I kept hoping for a VERY long time that they would announce this game for consoles. I really don't have a powerful enough PC for it. It's been years, and still no word, which sucks because I sure aren't spending $$$$ to build another rig just to play it. If they release it on the PS4, that's fine I'm all for that, but otherwise I can't play it.
@Joeguy00 I agree. And personally, I play mostly single-player games cos I'm not ALWAYS connected and thats why if the NextBox has always-on internet (no matter the type), I'm not interested. I don't mind the once-in-a-while internet connection to verify my games, but for the game to fully require constant internet connection to play, I don't like it.
My current internet connection plays Youtube videos at 480p (most of the time) and while doing that, I can't download at up to 100Kb/s. When not playing any videos online, My download speed can reach 200-400Kb/s. It isn't bad, but not very good. If a game requires always-on internet, Lag must happen whether its in the game, or playing youtube videos, or downloading with my pc. So, even though I'm mostly always on-line, an always on console won't be worth it
Like in any extreme survival situation, the early moments of Don't Starve's grueling-yet-fascinating struggle to stay alive are electric. Suddenly the clock is ticking. Confidence is high as you first explore a vast open-world wilderness teeming with danger. From trapping a rabbit for the first time to crafting an axe to chop precious firewood before nightfall, every minor accomplishment that keeps you ticking is immediately gratifying. But as the days draw on and dodging death's icy grip gets harder, the rigors of this unflinchingly brutal roguelike adventure chip away at your patience.
Don't Starve casts you in the unfortunate role of Wilson, a scientist who has been mysteriously transported to a strange and deadly world by a demon-gentleman. With little more than a quick greeting, your adversary vanishes, and you're left alone to figure out how to stay alive. Story and dialogue are pretty minimal, aside from a few encounters in the super tough adventure mode, which is accessed by first locating a portal hidden in the randomly generated survival mode world. The hands-off nature of the story is a strength, allowing the heavy atmosphere and outstanding visual design of this grim land draw you in. There's little time for dalliances anyway. A great many things in the game's eerie world are out to kill you from the get-go.
Survival doesn't come easy, but there's an undeniable thrill to the challenge. Your first few minutes of exploration hinge on harvesting whatever basic resources you stumble upon: a few twigs, some flint, rocks, a handful of grass. Collect enough of these raw materials, and you can make an axe, a torch, rope, a spear, and other crucial tools that increase your chances of survival. Don't Starve's deep resource harvesting and crafting system brings previous open-world games like Minecraft and Terraria to mind, and it's one of the game's strongest hooks. Figuring out how to put each item you collect to good use is a fun process of experimentation. Basic items are relatively easy to cobble together with minimal materials, though creating science and alchemy stations also pushes you further down the crafting rabbit hole by unlocking tons of more elaborate item recipes to pursue. Of course, staying alive long enough to build everything is another story.
Dangers are frequently stacked against you in inventive and sometimes frustrating ways. Exploring, scavenging, harvesting resources, and building are best done in the day. Without a torch or a campfire to provide illumination when night falls, you will be torn to pieces by the demonic creatures that roam the darkness within seconds. Building a fire isn't enough either. You have to have enough wood or other fuel sources to keep it lit throughout the night, which creates a constant state of near panic every time the twilight phase of the day/night cycle arrives. Getting caught without the necessary ingredients for a fire or ample burnable materials to last the night spells instant doom.
Changing seasons also usher in new problems to tackle. Live long enough, and winter rears its frosty head, bringing subzero temperatures that cause you bodily harm if you venture too far from a heat source. Admittedly, these interesting wrinkles add depth and additional difficulty to the already challenging survival mechanics at play. They sometimes tip the scale too far, however, particularly given the plentiful supply of other potentially life-ending obstacles thrown in your path.
Many games require decision making, but Soul Sacrifice emphasizes choice more than most. Everything, from the abilities you possess to the monsters you battle, is subject to choice: to save or to sacrifice? This notion is ingrained in both story and character progression, presenting you with limitations and dilemmas that make this grim monster-hunting game very appealing. Decision making alone isn't the only reason to give Soul Sacrifice a try. It's rich with evocative characters, has creatively fiendish enemy designs, and is coated with an effective layer of gloom and doom. Pleasingly, the captivating presentation and narration overshadow the game's repetitive tendencies, and the weight of every decision makes the otherwise straightforward action a truly thought-provoking affair.
Before your journey begins, you're locked away in a cage made from flesh and bone, awaiting sacrifice at the hand of the ultimate sorcerer, Magusar. A mysterious book, the chatty Librom, emerges from the remains of the sorcerer's last victim. Part necronomicon and part snarky companion, Librom is your portal to the past of Magusar's former partner, and through it, you experience Magusar's rise to power. As the game's quest hub, customization menu, and glossary, it's an inventive approach that suits a portable game quite well. The lack of an overworld is odd at first, but since you're a prisoner, it makes sense in context.
While reliving the life of a sorcerer once sworn to hunt possessed humans and animals, your primary charge is simple: defeat and sacrifice your enemies in order to rid the land of foul beasts. You trudge through rotten wastelands to frozen caves, casting spells, pummeling enemies, and dodging incoming attacks while managing your limited pool of resources. Every mission has clear-cut conditions; you must defeat a set number of common enemies, locate hidden items, or topple horrific archfiend juggernauts. In order to surmount the often difficult campaign missions, you're often forced to beef up your character by undertaking optional Avalon Pact missions. This is unfortunate, since most Avalon Pact missions lack challenge or variety, especially in the first half of the game. It's a blessing, then, that there are so many interesting side stories peppered throughout to distract you from the repetition at hand.
You head into every mission with a set of six abilities, or offerings, ranging from melee weapons to summon spells. You start with a small selection, but every mission rewards victory with new offerings based on your performance. An offering can turn your arm to stone, heal your party, trap your enemy, and even stop time. Without a stock of offerings, all you can do is run. Offerings can be used only a certain number of times during the course of a single quest, though sacrificing enemies and tapping into one-time-use environmental pools lets you replenish an individual offering's cast count. If, however, you get sloppy and sacrifice all of a particular offering during the course of a mission, you must wait until the end before replenishing your ability to use it.
Coordinating the relationship between your various offerings is critical during the challenging archfiend battles, and losing access to just one is often enough to tip the scales in your enemies' favor. You could carry more than one of a particular offering into battle, but it's better to diversify your capabilities. Thankfully when you possess multiples of a single offering, you can sacrifice the extras to boost the cast count of another. Like most actions in Soul Sacrifice, this action carries ramifications. The decision to boost an offering's cast count diminishes your resources for fusion, a process that lets you create completely new and advanced offerings. Fusing offerings isn't critical to success, but it gives you a chance to delve a little deeper into the elemental variations for most of your existing inventory.
Once an enemy is defeated, it's up to you to choose whether to save or sacrifice its soul, permanently boosting either your stamina or strength stat, respectively. Souls also act as replenishments during battle: sacrifices refill some of your offerings, and saved souls restore a bit of health. The decision usually comes down to your needs at the time, but the smart player will take the time to coordinate their decisions. Since your choices effect skill levels, you may find that too many snap decisions shape your character's traits in ways you never intended. However, outside of a few pivotal instances, your decision bears little weight on the story at large.
While you don't have equipment in the traditional sense, you can equip sigils, which are symbols carved into your right arm. When you defeat enemies and absorb their soul shards, new sigils are unlocked. Each sigil has two conditions attached, but the second becomes active only when you've struck the proper balance between sacrificing and saving your enemies, reflected by the affinity of your arm, and determined by your tendency to save or sacrifice.
Like gathering new offerings for fusion, you may find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to grind through old missions to acquire the right ingredients to produce a new sigil. That's not so bad, but limiting certain abilities to your arm's affinity seems unfair given how it's managed. You have to spend resources on lowering your life or magic levels, and then replay missions in order level up the opposite levels. Sacrificing items and resources is one thing, but asking the player to sacrifice hours of hard work takes the notion of sacrifice a bit too far for the game's own good, especially when you consider the repetitive nature of most missions.
The Minecraft franchise continues to break its own records, with Minecraft: Pocket Edition recently hitting 10 million sales.
The announcement was made on the Mojang website. The post also contained news concerning upcoming content for the Pocket Edition. Menu tweaks, the Minecraft Realms cloud service, and buckets are amongst the new features mentioned.
The sandbox adventure game is available on iOS, Android, Xbox 360, PC, Mac, and Linux, and has sold over 17.5 million copies across all platforms.
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition sold 400,000 copies on launch day, recouping development costs in just one hour. The game went on to sell a total of 1 million copies within the next four days, and knocked Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from the top of the Xbox Live activity chart for one week in October 2012.
The PC version of Minecraft broke the 10 million sales mark in April this year, a figure which includes the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of the game. Developer Mojang has said it will consider porting the game to PlayStation once the exclusivity contract with Microsoft finishes, although it was not specified which console.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 co-developer Sledgehammer Games will not be involved in Call of Duty: Ghosts, the studio has confirmed.
"Congrats to @InfinityWard on #CODGhosts!" tweeted the studio. "Our team is heads down on our next project, but best wishes to the hardworking team at IW!"
Sledgehammer Games was founded in 2009 by ex-Visceral Games heads Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield. The team was originally working on a third-person Call of Duty spin-off, but the project was cancelled when the studio was presented with the chance to work on the main series with 2011's Modern Warfare 3.
The studio was last seen recruiting for what it dubbed "the next Call of Duty title," which suggests Activision may have another Call of Duty title already in the works.
Call of Duty: Ghosts was announced by Activision yesterday, with the game coming to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and next-generation platforms. Call of Duty: Ghosts gameplay will be shown during the unveiling of Microsoft's next-generation console on May 21.
Producer also says users will need to play the next Zelda game with 3D to get the full experience.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 2 producer Eiji Aonuma confirmed the existence of Link to the Past 2's dark world in an interview with GameSpot sister site CNET.
The dark world was a central part of the 1992 SNES original--it was the realm where longtime series antagonist Ganondorf had been imprisoned--and required hero Link to have the Moon Pearl in his inventory otherwise he would transform into a pink rabbit upon entering.
A common motif of Zelda games is being able to travel to alternate worlds, with Ocarina of Time allowing Link to travel to a dark future and Twilight Princess featuring its own twilight world.
Also in the interview, Aonuma said that the game was being designed specifically for the 3DS' lenticular screen and that players wouldn't be able to experience A Link to the Past 2 without having the console's 3D slider cranked to maximum.
Aonuma also says that the idea of Link being able to transform into a painting originated from the Phantom Ganon boss fight from N64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Phantom Ganon attacked Link by hiding in six identical paintings.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 2 will be released for 3DS later this year.
Martin Gaston has absolutely never at all had the song from Beauty and the Beast sung to him at any point during his life, ever.
Great 1980s movie montages featured plucky underdogs, perhaps played by Sylvester Stallone, or maybe Ralph Macchio, demonstrating their determination to triumph over the forces of communism, bullying, or stodgy adults who don't believe in the power of young love. They were accompanied by properly cheesy pop hits, possibly performed by Joe Esposito, or maybe Deniece Williams, creating a wonderful audiovisual time capsule that could have only originated in that fabulous decade. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon understands the power of the '80s. When its inevitable montage comes, you probably won't know the music, but you'll know the type. It's the kind that would have been sung by Michael Sembello, or Kenny Loggins, or Foreigner. If you're a child of the decade, you'll be glad that Blood Dragon knows you so well.
Pro tip: don't stand so close to exploding C4.
Don't worry, though: if the 1980s are before your time, or if you don't retain any nostalgia for the decade of parachute pants and the Brat Pack, Blood Dragon stands on its own without relying on references, though it packs in plenty of them. This downloadable spin-off of 2012's Far Cry 3 is a fantastically entertaining first-person shooter with more clever dialogue and action-packed hours than most full-priced games. At $15, it's a better deal than every Cabbage Patch Kid you ever loved, every Tears for Fears record you ever spun, and every Muppet Babies episode you ever viewed. Combined.
Well, perhaps Blood Dragon isn't quite that valuable. Nevertheless, it's hard not to be charmed from the moment it begins. Low-resolution cutscenes introduce you to Rex Colt, cybercommando. Rex is voiced by '80s mainstay Michael Biehn, better known for appearing in films like The Terminator (as Kyle Reese) and Aliens (as Dwayne Hicks). Biehn's forced rasp is the perfect complement to Rex's nationalist badassery, and his sincere line delivery makes several scenes all the more hysterical. Consider this dialogue: "I swore an oath to a special lady. Lady Liberty. She taught me that winners don't use drugs." It's a corny line right out of a War on Drugs-era public service announcement, but in the context of an offer to have dragon blood injected into Rex's veins. Meanwhile, you "rent" (that is, collect) VHS tapes of movies with titles like Bourne to Dance; this particular film features a special teacher showing his student "the kind of love he's never known before…the love of dance."
You don't need to know the '80s to get Rex's repeated oral sex gags, of which there are far too many. Nor do you need to know the past to understand that calls of "no" during a consensual sex scene would have been inappropriate in any decade. Luckily, most of the jokes aren't so juvenile, including video game cracks that make fun of red exploding barrels, game-violence controversies, and even Ubisoft's own games, like Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed. (Listen for bits of throwaway dialogue about girls with tribal tattoos and feather collecting.) The tutorial sets the tone straight away, telling you to press a button "to demonstrate your ability to read," and loading screens helpfully inform you that if you need a hint, perhaps the next loading screen will have one for you. Not every joke is so obvious--you may not notice or get nods to erotic artists and prison documentaries--but the gags are there, making Blood Dragon one of the funniest games in recent memory.
Of course, an '80s-focused game wouldn't be complete if it didn't look the part, and Blood Dragon certainly makes proper homage to its inspiration. Cutscenes look as if they could have been ripped right out of the original Metal Gear, or Shadow of the Beast, complete with the muddy reds, purples, and blues that characterized them. The same color scheme, in turn, infuses the first-person gameplay, as if you're traversing the game's medium-size island while wearing dark magenta sunglasses. Small audiovisual touches, such as the way Rex sometimes takes a blowtorch to his cybernetic arm when healing, and buzzing sounds to indicate Rex's part-mechanical nature, enthusiastically sell the roboapocalyptic setting. And by the final hour, which lends a sly twist to common action-game power trips, you'll appreciate how Blood Dragon uses nostalgia and humor to say something about the state of modern shooters.
Blood Dragon isn't just an homage to great memories, however, but a terrific game in its own right. If you played Far Cry 3, you will recognize the structure. Enemy bases are strewn about the island you explore, and by annihilating all of the enemies that patrol them, either silently or forcefully, you convert them to your cybernetic cause. Meanwhile, you move from mission to mission, infiltrating dams and rescuing endangered trash-talking scientists, using semi-futuristic variants of familiar weapons--a sniper rifle, an assault rifle, a bow, and so forth--that handle like their standard Far Cry 3 counterparts. In time, you upgrade most of these weapons; your sniper rifle's bullets gain an explosive charge, your shotgun gets a flaming kick, and so on. You earn access to weapon upgrades by finding collectibles and performing side missions, and you earn other enhancements, such as the ability to perform silent takedowns on heavies wielding flamethrowers, by leveling up. There is no skill tree or anything like that: when you cross the necessary level threshold, you gain new skills automatically.
The disappointing Aliens: Colonial Marines is now the subject of a class action lawsuit, with both Gearbox Software and Sega accused of misrepresenting the game to consumers with false advertising.
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in a Californian court and spotted by Polygon, alleges that the final game "bore little resemblance" to the early footage of the game shown in demos and gameplay trailers.
"Each of the 'actual gameplay' demonstrations purported to show consumers exactly what they would be buying: a cutting edge video game with very specific features and qualities," reads the claim filed by law firm Edelson LLC on behalf of plaintiff Damion Perrine.
"Unfortunately for their fans, Defendants never told anyone--consumers, industry critics, reviewers, or reporters--that their 'actual gameplay' demonstration advertising campaign bore little resemblance to the retail product that would eventually be sold to a large community of unwitting purchasers."
Another complaint to the UK's Advertising Standards Agency has previously forced Sega to add disclaimers to the game's trailers stating that the footage shown in commercials was not indicative of the final product.
Other sources told GameSpot earlier this year that Gearbox neglected development on Aliens: Colonial Marines in favour of Borderlands 2, the company's own IP.
Gearbox President Randy Pitchford has acknowledged the criticisms. Responding earlier in the year on Twitter, he called the complaints "fair" and said the studio was "looking at that."
"Lots of info to parse, lots of stake holders to respect," he added.
The long-delayed Aliens: Colonial Marines finally launched this year to a largely negative reception. In the wake of its release annoyed ex-developers expressed their frustration with the way the title was handled, and reported that much of the game was outsourced to other studios.
The Wii U port of the game, once promised as the definitive version, was also cancelled.
PlayStation-exclusive MMO from Eve Online developer to launch on May 14.
Console MMO Dust 514 will launch on May 14, according to a status update from the game's official Twitter account.
The project was first unveiled at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2009, and will be CCP Games' first new title since 2003's Eve Online. Exclusive to the PlayStation 3, the game will be linked with the wider Eve Online universe.
The two games were officially connected on January 10 this year, and allowed players of both titles to interact with one another.
CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson has described Dust 514 as a first-person shooter/real-time strategy hybrid that will take place on the planets within Eve Online.
Dust 514 will be free to play and utilises a micro-transaction model. For more information on the game, be sure to check out GameSpot's previous coverage.
Zorine is the Community Manager at GameSpot Australia. She enjoys competitive gaming, eating and winning. Is prone to gamer rage.
