Batman: Arkham Origins gets Deathstroke, Kevin Conroy
Kevin Conroy confirmed to be lending his voice-over talents to Batman: Arkham Origins; Deathstroke playable via DLC.
Long-time Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy has confirmed his involvement in the upcoming Batman: Arkham Origins, Joystiq has reported.
The actor revealed at Comic-Con that he has already spent 10 months in the studio recording lines for the game, although he did not specify which role he would be playing. Conroy was the voice of Batman inArkham Asylum and its sequel Arkham City. He also played the character in MMODC Universe Online, and the recently released DC brawler Injustice: Gods Among Us
The news contradicts reports earlier this year that the actor would not be reprising his role as the Caped Crusader in Arkham Origins.
Fans will have a chance to gain access to an unannounced Deathstroke DLC when pre-ordering Arkham Origins, according to an offer on Amazon.
No further details about the character's involvement are available, although Deathstroke was previously featured in a Warner Bros. teaser trailer fighting Batman.
Batman: Arkham Origins tells the story of Batman's early years in the Arkham series. It is the first game in the universe not to be developed by UK developer Rocksteady. The game is scheduled for release on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Wii U on October 25.
UK Chart: Metro: Last Light surfaces top but fails to outsell predecessor.
Dead Island: Riptide falls to second, and FIFA 13 climbs back up to third.
4A Games' Metro: Last Light has emerged top of the UK charts after its first weekend on sale, although the well-received sequel failed to match the numbers shifted by its predecessor in 2010.
The original Metro 2033 was released in March 2010, and debuted fifth in the UK charts at the time.
FIFA 13 climbs back up to third place, and 3DS-exclusive Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity enters the chart in fourth.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is fifth, Tomb Raider sixth, and the retail release of Telltale Games' serial adventure The Walking Dead is seventh.
The top 10 is rounded out by DC brawler Injustice: Gods Among Us in eighth, which pushed Assassin's Creed III into ninth by less than 200 sales, and BioShock Infinite in tenth.
Elsewhere in the chart, poorly reviewed movie-tie in Star Trek drops to 32nd from last week's 24th place finish, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter re-enters the chart at 37th.
The Top 20 UK chart for the week ending May 18:
1. Metro: Last Light 2. Dead Island: Riptide 3. FIFA 13 4. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity 5. Call of Duty: Black Ops II 6. Tomb Raider 7. The Walking Dead 8. Injustice: Gods Among Us 9. Assassin's Creed III 10. BioShock Infinite 11. Far Cry 3 12. Luigi's Mansion 2 13. Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins 14. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes 15. God of War: Ascension 16. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 17. Grand Theft Auto IV 18. Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City 19. Skylanders Giants 20: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Eador: Masters of the Broken World Review
Game-crushing bugs overshadow the turn-based tactical goodness Eador: Masters of the Broken World offers.
The Good
Combat keeps you on your toes
Heavy management focus scratches that tactical itch.
The Bad
Crashes and stalls frequently
Menus are crowded and difficult to use
Offers tactical misinformation
Multiplayer has severe connection issues.
Eador: Masters of the Broken World is too difficult to enjoy. Even on the easiest setting, it does everything it can to keep you from making progress. Whereas some games lay honest challenges and let you learn your way through them, Masters of the Broken World offers false information that's difficult to plan around. It gives you the option to tinker with systems you can't understand until the game offers a half-baked explanation. To make it worse, it's so unstable that bugs and hard crashes frequently cut your adventures short, as if the game weren't already oppressive enough.
The first thing you notice about Masters of the Broken World is the overwhelming number of buttons, as colorful and varied as a candy shop. This is a hardcore turn-based role-playing game with base management, provinces to capture, stats to improve, and a slew of things to always be concerned with. It's overwhelming in an intense, classic PC game sort of way, and at its best it's a gripping brain twister with high stakes and high rewards. The various worlds you must conquer are called "shards," and each offers unique benefits that help you as you attack the next one. You are a god who manipulates mortal heroes to do your bidding and claim lands, which is a neat way for a game to justify its genre through fiction.
Combat takes place on a grid of hexagonal spaces. Various infantry units join your hero, who belongs to a powerful fantasy-standard class like a warrior or a mage. Before combat, you see how many and what type of foes to expect, and the game offers a battle prediction. This pre-combat assessment couldn't feel less accurate, which is a huge problem because it's often the deciding factor for whether you initiate a fight, negotiate, or retreat. Not only can the enemy outnumber your party, but nearly all of its soldiers might outlevel yours by five times. Yet the game might predict that "the enemy will be destroyed," displayed in reassuring green type. This is bad information. Lost troops are gone forever once a battle is over, so the cost of a party wipe is staggering. New fighters must be purchased and trained again, which takes time and feels like a grind.
When forces are evenly matched, combat is a wonderful game of resource and land management. Moving a character forward to a hill offers range benefits, but it might be more useful to send weak units into a forest patch for defensive bonuses. Magic isn't based on mana, but on a limited number of uses. This means you can't just nuke everything in sight to win. You need to move units out of hit zones. You need to be concerned with draining enemy stamina. It feels like a deep board game, but with particle effects.
Sadly, the game frequently stops working. A few hiccups could be tolerated in a game with so many systems running simultaneously, but Masters of the Broken World is, well, utterly broken. Everything from combat to movement to construction happens as part of a chain of actions. When you finish queuing tasks, you hit the execute button, and the game jumps into motion… sometimes. More times than you would want, the execute button, as well as the entire bottom row, simply fails to work. When this happens in combat, the only options are to quit the game and lose progress or activate auto-battle mode, which rarely ends in your favor. Sometimes the weapon switch command doesn't work. Sometimes your hero gets stuck in one province on the overworld map. And all too often, Masters of the Broken World just crashes completely.
There is satisfaction to be found in the game's vast and deep strategy elements. Building up your city's defenses and resource production rate helps you conquer other provinces and strongholds more quickly. Stationing guards can be an exciting gamble because the units can grow corrupt, stealing income or terrorizing townspeople. The problem is that you're given access to features that you can't understand because the game hasn't yet taken the time to teach you. Granaries can be built in provinces, for example, and they give each sector a population boost. However, overpopulation can lead to unrest, which can lead to a rebellion. The game's suggested counter is to build a guard outpost, which doesn't work at all. Provinces inevitably fall, and you're forced to battle and recapture areas you used to own. This isn't fun, and doing work you've already done just to rectify something you don't know how to fix is aggravating in all the wrong ways.
A system of karma and random events breaks up the typical bribe/fight/conquer gameplay. Sometimes a horde of enemies might attack one of your provinces, and you have to decide whether it's worth your time and resources to help defend it. If you leave your people to die, you naturally lose karma. You might be the kind of person to never accept bribes, but if someone is offering a lot of gold and you have your eye on an expensive new structure for your base, maybe you'll accept. Unfortunately, karma doesn't seem to have a substantial effect on anything you do. You'll appreciate the distraction from the core game mechanics, but a distraction is really all it is.
Masters of the Broken World has a Hot Seat mode, which has two players taking turns in the chair in front of the computer as they battle each other. It's a great idea, and it's fun when it works, but it's not immune to the bug problems found in the single-player campaign. There’s also an online mode, but finding a reliable match is a miracle. You might wait half an hour to play a single skirmish, only to have the connection fail before a game starts. When you could cook dinner in the time it takes to find an opponent, something is very wrong.
Any enjoyment derived from Eador: Masters of the Broken World is buried beneath a landslide of inexcusable technical issues. Building up a home base and expanding into the world should be rewarding, but frequent and unfair bugs make any progress feel less like victory and more like a stroke of good luck. Some serious patches could uncover the game buried beneath the flaws, but as of right now, playing Masters of the Broken World not worth the headache. In this high-fantasy world of trolls, archers, and the undead, it's a shame that your most dreadful enemy is the game itself.
วันอาทิตย์ที่ 19 พฤษภาคม พ.ศ. 2556
Call of Duty: Ghosts teaser video revealed
Official Twitter channel for upcoming first-person shooter hyping May 21 reveal with new teaser video.
The video, a short clip released through Vine, shows what appears to be several shots from an in-development version of the upcoming first-person shooter.
GameSpot will have full coverage of the presentation, which begins at 10 a.m. EDT. Microsoft is widely believed to announce its next-generation Xbox at the event and give first details about the long-rumored platform
SimCity Amusement Park Pack DLC confirmed after retailer leak
EA has confirmed funfair DLC for its controversial 2013 reboot of SimCityafter it temporarily appeared on a retailer website.
While it was quickly removed, the SimCity Amusement Park Pack DLC briefly appeared on UK retailer Green Man Gaming.
The blurb for the expansion offered SimCity players the chance "build the amusement park of your dreams, right in the middle of your city." The description also offered "classic rides, vehicle rides and thrill rides."
"Will you focus [on] the aesthetic look or maximising your profits? Perhaps you can have the best of both worlds," concluded the description.
Following the leak, the official SimCity Twitter feed confirmed a May 28 release for the DLC.
"Some of you may have seen thrilling new #SimCity content that arrived too early at the gate. It’s coming May 28. We think you’ll be amused," wrote the account.
Fable studio seeking devs with experience reimagining franchises
New job listing at Lionhead Studios calls for person with proven ability for bringing new ideas while "ensuring heritage is respected."
Fable developer Lionhead Studios posted a new job listing recently seeking a developer with a "background working on new franchises or reimagining's of existing franchises."
A call for an animation director (viaOXM), posted this month, adds that a desirable candidate would have a "proven ability to bring new ideas to new franchises whilst ensuring its heritage is respected."
The job posting suggests a return to a series Lionhead Studios has worked on before. The Guildford, United Kingdom, developer has created a handful of franchises, though its most well-known work is the Fable fantasy role-playing series.
Another new job posting, this one for a core engine programmer, seeks a developer with experience making games on Epic's Unreal Engine 3 and/or Unreal Engine 4. Past Fable games have been built using various iterations of the Unreal Engine.
The company recently hired MMO veteran John Needham to lead the studio. He was formerly the CEO of Marvel Heroes developer Gazillion Entertainment and, before that, City of Heroes maker Cryptic Studios. He has also been chief financial officer at Sony Online Entertainment.
Total War: Rome II fastest preordered game in franchise history
Sega reveals preorder figures for upcoming strategy game are over six the number for Shogun 2 during its "first official week."
Total War: Rome II is the fastest preordered game in the history of the strategy series, publisher Sega announced today. According to the company's data, more than six times the number of gamers have preordered a copy during its "first official week" than did for predecessorTotal War: Shogun 2.
In addition, Sega said the $155 Total War: Rome II Collector's Edition has seen strong preorders, with over half of the available copies already sold out in the United States. The publisher previously announced that the collector's edition would be limited to 22,000 units.
Lastly, Sega announced that it sold more than 2 million Total War games in the past year, despite no new core installment in the series being released.
US retailer cancels preorders; tells GameSpot it is waiting to "hear further" from Ubisoft about Rainbow 6: Patriots.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6: Patriots has been pulled from the database of US retailer GameStop, with all existing preorders being cancelled.
Speaking to IGN, a source said that the US retailer "actively flipped a switch" to remove Rainbow 6: Patriots from its systems.
The source continued by saying that the retailer does not remove games from major publishers without official confirmation that the title has been cancelled.
A GameStop spokesperson told GameSpot that the retailer has "stopped taking reservations as we wait to hear further from Ubisoft on an official release date for Rainbow 6: Patriots."
When asked about the possible cancellation of the title, a Ubisoft representative added that "we have nothing further to share about Rainbow 6: Patriots at this time."
At time of writing, no other major retailer has pulled the game from its listings.
Sony announced today the PlayStation 3-exclusive bundle will launch July 9 for $50. Previously, the collection was scheduled to launch in June. No reason for the delay was provided.
On top of the games, the compilation pack will also include two Ashley Wood digital graphic novels for Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2.
Upcoming Metal Gear Solid games include Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Release dates for both games have not been announced.
Team Fortress 2 adds first community-made update
Robotic Boogaloo update for Valve's free-to-play shooter introduces 57 new items and is 100 percent fan-made.
Valve's free-to-play team-based shooter Team Fortress 2 has added its first community-made update. Called Robotic Boogaloo, the update adds 57 new items and is available to download today.
When we first launched the Workshop back in 2011, we had no idea what the TF2 community was capable of," Valve said on the Team Fortress 2 blog. "As the hats, beards, boots, and hairdos started rolling in, we realized there was a huge well of creativity out there. But we didn't appreciate just how deep those waters ran until the community-made updates started appearing."
Valve points out that the Robotic Boogaloo update is 100 percent community-made, including the in-game content, the update hub website, the animated short, the comic, and the splash images in the Steam store.
"Plus, in a first for the Team Fortress economy, all the creators of the Robotic Boogaloo Update have decided to share the revenue earned from the sale of RoboCrate Keys," Valve said. "That means that everyone involved will be profiting from this update, not just the people making hats."
For more on the Robotic Boogaloo update, check out its official website.
NPD: Injustice: Gods Among Us April's top seller in US
NetherRealm's DC brawler the best-selling title in region last month; overall industry sales slide 25 percent; Xbox 360 sales hit 130,000.
Injustice: Gods Among Us was April's top-selling title in the United States, according to data released by the NPD Group today. It marks the first time since April 2011 (Mortal Kombat) that a fighting game ranked in the top spot. No specific sales figures were provided, though it is estimated to have sold 424,000 units in the month.
Overall, industry sales slid by 25 percent to $495.2 million. However, NPD analyst Liam Callahan points out that the sales figures make up only about half of the total consumer spend for the month.
"When taking into account our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in April such as used and rentals at $76 million, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including microtransactions, subscriptions, mobile apps and the consumer spend on social network games at $267 million, the total consumer spend in April is $802 million," he said.
In addition, Callahan pointed out that the Easter holiday typically accounts for a 10 percent boost in sales for the month. Since Easter fell in March this year and in April last year, a direct comparison is "difficult," he said.
Regarding hardware, total sales plummeted by 42 percent to $109.5 million. Microsoft was again the market leader, selling 130,000 Xbox 360 units in the month, down from 236,000 systems this time last year. Total retail spend on the Xbox 360 platform (hardware, software, and accessories) was $208 million.
As for software, this category decreased 17 percent in April to $267.8 million in April. Though the overall sector declined year-over-year, sales of April 2013 titles posted positive figures over April 2012, which was led by Activision's Prototype 2.
"Despite overall declines, April title launches in 2013 fared better than games that launched in April 2012, up 118 percent in unit sales and 130 percent in dollar sales," Callahan said. "This increase was driven by games like Injustice: Gods Among Us, Dead Island: Riptide, and Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins."
Separately, Nintendo announced that it has sold 2.1 million first-party 3DS games through the first four months of the year, up 52 percent over last year.
"In 2012, it took 30 weeks for Nintendo 3DS to sell 2 million units of first-party software. In 2013, the platform accomplished that same feat in 18 weeks," Nintendo said.
Nintendo said Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins shifted nearly 94,000 combined physical and digital copies. Notably, it was released on April 24, near the end of the NPD Group's reporting period. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon sold 140,000 units in the month (physical and digital), boosting its life-to-date total to 530,000 units.
The only Wii U title Nintendo revealed sales statistics for was New Super Mario Bros. U, which has now sold nearly 770,000 combined physical and digital units to date.
Shifting to accessories, this sector fell 19 percent to $131.4 million for April 2013.
"Though every accessory type experienced year-over-year declines in April 2013, year-to-date trending increased by over 20 percent for the combined sales of point cards, headsets/headphones, and All Other Accessories (which includes Skylanders)," Callahan said.
APRIL US GAME SALES (April 7-May 4, 2013) OVERALL DOLLAR SALES
Total retail sales: $495.2 million (-25%) Non-PC hardware: $109.5 million (-42%) Non-PC software: $254.3 (-17%) Accessories: $131.4 (19%) Total software: $267.8 million (-17%)
TOP 10 GAMES FOR APRIL 2013 Title (Platforms) - Publisher
1. Injustice: Gods Among Us (X360, PS3, Wii U) - Warner Bros. 2. Dead Island: Riptide (X360, PS3, PC) - Deep Silver 3. BioShock: Infinite (X360, PS3, PC) - Take-Two 4. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (X360, PS3, PC, Wii U) - Activision Blizzard 5. Defiance - (X360, PS3, PC) - Trion Worlds 6. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS) - Nintendo 7. NBA 2K13 (X360, PS3, Wii, Wii U, PSP, PC) - Take-Two Interactive 8. Skylanders Giants (Wii, X360, PS3, 3DS, Wii U) - Activision Blizzard 9. Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins (3DS) - Nintendo 10. MLB 13: The Show (PS3, PS Vita) - Sony
