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Microsoft Officially Admits Next-Gen Xbox Exists!
Well, they didn't just do that. Kotaku (amongst others) has the official invite from Microsoft to come see the next-generation Xbox in Redwood, Washington (MS' headquarters) on May 21st at 10AM Pacific. This does fall in with the rumors that MS' event revealing the next Xbox would come in May, although there were rumors for April, too, and either way it makes much more sense to have your own big reveal event before E3 anyway. (If you're curious, the 360 had a reveal event in May 2005, hosted by actor Elijah Wood and featuring the band The Killers, and it was broadcast as a half-hour show on MTV.)
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Leviathan Warships Trailer: Ship Just Got Real
After so many trailers with explosions and gunshots and orchestra hits, I have to say: this is obviously meant to be kind of a joke, but it's still a breath of fresh air.
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I Guess Skyrim DLC Is Done: Main Team Moves On
Eurogamer has word from Bethesda Game Studios that the main team making Skyrim DLC is moving on to their next big project, which is presumably the next Fallout game. It's reasonable to think that at least some of the team that made the original Skyrim - engine programmers and such - have already been in pre-production on it. Seems like that now the content creators - guys that do level and quest design, music, art, and such - are now over on the new game.
I guess that means there won't be any more Skyrim DLC. Shame, since it seems like there'd be a market for more, but maybe the devs are just sick of bumping into so many technical limitations on consoles - especially the PS3, which Skyrim had so much trouble with in the past.
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EA Retiring Big Facebook Games
Joystiq has the story on how EA seems to be pretty drastically changing their focus. They're shuttering Playfish - a company EA bought less than 3 years ago for $300 million - and closing down their Facebook games entirely this coming June. That means SimCity Social, The Sims Social, Pet Society, and more. In fact, the only EA Facebook game seemingly missing the cut is Madden Social, which is made by another EA team. As Destructoid's Jim Sterling puts it on Twitter, "If even EA's pulling out of the market, the udder's well and truly sputtering dust."
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Racism and Violence in BioShock Infinite: Let's Go Deeper
Now that BioShock Infinite has been out for a few weeks, in-depth looks at the themes of race and violence in the game are starting to appear. I tried to stay away from going in too deep in my review and for some, that alone will mean I'm an evil person that's guilty of excusing violence or even of being racist simply by omission, but it should be pointed out that the hectic AAA game review cycle gives many reviewers (myself included) a choice: either you can be timely, or you can be thorough - not both. I decided to do the former, knowing that there's plenty of time for people to do the latter. But other writing is coming in that goes deeper, so let's take a look at it.
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Flashback Remake Announced
After all that buttcrap with Ubisoft and the Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon leak and security issues with UPlay, it's nice to see them bounce back with a pretty interesting retro remake that no one saw coming. They've just announced a new 2.5D remake of Flashback, a great but under-appreciated platformer originally released in 1992 by French developer Delphine Software (who also made Another World, also known as Out of this World in the US). The original game started out on Amiga and moved to DOS, SNES, Genesis, Mac, and even the Atari Jaguar. This one will be designed by Paul Cuisset, who also designed the original game, and while Delphine is long gone, his team at VectorCell will be helping him make this new Flashback, which is set for release on PSN and XBLA (yo - no PC? Let's hope for that announcement soon) later this year. Here's a trailer:
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Naughty Dog Demands Females in Focus Testing
According to The Escapist, apparently Naughty Dog (Uncharted) had to demand that women be added to focus tests for their upcoming action game The Last of Us. Good on them for making this demand, but there's something else here...
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Who Owns the NOLF IP?
This is a weird one. Activision's Dan Amrich has been asked about who possibly owns the IP to the Monolith Software franchise No One Lives Forever, which was a pair of spy-themed first person shooters from a little over a decade back. These games were great little titles, with amazing humor and solid stealth and action that holds up even today. People are asking for the re-release on a site like Good Old Games, but Amrich says that Activision, who merged with the franchise's publisher Vivendi years ago (but years after the original release of the games, which was long before digital distribution was really something that publishers considered), doesn't own the rights. At this point, he's asked around, even to people at Monolith, and he can't figure out who owns those rights. Someone needs to come out and raise their hand or at least point to who bought them in that period probably around the time that Vivendi was bought.
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Xbox Always Online Rumors
From a case study in how to not use Twitter to the truth of so many PS4-related rumors going around, it seems likely that Microsoft plans for the next Xbox to only work when it's connected to Xbox Live. Enthusiast gamers are up in arms over it, and for good reason: here's why.
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Hollywood Actors for DLC? That's Call of Duty for Ya
Yahoo has word that the Uprising DLC for Call of Duty Black Ops 2 will have four new multiplayer maps for its regular mode, but it's also going to have a "Mob of the Dead" mode with the voices of Ray Liotta (GTA Vice City, Goodfellas), Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix, The Sopranos), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill), and Chazz Palminteri (The Usual Suspects, A Bronx Tale). These are some of the best voices behind mob movies over the last twenty years, and while there's super A-list talent like DeNiro or Pacino that they didn't quite get to, I'd argue that these voices are probably even better for a video games. But there's something else going on here...
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Disney Shutters LucasArts Entirely
If you thought that the Disney purchase of the Lucas empire was going to mean a renewed focus on video games (New adventure games! A Tie Fighter sequel!) under the LucasArts label, well, that dream has just been dashed. Kotaku has word that Disney has closed LucasArts entirely, canceling Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault in the process. Last year, LucasArts stopped hiring and announcing anything new, and today, under the Disney banner, the label is gone and 150 people have been laid off. But is this something we should be up in arms about?
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Warren Spector Leaves Disney
It looks like the fairy tale has ended, as Warren Spector has tweeted that his tenure at Disney is over. It probably has a lot to do with the commercial and critical failure of Epic Mickey 2, but I still find it curious that there were more than four months between the game's disappointing release and Spector's departure, but still - Bethesda, get him going at Arkane Studios, maybe? Be nice to have him reunited with Harvey Smith and back making games (maybe in a slightly lesser role than executive producer) at the Austin-based company that made Dishonored.
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Thief 4 Trailer
Is Eidos Montreal's Thief 4 just called Thief now? Seems like it, as this new cinematics-only trailer gives it that simple name. Regardless, we get to see a few of the tricks that might get used in this game, and with early confirmation from Eidos that you'll be able to complete the game without killing anyone if you like, the focus will likely be on choices regarding how to complete missions - which is generally just what fans of the classic Thief games want. I'm a huge fan of first person games that challenge the classic shooter attitude and mentality, and with the success of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dishonored, and BioShock Infinite, I have high hopes for Thief moving forwards as a renewed franchise.
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Mass Effect 3 Infographic Stats
EA and BioWare released this interesting infographic with stats on how Mass Effect 3 was played. It shows the gulf between the number of hardcore fans of the franchise and casual buyers of the game; you might be surprised to find out that only 18% of players chose female Shepard, despite the almost objectively-better voice acting. Over 43% played the straightforward, most action-game-like Soldier class, which was one of six classes in the game; less than 40% left Tali alive at the end; and 64% of players didn't even see Wrex, which meant that either they killed him in Mass Effect 1 or, more likely, that they didn't import a game from ME1, and the inexplicable default game behavior for ME3 was to not involve Wrex at all.
Sometimes hardcore gamers don't understand the vast number of players who aren't huge fans of every game, who don't spend every waking moment both in and out of work/school thinking about games, who don't read and argue about games on Reddit or forums. Well, here's some evidence that shows a glimpse of those numbers - and shows why publishers do try to cater to them. After all, sixty bucks from a hardcore gamer spends just as well as the same amount of cash from someone who's not quite so dedicated...
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Blizzard's Jay Wilson Admits Diablo 3's RMAH Was Bad
Joystiq has an interesting highlight of a talk by Blizzard's Jay Wilson at GDC. In it, he says that Diablo III's auction house system was a mistake - of course, he's not in charge of that game any more, so who knows whether it'll get changed? But if you were tasked with fixing the game, short of redesigning the whole thing, how would you do it?
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Battlefield 4: 17 Minutes of Gameplay
EA and DICE have officially released a 17-minute gameplay video for Battlefield 4. A few things astute viewers might note: this is the PC version of the game, we see the return of full building destruction in a structure you're actually fighting in (albeit in a mostly-scripted sequence), and we're seeing some features, like spotting, work its way into single player. This sequence is also apparently the game's prologue according to a "high score" popup in the top right. Anyway, check out the trailer; this is the first extended cut of what we can expect games to look like next gen.
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High-Def Super Metroid Imagery
We've seen a few of these before - the Doom one was amazing - but I feel that the colors and textures that TJ Townsend used in this video below of the high-res Photoshop re-creation of a classic Super Metroid screenshot make for an even more impressive work. What do you think?
(And let's not gripe too much over the fact that there were no Metroids in Mother Brain's room. He obviously just wanted to get all of those visuals into one image.)
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown iOS Announced
Joystiq has a report that 2K Games has announced a port of last year's AAA tactical game XCOM: Enemy Unknown is getting an iOS port. The interesting part is that Firaxis lead designer Jake Solomon says that it's a straight port without any removal of features. Still, I kind of imagine that some graphical fidelity will be reduced, as the console versions are several gigs and the PC version weighs in at over 13GB. Surely the quality of those assets will be reduced in order to make a more reasonable-sized install on iOS devices. Still, this is a big deal, seeing a big-budget game start getting ported directly to a mobile device.
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Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Announced
Blizzard has announced a new free-to-play online game called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. It's an online version of a collectible card game where booster packs can be earned by playing the game or spending money - they're currently looking at around a dollar - and then play matches on an animated 3D board. They're targeting PC, Mac, and iOS at this point, the game is playable on the PAX East show floor, a beta is scheduled for this summer, and the release is sometime after that in 2013. A lot of people will be disappointed at this announcement because it's not another AAA game taking five-plus years to develop and leading to four years worth of hype, I like that Blizzard is at least finally trying something new again.
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Transistor Revealed
Supergiant Games, creators of indie hit Bastion, have released a trailer for their next title, Transistor. This one looks like it's more sci-fi, and the trailer does a good job of delivering music, style, concept art, and actual gameplay. Don't expect to see the game for a while, though; the release date isn't until sometime in 2014.
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