What happens when a well and truly terrible game lands in the hands of games critic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw? You’d expect him to explode with great new Yahtzee-isms. He definitely does come up with some great metaphors but he seems more amused by how bad the game is than anything else. He actually recommends it too.
Category Archives: Games
Saints Row IV Cleared for Australian Release on Third Try
The third time was the charm for Saints Row IV and developer Volition. After being refused classification in its previous two appearances in front of the Australian Classifications Board, SR4’s third application for classification got the game rated and cleared for sale in Australia with an MA15+ rating.
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Aarklash: Legacy Preview: A Little Bit of Old School
It’s not often that we get our hands on a preview version of a game but who am I to turn down a new experience. So, naturally, when Cyanide gave me an opportunity to take an early look at their upcoming RPG Aarklash: Legacy, I jumped at the opportunity and was pleasantly surprised with what I saw.
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New Star Wars: Battlefront Coming Summer 2015
Can’t wait to get your hands of the upcoming EA Star Wars games? Well, I would advise you not to hold your breath because we’re still a ways out from seeing them.
During their 1st quarter earnings call, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen revealed that the first of EA’s Star Wars games under the current licensing agreement will be the new Battlefront. Unfortunately, we shouldn’t expect it until summer of 2015 which means another two years of waiting for a new Star Wars game.
In his announcement, Jorgensen noted that they were timing the release of Battlefront around the planned release of Episode VII. While the teaser trailer was decidedly original trilogy inspired, it’s entirely possible that this could mean that the new Battlefront could tie into the new trilogy. Even if it’s DICE making the game, the prospect of a movie tie-in game worries me. I don’t think I need to tell you why.
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Rogue Legacy Review: Everybody Rogue
With the games release schedule decidedly quiet during the summer, it’s a good time for everyone, including would-be games critics, to catch up on games that you might have missed during the first months of the year. To be quite honest, I’m not sure how many of this year’s big releases I’ve finished.
I’m starting with the current indie darling du jour, Rogue Legacy. It’s received heaps of praise from critics but what do I, a gamer of average skill and free time, think of the latest big thing on the indie game scene?
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XCOM: Enemy Within Rated by Korean Ratings Board
Well, we knew that the classic style of XCOM games would continue after the success of last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown but we didn’t know that a sequel was so far along in development.
Yesterday, the Korean Games Ratings Board posted a rating for a PC, PS3 and 360 game called XCOM: Enemy Within.
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Nintendo’s Financial Results Show Wii U Worries
Nintendo’s first quarter results had some good news and bad news for the Japanese console manufacturer. On the plus side, they turned a net profit for the three months from April to June and scored their highest gross profit compared to sales in the last five years.
The bad news is that those good financial results were on the back of 3DS hardware and software sales. The 3DS managed almost nine times the console sales and eleven times the game sales of the Wii U as Nintendo’s next-gen offering limped through the quarter with only 160,000 consoles sold.
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The Humble Deep Silver Bundle?
I could be wrong but I think that Deep Silver secretly bought the rights to sell games via Humble Bundle in the THQ bankruptcy fire sale? That’s the only logical explanation for the latest Humble Bundle being the Humble Deep Silver Bundle.
The base deal includes copies of Saints Row 2, Saints Row: The Third, Risen 2: Dark Waters and Sacred 2 Gold. If you pay more than the average, you add on the SR3 Full Package (season pass) and Dead Island: GOTY Edition. As an extra bonus for big spenders, dropping $25 or more gets you Dead Island: Riptide.
I’d imagine a lot of people picked these games up during a past Steam Sale or even during the Humble THQ Bundle. If you haven’t, here’s a chance. But if you do own some of these games, folks on Reddit say the Bundle doesn’t let you gift those games. They just disappear. Suddenly, $25 for DI:R and the SR3 season pass doesn’t appeal to me.
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Ouya Monetization “Better Than Expected” Despite 73% of Users Not Buying a Game
In a recent interview with The Verge, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said that, “Monetization on Ouya is so far better than we expected.”
The problem with that statement is that is makes no sense by almost every objective metric. In the first month following the $99 console’s release, only 27% of owners have paid for a game. That leaves three-quarters of consoles sticking with the free games and trials currently available.
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Phil Fish vs. Marcus Beer Says More About Games Journalism than Either Man
The weekend’s big gaming news story wasn’t about a new game or another major announcement but a feud between two gaming personalities.
On one side was Marcus Beer, GameTrailer’s Annoyed Gamer, who criticized prominent indie developers Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow for not commenting on Microsoft allowing indie game self-publishing on the Xbox One. On the other side was the aforementioned Phil Fish who didn’t take kindly to Beer lobbing personal insults at him on video.
However, I don’t think that the takeaway from this feud should be anything about either Beer or Fish. I think how this feud started says more about how this gaming journalism works and why it might be irreparably broken.
et geekera 