New Games |
- Skylanders franchise nets $1 billion in worldwide sales
- MLB 2K13 sees return of the Perfect Game Challenge
- Criken's Quickies takes a humorous look at The Ship
- Gas Powered Games shuts down Wildman Kickstarter
- Siren: The success of suspense over surprise in horror
- Four new Club Nintendo rewards surface
- Closure free on PS Plus tomorrow, Critter Crunch $1.40
- Is System Shock being revived on Steam and GOG.com?
| Skylanders franchise nets $1 billion in worldwide sales Posted: 11 Feb 2013 03:00 PM PST Activision's Skylanders franchise just topped $1 billion in worldwide retail sales, the company announced, inclusive of its toys and accessories, and hit that milestone in only 15 months. Last week, we reported over 100 million Skylanders toys have been sold in the U.S. alone, and that Skylanders Giants, released last fall, generated more than $195 million in U.S. sales during the holiday season. "The key to longterm success is continuing to bring breakthrough innovation every time," Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing said during the company's Toy Fair 2013 press conference last week. Skylanders: Swap Force was unveiled just after that statement, and will ship this holiday season. |
| MLB 2K13 sees return of the Perfect Game Challenge Posted: 11 Feb 2013 02:30 PM PST 2K Sports will once again be putting on the MLB 2K Perfect Game Challenge, though the format has changed somewhat for MLB 2K13. Starting on April 1, players can begin competing for a total of $750,000 spread across 30 MLB Team Leaderboard prize pools; that's $25,000 for the top player for each team. From there, 2K Sports will put on a tournament in New York this July for the top four competitors, with the overall winner taking home $250,000. Perhaps not as great as the prior years' million-dollar prize, but hey, that's a nice chunk of change. |
| Criken's Quickies takes a humorous look at The Ship Posted: 11 Feb 2013 02:00 PM PST Although the indie PC game The Ship had a myriad of technical issues, the fact remains that it was still good fun with the right group of people. As a whodunit experience, The Ship tasked players with avoiding one mystery killer -- like an interactive, third-person Clue. Enter the crew from Criken's Quickies, who take The Ship to town, and highlight some of the funnier aspects of the game, like the numerous glitches and goofy animations. Now I just want to go back and play! |
| Gas Powered Games shuts down Wildman Kickstarter Posted: 11 Feb 2013 01:30 PM PST During Gas Powered Games' Kickstarter campaign for action-RTS/RPG game Wildman, "a substantial number of the team" was laid off to avoid a situation where employees wouldn't receive severance pay if things didn't work out. Ultimately, they didn't -- Gas Powered has canceled the Wildman Kickstarter, it was revealed in an update today. "At this point, it makes sense for us to focus our attention on other ways to keep Gas Powered Games running. Unfortunately, we are unable to share any specifics in public. When we have news to share, we will be posting it on our site. If you want status updates, or if you want to continue discussing Wildman and/or this Kickstarter, please consider migrating over to forums.gaspowered.com. "We are profoundly grateful to those of you who backed this project and Gas Powered Games. Your passion and hard work put us in a position to write this exciting new chapter in the history of GPG," concludes the final update. As unfortunate as this situation has been -- I thought the game showed promise, though clearly not enough people felt the same way -- it could have been even worse under different circumstances. At least this way, it was fairly clear Wildman wasn't going to work out, and the plug was pulled in advance. Here's hoping the studio can be salvaged. |
| Siren: The success of suspense over surprise in horror Posted: 11 Feb 2013 01:00 PM PST [For his "Horror Story" Bloggers Wanted response, Dtoid community blogger Revuhlooshun shares his experience with the PS2 classic Siren, and the difference between "surprise" and "suspense" as a means for scares. Want to see your own words appear on the front page? Go write something! --Mr Andy Dixon] The original Resident Evil f*cked up my childhood. Living out near the woods as a kid, that game was the last thing that I needed to see while growing up. Leaving the house at night became a dreaded affair for years to come. Basements became a place that I no longer ventured into. If the power went out in a room that I was in, I wailed like a bitch. There was even a brief period of time where I lived in an apartment that was right behind a graveyard with the windows facing towards it. "Oh my gawd, if sh*t starts poppin' out the grave, I'ma be the first to go!" I don't know how my parents ever got me to sleep in those days. They must have been crushing Ambien caplets into my desserts before they put me to bed. It's been a long time since a horror game has spooked me so much; I sort of became desensitized to the genre after playing so many of its games. I still enjoy horror games and play them frequently, but it's from a much different perspective than the one I had during middle school. Now when I play a horror game, it's less about the scares and more about savoring the atmosphere. It's a little saddening to say that, but let's be honest: How can a game scare you after you've seen everything that the genre has to offer? There just comes a time where these games stop scaring a person. Then I played Siren, and I no longer want to go to Japan. Ever. Siren is a PS2-era game produced by a lot of former Team Silent members, including the creator of Silent Hill, Keiichiro Toyama. A bunch of cult shit is going down in Bum Fuck, Japan, in an attempt to resurrect some sort of ancient god, and now everyone is turning into zombie-like mutants because of it. You play as multiple characters trying to flee from the area, ping-ponging between their stories to gain new perspectives of the situation as it unravels. What sets this game apart from a lot of mainstream horror titles is that most of these characters are either defenseless or armed with only makeshift weapons (there are a few exceptions to this rule, with one or two characters occasionally wielding firearms with limited ammunition). Given that you're playing as ordinary civilians using shovels for self-defense, the emphasis of the game is placed on stealth: You start at Point A, you sneak to Point B, and you pray to God that you're not spotted in between. You're not playing as a space marine or a STARS member, meaning that engaging with these mutants in hand-to-hand combat is usually a suicidal endeavor. In fact, you're better off just hitting the reset button as opposed to trying to brawl your way through a level. This game got to me in a way that many haven't, which baffled me for a while. Why can a game like Silent Hill or Amnesia not phase me at all, but Siren can crawl under my skin with little to no effort? It took me a while to distill the answer, but I found part of it in the often-quoted words of Alfred Hitchcock:
An integral mechanic to Siren is "Sightjacking," which allows the player to see through the eyes of the creatures around them (and the reason that they can do this is because all of the characters are slowly devolving into these creatures -- fuck!). This mechanic plays exactly into what Hitchcock was talking about when he spoke of suspense vs. surprise. The previously mentioned Resident Evil relies a lot on surprise. Be it the dog jumping through the window on the first floor or the zombie hiding in a closet, the scares are brisk affairs that offer sudden jolts of fear which subside as quickly as they arrive. This is a much different approach to horror than Siren's focus on suspense. By allowing you to see into the eyes of your enemies, this creates a natural, perpetual tension that feeds into the game's hunter-vs-hunted dynamic of largely unarmed civilians pitted against a crowd of overpowered superfreaks who kill with impunity. The game's atmosphere and general weirdness help to feed the player a sense of terror and hopelessness, but it is the game's unrelenting thirst for suspense and anxiety that brings about the most dread. There's nothing more terrifying than hiding in a corner where you think that it's safe, only to then see an enemy heading towards you through its own eyes. There came a point in the game where I had to delve into a tunnel, and I could see that there were at least two-to-three enemies laying in wait for me below. Not only did I know of their existence, but I knew of their general locations and I was equipped with a shotgun loaded with proper greetings. Yet I was terrified to go down there, even while playing as one of the game's few gun-toting leads. What if something goes wrong? What if they don't die right away? This gun only holds two bullets, am I going to have time to reload? What if they gang up on me? What if they're too fast? What if I'm too slow? Can somebody turn on a light in here?! This is way too stressful right now! I loathed every step I took in this game, which speaks to the suspense that it puts forward. Siren put the screws to me at every chance that it got, causing me to sweat bullets for its entire duration. Every time that I turned this game on, I had to mentally brace myself for the shit that I was about to deal with. "Look man, just take shit real slow. There's no rush. Well, actually, there is, and if you get spotted, then run like a bitch and hope that these dudes will tire out before they can find you. Why am I playing this game?!" The answer is because the game is awesome, of course. It's been quite a while since a game has riled me up like this. Is every person going to have the same reaction to this game that I did? No. Horror is subjective, and different things scare different people. But at the very least, I think that most people who are into the horror genre can appreciate the game for what it is. I encourage everyone to give this game a spin, if only to take in the story and the wonderful sights of Hanuda village. Just don't drink the water while you're there. |
| Four new Club Nintendo rewards surface Posted: 11 Feb 2013 12:30 PM PST If you have some coins to spare, you can grab four new games right now from Club Nintendo: Birds & Beans (DSiWare, 100 Coins), Metal Torrent (DSiWare, 150 Coins), Paper Mario (Wii Virtual Console/Nintendo 64, 200 Coins), and Kirby Super Star (Wii Virtual Console/SNES, 150 Coins). They're all available until March 10, 2013. As for recommendations, Kirby Super Star and Paper Mario are probably my only must-haves if you haven't played Kirby on the DS or the Wii collection already. The other two games are pretty solid, making it one of the best Club Nintendo offerings to date. Head on over to Club Nintendo's website now to claim your rewards, if you're interested. |
| Closure free on PS Plus tomorrow, Critter Crunch $1.40 Posted: 11 Feb 2013 12:00 PM PST There's one deal on PlayStation Plus this week that just seems too good to pass up. Starting tomorrow, Critter Crunch will be available for only $1.40. At that price there's almost no excuse not to be regurgitating colorful nutrients into the mouths of your kin by this time Wednesday. Subscribers can also save on spooky platformer Closure (free), NHL 13 ($38.39), a top down shooter by the name of Alien Breed that features cross-buy functionality ($7.99), and aquatic papercraft platformer Derrick the Deathfin ($4.00). PlayStation Plus Update: Closure Joins the Instant Game Collection [PlayStation Blog] |
| Is System Shock being revived on Steam and GOG.com? Posted: 11 Feb 2013 11:30 AM PST While it should be taken with a grain of salt, a website is reporting that the System Shock franchise will be available on Steam and GOG.com in the very near future. Flesheatingzipper.com is reporting that Night Dive Studios will be porting the game to appear on GOG.com "within days." GOG.com seems like a natural fit; its emulation tools make running old PC games on new hardware a cinch. I played System Shock 2 just before BioShock was released, and it was a nightmare. I had to adjust the amount of CPU cores I had active and the game crashed frequently. I'd appreciate a version that was a lot easier to run on my PC. Night Dive Studios is a new developer/publisher and its Facebook page says that the studio "specialize in finding classic, abandoned and forgotten PC games and bringing them back into the hands of gamers." A noble aim, but I'll believe it when I see it. We've contacted GOG.com to see if they can offer any confirmation of these claims. Fear Me, Hacker: System Shock Franchise To Resurface on Steam/GOG.com [Flesh Eating Zipper] |
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