ESL Buys eSports Services, Launches ESL America
First, it was their takeover over the WCS America. Now, ESL is launching their eSports takeover of the whole of the Americas after buying eSports Services (ESS) and launching a new studio in Los Angeles to host ESL’s operations in North America.
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Comic Book Pull List for April 2, 2014
Without that issue of Forever Evil #7 that I was looking forward to this week and no Justice League on the horizon, that DC Comics section of the pull list looks awfully bare. However, DC Comics superstars Ivan Reis and Joe Prado (who are lovely people should you ever get the chance to meet them) are back on the Aquaman beat with Aquaman and the Others #1.
Over at Marvel, they’re doing another hypothetical alternate reality miniseries. This time, it’s about the Age of Ultron storyline. What if Hank Pym was able to create an even more dangerous version of Ultron? We find out in What If: Age of Ultron #1. And Dark Horse continues to do their Joss Whedon TV series continuations with Angel and Faith: Season Ten #1.
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The GOATY is Here! Goat Simulator Launches Today
The most anticipated game of 2014 is out today. Goat Simulator, a developer-described “small, broken and stupid game,” is out on Steam, appropriately, on April Fools’ Day. If you pre-ordered the game (like me), you’ve already been playing since Saturday but now’s the chance for everyone else to get in on the goat fun.
To mark the launch, Coffee Stain Studios did the only appropriate thing and made their launch trailer a parody of the Dead Island trailer.
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Don’t Expect Forever Evil #7 Until May
We’re you looking forward to the final chapter of DC’s big universe-wide Forever Evil event in the eponymous miniseries? Well, you may have to wait a little bit to read that. DC Comics has quietly delayed the release of Forever Evil #7 back to May 21st.
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Report: iPhone 6 to Come in Two Sizes, Both Bigger than the iPhone 5S
I hope you didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on the iPhone 5S thinking that is was going to be the be all and end all of iPhones. Only six months after the release of the latest iPhone, reports have come out about the upcoming bigger and better iPhone 6.
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Can We Talk About the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Trailer?
Well, we’ve seen the trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot and… I’m willing to say that it’s not the TMNT that I grew up with. For all the talk about how it looks gritty like the 80s comics, all I see is another generic Michael Bay blockbuster movie. Buildings falling, explosions, excessive use of CGI, a lead actress there for her looks rather than acting. Those are all Bay trademarks and Bay movies tend to make a lot of money but also tend to be critical duds.
I’ve never really been a fan of the live action TMNT movies. They struck me as a mix of stoner movies and 90s teenage clichés. This, so far, looks to be less stoner and more generic blockbuster action. Maybe that’ll make it more tolerable. At least the turtles are mutants rather than aliens. Also, where are Splinter, Shredder and Krang?
So am I the only one that watches this trailer and goes “uh oh?”
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IEM World Championship by the Numbers
With a peak of over 600,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch and over 1,000,000 concurrent viewers when adding in other sources, the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship from Katowice, Poland, was an absolute success. It was the ESL’s most-watched tournament and the most-watched event based in Europe in eSports history with 5.7 million hours more content watched than the previous record holder, the 2013 Dreamhack Winter Championship.
For this and more stats about IEM Katowice, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
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Geek Links of the Week
Hasbro is launching a special edition of Monopoly that will include the most popular house rules as official rules of the game. Is nothing sacred anymore? [New York Times]
Astronomers have found the first asteroid that has rings. That’s got to be one hell of an asteroid. [NBC News]
Asher Vollmer talks about all the Threes clones that have come out since the game’s launch that have overshadowed his game. [Asherv]
Reddit CEO, Yishan Wong, doesn’t much care for the Bitcoin community on Reddit. On the other hand, he loves the Dogecoin community. /r/Dogecoin FTW! [Quora]
Gearbox and 3D Realms are going to war over Duke Nukem. Considering Gearbox’s track record with other companies’ IP, I know my rooting interest in this battle. [Wired]
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Catch Up (or Refresh) on Game of Thrones with These Recaps
We’re just nine days away from WrestleMania XXX the Season Four premiere of Game of Thrones. Since viewership keeps for GoT keeps going up, I would assume that a bunch of people are jumping in just to see what the hype is about. The problem with that is that Game of Thrones isn’t really the sort of show you can just jump into part way through and quickly grasp everything that has happened (and a lot has happened).
So to help out newcomers to Game of Thrones (and those needing a quick refresher course), for today’s Friday of Ice and Fire, we have some quick-ish recaps of the first three seasons of the show.
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Free to Play Review: A Long Way to the Top
It’s only fitting that a free-to-play game gets a free documentary to go with it. Valve’s popular free MOBA, Dota 2, now has a quasi-companion documentary called, appropriately, Free to Play. However, it’s not really a Dota documentary and you don’t even need to like video games to like the movie.
While the title Free to Play implies that it’s a documentary about Dota 2 and its development, popularity and the impact its had on gaming, Free to Play is actually about eSports. The documentary follows three competitive Dota players, each with a different background, as they pursue the $1 million grand prize for Dota 2’s The International championship.
et geekera 