You want to play the next Assassin’s Creed game, but you’re still busy cruising around the countryside with your anime boy band bros in Final Fantasy XV. What can you do? Beginning August 31st, Assassin’s Creed will slide into Final Fantasy XV’s world with the free Assassin’s Festival DLC. It’s a chance to pick up some snazzy new hoodies for you and your buds, and share some Abstergo-approved Cup Noodles.
The town of Lestallum will transform itself for the event with signs and banners signaling the arrival of the festival, and new activities will be available for players to participate in.
As a bonus, if you’ve gotten a Dream Egg from the Moogle Chocobo Carnival, you can get an assassin outfit for Noctis one day early!
Tony Carnevale, Tom Chick, and Bruce Geryk dive deep into the reprint of Victory Point Games’ solitaire classic, Nemo’s War. What’s new, what’s better, what’s worse? And what’s the deal with these rules?
Overwatch’s Mei got her own animated short today, so it’s doubtful that many people will pay any attention to the companion video Blizzard released for Hearthstone. Given a choice between a sexy anime Overwatch nerd and a plucky Disney-esque Hearthstone song, we all know which mini movie will get more views. Still, it’s a valiant attempt to lodge an ear-worm into everyone’s brain.
“Hearth and Home” being an ode to Stonebrew Tavern is catchy, but it’s no “When I Find Love” from Saints Row: Gat out of Hell. It’s certainly not as good as “Oh No You Didn’t” from the marketing for Mercenaries 2, which despite being almost ten years old, still manages to pop into my head to this day.
The upcoming XCOM 2: War of the Chosen expansion features a scored Challenge Mode. In challenge mode missions, players will be tasked with conquering specific scenarios using the same pre-made squads of soldiers, with the results being posted to a global leaderboard. Firaxis will create new challenge missions on a regular basis. Who can save more civilians? You, or that guy in Portugal? Who can snipe more snakemen? You, or the jerk in Alabama? We’ll find out on August 29th when War of the Chosen goes live.
BioShock turns ten years old this month, and if you feel you need a new way to separate yourself from your money, 2K Games has an exclusive deal for you. The BioShock 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition bundles all three of the BioShock games with their DLC, a numbered certificate of authenticity to satisfy your moral superiority, and an 11-inch Big Daddy statue to show off your inherent worth. It’s $199, which is the objectively fairest price possible. The package won’t actually be available until November 14th, but if you give them your money now, 2K Games will reserve one for you at launch so the mindless masses don’t beat you to the “extremely limited” sale quantities.
Consider a wilderness, lightly populated by natives. They have pagan sites dedicated to local nature gods. They worship a river or mountain or clouds or nighttime or something. Some sort of quaint animism. Now here come European explorers from across the sea. They set up small towns. The towns coalesce into entrenched cities. Culture spreads. The holy sites are abandoned and the natives are assimilated. The wilderness is now tamed. Settled. European. Probably Christian.
Aliens is one of the easiest templates for a low budget sci-fi thriller. Just gather some sci-fi props, secure a shooting location, and figure out what to do for your monster. In the case of Armed Response, these are, respectively, an RV, a warehouse and, uh, they’re invisible. The invisible monsters bit is a great way to save money. Or you can also just pretend something infects or haunts some of the characters. Now they can be your monsters. To its credit, Armed Response splurges on a couple of bad CG sequences late in the movie involving ghostly arms. Literally arms. Not weapons. But actual arms. That’s your reward for sticking with it. Continue reading →
This week’s meeting of the Charlize Theron Fan Club shall come to order. At the 1:38, after a couple of closing Atomic Blonde comments that end at 1:40, we look both ways before discussing scenes of people crossing streets.
Rise of Nations, the seminal 2003 real-time strategy game from Big Huge Games, is coming to the Microsoft Windows Store. It’s the Extended Edition that’s already available on Steam, but built as a Universal Windows Platform app. If you’re hesitant about being locked-in to a limited multiplayer community, the upcoming UWP version will feature cross-play with Steam players! In fact, the beta branch of the Steam version is already cross-play enabled.
Rise of Nations: Extended Edition is coming to Windows Store on September 14th.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I thought the first season would feel like a complete experience from A to B to Z. But just as I think it’s wrapping everything up, it instead resets everything. It goes from A to B to A-point-one. The situation has not changed substantially. Some of the characters’ lives have certainly changed, but the overall situation might as well be a reset to the beginning of the season. Continue reading →
We resolve the burning question that haunts everyone playing Agents of Mayhem. Daisy or Scheherazade? Fortunately, you can have both on your team. You probably should. We also talk Tacoma, Blood Bowl 2, and the Atlas Rising update for No Man’s Sky.
Planet Coaster has partnered with the real-life amusement park Cedar Point to release a free addition for the game. The 1.3.6 update includes in-game assets and blueprints to build the Steel Vengeance roller coaster, which will join Cedar Point’s collection of rides in May 2018. The wood and steel hybrid design will be the tallest and fastest coaster of its kind when it opens, and will feature the most airtime of any currently existing coaster. You can check out a first-person rendition of the ride here, or you could just build the darn thing in Planet Coaster and “ride” it there.
This partnership is notable for bringing an officially licensed coaster to players. The genre is chock full of generic amusements and fan interpretations of rides, but where are all the sponsored El Toro, Goliath, or Apollo’s Chariot DLC? Will we see the various Six Flags or Busch Gardens parks in video game form? There are a ton of independent amusement parks throughout the world that could use this platform to advertise their rides. Plus, we can have the guilt-free thrill of derailing licensed coasters into crowds of virtual people.
Fantasy Flight Games is publishing Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 30th Anniversary Edition later this year. Before 1987, we didn’t know that Sienar Fleet Systems manufactured the ubiquitous TIE Fighter. We didn’t know where Boba Fett came from or who the Mandalorians were. We didn’t know that the little things that looked like pens on Imperial officers’ uniforms were code cylinders. Basically, our knowledge of the Star Wars universe was woefully incomplete until Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game from West End Games came out and codified the lore into something worthy of nerd nitpicking. It’s thanks to these early gaming books that Star Wars dorks could stand toe-to-toe with Trekkies in comparing minutia. West End eventually went bankrupt and the license passed to others, but the 1987 rules and sourcebook permanently influenced the franchise canon, much of it surviving through the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm.
The $60 bundle will include reproductions of the basic rule book and The Star Wars Sourcebook.
Thanks to the release of StarCraft: Remastered we can now zoom in and see all the fine detail we lost in the original game’s pixelated resolution. The game’s high-definition 2D graphics were made with the guidance of the original artists, who revealed the horrifying truth behind the 1998 designs. Look closely at the center of the anti-air missile turret. Every time you built a wall of missile turrets to protect your Terran outpost from a rampaging horde of Zerg Mutalisks, you were ordering brave men to their deaths. There was a little guy manning each tower, ready to give his life for your base.
When writing about Agents of Mayhem, it’s tempting to call out the obvious similarities and influences. The amped up cartoon charm of Overwatch. The infinitely customizable character classes of Diablo III. The gratifying doo-dad hunting of Crackdown. The intricate combat and character interaction of League of Legends nee Defense of the Ancients. The cheery superhero team spirit of The Avengers. The breezy vulgarity of Archer. The purple hues of Saints Row.
But none of that tells the whole story. None of that gets at why Agents of Mayhem stands mightily on its own. This is not just an open-world Overwatch. This is not just Saints Row with superheroes. This is a masterpiece that’s been waiting for 30 years to bust out from the collection of talent at Volition. For a number of reasons, it demands a place among the best of the best. Twelve reasons, to be precise. Continue reading →
