Gone Home is coming to consoles this year

Posted on March 10, 2014 by John Scalzo

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The Fullbright Company has announced (via their blog) that they plan to bring Gone Home to consoles this year. The console edition of Gone Home will be published by Majesco’s indie imprint, Midnight City.

Gone Home is an adventure game told from the first-person perspective of Kaitlin Greenbriar, who has returned to her Oregon home and found it deserted. As Kaitlin explores the empty house, players attempt to piece together what happened to the rest of the Greenbriar family.

Gone Home was one of 2013’s most critically celebrated titles, garnering multiple nominations from the the DICE Awards, GDC Awards, and the BAFTAs. Fullbright was not ready to announce a release date or possible platforms for the console port, but they’ve confirmed that more information will be available soon.

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Marvel is creating a connected universe of games too

Posted on March 10, 2014 by John Scalzo

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Ladies and gentlemen, time to light your cigars, the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” is about to get a baby brother. Speaking at this weekend’s SXSW Festival, Marvel’s Vice President of Games, TQ Jefferson, revealed that the company is working on linking all of their video game projects through a similar shared universe:

“You might have noticed that certain similarities and threads touch from one game to the next. Much like you see in publishing and film, we’re trying to build a gaming universe connected by common elements and narrative into a larger gaming initiative.”

Obviously, this new gaming initiative is still in the early going as the publishing rights to several recent games based on Marvel properties, including Deadpool, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Lego Marvel Super Heroes, were licensed to outside companies. However, Marvel has shown great interest in expanding and updating Marvel: Avengers Alliance, a free-to-play title for mobile devices that tied in with the Avengers film. Perhaps that will be the seed from which their connected gaming universe will grow.

The future of Marvel’s game development ambitions may lie with their parent company, the Walt Disney Company. But Disney, and their Disney Interactive division, hasn’t had much success in developing games in-house. Disney Infinity sold like gangbusters, but the company passed on developing new Star Wars games and doesn’t appear to have any new titles in the works aside from Disney Infinity 2.

[Source: Variety]

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Weekly Warp-Up: Time Is On My Side Edition

Posted on March 9, 2014 by John Scalzo

No, that’s not a typo. Welcome to the Weekly Warp-Up, your weekly wrap-up of the biggest and the best articles posted at Warp Zoned this week…

The clock is ticking ever so slowly away from Winter, but things sped up last night as we’ve sprung forward thanks to Daylights Savings Time. Even though time has skipped a beat, or an hour, you can still skip backwards and check out What We Played in February. When we weren’t playing, we managed to put together our very first Monthly Recap video as well. Hopefully, this is the first of a lot more video content to come from the Warp Zoned stuff. Oh, and for all you forward-thinkers out there, we also put together a look at The Games of March.

Speaking of lost time, Dan Hobbs recently reviewed Eidos Montreal’s Thief reboot and he wants the developers to return all the time they took from him. Finally, I dug into a few beloved puzzle games (including Threes, Dr. Mario, and Tetris) and asked why they’re so beloved. The secret is A Playing Card With Fangs or “How Puzzle Games Use Characters to Get in Our Heads.”

More news from the week that was can be found after the break.

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New Releases: TitanFall, Dark Souls II, Yoshi’s New Island, More

Posted on March 9, 2014 by John Scalzo

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It’s finally here. After a boatload of E3 awards and a hugely successful beta, Respawn’s TitanFall is ready to bring man versus mech multiplayer to the PC and Xbox One this week. And if you haven’t picked up an Xbox One console yet, don’t forget that the Xbox One + TitanFall Bundle will also be available on Tuesday.

If you haven’t upgraded to a next-generation system yet, you’ll probably be pleased to know that From Software will bring Dark Souls II to the PS3 and Xbox 360 next week. If you’re waiting on the PC version, it’ll be available at the end of April.

Finally, Nintendo will make the 3DS a Yoshi-er place this week with the release of Yoshi’s New Island and Tecmo Koei will continue the popular Atelier with the release of Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky on the PS3.

A full list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break.

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Posted in 3DS, News, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Tagged , ,

Tales From the Borderlands will tell a two-sided Rashomon-style tale

Posted on March 8, 2014 by John Scalzo

TalesFromTheBorderlands_Panel_SXSWMarge: You liked Rashomon.
Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

Developers from Telltale Games and Gearbox Software took the stage at the SXSW Festival today to talk about their upcoming collaboration, Tales From the Borderlands. During the talk, the developers revealed that the game will feature a two-sided narrative that will be told in flashback by the two main characters. Fiona, the Carmen Sandiego-like woman in red, is a con artist and Rhys, the cybernetically-enhanced dude with her, will be broody and cybernetically enhanced. Together, they’ll weave a story about their time on Pandora that won’t quite match up with the other’s retelling or with reality. The storytelling conceit, which was borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, has been used many times over the years including the Simpsons quote above and my favorite episode of The X-Files ever (season four’s “Bad Blood”).

Tales From the Borderlands is said to be funnier than Telltale’s more recent output (it definitely won’t be like the typically dour The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us) and will feature the franchise’s signature brand of humor. There will also be some shooting sections to the game, but according to Telltale’s Harrison Pink, they’ll be controlled “in a Telltale kind of way.”

Even with all this new information, the developers did not reeval any gameplay video and we still don’t know when Tales From the Borderlands will be released or what platforms it’ll appear on.

[Source: Polygon]

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Sony is bringing The Last of Us to a movie theater near you

Posted on March 8, 2014 by John Scalzo

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Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures, has revealed (via Deadline) that they will distribute a film adaptation of one of 2013’s best-loved games: The Last of Us. The company will partner with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to produce the film and they have given huge amounts of creative control to Naughty Dog, the development team behind the game. Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells, Christophe Balestra, and Bruce Straley will serve as “creative architects” on the film along with Creative Director Neil Druckmann, who will also write the screenplay.

Casting for The Last of Us will be crucial to the film’s success as fans have fallen in love with Joel and Ellie and the actors who provide their voices (Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, respectively). It’s unlikely that they’ll reprise their roles in the film as Baker has never acted in a live-action production before and Johnson is more than a decade older than the teenage Ellie. Ellen Page, who turned 27 a few weeks ago and bears more than a passing resemblence to Ellie, is likely also too old to portray the teenager.

A search for a director has also begun and Raimi would seemingly be a perfect fit, though its unknown if he’ll have anything to do with the film besides offering his services as a producer. Plus, he’s got Army of Darkness 2 currently in development.

In recent years, Screen Gems is probably best known as the studio behind the Resident Evil film series, so they’re certainly familiar with adapting beloved game franchises.

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A Playing Card With Fangs: How Puzzle Games Use Characters to Get in Our Heads

Posted on March 7, 2014 by John Scalzo

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An edited and updated version of this article is now available at Video Game Canon.

As video games begin to resemble film and television productions more and more with each passing generation, it’s interesting to observe that puzzle games remain a vibrant genre. Puzzle games burst onto the scene at the very beginning, back when gaming was nothing more than a handful of pixels projected onto an old television. While everyone in the “real world” was attempting to master a Rubik’s Cube in as few moves as possible, gamers were tackling the line destruction of Breakout and the line construction Tetris. However, without realizing it, the puzzle genre became just as story-driven as everything else the game industry produces today.

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Posted in Features, Mobile, Top Story | Tagged ,

Daily Scoop: March 7, 2014 – Friday at last!

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Nicole Kline

Hello there, gamers! I bet you’re excited for the weekend to start. What will you be playing over the next few days? There are so many great games coming out over the next few weeks that it seems like everyone’s scrambling to wrap up the games they already started. I’m really looking forward to TowerFall Ascension, which absolutely everyone on the planet needs to buy on Tuesday. Seriously. Buy that.

Let’s talk about deals! Over at Steam, they’ve got a new Daily Deal that went live today. It’s Resident Evil Revelations, and it’s a whopping 75% off, marking it down to $12.49.

Other than that, there are a few more sales over at the Humble Store. You can grab Commandos Collection for $3.24, as well as Kings Bounty: Warriors of the North for $12.49.

As always, let’s wrap this up with some great t-shirts!

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Posted in Daily Scoop, Etcetera, News |