marți, 31 decembrie 2013

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The Waiting Game - Most Wanted in 2014
Dec 31st 2013, 20:00

With the year coming to an end, Johnny takes a look forward at the five games we're most looking forward to in 2014.

Halo for Xbox One is Halo 5, Xbox Australia says [UPDATE]
Dec 31st 2013, 16:46

[UPDATE] A Microsoft representative told GameSpot, "This post was made in error, and we will be updating it shortly. We have made no announcements regarding the name of Halo on Xbox One. As we have stated previously, the award-winning franchise continues on Xbox One, beginning in 2014. We have no further details to share at this time."

The original story is below.

The all-new Halo game Microsoft announced for Xbox One at E3 2013 in June is Halo 5, not a spinoff, according to a Facebook post today from Xbox Australia.

As part of an ongoing series of reasons to buy an Xbox One in 2014, Microsoft said, "Reason #14 - The Prometheans and Covenant just won't give John-117 a break! Master Chief returns for the thrilling continuation of the Reclaimer Saga in Halo 5."

In June, former Xbox boss Don Mattrick referred to the new Halo game as Halo 5.

However, Microsoft Game Studios corporate vice president Phil Spencer declined to say if this game was Halo 5 when approached by GameSpot earlier this year. He only described the game as "legitimate."

We've reached out to Microsoft for comment on today's report, but were unable to reach a company representative at press time.

Microsoft has released only one trailer for the next Halo game, showing off Master Chief in the desert. The all-new Halo game launches in 2014 on Xbox One, following Halo: Spartan Assault, which launched for the new system just this week.

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Violett Review
Dec 31st 2013, 03:37

In ways both fantastical and familiar, Violett weaves a yarn that snakes around you and pulls you in. This point-and-click adventure shoves its surreality and challenge to the forefront, announcing its intention to lure you into its twisted world and twist your brain into knots from the get-go. As the story grows, the game's mechanics wane, touching on possibilities Violett never fully exploits. Yet where the lead character's magical abilities never wholly blossom, the journey casts its own kind of spells on you. Push past the frustrating initial moments and prepare for a lovely and unusual tale.

The basic setup is one we've all heard before. A young, rebellious teen moves away from her school and her life in the city to an old haunted house in the middle of nowhere. It's a bit hackneyed, but it works as a solid foundation for the game's real draw: a mind-bending nightmare world filled with tough puzzles and inventive visuals.

Channeling some unholy fusion between all of the great surrealist artists as well as a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll, Violett opens with the eponymous teen looking around her room for something--anything--to do. She spots a glint through a hole in the baseboard and reaches in to find herself quickly transported to a visually stunning alternate world. The story is pretty bare-bones and is almost exclusively without words, instead relying on pictures, symbols, and facial expressions to communicate. Unfortunately, while that approach helps the already stellar visual presentation, Violett's first few moments are marred by a dedication to that minimalism.

After her transportation to this alternate dimension, Violett finds herself trapped inside a cage, and you, as the player, have some small degree of control over her surroundings. At first, she can't do much besides rock her cage back and forth, by means of you clicking and dragging the mouse to and fro. Unfortunately that requires some strange timing, and it took me about 10 minutes to get the hang of it. On the flip side, that awkward motion shows up only once more at the very end of the game. Coarse first impressions aside, this first scene is fantastic as a vertical slice of everything you need to learn to progress.

This pond is more representative of the late-game stages and lacks the strangeness of earlier stages, instead looking very grounded, albeit quite somber.

Once you've rattled your cage sufficiently, you briefly grab the hands of a fairy, also imprisoned, which grants you some basic telekinetic powers. From there, you can manipulate objects throughout the room, either by simply clicking on them or by clicking and dragging them in a specific direction to achieve a specific effect. If you're trying to manipulate an object in the wrong way or at the wrong time, Violett shakes her head and mumbles disapprovingly.

Scattered around the room are a few colored orbs that you can collect by clicking on them. They are hidden, though, and very carefully disguised by the environment. These are orbs of elemental power, and they act as a constant sort of Easter-egg hunt. Often there are four or five on any given screen, but figuring out exactly where they sit is a running puzzle that helps guide you to look around the room for clues as to your next objective. With this knowledge in hand, you have all you need to move on.

Not everything in Violett's world looks like it comes from the land of nightmares...sometimes there are colorful party balloons!

From there, things start to get really strange. The first room you come to after the introductory area features a demonic-looking teapot that never takes its one eye off of you. It's distinctly unnerving, but works well to set the creepy, absurdist tone. This room also tests the lessons you learned in the first room to make sure that you've got the hang of them. From there, you find an M.C. Escher-inspired hub of sorts that leads off to several other places, and the game proper begins. This is also the toughest part of the game, since you have several rooms that you must tackle with relatively little to guide you. The strangeness of the world and the obtuse rules it follows highlight Violett's nature as an outsider to this world. You don't understand it, because she doesn't, at least not yet. Regardless, this first hub and its connected rooms amount to the first few hours of gameplay, and they are stunningly hard. While some of that difficulty continues, after you start to get a decent grasp on the world, it isn't quite as alien or as hostile.

There's an overarching theme of escapism that steadily transitions to homesickness, much in the way that Alice's trip through the rabbit hole first seems like a fun romp before becoming more and more hostile. Here, though, the first few environments are remarkably unfriendly, whereas the later ones are wistful and lonely. Because there are no words or real cutscenes to help communicate the game's message, and there's a strong implication that this is Violett's escapist fantasy, it's hard to shake the feeling that this trip through the rabbit hole is reflective of Violett's own emotional state. Helping that interpretation along is the absolutely fantastic musical score. The music changes from room to room, helping to contextualize each major location in the game. Some rooms rely on pizzicato strings to imply that Violett is in danger; others shift into G minor chords to imply sadness and loneliness.

A few orb locations are obvious, but some aren't so easy. There are quite a few in this shot alone. Can you find them all?

While the meat and potatoes of such simple games are the environments and the puzzles, Violett does have a few odd problems. First, while the colored orbs I mentioned earlier are useful in that they help encourage you to look around and closely examine the rooms, they don't have much utility beyond that. Later, Violett gains some other powers in addition to her telekinesis. It's sort of implied that the strength of those powers is related to how many orbs you've collected, but they don't change at all over time. Even if they did, those other powers are rarely used. Violett's ability to float, make plants grow, and finally encapsulate herself in a shield all seem like they'd be fantastically useful for navigating such a strange land, but they never come up in a story-critical context until the last few seconds of the game. Instead, they're used only to help collect pages of a diary left by an unknown stranger. These pages aren't critical, nor do they provide any hints to help the game along. They are entirely optional, though you often have to go to rather extreme lengths to collect them. I was left feeling that the game is unfinished, because these skills aren't used for anything interesting or vital.

Despite the oddly incomplete utilization of otherworldly psychic powers, and an insane difficulty curve, the emotional context goes a long way to helping Violett along. The steep curve is representative of Violett's own confusion, and the powers are her growing determination to escape this alternate world and return home. Violett is quiet and unassuming, but it steadily weaves a tale about childhood fears and desires with which we are all too familiar. Despite its surreal setting, it has a very personal touch that grounds it.

Halo: Spartan Assault Video Review
Dec 31st 2013, 02:46

Halo: Spartan Assault transfers adequately from mobile platforms to the Xbox One, with microtransactions in tow.

Hackers take down League of Legends, EA, and Blizzard temporarily
Dec 31st 2013, 02:03

A hacker group going by the name DERP has taken responsibility for DDoS attacks earlier today against League of Legends, EA.com, Battle.net, and other gaming sites. The downtime for each site seemed to last no more than 10-15 minutes, but the real target of the attacks, according to a post on Reddit, was a Twitch streamer going by the alias Phantom Lord.

Reddit summarizes the situation as: "A group called DERP is apparently DDoSing League of Legends NA/EU/OCE servers. They also took down Dota 2, Club Penguin, Battle.net, EA.com. They are taking down whatever game Phantoml0rd is playing (or perhaps, trying to play rolf). Most recent event is Phantoml0rd playing on OCE with stream fans and they took it down. On behalf of the League of Legends situation, it seems like they are directly attacking Internap network, Riot's service provider."

According to his Twitch channel, PhantomLord is a "professional streamer" with over 350,000 followers. PhantomLord's stream is currently down, but according to his Facebook and Twitch chat, police were called to his home in response to a "hostage situation." PhantomLord wrote, "Just had an automatic pointed at me, put in hand cuffs, and sat in the back of a cop car as I watched as 6 policemen go through my whole house." He later posted that the situation had stabilized: "I'm good guys. More updates soon, promise."

The previously affected sites are all currently online and functioning normally, but we'll update this story with new details as they develop.

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luni, 30 decembrie 2013

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The Last of Us on PS4? "We'll see" says Naughty Dog
Dec 30th 2013, 20:31

Could Naughty Dog's acclaimed post-apocalyptic action game The Last of Us come to the PlayStation 4 some day? "We'll see" is the message Naughty Dog told a fan who asked that very question on the PlayStation Blog recently.

"We're just getting our Naughty Dog engine up and running on PS4 as we work on the next Uncharted project," Naughty Dog community strategist Eric Monacelli said. "We will see what the future brings! :)"

This response is more hopeful than the one Monacelli provided in October, when he bluntly stated that Naughty Dog has "no plans" to bring The Last of Us to PS4.

The Last of Us launched exclusively for the PlayStation 3 in June 2013 to widespread acclaim, and it was our 2013 PS3 Game of the Year selection. The game has shipped over 3.4 million copies.

Naughty Dog has at least two internal development teams, though the company's only confirmed project--outside of new DLC for The Last of Us-- is the new Uncharted game for PS4. Monacelli said gamers can expect a "full reveal" of the game sometime in 2014.

MXGP: The Official Motocross Videogame - Riders Video Interview
Dec 30th 2013, 20:10

Take a look at this riders interview for MXGP.

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Porn discovered on 3DS purchased as Christmas present for 8-year-old
Dec 29th 2013, 12:31

One child made a surprising discovery Christmas morning. After snapping some images with a 3DS he received on Christmas, Tom Mayhew's 8-year-old son found various pornographic images saved on the system, WAVY News 10 reports.

"He went to play his games, not knowing anything was on it," Mayhew said. "After a while, [the kids] took pictures of themselves and when the picture was taken it went to a file."

When Mayhew's son opened the image files, he found a dozen pictures were already there--pictures he was not meant to see.

"It was a shocker because we had family here, and there were a lot of kids here," Mayhew said. "The kids were the ones that discovered those pictures."

"There is no reason for them to be even really on there," he added. "It's disgusting for one. It seems that this was the only thing left on it."

Mayhew purchased the 3DS at a Wal-Mart in Hampton, Virginia and said the images were time-stamped for early December. However, he bought the 3DS on December 23, so the portable was likely purchased and then returned without Wal-Mart wiping the system of user data.

This is not the first time a porn-filled 3DS has been sold to a unknowing consumer. Last year, GameStop sold a refurbished system containing sexual images to a Colorado man, who gifted the portable to his five-year-old son.

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duminică, 29 decembrie 2013

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Report: China bans Battlefield 4, calls it threat to national security
Dec 28th 2013, 12:20

The Chinese government has banned Electronic Arts' military FPS Battlefield 4 because it contains content that threatens national security, the country's Ministry of Culture has said.

The Wall Street Journal points out that this decision is not likely to negatively impact EA's business because the publisher doesn't sell Battlefield 4 in China.

The ban comes after the release of downloadable expansion China Rising, which features four multiplayer maps on the Chinese mainland.

An official copy of the Ministry's announcement is not yet available and an EA representative declined to comment on the story.

Last week, a Chinese newspaper accused Battlefield 4 of "discrediting China's image" and "distorting the truth in an effort to mislead young people."

China lifted its 13-year console ban in September with the creation of a new free-trade zone in Shanghai.

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sâmbătă, 28 decembrie 2013

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18 Life Lessons Taught By Video Games

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The 9 Most Annoying Kinds In Gaming

You play games to ESCAPE from snot nosed kids
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Gaming's Craziest Cults

Gain admission into heaven... for a monthly fee
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Gaming's Coolest Convicts

Crime doesn't pay, unless you're these guys
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Famous Game Devs Before They Were Famous

They were the guys you knew getting shoved into lockers
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