Most Recent: PC

Conan O’Brien and PewDiePie tame a badger in Far Cry: Primal

Professional Let’s Player and Swedish man PewDiePie joined Conan O’Brien last night to play Ubisoft’s Far Cry: Primal in the most recent “Clueless Gamer” segment. Prepare for the game yourself by time-traveling back to 10,000 BC with the guys, and see their adventures with giant woolly mammoths, rogue corpse-mutilating badgers, and mostly unsuccessful club-throwing and owl-being.

Far Cry: Primal was released yesterday and new episodes of Scare PewDiePie are currently being released every Wednesday on YouTube Red.

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Kickstart This! Need to Know, Essence: The Resurrection, A Place for the Unwilling

I’ve survived Chinese New Year and a solitary Valentine’s Day (because my other half is currently in China), so I decided to spread the love further than one day by highlighting some of the fantastic games currently vying for funds on Kickstarter. And for the price of a romantic gourmet burger, you could help finance a cool game that you actually get to play. Thankfully, not all the projects I picked are lovey-dovey.

We start things off with the mass-surveillance thriller Need to Know from Monomyth Games. Next, there is the surreal first-person exploration adventure Essence: The Resurrection by ONEVISION. Finally, we have an interesting isometric sandbox sim called A Place for the Unwilling by MadeInSpain Games. (more…)

Posted in Features, PC, PS4, Top Story, Xbox One |

Crowdfunding campaign for Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch launches on Fig

Snootchie bootchies… Kevin Smith is making a video game! The Clerks director has teamed up with Interabang Entertainment to develop Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch, a 2.5D beat ’em up about a cursed mall. With an art style inspired by Clerks: The Animated Series, Chronic Blunt Punch might just be the Askewniverse game adaptation we’ve been waiting for:

Jay and Silent Bob’s customers are gone and they’re on a mission to find out why. Their search soon leads them to the sparkling new mega-mall which is almost a city unto itself complete with apartments, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. On the surface, the mall seems a Utopia. But as our heroes soon discover once a would-be patron of this paradise enters they find they can’t make their way out. Before long the power of the place mesmerizes them and they no longer remember their lives before becoming permanent citizens of The Galleria. Who’s responsible for this diabolical labyrinth?! What do they want?! Will Jay and Silent Bob ever find the Orange Julius?! Only time will tell…

Interabang has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Chronic Blunt Punch through Fig, and the developer is seeking $400,000 by March 31. Like Fig’s previous crowdfunding success story, Pyschonauts 2, prospective backers will be able to pledge money through a variety of reward tiers or invest in the final product and receive some of the profit back further down the line. As of this writing, the campaign has amassed $25,000 in pledges and investments.

In addition to “voicing” Silent Bob, Smith will serve as a consultant on the game to ensure it captures his signature vulgar streak. He’ll be joined in the recording booth by his hetero life mate, Jason Mewes, who will provide Jay’s unmistakable voice. Players will be able to team-up in a two-player co-op mode and they’ll also be able to use their words to drive the story in new directions with the Convo Combo Combat mechanic. According to Interabang, the mechanic “changes the dynamics of enemy showdowns through cutting insults combined with an intricate facial animation system that bonds dynamic fighting with timed phrase matching.”

If Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch reaches its crowdfunding goal, the plan is to release it for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One in February 2018.

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Bethesda will add official mod support to Fallout 4 (on PC) in April; Console release to lag one-two months behind

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Bethesda’s Todd Howard is a very busy man. But the company’s Studio Director found the time to sit down for a discussion with Game Informer recently, where he revealed that official mod support for the PC version of Fallout 4, AKA the Creation Kit, will be available in April. Howard also confirmed that PS4 and Xbox One owners will get a chance to play with Fallout 4’s mod tools, but they likely won’t be ready until May or June:

Game Informer: When can we expect to see mods, especially on console side?

Howard: Our goal is between the first two DLCs. It’ll go up at that time on PC. In April. All of that stuff will go up on PC. People are beta testing it. There’ll be a lag on consoles. We want to get it up on PC and have it work. It’ll probably be a good month before it hits Xbox One, and another month for PlayStation 4.

Howard was a huge presence at last week’s DICE Awards, when he trudged to the stage on Thursday to collect “Game of the Year” honors for Fallout 4. That same day, he also had a conversation with comedian Pete Holmes and told the audience that Bethesda is currently working on three unannounced projects that are, in his words, “big and crazy.”

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Tom Clancy’s The Division Beta Impressions: Fear and Loathing in New York City

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After watching Ubisoft’s E3 2015 playthrough last year, I started up the weekend-long beta for Tom Clancy’s The Division with some vague memories of a very traditional looking third-person shooter with an online mode designed to encourage uneasy alliances. Now that I have played The Division, I can confirm that it does indeed play like most other third-person shooters, and yes, it looks about as uninspiring as most of them, too. Fortunately, The Division’s hook, “The Dark Zone,” does occasionally deliver great, tense moments in which you’ll be wondering which member of your hastily-assembled team is going to try to kill everyone and make off with the loot. And who knows? Sometimes, it might even be you. (more…)

Posted in PC, Previews, PS4, Top Story, Xbox One | Tagged

Check out the first trailer for The Arbiter in Killer Instinct Season 3

Killer Instinct Season 3 will kick off on the Xbox One and PC next month, but the upcoming addition of franchise mainstays Kim Wu, Tusk, and Gargos might be overshadowed by a pair of previously-confirmed guest characters.

Microsoft and Iron Galaxy unveiled Rash (of Battletoads fame) last year, and now we’ve been given our first look at The Arbiter’s Killer Instinct debut. Unfortunately, it sounds like Keith David won’t step up to the microphone for the character in Killer Instinct Season 3.

Iron Galaxy usually requires two-to-three months of development time to bring each new character to Killer Instinct, so it might be a while before we get to play as The Arbiter. Though you never know, the team might break with tradition and release the entire character set for Season 3 all in one fell swoop. Probably not, but I can dream, right?

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New Releases: Far Cry Primal, PvZ Garden Warfare 2, Mega Man Legacy Collection, More

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A trip back to the Stone Age, anthropomorphic plants with guns, and a compilation of some of the greatest platformers ever sit atop this week’s new release roundup.

Publishers are easily swayed by trends and it’s not hard to slot many of the most popular shooters of the last 15 years into three well-defined eras. After Medal of Honor, everyone rushed to produce a shooter set during World World II. After Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the hardware and tactics of the modern military became the focus. And after Deus Ex: Human Revolution, many shooters have seen shifted to the “not-so-distant future.”

But Ubisoft wants to go back… even further back than the European Theater. And that’s why Far Cry: Primal (PS4, Xbox One) features a battle between warring tribes of Stone Age warriors. Trading machine guns and laser rifles for stone knives and spears, Far Cry: Primal also lets players train a prehistoric tiger to do their dirty work for them.

And on the subject of bizarre shooters, EA and PopCap Games are back this week with another entry in the Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare saga. Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) is a time-hopping trip that also adds back in the single-player modes that its predecessor was lacking.

Finally this week, Capcom brought together the first six Mega Man games for the retail release of the Mega Man Legacy Collection (3DS, PS4, Xbox One). If you didn’t play it last year, you should definitely stop putting it off.

A complete list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break. (more…)

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Fallout 4 wins “Game of the Year” at 2016 DICE Awards

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The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences held their annual DICE Awards ceremony last night, and Bethesda’s Fallout 4 emerged from The Vault to take home “Game of the Year” honors. The expansive open world RPG also won in two other categories, “Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year” and “Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction.” However, it wasn’t a sweep for the post-apocalyptic adventure.

A trio of other games took home three awards last night including Moon Studios’s Ori and the Blind Forest (“Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition,” “Outstanding Achievement in Animation,” and “Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction”), Psyonix’s Rocket League (“Sports Game of the Year,” “Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay,” and the “DICE Spirit Award”), and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (“Outstanding Achievement in Game Design,” “Outstanding Achievement in Story,” and “Outstanding Technical Achievement”).

While the ceremony featured plenty of revelry and merriment, last night’s DICE Awards were also a bittersweet affair as Satoru Iwata was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for his distinguished business leadership of Nintendo. And Hideo Kojima, who recently parted ways with Konami after more than three decades with the company, was named to the AIAS’s Hall of Fame.

A complete list of this year’s winners (which also includes Super Mario Maker, Mortal Kombat X, Star Wars: Battlefront, and many more) can be found after the break. (more…)

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