The Wicker Man meets The Exorcist meets The Crucible, but with nary a concession to a modern horror movie audience. Things don’t jump out of the shadows. There isn’t any of the usual gore. It’s not found footage. The actors even talk funny.
Most of first time director Robert Eggers’ experience is as a production designer, and it shows. The Witch is gorgeous with its rustic simplicity, sickly grey cinematography, and richly inhabited period costumes. But Eggers shows considerable skill as a director, telling his story with an unnerving slow burn, a harrowing score, and poetic dialogue. He relies heavily on his cast. His script expects a lot from them. Ralph Ineson’s stately basso profundo and the harshly austere lines of Kate Dickie’s face will be familiar to anyone who’s seen them on Game of Thrones. It’s no surprise these British veterans are fascinating to watch. They make an imposing couple. You’d think ancient pagan things in the woods don’t stand a chance.
But the foundation of The Witch is its child actors. Newcomers Anya Taylor-Joy and especially Harvey Scrimshaw, dwarfed by his father’s musket, manage difficult dialogue and difficult scenes that would have completely undermined the movie if they didn’t work. This is ultimately a horrific fable, a grim fairy tale, and it needs children. It’s hungry for them.
The Witch shares a superficial similarity to Poltergeist and The Exorcist. But because it’s set in a very different time, because it’s about people with deeply religious worldviews and a distinct way of talking, there’s a remote quality to it. This isn’t a horror movie you watch and think about what you would do. This isn’t It Follows or 28 Days Later. Instead, it plays out like someone else’s horror movie. It’s about the things they would be afraid of, how they would act, what they would feel, what they would do. But because it’s so effective, because Eggers and his cast sell the horror with such conviction, there’s no safety in its remoteness. Ultimately, The Witch would have us all.
Why is it horror February? Six reasons. Dying Light, Layers of Fear, Soul Axiom, Darkest Dungeon, The Flame in the Flood, and Jason McMaster’s performance in our online game of Arkham Horror designer Richard Launius’ latest boardgame, Legends of the American Frontier.
Iranian news has been showing footage from this combat engagement in which an alleged Hezbollah sniper kills six Islamic State fighters in less than two minutes. According to some of their press outlets, the sniper is accomplishing this amazing feat of marksmanship with an Iranian-manufactured Arash anti-materiel rifle. The problem is that blurry icon that pops up in the bottom of the screen. It’s the headshot notification from Electronic Arts’ 2010 Medal of Honor game. It’s tough to see because the Iranian video is a mess, but Factually has the breakdown. The good news is that this is probably the most anyone has discussed Medal of Honor in a long time.
More flying! More grappling! More stuff blowing up! The Sky Fortress DLC will bring new challenges, new killing tools, a weaponized wingsuit, and a honking big sky-platform slathered in hostile drones. From the looks of it, the upcoming DLC package just gives folks more of what they experienced in the base game, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. No one was playing Just Cause 3 for its deep story or complicated characters.
The Sky Fortress DLC is coming in March, and is included in the Air, Land and Sea Expansion Pass. The pass owners will get the DLC a week early.
Activision is offering a stripped-down Call of Duty package on PC that only has multiplayer. The Multiplayer Starter Pack allows gamers to get in on the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 3, the latest Call of Duty, for a bargain price of $15. This version of the game gives you the ability to join the versus ranked multiplayer modes and grind to your heart’s content for 55 levels. You’ll get unlock tokens to access weapons, classes, and abilities, you’ll be able to buy Cyptokeys to gamble on bonus items, and you can purchase the DLC map packs to open up more match arenas. This is a limited-time offer that will only be available until February 29th.
There are a couple of points to consider with this offer. Since you can only max out at level 55 and you aren’t able to start over in Prestige levels with this version of the game, players will have to be judicious about their unlocks. There are 75 items to unlock in Black Ops 3, which means you’ll be missing a few wild cards, specialists, or guns. Owners of this limited package also cannot set up custom games with bots or use mod tools once they are released. The cooperative zombies mode and the story campaign are not available to the Starter Pack players. If a gamer decides to continue the level treadmill, they’ll need to purchase the Multiplayer Starter Pack Upgrade which will give them the rest of the game, including the ability to start over in Prestige levels, for $45.
We didn’t care for the story campaign or zombies mode, but the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 3 is arguably one of the best iterations of this style of gameplay. Activision has not said if the Multiplayer Starter Pack offer will come to PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
Are you one of the brave folks that purchased the Season Pass for Fallout 4? Good news! You’ll finally find out what you get for that money. Bethesda has released some vague information about the DLC that will be bundled into the Season Pass. Automatron, coming in March, will add customizable robot companions and evil robots into the wasteland, including the Robobrain from previous Fallout games. The Wasteland Workshop, coming in April, will give players the ability to catch post-apocalyptic fauna in traps and fight them in arenas, as well as adding more workshop designs. Far Harbor, releasing sometime in May, appears to be the most substantial of the DLC packages coming, offering a whole new area to explore in coastal Maine.
Here’s where things get sketchy. Bethesda feels that the Season Pass is such a good deal, and their coming content is so beefy, that maybe they undervalued it. Starting on March 1st, the price of the Season Pass will increase to $49.99 from its current price of $29.99. It should be noted that Techland executed a similar bump with The Following in December 2015. The Dying Light Season Pass increased by $10, once the developer decided The Following was worth $19.99 by itself. This is the chance for early adopters of the bundle to laugh at the procrastinators. At least until the next deep sale discount.
In the original Tomb Raider — the most recent original Tomb Raider — our cast of characters is shipwrecked on a sinister island. Lara Croft becomes their unlikely savior. Well, of the ones that survive. Because the template isn’t pulp adventure; Tomb Raider is a horror story in which our heroine is transformed by violence and death. As she descends into increasingly nightmarish levels, the island’s mysterious background emerges and the members of the cast meet their various fates. It’s an exciting character-driven story about peril, heroism, and violence. Just describing it makes me want to play it again.
Rise of the Tomb Raider, on the other hand, is the typical ham-handed videogame story, clumsy, cringe-worthy, and aimless.
Bruce Geryk’s new podcast debuts here. It’s called Wild Weasel and Paulie Shore is not involved. Instead, it’s about wargaming. And it’s the sort of podcast where the host casually rolls out the phrase “French ironic lyricism”, but then says he hates the word “synergistic”. It’s also the kind of podcast where the host isn’t shy about telling you the five best wargames of all time. Of all time!
There is a crudely-constructed goat sprinting through a cubist landscape. Dodge left or right? Does it matter in the face of terrorism? The Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks the youth of America can learn to spot the signs of extremist activity by navigating a virtual goat through a cheaply made runner. The Slippery Slope to Violent Extremism will somehow make the link between idle surfing of government-sponsored web pages and protecting freedom. Successfully hit the arrow keys at the right times, and a Zen-like lesson pops up for you to ruminate over.
Follow the distorted logic of blame that can lead a person into violent extremism.
Star Citizen is being split in two. As of yesterday, if you want to purchase the complete package, you’ll need to buy Star Citizen, the half with the persistent multiplayer universe, and Squadron 42, the half with the single-player campaign. Each game will be $45 on its own, but if you buy one, the other title can be purchased later for $15. Anyone that pledged to Star Citizen for the basic license before the split will get both halves. New purchasers get to pay for each half separately. Roberts Space Industries noted that the two games are still part of the original vision.
The package split does not change the fact that Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are part of the same game universe, or the fact that the games are functionally connected. You will access Squadron 42 through the same game client. And your performance in Squadron 42 will still have an impact on your career in the persistent universe, whether you buy both segments together or if you choose to add one further down the line.
As for why it’s being done, the developer explained that an “a la carte” presentation was always part of the plan. The modules being purchased separately allows customers to access the persistent universe or the campaign for the original $45 price while development continues.
