Monthly Archives: January 2014

Geek Links of the Week

This is the single most comprehensive look at how gamers deal with morality systems in games that you’ll ever read. Absolutely fascinating piece. [Journal of Games Criticism]

You know, I’d like to change my Twitter handle to something shorter but still easily identifiable as my own personal account. After reading the experiences the man formerly known as @N had when someone stole his PayPal and GoDaddy accounts to steal his Twitter handle, I think I’ll keep my undesirable handle. [The Next Web]

Remember last week’s post about Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition’s framerate? Well, turns out that the initial reports were mostly accurate. While the PS4 had a wider range of FPS than anticipated, the Xbox One version never climbed above 30 FPS and was outperformed by an average of over 20 FPS. [Digital Foundry]

The man behind the Black Mesa mod for the Source Engine got his hands on Valve’s new VR device. Here are his impressions. [Carlos Montero]

If it was Doritos, it would be the most cliche gamer snack ever but this is pretty close. In Japan, you can now get packets of Mountain Dew flavoured Cheetos. [FoodBeast]

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Final Fantasy XIII Goes 16-Bit For Lightning Returns Story Trailer

I’ll make an admission up-front before I run this trailer:  I made it about an hour into Final Fantasy XIII before I was so bored to tears that I stopped. I saw my sister playing it too and that did nothing to pique my interest. Neither of us could be bothered to buy FFXIII-2 either. It’s a shame because I was a huge Final Fantasy fan in the PS1 and PS2 era (but who wasn’t).

So when I got the press release for the latest Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, I thought it was just another generic story trailer to fill you in on the last two games. Instead, Square Enix broke the mold and retold the first two Final Fantasy XIII games in 16-bit graphics and audio. It looks amazing and harkens back to the epic Final Fantasy VI (or FF3 in America).

I don’t like running trailers and doing everyone else’s PR work on the blog but the uniqueness of this trailer is worth a second look. By the way, the trailer contains many, many spoilers.

World of Warcraft Celebrates 10 Years and 100 Million Players

This fall, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft will have been around for ten years. Just ahead of its tenth anniversary, Blizzard announced that the flagship of the MMO genre reached the 100 million account milestone. Those 100 million players have created over 500 million characters in the world of Azeroth. Sure, WoW might not have as many players now as it did at its peak but it’s still the biggest game in MMOs.

For more about the last ten years of WoW, we have a handy infographic for you.

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Microsoft Leaks Show Big Plans for the Xbox One This Year

xbox-one-whiteAfter a rocky initial announcement and slower sales than the PlayStation 4 at launch, Microsoft is going full-tilt to right the ship and assert the dominance of the Xbox One in the console market.

A number of leaks by NeoGAF user nktrnl, which were subsequently verified by various gaming news outlets, indicate a number of big games and console plans for the Xbox One over the next twelve months to get it on top of the current generation of consoles.

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Ryu Attacks Taylor Swift at the Grammys, Fails to Silence Her

Street Fighter’s Ryu made a surprise appearance at the Grammys when he attacked Taylor Swift in the middle of her performance. Swift showed impeccable professionalism and continued her song unabated… Much to the world’s chagrin. And this is why I always picked Ken.

At least we got this cool video from Twisted Genre. He wins! Perfect!

Sony Working on PS1/PS2 Emulation for PS4

playstation-consoles-headerIt looks like Sony isn’t content with solely utilizing their PlayStation Now cloud gaming platform to bring backwards compatibility to the PlayStation 4. Reports indicate that SCE is working on software emulation to run PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games right on your PS4.

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Nintendo Financial Results Reveal Troubling Information

nintendo-mario-logoWe knew that Nintendo has been in rough shape since the launch of their current-gen Wii U console was a catastrophic flop. Between not having any killer apps on launch to an apparent massive marketing problem getting the message out that the Wii U is a new console and not a controller, the last year-and-a-half hasn’t been pretty for the granddaddy of game companies.

Yesterday’s quarterly earnings call showed how bad the situation is for Nintendo. The company announced a big loss for the fiscal year, noted poor Wii U sales for the first nine months of the fiscal year and lowered expectations for 3DS sales for the year.

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Every Doctor Who Regeneration in GIF

It’s only about eight-and-a-half-ish months until we get more Doctor Who. I’m not suffering withdrawals. This post should not be taken as a sign of my mental state. GIFs!

I mean, I was on Tumblr the other day and found my favourite collection of Doctor Who regeneration GIFs I’ve ever seen. There have been a lot of regeneration GIFs since we found out that Matt Smith was leaving Doctor Who but these ones showing before, during and after along with The Doctor’s last words is pretty cool.

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Haven Renewed for 26 More Episodes

haven-title-card-bannerFor a while there, fans of Haven were expecting the worst given that Syfy was taking longer than usual to make any announcement about the future of the series and the channel’s propensity for cancelling series after their fourth season.

Yesterday, though, Haven fans were given the news that not only was Haven renewed but Syfy ordered 26 episodes (the equivalent of two seasons of the show) to be shown over the next two years.

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Square Enix Launches Collective Game Funding Platform

square-enix-collective-headerBack in October, Square Enix announced their new Collective program that was a combination of Steam Greenlight and crowdfunding into one platform. Proposed indie games are presented to users, they vote on which they’d like to see made (similar to Greenlight) and those selected by the community go to crowdfunding to get money to make it.

This week, Square Enix officially launched Collective and unveiled the first three games to be put the community for approval.

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