#but xbox???? never saw it co- [gets shot]

[235uranium]

genuinely the announcement of the p5r switch port was insane. it'd been a running joke for years that atlus would never release main persona titles on a nintendo console and then...

[shadowredfeline]

Four in One Post

For the Trade i ask.

It's really Sweet to see these OC Couples fighting off the dinosaurs. Since I have remembered my dad played the first and the second on the Nintendo 64, what i don't like was the Lefty controls in the Nintendo 64 version. But since i just ordered the Trilogy on the Switch, the controls are much since the controls are just right. But i'm sure both the other Multiplatform versions like Xbox and PC would be something for both you and our A-Pal to try. And ever since i saw Deev played the PC version during his live stream, and they're really funny. And i was lucky i did made a birthday drawing about that for him and include Sam, Jo and Luna to tag along with him. But i'm sure Luna might try it as well, but i don't think she might be into that, even if she's always into Magical Girl Anime and Nintendo and Sanrio as well as for Cartoon Stuff. But let's hope Shadow, Lisa, Spot and Vanilla will survive by hunting Dinosaurs as well as for Hunters that look similar to the Cartoon Network characters or even people in Bikini Bottom.

Shadow R 😺🗡️: Alright, we'll take out the dinosaurs and hunters whenever we see them!

Lisa 😺❤️⚡️: Right! I know this is my first time experience this game ever since you, your dad and Deev played this game.

Shadow R 😺🗡️: Yes, and Thanks to Spot and Vanilla helping us, we'll be sure to hunt anyone who gets in our way.

Lisa 😺❤️⚡️: Totally!

For Two Responses

First Response on our A-Pal's Pic.

I would ask the same thing because Sanzaru and Sucker Punch have not been doing anything Sly Cooper Related for so long. I mean i know Sly Cooper Thieves in Time was good, but it's been over like 11 years good, and it's time we could go for another one. And it's too bad they didn't release their movie after the Ratchet and Clank movie got terrible ratings, if Sony Pictures were to still produce the movie or show with PlayStation Productions, that would be really nice. I know they did well with the two PlayStation movies, Uncharted and Gran Turismo. And Last of Us which is just a TV Series which we're okay with. Also, i didn't know Sucker Punch worked on the Ghost Series. Not only they made that and Sly Cooper, but my brother and i also played another title called Infamous which the game is quite good. We've played the second and maybe the first one. But i would love to try Second Son even though it's just an okay game on the PlayStation 4. But i should give the Ghosts Series a shot if i have enough dough of me playing any of the PlayStation 5 title.

Second Response on Christmas and my trip with my Social Club.

It's kinda bizarre that a lot of people in my country have been setting up a lot of Christmas stuff this week. Since i know Thanksgiving is only about 6 days away, and afterwards, my family and i would put our autumn and Thanksgiving stuff away and get the Christmas stuff out. And while i start the Christmas exchange with you and our other friends, i have to focus on making a birthday drawing for Luna since her birthday is 10 days before Christmas. And yeah, we do have Whataburger in my state, AZ, I only have like 20 of them. And i'm not sure if other states have them. I know Texas does, but i would refer getting some in Arizona. They have the best ketchup, they have the best milkshakes, they have delicious food as well, and they have the best breakfast there is. And my mom loves having their food, their shakes and their breakfast, and i'm sure my mom enjoys having their pancakes even she got pregnant with me. Plus, i'm sure the Speedsters and the Rabbits would love to try some as well.

And Message from Debby and Paul.

Debby 😺📱🖥️: Mmmmm I just love their pancakes. They're so good. I hope you'll like some Rita. They taste good as well as for other breakfast food at Whataburger. Even Windy might love these too. My Husband had some as well as for other Breakfast options as well. But i hope you and Windy will both love it. Same with their fries and Ketchup.

Paul 😺⚔️⚒️: Well, i do like their breakfast too. Their Taquitos and Sandwiches are really good. Same with some of their lunch and dinner meals. And for Bonn and Scottie, i hope you both like the Taquitos, they got some in hash brown sticks, sausages, and Bacon too. And Scottie, if you and your wife are not into eating meat, there's always the Pancakes platters and Egg Sandwiches and Biscuits you both can have. Even Sam will love them too. Plus, the Cinnamonrolls are good too. I know Debby and i never had them, but i know they're really delicious alongside the Hash Brown sticks.

Debby 😺📱🖥️: And for Lunch and Dinner, there's always Burgers and Chicken tenders and Whatawings. Plus, their onion rings and fries are good too. But i hope you four will like them. As well as for their desserts and salads too.

Thank you, Debby and Paul. And now let's get onto our Filipino Friend's on This Day Post.

It looks nice seeing Murukir looking at the sunset. And yeah, i have used Microsoft Paint so many times from different Windows systems, until i got tired of using it. And lucky for me, i do have Medibang Paint as well as for Colors Live. But with Medibang Paint, i'm also going to test out some of the shapes as a test shot for one of my upcoming drawings. But it'll take a lot of practice getting use with Medibang Paint's shapes compared to using the shapes with Microsoft Paint. Maybe i might keep on with the improvements when drawing with Medibang Paint on my computer, IPad and Cellphone. But i hope with the sunset, let's hope the OC Couples would enjoy seeing the sunset. Even as themselves or as mermaids. Plus, i'm sure they could enjoy hula dancing while the sun is setting.

Also, i do like listening to Lo-Fi Music as well as for some ASMR and Calm Video Game Music anytime i want to relax. Same goes for listening to relaxing music on the beach.

[mychemicalrachel]

Right Here

Takes place right after Eddie Begins. After narrowly avoiding death and being buried alive, Eddie has a question for Buck.

Word count; 1776

Read it on Ao3!

He can���t sleep.

Even if he could, he’s not sure he would want to.

Everytime he closes his eyes, he sees Eddie; covered in mud, buried in the sodden earth, alone and scared. He sees himself digging, screaming, trying to reach him. Trying to let him know he wasn’t alone, that Buck was right there, that he’d always been right there.

If the memories are hitting him this hard while he’s awake, Buck knows that sleep is a long way off. He makes himself some tea and settles into the couch, preparing for a long night.

He flips through channels and turns on the Xbox, only to turn it off again a few minutes later. He scrolls aimlessly through Netflix and starts shows he can’t focus enough attention on, then starts the whole searching process over, trying to find something else to watch. Something to occupy his mind so he isn’t thinking so damn much.

It’s not until a knock sounds for the second time that it earns Buck’s attention. A brief, fleeting acknowledgement; someone is here. And just as quickly, it’s dismissed; someone is here and if he ignores them, they’ll go away. He settles back, sips his tea, and starts another show.

He’s almost forgotten it completely when the door opens, and that sound warrants a lot more attention than just a knock. He tries to remember coming home; He’s fairly certain he locked the door. Even in his mechanical state, it’s habit. And that means that whoever is here has a key.

He waits, head inclined toward the entrance.

“Buck?”

He blinks. “Eddie?” Buck is on his feet before Eddie even rounds the corner. At first he thinks he must be imagining it-- maybe he fell asleep after all and this is just a dream. But Eddie hesitates in the entryway and the pause gives Buck enough clarity of mind to realize it’s not a dream.

“What are you doing here?” Buck demands. He starts forward just as Eddie does, and they both freeze again. “Come in here. Sit down. What are you doing here?” he asks again. He shoves the remote and Xbox controller off onto the floor and ushers Eddie to take a seat on the couch. “You should be resting. You look like hell.”

Eddie grimaces, but laughs nonetheless. “You should talk. Did I wake you up?”

Buck shakes his head. “Can’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

After the tsunami, Buck recalls a lot of nightmares. He remembers waking up in a cold sweat, shouting Christopher’s name. There were nights and days he spent awake, replaying the moment in his mind, telling Eddie that he’d lost his son.

He can’t even begin to imagine the sort of nightmares Eddie is fighting right now.

“You should be resting, at least.”

“I’m fine,” Eddie says, but he shifts uneasily on the couch. He’s turned to face Buck, one leg pulled up under him, hands splayed on his knees like he’s bracing for impact.

“You were buried alive,” Buck reminds him.

“I remember,” Eddie says. “And I am fine, Buck. Physically. But… That’s kind of why I’m here.” He takes a breath and Buck feels it, too; that moment of impact, bracing for a collision. He waits for whatever it is Eddie might say.

Silence passes in waves, each second another tsunami hitting Buck again and again. He wants to press for more, but he’s afraid of pushing Eddie too far, pushing him away. He stays quiet.

Eventually Eddie swallows, the knot in his throat bobbing along as he speaks. “Back when I was in Afghanistan, there was an attack. They shot down the helicopter. There was fire and sand everywhere, I was choking on it. And I was trying to save everyone, but I got shot. I was bleeding and I was just thinking about….about everything. About my life.”

He sniffles, wiping a hand across his nose. Buck watches a tear splatter on his jeans, but doesn’t say a word.

“I was so scared,” Eddie admits with trembling lips. “That was the only time really that I thought I might die over there.”

Buck’s brow creases. A few times, in the almost two years that Buck had known him, Eddie talked about serving. Mostly it was about the friends, the family, he had while he was over there. But he’d never heard this story. He wonders why he’s hearing it now, of all times, but he knows Eddie needs to get this out in order to say whatever it is he came here to say.

“I had this picture of Christopher and Shannon. It was taken on his fifth birthday. They were smiling, and Cristopher looked so happy. I knew…” Eddie pauses, breathing, to swipe a finger across his lower lip. “I knew that they had each other. If anything happened, if I didn’t come home, I knew that they would be okay because they had each other.”

“But you didn’t die,” Buck says, because he has to say something. He feels the urgency swell to remind both himself and Eddie of this, that he is alive, he’s okay, that he’s here. “You made it home for them.”

Eddie nods. “I knew being a firefighter was dangerous, but last night…”

He trails off and for a long time Buck thinks maybe he won’t even finish. That’s the end of the story, the conversation is over. But Eddie sits up straighter, a look of resolve hardening his features when he finally meets Buck’s eyes. “Last night, I really thought I wouldn’t get out of there. I thought I was gonna die, Buck.”

“What are you saying, Eddie?” Buck asks, because he hates the way this sounds. It was the tone of voice Maddie had used when she explained that she was moving away with Doug. The voice Abby had used before she boarded a plane and never looked back. It was the sound of someone leaving, of being left behind, and Buck was all too familiar with that sound.

The idea of losing Eddie, too…

He saw himself once again, with dirt under his fingernails as he fought to dig Eddie out. 

“Before,” Eddie said, stressing each word, willing Buck to understand, “if anything happened to me, Shannon was there. But she’s dead. I am all Christopher has left. If something happened-- if I hadn’t gotten out of there last night--”

“But you did,” Buck tells him.

Eddie huffs in exasperation. “Will you be quiet for two minutes, Buck? I’m trying to ask you something.”

“It sounds like you’re breaking up with me,” Buck says. And he knows how ridiculous it sounds. It feels ridiculous. There’s nothing between them, nothing tangible at least. Nothing to break but a friendship and a co-workmanship. Unless… 

“Are you quitting? Because you can’t do that, Eddie. Even Bobby won’t accept a resignation right now. You’re under a lot of stress--”

“Dammit, Buck,” Eddie exclaims. “I’m not resigning. I’m trying to ask you to be Christopher’s godfather!”

The words hang heavy between them and Buck runs them through his head again, then a third time to make sure he’s heard them right. When he’s certain he has, he asks, “What?”

Eddie sighs. “Christopher loves you. You’re my best friend. I told you before, Buck, I trust you more than anyone in the world to take care of him, and I meant that.

“That was for babysitting!” Buck shouts. “For taking care of him for a few hours. Not raising him!”

“Look,” Eddie laughs, and Buck immediately feels some of the tension leave his body. “You don’t have to answer right now. And even if you say yes, it’s not like I’m expecting to drop dead tomorrow. It’s just a what if.”

“Pretty morbid what if.”

Eddie tilts his head, studying Buck. “When you became a firefighter, did you draw up a will?”

Buck thinks for a second. “Yeah,” he admits. But it was nothing super serious. It was a formality. A distant safety net for if anything ever happened on the job. But Buck didn’t have anything of value anyway, he just left everything to Maddie; a sick sort of joke that she would deal with all of his baggage, emotional and otherwise, even after he was dead and gone. But this…

This is Eddie asking him to be Christopher’s godfather. His legal guardian if anything should happen to Eddie.

This was very much real.

“You can’t put a kid in a will, Buck,” Eddie says. The force of the words are lessened with a shrug. “This is just my way of making sure Chris is taken care of. If anything ever happens.”

“What about your parents?” Buck asks, and immediately knows he hit a sore spot when Eddie grimaces.

“They love him,” Eddie concedes. “But there’s a reason we left Texas.”

“But--” Buck gapes. “Why not Bobby and Athena? Or Hen? They have actual kids, Eddie. I don’t know the first thing about being a parent. Why me?”

Eddie watches him, his gaze soft and open when he smiles. “You love him, probably as much as I do. The rest you figure out as you go. You think I had any idea what I was doing at first?”

“You had years of practice,” Buck says.

Eddie nods. “And hopefully I’ll have a lot more years left. But if I don’t--”

“Are you sure about this?”

“One hundred percent, Buck.” Eddie leans forward, his hand coming to rest on Buck’s. It’s warm in a way Buck doesn’t look at too closely-- he just allows himself to enjoy it. “I trust you.”

“Yeah,” he says, and then nods with more determination. “Yeah, Eddie. Of course. You know I’d do anything for you and Chris.”

Eddie squeezes his hand once more, but doesn’t pull away. He leaves them there, their hands tangled on Buck’s knee. He grins, “That’s how I know I’m making the right choice. Now scoot over,” he shoves at Buck, kicking his shoes off onto the floor and pulling his legs up onto the couch. “You were right about needing rest. What are you watching?”

Buck lets himself be manhandled into a comfortable position before restarting the show he had picked, but they don’t make it past the opening credits before he hears Eddie snoring peacefully on his shoulder.

He glances down, watching Eddie’s chest rise and fall. He counts the breaths and lets his own breathing fall into the same rhythm. It makes it all the more real, like they’re sharing one set of lungs. He finally falls asleep knowing that Eddie is alive, that he’s safe. That he’s right here, exactly where he’s supposed to be.

[audiogrizzly]

Top 5 Games of 2019

It was a little tricky to construct a top 5 for this year, though there have been a couple of surprises.  I wasn’t expecting the year to be a bit crap as we are no w on the cusp once more of a new generation.  But 2012 wasn’t all that bad of a year (PS4 and Xbox One would release in 2013) and at the moment, everyone is doing alright.  PS4 has sold through over 100 million systems, Nintendo are definitely on an “on” generation with Switch, Xbox has been able to get back into peoples good books with things like Game Pass (on both Console and PC, their PC side they seem to really be turning around), there’s even interesting things happening in the mobile space with Apple Arcade.

This won’t be the last year where my top 5 games are full of current gen titles, I am expecting the new systems to drop in around November, last time it was hard to find a top 5 specific to PS4 (as I listed each platform separately back then).  It IS however, another list of mostly AAA tier games.  If you want to know what smaller more “interesting” games I have been playing, check out my honourable mentions at the end.

Also, follow me on Melee.  It’s this new image blogging service from Imgur which you can download now on the IOS App Store (its just on iPhone at the moment) and it has seemingly been built to help people share gaming related clips and images off of places like Twitter and Instagram (and err, here on Tumblr).  I posted a couple of daft clips of me failing in Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 and it didn’t take long for them to amass a few likes and comments.

That sounded like a sponsored advert but ain’t nobody paying me for this.  Let’s get into my top 5

5. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

I was about to select Gears 5 to be my number 5 until I saw sense and cast my memory back to when I started playing Jedi (all the way back in November.  I was impressed by its intense action, impressive visuals and great characters.  I especially enjoyed the 4 armed pilot who always complains.  I did feel that towards the end I got sick of managing large groups of enemies so I dropped the difficulty to get through it, but I still haven’t achieved 100% of activities on all planets so I can still go back to it one day.

4. Borderlands 3

We all knew this was coming but not even I had any idea that we would have been actually playing it in 2019 way back at the start of the year.  For me, I look at the game.  I don’t care about weird magicians or their insane sounding legal woes, all I’m interested in is the work of a team who deserved better for their last title, but am still glad returned to what they do best, looting and shooting.  I enjoyed rejoining these characters I have followed over the last 10 years, all the referenced to older games, cameos from characters from Tales From the Borderlands and The Pre Sequel and was sad to see some people go.  I still have about a year of extra content to go through and I really appreciate the efforts they have made to make the game last longer than just one playthrough through in the Proving Grounds, Circle of Slaughter and Mayhem modes.  Though I have always tended to stick to Borderlands games and create builds for each and every vault hunter, so I will be doing that.

3. Mortal Kombat 11

It’s been a while since I last put a fighting game into my end of year round up.  And I HAVE fallen off MK11 a little bit, but this entry reminded me of how impressive it is for Nether Realms to pack their fighting games with some many things to do and keep people playing outside of just going into matchmaking and fighting others.  The Vault this year is basically another little adventure full of exploration and puzzle solving and the Towers of Time give you plenty of challenge and direction of many months to come.  You also have to give the developer credit for never backing down on the brutality of the game, they must have all got their heads together after DC Universe vs. and vowed never again to make watered down versions of Fatalities.  It is a game that keeps getting better and better.

2. Call of Duty Modern Warfare

I was debating whether or not to include this years CoD.  I always get the same type of enjoyment out of it each year, people complain that it never changes but I’m glad it sticks to a formula.  Of course they are not identikit games, there are new maps, new modes, new ways of building your loadout and new touches, like how in this year you can snap to edges to stay in cover while you shoot, there’s the new special equipment system where you can drop ammo or reduce your footstep noise.  Having doors you can either peek through or smash open adds another level of strategy, there have been times where I have been able to escape being under fire by closing a door, re-positioning and then wasting whoever just wanders in.

The campaign this year, good to see it back, but whatever, the co-op mode is Spec Ops again, like it was back in MW2 and 3 but on a much larger scale, I have yet to complete one of these btw.  But as always, it’s the multiplayer that does it for me and Modern Warfare deserves credit for being what must be the first AAA game to feature cross platform play, not just launch with it.  I know that games like Fortnite are popular, but I don’t see that as a AAA title, it doesn’t have the full package, it’s just a mode and it started off small.  Call of Duty is expected to be big each year, has a lot riding on it and allowing for cross play is a big step.  I especially appreciate being able to play with a keyboard and mouse on PS4 and being able to matchmake only with people playing with controllers on PC, in fact, I have never really given the game much of a shot on PC before as I know people just fall of it, there has often been low player numbers reported on the PC versions of CoD and it looks like it won’t have that problem this time round due to cross play.

Modern Warfare still has to contend with Destiny 2 and Overwatch for my time as my main multiplayer game but it’s still as fun as ever.

1. Control

Put this down as my main “surprise” game of 2019.  A game which was not on my watch list, though I was aware of it as you can’t ignore a game from the makers of Max Payne (I did skip Alan Wake and didn’t care much for Quantum break though).  Bought it at the last minute before its release, downloaded it and was wowed by the sinister nature of the environment you run around in.  This weird fictitious US government agency which looks into paranormal activity which you seem to have become in charge of because you picked up a mysterious weapon from the deceased Director while searching for your brother.�� What then follows is about 12 hours of wacky powers and odd video clips as you unearth what has been going on in this strange ever morphing building.

I especially loved how the game never holds your hand too much, the map of each floor is vague enough that you also have to rely on in-game signposting to move around, as well as a bit of memory work.  There is also great humour involved too in some of the PSA posters on a lot of the walls, the antics of the caretaker and the videos you find of Dr. Darling throughout the game.

I did have a few weird technical issues with the game throughout playing, but still found it to be visually pleasing, there was this weird hitch that used to appear after coming out of the pause screen that always threw me, it would be followed by a few moments of low performance before getting back into the smooth action.  But this didn’t stop me from having a great time with Control.  Perhaps the game that will be the most prominent in my head when I think of 2019.

So there you have it, control is my best game of 2019.  But let’s look at the other new games I played throughout the year in my honourable mentions:

Gears 5

The Outer Worlds

Days Gone

Apex Legends

Far Cry New Dawn

Trover Saves the Universe

Concrete Genie

Devil May Cry 5

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

And also a special mention to these old games that were rereleased/remastered/repackaged etc in 2019:

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition Remastered

Halo Reach

And now, a look at the games I have on my watchlist for 2020:

Cyberpunk 2077

Last of Us Part 2

Ghost of Tsushima

Halo: Infinite

Watch Dogs Legion

Phantasy Star Online 2

Gods & Monsters

Doom Eternal

Overwatch 2

Diablo IV

Minecraft dungeons

Marvel's Avengers

Carrion

Streets of Rage 4

Will they all even come out?  Let’s find out, happy new year!

[magog-on-the-march]

Lanning says real-time rendering is now at the point where it's possible to create movies and TV shows using virtually the same assets as a game project. For Soulstorm, the models and rigging in the cinematics are essentially the same as what players see during gameplay; the game just uses higher resolution texture maps for cutscenes. Lanning says that having such unified data sets gives game developers tremendous business opportunities to take their creations into other media.

"If we look at TV series, real-time is perfect for episodic series because the database is continuous," Lanning says. "I have Abe, I bring him in to the next shot, I tell him to run and I'm not re-animating anything… But for Hollywood, if we were to make a pilot, the pilot is the cheap thing. If it's greenlit, then you can get into the real costs. The problem with the real-time capability is that the pilot's the most expensive thing. You have to build real-time databases that have all this knowledge and logic built in that have to be smarter than the film databases."

In that sense, making a game like Oddworld: Soulstorm is in essence like making a pilot for a future TV series.

"One of the reasons we overinvested in this project is because we still share that dream that databases can cross-pollinate into different verticals for media. In order to get there, you have to somehow be able to have the opportunity to go past the cost of that initial high-priced pilot... Then if we're talking to someone who's interested in a linear series of the IP, we can say this is going to carry over. We can make that pilot."

(Full article under the cut for posterity)

At this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Oddworld chief creative officer Lorne Lanning and executive producer Bennie Terry III are talking up their latest project, Oddworld: Soulstorm. But they don't have a booth of their own, and they aren't hitching a ride with a publishing partner or platform holder, either. Instead, they are being hosted by Unity, the engine in which Soulstorm is being built.

Naturally, they want to talk about technology, and there's plenty of reason for it. After all, the Oddworld franchise was built on high production values. Lanning and Oddworld chairman Sherry McKenna co-founded the company in the mid-'90s after working together at Hollywood visual effects house Rhythm & Hues, and the studio's early titles showcased cinematic visual and storytelling sensibilities that set them apart. Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus were heavily promoted exclusives for PlayStation. Then Microsoft lured Oddworld away from Sony to show off the Xbox's technological virtues with the exclusive Munch's Oddysee.

But things got tricky after that, and Oddworld's position in the industry shifted. Its fourth title, 2005's Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, launched late in the Xbox's lifespan and with an unimpressive marketing push from Electronic Arts, which wanted a PlayStation 2 version that never materialized. Months after Stranger's Wrath launched to critical acclaim but commercial apathy, Oddworld shut down its development studio and shifted its focus to film and TV. Oddworld would return to games years later, but it was no longer in the business of AAA system-selling exclusives.

"What I saw happening in the industry was the ambition of what you needed to get a project greenlit and funded from publishers was getting to be a really difficult bar to reach in the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 generation," Lanning says. "Things were starting to look better and people were realizing art assets cost a lot more, animation fidelity had to be better, lighting had to be better, they had to bring in Hollywood art directors, screenwriters... everything got more complicated. Everything got more expensive.

"For the developer, the incentives became less because it didn't mean everyone was selling a lot more units; it just meant games were more expensive, the market's more cluttered, your chances of success were lower, it would cost you more time, more energy, and you're going to get less of a deal on your end because it's a higher risk for the investor. That's just capitalism."

In large part because of that hostile environment for creators, the company has slowly built its way back up to the point where it could self-finance Soulstorm, porting its catalog of games to new platforms and partnering with Just Add Water to develop 2014's Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty, a modern remake of the studio's first game.

"We're small. We're lean, we're mean," Terry says of the studio, but he adds that the company is still striving for a "near-Pixar level of quality" on a budget. That's where the studio's partnership with Unity comes in, as Terry says the engine maker has been "absolutely instrumental" in guiding the developers to best take advantage of what the engine can do.

The "near-Pixar" quality goal is only possible because the quality of real-time rendering has closed the gap with pre-rendered computer graphics, Lanning says, and the big quality benefits now come not from rapid iterations. Real-time graphics might not be as technically impressive as something pre-rendered, but he says whatever shortfall there is can be more than offset by being able to tweak and revamp things again and again, rather than making a change and having to wait overnight for it to render to see what impact it had.

"The efficiency of the models and computing is such that when we're working on our cinematics now and show them to someone, they think it was probably done in Maya," Lanning says, "But they're not. They're rendered in real-time in Unity. And in doing that, we're able to adjust lights on the set in real-time, adjust performances in real-time. We're able to play with all kinds of things that would have taken longer with a different mindset. If you're pre-rendering movies, you don't mind waiting until tomorrow to see the shot. But we don't have the time and efficiency for that."

He recalls a joke about Stanley Kubrick: "On the seventh day, God said, 'Let's rest.' And on the eight day, Kubrick sent it back for changes."

"I'm not calling myself a perfectionist, but that's the nature of a perfectionist," Lanning says. "They just want to keep tweaking and tweaking it. The faster they can make those tweaks, the better the quality you're going to get, provided the horsepower is under the hood to get there."

Lanning says real-time rendering is now at the point where it's possible to create movies and TV shows using virtually the same assets as a game project. For Soulstorm, the models and rigging in the cinematics are essentially the same as what players see during gameplay; the game just uses higher resolution texture maps for cutscenes. Lanning says that having such unified data sets gives game developers tremendous business opportunities to take their creations into other media.

"If we look at TV series, real-time is perfect for episodic series because the database is continuous," Lanning says. "I have Abe, I bring him in to the next shot, I tell him to run and I'm not re-animating anything… But for Hollywood, if we were to make a pilot, the pilot is the cheap thing. If it's greenlit, then you can get into the real costs. The problem with the real-time capability is that the pilot's the most expensive thing. You have to build real-time databases that have all this knowledge and logic built in that have to be smarter than the film databases."

In that sense, making a game like Oddworld: Soulstorm is in essence like making a pilot for a future TV series.

"One of the reasons we overinvested in this project is because we still share that dream that databases can cross-pollinate into different verticals for media. In order to get there, you have to somehow be able to have the opportunity to go past the cost of that initial high-priced pilot... Then if we're talking to someone who's interested in a linear series of the IP, we can say this is going to carry over. We can make that pilot."

This is not a new goal for Lanning, as he's never been quiet about his transmedia aspirations. And while he's seen skepticism from the film and TV industries about the potential advantages of re-using assets from games to linear media, Lanning's insistence in the idea's merits is unwavering.

"George Lucas understood this by saving every model from Star Wars and amortizing it into Empire Strikes Back," Lanning says. "You can bet every little TIE Fighter that was built got amortized. He saved all that stuff because he saw the benefit of having one IP that continued over time, and how you could re-use things. Hanna Barbara figured this out where Fred and Barnie were running across the same seamless painting in the background 10,000 times because they were doing a cheaper Disney that was more economical. But the barrier has to be broken. Someone has to prove it where it doesn't look like low-budget CG."

Lanning believes game technology is finally at the point where it could produce real-time CG TV shows that look a step up from Saturday morning cartoon fare. While that could help developers like Oddworld build a viable business, Lanning doesn't believe all the efficiency and rapid iteration can do anything to reverse the escalating cost of competing in the AAA market, or even hold it in check.

"If you're striving for the top, no. [It doesn't get cheaper] because someone's always going to want something better, faster," Lanning says. "And even if we reached the point where everyone who's capable can do magnificent, then the arms race is about who can do magnificent cheaper and faster again. So in that respect, speed will always be an issue. The creation of databases, the creation of rigging, there are all these areas that can be more highly optimized and smarter."

Terry adds, "In the arms race itself, there are elements that lend themselves to becoming less expensive because it's easier and more democratizing technology."

He points to his own stint at Rhythm & Hues in the 2000s, when someone needed to understand how light behaves at a very deep level in order to work with it in computer graphics.

"We were trying to pierce through an uncanny valley using decades of experience to pull off mind-bending tricks in the engine," Terry says, "where now I can get to that quality by hitting a few buttons and executing it without having to be a graphics engineer... But the creativity to push it further to that next level always takes more time and energy, resources and money, because your talent needs to push the tool."

The talent obviously makes a huge difference in any project. For Oddworld: Soulstorm, Lanning says it helped create a game that should realistically have cost a lot more than its actual development budget.

"We just have a lot of history, we do it a certain way, we're deeply involved, and we get no sleep," he says.

That leads into the second part of our interview, in which Lanning discusses his views on crunch and unionization. It should run later this week.

[dzpenumbra]

1/15/23

Today did not go as planned. I think I'm going to make that my new catch phrase.

Instead of scrolling social media in bed - a nasty habit I have been successfully avoiding lately - I tried something else. A dating app. Like that's any fucking different, honestly. It's more of a shitty mobile game, to be honest. Like a really shitty not-fun pay-to-win mobile game, with pretty high stakes. It frustrates me, and depresses me.

I shifted my attention over to... anything else at all after a bit. It was just getting frustrating. 2 matches in like 3 years, one ghosted (which isn't the end of the world, honestly) and one literally used me to get rid of 2 entire goat skeletons and then never talked to me again. I wish I was kidding. And to be fair to myself, I'm not unattractive, I'm intelligent, I'm not currently in a relationship (which apparently is pretty uncommon for people in my demographic by how much I see that coming up), I'm emotionally in-touch, I keep myself moderately active, I work on mind, body and soul, and I am constantly seeking self-improvement. I don't really know why I don't get any hits for like... years at a time. It makes me feel like there's something wrong with me. :(

I have been on one "date" since 2018 and that was some alcoholic chick driving over in her pajamas, dropping off two giant bags full of goat bones, having me watch Bo Burnham's "Inside" with her, which induced a gigantic panic attack which I gracefully recovered from within like 3 minutes, then... she just peaced out and I never saw her again. Is this what dating in your mid-30's is like? Or was this an extreme example here...?

Anyhow, that was depressing as fuck so I decided to... schedule an appointment for a vaccine booster. Because I haven't gotten a vaccine shot since like... 2021. And I think it might make me feel a bit better about going and doing things in society if I get that taken care of. So I set an appointment for 4 this afternoon and got up and started my day.

Yoga was nice, not too intense, not too relaxing, a happy median that went by surprisingly quickly. I peeled a whole bag of potatoes, prepping to make slow-cooker mashed potatoes while I get shit done. I showered. I took the compost out and cleaned the snow off the car by hand, you know, because I don't have a scraper or a brush or anything at all. Just gloves. It took a while but I got it done.

I drive up to the pharmacy and say I'm there for my appointment, and they just look at me like I've got 3 heads. I double check, give them my name, nothing. I ask if they can just pencil me in or something, or help me set up an appointment. "You have to do it online". While I'm literally standing in the store. ... So I walk to another aisle and schedule an appointment for tomorrow. I noticed my mistake. There was a big red button that said "Book Appointment" that I didn't hit, I thought I already had the appointment set and everything. -_-

Then I went to check for pushpins. Nothing. Again. I just got two big bags of candy and some batteries for my Xbox controller so the trip wasn't a complete wash.

I got home and actually did some home decorating. I got my dartboard set up, which is cool. I hung some string lights. I finally got my big whiteboard up and running. Lots of things started coming together. Then my Mom called.

I told her the story, she thought it was amusing. Then she started just... volunteering to help me get a workbench for my apartment, and started like... just doing it. As I was trying to finish cooking my potatoes. It was a bit confusing. And it wasn't working at all. It quickly started to create a conflict. It just started stressing me out, she clearly had no idea what she was looking for and I just didn't have the patience to literally draw her a picture like she was asking me to. It turned into a fight pretty quick. The second she caught wind of my stress, it was curtains. And the kicker? It's her birthday. And I completely forgot. I barely even know what day of the week it is most of the time. I felt bad, but like... birthday isn't a free pass to vent stress on me.

I managed to get through to her, which has been getting surprisingly a lot easier lately. But this time, I did it differently. I made a point to point out that I cannot make these conflicts resolve. That it might seem to her that I am making them stop, that me explaining the situation and calming her down is what's making the "fight" (aka panic) stop. But it isn't. It's not me at all. I'm just an accessory. I'm just feeding information. I'm just a narrator. She is the one who stops it. By letting it go. By trusting. By shifting gears. I simply put out my empirical perspective of what I've experienced, and my pleas of what I wish for the direction of the conversation. The rest is out of my hands. And it actually got through. Which is huge progress. And I'm really proud to see it. That's really hard work, to snatch the steering wheel from Fear brain and start being more deliberate about the Now.

I felt bad that I didn't really do anything for her birthday. And I didn't even remember. She deserves better than that. But, you know, she has two other sons and a husband. And she had gotten like 3 other phone calls that day, so... it doesn't all weigh on my shoulders. And I rarely get that kind of fanfare for my birthday so... *shrug*. I've still got a jewelry piece to finish for her, I'll just combo deal the two. It's a pretty sentimental piece, I'm sure she'll be pleased either way.

The rest of the night was just eating tons of food and playing/recording Rimworld. The story is definitely interesting, I'm just... not fully pulled into it. I don't know, I'll see how it plays out.

Bed. I have that appointment in the afternoon, and I'm nodding off already.

[bizarredawdler]

Halo 3 and My Experice With It.

Since Halo 3 was officially released on this day 10 years ago, I figured I might talk about my experience playing the few chunks of the game when I had the chance, and how over the years I came to appreciate and understand the impact that series has had on the video game industry as well as why so many people love that series.

So my first instance of actually playing Halo 3 was when one of my high school friends called Marc-André, invited me over to his house on weekends to play a few multiplayer matches as well as do a few of the missions in the campaign. I'll admit that, at the time, I wasn't really a fan of FPS games in general, but he LOVED that game, and wouldn't stop talking about how awesome the story was, how he had amazing online matches as well as how good he was at completing the campaign at the hardest difficulty setting (admittedly, he was a bit of a show-off... :P). So out of curiosity I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, we played multiplayer matches online and offline, and I got killed. Multiple times. In humiliating ways! One particular instance that stuck with me was when I did a 1v1 match against him in a relatively small map, and we were both on the opposite side of the map. Just for fun, he decided to throw a plasma grenade as far and high as he could, and through sheer luck, he managed to get me and score a point, even though he couldn't see me and I was on the opposite side of the map. We both had a good laugh about it!

And yet the funny thing is, even when I got killed that many times and so quickly as well, I was still enjoying the game, and I think one of the reasons is because depending on how you would get killed, your character would ragdoll in different ways, and I remember enjoying seeing myself get blowned away by a plasma grenade and flying 10 feet in the air with my character wailing his arms and legs. It was something that was strangely satisying to me. It helped that it didn't take long for your character to respawn, so there was very little down time. And when I did get good and started having a few kills, it was really fun and I started to understand one of the main things that makes this game and the series really good: Master Cheif feels so satisfying to control!

And that satisfaction was made even more apparent when I played the co-op campaign with Marc-André. This was probably one of the first games that made me aware of what I liked seeing in a character in general. One of the things I liked a lot about Master Cheif was that he was a one man army, and you could feel that when you controlled him. Each time he hit an enemy with the stock of his gun , the impact felt satisfying. Every time he jumped, there was this awesome momentum and weight that made you feel like you had a badass armor on and was ready to take on the world. Every time you weilded a big weapon, there was this beautiful balance of weight and enhanced strength that made you feel like you were carrying something heavy, but you were strong enough to carry it easily. All those subtle gameplay elements really emphasised the awesome power Master Cheif had. Not only that, but I loved the fact that you didn't see his face, because #1 It put more emphasis on his cool looking armor and #2 It allowed him to have this aura of mystery and anonymitiy to him that added a lot to his character, and I liked that.

I remember also being surprised by how good the music was. Usually with FPS games, the orchestral music tends to be bland or just there to serve it's purpose, but here, I felt like the orchestral music had personnality and enhanced the gameplay and story moments a lot.

Unfortunately, this was pretty much my only experience with the game, as I have never actually sat down and played through the entire trilogy by myself, since at the time I didn't own an Xbox 360 and my parents weren't to keen on me having video game consoles at the time, and so after high school, I pretty much just forgot about the series and moved on...

... that is until last year, when I met @afronick and @thathomestar on tumblr. Upon seeing their Halo posts and discussing more about it, I discovered that the game had a huge impact on FPS games that I wasn't aware of when I was in high school. They both made me understand just how much the game contributed in terms of FPS gameplay mechanics that would become the standard for a very long time, and seeing their hatred for the newer games in the series and how those games missed the mark in terms of what made the original trilogy so good made me realise how passionate the Halo community was. It made me understand that my friend Marc-André wasn't exaggerating when he talked about how much he loved that game, because now I saw other people speaking as passionately as he did about it. I also began to understand that Bungie itself was a huge reason people loved the games so much, as from what my friends told me, they had a pretty good relationship and friendship with their fans that you don't really see often with big AAA video game companies, and I appreciate them much more because of it.

In conclusion, even though my experience with the series is pretty limited, I'm glad I had the chance to play Halo 3 a little bit, as it taught me that sometimes I should try things that are out of my comfort zone video game wise, because who knows: I might enjoy it and it might turn out to be a classic I wasn't even aware of.

Happy 10th birthday, Halo 3 : )

[daleisgreat]

30 Years of TurboGrafX-16 & 25 Years of 32-X: A Lethal Combination!

Greetings and thank you once again for joining me in another anniversary retrospective! I know we are in the first month of 2020, but please indulge me and pretend it is still 2019 so I can say this is officially a piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of the North American launch of the NEC TurboGrafX-16 and the 25th anniversary of North American launch of the Sega 32X! Yes, this is the two-for-one anniversary special! I have been neglecting this for too long and wanted to have this up before the end of 2019, but I think I was a wee burnt out with my tomes I crafted for my other three flashbacks I posted throughout this past summer. I have good faith this will be a shorter piece because even though I have a history with both the TG16 and 32X, my experiences with them are both greatly after their original launches so I do not have those twee childhood memories of the 32X and TG16 as I did with the GameBoy and Genesis. Regardless, I do cherish my time with both ill-fated systems I will be covering today, so let us kickoff with the system that came out first, NEC’s TurboGrafX-16 in 1989.

Yup, these are the issues of Game Players I dug out of the closet and took poor quality cell phone pics for proof of where I first remember reading about the TurboGrafX. Even though TG16 launched in America in 1989, I do not recall seeing it in stores or hearing about it until 1994 when I got my first videogame magazine subscription to Game Players. Yes, I still have those 1994 issues of Game Players in my closet and if I can find the right issues I will attempt to paste in a semi-decent cell phone shot of the pages that referenced the TG16. If memory serves right, I believe there was a spread video pinball games that highlighted both Crush pinball titles for TG16, and another column highlighted TG16’s Ys Books I and II for being a revolutionary RPG title with its then-unprecedented cutscenes and voiceovers. I also discovered about TG16’s mascot, Bonk when reading a review in GP for the NES port of Bonk’s Adventure.

By consuming other gaming press media over the following years I eventually learned what happened with the TG16 and its CD add-on in America and how they did not fare as well as they did in Japan and quickly faded out within a year or two after the SNES launched in America. I never had a friend that owned the TG16 growing up, nor do I recall a store kiosk having any set up for play in my middle-of-nowhere hometown. I cannot remember even dabbling with hunting down TG16 emulators since I never saw the games out in the wild for sale at my local shops to peak my curiosity. So I believe the first time I played a TG16 game was when the Wii launch in 2006 and also debuted at its launch the Wii’s downloadable classic games for its ‘Virtual Console’ channel. The TG16 was one of the supported platforms and I recall downloading the hit multiplayer game, Bomberman ‘93 around or shortly after the Wii launch making it likely the first official TG16 game I played.

Aside from playing my first TG16 game in 2006 on the Wii, 2006 was a big year for learning a lot more about the system thanks in part to one particular podcast. Apple debuted podcasts in 2005 and other MP3 players quickly supported them too. I sampled countless gaming podcasts, but one I quickly got turned onto towards the end of 2005 was one Team Fremont Live. That podcast is still around to this day, but underwent a couple name changes and is now known as Super-the-Hardest. I quickly became a fan of the three hosts, John, Moe and Hilden and loved their take on videogames. They had frequent retro gaming segments on the show and the trio frequently waxed nostalgic for their TG16 memories. Over the years consuming their podcast and participating in their forums my knowledge for the system exponentially expanded! If you currently dig through the Super-the-Hardest archives or check out these links, you will find a wealthy amount of TG16 articles there to learn a ton about the platforms and their recommended games.

The then-Team Fremont Live hosts lived about a five hour drive away from me, and they had on open invite community event in the summer of 2006 where I first met them in person and gamed and drank the night away with them and their fellow community members. It was an awesome time, and in January 2007 they hosted another community event for their first ever year-end awards, ‘The Darryls!’ I remember meeting up with the three hosts the night before the event for a ‘packing party’ where we drank all night again and quickly got stone cold sober, literally, as we packed up the van with recording equipment in the middle of a January Midwest night of biting subzero temps! The Darryls transpired the next day and I got reacquainted with many community members again and there were several TVs set up with various games to play for everyone in what ended up being another memorable night with the TFL community. John, Moe and Hilden did a special presentation later on in the night for their 2006 best of game awards and did a contest drawing towards the end of the night that I was the lucky winner drawn. My prize was a TG16 system, complete in box and with a copy of the original pack-in game, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones! I was blown away and stunned the prize was going to be a system! That pic at the top of this article is indeed me being the proud new owner of a TG16! Keith Courage was a decent little platformer, but I would never become that skilled at it and would peter out of lives by levels two or three and regret never taking the time to master that game.

Thanks to listening to many hours of TFL at that point however and through other online research over the years I knew which games to hunt down. Luckily in 2007 and for the next few years TG16 releases remained affordable to hunt down as most games save for a select few went for under $20. I tracked down a far superior platformer in Bonk’s Revenge. Its vibrant visuals, challenging-but-fair platforming and adorably gruff mascot Bonk blew Keith Courage away and looked graphically on par with the other 16-bit platforms. World Court Tennis initially appeared as another run-of-the-mill tennis game, but diving into ‘Quest Mode’ provided an in-depth medieval narrative complete with an RPG-esque overworld and random tennis battles! I looked into getting the CD add-on, but from what I gathered it sounded like the add-on attachments had a high faulty rate by 2007 and were not worth the risk. Even with those drawbacks I regret missing out on the TG-CD games and only had the chance to dabble with a handful off of other collections and Virtual Console over the years. Fighting Street (aka the original Street Fighter) had its only American console physical release on the TG-CD, and I did not get a chance to play it until a Capcom released a arcade hits collection on the original Xbox. Ys Books I & II was a revolutionary RPG for what its cinemas and voiceovers debuted to the market, and it was not until the Wii Virtual Console that I finally had a chance to experience the original version. Turbo Technologies brokered a bonkers deal with EA to bring a little known version of Madden to TG-CD that I would have played the heck out of compared to the other gridiron game on the platform I will touch on shortly.

The TFL crew were big fans of shmups (aka the original ‘shooters’) and I recall them being high on Blazing Lazers and I wound up spending many hours trying (and failing) to vanquish that space shooter. Already being a diehard fan of videogame pinball in 2007, both Alien Crush and Devils Crush were among my first TG16 purchases. They were both fantastic multi-layered pinball titles, with several screens of verticality to flip the pinball through and vanquish enemies and mini-bosses away on the playfield. I loved both games, and if you want a current rendition of that then I highly suggest tracking down the recent release of Demon’s Tilt that is available on most current platforms. Demon’s Tilt is essentially a modern take on the Crush games, but on crack with amped up visual effects since it is capitalizing on the horsepower of modern systems. After accumulating these several titles I would make it a habit to add one or two more a year at an annual retro videogame expo I regularly attended in Milwaukee called the Midwest Gaming Classic. John, Moe and Hilden would also attend MGC most years around this time and I would make it a point to track them down at some point during the convention and get them to recommend me a TG16 for under $20. There recommendations never failed, and this was how I discovered NEC’s answer to Ikari Warriors (Hey, I was a huge fan of the NES game!) in the superior Bloody Wolf, and the quirky platformer, JJ and Jeff. The yearly MGC pick-up was how I finally procured a copy of the gore-slasher-fest that is Splatterhouse. I would also chance random games that caught my eye for the TG16 and did not go for that much. I loved my 8 and 16-bit sports games and took a shot on TV Sports Football, and it was a decent adaptation of the gridiron, but did not measure up to the many other football titles on the other 16-bit platforms.

The same can be said for the TG16’s sole American wrestling game, Battle Royal, it was an OK videogame grappler, but nothing that held my lasting attention. However, the excellent FirePro Wrestling series got its start on the platform as Japan-only exclusives, and I will give props to my former podcast co-hosts Chris & Lyzz for grabbing a copy of FirePro: Second Bout for me at MGC one year I could not make it. The FirePro games have evolved into the pinnacle of 2D wrestling games over the years, and it is fascinating to see how it started on the PC-Engine in Japan and even in FirePro’s earliest installments it was already a class above the competition. While both of these wrestling games went for under $20 by 2012, the next year when I returned to MGC in 2013 TG16 game prices inflated exponentially. For proof I was looking up some old MGC photos from my pictures library, and found some photos of Chris & Lyzz’s 2010 MGC loot-haul laid out on their bed. As you can see they picked up a TG16 and several games, if you zoom in on the photo you can see most of their games went for under $20. I have no idea what brought on the sudden demand, but a vast majority of TG16 games started going for around $50-100 within a couple years and that was without jewel cases and instructions!

For this piece, I contacted Chris and Lyzz for their memories of picking up the TG16 and their favorite games they have played since, and Chris responded back with the following: ”I can't remember much. I just remembered that I liked Bonk’s Adventure and Fantasy Zone. Bonk’s Adventure because of how much I used to like side scrolling games and that is the only game that I wanted to play at the time that didn't come out for the NES/SNES/GEN. Fantasy Zone because of the sheer weirdness factor of it.” 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the TG16 launching in North America and I wanted to do something special to commemorate it. I was in the midst hosting my own videogame podcast, On Tap, at the time and invited John, Moe and Hilden to come on for a special TurboGrafX anniversary episode! It was a delight to have them on the show and have them take us all to school with their master’s degree knowledge of all things Turbo and reminisce about the TG16 for an hour. I recently dug that episode out of the archives and uploaded it onto my YouTube channel and will embed it below for your listening pleasure!

This is a special TG16 20th anniversary podcast I recorded 10 years ago! Add it to your queue to listen to for more TG16 wisdom! I would bust out the TG16 once every year or two until several years ago when the WiiU became my virtual replacement. The WiiU started supporting the TG16 by uploading a ton of the TG16 library to the WiiU version of the Virtual Console in 2016 and uploaded nearly a game a week from mid-2016 until early 2018, well after the launch of the Switch. I sold my Wii after owning it for only a year and only owned a few TG16 games for it, so this late infusion of TG16 titles on the WiiU caught my eye (and other Retro enthusiasts too). This culminated in about 50 TG16 games hitting the WiiU by the end with even a few former Japan exclusives among them….and I bought all of them! The original Wii Virtual Console that is backwards compatible on the WiiU remained open until early 2018 to purchase their TG16 games too which I used to acquire other acclaimed TG16-CD games not available on the WiiU like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Ys Books I and II.

A few times a year I fire up my WiiU and pick a few random games to play from my many Virtual Console purchases. It was this way I finally got around to trying out the Legend of Zelda-inspired Neutopia and having a fun night with a couple buddies hack and slashing away in Dungeon Explorer. I also got to take in the ridiculously huge sprites of the brawler China Warrior and finally experienced TG16’s take on Outrun in Victory Run. The WiiU surprisingly wound up a gratifying legit alternative to the now-absurd asking prices for used TG16 games, and a convenient way to make TG16 games appear on a HDTV without the fuzziness that happens when I plug an SD system into a HDTV. While I never knew of the TG16 during its active North American lifespan or got a chance to play it until this century, I still have priceless memories of discovering hit titles exclusive to that system that stood out in a way unlike anything else on its 16-bit competition. The 32X is a whole other beast though. I remember being a furious 11 year-old upon its release in 1994. I vividly recall the hype in Game Players for it and even 11 year-old Dale thought Sega was out of its mind for releasing a $150 add-on for the Genesis merely several months before the Saturn when Sega already had plenty on the market to tide them by with the Genesis, Game Gear and SegaCD. A wee shy of 50 games only came out for it in the little over a year games were published for the 32X, and nearly half of them were marginally enhanced Genesis titles. From reading mags during its lifespan and hearing other gaming media reflect back on it throughout the years I gathered the add-on had a handful of standout exclusives, but was largely forgettable and not worth tracking down, and I hand no plans to do so, until….

Living proof of the speculated demon that is Sega's Tower of Power! …In 2009 a co-worker was about to get married and was parting with his gaming collection to raise funds for the wedding/honeymoon. He knew me as an ardent game player and gave me a print out of what he was selling and his asking prices. This was still a couple years before the big retro used game boom I described above, because around same time a couple years later 32X game prices jumped just like TG16 games. Still, I noticed most of his prices were at the higher end of most eBay auctions when I researched them online. I did not have a SegaCD or 32X in my collection at the time and there were at least a few exclusives on both systems I always wanted to try, and with the funds going to a good cause I made an offer for those systems with about a dozen games in the middle range of what he was asking for and what other asking prices I saw online at the time. I want to say I paid roughly $200 for the lot.

I got about six or seven games for 32X from my co-worker and later tracked down three or four more over the next year or two to get the other 32X games I wanted. I had a couple up-ports/’Remasters’ from the Genesis for 32X like Toughman Contest and WWF RAW. Toughman Contest was EA’s gritty take on Punch-Out that I was a big fan of, and it got a big endorsement from toughman hot-shot at the time Butterbean. The 32X version did not add too much other than lightly touched up graphics and framerates. The 32X version of RAW though had a couple extra weapons at ringside to bash adversaries away with and its own exclusive wrestler, the masked Kwang, who later on went to be better known as Savio Vega in the WWF throughout the 90s. Unfortunately the gameplay for those old Acclaim 16-bit games had those tired button mashing grappling meters that killed your thumbs and was a few entries old at that point so it did not get too much playtime from me. A 32X version I did enjoy was of Doom, and for a few years it was the only version of the iconic first person shooter I owned until a version hit download on 360 a couple years later. I was a big fan of Sega’s early polygonal titles, Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter on the 32X. The launch Saturn version of Virtua Fighter was notorious for being a buggy mess, and the 32X version that released a few months later surprisingly had a smooth framerate and played as crisp as I recalled in the arcades. Sega somehow against all odds managed a port of Virtua Fighter on the Genesis, but had a somewhat cleaner version with exclusive tracks on the 32X later that year. I loved me some Virtua Racer and if I ever get a Switch one of the first eShop downloads I plan on getting is the recent touched up remake of Sega’s first polygonal racer M2 developed last year. Finally the last upper-tier quality game I have in my 32X library is Sega’s arcade port of Star Wars Arcade. It only had the three missions of the arcade that boasted dog-fighting missions on the Death Star and a Super Destroyer, but they were quick mindless, pick-up-and-play blasting fun.

As seen above, Doom had a pretty solid 32X port at the sacrifice of screen resolution and I suffered through RAW's middling gameplay for its exclusive character Kwang and extra ringside weapons. There were five 32X CD games released with Slam City and Corpse Killer pictured above in their unremarkable glory! I do own all five ‘Sega CD 32X’ games that come on discs for the Sega CD, but require the 32X in order to load. All five of these games are FMV-based games from Sega and Digital Pictures and all have releases on the SegaCD already, but the 32X CD versions have slightly better resolutions and framerates thanks to the added power from the 32X. None of the five games are all that fun regrettably. I have awful memories of the clunky controls in one-on-one basketball in Slam City with Scottie Pippen and never getting a good memory for the order of camera patterns in order to succeed in Night Trap. I guess Corpse Killer was a semi-decent on-rails light gun shooter with digital characters similar to Area 51 of that same era, but with far cheesier acting and implementation. Both Night Trap and Corpse Killer recently got touched up remasters on the PS4 for those brave enough to see how they hold up today.

There were a few other 32X games I wanted to track down, but I neither saw them in the wild, had negative buzz or at that time were already going for a bit more than I preferred, and are selling for outrageously more today. I always heard good things about Knuckles Chaotix being a decent substitute for a Sonic-style platformer on the system, but that one always escaped me. I loved the World Series Baseball games on Genesis, and the 32X got a slightly up-res’d version of the ’95 release, but it had such a low print run that it is one of the higher selling games of the 32X library. I liked the original 80s version of the arcade shmup, Zaxxon and was bummed to see the polygonal 32X follow-up get panned with negative buzz which kept me away from that version. Finally, the comic book game nerd in me always wanted to own Spider-Man: Web of Fire, but with it having a low print run being the final the 32X game, and combined for being an awful game to boot were a lethal combo to keep me away from it for good. That wraps up this two-for-one flashback anniversary special on the 32X and TurboGrafX-16. What were some of your favorite games or memories of those systems? Feel free to comment about them below or reach out to me on Twitter @Gruel. I guess combining my memories of both systems went on for a bit longer than I anticipated, but I managed a modicum of brevity by being about a 1000 words shorter than my gigantic Dreamcast special. If you want to check that one out or my anniversary specials on the GameBoy or Genesis, than check the links below!

UPDATE: A couple hours after posting this I realized I completely forgot to touch on the fast approaching release of the TurboGrafX Mini in North America in several weeks!!! It is launching as an Amazon exclusive so do not be on the lookout for it in retail stores right away. It has over 50 games, about half of which are Japanese PC Engine versions. If you want something more physical than pick and choosing which games to download on the WiiU, the TurboGrafX mini is an ideal way to start discovering most of the top titles for the system! As for the 32X…..Sega did release their own official Genesis mini last fall, and did include a 32X add-on mini attachment…..that is sadly for visual purposes only and is completely non-electrical. While the overlords of the TG16 library at Konami have re-released TG16 games on several platforms over the years I cannot think of a single 32X game that got one digital or physical re-release unless you count the up-ports of Night Trap and Corpse Killer Keep your fingers crossed though, a working 32X mini may one day happen. My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary

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Greedfall and other games coming to Xbox One this week

Greedfall and other games coming to Xbox One this week. Path of Exile: Blight (September 09, 2019) Stop the spread of the deadly Blight by building towers to defend yourself against monsters. This expansion includes the Blight challenge league, three revamped balance archetypes with new skills and support gems, plenty of new items, two old leagues being integrated into the core game, and a focus on giving you more freedom to choose which aspects of Path of Exile's content you play and when. GRID (September 10, 2019) Offering unrivalled moment-to-moment racing, GRID returns with an all-new experience where every race is the chance to choose your own path, create your own story, and conquer the world of motorsport. Fight in thrilling wheel-to-wheel battles with the most iconic and desirable race cars, from GT through Touring and Muscle to Stock and Super Modifieds – and in some of the world’s most iconic locations. eFootball PES 2020 (September 10, 2019) Experience the most realistic and authentic soccer game with PES 2020, featuring Juventus exclusively licensed, alongside partnerships with FC Barcelona, FC Bayern München, and Manchester United! New features: GAMEPLAY: New dynamic dribbling skills, new first touch techniques, and finely-tuned ball physics, all developed in close consultation with renowned midfielder Andrés Iniesta.MATCHDAY: Pick a side and join forces with newcomers and veterans alike in a grand struggle for dominance in this new online competitive mode.MASTER LEAGUE: A completely revamped ML experience awaits — featuring a new interactive dialogue system, an overhauled menu design, and a more realistic transfer market realized through improved data integration. NHL 20 Ultimate Edition (September 10, 2019) EA SPORTS™ NHL® 20 introduces cutting-edge gameplay innovation to showcase your skills, more customization to unlock your style, and new modes to compete with friends. RPM Tech-powered gameplay introduces Signature Shots that replicate your favorite NHL players’ real-world shot styles. Over 45 new shot animations make every attack a threat, and new passing and puck pick-ups create faster, fluid gameplay executed at full speed. A revamped broadcast package delivers all-new visuals and commentary. Combined with over 1,100 new customization items for your club and character, your biggest goals look incredible during the action and in the highlight reel. Finally, NHL 20 adds three new game modes. HUT Squad Battles features weekly teams, built by athletes and artists, to challenge for unique rewards. The fan-favorite ONES can now be played with friends on the couch, and the all-new Eliminator mode in World of CHEL introduces winner-take-all competition where you and your friends compete to be the best in the barn.

GreedFall (September 10, 2019)

Explore uncharted new lands as you set foot on a remote island seeping with magic, and filled with riches, lost secrets, and fantastic creatures. Forge this new world’s destiny, as you befriend or betray companions and entire factions. With diplomacy, deception and force, become part of a living, evolving world - influence its course and shape your story. Engage in a core roleplaying experience – achieve quests and complete objectives in a multitude of different ways – through combat, diplomacy, deception, or stealth.Complete freedom in character progression – play as a male or female, customize your appearance, and freely choose your abilities, spells and skills.Delve into a mysterious world of magic – begin a grand journey and uncover ancient secrets protected by supernatural beings, manifestations of the island’s earthly magic. NASCAR Heat 4 (September 10, 2019) NASCAR Heat 4, the official video game of NASCAR, looks, sounds, and plays better than ever! New Features: Track Maps, Unlockable Paint Schemes, Dynamic User Interface, More Driving Control Options, Deeper Career Mode, Sonoma Raceway & Charlotte Roval Track UpdatesNew Graphics & Sound - Complete overhaul of all graphics and audio packagesDraft Like a Pro - Team up and draft with other drivers with the drafting featuresSmarter, Competitive AI - The AI now runs multiple racing lines and utilizes new controls to adjust its skill range, stability and spreadCompete for a Real NASCAR Esports Team - NASCAR Heat 4 is the only way to qualify for the eNASCAR Heat Pro League where you can race for a real NASCAR team. (Note: the eNASCAR Heat Pro League is currently available to USA players only) Gears 5 (September 10, 2019) From one of gaming’s most acclaimed sagas, Gears is back and bigger than ever, with five thrilling modes and the deepest campaign yet. With all-out war descending, Kait Diaz breaks away to uncover her connection to the enemy and discovers the true danger to Sera – herself. In addition to the epic campaign (with 3 player co-op), experience the all-new Escape multiplayer mode, compete online in Versus, team up with friends in Horde, and create custom maps with the new Map Builder. Distraint (September 11, 2019) DISTRAINT: Deluxe Edition is a 2D psychological horror adventure game that tells the story of Price, a young man who seizes an old woman’s apartment. After seizing her home, his humanity is now gone. So begins his tale of regrets… Creep your way through different locations, learning the backstory of Price and his motivations that led him down this dark path. Progress through the somber story by solving light puzzles across a variety of different scenarios and settings! Features: Side scrolling 2D art with dynamic hand drawn graphicsAtmospheric music and sound designMinimalist interface so your focus never wavers from the experienceDelve into a unique story full of intriguing twists Super Dodgeball Beats (September 12, 2019) Take part in insanely cool dodgeball games played to the rhythm of 18 original music tracks. Conquer your rivals in style with perfect rhythm and sweet moves. There’s nothing else like it! MULTIPLAYER: Play against a friend via couch co-op and show off your amazing skills. Choose from 4 different teams, 8 gorgeous hand-drawn levels, and select any music track you want! Perfectly time your supercharged moves to finish off your opponents! CHAMPIONSHIP MODE: Be the galaxy’s best dodgeball team in this intense single-player mode! Your squad of 4 dodgeball students must rise through the ranks and face the weirdest foes, from the fearsome Vampire dodgeball masters to the mysterious thunder-infused ancients. Make it far enough and you’ll face even weirder and more powerful dodgeball bosses! INSANE POWERUPS: Turn the tide of battle by utilising a plethora of powerups including grenades, doughnuts, stone golems and more. Colina: Legacy (September 13, 2019) Alex wakes up in his grandmother's home alone and unsure of where everyone has gone. As he begins to escape from the house, the feeling of something watching him lingers on his mind. Facing the unknown, Alex must make it through the night, and the house, before he loses more than just his mind in this indie horror game. Ellen – The Game (September 13, 2019) Help young investigator James uncover the dark truth behind the murder of the Smiths' and their missing daughter Ellen in this thrilling 2D pixel horror game. If you don’t believe in paranormal events, meet the people from White Hill. It’s been years since all but the daughter in the Smiths’ family were found brutally murdered. The people of the town are getting uneasy as more and more witnesses have spoken about seeing the silhouette of a little girl standing in the house. Rumors spread that the silhouette has to be Ellen, the daughter of the Smith’s family, whose body was never found during the investigation of the murders. 1 year later, James, a bright and eager investigator, has taken matters into his own hands to finally reveal the truth of what happened that horrible night. Features: Play as James, an intelligent detective who is trying to get to the bottom of the paranormal events happening in the Smiths' Residence at White Hill.Dive into an emotional and thrilling experience while solving puzzles and persisting through nerve-racking scenarios.Listen to breath-taking soundtracks as you’re traversing through the unnerving residence of the Smiths' in a beautiful pixel art style.Enjoy the atmospheric storytelling as you unfold the mystery by completing all chapters. Light Fairytale – Episode 1 (September 13, 2019) - Introduction: Light Fairytale is a turn-based Japanese-style RPG in full 3D, set in a dying underground world ruled by a fierce and powerful empire. The goal of this project is to bring back the immersion and emotion of 90's era JRPGs on current hardware, with the expected evolution in both design and technique. - Story: A long time ago, the world was prosperous. Technology and sciences were quite advanced, and people lived in great pleasure and casual excess. However, this proved their undoing when the world as they knew it, seemingly in an instant, was destroyed forever. Desperate and forlorn, the survivors of civilization resorted to fleeing to the only place on the planet where it was still possible to live - deeply underground. And so there they stayed, and survived. Thousands of years later, the history of the surface has been forgotten, left to dust, and the wealth of the past lost to time. Even the very word "sky" has lost all meaning... And then, a young boy named Haru wakes one day, fleeting dreams of vast green plains and a clear blue void locked in his memory; deep rooted, unshakeable... and driving him to know just what he saw. Now, he must embark on a great adventure in order to discover the mysteries of the lost world, confronting the rulers of this dystopian society and beyond with the aid of a mysterious, silver haired girl... Light Fairytale will span over multiple episodes. A long journey awaits! - Characters: Haru: A bit lazy and a lot naive, Haru nonetheless is a kind soul and knows how to handle himself if push comes to shove. His noble heart can move people to do things they'd never dreamed themselves capable. Kuroko: She might be short and cute (sometimes), but don't let that fool you: Kuroko is exceedingly capable in battle and always willing to step up. She's also fond of technology - maaaybe a bit too much so. - About neko.works neko.works is a one person indie game studio from France making modern renditions of classic concepts. Features: Classic turn-based battles that happen directly in the field.Modern real-time 3D graphics.Cute chibi characters.Two playable stories with many alternate events and a few exclusives. Read the full article

[ramajmedia]

Man of Medan Review: Scary Sailor Stories | Screen Rant

Man of Medan, the first entry in Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology, brings a strong multiplayer focus to the cinematic horror of Until Dawn.

Developer Supermassive has a strong pedigree in cinematic horror. Until Dawn combined the filmic presentation of the best Quantic Dream titles with tight writing, top-tier acting talent, mind-blowing facial capture animation technology, and a genuine love of genre storytelling. All these elements combined to make Until Dawn a surprise hit that put the developer on the map. Followup efforts Hidden Agenda and The Inpatient were less successful, with a frustrating reliance on gimmicks like PlayStation VR and PlayLink undercutting the twisted mysteries at hand.

For their latest project, Supermassive is going back to basics, returning to the realm of pure cinematic horror. Man of Medan is the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology. Like Until Dawn, Man of Medan stars a cast of attractive young people thrown into a harrowing horror scenario, while the player is tasked with the responsibility of trying to keep them alive during their numerous trials.

Related: The 10 Best Choose Your Own Adventure Games

From the start, Man of Medan offers three ways to play: single player, online multiplayer for two players, and a local, "pass the controller" mode for up to five people to enjoy. In single player, the character switches between the five playable characters as the game progresses, and their decisions (and performance during Quick Time Events) determine who lives and who dies. While this mode offers a more traditional experience for fans of cinematic games, the true magic lies with two-player online co-op, called Shared Story Mode. The host can team up with someone on their friends list and play through the game as a team. Sometimes, the two players will be together, but some instances will have the players split up, leading to some asymmetrical scenarios.

While playing solo, the pacing can slow to a crawl as the game switches from one character to the next, showing them all getting scared in their own distinct ways. In multiplayer, however, it's much more streamlined. Each player will still have plenty of chances to control every character, but the whole thing moves by with a palpable energy, and communicating with a partner is key to unraveling the game's central mystery. Communication is also important key in interpreting certain events, since they may only be seen by one player, and not the other.

It's best to experience the game the first time via two-player co-op before giving it a shot in solo play. After getting a fairly thorough understanding of Man of Medan, it's jolly fun to gather a group of friends and act as something of a dungeon master during Movie Night, casting friends in the roles they feel best suit them. Each playthrough of Man of Medan takes between 4-6 hours (a bit less in two-player), but each adventure has a different outcome, especially with the inevitable wildcards which arise in Movie Night. In any given playthrough, all five heroes may survive, or all five might die. In our first go-round, two of the would-be survivors were killed in the final third of the game, but a thoughful (and lucky) second playthrough saw the whole team survive to the end.

The cast of Man of Medan is comprised of a mix of talented actors. The most well-known actor in the cast is Shawn Ashmore (Quantum Break, X-Men, The Following), though he plays an equal role in the ensemble alongside everyone else. Intermittently, Man of Medan will give players a brief respite, returning to the library of "The Curator." Played by The Crown's Pip Torrens, The Rod Serling-esque host of The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Curator is happy to address players directly and tease, encourage, or criticize their choices at various checkpoints in the game.

The facial animation is just as good as Until Dawn, if not better, and every closeup on a character in distress feels like a work of art. The full body animations, by contrast, can sometimes feel a bit robotic, but it's never outright bad. Best of all, Man of Medan runs at a much better framerate than Until Dawn, courtesy of the Unreal Engine 4. There are still plenty of dips here and there, but it feels considerably more stable than its predecessor. Even on PlayStation 4 Pro, textures can take a moment to pop in; this can sometimes lessen the impact of a sudden jump scare when a skeleton face jumps out in front of the screen before its low-res placeholder textures are replaced by the real deal.

Man of Medan is best enjoyed with friends, and part of that is because the main story is pretty thin. Four friends with varying interpersonal dynamics hire a sea captain (the fifth lead) to bring them out to a supposed crash site. After an encounter with a small band of scary pirates, everyone winds up on a mysterious ghost ship. It's a pretty straightforward premise, and the excitement doesn't come from the cliche narrative, but from how much fun it is to have a degree of control over how characters react to these cliches. There is a secret to the horrific events on the ghost ship, but it's so clearly telegraphed ahead of time, it hardly qualifies as a twist.

There is a lot less player agency in Man of Medan than in Until Dawn. There are fewer game-changing binary choices to make, and the QTE events are comparatively simple. There are still plenty of divergent paths and countless possible outcomes, but it doesn't feel as sprawling as its obvious progenitor. Perhaps this relative simplicity was the price Supermassive chose to pay in exchange for its unique and innovative multiplayer mode. For fans of co-op games, it was absolutely the right choice, but for players who prefer going solo, Man of Medan feels distressingly simple, and a big step backwards.

Man of Medan is an adventure best enjoyed with a friend in Shared Story Mode, and then enjoyed with many via Movie Night. Playing alone creates a decidedly lesser experience, but it's nonetheless a must play title for fans of cinematic adventure titles. Supermassive Games plans to create many more entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology; while certainly not without its flaws and shortcomings, Man of Medan is a strong starting point for future titles, and we're eager to see what The Curator has in store for us next year.

More: The 14 Scariest Video Games Of All Time

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Screen Rant was provided a PlayStation 4 digital copy for review.

source https://screenrant.com/man-of-medan-review/

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1-200

200: My crush’s name is: I don’t actually have a crush anymore😂😂199: I was born in: June198: I am really: weird197: My cellphone company is: Vodafone - it works where i go on holiday so it does me just fine 😂196: My eye color is: it changes - like sometimes its blue, green, grey and a mixture of blue and green - it’s weird .195: My shoe size is: 3 or 4 (5 at a push)194: My ring size is: I’ve never actually had it measured so idk 😂😂193: My height is: 5ft 5 - I’m growing lads!!!192: I am allergic to: waterproof plasters, bee/wasp stings (only mildly though - like i won’t die but just turn into a massive red ball), some soaps, most makeups, chalk and face paint.191: My 1st car was: I can’t even drive yet 😂😂190: My 1st job was: I don’t know if you would class this as a job but for my work experience, I worked at a cafe for two weeks. 189: Last book you read: Jane Eyre (one of my faves)188: My bed is: single - like me😉😂187: My pet: (s) two cats, (which my mum named) one called Mike and the other called Matt. I also have a pony called William (Billy for short)186: My best friend: @paigexxixo @sdmn-md @minibaeminter @wroetoredman @line-sidemen @mintersmini @wroetojill and a girl from irl called Catherine - i couldn’t choose one so have a few of my faves185: My favorite shampoo is: John Frieda Frizz Ease184: Xbox or ps3: PS3 cos I haven’t played XBox183: Piggy banks are: expensive bacon182: In my pockets: by Morrie (who kinda sounds like Marzia which is kinda scary?)181: On my calendar: is my exams😂180: Marriage is: okay? I haven’t had my wedding yet so I don’t know?179: Spongebob can: dance the best.178: My mom: likes to name animals weird names. 😂177: The last three songs I bought were? A candle, some chocolates and a shock absorber.176: Last YouTube video watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSAeOhCrv_s175: How many cousins do you have? About 14 give or take 😂 174: Do you have any siblings? One - my sister (she’s 17 - 2 years older than me)173: Are your parents divorced? Nope.172: Are you taller than your mom? I’m the same height maybe a lil smaller 😂 171: Do you play an instrument? Not currently, no. But I can play the drums, recorder and piano/keyboard (not perfectly but alright)170: What did you do yesterday? I played in two tournaments and had a back massage.[ I Believe In ]169: Love at first sight: Idk 😂😂 168: Luck: Yeah I guess.167: Fate: Yeah. 166: Yourself: Mm not all the time 😂😂 165: Aliens: Yeah.164: Heaven: Yeah.163: Hell: Yeah.162: God: Yeah definitely.161: Horoscopes: Some.160: Soul mates: I guess? 😂 159: Ghosts: Yeah.158: Gay Marriage: YES! UNFOLLOW ME AS I DO NOT CARE, I BELIEVE IN EVERYONE HAS RIGHTS TO MARRY WHO THEY WANT, WHEN THEY WANT FIGHT ME IF YOU WANT!!157: War: Definitely not! 156: Orbs: Yeah I guess?155: Magic: Some 😂 [ This or That ]154: Hugs or Kisses: Hugs153: Drunk or High: Neither - I don’t do either of them.152: Phone or Online: Depends.151: Red heads or Black haired: Both are equally as cute150: Blondes or Brunettes: Both are equally as cute149: Hot or cold: Warm.148: Summer or winter: Winter147: Autumn or Spring: AUTUMN! IT’S THE BEST SEASON EVER!!!!!!!146: Chocolate or vanilla: Both together cos I’m a weirdo like that 😂😂 145: Night or Day: Night - I love looking at the stars tho I do like to cloud watch from time to time144: Oranges or Apples: Apples.143: Curly or Straight hair: Straight142: McDonalds or Burger King: Maccy D’s all the way😂😂 141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: Not really a fan of chocolate if I’m honest 😂😂 140: Mac or PC: PC for generic stuff, Mac for editing139: Flip flops or high heals: Neither.138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: Ugly and rich so I can give money to charity etc137: Coke or Pepsi: Neither136: Hillary or Obama: Obama135: Burried or cremated: Either, I don’t care I’ll be dead 😂134: Singing or Dancing: Neither 😂😂133: Coach or Chanel: ??132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: ??131: Small town or Big city: Both130: Wal-Mart or Target: Neither 😂😂129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: Both are hilarious 😂128: Manicure or Pedicure: Neither 😂127: East Coast or West Coast: ??126: Your Birthday or Christmas: Both?125: Chocolate or Flowers: FLOWERS!!124: Disney or Six Flags: DISNEY!!123: Yankees or Red Sox: ??[ Here’s What I Think About ]122: War: shouldn’t be a thing.121: George Bush: needs to grow up.120: Gay Marriage: I FULLY SUPPORT IT - UNFOLLOW ME IF YOU WANT!119: The presidential election: irdk? I don’t watch it.118: Abortion: it’s people’s choice117: MySpace: ??116: Reality TV: don’t watch it115: Parents: some do a lot more than others to provide for the kiddas114: Back stabbers: fuck you, ain’t nobody stabbing me in the back113: Ebay: it’s cool, you literally can get anything and everything off of it112: Facebook: it’s okay?111: Work: as in job? do what you wanna do, not what your mum or dad says.110: My Neighbors: very funny. 109: Gas Prices: you make my grades jealous - going up.108: Designer Clothes: i don’t really where designer 😂😂107: College: i like the look of the one I’m intending to go106: Sports: I LOVE THEM (except netball, benchball and basketball - please don’t hate me, i’m just short and i struggle 😂😂)105: My family: they are okay, just fam really.104: The future:i don’t tend to think much of it, i just let it happen 😂😂[ Last time I ]103: Hugged someone: like 10 mins ago102: Last time you ate: like an hour ago101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: A guy called Daniel (I didn’t see him until last week but I didn’t see him since November)100: Cried in front of someone: Idk 😂 99: Went to a movie theater: Last year - to watch Finding Dory98: Took a vacation: idk 😂 97: Swam in a pool: last year 😂 96: Changed a diaper: never 😂 95: Got my nails done: last august for a wedding - never again94: Went to a wedding: the same wedding 93: Broke a bone: two years ago 92: Got a peircing: two years ago91: Broke the law: never 😂 90: Texted: half an hour ago[ MISC ]89: Who makes you laugh the most: lots of people 😂😂 88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: my bed 😂 87: The last movie I saw: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2 - Ik i’m a kid at heart, don’t judge 😂 86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: leaving school85: The thing im not looking forward to: my exams and tomorrow84: People call me: lodes of shit, I ain’t gonna name ‘em all but some people know what they say.83: The most difficult thing to do is: waking up in a morning82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: nope81: My zodiac sign is: Cancer80: The first person i talked to today was: Mike - the cat but if we talking about people - my dad 😂😂 79: First time you had a crush: 3 years ago78: The one person who i can’t hide things from: nobody, i’m very open 77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: idk 😂😂 76: Right now I am talking to: @paigexxixo  about bridge to terabithia 75: What are you going to do when you grow up: hopefully a graphics designer74: I have/will get a job: hopefully soon73: Tomorrow: school72: Today: sleep71: Next Summer: be fit70: Next Weekend: hopefully ask one of my friends from tennis their details69: I have these pets: cats and pony68: The worst sound in the world: nails dragging on chalk board, people smacking lips, people clicking pens, people shouting, people crying, people laughing, gun shots, explosions etc67: The person that makes me cry the most is: nobody 😂😂 66: People that make you happy: I could list forever65: Last time I cried: earlier - i was watching a vid of these boys crying and it just gets to me64: My friends are: lodes of people - most i have listed before63: My computer is: an acer62: My School: ??61: My Car: Audi A3 2010 model 1.6l?60: I lose all respect for people who: are homophobic, transphobic etc, people who hurt animals and people etc59: The movie I cried at was: ?? 58: Your hair color is: blonde57: TV shows you watch: that 70′s show, merlin, sherlock, heartland, doctor who, phineas and ferb, spongebob, tom and jerry, loony tunes56: Favorite web site: idk 😂😂 55: Your dream vacation: Guernsey, Jersey, Rome or Geneva54: The worst pain I was ever in was: when i either broke my arm,  or when i fell off a horse and dislocated my knee and cracked two of my ribs or when i fell off a different horse and almost broke my back53: How do you like your steak cooked: i don’t eat meat or fish 😂😂 52: My room is: 8 year old me’s bad desicion51: My favorite celebrity is: Johnny Depp50: Where would you like to be: some place else49: Do you want children: not particularly48: Ever been in love: nope47: Who’s your best friend: lodes of people46: More guy friends or girl friends: guy friends45: One thing that makes you feel great is: people44: One person that you wish you could see right now: @paigexxixo or @sdmn-md43: Do you have a 5 year plan: nope 😂 42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: nope 😂 41: Have you pre-named your children: nope😂 40: Last person I got mad at: *people: Looserpool 39: I would like to move to: either Guernsey, Jersey or Geneva38: I wish I was a professional: tennis player or sleeper 😂 [ My Favorites ]37: Candy: Caramac36: Vehicle: Car (Tesla Model S P100D)35: President: Obama34: State visited: none - I’ve never left England33: Cellphone provider: Vodafone32: Athlete: Jessica Ennis-Hill31: Actor: Johnny Depp/Leo DiCaprio/Patrick Stewart30: Actress: Emma Stone29: Singer: ??28: Band: ??27: Clothing store: ??26: Grocery store: ??25: TV show: I have lodes24: Movie: I have lodes23: Website: I have lodes22: Animal: I love them all21: Theme park: I’ve only ever been to Flamingo Land20: Holiday: Yorkshire Dales or Whitby19: Sport to watch: Football (Soccer)18: Sport to play: Tennis17: Magazine: ??16: Book: Either Jane Eyre or I Capture The Castle15: Day of the week: Saturday14: Beach: idk 😂😂 13: Concert attended: I’ve never been to one 😂 12: Thing to cook: I like to cook all sorts 😂 11: Food: I like all sorts 😂 10: Restaurant: ??9: Radio station: ??8: Yankee candle scent: idk 😂 7: Perfume: idk 😂 6: Flower: Rose, Lily or blossom5: Color: Red or black4: Talk show host: ??3: Comedian: Michael McIntyre, Jack Whitehall, Peter Kay or Russell Howard2: Dog breed: Border Collie1: Did you answer all these truthfully? Yes!!!!

[aion-rsa]

15 Underrated E3 2021 Games Not Enough People Are Talking About

https://ift.tt/3vGBozn

Despite being a somewhat quiet year for the show, E3 2021 was filled with so many new titles and updates to previously announced major projects that it’s hardly a surprise that many smaller games featured during the show ultimately went overlooked and ended up being somewhat underrated.

Yet, this is so much more than a list of games that let us celebrate little studios and individual developers. At a time when Covid-19 production delays threaten to push so many major games into 2022 and beyond, these 15 titles (and so many more) could end up working their way into upcoming game of the year conversations just as they remind us that new ideas aren’t dead: they’ve just gone indie.

From wizards with guns and spiritual Thief sequels to cosmic horror punk RPGs and escape room deck builders, these are the 15 underrated E3 2021 games that not enough people are talking about. 

15. Wizard With a Gun

You’re going to see a number of Devolver Digital games on this list, but few E3 titles from any publisher or developer made as good of a first impression as developer Galvanic Games’ Wizard With a Gun.

Described as an “online cooperative sandbox survival game,” Wizard With a Gun looks like a blend of Don’t Starve and Enter the Gungeon. Aside from the incredible name, the thing that stands out most about this game is the ability to combine magic and guns to craft some truly wild weapons. Interestingly, it may actually be possible to push your experiments too far and craft something that will hurt you more than your enemies.

14. Gloomwood

I’m a huge fan of developer New Blood Interactive (probably best known for 2018 horror shooter DUSK), and Gloomwood could just be their best game yet. 

Gloomwood is a stealth survival horror game that, in many ways, effectively serves as the Thief sequel fans have been begging for. The game’s Steam demo showcases its tremendous potential, but the title’s E3 2021 extended gameplay preview suggests that the best is yet to come. 

13. Replaced

There’s a good chance that you actually saw this game considering that it was featured fairly prominently during Xbox’s E3 2021 show, but it’s pretty much impossible to give this project enough love. 

While most people are (understandably) focusing on Replaced’s wonderful pixel art visuals, the few glimpses of action gameplay that we see in the title’s debut trailer suggest that this is going to be so much more than an artist showcase.

12. Bear and Breakfast

Bear and Breakfast was actually quietly revealed last year, but I’m more than happy to use its brief E3 2021 appearance as an excuse to hype up this wonderfully wholesome game with a potentially dark twist.

Bear and Breakfast presents itself as a kind of sim/builder game starring colorful and friendly woodland creatures, but both trailers we’ve seen so far suggest that there’s something darker at play that only reveals itself as you expand your cabin empire and dive deeper into the forest.

11. Harold Halibut

Somewhere between a Wallace and Gromit cartoon and a Wes Anderson movie lies the weird and wonderful Harold Halibut.

This stunningly beautiful project may just win you over with its stop motion visuals alone (which were handcrafted in real life and digitally scanned into the game), but it’s Harold Halibut’s classic adventure gameplay that could prove to be its best feature.

10. Lake

Lake is another one of those games that we actually heard about before E3 2021, but this is one of those projects that just keeps looking better every time we see it. 

If you can get past its Hallmark movie premise (a young woman leaves her big city job to return to her small town home and deliver mail), you’ll find that Lake’s large world, branching storylines, and diverse cast of characters may just make it one of the most compelling narrative experiences on the horizon.

9. The Anacrusis

The most logical reason more people weren’t talking about The Anacrusis after Xbox’s E3 2021 show is that the multiplayer co-op FPS was arguably upstaged by two bigger, somewhat similar titles: Back 4 Blood and Redfall.

Were it not for those titles, I suspect that more people would have instantly fallen for this ‘70s sci-fi-inspired shooter with roguelike and dungeon master elements. The Anacrusis promises to offer hours of replayability, which should make it a perfect addition to the Game Pass library.

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8. Loot River

I understand if your brain is wired to ignore the mention of another roguelike dungeon crawler, but Loot River has already found some ways to distinguish itself from some considerable competition. 

The highlight of this game so far is undoubtedly its level manipulation mechanics which add a compelling puzzle element to what may otherwise be a more standard entry into the genre. Having said that, even as a standard genre entry, Loot River looks like a lot of fun.

7. Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart is another one of those games that weirdly almost suffered from its prominent place in the Xbox E3 2021 showcase as it was flanked by larger titles that garnered most of the attention. 

However, nearly every aspect of this game we’ve seen so far is, at the very least, compelling. Atomic Heart’s physics and power-based shooter gameplay looks like a blast, but it’s the game’s alternate 1950s Soviet Union setting and Fallout vibes it gives off that really has us intrigued.

6. Death Trash

Speaking of Fallout, you probably think that The Outer Worlds 2 and Fallout 76 are the E3 2021 games that will come closest to offering a proper new Fallout experience. However, Death Trash may just be the game that realizes the potential of so many of the little things that make that franchise great.

This cosmic horror punk rock action RPG so perfectly captures the spirit of classic games like the original Fallout titles and Shadowrun that it’s hard to look at it and not wonder how it was possibly assembled by a single developer. This labor of love should absolutely be on your wishlist.

5. Sifu

There just aren’t enough martial arts video games in the world. I’ll never understand why that’s the case, but it’s just one of those sad facts of life. 

While Sifu impressed us when it debuted during a PlayStation broadcast earlier this year, the game’s E3 2021 gameplay trailer ensured it will stay on our radars. Sifu’s intense melee fights and environmental interactions could just make it the go-to experience for starved martial arts fans everywhere.

4. Demon Throttle

Recent years have gifted us with a number of notable retro action games, and Demon Throttle looks more than ready to join the ranks of exceptional experiences like Shovel Knight and The Messenger.

This top-down co-op shooter is currently garnering attention for its physical-only release strategy, but it’s the game’s chaotic action and outlandish humor that will really make you want to add it to your shelf. 

3. Inscryption

The deck builder genre has offered some of the most quietly compelling video game experiences in recent years, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever seen a deck builder as intriguing as Inscryption. 

The creator of 2016’s bizarre and wonderful Pony Island brings us this strange little game that combines elements of the deckbuilding genre with escape rooms and psychological horror. I can’t imagine how all of those incredible flavors are going to be mixed together into something cohesive, which honestly makes me that much more excited to see what this game is all about. 

2. Trek to Yomi

If Ghost of Tsushima didn’t quite give you a full dose of your Kurosawa-inspired video game fix, then you have to check out what Trek to Yomi promises to offer.

Trek to Yomi’s black-and-white visuals and samurai setting are obviously welcome Kurosawa callbacks, but it’s the way the gameplay references everything from Limbo and Mark of the Ninja to Bushido Blade that instantly shot this one near the top of our shortlist of underrated E3 2021 games more people should be talking about.

1. Immortality

With Her Story, Telling Lies, and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Sam Barlow has firmly established himself as one of the most exciting and daring writers in gaming. Now, Barlow returns with E3 2021’s most underrated and overlooked game, Immortality.

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Granted, we don’t know much about Immortality, but between the intriguing (if vague) premise that sees you explore three lost films starring a now missing actress and Barlowe’s outstanding track record, there’s no world in which fans of story-driven games won’t want to keep a close eye on this one.

The post 15 Underrated E3 2021 Games Not Enough People Are Talking About appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[operationrainfall]

Title NeuroVoider Developer Flying Oak Games Publisher(s) Plug In Digital Ltd Playdius (PC) Release Date March 20th, 2018 (Vita) Genre(s) Twin-Stick Shooter, Rogue-like, RPG Platform(s) Vita, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC Age Rating E10+ for Everyone 10+ Official Website

The rogue-like genre certainly is an interesting one. Despite having a pretty well-established list of game mechanics that define what the genre is, the sky’s the limit when it comes to what can be done with those mechanics. From basic RPGs to those that combine elements of platformers and shooters, there are actually quite a few different options that developers can choose to explore. This time around, I took a look at a twin-stick shooter with rogue-like aspects that places heavy emphasis on randomized builds. NeuroVoider originally launched back in late 2016 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. After receiving mostly positive reviews on those platforms, it saw a subsequent Nintendo Switch release in 2017 and a surprising PlayStation Vita release in the spring of 2018. For the purposes of this review, I will be focusing on the Vita version.

NeuroVoider doesn’t place much of an emphasis on story, but the tutorial gives you as much as you need. You awaken as a brain floating in a test tube, break out of that tube, and acquire a robotic body by choosing from one of three possible classes: Dash, Rampage, or Fortress. Your goal from that point on is to go from level to level, kill everything that moves, destroy the generators scattered throughout, and use newly obtained parts to upgrade your body. Along the way, you’ll encounter several bosses and make your way to the master at the end. Choosing the Dash class grants you the ability to move quickly from place to place, but your HP may be lower than the other two classes. Fortress class bodies are slow-moving, but they make up for that weakness by offering you more HP. I spent the majority of my playtime using the Rampage class since it’s essentially the best of both worlds.

I’ve labeled NeuroVoider as a rogue-like, but the only real defining characteristics that led to that distinction are permadeath and randomized enemies, loot, and level progression. The structure of each level is also procedurally generated. There are between 5-6 different settings that a level can revolve around. After each level there is an “intermission” screen where you are given the choice of three randomly chosen locations. Each of these will have a randomly assigned size, structure, number of “elite” enemies, and varying degrees/quality of dropped loot. The loot itself is what really makes each playthrough unique, as each item that you obtain can be normal, uncommon, rare, or even “glitched”. You use these items to upgrade your base unit’s core, vision components, mobility, and weapons. Each item also comes with its own randomized values for HP, EP, damage dealt, etc.

When you first begin a playthrough, you can either choose to generate a brand new body for yourself or use a code from one of your previous playthroughs. It’s all luck of the draw for which parts you will be initially assigned. From there, you will obtain new items as you defeat enemies and gather parts. Depending on which level you choose out of the possible three, the quality of loot that you can obtain will increase or decrease. I found that it’s generally better to start off by choosing stages with low difficulty and medium quality items. Once you upgrade once or twice, then you can start ramping up the difficulty. Keep in mind that once you die, it becomes difficult to reclaim your lost items (though it can be done).

The last main point of customization comes in the form of forging new pieces for your body. If you obtain new parts that don’t fit with your desired class/loadout, you can scrap them and use the materials to synthesize new pieces. These new pieces will be generated at random and could be better or worse than what you had before. I’d instead suggest saving the scrap materials to help repair your unit as it becomes damaged. Additionally, if you decide at some point while playing that you’d like to switch classes, you can do so by simply exchanging your current parts for ones that are associated with one of the other two classes. Unfortunately, you can’t mix and match class-specific parts, but that ability would give players an unfair advantage.

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All talk of customization aside, NeuroVoider at its core is a top-down, twin-stick shooter. You use a combination of different guns and energy weapons to mow down robotic enemies before they can do the same to you. Keeping in mind that I’ve only played the PS Vita version, I must say that controlling your unit is easier said than done. While basic movement is pretty fluid, aiming can initially be a bit of a challenge. Something about lining up shots with the right analog stick just feels a bit stiff. This could just be my own perception though and I did get used to it rather quickly. What I didn’t get used to though was the usage of the Vita’s back touchpad. Regardless of loadout, your unit comes equipped with two features, each of which are tied to the back touchpad. Tapping the left side of the pad activates special abilities that you can choose beforehand like HP regeneration or EMP blasts. The right side of the pad is reserved for class-specific abilities like shielding and dashing. The problem with this system is twofold: The left side ability can be used roughly once per level and the right side ability can quickly overheat your unit, causing HP loss. Why is this an issue? Well, if you’re like me, it’s likely that you tend to hold your Vita by resting your fingers on the touchpad. With so few games actually using the touchpad for input, I’ve grown accustomed to simply placing my fingers there. While I attempted to avoid touching the pad while playing, it was a hard habit to break and I found myself wasting my abilities and overheating when I didn’t intend to. This issue won’t exist for other versions, but it’s definitely a point of annoyance on the Vita.

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Input troubles aside, the rest of the game plays just fine. As a shooter, it’s pretty competent and I enjoyed using a variety of different tactics and loadouts to see which ones worked best. The text is a tad too small to read at times, but that was never a huge issue for me. Perhaps the only other item to be aware of is the lack of multiplayer support on the Vita. If you take a look at the “New Game” screen, you’ll notice that there are four different test tubes, but only the green one is able to be selected. This is because the other three are reserved for other players. If you have the PC, Xbox, PS4, or Switch version of the game, you can select these and play local co-op with other people. Given limitations with the Vita and its low install base, it’s unfortunate but somewhat expected that this would be the case. Still, leaving out the multiplayer feature altogether seems like a huge loss for this version, especially given the positive feedback for this feature in the other versions.

We’ve talked a lot about gameplay, so let’s shift gears and talk about the art design now. NeuroVoider is a very dark and futuristic looking game. It’s comprised of really well done pixel art, both for the sprites and the backgrounds. Each level has its own theme and each of them are done quite nicely. From laboratories, to sewers, to ice levels, to what seems like hell itself, there are a good variety of different environments to explore. Keep in mind too that each level will be structured slightly differently, so no two levels will look identical.

I have very mixed thoughts when it comes to the music and sound design. On one hand, the soundtrack is done by synthwave artist Dan Terminus and I was very pleased with the tracks that were included. The music overall is very dark and sci-fi sounding so it fits in perfectly with the vibe that the developers were going for. On another positive, the sound effects themselves were pretty nice. I never noticed any issues with these or felt that they were out of place. I did however notice a glaring issue with the background music, namely that it didn’t always play correctly. There were numerous times when I would be in the middle of a level and the background music would simply cut out at random, never to return (until the next level). On none of these occasions did I notice any similarities; they just happened out of nowhere. I’ve seen online that some players of the PC version have reported having no sound at all, but I was unable to verify if my issue was specific to the Vita version or not. Regardless, it is an concern to make a note of.

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Despite some issues specific to the Vita version, I walked away feeling quite impressed with NeuroVoider and I’m certain that I will continue to play it off and on now that this review is done. Aside from my reservations with the touchpad input and the sound issues, it’s still a very competent shooter and an interesting rogue-like. Since this game relies heavily on trial and error, there really is no cookie-cutter answer for how long this will take you to play. I found that my longest run was a little over an hour, though most of mine fell somewhere between 30-45 minutes. My overall playtime was somewhere in the ballpark of 7-8 hours. If you throw multiplayer into the mix, your times may vary further. In summary, NeuroVoider’s interesting use of randomized loadouts, high replayability, and reasonable price point of $9.99 (for the Vita version) earn it a thumbs up from me. Having said that, I’d forgo playing this on the Vita and spend the extra $5 or so to pick up a version that supports multiplayer.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”4″]

Review Copy provided by the publisher for review purposes.

REVIEW: NeuroVoider Title NeuroVoider Developer Flying Oak Games Publisher(s) Plug In Digital Ltd

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND  October 5, 2018  -  Venom, The Star Is Born, The Hate U Give

Going to change things up again this week as we get into October, because I want to give special attention to a film called THE HATE U GIVE (20thCentury Fox), which is opening in select cities this weekend but will expand nationwide on October 19.

In this adaptation of Angie Thomas’ book (which I haven’t read), Amandla Stenberg plays Starr Carter, a teen girl living a dual life with her family in the primarily black Garden Heights community and when hanging out with her bratty white high school friends who are always trying to act “ghetto” around her. At home, Starr has loving parents, Maverick and Lisa (Russell Hornsby, Regina Hall), a younger brother Sekani and half-brother Seven. When Starr sees her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) shot by a white police officer, she’s unsure whether she should come forward and testify. Her police officer uncle Carlos (Common) doesn’t think so, especially since Khalil might have involved with Maverick’s old crime-boss King (Anthony Mackie), who wouldn’t want his business known to the police.

It seems like a fairly simple plot derived from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but there’s so much more to the movie than the ongoing battle between the police and the poorer communities they patrol.  In many ways, Starr is dealing with an identity crisis that I imagine   many African-Americans must face, having to be one way around white friends and co-workers and another way at home or with their family.

Besides the fact that this is Stenberg’s third movie this year where she had a hunky white boyfriend, she is so much better in this than her other films because she brings a playful energy to Starr that makes you want to follow her story.

Audrey Wells adapted Thomas’ book into a fantastic screenplay and director George Tillman Jr., whose filmography includes oddities like the biopic Notorious and Dwayne Johnson’s Faster, really directs the hell out of this movie

There are so many great scenes including one between Stenberg and Common where they have an honest talk about the different sides of what might seem like a cut-and-dry case of police racism.

The Hate U Give (which is derived from Tupac’s “T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E” motto that “the hate u give little infants effs everyone) is a movie that shares an important message without hitting you over the head with it ala Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman or some of the other films in the oeuvre release this year.

I guess my only misgiving about the film is that it goes on a little long, offering a few satisfying scenes that could have easily ended things there, but then continuing with a full-scale riot when tempers explode after the trial of Khalil’s murderer.

In my opinion, this is up there with some of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and only slightly behind A Star Is Born (review below) this week. While on the surface, it might not seem like a movie that would appeal to everyone, it works on so many levels, including as a straight-up coming-of-age film (and by now, you all should know how much I love those).

Rating: 8.5/10

The Hate U Give is kind of the Hollywood version of the #BlackLivesMatter story, but if you’re looking for something a little more grounded in reality, you should check out Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Monsters and Men (Neon), which is now playing in select cities. I got a chance to rewatch it this past week, and I was just as impressed as when I saw it at Sundance.  BlacKkKlansman star John David Washington is particularly impressive, again playing a police officer.

We now return you to the regularly-scheduled movie preview column after the jump…

This might surprise some but not others that this coming October is offering some of what might be the best films of the year, between this week’sA Star Is Born and The Hate U Give to next week’s First Man and Bad Times at the El Royale. We’re living in exciting times!  

VENOM (Sony)

In what looks to be the second to last “superhero” movie of the year, Sony is finally making a movie dedicated to Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis who later became a hero, hoping the fans will forget all about the awful version of Venom from Spider-Man 3.  A big selling point for the movie is that it returns Tom Hardy to the comic book world after playing Bane in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and he better hope fans like his Eddie Brock/Venom more than they did his strange-sounding villain.

Hardy has been laying low recently, his last film being Nolan’s Dunkirklast year in which the actor was barely recognizable as a WWII jet pilot. It was two years before that when he appeared in Inarritu’s Oscar-winning The Revenant, the crime-drama Legendand George Miller’s long-awaited (and also multiple Oscar nominee) Mad Max: Fury Road.  In the years following The Dark Knight Rises, Hardy has also starred in a number of smaller films that haven’t gotten much traction, so it’s odd to see him returning to superheroes only six years after playing Bane.

Venomalso brings director Ruben Fleischer back into the Sony fold after directing the horror-comedy hit Zombieland and the comedy 30 Minutes or Less, although Fleischer has been focusing on television in the last five years since the Ryan Gosling crime-drama Gangster Squad. Neither of the latter two movies did as well as Zombieland, and it definitely feels like he has something to prove with Venom.

Unfortunately, people have already been vocally pessimistic about the movie ever since the first trailer didn’t bother to actually show Venom, and things got even more questionable after seeing Venom in a rather awkward longer trailer.  Much of the movie’s success is going to depend on whether reviews totally trash the movie or whether some critics actually like what Fleischer and Hardy are doing. So far, the RottenTomatoes reviews are at 28% Fresh, pointing more to the former, but one wonders if curious fans will still give the movie a chance.

Some have suggested Venom could open with over $60 million but I’m going a bit lower with around $55 to 57 million and $130 million or so total domestic. What’s interesting is that the opening range for the movie puts Venom into consideration to become the top October opening over Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which opened with $55 million a few years ago. Regardless of whether it sets a new October opening record or not, I expect a fairly large drop after its opening weekend just because the fans will rush out to see it and then move onto other things.  Expect this to end up around $125 million domestic, which is not great, probably not enough for a sequel unless the movie surprises internationally.

Mini-Review: I’ve never been a huge fan of Venom as a comic book character. He always seemed a little one-dimensional to me, even as other writers/artists tried to flesh him and his host Eddie Brock out. (So far, Donny Cates’ take on Venom is well worth reading.)

I’m going to assume you know something about the character, his history as a Spider-Man costume-turned-villain and then how he became a hero. It’s obvious Tom Hardy and director Reuben Fleischer were making a movie for fans of the character who were disappointed with his handling by Sam Raimi in Spider-Man 3, and for the most part, it’s fairly faithful other than any references to Spider-Man.  In fact, the whole story has  been moved to San Francisco, as to avoid any other Spider-Man comparisons.

In this case, the symbiote comes down to earth in a space shuttle made by the Life Corporation run by an Elon Musk-type CEO named Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), and Drake does experiments on the homeless to try to make them hosts for the alien creatures. Tom Hardy plays investigative reporter Eddie Brock, a big-time loser who loses his lawyer girlfriend (Michelle Williams) when he snoops into a case against Drake. While investigating at the Life Corporation, one of the symbiotes takes to Brock, and you can probably guess what happens.

Although this is a straight-up origin story in the simplest terms, some things just don’t work and there are definitely issues, the first being the often silly screenplay that is constantly on the border of veering into campy Nicolas Cage territory. Much of that is due to Hardy, who plays off the silliness of the schizophrenic nature of the character,

On paper, Venom could have easily been a terrifying R-rated horror film with lots of gore, but trying to keep it at PG-13 means that Fleischer makes it more of an action-comedy, and there is enough decent action scenes and quirky humor to keep things entertaining.

Probably one of the things that makes or breaks any comic book movie is the CG visual FX and Fleischer’s hefty team of animators does a decent job making Venom watchable with long black tendrils that reminded me of the video game Prototype (one of my first Xbox games). Things do get a little messy when a counter-symbiote is introduced named “Riot” is introduce and the end battle has some of the same problems as the Ed Norton The Incredible Hulk in that it just doesn’t deliver.

Even so, if you ARE a fan of the comic character, you should be pleased with this incarnation just as those unfamiliar with the character from the comics will probably find the movie and Hardy’s performance to be off-putting. The film never deteriorates to the point of being a Catwoman or Fantastic Fourlevel trash fire, though. Despite some tonal issues, it’s often fun and entertaining, especially the action scenes, and if nothing else, there’s an end credits scene that will make people (esp. Venom fans) hope this movie does well enough to warrant a sequel. Rating: 6.5/10

Venom is going to have a lot of strong competition for older moviegoers and women of all ages with...

A STAR IS BORN (Warner Bros.)

This wasn’t even remotely one of my more anticipated movies of the year until it started getting rave reviews out of the early September festivals, but I’m sure it would have gotten a lot of attention for being Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, even if it seems like a shoe-in to win lots of awards over the next few months.

Obviously, this is a remake of a movie that dates back to the 1937 movie starring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor, which was nominated for 8 Oscars, winning for its story (as opposed to its screenplay). It was remade in 1954 with Judy Garland, and that was nominated for six Oscars and then again in 1974 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Krisstoferson, and that also only won one Oscar out of four nominations. Can Bradley Cooper’s version possibly break the “jinx” and make a movie that wins more than one Oscar? I think so.

Cooper has mostly been taking time off of acting to direct A Star Is Born, merely providing the voice of Rocket in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and this year’s Avengers: Infinity War. He kind of hit a bit of a downturn in the years following his enormous hit American Sniper for Clint Eastwood, which grossed $350 million and got Cooper his third and fourth Oscar nominations. (Cooper has already been earmarked for a number of Oscar nominations for A Star is Born, for acting, directing and possibly even for writing some of the film’s songs.) Neither of Cooper’s 2015 movies with Jennifer Lawrence (Serena and Joy) did as well as their first two movies together with David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Cooper’s movies with Cameron Crowe (Aloha) and his cooking movie Burnt also didn’t do very well. Even so, Cooper had already been elevated to the A-list as an actor

The real ringer for Cooper’s debut is casting Lady Gaga in the role of Ally, the lounge singer who Cooper’s Jackson Maine discovers and falls for, because Lady Gaga has such an enormous diehard fanbase that even the younger girls might not be discouraged by the film’s soft-R rating. (Honestly, I still have to question the MPAA who gives this an R and Venom a PG-13 when there was WAY more swearing in that one.) Anyway, Lady Gaga is pegged to be nominated for an Oscar for her performance and probably one of her songs, too,

Another one of the films ringers is comedian Dave Chapelle, who basically just appears in one section of the movie but Warner Bros. wisely has cut a second trailer featuring him to play in movies like Night School in hopes of appealing to some of the African-American audiences that will see this movie as very white bread. More importantly, it stars Sam Elliot as Jackson’s older brother who has many great scenes with Cooper and is likely to be nominated for his first Oscar for it. (He should have been nominated for last year’s The Hero if you ask me.)

There are many easy comparisons for A Star is Born from Eminem’s 8 Mile ($51.2 million opening, $116m total) and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line ($22.3m opening, $119m total). There’s certainly the hype that came with 8 Mile going into opening weekend and Cooper certainly has enough box office pull, but the fact that this is a remake might already make some older audiences wary. At the same time, Gaga and Cooper’s modern take on the age-old story is likely to appeal to younger audiences, as will the music that runs a wide gamut of country rockers and ballads, including a couple that will likely be nominated for Oscars.

The good news is that the movie has been receiving rave reviews since it premiered at Venice and then played Toronto shortly afterwards.

This is the thing. I think A Star Is Born is going to do very well this weekend, probably more than $40 million, but I think it’s really going to kill in the weeks to come as word-of-mouth and repeat viewings pushes the movie up over the $150 million mark. If the movie plays as well as I think it does, I wouldn’t even be surprised to see it approaching $200 million once it re-expands to take advantage of inevitable awards.

Mini-Review: It’s been more than a minute since I saw the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson A Star Is Born, so I’m not too adverse to a fourth remake, as much as I was concerned about a movie featuring an actor I’m so-so on and a pop singer whose work I never really cared for. Imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying the film almost immediately as we see Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine performing on stage with the very loud live music coming from the Dolby sound system where I saw the movie.

Maine is an alcoholic so after the show he goes looking for a bar, winding up at a drag night of one local watering hole where it just so happens that Lady Gaga’s Ally is performing “La Vie en Rose” (maybe a nod to another Oscar-winning actress?). He’s immediately enthralled and goes backstage to meet her, and the two immediately hit it off, hanging out and learning more about each other. Ally immediately starts enjoying the perks of Jackson’s fame as he flies her to one of his concerts and pulls her up on stage to perform the song “Shallow.”

Things progress from there as Ally becomes famous from a video of her performance with Jackson. After one show, Ally is approached by a manager-type who wants to make her an even bigger star, and he proceeds to do what happens too many times in the music industry where he tries to transform her into some pop diva that’s

I really enjoyed seeing the romance and relationship between the two leads evolve, because Cooper’s Jackson Maine is quite a smooth-talker, even if he’s slurring most of his words. Gaga is also impressive, likely bringing some of her own struggles in the music business to the role. On top of that, the supporting cast, including Sam Elliot as Jack’s older brother and Andrew Dice Clay as Ally’s Dad brought a lot to the mix as Cooper ably balances the film’s tonal shifts from heavy drama to lighter moments.

Things do get a little bit predictable during the second act as Ally’s star begins to rise while Jackson’s starts to crash and burn, and he’s unable to accept how she’s becoming more successful than him, as his career begins to stagnate. He stops drinking, then starts drinking again and things just get worse and worse, as he seems to be hindering her career. The film’s last act is a stunner as Jack tries to get his alcoholism in check and Ally’s star continues to rise, making it obvious something’s eventually going to give.

A Star Is Born is an impressive debut from Cooper, not only for his direction but also how he elevates himself as an actor to keep up with his perfectly cast co-star. That’s not even considering that he co-wrote many of the film’s gorgeous songs. I enjoyed this film far more than I thought I would, and I know that I won’t be the only person seeing it multiple times.

Rating: 9/10

Venom shouldn’t have a problem taking the top spot although we’ll have to see whether negative reviews manage to keep the fans away. Either way, it will beat A Star is Born on Thursday/Friday but then the latter will pick up steam, bearing in mind that Monday is Columbus Day so there’s no school and government offices are closed, which could help some of the returning movies, as well.

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Venom  (Sony) - $55.6 million N/A 2. A Star is Born  (Warner Bros.) - $42.5 million N/A 3. Night School  (Universal) - $15 million -46% 4.Smallfoot  (Warner Bros.) - $14.5 million -37% 5. The House with a Clock in its Walls  (Universal) - $7.3 million -40% 6. A Simple Favor (Lionsgate) – $4 million -38% 7. The Nun  (New Line) - $3 million -54% 8. Crazy Rich Asians  (New Line) - $2.7 million -35% 9. Hell Fest  (CBS Films/Lionsgate) - $2.2 million -57% 10. The Predator (Fox) – $1.7 million -57%

LIMITED RELEASES

Other than The Hate U Give, this weekend is kind of a mixed bag for limited releases, since I haven’t watched as many of these as I probably should.

Almost a year after it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s LOVING PABLO (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) starring Javier Bardem as the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar as it follows his rise to power while in a love affair with Colombian journalist Virgina Vallejo, played by Penelope Cruz. The film is based on Vallejo’s book, and it’s opening at around 15 theaters across the country.

Filmmaker Peter Bogdonavich pays tribute to the great silent film Buster Keaton with Buster Restored (Cohen Media Group), which combines footage from Keaton’s silent comedies with interviews by those he’s inspired including Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino and Johnny Knoxville. It opens at the Quad Cinemaon Friday along with a small Buster Keaton retrospective and then opens at the Landmark Nuarton Oct. 19

Matt Tyrnauer follows his recent doc Scotty and the Secret of Hollywood with Studio 54, opening at the IFC Center Friday. It looks at the New York nightclub that was the place to be seen between 1977 and 1980 but was exceedingly hard to get into as its popularity and notoriety rose. Tyrnauer was given incredible access to the man-behind-the-club Ian Schrager, who tells the story of Studio 54 for the first time. After a number of showings at IFC Center with Tyrnauer in attendance, Studio 54 will then open at the Landmark Nuart in L.A. on Oct. 12.

Opening at the Film Forum in New York is Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich’s Moynihan (First Run Features), a portrait of former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who tried to contend with poverty and racism in the greatest city in the world. (The latter bit is my own personal opinion. I haven’t seen the movie.)

Not to overshadowed by Bradley Cooper, Cuba Gooding Jr. stars and makes his directorial debut in Bayou Caviar (Gravitas Ventures), which stars Richard Dreyfuss as a Russian gangster who hires Gooding’s former boxer to take down an associate’s son-in-law with a scandalous tape. It also stars Famke Janssen, Katherine McPhee, Ken Lerner and Lia Marie Johnson.

Bella Thorne and Jessie Usher star in Jeremy Ungar’s Ride (RLJE Films) with the latter playing James, a struggling actor who drives people around L.A. for a ride-sharing service. The job gets slightly better when he hits it off with the beautiful Jessica, but the two of them are then taken on a crazy joy ride by another fare.

Following its run on DirecTV, Trevor White’s A Crooked Somebody (Vertical/DirecTV) stars Rich Sommer as a medium who goes against the advice of his minister father (Ed Harris) trying to call forth the dead, only to be idnapped by someone who desperately wants to make contact with the dead.

Terence Stamp and Ann Demetriou stars in David LG Hughes’ Viking Destiny (Saban Films/Lionsgate), the latter playing a Viking princess who is forced to flee her kingdom after her king father (presumably Stamp) is murdered, so she travels the world building an army to get revenge. In case you’re wondering what Game of Thrones has inspired…. wonder no more!

Michael Ironside stars in Michael Peterson’s horror film Knuckleball (Freestyle Digital Media) about a 12-year-old who finds himself alone on an isolated farm after his grandfather dies. (I assume Ironside plays the latter.)

I also don’t know a ton about Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Wobble Place (Breaking Glass Pictures), which has an exclusive run at Metrograph starting Friday with the filmmaker in attendance for a few screenings. Best I can do to describe this is to share the odd trailer…

This week’s Yash Raj Films offering is Abhiraj K. Minawala’s Loveyatri, a love story set during the 9-day festival of Navrati, starring Aayush Sharma and Warina Hussain, a romance which almost comes to an end as she travels back to the UK leaving him in India.

Filmmakers Jukka Vidgren & Juuso Laatio’s Scandinavian cult-comedy Heavy Trip (Doppelgänger Releasing/Bloody Disgusting) will open in select theaters Friday before going to VOD on Oct. 12. It stars Johannes Holopainen as a guy stuck in a small Finnish village who is also the lead singer of metal band Impaled Rektum, a band who hasn’t played a single gig in 12 years until they’re booked to play a Norwegian festival.

And speaking of which, Bloody Disgusting’s Retro Nightmares continues with a double feature of Amityville: The Evil Escapes & Amityville: It’s About Time on Thursday Oct. 4 in select cities.

Lastly,  Anthony Nardolillo’s Shine (Forgiven Films/GVN Releasing), which won the Best Feature award at the 2017 Urbanworld Film Festival, comes out Friday, starring salsa dancersJorge Burgos and Gilbert Saldivar as two brothers who find themselves on opposite sides of the gentrification hitting East Harlem.

STREAMING

The only major new film streaming on Netflix is Tamara Jenkins’ new film PRIVATE LIFE, which premiered at Sundance and just played the New York Film Festival. It stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as a married couple who have been trying to have a baby and start looking at alternative methods after fertility treatments aren’t working. Jenkins is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 2007’s The Savages, starring Laura Linney and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. (The movie also opens at the IFC Center in New York and at a theater in L.A.)

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

I’m pretty excited about my local theater’s latest series, an Albert Brooks retrospective that runs between Friday and Tuesday and including some of his classics like Modern Romance, Lost in America, Mother, Defending Your Life,Real Life and a program of SNL shorts.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Alain Resnais’ 1974 film Stavisky, featuring music by Stephen Sondheim, gets a restoration, which opens here on Wednesday.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Beyond Fest 2018 continues with a double feature of Flash Gordon and the West Coast premiere of the doc Life After Flash. Thursday sees a double feature of The Monster Squad and the new documentary about the movie called Wolfman’s Got Nards. Beyond Fest will then wrap on Saturday with a TRIPLE feature of Black Christmas and Halloween from 1978, as well as the brand-new Halloween weeks before its nationwide release.

AERO  (LA):

American Cinemateque’s other L.A. theater continues its own Beyond Fest Tribute to Cronenberg with a double feature of the director’s Crash and Spider on Thursday night. It also begins the series The Life of Reilly, as in John C. Reilly, with a double feature of Chicago and Step Brothers on Friday, and then a free screening of Reilly’s new film The Sisters Brothers on Saturday. Saturday also sees a screening of PT Anderson’s Magnolia with Reilly in person and a screening of A Grin Without a Hat (1977) to celebrate Icarus Films’ 40th anniversary.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

To help celebrate last week’s retrospective recipient Peter Bogdonavich’s new doc The Great Buster: A Celebration (see above), the West Village theater will also show a trio of Buster Keaton shorts, The General and other Keaton classics.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

Along with a program of Jean Vigo shorts, the Hollywood theater will show the new 4k restoration of the director’s L’Atalante that screened at Film Forum last week.

MOMA (NYC):

The Unknown Jerry: Home Movies and More from the Jerry Lewis Collection at the Library of Congresscontinues with  Come Back Little Shiksa (1962) and The Re-Inforcer (1951) on Friday, Fairfax Avenue (1951), and a couple features on Gar-Ron Productions on Saturday and The Bellboy (1960) on Sunday, as it continues into next week. The month-long Modern  Matinees: Vincent Price will show Edward Scissorhands on Friday afternoon.

[beautyandthewolffanfic]

Fallout 76: Everything we know about Bethesda's shared world shooter - DailyGadgets

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Fallout 76: Everything we know about Bethesda's shared world shooter - DailyGadgets

War. War never changes — but the world of Fallout apparently does. Bethesda’s next post-apocalyptic adventure game is almost here. Fallout 76 will be here in November, and it’s taking the series somewhere it’s never been before: Online.

The company has been dropping hints about the game for months — between the snippets of the game we saw at Microsoft’s E3 event, Bethesda’s own showcase and at Quake Con, there’s a lot of info to sift through. The short of it is that Fallout 76 is less punishing take on the online survival RPG akin to RUST or DayZ, but that’s just the tip of the nuclear warhead.

There’s a lot to uncover here, however, so before we get to what Fallout 76 is, let’s go over the basics.

What is Fallout, anyway?

Ever wondered what would have happened if the Cold War got hot, and everybody dropped atomic bombs on each other? That’s Fallout. The first game takes place a little over 80 years after the world was devastated by nuclear warfare and portrays a dystopian wasteland built on the ruins of the United States. Fallout 2 took place just a couple of decades later, but when Bethesda took the franchise over, the timeline jumped forward: Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 take place around 200 years after the bombs dropped.

In most games, the player is the descendant of people who survived the war by retreating to long-term bomb shelters called Vaults — and they’re leaving the comfort of their underground city for the first time to explore a destroyed and desolate world.

It sounds grim, but it’s surprisingly packed with humor and great music, while its engrossing open worlds are buoyed by solid RPG mechanics.

Now Playing: Watch this: Fallout 76 first look shown at Microsoft’s E3 2018 conference

2:55

OK, then — so what’s Fallout 76?

Fallout 76 is the latest Fallout adventure, and it’s the earliest game in the Fallout timeline. Previous games in the series mention Vault 76 as one of the earliest bunkers to be opened — a little more than 20 years after the bombs dropped, and Bethesda confirmed that on the stage at E3 2018. 

That means players in Fallout 76 will be seeing a world ravaged by the aftermath of nuclear war, but not ravaged by time — making them among the first survivors of the Great War. And most importantly, the first survivors to start rebuilding society. It also means less time has passed since the bombs dropped, which means…

Bethesda

It’s a lot more colorful than Fallout 4

The Earth may be poisoned by nuclear fallout, and the future of the planet’s flora may be grim — but in Fallout 76, it hasn’t been that long since the bombs dropped. That means, well, that it’s not as muddy, dull and brown-looking as some of the previous games. Early shots of the game’s world shows a landscape dotted with plants and trees of all kinds of colors.

It doesn’t hurt that the buildings in this version of Fallout have only been standing empty for a few dozen years, either. Not hundreds.

That better-looking world isn’t just the developers adding more trees to the landscape either — Bethesda’s Todd Howard says that the game’s rendering engine has been given a major overhaul.”We always start with the world,” He said at E3. “This time, it starts with new lighting, rendering and landscape technology.” Fallout 4 has better lighting, and farther viewing distance than any other Fallout game. Not bad!.

It’s the biggest Fallout game ever made!

According to Howard, Fallout 76 is the largest Fallout game ever made. In fact, the game world it’s set in will be four times larger than Fallout 4, previously the largest game in the series.

“Set in the hills of West Virginia,” he said, “You are one of the first to emerge into a very different and untamed wasteland.” And indeed — it is different. Howard says the world is huge, diverse and features six distinct regions to explore, each pulling from real culture, locations and even legends from the area.

…But you won’t need to walk everywhere

There might not be vehicles in Fallout 76 (at least none we know of), but you still won’t have to walk all the way across its massive map. Well, at least more than once: developers recently confirmed that the game would include a “fast travel” section that will enable you to instantly travel to different points in the game world.

It’s a good thing, too. The world needs to be huge, too — because you won’t be playing Fallout 76 alone.

Fallout 76 is a shared-world survival game that’s ‘entirely online’

You aren’t the only vault dweller escaping the confines of an underground bunker to greet the irradiated world — the Vault 76 in Fallout 76 is filled with other characters too — and they’re all real people.

Speaking at Bethesda’s E3 2018 showcase, game director Todd Howard announced that Fallout 76 is “entirely online,” but that isn’t to say it’s a massively multiplayer game though — it’s more like a “shared world” shooter, similar to games like Destiny. When you play the game, you’ll be on a map with a dozen or so other players. Not hundreds, not thousands — just few. It is the apocalypse, after all.

That matches up with early rumors, which claim that Fallout 76 started life as a multiplayer prototype for Fallout 4, but evolved into an online survival RPG. That actually makes a lot of sense: Fallout 4 introduced building mechanics to the franchise, tasking the player with building out settlements for other survivors. Now, Fallout 76 is taking that mechanic online, and letting your friends help.

You won’t be able to play with friends on other platforms, though

Fallout 76 might be a shared-world shooter of sorts, but you’ll only be able to share that world with friends who are playing on the same platform as you. In other words, Xbox One players won’t be able to pal around in the apocalypse with PlayStation 4 owners. According to the game’s creators, that’s Sony’s fault — the company has made a habit in recent years of barring online games from enabling cross-platform support. It happened with Rocket League, Fortnite, Minecraft and now, Fallout 76.  Bummer.

There might be less NPCs

In Fallout 76, every other human you encounter in the game is a real person — another player, on their own adventure in the wasteland. That means you won’t find any other humans out living in the wasteland with dialogue trees and scripted missions to give out. That means there might be fewer NPCs in the world to interact with — but it doesn’t mean there won’t be any. 

It’s online, but there’s still a main story

Despite the multiplayer focus, Bethesda’s Pete Hines says the game does have a main campaign. “There definitely is a story in this game,” He told GameSpot. “What happened to the people outside after the bombs fell? Where are they? What are the new threats? How do you solve that?”

Bethesda was very careful when it said that every human being you encounter in the game would be a player — but humans aren’t the only characters in Fallout. Bethesda has revealed that there will be a new faction of intelligent ghouls in the game (Zombie-like irradiated humans) called who can serve as NPCs.

Skill points and perks are back, but they’re different

If you’ve ever played a Fallout game, you know that every character has their own special attributes. Or, rather, that their attributes are S.P.E.C.I.A.L – Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. Traditionally, players get a set number of skill points to pour into each of these attributes. Each time a character levels up, they get more points — which the player uses to define their character’s development over time. Characters could also earn “perks” that would give them specific stat boosts or unique traits.

These systems are returning for Fallout 76 — but they’re a bit different. Rather than serving as numeric markers for how strong or agile your character is, skill points will denote how many perks you’ll be able to use in each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. category. Oh, and perks are no longer permanent character changes either, but equitable “cards” that you can toggle on and off to change your character’s loadout.

Like in the original game, each perk card adds extra bonuses to your character. A luck-based “scrounger” card for instance will give you a 50 percent chance to find extra ammo when you search containers. The “Expert heavy gunner” perk card, on the other hand, adds an extra 10 percent damage to nonexplosive heavy guns you equip. The catch? Each of those perk cards has a value assigned to it. If you want to equip a perk card with a value of 3, you need at least three points in that card’s attribute to use it.

Yes, that is a bit complicated — but the result is a system that allows you to more freely swap out your character’s abilities and change your play style on the fly. At least that’s the hope.

Not everybody you meet online will be your friend

Although Bethesda mostly showed off Fallout 76 as an online co-op version of the series you can play with your friends, it didn’t shy away from the antagonistic side of multiplayer gaming, either. Other players in Fallout 76 will be able to team up with you to explore the West Virginian wasteland, or hunt you down and attack you to fight for land.  Why do they need land? Well, to build things of course.

You’ll be able to build your own base — and move it wherever you want

Building settlements was a big part of Fallout 4 — and that element is coming to the online world of Fallout 76, too. Players will be able to gather resources and create a base or settlement in the wilderness, complete with defense weapons. Don’t worry about over-crowding though: you can build any base you want, but Howard says you’ll also be able to pack those bases up and move them to other locations. Player-built structure’s won’t appear when that player is not logged in either, so the map won’t be littered with half-built camps. 

You can fire nuclear missiles at other players

if you’re wondering why this wasteland isn’t quite as irradiated as the world is other Fallout games, well — the game has an reason for that. In addition to exploring, rebuilding and surviving West Virginia, you may have a hand in destroying it, too. Scattered throughout the world of Fallout 76 will be inactive missile silos, with launchable nuclear armaments for any player resourceful enough to find the launch codes.

Players will be able to use these codes to launch attacks on other player settlements, NPC enemy camps, or other random areas of the game — which will make them ripe for harvesting loot. Well, assuming you can survive the radiation the missile causes. Nuking an area basically turns it into a “high level zone,” which spawns the toughest enemies in the game.

V.A.T.S. combat will be very different

That’s the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or V.A.T.S. Well, at least in the game’s lore — in terms of gameplay mechanics, it’s a mode that lets you freeze the game and call your shots, displaying your chance to hit an enemy’s arm, torso, legs, head, etc. with percentages. It’s a carryover inspired by the game’s 1990s origins, when Fallout was an isometric tactical adventure game.

The game’s E3 trailer didn’t show a single moment of the tactical targeting system, but Todd Howard says the targeting system is still a part of Fallout 76 — it’s just going to be different. It won’t freeze time, however, or enable slow motion action the way it does in the VR version of Fallout 4. This version of V.A.T.S. is a real-time targeting system.

“It doesn’t slow time. But it lets you target and pick parts and all of that, but it’s in real-time. It still works great,” he says. “It’s different, obviously.” It definitely sounds different.

DLC will be free, but there will still be some microtransactions

According to the Making of Fallout 76 documentary, you won’t have to pay for updates: all major in-game DLC for the game will be free, and updates will be available “for years to come.” That said, Bethesda will be all to happy to shut up and take your money — microtransactions will allow players to purchase cosmetic items for their character through an online store. Bethesda says players can earn these games through regular gameplay, too.

Despite being online, players won’t be able to endlessly bully each other

It’s almost a law: if a game is played online, someone is going to make a point of being a jerk. Fortunately, Fallout 76 is being designed to prevent players from griefing each other. Speaking with GameSpot, Bethesda’s Pete Hines explained.

“You can’t be harassed by somebody who just keeps chasing you around the world and keeps killing you over and over again; the game literally doesn’t allow that to happen to you,” he said. “Death isn’t supposed to be a super-negative thing. You don’t lose your progression, you don’t lose all your stuff, somebody can’t kill you and then take everything in your inventory [and then you have to] start over.”

In fact, in a recent interview Bethesda said some players might be immune to being killed by other players — at least until they get out of a lower-level newbie bracket.

Getting shot by another player doesn’t hurt that much. At least not at first. The first attack from another player will only inflict minimal damage. It also present you with a choice: fight back or flee. If you fight back, you’ll face the full brunt of your enemy’s attack. That doesn’t mean you’re invincible if you run away — unwanted enemy attacks can still kill you — but if a player kills in cold blood, they’ll be marked as a “wanted murderer.”

Bounty system

Planning on trying to murder every other player you come across? Get ready to be hunted. Players who chose to grief others will be marked as “wanted murderers,” and their location will marked as a red star on the map — encouraging other players to track them down and take revenge. It’s more than just a nuisance, too: wanted players will have a bounty on their head, and the payout for that bounty will come from their own inventory.

Either way…

Death isn’t the end

Fallout 76 is definitely an online survival game, but Bethesda describes it as a “softcore” survival game. Death doesn’t mean loss of progression or of end of your character like it does in other online survival games. This means you can play, take risks and fail without fear of feeling like you’ve lost hours of gameplay for one mistake.

This is part of why other players won’t be able to ruin your game experience — if another player kills you, you won’t suffer a big penalty for it, and the game will give you an option to avoid interacting with that player again for awhile.

If you join in on a friend’s game, your progression goes with you to their world, too. The online element, Howard says, is more about giving players a way to share their memorable game experience with others — though other players can absolutely be a threat to your survival. Watch out for those nuclear warheads.

There’s going to be a beta version of the game before launch

Bethesda says it plans to have a “Break it Early Test Application,” for the game. You know. A beta. “I’ve read on the internet that our games have a few bugs,” Howard joked at E3. “Sometimes it doesn’t just work.”

It’s true, Bethesda games have a bit of a reputation for being buggy at launch, and that’s not something that goes over well in an online environment. The company is doing everything it can to mitigate a rough launch, and wants to enlist players to help it test the game’s dedicated servers before going live to the world. If you want to get into the beta, however, you’ll have to preorder the game — and you’ll need to play on Xbox One if you want to play first. Bethesda says the beta is coming to all platforms, but Microsoft’s console will get it just a little bit early.

That said, you won’t have to wait too long to play it, even if you’re not in the beta. The first beta invites are going out in October — but the game itself launches just over a month later.

Any progress you make in the beta will carry over to the full game

Playing the Beta won’t be a waste of your time — Bethesda has already confirmed that the beta test is actually the full-release game. Any progress you make playing around in the early-access beta will carry over to the full experience when it hits stores. It still might be a rocky experience, as it’ll be a stress test of Bethesda services and online systems, however.

You can listen to the trailer’s cover of Country Roads on YouTube

One of the best things about Fallout games is their soundtracks. This one is already starting to sound pretty good.

There’s a collectors’ edition — and it comes with a helmet!

One of the coolest things about Fallout 4 was its collectors’ edition — a special edition package that came with a wearable version of the Fallout Pip-Boy device that your character wears in the game. It’s even functional, featuring a slot to put a cell phone that allows it to integrate with the game. Fallout 76 has something similar:

The Fallout 76 Power Armor Edition comes with a glow-in-the-dark version of the games map and a Power Armor Helmet, complete with a working head lamp! The helmet is designed to be wearable, too — making Fallout 76 cosplay a little easier. You only have to build the rest of the armor yourself.

The PC version of Fallout 76 won’t be available on Steam

If you’re hoping to add the latest Fallout game to your massive Steam library, you’re out of luck — the PC version of the will be exclusive to Bethesda.net. That’s not too much of a surprise: other Shared World shooters like Destiny 2 tend to live on their own native platforms, and it’s not uncommon for Massively Multiplayer games to launch on their own before making their way to Steam later, if at all.

Fallout 76 comes out this November

Back in 2015, Bethesda showed Fallout 4 for the first time at E3, promising that gamers would be playing it later that year. They were. Now, the company is doing it again — Fallout 76 will launch on Nov. 14, 2018. That’s only a few months away!

Even so, some fans can’t stand the wait, and are already coming up with theories: from analyzing the cover of Take Me Home, Country Roads that plays over the trailer for clues, to examining a blurry purported screenshot of the game lifted from a documentary about Bethesda.

In fact, some fans have gone back to Fallout 4 ($20 at Best Buy) in anticipation.

Others have already suited up!

Either way, most fans are at least taking the wait with a grain of humor.

Now Playing: Watch this: Survival Mode Is how Fallout 4 should be played

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You can also check out GameSpot’s coverage of Fallout 76  and Giant Bomb’s coverage of Fallout 76. And for all things E3 2018, head to GameSpot and check out its press conference coverage here.

[lunagrey]

I go out and have fun :)

I don't date. I don't really go out. I occasionally have lunch dates with coworkers I like, but my nights and weekends are spent at home (or traveling - more on that later) reading, writing, crafting, or gaming (let me just say that the Xbox One was a great investment). But every once in a while, even curmudgeons need more than books and virtual worlds. I wasn't always this way. I used to live in California. With a boyfriend. Who loved to Go Out, Do Things, and Be Seen. Every weekend was an adventure, a party. So many friends, so many dinner parties, so many trips, so many outings. It was EXHAUSTING. I did enjoy it, mostly. I'm an introvert with shades of extrovert, meaning I can be the center of attention, I can whip out Persona and entertain you for hours. But there's a cost. Eventually, I will need to unplug and scurry away and hide and recharge. The boyfriend never understood this, being a full-on extrovert. He never got drained, the attention fed his energy and his ego. And I think it kind of upset him that I could not be the same, that I needed the downtime, even from him, because he would drain me, too. Energy vampires - they are real, people! So when I moved here (Have I ever said where "here" is?) I kind of... well, I guess I went off the grid in a way. (I did try dating, after a while, but that was incredibly disappointing on so many levels...) Oh gosh, I've gone off on a tangent and I don't even remember what the point was. I do this a lot. With emails or essays - I'll have a point but then I'll stick in a bit of backstory that leads to this funny story which leads to another anecdote and then I'm like, where am I? What was I saying? I don't do this with poetry or stories - I guess because of their structure, you kind of need to stay on point. But the unstructured nature of emails and I've gone off again. Going out! That's right. I went out on Friday. It was fun. I've had a rough time lately, lots of stuff going on at work, plus right now there's a metric ton of family drama (extended family - my parents are normal but there's a lot of crazy in the family, I know I got some of it but damn, the crazypants relatives have got me beat!) And my poor parents are kind of caught in the middle and now so am I. (Not to get too specific, but think "death in family, the deceased is kind of wealthy, he died without a will, the vultures are circling and they want their cut now" sort of thing. It's horrible and disgusting and it's killing my Dad cos that's his little brother and some people are fighting like hyenas over what he left behind... and forgotten that hey, a PERSON HAS JUST DIED.) Sorry. As you can see, I'm upset over this, too. Back to going out... So there's this guy. He's a friend. We used to work together. We've kept in touch. We've gone out a few times. I'm so insanely attracted to him it's stupid. He's attracted to me, too. There's no... relationship. It's just... I don't know what it is. But it's fun. ;) He knows I've been having a rough time. And he knows about the health issues, my past life, he knows quite a bit about me (real me) actually. And I've learned quite a bit about him over time. We get along well. We are compatible. We are alike in many ways. (Except the outdoors stuff... he's all outdoorsy/camping/fishing/etc and my version of roughing it is staying in a hotel that doesn't offer room service...) We text back and forth every day and every once in a while we meet up and hang out. We went out on Friday. Dinner, drinks, talking so long the server got tired of coming around to ask if we needed anything else. When we left the restaurant, he asked if I felt like playing pool. I'm not a pool player, but it's all math and physics anyway so I didn't do badly. I managed to make a few shots that looked impressive and sink most of the balls so I was happy. There was a band playing and it was loud but they were good so I didn't mind. He and I were laughing and having a good time and for a few hours I forgot everything else. At one point, he asked if I wanted another drink. "If I have another drink," I began, "I'll probably end up molesting you on the way home..." He just laughed, but when I came back after my turn at the table, I had another drink waiting for me. The place shut down at 2. I'd been having fun, so I'd lost track of time. I don't think either of us was ready to call it a night, so he drove down dark, winding country roads. We saw foxes and armadillos. He pulled off the road into a camp site, then followed a narrow dirt trail to the river. He found an individual camp site (I briefly wondered if he'd camped here before) and parked. "Want to get out and walk around?" He asked. No way. I like the outdoors, I like hiking and exploring, but I'm not a fan of the woods at night. I've been lost in the woods on a mountain at night, and had to find my way down in the dark. (It happened in Alaska. I'll have to tell you about it sometime. It's funny and scary and makes me look stupid but it's a good story and a good warning of "What Not To Do.") He's sitting there, looking at me, and I know he won't make a move without some cue from me. I know he wants to, but he's cautious and he told me once he's afraid of overstepping. That's the trouble with non-relationships. You're never really clear on boundaries and permissions. There have been times when neither of us has wanted to make the first move, out of... I dunno, fear? Like maybe the other doesn't want physical contact? Although we've both told the other on several occasions that permission is granted and to go ahead and touch or kiss or whatever... but still here we are, like teenagers, unsure of the next move... I know it was the bourbon (I love bourbon, I love the burning sweetness, I had my first taste when I was 14 or so and I know most people say they didn't like their first taste of alcohol but I absolutely loved it)... I reached over, grabbed his collar, and pulled him to me. I wasn't thinking about anything but wanting to feel his lips on mine. We laughed about it, making out in his car like teenagers with no place to go. But we really have no place to go - he has a teenaged son at home, I have roommates (my brother and his girlfriend) and either of us going to the other's would just be awkward. He did mention a hotel room once... but hotels are not for fun, semi-innocent makeout sessions... a hotel would mean we were crossing over into adult territory... crossing the threshold of a hotel room means sex, real sex, and all the emotional baggage that goes along with it. Am I ready to have sex with this man? My body says "oh my gosh YES!!!" but my brain says "whoa, hey, let's think about this, ok, everything could change..." I got home around 5am. I'd been up nearly 24 hours (I'd woken up at 5:30 Friday morning) and I'd been nodding off in the car on the way home... He thought it was funny, I'd be talking, my eyes would close, then suddenly I'd open my eyes again and realize I'd fallen asleep. I got home, got into my room, pulled off my clothes, pulled on pajamas, picked up the cat, and crawled into bed. I fell asleep smiling.