First of all, is MSFT trying to sell the fact that in some awful and unreasonable way the Xbox One is backwards compatible? Oh, I need to hear more about these claims.
“[…] I think we might have blown our seasonal load too early.” So, this is a thing.
I believe the reason that No Man’s Sky will be a success isn’t because of the first-person shooterism or the fact that it’s a four-man game developer entering the same genre arena that Bungie’s attempting to claim next year with Destiny, it’s because of the art direction. Those colors and the way that everything is rendered just screams Mirror’s Edge to me. Even though Faith’s runabout-is-fair-play adventure didn’t sell that well because EA marketed it, any competently created game that includes procedurally generated anything will.
Metal Gear Solid V preorders for the Playstation 4 will get a DLC mission where you play as Solid Snake, but Xbox One variants will get a DLC mission where you play as Raiden circa Revenegance? I liked MGR for the challenge it provided, but console-specific exclusives always irks me. I’ve thought twice about buying a Xbox One lately, and if this sort of polarity becomes a trend, it will only add more complexity to making a decision.
Good Ol’ Games is one step away from Steam with regards to being trustworthy game distribution methods. DRM-free classics that don’t require a front-end to acquire, and now they’re offering refunds? Perhaps they’re more trusting than Steam is at this point.
Oh, it’s just a scam. Morons who brick their Xbox Ones deserve to have voided their warranties and ruined their systems. Backwards compatibility? Odds are your Xbox 360 is setting right beside the Xbox One you just bought AND IT STILL WORKS.
100k user registration spike? 10% of all content on Twitch came from PS4s since launch? Time to start shaming MSFT for not including Twitch streaming in the Xbox One launch software suite.
Another adventure game from Telltale that everyone will care about except for me! Yay!
Another iOS game that’s ruining the sacred history of a certain comic book hero failing miserably at getting reinvented? What a tease.
Well, the intro doesn’t really need spicing, but I wonder if Loading Ready Run have heard about Hot Pepper Game Reviews. That sounds like it could be a kick-ass way of making the intro spicier.
1197 vehicles in the latest Gran Turismo game? Sweet. Looks like Graham is sold on the Lunar Rover being included in the game. That’s fine, but I’m sure that the break-neck speeds of 10 miles per hour will really make it a viable choice in the various races the game provides.
A Japanese game developer in the mid-90s overvaluing art over gameplay? I’m sure Street Fighter 2 wasn’t the first game released where that was the case, but I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised that it is.
Sports games hit a plateau this past year with the iterations released in the final months of the present generation of consoles. Sure the graphics could always be improved, but the performance and the control that players had over athletes in these simulations have it a high point. With many of these titles borrowing multiplayer game cues from buying packs of trading cards to build out a roster in the fairest way possible, it really is something where increasing the number of unique models in the audience has become a tentpole issue for the various franchises of sports titles. Realistic crowds were more of a selling point than multiple players contesting a ball in mid-air in the FIFA ’14 trailer. Do sports game fans really care about the simulated audience?
Mobile gaming embracing pay-to-win isn’t a new phenomenon, but it being new to DC Comics characters and universes seem to be. Injustice: Gods Among Us features in-game purchases that allow you to unlock late-game characters early, making the whole game a bit more of an exercise in patience more than skill. The other titles have in-game purchases that are locked to game progress, and suffer for the lack of exploitability. It’s a shame that these games are just money sinks instead of decently fun titles in their own right.
The Ellen Page Simulator just seems to be more of a derivation of Heavy Rain for the sake of the game developer doing something that’s weird and paradigm shifting instead of a game that actually seems unique enough to warrant praise. The actors are actors and they do their jobs pretty well, but as Graham points out, the limits that the game presents to the player on relatively simplistic sequences, such as walking down a hallway, break the whole point of the game as the developer sees it. Beyond: Two Souls was supposed to have so many decision trees and capacity for variance that it was supposed to blow most other games out of the water. Instead, it barely holds up thanks to the performance of the actors involved.
Desert Bus time this weekend? Desert Bus time this weekend.
COD: Ghosts runs at 720p on the Xbox One while it runs at 1080p on the Playstation 4. It’s still a bad game because fake Infinity Ward made it. No need to have a discussion about which system is better using COD as the framework.
