You can wait until November to play Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Frostbite Engine powered multiplayer, or you can fire up Star Wars: Battlefront II from 2005 now and play the newly re-enabled multiplayer for this classic title. According to the announcement, up to 64 players can now fight over the fate of the Star Wars galaxy on Disney’s servers. Official multiplayer for the game has been missing since GameSpy shut down their servers in 2014. While third-party servers have existed to fill the gap, the presence of an official multiplayer solution is welcome news to old-school fans.
Doug Liman brings us the story of a roguish drug smuggler against a backdrop of real-world political intrigue. At the 59-minute mark, we pause for a moment, look uneasily at each other, and then start talking about awkward moments in movies.
I can go on at length about the difference between reviewers and critics. Seriously, don’t get me started. Suffice to say, one of them makes a worthwhile contribution. The other is just kind of there to little effect, hardly more than another number stirred into an aggregate. I know which one I hope to be, but I also have enough healthy self-doubt to suspect which one I usually am.
So Review is particularly relevant to me as a mean-spirited jeer at the futility of evaluating experiences in isolation instead of actually experiencing them in context. This Comedy Central series just wrapped a third and supposedly final season earlier this year. But is it any good?
NRG Esports is closing their latest round of funding and celebrities see money in the growing e-sports industry. Jennifer Lopez, Marshawn Lynch, and Michael Strahan join earlier investors Shaquille O’Neal, Twitter CEO Anthony Noto, and Alex Rodriguez. Check out how excited Shaq and J.Lo are about Overwatch in the video. Do they know about Roadhog’s hook combo? What are their opinions on the Tracer derriere controversy? Does Jennifer Lopez main Hanzo?
Does Guild Wars or Original Sin have better NPCs? Tom Chick and Nick Diamon present their cases. Jason McMaster decides. Also, the latest RollerCoaster Tycoons, the state of superhero games, Project Cars 2, Total War: Warhammer II, and the new Call of Duty beta.
Would you pay $15 for a more hardcore version of Skyrim? Bethesda is testing a survival mode for Skyrim Special Edition that will add the usual difficulty enhancers to turn it into a more grueling open-world experience. You’ll need to eat and sleep. The cold can kill you. Fast travelling is disabled. Health no longer regenerates. It’s similar to the survival mode that Fallout 4 received last year. The difference? Fallout 4’s mode was a free update. Skyrim Special Edition’s addition seems to be a Creation Club exclusive with a price.
“Both PC and console players will get Survival Mode free for one week once it launches on their preferred platform.”
Note that “free for one week” bit. In images captured by a beta tester, the Creation Club price (disabled for the test) is 800 points, but thanks to the usual funny money shenanigans, you can’t buy exactly 800 points with real money. The next valid purchase option is $15 for 1500 spacebucks.
Assassin’s Creed Origins will get a peaceful free-roaming exploration mode. The Discovery Tour feature, will disable combat and allow players to travel through virtual ancient Egypt and learn about the true history of the setting. It’s an expansion of the series’ Animus Database that presented historical fact with a dash of snark from the in-game character of Shaun Hastings. The Discovery Tour will present interactive tours guided by Egyptologists that consulted on the game.
“It’s a more educative mode, so it’s clearly focused on education and on bringing to people actual facts, more academic knowledge.”
We’ll miss the dry sarcasm of Hastings, especially when it came to his opinions on Victorian era beer. The Discovery Tour feature will not be present at launch on October 27th. Ubisoft plans to add the mode in a free update to the game in early 2018.
Let’s talk people lost in a desert, literally and metaphorically. In recent movies, there’s Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch, in which the lovely Suki Waterhouse is exiled into a morally parched wasteland to learn hard lessons about revenge, cannibalism, and family values. It’s a deliriously messy swirl of post-apocalyptic aesthetics with a fantastic female lead. Waterhouse holds her own against Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, and even Keanu Reeves struggling with some of the worst dialogue since Point Break. Mad Maxine. There’s also Grave Encounters director Colin Minihan’s It Stains the Sands Red, one of those rare horror movies more concerned with character development than horror. It’s a wickedly clever variation on the buddy road trip, with zombie mythology standing in for a woman’s bad choices constantly two steps behind her. Brittany Allen’s comedic but poignant performance drives the movie across the desert through sheer force of will, with a little help from vodka and cocaine.
These are both uneven movies, definitely worth watching, but neither comes together as well as Happy Hunting. Continue reading →
Thrustmaster has taken the shroud of secrecy off the T.Flight HOTAS One, the first flight stick authorized for the Xbox One. It can be used with PCs as well as the console, and the hardware was designed with assistance from Frontier Developments for use with their Elite Dangerous space sim. (In fact, an update for Elite is releasing today with T.Flight HOTAS One support.) It’s all the thrusty throttley zoomy twisty flight stickery you could want on a console with a limited flight sim library.
The Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS One will hit store shelves on October 7th for $79.99.
Here’s the trailer for The Mummy Demastered, the upcoming licensed movie game from WayForward Games. That’s the latest The Mummy starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella. Not the Brendan Fraser series, or even the Boris Karloff film. It’s got that side-scrolling retro pixel indie vibe, so props to WayForward for making frugal use of the license. It isn’t the first time WayForward has made a pixel-art game for The Mummy franchise. They made 2002’s The Scorpion King: Sword of Osiris. That’s the one with Dwayne Johnson’s computerized head and torso grafted onto a giant scorpion’s body.
The Mummy Demastered is launching later this year on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. You can check out how much Quarter to Three liked The Mummy here.
Bluehole, the publisher of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is not pleased with Epic’s foray into the same arena. While Fortnite Battle Royale is going free-to-play, Bluehole is pondering their relationship with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. In an interview with GamesIndustry, Bluehole’s Chang Han Kim pointed out that while they pay Epic for their UE4 engine license, Epic has suddenly become a competitor, including the use of Battlegrounds in their marketing.
“We have also noticed that Epic Games references PUBG in the promotion of Fortnite to their community and in communications with the press. This was never discussed with us and we don’t feel that it’s right.”
Whatever the outcome, it’s likely that Fortnite won’t be the last copycat of Battlegrounds. To date, Bluehole’s multiplayer phenomenon has sold over 11 million units on PC alone.
There is a new Planet of the Apes game coming from Imaginati Studios, in partnership with Andy Serkis’ The Imaginarium. Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a storytelling adventure game set between the last two movies. It’s reminiscent of Heavy Rain or Until Dawn, but there’s a multiplayer twist. Up to four people can play together and vote on the outcomes for the game’s choices. But it’s not just a straight majority vote all the time. There are crucial choices that will allow players to spend limited override tokens that will give their votes more weight, adding a bit of a competitive component to the proceedings. What better way to recreate the feel of the apes versus humans war, than with contentious committee voting?
On the PlayStation 4, the voting is done through Sony’s PlayLink system, allowing everyone to sit together and cast their votes via their mobile devices. Imaginati CEO Martin Alltimes hopes the feature marks a return to family couch co-op.
“We can have a social experience around the television that used to be part of console gaming and has now largely gone away with online.”
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier will launch later this year on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Given that there are so many good boardgame ports available, it’s a pretty lousy time to sell a lousy boardgame port. It doesn’t help when the boardgame being ported is nothing to write home about. It certainly doesn’t help when it wants you to buy pointlessly expensive maps, not to mention actual gameplay mechanics. This sure is demanding for such an inconsequential game. It barely even qualifies as beer n’ pretzels. How about suds n’ crumbs?
