I know more than one person does the reviews at IGN but I still like to have a laugh at box quotes proven wrong. Battlefield 4 promoted itself with an IGN quote saying that it blew CoD: Ghosts out of the water. Then the actual reviews come out and…
By the way, BF4’s current-gen console score was only 8.0/10. That’s an even bigger win for CoD.
Not nine hours after we ran the story about Humble Bundle changing how they distribute games on Steam, the folks at Humble Bundle have done an about-face on how they handle the distributing games that you already own on your Steam account. Now, they’ll allow you to give extra games to friends and family.
If there’s a franchise that’s used as a metaphor for everything that people see as wrong with gaming today, it’s Call of Duty. People are using racial, ethnic, homophobic and misogynistic slurs online? Damn CoD kids. Effectively recycling last year’s game for a big profit this year? Old CoD trick. The death of the single-player campaign at the expense of getting everyone into and spending money on multiplayer? You better believe that’s a CoD’ing.
So with the release of the transitional Call of Duty: Ghosts on current generation consoles yesterday, one had to wonder if the reviews would be a referendum on the franchise as a whole.
The answer is that I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never played a CoD game so I won’t be able to tell you how Ghosts this stacks up. (Sorry, I’m just not a big FPS fan.) Many reviewers noted that this was remarkably similar to Infinity Ward’s last effort, CoD: Modern Warfare 3, and marked it down as a result. Others noted that but gave it a high mark because it was still fun. So if you loved MW3, there’s nothing to turn you off here.
One of the great challenges of buying games on Steam is juggling the need to play a good game when it’s released with the fact that you can get a game for 33% or more off the launch price if you just hold out a couple of months at the absolute most for the next Steam sale.
Humble Bundle has changed its Steam key policy so that you no longer get actual Steam keys when you buy bundles. The Humble Store will instead require you to link your Humble Store account to your Steam account to activate your new purchases.
The good folks at PBS and Kill Screen Daily that bring us Game/Show have another interesting look into how we game. This week, they examine why gamers get angry about games and the affect rage has on how we play. It’s a really cool video they did and it’s good to see there’s nothing wrong with throwing the occasional controller. And they have a Francis clip which is always awesome.
Those of you hoping for a big budget free-to-play real-time strategy game that could rival the big RTS games out on the market will have to wait a little longer. EA announced this week that they were cancelling the in-development F2P RTS Command & Conquer and closing its developers Victory Games.
I know that people often joke that certain big awards are bought and paid for but PC Magazine has their own unique way of getting money out of award recipients. Rather than making them pay to win the award, Ziff Davis, the owners of PC Mag, make winners pay to use the logo saying they’re PC Magazine award winners.
I’ll make an admission before we go on. I was so bored with the story in AC: Revelations that I stopped playing part way through. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t think I made it more than a couple of hours in AC3 either. I went about as completionist as I had this side of Mass Effect or the PS1 & PS2 Final Fantasy games in the first three AC games but couldn’t will myself to even finish the two most recent.
A lot of critics hail AC4 as a return to form for the franchise with a focus on an increase in the general fun in the series thanks to piracy and the pirate-themed story. Mind you, there were quite a few reviewers lamenting that little had changed mechanically in this game when compared to the previous games in the franchise. If you’ve played previous AC games and loved them, you’ll probably love this one too. For those who fell, out of love… Do you like pirates?
Just when you thought that the next-gen console launches would be the gaming event of the year to bankrupt you, yesterday happened. We had the releases of WWE 2K14 and Sonic Lost World (coverage soon) and the current-gen launches of Battlefield 4 and Assassin’s Creed 4. We’ll be covering the next-gen versions of those games when they come out (I haven’t decided if I’ll break-up critics roundups between PS4 and XB1 later) but for now, we have the current generation editions of these games to cover.
One of this year’s most interesting battles will be the sales duel between spunkgargleweewees as Battlefield 4 and CoD: Ghosts are out within a week of each other this year. The first one up is BF4. While nobody expects the current-gen version of the game to be as good as the next-gen or PC builds of the game, the consensus is that the multiplayer portion of the game is great and the single-player is as underwhelming as usual. However, I don’t think you’re buying a modern military shooter for the story. Unless you’re buying Spec Ops: The Line. That game was fantastic.
et geekera 