“Here comes Alicia Vikander!” says Kelly Wand. You have been warned.

Next week: 12 Monkeys

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After you get past gluing together teensy bits of plastic and then receiving your mauling at the claws of what should have been a tutorial, Kingdom Death: Monster finally shows you what it really is. Once you’re filling out the sheet for your settlement, you’ve arrived and now you can see clearly. Now you can see what the road ahead looks like. What’s that strange hulking shape up there? Is it getting closer?

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After a little bit of complicated math about the Anno series, we discuss Surviving Mars, Vermintide 2, Antihero, Endless Space 2, Space Tyrant, Pit People, Into the Breach, The Crew 2, Sea of Thieves, Diluvion, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Sniper Elite 4. That’s an even dozen games in less than an hour!

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What happens when a music superstar with 36 million Twitter followers hops into a session of Fortnite with one of the most popular videogame streamers in the world? You blow out all the records for Twitch viewership. Late last night renaissance man Drake popped into a game with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and hit a peak of 607,000 Twitch viewers, easily surpassing the previous high of 388,000. Drake performed well, telling Blevins at one point that he’d only got into the game a “month or two” ago.

If that wasn’t enough of a pop-culture confluence, by the end of the night, Pittsburgh Steelers receiver John “JuJu” Smith-Schuster, rapper Travis Scott, and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom joined the game. It all sounds so amazing that one might think it a prearranged marketing stunt, except for the way the group’s in-game meetup was plagued with technical issues for a good part of the stream. (Drake’s PlayStation tag was apparently too full.) Most of the issues were eventually resolved thanks to judicious use of cross-play between the PlayStation 4 and PC versions of the game. Basically, this may have been the best advertisement for Fortnite ever.

You can check out an archive of the gaming session here.

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Sam Barlow, creator of the much-lauded 2015 Her Story mystery game, has released his interactive media update to WarGames. #WarGames, from Barlow and production company Eko, features scrappy young “hacktivists” cracking Gibsons and using hashtags for the forces of good. The player (media interactor?) gets to help the crew and do a lot of passive observation.

The first season is up on Steam, but it’s also available on Eko’s site free with ads.

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Jeff Goldblum will appear in Jurassic World Evolution. It’s no Cooking with Jeff Goldblum, but this announcement that he will be present in one form or another as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Frontier’s upcoming dino-theme park sim is almost too cute for words. It’s not clear why Dr. Ian Malcolm would help the player build a new amusement park filled with murderous dinosaur facsimiles from InGen, but with Frontier behind the game we can expect lots of Planet Coaster goodness using the popular Universal Studios license.

Jurassic Park Evolution will release later this year, probably around the time Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hits theaters.

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The good news is that you guys are awesome! We got 1,803 votes for this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Raiser. The bad news is that this is a podcast about Eli Roth’s Death Wish. You can jump to 1:21:30 if you don’t want to commiserate with us.

Next week: Tomb Raider, and the Make Us Watch Whatever You Want winner the week after that

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There is now a subscription option for Dota 2. Dota Plus is an ongoing, uninterrupted evolution of the Battle Passes that Valve would sell during the Majors and The International tournaments. Now that there’s a Pro Circuit featuring games all year long, the Battle Pass concept has changed to keep up. For $4 a month, subscribers will get the ability to level heroes and gain Shards, a new in-game currency, which can be traded in for goodies. They’ll also get access to special challenges for their heroes, and their subscription will allow a “free” entry to each weekend Battle Cup tournament that will otherwise cost $1 per admission ticket. Perhaps the most intriguing offer for subscribers is access to Plus Assistant, a new tool that gathers and analyzes everyone’s build decisions in real-time and offers suggestions for the user’s own build. It’s like having a personal meta-game counselor.

Dota Plus is available now.

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Mickey Keating wants us to know he’s seen Taxi Driver. Well, at least the shoot out at the end. In Psychopaths, a new low for the most uninteresting horror director working today, he restages a snippet of the brothel shootout, shot for shot. He also wants us to know he’s seen Audition. Well, at least the torture scene at the end. But Martin Scorsese and Takashi Miike understand that something needs context to be truly horrific. The ends of Taxi Driver and Audition wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without the rest of the movie laying the groundwork. Which is why those scenes are at the end and not merely edited in at some random spot. Keating apes, without understanding, to such a degree that his movie is barely even a movie.

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Blood shoots from your femoral artery at an alarming rate, killing you in seconds.

The title “Blood Geyser” precedes the text in boldface type. It’s what happens when you take a severe injury to the legs and roll a 1 on the Severe Injuries table for legs. It’s how Ariadne died after being dragged away by a White Lion.

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Well, now there’s this.

In order to win this mission, you have to satisfy several victory conditions. Among them is the following:

“At least one active US soldier is in any hex of the heights in the southeast corner of the map (defined by the elevation change running from Q-19 to Y-13) from which he can see all the road hexes on the map.”

After the jump, there’s just one little tiny problem. Continue reading →

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Tom Chick and Space Tyrant lead designer Dave Quinn talk about why this isn’t the usual 4X in space. And how it might not exist if it weren’t for Illwinter’s crazily detailed Dominions games.

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So far I’ve spent a ton of time singing the praises of this game. But what’s actually been going on in my playthrough? Honestly, not a ton.

After the jump, a die roll too far. Continue reading →

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Treyarch and Activision have confirmed Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. That’s a four to you normal people. In fact, let’s agree to nip this in the bud. We’re going to write that as “Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” or “Blops4” from now on because we’re not crazy.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will launch on October 12th.

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I may or may not have been alive in 1983, and if I was, I was certainly far too young to play wargames. But it seems to me that Ambush! is an absolute masterpiece of game design for that era. Computer wargames were ugly and obtuse; board wargames needed to be played with an in-person friend equally as nerdy as you… and were also obtuse. Ambush! is played solo, and it’s incredibly streamlined. Every feature designers Eric Lee Smith and John Butterfield chose to include serves a purpose.

After the jump, let’s look at a few of those things. Continue reading →

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