Unfortunately, this game shares half a name with Duck Dynasty and half a name with Family Feud. And screenshots can’t do much to highlight what’s special about it. You’d look at it and think it’s wacky couch multiplayer no different than something like Move or Die. Chase each other around, jumping, punching, jumping, punching, jumping, punching.
This is what people do when they don’t have a Super Smash Bros. Continue reading →
Valve just updated Half-Life. The small patch addresses a couple of longstanding crash issues, and absolutely does not hide a clue about Half-Life 3 in the game. If you shimmy along the cliff level in Half-Life and look near the third stubby rock just before the helicopter fight, you will not find a hidden number code that leads to a web site with tantalizing clues embedded in a scrambled image of the G-Man. Just because Valve patched an almost twenty year old game does not mean anything fishy is going on. Do not bother looking for the reversed audio file of Gabe Newell ordering the next chapter of Gordon Freeman’s journey. It doesn’t exist.
If anyone finds anything suspicious, please contact your nearest Black Mesa Communications Liaison.
Sofia Coppola’s Civil War battle of the sexes is not a fair fight. One dude versus seven chicks? And they’ve got Nicole Kidman on their side? At the 1:20, we suddenly sit bolt upright and discuss people waking up in movies.
At the halfway point through 2017, you don’t really need people to write articles about how they like Nier and Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands and that new Zelda game on the Nintendo Switch. Exactly no one will be surprised that we think some of these games are the bee’s knees. The more valuable public service is calling out the games you didn’t know about, but maybe you should. After all, you don’t want your 2017 games of the year list to look like an NPD sales chart, do you?
So for the next ten days, in no particular order, I’m going to tell you about ten different games that I think are the bee’s lesser known knees.
Steam is lousy with shmups. Shoot-em-ups. Bullet hells. Call them what you will. Most are as forgettable as any other. Unless they’re made by Cave, a developer that puts some kind of magic pixie shmup dust in their games. Otherwise, if you’ve seen one shmup, you’ve seen them all.
Digital Extremes has announced Landscapes for Warframe, hand-crafted open world instances with an MMO-style hub town with NPC quests and a day and night cycle. The first such area to be added to the game, Plains of Eidolon, features the village of Cetus where up to 50 players can freely roam, team-up, and take on Ostron scavenger quests in the surrounding countryside.
Players will be able to fly and fight from their Archwings and battle normal enemies in the wilderness during the day, but at night the colossal Eidolons rise from the ground to destroy Warframes. These giant baddies ape MMO boss monsters in that they will require coordinated groups of folks plinking away at their bodies to defeat them. Hit the giant enemy crabs in their weak spots!
Remember how much Grixsnak the Slayer wanted to kill you in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor? Or how badly Turg Rattlebreak desired your head on a pike? Thanks to the free Nemesis Forge update for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, those dirty rotten scoundrels can follow you to the upcoming sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Man, you must’ve really pissed off Hoog the Undying for him to travel all the way over to another game just to deal with you.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is currently on sale for $4 on Steam, Xbox, and the PlayStation digital stores. Middle-earth: Shadow of War will launch on October 10th.
The latest patch for Horizon Zero Dawn adds New Game+, an Ultra Hard difficulty, face paint, and new gear. The 1.30 update allows players to repeat their open-world adventures with Aloy, but retain their inventory and character level. It’s the perfect way to experience that story again! Although the level cap of 50 remains in place, the New Game+ option gives players the ability to challenge themselves against tougher enemies with the Ultra Hard difficulty option that players can enable before embarking on their quest. Guerrilla Games also announced that the 1.30 update adds new face paint for Aloy as well as more expensive versions of existing weapons and outfits. Sashay away Aloy!
Creative Assembly has announced Total War Saga, a spin-off series for more focused games about specific conflicts. Total War Saga games won’t cover new eras. Instead, the games will use assets featured in past titles like Rome or Empire, but they will drill down to an historical campaign. You’ll still have the grand strategic map and the real-time tactical battles. You’ll just be chasing a goal. Director Jack Lusted pointed to the Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai standalone expansion and its depiction of the Boshin War as an example.
They’re what I like to call table-flip moments in history, where events are in the balance and could go any number of interesting and unique ways. This makes them a perfect fit for Total War games, where we give players the freedom to depart from the actual historical events and explore what might have happened had things gone differently.
While the campaign hasn’t been revealed yet, Creative Assembly revealed that the first Total war Saga game will be a “spiritual follow-up” to Total War: Rome II.
Everyone is looking forward to Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PlayStation 4 from Insomniac Games. It’s got web-slinging, flip-kicks, zipping between skyscrapers, and most importantly, it has the quips you’d expect from Peter Parker. The only problem is that 2018 is a long way off. The good news is that there’s a new Spider-Man game available right now, and it’s free! The bad news is that you need a VR system to play it.
Spider-Man: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience may sound like a dubious edutainment attraction at Disney’s EPCOT Center, but its actually a VR game. Well, it’s less a game and more a 5-minute target practice tutorial and advertisement for the movie Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it’s free and you do get to swing a couple of disembodied hands around. Zap balloons! Pick up rooftop garbage and sling it around! Clumsily grab your mask and jostle it onto your VR head. It’s just like being a superhero!
Spider-Man: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience is available for PlayStation VR and PC VR through Steam.
I don’t have a Switch, so I can’t get on the Breath of the Wild bandwagon. I’m not sure there’s room for anyone else on that thing anyway. And I haven’t cleared the six hours from my schedule to boot up Persona 5 and get to the actual game part. I’ve played enough of Torment: Tides of Numenera to know that I probably shouldn’t be writing this list yet.
If you want to see Terminator 2 again, you’ve got a couple of options. You can wait for this:
Director James Camerons 4K 3D conversion of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been booked for an Aug. 25 domestic release by AMC Theatres.
Terminator 2 has stood the test of time and is still hailed by critics as one of the best sci-fi movies in film history, said Elizabeth Frank, exec VP at AMC Theatres. Now, the newly restored version of the classic will take the already extraordinary special effects to a new level, and AMC is honored to give fans a newly immersive experience of a legendary film, as well as introduce the blockbuster to a new generation.
Or you can just click that video up there until it gets pulled for copyright infringement, since it’s virtually indistinguishable from the release version. It uniquely captures the stoicism with which Schwarzenegger played his role, not to mention a certain je ne sais quoi exuded by Edward Furlong. I’m not sure that stuff will come through so well in 4K 3D.
There have been 329,970 returns of Facepunch Studios’ survival crafting game Rust since it launched in early access on Steam. Developer Garry Newman told PCGamesN that despite the over $4 million in returns, he’s okay with the lost revenue. According to Newman, the returns equate to about 6% of Rust’s overall sales, which matches the return rate other developers he’s spoken to have seen.
“I put that down to people using the refund system as a demo. I think in the long run, people knowing the refund system is there probably gained us more sales than it lost us.”
Why do people return Rust? Newman said “no fun” and “bad performance” were the top two refund request reasons given by players.
The latest update for Ghost Recon Wildlands adds an optional Tier 1 mode that increases difficulty and rewards player progression in the later stages of the game. Upon enabling the endgame option, players will start at Tier 50 and accrue experience towards Tier 1. It’s like golf. The lower your number, the better. Except along the way, enemies will grow tougher. At the same time they move down the tiers, players can level up their weapons, increasing the damage output. Got all that? In Ghost Recon Wildlands, your character level now goes from 1 to 30, (35 in the Fallen Angels DLC) then it jumps to Tier 50, then it inches back down to Tier 1. Meanwhile, your rifle goes up to 30.
The Tier 1 update for Ghost Recon Wildlands is available today.
