Monthly Archives: April 2015
DC Featured in Mattel’s First-Ever Action Figure Line for Girls
Mattel has teamed with DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. to launch its first line of action figures aimed squarely at girls.
Coming third quarter 2015, the DC Super Hero Girls line features DC's "most powerful and diverse line-up of female characters as relatable teens," according to a press release, and will launch on multiple platforms and media, including books and LEGO playsets.
The toy line was developed for girls ages 6-12 and focused on female superheroes and supervillains during their "formative years, prior to discovering their full super power potential," according to Mattel.
7 Changes Coming to Destiny You Need to Know
Earlier today, Bungie put on a big Destiny live stream to show off the upcoming House of Wolves expansion, and how it's going to change the game - even for players who don't purchase it. There was a ton of info, but here are the big highlights in one handy-dandy place. For more detailed info on stuff that's exclusive to the expansion, check out our House of Wolves wiki. Guardians assemble!
This is probably the single biggest piece of info to come out of the event. Where all your gear became obsolete to The Dark Below's vendor and raid gear unless you erased all the leveling progress on it to start from scratch, once House of Wolves hits, that will no longer be the case. Even if you don't buy the new DLC, everyone will be able to upgrade existing gear to the new stat thresholds, ensuring you can continue to level and play with the gear you've likely invested a lot of time and resources into. It's nice to see Bungie learning from their mistakes here.
Patrice Desilets Teases Impending Triple-A Game Reveal
Patrice Desilets, the creator of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise and founding head of Panache Digital Games, will likely reveal his next big title during tomorrow's Reboot Develop conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
The former Ubisoft creative director will be giving the conference's keynote presentation, where he plans to discuss what's next for him and his new studio. In a post on Twitter, Desilets teased "there's a good chance" we'll get a proper reveal of his new project at that time.
Chinese Construction Workers Unearth Clutch of Dinosaur Eggs
A construction project underway in the Chinese city of Heyuan accidentally unearthed a total of 43 dinosaur eggs. Archaeologists were called to the scene to excavate the eggs, a process that took them over two hours.
According to official state news, of the 43 eggs discovered at the site, 19 were removed from the site intact. Du Yanli, curator of Heyuan's dinosaur museum, commented that the eggs were large in size, with one measuring 13 cm in diameter.
What type of dinosaur the eggs belonged to remains to be seen, but the eggs have been sent to the museum for further study.
Heyuan is somewhat of a dinosaur egg hotspot, with over 17,000 eggs discovered since a group of the world's luckiest children discovered the city's first group of fossils while playing at a construction site in 1996.
Tesla’s Home Battery Will Be Unveiled This Month
Elon Musk isn't content to just power automobiles with batteries. The billionaire entrepreneur wants you to power your home using a battery from Tesla Motors Inc.
In an email to investors, Tesla announced it will announce a home battery and a utility-scale battery at its event on April 30. Bloomberg Business reported the company will explain the advantages of its solutions and why "past battery options were not compelling."
At the end of last month, Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla, tweeted that the company would unveil a major new product line on April 30, and it wouldn't be a car.
The advantage of powering a home using a battery over traditional distribution methods is that the batteries can charge during the night time, when demand for power, and therefore rates, are lower. The home would then run off the battery during the day time.
Age of Wonders III: Eternal Lords Review
I founded my empire in the depths of the earth. As it grew, I built it with the bones and rotting corpses of the subterranean dwarven kingdoms. For millennia, I crafted my undead legions, preparing to crawl out of the caves and rock and wage war on the evil in the world. That's right. My zombie army was good and holy, wanting nothing more than to create a unified world government founded on the principles of cooperation, trade, and kindness.
Age of Wonders III encourages this type of emergent, player-centric storytelling. The more I play, the more I realize that its strengths come from the unique melding of role-playing and turn-based strategy. It trusts you to create your own rich role-playing experiences and lets you control the narrative through empire-building and a robust tactical battle system. The result is a vibrant, special game that is ruthlessly entertaining. Age of Wonders III's latest expansion bolsters an already exceptional core with more races to play, a better grand-scale strategy, and an excellent morality system.
Eternal Lords trusts you to create your own rich role-playing experiences and lets you control the narrative through empire-building and a robust tactical battle system.
Those familiar with the Age of Wonders series, particularly the third installment, will immediately recognize the tactical/strategic duality driving each session. You'd bounce between macro- and micro-management, controlling both the direction and structure of your civilization as well as the outcome of individual battles. However, that two-stage system is hard for any game to pull off well, and it was one of Age of Wonders' weakest points. While tactical bouts had plenty of variety and the available options made matches thrilling and tense, the large-scale planning lacked depth, leading to a lackluster half. Eternal Lords finally brings enough new features to flesh out the game and cover almost all the base game's weaknesses.
For starters, two new races (the Frostlings and the Tigrans) are added to the basic Dwarves and Elves. Both have a visual flair and uniqueness all their own. Frostlings, for example, are an offensive race with bonuses for ice magic. They dwell in cold areas and can take advantage of often-barren land to launch raids on more temperate cultures. Tigrans are their natural foil. Based on the mythology of ancient Egyptian culture, they are a quick, desert-dwelling class of felines. They worship the sun and idolize the duality of nature. To wit, Tigrans specialize in necromancy, and they worship the dead as well as the living. This makes Tigrans an ideal pairing for Eternal Lords' new class--the Necromancer.
In the base Age of Wonders III game and the first expansion, players chose both the race and class of their young nation's leader. Because a good chunk of the game was modeled after Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy settings, the classes were standard fare: rogues, warlocks, and warriors. Necromancers are a bit different. Whereas the others fit into standard heroic archetypes, fiction has always associated the art of controlling the minds and bodies of the dead with evil. Let us not forget that in the original Hobbit novel, Tolkien created a necromancer character who bided his time until he could revive himself as the Dark Lord Sauron.
Age of Wonders III's latest expansion bolsters an already exceptional core with more races to play, a better grand-scale strategy, and an excellent morality system.
Suffice it to say, it's a strange premise to work into an empire-building strategy game. Even fictional conceptualizations of the undead lend themselves to a different system of goals and values. The dead, for example, don't care where they are or what they're doing. They're nigh unlimited as well because any war is likely to yield more soldiers to bolster your armies. Eternal Lords understands this and makes necromancy and its related magicks whole and distinct.
I spent the majority of my time with Eternal Lords leading an undead sect of dwarves below ground. I defended my cities with small bands who could summon up much larger armies from fallen warriors on the battlefield. They were a bit weaker than some other units, but I overwhelmed my enemy with sheer numbers. After a time, I gathered enough power to cast a massive spell that revived recently killed troops from around the world under my control. I had become a demigod, and my abrupt omnipresence spooked other world leaders. In short order, I flooded the surface with my abominations and championed the spread of good and kindness throughout the world. Again, it might sound incongruous, but it does a make a sort of sense when you consider how all of Eternal Lords' pieces fit together.
For example, the morality system facilitates a broad variety of play styles and leads to some distinct late-game units based on your alignment. The path of good is tied more to sparing the lives of the innocent and protecting the weak than it is to any cosmic moral authority. As such, I decided that my undead were like friendly vampires. They did what they needed to do, but they were more interested in establishing systems of cooperation with the hope that everyone else would willingly choose to become zombies at some point in the future.
To that end, I made friends with the other races, brought them under my protection, and governed them as well as I could. I eventually converted them, but they were almost always better for it. Those choices lead to a positive alignment in the game, and I won by unifying the globe in peace and harmony. You won't see any complex, ambiguous moral quandaries here, but it works as the foundation for a creative system to promote an interesting network of decisions and allegiances.
Tendencies towards openness and role-playing even show up in Eternal Lords' single-player campaign. Here, you'll play as Arvik, a necromantic Frostling. He is the heir to his kingdom's throne and is thrust into a complex political situation, forcing him to make a series of tough calls as he unlocks his abilities as a powerful wizard. Each new scenario presents you with important decisions regarding how you want to govern your people and what kind of leader you want to be. It's not the best writing around, but it does reinforce the themes of Eternal Lords' minute-to-minute play--engaging decisions.
Eternal Lords carries a few problems over from its core game. Worker units aren't terribly useful, for example, outside of building singular roads. Flying units can move around the battlefield without any kind of penalty, and because those are typically the strongest units (i.e., dragons), it can sometimes feel like you don't have much recourse against stronger opponents. That's balanced somewhat by the sterling tactical play, which rewards careful planning and gutsy gambles, but it still leaves something to be desired.
The morality system facilitates a broad variety of play styles and leads to some distinct late-game units based on your alignment.
Strategy game legend and Civilization creator Sid Meier once said, "Games are a series of interesting decisions." By that metric, Age of Wonders III: Eternal Lords is excellent. Your possibility space is vast, and you can craft your adventure and your nation in any number of ways. Systems of morality, player races and classes, and governance all work together to create an interlocking web of player-driven narrative potential. This expansion's only real weaknesses are those endemic to the structure of the base game, but Eternal Lords is a worthy follow-up and fresh take on the classic turn-based strategy game formula.
The Flash/Arrow TV Spinoff Title Potentially Revealed
While at Missouri's Cape Comic Con, The Flash star John Wesley Shipp -- aka Henry Allen, aka the original TV Flash -- dropped some interesting hints about the speedster show, as well as the upcoming Flash/Arrow spinoff on The CW.
John Wesley Shipp | Photo by: Cherie Roberts
Most notably, Shipp may have revealed the spinoff's title. During an interview with Comic Book Resources, the actor casually referred to the series' title as "Legends." That might ring a bell for DC fans -- Legends was also the title of a limited series published in 1986 and was the first major crossover after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Hmm...
Destiny House of Wolves Will Support Upgrades for Old Gear
Destiny’s upcoming House of Wolves expansion will introduce an upgrade system that allows players to upgrade Legendary and Exotic gear to a higher max damage threshold.
Upgrading Legendary equipment will require a new resource, called Etheric Light, which can be obtained from House of Wolves’ new endgame activities Prison of Elders (a co-op arena based mode) or Trial of Osiris (a new PVP mode). Etheric Light can also occasionally drop outside of House of Wolves during co-op Nightfall sessions or Iron Banner events.
Meanwhile, upgrading Exotic Gear will not require Etheric Light. Instead, players will use a combination of Exotic Shards and other materials to overhaul the gear. Upgraded armor will bump the players to the new Level 34 cap. Meanwhile Legendary and Exotic weapons will get pushed to 365 damage limit (up from 331). Players will not need to own House of Wolves in order to upgrade gear.
10 User-Created Conker Levels Hitting Project Spark
A ton of new Conker-related content hits Project Spark tomorrow, including the hour-long first episode of Conker's Big Reunion and the Conker Creation Pack.
You'll be able to purchase Conker's Big Reunion through the Project Spark store for $5 / €5 / £4 or 500 in-game tokens.
Find more pricing details on the Project Spark forums.
The Conker Creation Pack, detailed last month, comes only as part of the Conker Mega Pack for $10 / €10 / £8 or 1000 in-game tokens.
What Happens When You Give a Robot $100 in Bitcoin? It Buys Drugs
An automated online shopping robot set up by a Swiss art collective has run afoul of law enforcement. The bot purchased a Hunagrian passport, a baseball cap with a built-in camera, and some Ecstasy.
The bot, known as the "Random Darknet Shopper," is given a weekly allowance of $100 USD in Bitcoin and then let loose on the so-called "dark web," where illicit substances can be bought and sold in a more protected environment than the normal old internet.
According to cnet, the Swiss authorities confiscated the bot and its illegal wares in January, and the bot was recently returned to the artists with its purchases intact. Well, the ones that weren't illegal party drugs at least. The MDMA tablets were destroyed by the authorities.