Kellogg’s is making a Mario-themed cereal that will be packed into an Amiibo box. The limited edition Super Mario Cereal coming this month, features packaging that has the same digital functionality as Amiibo figurines. Tapping the box on a Nintendo Switch will give Super Mario Odyssey players in-game rewards like hearts or coins. The cereal itself resembles General Mills’ competing product Lucky Charms. It’s packed with sugary stiff marshmallow bits made to look like familiar Mario assets like mushrooms and power-up blocks. According to Kellogg’s, Super Mario Cereal may hit store shelves as early as December 11th.
Super Mario Odyssey released on October 27th and sold over 2 million units in 3 days.
It wasn’t just Martin and Charlie Sheen versus the North Vietnamese Army in the Vietnam War. Troops from Australia and New Zealand joined the fight, and Rising Storm 2: Vietnam has just added those soldiers and equipment to the game. The free Bushranger Content Update features the Australian Army faction, six new firearms, the eponymous Bushranger attack helicopter, and Australian commanders can call in a Canberra Bomber strike. Three new 64-player maps come with the update as well, so you’ll have plenty of territory to test out the toys.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam will be on sale for 50% off until December 1st.
You can now buy land in Star Citizen. More accurately, you can pre-purchase a certificate to claim land when the feature is implemented. The details are vague and a little confusing, but the gist is that for $50 or $100, you can buy a Land Claim License that you’ll be able to use to grab a plot of virtual real estate in Star Citizen someday. Although a couple of land masses are now in the recently released 3.0 work-in-progress version of the game, there’s no date for when the system will actually be live. According to the FAQ, players that pre-purchase these claims now will not have a significant advantage over people that wait as the claims will also be buyable with in-game money. Because the vision of the final version of Star Citizen includes “billions” of square kilometers of viable property, there will be plenty of good locations to go around, or so the developers say.
What will you be able to do with the in-game land? Building modular outposts, mining, farming, or plain old real estate flipping are listed as possibilities that may come to fruition. The stars are the limit when the game isn’t even done! The developers even supplied in-game fiction to explain the claim sales.
The UEE sells claim licenses for the same reason as any government – to raise revenue to fund public benefit programs, to liberalize its economy, to spur growth and tax revenue, and to fund the military campaign against the Vanduul.
Star Citizen has raised over $168 million in revenue from crowd-funding and early access sales.
That’s Ode, the latest game from Ubisoft’s indie-ish Reflections. They developed Grow Home, Grow Up, and Atomega and they launched this yesterday with very little notice. The player guides Joy, the little bubble character, through musical landscapes to hoover up scattered stars. It’s all very twee and experimental, which would explain the bargain pricing and lack of marketing, but it’s good that Ubisoft is willing to let Reflections do this kind of thing.
Embark on a journey of pure joy, where every interaction with the environment has an immediate positive visual & aural reaction. Transform your character as you collect fallen stars and ascend through 4 fantasy worlds, revealing melodic landscapes to which you add layer upon layer of music to create a crescendo of sound and light.
Ode is available for Windows PC on Ubisoft’s Uplay service for a modest $4.99.
What’s going on with the experience grind in Destiny 2? That’s the question a lot of players have been asking over the long holiday weekend. It all kicked off when an armchair investigator dug into how the game throttles the rate of experience gain for players in certain situations. According to the data collected, players that stuck to the seemingly more lucrative XP activities in Destiny 2 may have actually had their XP scaled back by 90% with no notice. Shortly after the publication of the Reddit post, Bungie admitted that there were some shenanigans going on. They did have a system in place that essentially penalized players that stuck to easily repeatable content.
We are not happy with the results, and we’ve heard the same from the community.
It was a stunning turn of events to fans. The speed with which the developer responded to the initial accusations (over a holiday weekend) emphasized the severity of the breach of trust.
But the issue hasn’t ended yet. Further analysis by fans revealed that after the dynamic XP scaling was removed, Bungie increased XP level requirements by 100% across the board. Bungie has also admitted this is accurate. Any way you slice it, you’re going to grind for longer than you thought you were going to before all this came out.
(This review was written for one of my Patreon review requests. If you’d like to compel me to watch and write about movies like this, please check out my Patreon campaign.)
I have no business telling the guys who invented the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles what they did wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway. Hey, comic book guys from the 80s, when you invent a team of superheroes, the superheroes should be different from each other. For instance, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Incredibles, or the Justice League. A team of superheroes shouldn’t be four copies of the same thing. Even Charlie’s Angels always have at least one non-blonde. But the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are four of the same hero. That’s not how heroes work. That’s how bad guys work. Bad guys are all indistinct copies of each other. Heros should be the opposite as sure as white hats are the opposite of black hats. Heroes should represent individuality while bad guys represent conformist masses.
But these four turtles have to wear colored bandanas so you can tell them apart. There’s the orange one, the red one, the blue one, and the purple one. Even the color scheme is a big fail for leaving out a primary color in favor of two secondary colors. I eventually noticed that each turtle uses a different weapon. The red guy uses two sais, the blue guy uses katanas, the orange guy uses nunchucks, and the purple guy uses a staff. For me, watching the 1990 movie for the first time, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is just a color and a weapon.
Darth Vader is awesome. We all know this. Even if you’ve never seen a Star Wars movie, you know that Darth Vader is someone you don’t want to mess with. He’s gigantic. He wears space samurai armor. He has a red laser sword. He’s voiced by James Earl Jones. You don’t want to be on the bad side of that. All that imposing badassery is exactly why kids love to roleplay as Darth Vader. No one scares Darth Vader. Nothing hurts Darth Vader. That bully that torments you at recess? Darth Vader would destroy him. Early bed time? Not for Darth Vader. Time-out in the corner for breaking Mommy’s favorite cookie jar? No chance of Darth Vader agreeing to that! Pretending to be Darth Vader is the ultimate power fantasy. Getting to be Darth Vader in Star Wars: Battlefront II and mowing down hapless rebel soldiers gives you exactly the adrenaline rush and satisfaction you’d think it should. You are a whirling red and black sawblade buzzing through balsa wood. You are become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Electronic Arts’ season of loot boxes is off to a cracking good start. First, the publisher had to turn off the ability to buy goodies in Star Wars: Battlefront II due to widespread negative reaction, now they’re revamping payouts in Need for Speed: Payback. According to Ghost Games’ update, players will see increased experience rewards, faster restocks on garage upgrade offers, and an overall better mix of prizes in the game’s “bait crates” – which may be the most on-the-nose name for loot boxes yet.
We believe that owning a garage of customized cars is part of the essence that makes Need for Speed what it is. We’ll keep making tweaks, based on your feedback, and we’re committed to making car progression a much more enjoyable experience.
It’s not a complete suspension of the system, but a little slowdown on the curve.
Soma is getting an official “safe mode” that removes monster attacks. Frictional Games’ lauded techno-horror game will land on Xbox One on December 1st, and the developers have added a mode that removes monster attacks so the player can freely explore and experience the psychological fear without worrying about running from clumsy automatons. According to Frictional, some mamby-pamby cowards have been too frightened of the monster attacks to play the game. This new version of the game should solve that problem.
Players on PC have had a Wuss Mode mod available almost since launch thanks to the Steam Workshop.
Seiji Kanai’s Love Letter, a game about getting a princess to like you, has come a long way in five years. Back in the day, it was a shrewd little exercise in simplicity, featuring only eight different cards in a deck of sixteen cards. Your hand size was one. On your turn, you drew a card and then discarded down to the hand size, playing the ability of the card you discarded. In other words, all you ever did was decide which of two cards you’re going to play. It was over in minutes. After a few rounds, you moved on to play a Real Game.
But then came the rewrites. The latest rewrite of Love Letter has failed its sanity check. Continue reading →
Titan Quest, yes the 2006 action roleplaying game, has a new expansion. Today! Titan Quest: Ragnarok introduces Norse mythological creatures and environments. The expansion offers players a new Runemaster class that combines martial prowess with magical crafting, an increased level cap to 85, graphical and physics improvements, and new loot items including pants. Finally, pants.
Assassin’s Creed Origins update 1.0.5 will be live soon. Performance and stability improvements? Sure. Glitched quest fixes? Yup. The update even returns the Deluxe Edition’s Ambush at Sea quest which was disabled soon after launch due to a game-breaking bug. All that stuff is nice and you can peruse the patch notes here if you’re interested. This is all good, but standard stuff. The most worthwhile addition is something that will finally allow thousands of players to return to the game. There will be a beard and hair toggle, and your selected preference will remain saved. No more baby-faced Bayek when you return to the game from the last time you played it! Thank Ra!
Update 1.0.5 will launch today for the PlayStation 4 and November 20th for the Xbox One. The PC version doesn’t have a date just yet, but that’s likely because of the platform’s superior beard technology.
(This review was written for one of my Patreon review requests. Since Prey has been out for a while, I wrote specifically for people who have finished the game. It contains spoilers. Lots of spoilers.)
When F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, he wasn’t talking about second chances. A guy who writes Great Gatsby obviously believes in second chances. He was instead talking about the traditional structure of a three-act story. The first act sets up the conflict, the second act develops how the characters will deal with the conflict, and the third act is the climax in which everything is resolved. Fitzgerald was deriding Americans for skipping past the important second act in which the characters develop. Americans, he implied, go straight for the payoff.
Prey, a solid entry in the tradition of Bioshock, is the opposite of American lives. It is almost all second act. Continue reading →
