You know, I have a massive pile of comics that I haven’t had time to get around to reading. I really just have to put everything aside for an hour a day for the next week and just read. Maybe instead of reading books before I go to sleep, I should read a couple of comics. Does anyone have any decent techniques for powering through a backlog?
Anyhow, there are some interesting comics coming out this week. Browncoats will get the continued adventures of the Serenity in a comic written by Zack Whedon and executive produced by Joss. It’s Serenity: Leaves on the Wind #1 which picks up shortly after the Serenity movie.
Elsewhere, Dynamite’s well-regarded Red Sonja series gets its own one shot kids issue in Li’l Sojna #1. The Green Team’s time in DC’s New 52 comes to an end this week in Green Team: Teen Trillionaires #8. And if you’re looking for a zombie parody, Deadpool has you covered in Night of the Living Deadpool #2.
The oldest man to take over the helm of the TARDIS gets an old-school costume that harkens back to the outfit that Jon Pertwee wore as the Third Doctor. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor has lost the bowtie, tweed, cuffed pants and boots for a more elegant looking ensemble that I’d be more than willing to cosplay in.
The old Building (Critical) Consensus posts were never exceptionally popular and I was getting tired of doing them so I’ve decided to reboot the concept. I like the sort of meta-review summary of BCC but I’d like to try something a bit different. Rather than overall conclusions or summary statements, we’re going to look at detailed critical assessments on the game with specific opinions about gameplay elements, story, graphics and so on. So welcome to the Critics Corner.
I don’t think that Double Fine Games were planning to revolutionize indie gaming when they launched their Kickstarter campaign for Broken Age but that’s exactly what happened. What was just a project to make a Tim Schafer point-and-click adventure game ended up turning the industry on its head by showing that crowdfunding was a viable means to fund game production and that small devs weren’t always beholden to the whims of big publishers.
Still, Double Fine showed some of the issues with crowdfunding. Almost two years after the campaign launched, Broken Age is finally here but is being released in two parts to help fund the completion of the second half of the game. Scope creep and delays weren’t really considered a major risk to crowdfunders at the time but people think about it now.
So what do the critics think of Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s return to point-and-click?
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Sometimes the best way to remove the risk of third-party actions affecting you is to just buy them out. Microsoft didn’t outright buy Epic Games but they did buy their hottest intellectual property. Microsoft bought the Gears of War franchise from Epic and have handed it off to first-party developer Black Tusk Studios.
The graphic quality of games has come a long way over the last eighteen years. Perhaps the best illustration of the changes in graphic and art design since 1996 is the progression of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider games. Lara has come a long way from a 540 polygon character best known for her chest size to the high-def character in the Tomb Raider reboot.
To examine the change in the character’s look, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
I think we all knew that the United Kingdom’s so-called porn filter would end up causing more harm than good but I don’t think that gamers thought it would hit so close to home. League of Legends gamers have been experiencing errors after a recent update that included files with names that triggered the filters.
Anybody who is overly positive about almost anything in the gaming world is almost instantly hit with accusations of being bought by a publisher. Most of the time, statements like these are completely outlandish and unfounded. On rare occasions, though, these accusations find the mark.
Recently, it came to light that Microsoft was paying Machinima content creators for positive coverage of the Xbox One. Now, various outlets on the internet have revealed that EA has also been paying YouTubers for positive coverage of its games.
When the likes of Steam, Origin, Battle.net and League of Legends went down in recent weeks, it wasn’t through a traditional DDoS attack. Instead, they used a new type of attack to bring down services that otherwise would have been prepared. [Ars Technica]
An anonymous developer explains why third-party publishers and developers aren’t so gung-ho on the Wii U. [Digital Foundry]
Microsoft did a very silent Xbox One promotion with Machinima. Machinima partner videos featuring Xbox One content would receive $3 per thousand views from Microsoft but no one disclosed anything. [Ars Technica]
At some point in the near future, I’m going to start streaming and producing videos under the et geekera banner. Until then, read up on the growth of Twitch. [ReadWrite]
And rounding up the Ars Tehcnica links of the week, a tech startup has developed a sort of auto-aim rifle designed for ultra-precise shots. [Ars Technica]
While Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles have been out for a couple of months and are in a quiet period before the next big wave of next-gen games come in March, the upcoming Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition could reignite the battle between fans of the two biggest players in the home console market.
Recent reports indicate that TR:DE will run close to 60 frames per second for the majority of the game on PlayStation 4, the Xbox One version of the game will be floating between 30 and 45 FPS.
When Disney said that they would be producing “spin-off” movies alongside the VII, VIII, IX trilogy of films, I don’t think anyone expected them to bring their biggest guns off the shelf to make a movie.
No, Johnny Depp isn’t making a Disney produced Star Wars film. (Well, not yet and hopefully not ever.) Reports indicate that they’ve called in Pixar to make an animated Star Wars spin-off movie.
et geekera 