The man behind the Halo theme, the original trilogy’s soundtrack and the director of voice acting and sound design for the Halo franchise has been fired by Bungie. Marty O’Donnell took to Twitter to announced that he had been dismissed by Bungie’s board of directors in a move that he says was without cause.
I’ve talked about the bought and paid for reputation of games news reporting before on the blog. However, not everyone in the industry has gotten the growing message that readers and viewers are increasingly concerned about the ethics of games reporting.
The latest example is from a recent press event held by Ubisoft in Paris for Watch Dogs. At the event, the attending invited press members were given free Google Nexus 7 tablets.
In news that should surprise absolutely no one, another bug has been discovered in Battlefield 4. Whether this bug has existed since launch and never been documented with proof until now or was inadvertently created with another patch isn’t known.
What I can tell you is that you shouldn’t shoot in the vicinity of downed soldiers. The new “Death Shield” bug will make you pay by launching projectiles you fire toward a downed soldier back at you and killing you.
This is the sort of week where I can use the distraction provided by comic books. The return of winter after a couple of weeks that saw the snowbanks drop a good four feet is just depressing. Why I haven’t just skipped the country and gone somewhere warmer, like Siberia, is beyond me.
Anyway, let’s start this week’s recommendations with Boom Studios. I don’t give Boom enough love but I will for their latest series that examines what drives someone to be a superhero and what it means to be a hero in Translucid #1. The big two have two new series with familiar faces. After concluding the Indestructible Hulk series by revealing that the Hulk is not, in fact, indestructible, the Hulk is back in Hulk #1. On the DC side of things, they continue their villains kick with a new series beginning with Sinestro #1.
Did you know that A Song of Ice and Fire author and Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin also does wedding planning in his spare time? I kind of wish that he’d worry more about the books than TV or weddings but he does plan some memorable weddings.
By the way, spoilers.
When you come into a season of Game of Thrones, you know that it’s the ninth episode of the season that everything is building up to. That’s where something big happens. But what happens when the writers and producers change things up on you and make it the second, rather than the second-to-last episode that changes everything. We’re about to find out this season after The Lion and The Rose.
Just when you thought you were over your Hearthstone addiction, Blizzard drags you back in again. Blizzard used their PAX East panel to unveil the first expansion to the Hearthstone card collecting game: The Curse of Naxxramas single-player adventure mode.
Fans of the Civilization series or the classic Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuri game will have something new to sink their teeth into come this fall. Firaxis promised us something big at PAX East and their idea of a big announcement is to announce that the next game in the Civ series is the spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri with Civilization: Beyond Earth.
Peter Dinklage did an AMA on Reddit. He’s popping in and out as of posting so maybe the former Hand of the King and current Master of Coin will answer a late question of yours. [/r/IAmA]
Well, here’s something that shouldn’t surprise you. The NSA is reported to have exploited the Heartbleed Bug. It seems very underhanded to keep a major security flaw a secret just to exploit it in the name of “national security.” [Bloomberg]
I was going to give AMD’s new 295X2 GPU its own post but it looks like there’s a lot of news coming out of PAX East so that’ll dominate the early week posts. So here’s PC Gamer’s review of AMD’s new top-end graphics card. [PC Gamer]
Science is doing amazing things now. It was revealed this week that scientists grew vaginas for women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome and it went quite well. [The Verge]
Have you ever wondered how far Mario has to traverse in the first SMB game? Someone has figured that out for you. [Mental Floss]
Every now and then, our friends over at Movoto like coming up real estate valuations of famous fictional landmarks. To mark the return of Game of Thrones for its fourth season, they took a shot at valuing The Red Keep, the castle of the king of the Seven Kingdoms in King’s Landing. I won’t say that they did this just for us but they did email it to me just in time for Fridays of Ice and Fire.
So how much would buying The Red Keep set you back? I’d reckon that the Master of Coin would struggle to come up with that much money.
et geekera 