Strike Vector, the fast-paced aerial combat game from Ragequit Corporation, is headed to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One "soon."

Debuting first on PC, Strike Vector is a futuristic dogfighting game featuring shape-shifting jets and complex weapon combinations.

IGN's review of Strike Vector was mostly positive, praising its visuals and plethora of options, but accusing it of having unclear controls and little guidance.

We reached out to Ragequit about whether or not the console version, Strike Vector EX, will differ at all from Strike Vector on PC, and the team isn't saying anything yet.

Continue reading…

Strike Vector, the fast-paced aerial combat game from Ragequit Corporation, is headed to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One "soon."

Debuting first on PC, Strike Vector is a futuristic dogfighting game featuring shape-shifting jets and complex weapon combinations.

IGN's review of Strike Vector was mostly positive, praising its visuals and plethora of options, but accusing it of having unclear controls and little guidance.

We reached out to Ragequit about whether or not the console version, Strike Vector EX, will differ at all from Strike Vector on PC, and the team isn't saying anything yet.

Continue reading…

According to an inside source, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is leaving Konami after the completion of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Speaking with GameSpot, an anonymous source said "power struggles" between Kojima Productions and Konami have led to employment changes for Kojima himself, as well as other senior staff. They reportedly now work as contractors instead of full-time employees.

"After we finish MGSV, Mr. Kojima and upper management will leave Konami," the source said. "They said their contract ends in December."

Key developers, including Hideo Kojima, are also reportedly being given limited access to corporate internet, emails, and phone calls.

Continue reading…

According to an inside source, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is leaving Konami after the completion of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Speaking with GameSpot, an anonymous source said "power struggles" between Kojima Productions and Konami have led to employment changes for Kojima himself, as well as other senior staff. They reportedly now work as contractors instead of full-time employees.

"After we finish MGSV, Mr. Kojima and upper management will leave Konami," the source said. "They said their contract ends in December."

Key developers, including Hideo Kojima, are also reportedly being given limited access to corporate internet, emails, and phone calls.

Continue reading…

Swiss watch maker TAG Heuer is working with Intel and Google on a smartwatch that looks like an ordinary watch.

According to Ars Technica, the watch will be a replica of the Carrera sports watch, but with Intel inside. Will it be a mechanical watch with digital features, or will it be wholly digital with watch faces similar to those teased by Apple during its live event earlier in March? The report mentioned that the extent of the smartness of the upcoming smartwatch isn't yet known.

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Swiss watch maker TAG Heuer is working with Intel and Google on a smartwatch that looks like an ordinary watch.

According to Ars Technica, the watch will be a replica of the Carrera sports watch, but with Intel inside. Will it be a mechanical watch with digital features, or will it be wholly digital with watch faces similar to those teased by Apple during its live event earlier in March? The report mentioned that the extent of the smartness of the upcoming smartwatch isn't yet known.

Continue reading…

Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball is a fast and lively arcade playground, marinated in neon shades and seared by the hottest techno tunes. The lights pulsate as the bass bumps, the colors shift as the action swells, and, somehow, your movement seems to synchronize with the chaos painting the map. This competitive PC arena experience is teeming with character, but with its overly loose controls and absence of meaningful progression, the game pushes its style over its substance. Like disco itself, the enjoyment provided by Disco Dodgeball’s vibrant walls is fleeting, fading like a fad forgotten not long after its initial boom.

It fails to make a lasting impression, but that doesn’t stop the action from being gripping and entertaining early on. Robots roll on a single wheel up and down the various maps--resembling dance floors with their vivacious lights--while explosive dodge balls whizz by your head. Power-ups transform your projectiles into boomerangs and provide jetpacks mid-round, so it’s critical to keep your eyes on both the position of your opposition and these enhancements. Blasting opponents out of the air or pelting an unsuspecting robot with a ricocheted ball is supremely satisfying, but learning how and when to take a shot isn’t easy. You’re riding on a wheel against a surface providing little friction, so everyone on the dance floor continues to roll long after letting off the gas. Balls arc downward after being thrown and bounce off walls in often unexpected ways, so it takes a great deal of practice to understand how, when, and where to take a shot with so many variables at play.

Multiplayer games are player-hosted, so a high ping can result in robots flying from one end of the screen to the other as if hurled from a catapult; as a result, the already fast movement speed--which is only enhanced by a rechargeable boost--can be a little too sporadic to account for. There’s nothing wrong with combat that takes time to master, but even after hours of play, I never felt fully comfortable with the direction of my explosive shots.

Thankfully, there’s more to Disco Dodgeball than just throwing and catching balls. Beyond the classic Elimination and Deathmatch options, modes like Hoops and Grand Prix offer unique, interesting ways of playing with the mechanics. Hoops forces you to focus on fitting a specific ball through a square goal in order to score points for your team, while Grand Prix transforms the map into a speedway of sorts. Instead of using your momentum to dodge oncoming action, you must barrel through checkpoints as you race against the competition. Catching and throwing balls always remains a significant piece of the puzzle, but these various mechanical alterations allow for much greater in-game creativity that what the standard rules supply. Most servers lean toward the classic modes, but mixing up the rules within a room full of competent bots is always an option.

Once the early wonder starts to wear off, though, what’s left is a fun curiosity with hooks too dull to pierce the skin. There’s single-player content, including Arcade, Horde, Training, and a handful of other solo affairs, but the real appeal here is the competitive play. Leaderboards and the ability to level up provide some incentive to come back, but other than basic robot customization, the actual tangible rewards for continuing to play the game are weak. Without a true sense of progression, Disco Dodgeball doesn’t do much to pull you back onto its thumping dance floors.

When the connection is strong, the balls are bouncing as you intend, and there are enough players to populate the servers, Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball is a treat. The audiovisual package superbly complements the wall-to-wall mayhem found within a competitive round, and there’s a healthy suite of modes to mix up the action. There’s just not enough staying power, and controls that are a few notches too loose make it difficult to determine a shot’s trajectory. Disco Dodgeball is a creative player in a crowded space, but lacks too many attributes to stand out.

Tomorrow might be the bigger release day with Mario Party 10 coming to Wii U and Fossil Fighters: Frontier hitting 3DS, but today ain't too shabby either. Elliot Quest on Wii U is the most exciting new release, as it is a Zelda II-inspired adventure that feels like it could have been a long-lost NES game. Mutant Mudds developer Renegade Kid is also offering every single one of their 3DS and Wii U games at a deep 50% discount this week.

Mario Party 10 ($49.99, Available March 20)

Mario's latest shindig is finally here after a three-year wait (for home consoles at least). Mario Party 10 follows up on the same partying featured in Mario Party 9 while also adding two new modes. Bowser Party features a four-on-one challenge, as four players play a regular round of Mario Party while the fifth player uses the GamePad to control Bowser and catch the others. The other new mode, Amiibo Party, is locked behind owning Amiibo figurines. That mode is more like a simplified version of old-school Mario Party. Check out IGN's review for more details.

Continue reading…

Tomorrow might be the bigger release day with Mario Party 10 coming to Wii U and Fossil Fighters: Frontier hitting 3DS, but today ain't too shabby either. Elliot Quest on Wii U is the most exciting new release, as it is a Zelda II-inspired adventure that feels like it could have been a long-lost NES game. Mutant Mudds developer Renegade Kid is also offering every single one of their 3DS and Wii U games at a deep 50% discount this week.

Mario Party 10 ($49.99, Available March 20)

Mario's latest shindig is finally here after a three-year wait (for home consoles at least). Mario Party 10 follows up on the same partying featured in Mario Party 9 while also adding two new modes. Bowser Party features a four-on-one challenge, as four players play a regular round of Mario Party while the fifth player uses the GamePad to control Bowser and catch the others. The other new mode, Amiibo Party, is locked behind owning Amiibo figurines. That mode is more like a simplified version of old-school Mario Party. Check out IGN's review for more details.

Continue reading…

A pneumatic leg slams into a neon breastplate, dislodging a ball with curious, flattened sides--futuristic-looking in that characteristically impractical sort of way, like a concept car with inaccessible wheel wells. It’s a turnover in favor of Sporting Automata, and one of its robots lumbers into the phosphorescent glow of the end zone, where it spikes the ball and does a few celebratory sit-ups.

This is Cortex, an object lesson in a brand of futurism that's surprisingly hard to come by in the world of electronic sports. Its gridiron is littered with extruded geometries and embossed with cosmetic circuitry patterns. Broad-shouldered athlete-simulacra smash into each other like promo animations for the NFL on FOX as their head coach/Matrix operators look on, bottom-lit by monitor glow. It's a wildly speculative vision of what sports could one day be. It’s the kind of thing you used to see a lot more of earlier in the digital era, and a far cry from the current tack of e-sports with its gently iterative shooters and fighting games.

Frozen Cortex's other hereditary through-line runs straight back to football. In a planning phase prior to any action, two players simultaneously slip step-by-step instructions to their team of five robots, setting up running routes, passes, blocks, or zone coverage. The goal is to score by reaching the thin strip of the end zone or crossing smaller "extra point" tiles strewn across the randomly generated maps. Waypoints can be laid down with simple clicks of the mouse, and a bot will faithfully trace a direct route through them to the end of its line. With a full set of paths and nodes diagrammed out for the five robots, the traditional playmaking X’s and O’s here begin to take on the look of an electrical schematic, and it’s easy to imagine some subsequent Frozen Cortex ‘16 version introducing stutter-step resistors and spin-move inductors, or maybe a "battery" symbol for a stiff-arm to the face.

A lot of Frozen Cortex’s tactical potency is owed to the fact that it allows players to sketch out and demo their opponent’s game plan exactly as if it were their own. It’s a subtly brilliant little inclusion that opens up the opportunity to tailor-make counters to highly specific plays. Of course, the awareness that your opponent can just as easily construct a 1:1 model for any play you might conjure up ends up bleeding into your strategic subconscious, too. Against a well-versed player, a match of Cortex becomes an exercise in recursion: "They’ll be expecting the obvious pass--but they’ll also be expecting that I expect that they expect the obvious pass. But then again…"

You can imagine the effect this can have on turn length. Outside of a specialized mode with a thirty-second play clock, players can take as long as they want--days, even--to submit their move. But it’s all well accounted for in Frozen Cortex’s elegant matchmaking system, which allows you to field multiple games simultaneously and even enable email notifications in case your turn comes up while you’re away. While the server population never seems to stretch beyond thirty players at a given time, games are easy enough to come by. The measured, deliberate pace seems to attract a crowd that's more genial than most, if sometimes prone to "forgetting" about your match soon after you burn them for a big score.

This all means that it only takes a match or two to pick up the fundamentals, which is as long as I can recommend bothering with Frozen Cortex’s single-player mode.

With both players’ interpretations of the ensuing play in hand, the game crashes them into each other and films the resulting chaos like Jake Gyllenhaal’s creepy Nightcrawler cameraman, tailing runners with an uncomfortably narrow chase view or leaping sideways to frame the secondary getting burned on a long pass. A quibble, but it’s easy to lose track of a robot during these rare and irregular perspective changes, especially when a given part of the playing field so often looks like any other.

Learning to respect the deep ball is the first harsh lesson in the education of a Cortex player. A bot can hurl the rock from one end of the small field clear to the other--as long as there aren’t any tall blocks in the way--and drop it in the end zone to be caught or picked up by a nearby teammate. The longest passes freeze at their apex, ending the turn. This ostensibly allows the defense time to swoop in for an interception, but the effect is like a crystallization of that wonderful moment when an NFL cameraman begins that telltale, frantic sideways pan--the moment anyone watching suddenly realizes that something’s just gone dramatically wrong (or, less often for a Texans fan like me, right) in the backfield.

Unlike passes, runs draw out through the full length of a turn. True to real football, they’re the grind-it-out option, leaning on the cumulative effect of bonus point tiles for a win by attrition. Because of the idiosyncratic way that blocking works in Frozen Cortex, stopping the run requires a patient defense and timely risks. If it lapses enough to allow a robot to scamper through to the end zone after hitting a string of extra points, it’s a coup.

Two circles around each bot govern all collisions in a game chock full of them: one for blocking and one for tackling. A robot that’s "first on scene"--that is to say, reaches an area and goes stationary before the opponent does--will block any comers trying to run past its circle on their prescribed routes. But stationary bots will automatically bypass would-be blockers to snuff out ball handlers that enter their larger tackling radius. It's a strategic wrinkle that forgoes the random number generators so endemic to sports games in favor of something more aboveboard and ultimately more intuitive, too.

This all means that it only takes a match or two to pick up the fundamentals, which is as long as I can recommend bothering with Frozen Cortex’s single-player mode. There are two main formats: a one-and-done "Knockout" mode and a standard single-season league. In league play, the AI provides stiff initial competition, but it quickly fades as you use the perfunctory free agent system to outspend it on new robots with better stats. There’s an overarching text-based narrative involving an investigation into thrown matches, but it goes nowhere fast and rings especially hollow because Frozen Cortex actually allows you to bet against your own team and throw the game without consequences.

It's weird to cite a game for trying to go deeper or tell a story. But the futuristic coating that Frozen Cortex paints over its sport works best as a surface treatment. And if you don't cut into it, it looks great. The teams have slick, expressive names like "Heavy Perspective" or "SXT Vision," and their logos look like the glyph symbols in Blade that denote secret vampire rave nightclubs. The industrial electronica tracks thrum along as naturally as a pulse. A news ticker drip feeds evocative little blurbs like "Core 4’ Teams to Meet with WRC and League to Discuss Player Rights." It's only in the actual exposition that these things end up belabored, as the league's talking heads try to pack an entire personality into each of the tweet-sized messages they send before each match.

Maybe that's a mark in favor of replacing the human element in futuristic games like this. If you could only excise all those flimsy, unreliable human bodies, with their proclivities for head trauma and contract renegotiation demands, you'd perhaps reach something purer--sport ascended from the flesh, so to speak. Bigger but more thoughtful. Gladiatorial but safe. With blitzes that play out like chess, with mechanized athletes that can pull any move if you can just hit the right combination of buttons. Some ultimate game where nerd and jock fuse together and assume their final form.