Author Archives: Steve Murray
Haven: Chosen Review
So how do we wrap-up an up and down season of a TV show? If you’re the producers of Haven, you push the reset button on the season’s main storyline, remember that there was a more compelling villain that they introduced at one point and borrowed a bit from that other Stephen King show on TV.
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eSports Weekend Calendar: December 5 – 7, 2014
The big feature in this week’s eSports Weekend Calendar is ESL’s first standalone IEM event in North America. Usually, IEM events are run at big comic or gaming conventions but IEM San Jose breaks that mould by running at San Jose’s SAP Center, home to the NHL’s San Jose Sharks. IEM San Jose has both a League of Legends tournaments with some big North American and European teams and an SC2 tournament that will hand out the first WCS points for 2015.
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Microsoft Is Late with Payments to Indie Devs
Microsoft doesn’t have the best reputation in the indie gaming community. They didn’t have many fans before eliminating self-publishing on the Xbox One at the console’s announcement and subsequent reversal. They aren’t going to win any more with the latest scandal.
A number of developers on the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace have come out to say that Microsoft is late with their third quarter payments by over two weeks.
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Steam Launches Steam Broadcasting Streaming Service
The biggest digital store and the most popular game client in gaming isn’t enough for Valve. Last year, Steam announced the launch of their own operating system, controller and Steam-branded Steam Machine gaming PCs for the living room. Now, Steam is taking on Twitch with its latest project.
This week, Steam announced Steam Broadcasting, a new streaming service that will let you watch people play games in and through the Steam client.
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Are Marvel and Star Wars Coming to Kingdom Hearts 3?
It’s been over eight years since Kingdom Hearts 2 came out and things at Disney have changed quite a bit in that time. They’ve added a few new franchises and made three major corporate acquisitions, including Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilm. So what does that mean for the eventual Kingdom Hearts 3? The sky’s the limit.
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Comic Book Pull List for December 3, 2014
Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine with all the chicks? Shaft! It’s not everyday that I get to start a post with a killer line like that. But if you can dig it, Dynamite Entertainment is launching a new Shaft comic book this week starting with Shaft #1.
Meanwhile, over at Marvel, they have a comic prequel one-shot for the Agent Carter TV show with Captain America: Peggy Carter, Agent of SHIELD #1. And to give equal time to the other folks of the Big Two, DC Comics is bringing back the Secret Six once again. Fourth time’s the charm, right? We’ll see if the New 52 holds better luck in Sinister Six #1.
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LDLC Overcomes Cheating Scandal to Win DreamHack Winter CS:GO Tournament
That French eSports team LDLC won the $250,000 DreamHack Winter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament wasn’t a huge surprise. They’re quite good and experts considered them quite capable of picking up 2-0 series wins in their playoff matchups. The real surprise was the LDLC overcame unusual circumstances that would have sunk other teams en route to that championship.
At one point, LDLC was out of the tournament after the quarterfinals having lost to Fnatic but a scandal over Fnatic using a “pixelwalking” exploit resulted in a protest, forfeiture and a storybook run for LDC to the DreamHack Winter Championship.
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Steam Exploration Sale: December 1, 2014
This is it. Cyber Monday is also the final day of the Steam Exploration Sale. That means that you have carte blanche to buy what you really want without bankrupting yourself. That last part is probably the most difficult part of a Steam sale, especially with Christmas and the Steam Holiday sale three-ish weeks away.
Today, there are some of the usual deals and some cool new deals. As far as the status quo goes, there’s Skyrim, Killing Floor, Portal and XCOM. I’d imagine that most of you have them but you’re always going to get more opportunities with those games. As far as new additions to sales, Alien: Isolation is a steal at $24.99. If you’re not an Alien or survival horror fan, you can probably sit out ’til next summer but I’m having a lot of fun with it (and I promise that review is coming inside the next six weeks). Other newer releases with sales are Child of Light (which I’m buying) and Ryse: Son of Rome (which I refuse to buy for more than $10).
Happy end of sale day! Maybe that’s just all of our wallets talking.
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Here’s the First Trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
The moment that Star Wars fans have been waiting years for arrived last Friday. Since the announcement of a third Star Wars trilogy after LucasFilm’s sale to Disney in 2012, Star Wars fans have been hotly anticipating Episode VII.
Now, some thirteen months away from the film’s scheduled release, Disney is ramping up the already massive hype train for Episode VII with the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.
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Haven: Chemistry Review
We’re reaching the end of the first half of the fifth season of Haven. Just when you thought that it looked like you had all the answers to where Haven was going to build to for the mid-season finale, the writers used Chemistry to change the questions. I’m all for unpredictability but, to borrow a wrestling analogy, for a show that allegedly has a plot outline written years in advance, Vince Russo thinks that the writing on this thing is being rushed.
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