The first season of Hitman's episodic experiment comes to a close on October 31st -- no tricks. This final installment takes place in Hokkaido, Japan and according to publisher Square Enix, it's "the culmination of everything players will have learnt in terms of both gameplay and story." So hopefully you've been paying attention. The mission takes place in a remote compound replete with Zen gardens, an organic sushi restaurant (fingers crossed you can poison the shashimi) and a Japanese hot spring.
We're less than a week away from the release of Battlefield 1's Early Enlister edition and if you want to pre-order, there are options from three different retailers for cash bonuses. You can opt for a slightly bigger gift card incentive if you can wait for the physical delivery, or you can get instant gratification and pick up the Xbox One Battlefield 1 download code which also come with a cash bonus.
Let's face it, there's no buzzkill greater than realizing you need to spend half a day downloading the game (or updates) before you'll be able to play. Thankfully, we're seeing a new trend where even console digital copies will receive a pre-order bonus. For the Battlefield 1 Standard and Early Enlister Deluxe copies, the download codes are being sent out instantly after purchase as of writing.
The pre-load is live right now on Battlefield 1 for the Xbox One, and with the Microsoft Store sending keys out, you can start the download tonight. The file size on the Xbox One is about 42GB. The Early Enlister version will, of course, get you access as early as next Tuesday, October 18.
If patience is your virtue but you still want to pre-order for a cash incentive, your options grow. The biggest gift card bonus is Dell. There you can get a huge $25 gift code that arrives via email 10-20 days after the game ships. That's an impressive gift card bonus worth over 40% the value of the game. Dell sells physical discs, but they ship fast with free second-business-day options.
Best Buy is another physical disc option worth considering. There "My Best Buy Rewards" members will get $10 in rewards for pre-ordering the game. If you're a paid Gamers Club Unlocked member ($30 membership for two years), the deal gets even better -- you'll receive another 20% off for some additional significant savings.
If you sign up for GCU alongside the pricey $79.99 Early Enlister edition (which can be activated instantly with the digital version), the savings become more pronounced and you'll only need to buy about two more games within a year to "earn back" the cost of the membership.
Nintendo Japan have today given fans a brief glimpse at what must be one of the most sought-after rooms in the entire company: it’s storage area, where old consoles and peripherals are kept.
Did you remember to grab your free PC copy of Beyond Good & Evil? If not, now you can!
Dig up that dusty Uplay account info, sign in, and you'll be well on your way to playing the 2003 action-adventure title about a government conspiracy, a reporter turned rebel, and a dear old pig-man. It was the subject of not onebut two Memory Card moments (mind the spoilers, especially on the second link!) and it even cracked the top ten in Destructoid's list of the best video games of the 2000s.
If you're in the mood to discover this game or just give it another look in light of the recent Beyond Good & Evil 2 chatter from long-time designer Michel Ancel, allow me to send you off.
Everyone's favorite YouTuber PewDiePie has what appears to be exclusive access to an early version of The Last Guardian. He has posted the first 20 minutes or so on his channel, though around half of it is gameplay that has already been shown off before.
I've never thought this game looks all that great, and after watching the video, I'm not convinced otherwise. To me it looks like a majority of it is slowly walking around carrying heavy objects, slowly climbing ladders and chains, and occasionally having your dog bird thing do something. Without the "thing I'd like to pet," this seems like a snoozefest, but I hope for all the fans who have been waiting that isn't the case.
If last week's Oculus Connect left you hungry for more news about virtual reality, maybe news of a new hardware out of Valve's Steam Dev Days will do the trick. Perhaps the biggest tidbit is that the PC gaming juggernaut is working on a new controller for the Vive headset. What's different from the current wand, according to TechCrunch, is the device will allow users to pick items up and put them down, all without letting go of the controller.
The Final Fantasy masher-upper appropriately titled "World of Final Fantasy" is a mere two weeks from release. It's probably not enough time to play through all the games to acclimate yourself with all the characters from the long-running series. But, if we're into cutting corners, there's still a way to prepare.
On October 17, Square Enix is putting out a World of Final Fantasy demo for PS4 and Vita. It features protagonists Lann and Reynn in their Lilikin and Jiant forms as they encounter notable franchise characters like Cloud, Squall, and Lightning. Further, completing the demo unlocks Magitek Armor P in the Coliseum to both battle and capture in the full game.
The demo comes in five days, but we have another method off preparation today. Square Enix also revealed World of Final Fantasy's anime opening cinematic. Watch now, play next week, and you should have the world (of Final Fantasy) at your fingertips come October 25.
The idea was to show folks a quick five minute video of the character creation process in Skylanders: Imaginators while I work on our review. What I ended up is a nearly 20 minute testament to how deep and compelling this year’s gimmick turned out.
You're probably hearing a lot about Beyond Good & Evil lately, but if you weren't paying attention back in 2003 you may have no idea why people suddenly seem to care so much
Ronnie O’Sullivan is one of the greatest snooker players to ever pick up a cue. In the real world, he would kick your ass. In a virtual game of snooker, though, the dude has some problems. Mostly with the floor.
Cornfields are an underrated pick for places that have the potential for bad and/or otherwise weird shit to happen. Sure, they aren't as ubiquitously ominous as abandoned hospitals or decrepit mansions, but cornfields have a long history of being places where the spooky and weird tango.
Children of the Corn taught the world that kids, if left unchecked, would spend their time playing in cornfields and summoning elder gods. Aliens -- or bored farmers -- have turned huge swaths of corn into stalky canvasses for artistic expression. Halloween season transforms unassuming rows of corn into veritable mazes where maniacs, ghouls, and other terrors lurk. Hell, even walking through a cornfield in broad daylight can be a traumatic experience since our squishy human flesh can be sliced by a rigid leaf with surprising ease.
Basically, outside of their food-providing purpose, there's nothing good about cornfields.
Right-wing Northern Irish politicians are mad at a Mafia III mission where the protagonist does a job for the benefit of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). According to The Irish News, it "has been branded 'sick' by outraged unionists and has prompted calls for it to be pulled from shelves."
In "The IRA Don't Ask," Lincoln Clay steals cars for a Irish underboss Thomas Burke. The cars are destined for use as car bombs meant to "keep the Belfast law guessing." The game also includes a Northern Ireland flag defaced with the word "traitor."
Northern Ireland separated itself from the larger Republic of Ireland almost 100 years ago to stay as part of the United Kingdom, mostly because of Protestants in the region feeling more national identity with Britain than with the rest of Ireland (the Republic of Ireland is like 85% Catholic). Still, Northern Ireland is loosely made up of Catholic Nationalists who want to join the rest of Ireland, and majority Protestant Unionists -- like the politicians up in arms about a video game -- who want to remain part of the United Kingdom, and have been successful thus far in doing so.
MP Jeffrey Donaldson of the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which was called the Protestant Unionist Party at the time of Mafia III, was "very concerned" about the effect a mission in a video game could have on "impressionable" young minds.
"The IRA were a terrorist organisation that murdered very many innocent men, women and children in Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK," Donaldson said. "Whilst this game may seem to be a work of fiction for some, it could be seen as trivialising the suffering of innocent victims and the evil that is represented by all forms of terrorism."
Jim Allister, who leads an equally conservative DUP offshoot party called Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), says entertainment has a "duty to avoid glorifying violence" and calls using a real-life group "insensitive," even though Mafia III trades on some historical accuracy, dealing with the result of the Vietnam War, the KKK, et al. "This may be viewed as another clever way of earning money by some but it is most insensitive to victims," Allister said, somehow construing an IRA name check as a guaranteed money-maker.
The center-right Ulster Unionist Party, which governed Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1971 -- so while Mafia III takes place -- also got in on it, with Belfast UUP councillor Jim Rodgers saying he'd be contacting Mafia III's creators. "We went through 40 years of violence in which many lives were lost and people maimed. I knew there would eventually be some who would seek to exploit that to make money," he said, also confusing the presence of an IRA mission in Mafia III with the main draw to the open-world action crime drama.
I didn’t know how Battlefield 1 was going to approach the Great War, which was historically not great at all. I was worried they’d treat it like a fun game. But “Storm of Steel” doesn’t shy away from the war’s brutality.
Mafia III takes hours to really get going. Sometimes it’s a predictable, janky slog. Once it finds its groove, though, it’s an open-world crime game unlike any other. It’s a bold depiction of a difficult time and place—a portrait of New Orleans in the late 1960s, racism and ugliness included.
EA's explosive time-travel back to World War I releases next week. On October 18, Battlefield 1 launches and takes us to an era of mustard gas, trench warfare, and horses. How quaint. Early indications are that the semi-titular battlefields will be quite populated, as the game had an extremely successful beta. History has proven that successful betas have turned into huge sales for Electronic Arts.
If this game's gonna be popular, we don't want you to be the only one not playing it. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, you'd also want to; if they're all going to war, you'll want to ride shotgun in the tank.
Amazon has told us that it's rectifying that. It's stitching together the loose ends by throwing in a digital copy of Battlefield 1 on the winners' platforms of choice. That's kind of like the more expensive version of the collector's edition, just without the physical copy of the game.
To enter, leave a comment a comment with a war pun. You know, "Tanks for the opportunity," "I'm definitely gunna win" -- that kind of stuff. The worse they are, the more hilarious it is that Mike Martin has to read 'em all.
We'll cut the contest off on Sunday evening. That should be enough time to get the winners their digital copies in time for release and for the physical wares to show up soon thereafter. Now go and fund the war with your comments.
Jurassic World broke all kinds of box office records when it came out in 2015, so there was very little surprise regarding the existence of its as-of-yet untitled sequel
The time has nearly come for all you Hitman hold outs to potentially pick up the entire season, sans "season pass" waiting and delays. As of October 31, the finale will hit, and as promised it will be located in Japan, titled "Hakkaido."
After a few bland locales this one seems to shake things up quite a bit, with teases of outdoor cherry blossoms, some sort of wooden indoor area (presumably a bathhouse/Sentō), and a high-tech zone with servers and modern automatic doors. It's confirmed to feature two targets in the "hyper-exclusive GAMA private hospital and resort."
Atari's Nolan Bushnell is busier than ever these days -- in addition to his mobile game efforts, the video game pioneer is launching a virtual reality company. Modal VR is promising a combination of hardware and software that delivers high-end virtual experiences of the sort that make an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift seem like small potatoes. It's completely wireless, low latency (under 10 milliseconds) and accommodates multiple users in areas as large as 900,000 square feet. There are full body tracking suits, to boot. Instead of limiting you to sit-down or room-scale VR, developers could create immersive experiences that fill whole fields and warehouses.
The third episode of Telltale’s Batman game will be out for PC and console on October 25, the studio said today. It’s called New World Order, so hopefully there’ll be cameos by Scott Hall, Kevin Nash and that other guy.
UPDATE (11/10/2016):Just when we thought all the poster teasing was over, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has revealed a full collection of character posters, including Samantha Morton's seriously evil Mary Lou and her son Credence
I’ve been playing Gears of War 4 for a few dozen hours now and a good portion of that time has been spent waiting for the game to find someone to play with.
They don’t get a lot of press here on Kotaku, but sports games are still a big, big deal, especially in this fairly fallow fall gaming season where there ain’t much else for gamers to buy. Sony’s newly released charts of the top 20 downloaded games for PS4 in America in September lead with NBA 2K, FIFA 17, Madden 17 and NHL 17.
Hmm, what could ease the agony for folks who are eager to get their hands on a PlayStation VR… I know! Watching a calm Sony employee disassemble the nifty-looking headset into its dozens upon dozens of tiny parts! Well, I don't know if it will actually help with the wait, but it is fascinating to watch
Sony has announced that as of today, you can now demo PlayStation VR in King's Cross Station in London. Where, you may ask? Just look for the giant helmet thing with blinking lights.
It's part of their "Try VR" campaign, which, as VR publishers are finding out, is the best way to get people to buy into the tech -- even if brick and mortar testing is pretty tough to handle logistically due to health concerns and the subsequent requirement of paid staff to man the stations. At the Call of Duty XP event I recently attended, there was a whole team handling safety and hygiene for just several demo booths of a 10 minute session. These companies are spending a lot of cash on VR!
The unit will be in place until Sunday, and will run through 9PM local time throughout the week. Sony will then relocate to Manchester at the end of the month.
Laughing October 28 on Netflix, Skylanders Academy taps top animation, voice and production talent to make the toys-to-life game characters livelier than ever. Check out the official trailer.
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