The second most popular game on Twitch last week was Diablo 2? Standard, since the only folks playing Diablo 3 anywhere near normal as it should be are on now-last-generation consoles. Nice job there, Blizzard.
Square Enix iOS title pricing joke aside, Rovio’s incessant push towards monetizing every single aspect of their Angry Birds related games (and every other game they release) is starting to really push me away from ever seriously considering future mobile titles that are priced as ‘free’ in their respective stores. At least with most of Square Enix’s titles, I know what I am paying for ahead of time because they’re simply porting their products they’ve already ported to other less popular platforms, like the Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita.
It’s not a huge secret that development on the next title begins after shipping the game that your development house has been working on, and it’s definitely the case in the dynasty that is Gran Turismo. GT6 wasn’t a launch title for the Playstation 4, but that’s being addressed with its release this week. Forza never really held much of a candle to GT’s extreme simulation of everything car-related, but it was a title that Xbox One users picked up at launch. GT6 will certainly see success, but how long will it be until PS4 early adopters head back to their local game store, pull out their wallets and buy a new game? A fair question, I think.
Twitch integration has come to Minecraft. I’d have rather that Notch had been working on 0x10c instead, but I understand that subjecting the masses of Minecraft players to Twitch broadcasting while trying to run Minecraft in a stable fashion comes second to revenue generation.
Putting cameras in an average person’s living room with a microphone didn’t yield a second thought because of all of the marketing research potential that could be gathered from their players, but they didn’t realize that a camera pointing at a player could mean dicks on the Internet? Clearly, Sony hasn’t thought through the consequences of a player-facing camera as Twitch has decided that it would rather not list the PS4 Playroom as a title on their service, but what is MSFT going to do when this same situation affects them due to horribly, average Xbox One users?
Localization mixing as DLC isn’t exactly a new thing, but I suppose that Square Enix getting behind it makes the whole thing newsworthy. I’d buy the pack, but I still have to finish FFXIII, purchase and finish FFXIII-2 and then purchase FFXIII-3 before the optional patch becomes even remotely relevant to me.
That answer is easy, Graham: it’s FFVIII. Emo kids run about with swords that are also guns doing wire-fu maneuvers in order to save the world while playing random card mini-games and lamenting about not being in a relationship or something like that. What’s so hard to understand about that? It’s not so simple like the balance of the world has been destroyed and a party fights to correct it, yet I’m fairly sure I’ve got it nailed down in one run-on sentence.
GTA: San Andreas is the logical next step for Rockstar’s mobile gaming / porting strategy. Even though the controls aren’t really the greatest, all of their titles play flawlessly on iOS and Android. Can’t wait to not replay GTA:SA.
Sports games that aren’t FIFA can go die in a fire. That said, I hope they rip this non-FIFA sports game a new one.
Black Friday jokes? Neato. “Celebrate family by murdering family” is a bit too violent of a thought to be funny, in my view. I’d have gone with “Celebrate family by lining up outside a retail establishment for days on end without them.”
A new free-to-play Soul Calibur game? Now this could be a real step forward for fighting games. Their previous titles had weak stories to combine with a campaign-style mode that made playing a fighting game alone a reasonable notion. The depth of the character creation tools in previous titles in the series would allow players to completely customize the move set. If anything like this is on the horizon for the next Soul Calibur, I think it’s time for CAPCOM and other fighting game publishers to take notice.
With the cameras being shipped (or promoted) with the next-gen consoles, Sony’s approach to outsourcing photo content verification to Facebook seems like a pretty good call. Not only does the third-party integration strengthen how connected the Sony service feels, but it adds more and more value to having a Facebook account (along with a real name which is verified by the Facebook account) associated with your gaming profile. For consoles, the trend of moving away from anonymity doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
The football management genre of simulation games has finally come to American sports simulations in such a way as to finally be noticed. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not even newsworthy to explain how it works further than “it’s fantasy basketball in your fantasy basketball based on how fantasy basketball works with other meta bullshit”.
“I hope senpai makes it to the Final Four.” OH DEAR GOD GRAHAM PLEASE LET’S NOT MIX COLLEGE BASKETBALL REFERENCES WITH JAPANESE DATING SIM-SPEAK.
A “recursive Xbox setup” is exactly how I’ll be using my systems when I decide to pull the trigger on the Xbox One purchase, provided the display lag isn’t terribly game-shattering.
A short reference to Sony’s “WE OWN YOUR X” clause in relation to communication over the Playstation network stuff. But it does kind of make sense, don’t use a gaming console to facilitate drug deals. Do it on the street corner like everybody else.
“Don’t?” I sense Rockstar bashing in the near-future.
brb preparing my sexy thuomp outfit
PlayStation 4 consoles in Brazil have an import duty? Well, that would certainly cause the price to rise by over four times the initial USD-equivalent price of the console itself.
Unreal Engine 4 is only for PC. That’s fine. I think I’ll join the rest of the world in waiting for Epic Games to port the engine to another platform that needs it–like the upcoming consoles.
Now the teaser at the beginning of the episode feels a bit harsh. Of course there will be malware-seeded torrents of PC games available on various trackers. I’m pretty sure every major release in the past decade and a half has a spam-filled copy or honey-pot vector out there in some manner. This is normal and shouldn’t have warranted a PSA, but I suppose that PC gamers feel a bit jealous of the final-hour current-generation console players who have access to this great game and would do just about anything possible to get their hands on a copy.
Isn’t reselling access to PBS a crime? If it isn’t, it should be. Shame on Microsoft for pressuring PBS to put content on its Xbox service and then hide it behind the paywall that everyone already pays for.
Nintendo invented a new princess character for it’s upcoming Super Mario 3D World. Annnnnnnnd no one cared because it’s a 3D remake of Super Mario World. Bonus Graham Nintendo zing!
The Wii is dead in Japan, long live the Wii! Double bonus Kathleen Nintendo zing!
