Monthly Archives: June 2015
I Am Bread Coming to PS4
I Am Bread is heading to PlayStation 4 this summer.
Bossa Studios has announced the prequel to Surgeon Simulator will make the jump from PC to Sony's home console. I Am Bread has players trying to toast a single slice of bread by any means possible.
For more on I Am Bread, be sure to check out IGN's review of the puzzle adventure game.
Evan Campbell is a freelance news writer who streams games on his Twitch channel, talks about Nintendo weekly on the NF Show, and chats about movies and TV series on Twitter.
Rock Band 4 PC Is Off the Table for Now
Rock Band 4 won't be coming to PC, at least in the near future. And there are two major reasons for that: the music library, and piracy.
Not piracy involving the game software itself, but rather the music within the game. Licensing music is expensive, and developer Harmonix is responsible for how that music is used. Harmonix developer Daniel Sussman tells Eurogamer that consoles have better safety measures to ensure the security of the music files, while it's a bit more tricky on the PC side.
"There's something comforting about the closed network that comes along with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One," Sussman says. "That's important to our partners in the music industry. Not to say that's an unsolvable problem."
Television Critics Nominate Flash, Korra, Saul and Thrones
The nominees for the 31st Television Critics Association Awards have been announced, and include a wide array of subjects and genres.
For the first time, The Legend of Korra was nominated in the Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming category alongside the likes of Sesame Street and ABC Family's Switched at Birth.
For Outstanding New Program, Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul faces off against Fox's Empire, DC comics adaptation The Flash, CW's Jane the Virgin, and Amazon Instant's Transparent.
Official Fallout 4 T-Shirts Up for Pre-Order
The first two official Fallout 4 t-shirts are now available to pre-order from Bethesda's online store.
The first shirt features the Vault-Tec logo on the front, with "111" printed across the back. Vault 111 was seen in yesterday's reveal trailer, and is likely the main vault in Fallout 4. The second shirt (seen below) simply has the official Fallout 4 logo printed across the chest. The Vault-Tec shirt is expected to ship on July 6, while the logo tee will ship on July 1. Both are priced at $20 USD.
You can pre-order them right now from The Bethesda Store.
Image courtesy of Bethesda.
Danganronpa Another Episode Gets Release Date
NIS America has announced that its upcoming PlayStation Vita exclusive Danganronpa: Another Episode -- Ultra Despair Girls will be releasing on September 1 for those in North America.
To go along with the announcement, NIS posted the following trailer, which, as its title suggests, is riddled with despair.
Unlike the prior two entries in the Danganronpa series, Ultra Despair Girls takes a much more action-heavy approach, putting you in the shoes of Komaru Naegi and Toko Fukawa as they struggle to escape from a danger-filled city.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation Review
Carmageddon, released in 1997, was a bloody and entertaining car combat racer for its time. It was one of those oft-declared “violent games of the ’90s,” featuring enough wanton carnage to attract the ire of hand-wringing parents, politicians, and censors. You raced and killed your way to victory in one of many exaggerated vehicles, each of them strapped with rough blades, spikes, and other nasty parts, as you wrecked opponents and turned mobs of wandering pedestrians into chunks of flayed meat. The game was defined by its era. Carmageddon: Reincarnation attempts to bring that game back to life, but it does little to improve on the old formula, and the result feels out of its time. The game would be mediocre at best, but a host of serious performance issues and slippery controls ultimately leave enjoyment idling in the garage, choking on fumes.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation has many problems under the hood, but clunky performance is worst of all. The frame rate struggles to stay around 30, occasionally diving to create something akin to a Red Asphalt slide show; at times, it sputters and chugs worse than a 1970s-era Chevy truck left to rot in the backyard. One map in particular, a small arena with a large metal saucer that periodically drops on any hapless vehicles below, is nearly unplayable. As cars and trucks get crushed, the game screeches to a halt, leaving you to ponder the game’s fragile state and wonder just when it will all fall apart. But you won’t have to wait for long--the game crashes, freezes, and locks up your computer, forcing restarts. Of course, you can lower your graphics settings to squeeze out more frames, but doing so offers no favors in a game that already looks aesthetically dull. The performance, however, would be at least somewhat bearable with vehicles that are fun to drive. Well, buckle up.
A host of serious performance issues and slippery controls ultimately leave enjoyment idling in the garage, choking on fumes.
You would expect a game entirely focused on vehicles, from racing to combat, to put the utmost care and effort into how well they handle. Carmageddon: Reincarnation, however, could have spent more time under a mechanic’s careful eye--a lot more time. You can unlock a large roster of vehicles--most will be familiar to longtime Carmageddon fans--and send them soaring through frightened crowds of cows and human pedestrians (or peds, as the game refers to them), but precious few are worth taking out for a drive. Some of the heavier vehicles take to the road with the grace of a lobbed brick, but the majority control as though they’re being driven over greased ice.
At the slightest provocation, from bump to severed body part, vehicles spin out of control, making you fight to stay on the road. Even a minimal increment, such as diving from road to sidewalk, can cause your car to wildly jerk to the side, or worse, flip end over end. Small ramps also hide untold danger because hitting them at the wrong angle will more often than not send you flipping through the air to land on your roof, forcing you to burn points to respawn your car back onto its wheels. Large vehicles with large tires to match tend to have more stability on and off the road, but they lack the speed of the faster, sportier cars. And because most of Reincarnation’s game types favor zippy cars over slow-moving trucks, it’s not likely that you’ll stay behind the wheel of one for long.
At the slightest provocation, from bump to severed body part, vehicles spin out of control, making you fight to stay on the road.
Speaking of game modes, let’s go over which ones are good and which ones are bad. Ok, that was a trick statement: none of them are that good. In Classic Carma, you can win in one of three ways: finish a race, kill all the pedestrians, or destroy every opponent. Colored oil drums that dot the map provide you with the means for victory. Red barrels provide weapons and items, including flying Acme-sized anvils, explosive mines, oil slicks, and springs that propel nearby opponents and pedestrians through the air or into walls. Yellow barrels add a few more seconds to a countdown timer or some extra points. Those points can also be used to purchase weapons or defensive boosts, which you can add to a set of hotkeys. The mode takes you on a tour of the maps in Carmageddon: Reincarnation, which are surprisingly large (leading to lengthy load times), providing long, winding races across beaches, through sea towns, under icy caverns, and past industrial complexes.
Classic Carma is Reincarnation’s best form. To my surprise, I stumbled into rare moments in which racing along as my opponents and I exchanged metal and flak was actually fun. But these offered short bursts of excitement, and they were dragged down by technical issues and, after a while, boredom. Yes, you can only spend so many hours smashing lazy pedestrians and tumbling onto your roof for the umpteenth time before the game’s cheesy metal soundtrack gets drowned out by your tired sighs.
The other modes, many of which are inspired by those from the original Carmageddon, are mostly omissible. Two of them, Checkpoint Stampede and Ped Chase, are practically the same. One has you and your foes drive through a checkpoint, and the other asks you to crush a highlighted pedestrian on one side of a map. In the Car Crusher arena, you must destroy opponents to gain a point, while getting wasted costs you one. Another mode, Death Race, is fairly self-explanatory.
Fox ‘n’ Hounds, however, is just bad. In this mode, one player is the fox and is highlighted in blue. To win, you must spend a certain amount of time as the fox while avoiding being touched by other combatants, who otherwise become the new fox. Naturally, you would think that just avoiding enemies would be enough to snag an easy win. But the elementary intelligence powering your foes deflates any fun and challenge the game type could offer. Enemy cars smash into the fox, creating a twisting, writhing clump of metal as the fox title gets passed around so quickly that the game announcer has a hard time keeping up. This is the majority of my experience in Fox ‘n’ Hounds, a mode I eventually avoided like it was an oncoming bus.
The frame rate struggles to stay around 30, occasionally diving to create something akin to a Red Asphalt slide show.
The game also offers an online mode, in which you can test your ped-crunching skills against actual humans, who are smarter and deadlier than any CPU opponent. Here you are privy to all game modes, save Classic Carma, with the only major change being that resetting your vehicle takes three seconds instead of happening instantly. I didn’t get as many hours into the online portion as I wanted, mainly because I rarely found a game with people to play against.
So, with poor performance, stiff controls, and relatively dull game modes, I suppose the only thing Carmageddon: Reincarnation has left to offer is its dazzling sense of humor. Perhaps I have simply grown up, but I no longer chuckle at splattering dumb pedestrians against the hood of a digital car, with heads and viscera flying in all directions. I remember playing the original Carmageddon in my youth, giggling at a flying severed arm or three as I tore down a street. It’s all the same in Reincarnation, and I can’t get over how tame it feels. It’s not just that other games do violence better; this is the game’s humor, and it just doesn’t cause a reaction. During your travels, you will also spot a phallic-shaped building in the distance or hear frightened people screaming on a runaway elevated train as it tears around a city. There are rare chuckles, and I am not completely humorless, so hearing my car squeezing out a mine to the tune of a gurgling fart as it pummels disco-dancing bovines did provide a short laugh. But there isn’t much beyond that. After playing for a few hours, the humor was all but spent, as was much of the game.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation has the same flavor as the Carmageddon of yore, but not much attempt has been made at a revolution. It’s the same as it always was, and that isn’t exactly a point in its favor. Mowing down hundreds of the same meandering pedestrians demonstrating the same lousy animations is no longer as fun. Some games today, such as anything from Saints Row, do a much better job at car combat, racing, and killing heaps of pedestrians. Instead, the only thing Reincarnation actually achieves is standing as a reminder of how far gaming has come. The vehicular manslaughter of thousands of listless fodder swiftly falls into tedium after only a handful of hours, long before reaching the end of the game’s surprisingly lengthy 16-chapter campaign. The rose-tinted glasses are off; I was glad to have experienced Carmageddon all those years ago, but that’s where it should have remained.
Game Scoop!: The Big PC E3 Preview
E3 is almost here! The Big Three console makers always make major waves at the massive trade show, but PC gamers are also sure to have plenty to look forward to. Between an ever-increasing number of PC exclusives, and games that look better and play smoother on PC, there’s never been a better time to be a PC gamer.
We’ve split our E3 PC gaming preview into three major parts: games we know will be shown, games we think will be shown, and a couple pie-in-the-sky ideas that, if we’re being honest, won’t ever happen. But hey - we can hope, right?
Watch the video above or download the podcast version here.
Warhammer Is What Total War Was Meant For
When it was first announced that Creative Assembly was working on a Warhammer tie-in to the Total War franchise, my immediate reaction was a bemused, "They haven't done that already?" Now, after seeing a demonstration of the tabletop-inspired fantasy RTS, I was flabbergasted: "HOW have they not done this already?!" While some hardcore fans of the history-RTS series might be hesitant to accept Total War's foray into Games Workshop's massive universe, what little I saw of Warhammer quickly made me realize that this may indeed be the setting that Total War was made for.
Hearthstone Getting Alternate Heroes as Cosmetic DLC
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is adding more heroes to the mix, in the form of alternate portraits for existing classes.
The first of the classes to receive an alternate portrait will be Warrior, with the addition of Magni Bronzebeard. The new characters will come with new Hero power animations, unique emotes, an "entering the game" animation, and a card back. Each new Hero will cost $9.99, and Magni is said to be coming soon.
Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Teaser Trailer
Any movie which involves the Lincoln Memorial statue and a shark gets my respect. Without further ado, here's the new teaser trailer for Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!
Yes, it seems our favorite tornado-shark hybrid is invading Washington D.C. Spotted in the trailer are stars Ian Ziering and Tara Reid. And yes, that's Shark Tank's Mark Cuban wielding a shotgun.
Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (man, that's fun to say) airs Wednesday, July 22 at 9/8c on SyFy. It will also air on all 86 SyFy's channels around the world (including the AU and UK) within 24 hours of it's US debut.