Game developer Playdead, boutique media company iam8bit, and sex toy manufacturer RealDoll have teamed up to create a limited collector’s edition of Inside. The twist is that they’re not telling you what they’ve actually created. For $375, you’ll get the PlayStation 4 version of Inside and “several” other items, with at least one of them presumably being the mysterious thing from RealDoll.
If you’re wondering whether or not you can do with this what you’d normally do with a product from RealDoll, the creators are playing coy. They do note that the package “weighs a surprising amount” and based on the box image featuring silhouettes of the multi-limbed Huddle, we’ll leave the kink-shaming to others.
There are a lot of things Ambush! gets absolutely right, including one thing you might not expect a solitaire hex-based WWII board game to even include, let alone nail. The writing.
After the jump: The scariest three words you’ll ever read.Continue reading →
March marks the twentieth anniversary of the StarCraft franchise. That’s two decades of gathering minerals and constructing additional pylons. Starting today, players can get special StarCraft loot in their Blizzard games. Logging into Overwatch will give you a nifty Ghost skin for Widowmaker. Pop into Diablo III to get a miniature battlecruiser pet. StarCraft II players can get a bunch of skins, a special portrait, and a decal. Old school fans of StarCraft Remastered can get an anniversary user interface skin. Later in the month, playing Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, or Heroes of the Storm will give you celebratory prizes as well. It’s like finding a free cache of vespene gas or an unguarded expansion location.
For a while, I went through an “acquire solitaire board games” phase. This phase was motivated by the fear that, someday, an apocalypse might take out the electrical grid, and all my friends would die. Somehow, I alone would manage to survive in this nightmare world, along with my board game collection. That apocalypse may or may not come, but in the meantime, I’ve hoarded stacks of solitaire games, and I want to play them.
One of these is Ambush!, which I tried once, years ago, quickly realized I was Doing It Wrong, and flipped the table. By the way, did you know that you’re probably Doing It Wrong? Not just romantically and career-wise, but also when it comes to board games. Many years of my own personal research have determined that people simply can’t remember board game rules.
“But Tony!” you splutter. “I’m a hardcore nerd! My life’s passion is board games! I have a poster of Vlaada Chvatil taped to my bedroom ceiling!”
Jennifer Lawrence colludes with Russia! How’s that work out? Listen and find out. Also, this is the final week for you to participate in our Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fundraiser 2018! Listen to the very beginning of this podcast for details.
Jason and Ian are both like little devils on my shoulder. They’re not doing it right. Isn’t one of them supposed to be the angel? They’re telling me about this super expensive game that I had already heard of, but had zero interest in playing. Especially once I found out that you have to glue together the stupid miniatures yourself. Ugh. Who has the time? It’s not my job to put together a game the designer couldn’t be bothered to put together himself. Besides, I did my term of service gluing stuff together when I was 14 and getting gluey fingerprints all over Revell models of B-17s. But they’re each telling me things about the game that make me think there’s more to this thing than I knew. Ian has it and he’s clearly enamoured of it. Or at least invested in it. Jason doesn’t have it, but he wishes he did. He seems to admire it from afar.
They keep talking. Their words are cackles and pricking pitchforks and the lash of tiny barbed tails at the back of my neck. But I’m strong. They can’t do their work on me. It won’t work. It won’t work.
It’s really slow this time of year, so the only games we have to talk about are Pinball FX3’s new tables, Ion Maiden, Stellaris, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Metal Gear Survive, Vermintide 2, Pit People, Bayonetta 3, Delver, Abandon Ship, and a couple of others. Hopefully things will pick up soon.
This time in live action theater, it’s Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5. The bad guy Father Jerome leads his parish and shows how he can hold his own with the likes of Pagan Min and Vaas Montenegro. He so crazy! Someone once said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over while expecting things to change, but I guess this is a case of not messing with a winning formula.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board wants to protect kids, inform parents, and keep their partners rolling in revenue. To that end, the ESRB is proposing a special box label warning customers that a game may have in-game purchases. ESRB president Patricia Vance said the label would be separate from the normal ratings box and content points.
The new label would apply to loot boxes, cosmetic skins, subscriptions, season passes, music, DLC, and in-game currency. Basically, any optional purchase for a game that is done from within the software. According to Vance, the label doesn’t differentiate between offers because parents need simple information.
“It’s very important for us to not harp on loot boxes per se, to make sure that we’re capturing loot boxes, but also other in-game transactions.”
The ESRB feels this is a good first step in addressing the concerns against loot boxes. The organization also does not want to increase a game’s age ratings due to in-game purchase options.
The Konami versus Hideo Kojima drama continues. Someone on the Metal Gear Survive development team apparently has some feelings on the matter. Seen above is a shot of a clipboard that comes up during character creation. Starting with Hungry Komododragon, taking the first letter of each surname reveals “KJP Forever” presumably a nod to Kojima Productions, Hideo Kojima’s post-Konami studio. Below that, the titles are Bastard Yota and Cunning Yuji which may be directed at Survive’s lead developers Yota Tsusumizaki and Yuji Korekado, although it’s not clear if that’s a good-natured joke or a sincere insult towards them.
After a brief discussion of Edge of Seventeen, Horror Show, and Annihilation, we roll out this month’s 3×3 on parades, marches, and group demonstrations.
Blizzard is updating Warcraft 3. Patch 1.29 is being tested now, and once it’s released to the general audience, the classic real-time strategy game will finally have widescreen support for modern resolutions. Along with widescreen options, Blizzard is giving the game a blance pass, increasing the player count in lobbies to 24, and improving the game’s editor. For the Horde!
To celebrate, Blizzard is sponsoring a special tournament. The Warcraft 3 Invitational will be broadcast on Twitch on February 27th to the 28th. It will feature old-school Warcraft 3 champs as well as new esports stars clicking madly on peasants and peons.
The violence-free “edutainment” Discovery Tour feature for Assassin’s Creed Origin is out now. It opens up the whole game map for exploration, disables any conflicts like angry Roman soldiers or crocodiles, and presents 75 walking tours of virtual Egypt. But there’s a problem. Sharp-eyed porn hounds have noticed that all the game’s statuary have their naughty bits covered with seashells in this mode. Scallops everywhere! “How can you censor art boobies in a piece of software meant for classrooms?” countless nerds ask. Don’t fret. There is still brazen nudity in paintings and wall decorations. Also, there may be a rock formation in Giza that looks a bit like a wang if you squint hard enough.
I speak with Ryan Hewer from Little Red Dog Games about Space Alert, Papers Please, Serenity, and Flowers for Algernon, which all relate to Deep Sixed, his game about flying a spaceship unfit for space.
Electronic Arts has announced Burnout Paradise Remastered. It’s an all-in-one hi-def 4K version of Burnout Paradise for the newest generation of consoles. You can get all the vehicular assaults, billboard smashing, Avril Lavigne, and Guns N’ Roses you can handle from a time when a dynamic in-game online score chase in an open-world format was an amazing new idea.
Burnout Paradise Remastered will launch on March 16th.
