Back in October 2015, Square Enix announced that the upcoming Hitman game would release with three of its six levels at launch in March 2016. Less than two months before launch, Square Enix announced that Hitman would be completely episodic with the games six levels being released starting in March.
Adam Driver hosted Saturday Night Live on Saturday night and you just knew that Kylo Ren would be making an appearance. The villain of Episode VII: The Force Awakens took off his mask and mingled with his underlings at Starkiller Base as radar tech Matt. It went about as well as could be expected.
Some people call them walking simulators. The people in marketing prefer to call it interactive storytelling. The one thing that we can all agree on is that games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture are among the most divisive in gaming. Rapture itself has review scores ranging from 100% to 25% and is on best, worst and blandest games of 2015 lists.
I have a mixed history with walking simulators myself. While I loved The Stanley Parable, I had Gone Home figured out in about a half-hour but had to walk the experience through to the end. Where will Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture fall on the walking simulator spectrum?
Thanks to the United States government, we know that the cost of building the Death Star will be about $850 quadrillion (or $852,000,000,000,000,000 if you want all the zeros spelled out for you). Suppose that you want something a little smaller, faster and more nimble. You would be looking for a YT class Corellian freighter, perhaps even the Millennium Falcon. Fortunately, building a Millennium Falcon is much more affordable and operating it is a positive bargain.
To find out how much your own Millennium Falcon will set you back, our friends at Varooma have put together a handy infographic for you.
There’s a whole lotta eSports going on this weekend. Chief among the action are the two big MOBAs. Over in Dota 2, the jointly produced StarLadder Star Series and IMBAtv i-League season comes to an end with their playoffs and some top teams still in contention. Meanwhile, League of Legends starts league play this weekend worldwide. All five of the big leagues have games over the weekend so we can see who gets off to a hot start.
Elsewhere, there is various StarCraft action in Korea. The Heroes of the Storm Gold Series continues group play ahead of next weekend’s playoffs. And CS:GO has their first January Minor event in the Americas. That doesn’t sound too impressive but it’s worth $30,000 to the winner and an invite to the final eight qualifier for February’s MLG Columbus Major.
When EA announced their Access subscription gaming service on the Xbox One, everyone figured that it would be a matter of time before Electronic Arts brought it to PC. After all, they have their Origin game store and client whose one notable advantage over Steam is having EA exclusivity so it lags well behind Valve’s client and store in terms of user base and revenue.
This week, EA announced that their Access subscription service would in fact be coming to PC as Origin Access through their Origin platform.
It’s officially awards season in Hollywood! That means absolutely nothing to the Movie Trailers Roundup. I’m not sure you’ll see too many awards contenders releasing trailers now.
That being said, this week’s roundup has six trailers featuring some of the stars of Hollywood. Hiddleston, Portman, Kenobi, Owen Lars, the Coens, Spacey and McConaughey all feature in the roundup. That’s some serious star power coming soon.
In an unusual gaming controversy, Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) applied for a trademark of the term “let’s play” back at the end of October 2015. The application was discovered by the internet over the last week. This sparked a not insignificant controversy over SCEA trying to claim ownership of a fairly common term in the gaming world.
Funnily enough, the controversy should have been over before it even started. Before the news of the copyright application broke, the US Patent and Trademark Office refused Sony’s application.
Various modding communities have added some really cool things to video games. The Assetto Corsa community have created, among many other mods, a 2015 F1 mod and WTF1 dropped that into the third-party recreation of Mario Kart 64’s Rainbow Road track. While Sir Jackie Stewart, OBE and three-time Formula One World Drivers’ Champion, referred to the Nurburgring as the green hell, who knows what he would have thought of the rainbow hell that is Rainbow Road.
It seems a little unusual but January is shaping up to be a busier month for gaming than December. Today’s Game Trailers Roundup has eight trailers for you to watch. That’s better than last week’s post and that had three weeks’ worth of trailers.
We have three trailers for games that come out this month along with a beta that comes out this week. There are also a couple of announcement and gameplay trailers to round out the roundup.
et geekera 