The low-level echelon of so-called "gamers" have said their piece about Ubisoft's decision to delay Rayman Legends for the sake of porting it to the 360 and PS3. Now it's time for a real man's man to speak softly into your ear and say all the oh-so right things.
This man, by the by, is Andrew Eisen. He and his sexy man voice gained a smidgen of popularity back in 2011 when he chastised Nintendo for not letting him spend money on games that should have been localized. Whether you think his arguments are on the ball or not is irrelevant. He can say whatever the hell he wants as long as he continues to make sweet, passionate love to our ear holes.
Ubisoft Delays Rayman Legends For the Good of All Gamers [YouTube]
The new Xbox Entertainment Studios in LA will produce “visionary original interactive content” Microsoft has said.
Gamesbeat reports that the platform holder made the announcement at the All Things D: Dive into Media event last night. The new studio will be headed up by Nancy Tellem, Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president and will create new content as well as oversee live event streaming over Xbox Live.
The move appears consistent with the widely-held belief that the next Xbox‘s content offering will be broader. Microsoft Studios in Soho has already been experimenting with interactive content projects like Kinect Sesame Street TV, and this new US studio shows that Microsoft is investing in more content of this nature.
The report adds that Yusuf Mehdi, the senior vice president of Microsoft’s games division, also took the opportunity to push 360′s credentials as an entertainment hub. He stated that entertainment app usage on 360 is up 57 percent over a year ago, and ‘family content consumption’ on Xbox Video has grown 400 percent year over year.
As a series consisting of two excellent films followed by a growing counterweight of bad – or at least divisive – ones, the wider world of Alien could really use a break. As such, Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines has been pitched as a corrective, using the smart, muscular intensity of Aliens (which had the original tag line of “This time it’s war”) to build a new narrative branching away from James Cameron’s film, one that’s not mired down by the inexplicable non-drama of Alien 3′s off-world prison or the faraway weightlessness of Resurrection. The violence and swagger of the Colonial Marines are the feature attractions here, and to solve the problem of the ones we knew having been eviscerated by the time that Aliens was done, the developer invents a second unit of grunts to investigate what happened to the first.
The problem is that right from the start this makes the game feel more like a copy than a continuation. The new marine ship, the Sephora, is the double of the original Sulaco, and the shorthand images used to introduce the group – emerging from cryosleep, being briefed on a cold metal deck, a female pilot wearing aviators at the controls of a dropship – are all doubles too. This isn’t in the mould of Cameron’s film, it’s in thrall to it, right down to the roughneck dialogue and even the ship’s android, Rook, the twin of Lance Henriksen’s Bishop. As attractive as the availability of the star for the part must have been, a look to Prometheus would have shown the possibilities of introducing a new android character to the series.
So we are dealing with a facsimile, but on the surface at least, a good one. The Aliens aesthetic – still striking after all these years – is reproduced faithfully, going far beyond the improvised battlefield industrialism of the marines, with their rigged shoulder lights and harnessed smartguns. The deserted Sulaco, now infested with aliens and soon investigated by our new squad of bluff badasses, is just as Cameron left it, lit like a woozy disco of spinning orange hazard lights and echoing with deep, distant alarms. Piercing this anxious bass line is a set of occasional but distinctive noises – the reluctant hum of opening doors, the stutter of pulse rifles, and the whine of motion trackers.
Sadly, this is just a well-decorated shell, and nothing underneath suggests an understanding of why the films are so effective. It seems unfair, for instance, that the motion tracker, which has been borrowed by any number of firstperson shooters, should serve other games better than this one. But the implementation here is mysteriously clumsy: switching between the tracker and your weapons is so fast that there’s no real cost to having the device up all the time, and even when it’s stashed out of view it still warns of nearby aliens by emitting a single ping. In short, rather than enhancing the tension, it kills it. The tracker is so widely copied because it should be both functional and dramatic, but here it’s neither.
Of everything to come out of the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit last week, this undoubtedly brought me the most joy. Specifically, the moment I'm referring to happens at 2:07:30, when an intoxicated man jumped up on stage and wanted to thank all of the montage winners. No, really -- all of them.
A noble cause, to be sure, but a misguided one, perhaps. Chris Hardwick did an admirable job hosting the ceremony, particularly in this would-be moment of crisis. The interruption quickly turned into a comedy bit and really lightened the mood. Those folks on the Skylanders team apparently know how to have a good time.
Montage forever!
Valve has released an Expanded Mutation System for Left 4 Dead 2, which will first be available with a beta release before wider distribution. Essentially, this is an improved scripting system that will allow modders "to go past modifying existing scripts and write custom script logic, spawn and control entities, and much much more." I'm no expert, but that sounds like a potentially big deal knowing how creative the community is.
The company says that with the featured Squirrel scripting language, new Mutations for Left 4 Dead 2 can "rival all-new game modes in complexity." There's a Valve-made example, a survival mode called Holdout, and a wiki to get modders up to speed.
Once this is out of beta and in the Steam Workshop, the already great library of mods is only going to get that much better.
