One of the advantages of being a private company is that you are not required to publicly file your annual financial statements. That won’t stop people from trying to figure out the financial health of your company.
A market data firm called SuperData has prepared a report on the revenues of Valve and Steam. Their calculations indicate that Valve made $730 million in revenue in 2014.
The last major market is now open for business to video game console manufacturers. After opening up console sales for those units made in a specified “free-trade zone” in Shanghai, the Chinese government has opened up the country further to home games consoles. Now, consoles manufactured anywhere in China will be allowed to be sold in the country.
I’ve never really understood how Telltale can be so good at writing these episodic narrative arcs but be so completely incapable at writing the second episode of those stories. They go from great starts to non-existent follow-up and that certainly dampened my enthusiasm for the third episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Fortunately for Telltale, they aren’t too bad at bouncing back from a subpar effort and certainly did with this episode of TFTB.
Did you know that today marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of StarCraft II? On July 27, 2010, Blizzard released StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the much-anticipated sequel to 1998’s award-winning RTS and eSports dynamo StarCraft.
To mark the occasion, the team at SC2HL put together this retrospective of the best moments of competitive SC2.
The Electronic Sports League (ESL), one of the biggest eSports companies in the world, is going to be making a major change ahead of its upcoming ESL One event in Cologne. The $250,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament will be the first ESL run event to feature random drug testing for performance enhancing drugs.
The most recent NASCAR game that I played prior to picking up NASCAR ’15 was EA Sports’ NASCAR 06: Total Team Control. Before and after playing that, I regularly played NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. NR2003 is over 12 years old at this point but it’s still considered the best NASCAR sim ever made and still has a fairly healthy community.
So when Dusenberry Martin Racing announced that they acquired the NASCAR license, I was pretty excited. Their leadership includes a veteran of those classic Papyrus Racing Games NASCAR games so I was hoping this would be a sign of good things to come from NASCAR ’15.
Then DMR mentioned that this year’s game was a carryover from previous license holders Eutechnyx who had already started development on NASCAR ’15 when they acquired the license. If you know the name Eutechnyx, you may recognize them as the developers of Ride to Hell: Retribution. Oh my.
After the last episode of Game of Thrones (A Telltale Game Series), I lamented the fact that it felt like the story was far too on-rails for my liking and that the Forrester clan were getting no hope spots in their continuing battle to save their House from being crushed by the combined forces of House Whitehill and the various Bolton and Lannister forces. While the latter doesn’t really change that much (it is a Telltale game after all), we finally see a glimmer of hope and a little comeback from Team Ironrath.
Given that we’ve been beaten down emotionally by Game of Thrones on TV and in the game, it was nice to have that little bit of hope.
Experimental games are a hit or a miss. I’m not entirely sure that you will ever find a near universal opinion on any game but games that find themselves outside the standard mould are especially prone to that. People will either absolutely love new and different games and mechanics or they will resoundly reject them.
I use that as the intro to this review because experimental is an appropriate catch-all term to describe Her Story. It’s a mystery game that sees you dig through old police interrogation videos to determine the truth in a 21-year-old case.
It might not have a proper win state. It might rely on FMV in the style of a, well, 21-year old video game. It might be a game that’s only combat is your brain against itself. But it’s easily the best game I’ve played this year so far.
I know these episodic reviews of Telltale’s games aren’t exactly the most timely but the increasing length of time between Telltale’s releases aren’t exactly speedy either. We’re getting to the point where I’m not exactly sure that Telltale will be able to complete Tales From The Borderlands during this calendar year since the gap between releases is just over three months.
So some three months after it was released, I’ve finally gotten around to reviewing the second episode of Tales From The Borderlands. It would have been a lot easier to review this is I felt any passion for this product but I’m not entirely sure that I don’t feel a little more passion than Telltale does.
et geekera 