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?
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.
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.
One of the great things about the current gaming ecosystem is that not every game has to be a massive triple-A effort. It opens up the market to smaller games that wouldn’t have been made in the past. Take FIM Speedway Grand Prix 15, for example. Flat-track dirt oval motorcycle racing is so niche that I’m not sure that I ever saw it on Speed Channel. Yet this fairly unheard of form of two-wheel motorsport has one of the best racing games of 2015.
Since we did our look back at 2015 earlier this week, it only makes sense to look forward this week. It’s only logical to follow-up on our list of our favourite games of 2015 with a look at the games that we’re most excited about in 2016 with the Most Anticipated Games of 2016.
Virtual Reality is the next thing in gaming (again) but if you want to be an early adopter, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Oculus VR announced that the retail version of their Rift virtual reality headset will be shipping starting at the end of March. It will only cost you $599 USD before taxes and shipping to be one of the first to get your hands on one.
How about one last blog post before we close down for the Christmas break? At this time of year (okay, often sooner for everyone else), everyone does their year-end lists. As is tradition for etg, we close the year with our favourite games of the year. I think this year will be the last time we do the 15 for 15 thing because it was very hard getting to 15 games. Next year will probably be a top ten or something.
For now, here is our list of our fifteen favourite games of 2015. They may not be the best games of 2015 but they are the ones that I loved the most.
It was around this time two years ago that I suggested that the games industry needed a second showcase event apart from E3 every June. Following another edition of The Game Awards that was more interested in the new trailers and game reveals than it was in celebrating the best in gaming during the unspecified nomination period. I was planning on leaving this alone because I don’t see The Game Awards ever being an awards show but rather being a product of hype.
Last month, I changed my mind. While it wasn’t the first time they did this, I realized that Sony might have inadvertently stumbled upon exactly what I was looking for with their second PlayStation Experience convention and industry show.
et geekera 