Halo: Spartan Assault transfers adequately from mobile platforms to the Xbox One, with microtransactions in tow.
In ways both fantastical and familiar, Violett weaves a yarn that snakes around you and pulls you in. This point-and-click adventure shoves its surreality and challenge to the forefront, announcing its intention to lure you into its twisted world and twist your brain into knots from the get-go. As the story grows, the game's mechanics wane, touching on possibilities Violett never fully exploits. Yet where the lead character's magical abilities never wholly blossom, the journey casts its own kind of spells on you. Push past the frustrating initial moments and prepare for a lovely and unusual tale.
The basic setup is one we've all heard before. A young, rebellious teen moves away from her school and her life in the city to an old haunted house in the middle of nowhere. It's a bit hackneyed, but it works as a solid foundation for the game's real draw: a mind-bending nightmare world filled with tough puzzles and inventive visuals.
Channeling some unholy fusion between all of the great surrealist artists as well as a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll, Violett opens with the eponymous teen looking around her room for something--anything--to do. She spots a glint through a hole in the baseboard and reaches in to find herself quickly transported to a visually stunning alternate world. The story is pretty bare-bones and is almost exclusively without words, instead relying on pictures, symbols, and facial expressions to communicate. Unfortunately, while that approach helps the already stellar visual presentation, Violett's first few moments are marred by a dedication to that minimalism.
After her transportation to this alternate dimension, Violett finds herself trapped inside a cage, and you, as the player, have some small degree of control over her surroundings. At first, she can't do much besides rock her cage back and forth, by means of you clicking and dragging the mouse to and fro. Unfortunately that requires some strange timing, and it took me about 10 minutes to get the hang of it. On the flip side, that awkward motion shows up only once more at the very end of the game. Coarse first impressions aside, this first scene is fantastic as a vertical slice of everything you need to learn to progress.
This pond is more representative of the late-game stages and lacks the strangeness of earlier stages, instead looking very grounded, albeit quite somber. Once you've rattled your cage sufficiently, you briefly grab the hands of a fairy, also imprisoned, which grants you some basic telekinetic powers. From there, you can manipulate objects throughout the room, either by simply clicking on them or by clicking and dragging them in a specific direction to achieve a specific effect. If you're trying to manipulate an object in the wrong way or at the wrong time, Violett shakes her head and mumbles disapprovingly.
Scattered around the room are a few colored orbs that you can collect by clicking on them. They are hidden, though, and very carefully disguised by the environment. These are orbs of elemental power, and they act as a constant sort of Easter-egg hunt. Often there are four or five on any given screen, but figuring out exactly where they sit is a running puzzle that helps guide you to look around the room for clues as to your next objective. With this knowledge in hand, you have all you need to move on.
Not everything in Violett's world looks like it comes from the land of nightmares...sometimes there are colorful party balloons! From there, things start to get really strange. The first room you come to after the introductory area features a demonic-looking teapot that never takes its one eye off of you. It's distinctly unnerving, but works well to set the creepy, absurdist tone. This room also tests the lessons you learned in the first room to make sure that you've got the hang of them. From there, you find an M.C. Escher-inspired hub of sorts that leads off to several other places, and the game proper begins. This is also the toughest part of the game, since you have several rooms that you must tackle with relatively little to guide you. The strangeness of the world and the obtuse rules it follows highlight Violett's nature as an outsider to this world. You don't understand it, because she doesn't, at least not yet. Regardless, this first hub and its connected rooms amount to the first few hours of gameplay, and they are stunningly hard. While some of that difficulty continues, after you start to get a decent grasp on the world, it isn't quite as alien or as hostile.
There's an overarching theme of escapism that steadily transitions to homesickness, much in the way that Alice's trip through the rabbit hole first seems like a fun romp before becoming more and more hostile. Here, though, the first few environments are remarkably unfriendly, whereas the later ones are wistful and lonely. Because there are no words or real cutscenes to help communicate the game's message, and there's a strong implication that this is Violett's escapist fantasy, it's hard to shake the feeling that this trip through the rabbit hole is reflective of Violett's own emotional state. Helping that interpretation along is the absolutely fantastic musical score. The music changes from room to room, helping to contextualize each major location in the game. Some rooms rely on pizzicato strings to imply that Violett is in danger; others shift into G minor chords to imply sadness and loneliness.
A few orb locations are obvious, but some aren't so easy. There are quite a few in this shot alone. Can you find them all? While the meat and potatoes of such simple games are the environments and the puzzles, Violett does have a few odd problems. First, while the colored orbs I mentioned earlier are useful in that they help encourage you to look around and closely examine the rooms, they don't have much utility beyond that. Later, Violett gains some other powers in addition to her telekinesis. It's sort of implied that the strength of those powers is related to how many orbs you've collected, but they don't change at all over time. Even if they did, those other powers are rarely used. Violett's ability to float, make plants grow, and finally encapsulate herself in a shield all seem like they'd be fantastically useful for navigating such a strange land, but they never come up in a story-critical context until the last few seconds of the game. Instead, they're used only to help collect pages of a diary left by an unknown stranger. These pages aren't critical, nor do they provide any hints to help the game along. They are entirely optional, though you often have to go to rather extreme lengths to collect them. I was left feeling that the game is unfinished, because these skills aren't used for anything interesting or vital.
Despite the oddly incomplete utilization of otherworldly psychic powers, and an insane difficulty curve, the emotional context goes a long way to helping Violett along. The steep curve is representative of Violett's own confusion, and the powers are her growing determination to escape this alternate world and return home. Violett is quiet and unassuming, but it steadily weaves a tale about childhood fears and desires with which we are all too familiar. Despite its surreal setting, it has a very personal touch that grounds it.
One child made a surprising discovery Christmas morning. After snapping some images with a 3DS he received on Christmas, Tom Mayhew's 8-year-old son found various pornographic images saved on the system, WAVY News 10 reports.
"He went to play his games, not knowing anything was on it," Mayhew said. "After a while, [the kids] took pictures of themselves and when the picture was taken it went to a file."
When Mayhew's son opened the image files, he found a dozen pictures were already there--pictures he was not meant to see.
"It was a shocker because we had family here, and there were a lot of kids here," Mayhew said. "The kids were the ones that discovered those pictures."
"There is no reason for them to be even really on there," he added. "It's disgusting for one. It seems that this was the only thing left on it."
Mayhew purchased the 3DS at a Wal-Mart in Hampton, Virginia and said the images were time-stamped for early December. However, he bought the 3DS on December 23, so the portable was likely purchased and then returned without Wal-Mart wiping the system of user data.
This is not the first time a porn-filled 3DS has been sold to a unknowing consumer. Last year, GameStop sold a refurbished system containing sexual images to a Colorado man, who gifted the portable to his five-year-old son.
My first console I received was a Genesis (although I had been playing my brother's NES for several years). My mom had gotten me a SNES but actually took it back and exchanged it for a Genesis when, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I wouldn't stop going on about all the games you could get bundled with it or free with mail-in rebates. I was so happy when I opened it, I'll never forget the bump on my head I got when I jumped for joy and fell backwards, almost bringing down the Christmas tree in my joy. The year my mom died was the year I got a N64 and Super Mario 64 for Christmas, and my brother and I struggled to find even the first level because we had never played a 3D game and had no idea where to go. Getting through those first few levels Christmas morning brought my brother (11 years older than me) and I closer together and helped us ease the pain of the first Christmas without mom.
This year, I'm the one buying consoles and games for my friends, family, and myself (got a brand new 3DSXL). The joy these fantastic gifts bring reminds me what the season should be about: having fun and sharing joyful times with those closest to us. Thanks for sharing, and Merry Christmas Danny and all of Gamespot!
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Sat, 28 Dec 2013 20:22:41 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/report-china-bans-battlefield-4-calls-it-threat-to-national-security/1100-6416854/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png" data-ref-id="1300-2409926" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png" data-ref-id="1300-2409926"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">The Chinese government has banned Electronic Arts' military FPS <a href="/battlefield-4/" data-ref-id="false">Battlefield 4</a> because it contains content that threatens national security, the country's Ministry of Culture has said.</p><p dir="ltr" style=""><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/27/electronic-arts-battlefield-4-game-banned-in-china/" rel="nofollow" data-ref-id="false"><em>The Wall Street Journal</em></a> points out that this decision is not likely to negatively impact EA's business because the publisher doesn't sell Battlefield 4 in China.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">The ban comes after the release of downloadable expansion China Rising, which features four multiplayer maps on the Chinese mainland.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">An official copy of the Ministry's announcement is not yet available and an EA representative declined to comment on the story.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Last week, a <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/battlefield-4-accused-of-discrediting-china-s-image-by-military-paper/1100-6416825/" data-ref-id="1100-6416825">Chinese newspaper accused Battlefield 4</a> of "discrediting China's image" and "distorting the truth in an effort to mislead young people."</p><p dir="ltr" style="">China <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/china-lifts-13-year-console-ban/1100-6415060/" data-ref-id="1100-6415060">lifted its 13-year console ban in September</a> with the creation of a new free-trade zone in Shanghai.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6415801" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6415801/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p dir="ltr" style=""> </p><p style=""> </p> Sat, 28 Dec 2013 04:20:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/report-china-bans-battlefield-4-calls-it-threat-to-national-security/1100-6416854/ http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ Danny gets all nostalgic about a all those times unwrapping video game goodies on Christmas Day. Wed, 25 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Sat, 28 Dec 2013 20:22:41 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/report-china-bans-battlefield-4-calls-it-threat-to-national-security/1100-6416854/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png" data-ref-id="1300-2409926" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png" data-ref-id="1300-2409926"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/1179/11799911/2409926-chinarising1.png"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">The Chinese government has banned Electronic Arts' military FPS <a href="/battlefield-4/" data-ref-id="false">Battlefield 4</a> because it contains content that threatens national security, the country's Ministry of Culture has said.</p><p dir="ltr" style=""><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/27/electronic-arts-battlefield-4-game-banned-in-china/" rel="nofollow" data-ref-id="false"><em>The Wall Street Journal</em></a> points out that this decision is not likely to negatively impact EA's business because the publisher doesn't sell Battlefield 4 in China.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">The ban comes after the release of downloadable expansion China Rising, which features four multiplayer maps on the Chinese mainland.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">An official copy of the Ministry's announcement is not yet available and an EA representative declined to comment on the story.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Last week, a <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/battlefield-4-accused-of-discrediting-china-s-image-by-military-paper/1100-6416825/" data-ref-id="1100-6416825">Chinese newspaper accused Battlefield 4</a> of "discrediting China's image" and "distorting the truth in an effort to mislead young people."</p><p dir="ltr" style="">China <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/articles/china-lifts-13-year-console-ban/1100-6415060/" data-ref-id="1100-6415060">lifted its 13-year console ban in September</a> with the creation of a new free-trade zone in Shanghai.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6415801" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6415801/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p dir="ltr" style=""> </p><p style=""> </p> Sat, 28 Dec 2013 04:20:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/report-china-bans-battlefield-4-calls-it-threat-to-national-security/1100-6416854/ http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ Danny gets all nostalgic about a all those times unwrapping video game goodies on Christmas Day. Wed, 25 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
My very first console was an Atari 2600...I think I was 5 at the time...but the first one I recieved for Christmas was my NES. I remember that my mom and my aunt had to drive to New Hampshire (I live on the east coast of Maine...so it was a 5 hour drive for them) to pick up 2 NES consoles (limit 1 per customer) as they were sold out in Maine.
Although that console stopped working years ago...I still have R.O.B. and the gyros that came with it (Duck Hunt and Gyromite were the pack in titles).
Of course, I still have fond memories of the consoles I received in the years following....TG16, Genesis, SNES, SegaCD, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation, PS2, N64, Gamecube, Xbox, X360, PS3.....Wii (ok,....so no really fond memories of that last one....but at least my kids get some use out of it)....
Mix all that with a heaping serving of PC gaming....
I love video games!
Following reports on Nintendo's digital storefront being unavailable for some users and the delay of Pokemon Bank, the company posted the following update on their official Facebook page:
We sincerely apologize for the connection problems in the Nintendo eShop. We understand this is taking longer than expected, but we can assure you that providing a solution is our top priority. We are determined to make sure everyone can enjoy all that Wii U and Nintendo 3DS have to offer. In an effort to manage the high volume of traffic and ultimately improve your experience, we are temporarily taking the Nintendo eShop services offline between the hours of 4 p.m. - 4 a.m. ET. Thank you so much for your continued patience. We will keep you updated.
The issues are mostly likely related to the significant influx of new 3DS and Wii U owners following the holiday. Nintendo in an earlier statement wrote, "Due to the high traffic, players are having trouble setting up Nintendo Network IDs and downloading content in the Nintendo eShop on both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS."
Nintendo also recently announced that the eShop accounts for Wii U and 3DS can be connected by creating and linking the system network ID.
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Thu, 26 Dec 2013 20:21:42 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps4-game-killzone-shadow-fall-free-to-play-this-weekend/1100-6416850/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2375301" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2375301"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">PlayStation 4 game <a href="/phoenix-cms/reviews/form?id=6415536/" data-ref-id="false">Killzone: Shadow Fall </a>will be free to play December 28-31 for PlayStation Plus subscribers, Sony has announced. PS Plus members can start pre-loading the game now.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Developer Guerrilla Games pointed out to fans that the game's multiplayer mode is constantly evolving, with new features and content rolling out on a regular basis.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">"It's also important for us to reiterate that the Shadow Fall multiplayer experience will continue to evolve and expand with new content and additional features," the developer said. "In fact, a new update will soon go live that addresses many oft-requested features, including the addition of voice chat. Moreover, all additional maps will be made available for free to ensure that the community grows without fragmenting. We're committed to supporting Shadow Fall, and we're excited to share more about that vision early in the new year."</p><p style="">For more on Killzone: Shadow Fall, check out <a href="/killzone-shadow-fall/" data-ref-id="false">GameSpot's review</a>.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416088" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416088/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style=""> </p> Thu, 26 Dec 2013 07:23:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps4-game-killzone-shadow-fall-free-to-play-this-weekend/1100-6416850/ http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ Danny gets all nostalgic about a all those times unwrapping video game goodies on Christmas Day. Wed, 25 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Thu, 26 Dec 2013 20:21:42 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps4-game-killzone-shadow-fall-free-to-play-this-weekend/1100-6416850/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2375301" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2375301"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2375301-acrevkillzone+chapter+3+embargo+11-13+6am90.jpg"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">PlayStation 4 game <a href="/phoenix-cms/reviews/form?id=6415536/" data-ref-id="false">Killzone: Shadow Fall </a>will be free to play December 28-31 for PlayStation Plus subscribers, Sony has announced. PS Plus members can start pre-loading the game now.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Developer Guerrilla Games pointed out to fans that the game's multiplayer mode is constantly evolving, with new features and content rolling out on a regular basis.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">"It's also important for us to reiterate that the Shadow Fall multiplayer experience will continue to evolve and expand with new content and additional features," the developer said. "In fact, a new update will soon go live that addresses many oft-requested features, including the addition of voice chat. Moreover, all additional maps will be made available for free to ensure that the community grows without fragmenting. We're committed to supporting Shadow Fall, and we're excited to share more about that vision early in the new year."</p><p style="">For more on Killzone: Shadow Fall, check out <a href="/killzone-shadow-fall/" data-ref-id="false">GameSpot's review</a>.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416088" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416088/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style=""> </p> Thu, 26 Dec 2013 07:23:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps4-game-killzone-shadow-fall-free-to-play-this-weekend/1100-6416850/ http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ Danny gets all nostalgic about a all those times unwrapping video game goodies on Christmas Day. Wed, 25 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-point-christmas-console-memories/2300-6416707/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
In this, the first of four articles, we look back at highs and lows of 2013, beginning with the unveiling of Sony and Microsofts' consoles and our collective reactions prior to E3.
2013 has been on the most hectic, exciting years in gaming in a long time. The launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One may have taken the spotlight, but we also had a portable offering from Ouya, a redesigned portable from Nintendo (the 2DS), plus the unveiling of Valve's Steam Machine. Gaming itself may not have changed all too much in 2013, but the ways available to experience games were constantly evolving.
But although the industry is looking up now, the start of the year still felt uncertain and tumulutuous. The fate of any of these consoles was (and in some ways is still) uncertain, and there was far too regular news of layoffs and studio closures. One of the larger developers to leave the industry in 2013 was LucasArts. Disney acquired the developer along with LucasFilm, and early in the year Disney shifted the game studio to a licensing model, thus canceling (or at least putting on hold) anticipated games such as Star Wars 1313 and the Battlfefront sequel First Assault .
Given the state of the industry, it was easy to imagine an imminent collapse or some other disaster just around the corner. But all that just made it even harder to predict the circular route that Microsoft and Sony would take in their console reveals. We knew that the announcements would come soon in 2013, and that the new consoles would bear more in common with the PC than the 360 and PS3, but anything beyond that was pure conjecture. Both Sony and Microsoft were able to keep the design of their consoles tightly under wraps.
At the beginning of 2013, Gamespot made a number of predictions about what the future might hold. Some were right: Sony going with the simple PlayStation 4 title for their new console, the exploding popularity of MOBAs and League of Legends, and the rise of eSports to greater prominence in the gaming world.
However, some predictions were completely wrong. The reveal of Half-Life 3 and Source 2 from Valve, the Xbox tablet, and anything new with Final Fantasy VII were guesses that never materialized.
Early in the year, Microsoft suffered from a multitude of problems communicating the virtues of what was then still widely referred to as the Xbox 720. Gamers were outraged when it leaked that the system would require either a constant connection to the Internet (or at the least would need to check-in every 24 hours). And matters weren't helped when a creative director at one of Microsoft's studios responded to the outcry with the hashtag #dealwithit.
In addition, rumors were circulating that the next Xbox would be unable to play used games, and that users would be unable to unplug the Kinect. Microsoft said the Kinect would be able to be turned off at least (in an attempt to allay concerns of constant in-home monitoring), but by then it seemed too little too late.
Prior to E3, Microsoft revealed their console, but only managed to upset their fan base more by focusing on the system's social and media capabilities rather than on gaming. Some developers argued that getting the mainstream and television-focused information out of the way early would free up more time for games at E3.
Sony's press conference reveal took place before Microsoft's media briefing and did not include a hardware reveal, but Sony was willing to directly address some of their competition's biggest criticisms. The PS4, for example, would definitely be able to play used games. However, Sony remained suspiciously silent on whether or not their system would require the same 24-hour online check-in.
Still, Sony received praise for showing off their system's share features (which lets you record game footage or stream online at any time) and a first look at the PS4's games well ahead of E3. We got to see Sony exclusives like Infamous: Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall, and Knack, as well as confirmation that several highly anticipated games, such as Destiny (from Halo studio Bungie) and The Witness would be coming to next-gen. More game details and pricing would have to wait until E3, but Sony was already capitalizing on Microsoft's perceived problems...a trend that would continue in E3.
The problems around "always online" were especially prominent in the months before E3 because of a pair of games from Blizzard and EA that had non-negotiable internet requirements in order to play. A game-breaking bug in Blizzard's Diablo III was booting players from their servers. Meanwhile EA's reboot of SimCity hit serious launch problems in supporting the player base and just providing online server stability. The problems persisted for months and they were only exacerbated by the fact that the online component was not actually necessary to play the game.
Announcing a console that would potentially include those same problems with few obvious benefits was causing serious perception problems for Microsoft. Especially once Sony revealed that, due to the relative lack of high-speed Internet worldwide, their console would not have that prerequisite. But for better or worse, Microsoft stayed the course.
And in the background was the growing dominance of one of gaming's biggest phenomenons: League of Legends and the MOBA. It was a genre that was already wildly popular with a devotedly dedicated fanbase, but 2013 is when the MOBA came into its own in an even more mainstream way. League of Legends players were breaking audience records on their Twitch streams. And even in beta, Dota 2 from Valve was playing host to major league gaming tournaments.
There was a lot of excitement building up in the gaming world prior to E3, and fortunately, the rest of the year did not disappoint.
Good one Danny!
Reminds me of one of the sadder christmas stories of my life for some reason. I was 12 years old and all I wanted for Christmas was Mortal Kombat III for my SNES. I loved fighting games (still do) and I made sure everyone knew it would mean the world to me to get it. I didn't really anticipate to actually get it since money were kind of tight for my family back then. I lived in the country and there wasn't really any way to earn the money for buying games myself, so getting them for christmas or birthday was probably my only shot at getting games.
One morning - a couple of days before christmas, I wake up early, before my parents, and go into the living room. On a chair I notice something I almost couldn't believe: It's Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 - a game even better than Mortal Kombat 3!
I was almost exploding with happiness, but I realize it must have been an error. They had been wrapping gifts and accidentally forgotten it on the chair the night before. And so I contained myself, knowing that if my parents found out I had seen the gift, they might take it back, and went back to my room. On my way back I pass my brother who's going into the living room as I walk out.
Then comes christmas day. I quickly notice the gift under the tree and I plan how surprised I will look once I open it. Finally we get to the point where we get to open our gifts. I run over to it, tear off the wrapping and it's...
"Indiana Jones Trilogy"? This was of course not the game I had wanted. Knowing that my parents had spent a lot of money on it, I hold back my tears and manage to utter a thank you. Turns out my brother had told them I might have seen the gift, and they had gotten it exchanged just to be safe.
In the end I never got to own either Mortal Kombat 3 or Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
Merry christmas everybody.
Waiting for that game you really want to play can be a painful experience, but it doesn't have to be one! The Waiting Game cherry-picks the best games to play, films to watch and even books to read while you wait for launch day, helping you prepare for th
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Joe Danger and No Man's Sky developer Hello Games is not having a happy holiday. As a result of the storm that moved through the United Kingdom today, the company's office in Guildford was completely flooded, the developer said on Twitter today.
"Oh god. Water moves really quick. Hello Games has been totally flooded," the studio wrote. "Everything in the office has pretty much been lost :("
"A lifesize cardboard cut out of Joe Danger went floating past face down. Poor Joe. He's taking this the worst," Hello Games added. "Massive thanks to everyone who tried to help here today. We have learned that laptops float sometimes."
"Leaving now and letting firemen to help real people (all the houses around us with kids and xmas) - rather than us drowning to save a hdd :)"
Hello Games, which has fewer than 10 employees, is currently working on the ambitious, procedurally generated game No Man's Sky and Joe Danger Infinity. It is not clear how the office's flooding will affect development on those titles.
We will continue to monitor the story as it develops.
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Mon, 23 Dec 2013 20:20:20 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/titanfall-atlas-titan-reveal-trailer/2300-6416706/ Meet the Atlas Titan, the workhouse amongst the titan classes. The Atlas excels where all other models fall short. Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:01:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/titanfall-atlas-titan-reveal-trailer/2300-6416706/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/metal-band-avenged-sevenfold-launching-mobile-game-in-early-2014/1100-6416843/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2407918" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2407918"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">Hail to the King: Deathbat, a mobile dungeon crawler featuring the discography and artwork of American metal band Avenged Sevenfold, will launch in early 2014, it was announced today.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">The game, announced this summer, features the band's discography and artwork throughout its various stages. It is a companion experience for the Hail to the King Machinima series.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">"We've been fans of games since we were kids, and we thought it would be fun to create one of our own inspired by our favorites," Avenged Sevenfold singer M. Shadows said. "There are so many cool and innovative indie games being developed today, and we realized we could design and build the kind of game we'd love to play on our own. It is coming together amazingly well, and we can't wait to share it."</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Various Avenged Sevenfold songs are featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops titles, most recently with "Carry On" in <a href="/call-of-duty-black-ops-ii/" data-ref-id="false">Call of Duty: Black Ops II</a>. Check out a gameplay trailer for Hail to the King: Deathbat <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68qYR5qaACk&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow" data-ref-id="false">right here</a>.</p><p dir="ltr" style=""> </p> Mon, 23 Dec 2013 09:10:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/metal-band-avenged-sevenfold-launching-mobile-game-in-early-2014/1100-6416843/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
http://auth.gamespot.com/ Gamespot's Everything Feed! News, Reviews, Videos. Exploding with content? You bet. en-us Mon, 23 Dec 2013 20:20:20 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/titanfall-atlas-titan-reveal-trailer/2300-6416706/ Meet the Atlas Titan, the workhouse amongst the titan classes. The Atlas excels where all other models fall short. Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:01:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/videos/titanfall-atlas-titan-reveal-trailer/2300-6416706/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/metal-band-avenged-sevenfold-launching-mobile-game-in-early-2014/1100-6416843/ <figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2407918" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2407918"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/1179/11799911/2407918-hail.jpg"></a></figure><p style=""> </p><p dir="ltr" style="">Hail to the King: Deathbat, a mobile dungeon crawler featuring the discography and artwork of American metal band Avenged Sevenfold, will launch in early 2014, it was announced today.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">The game, announced this summer, features the band's discography and artwork throughout its various stages. It is a companion experience for the Hail to the King Machinima series.</p><p dir="ltr" style="">"We've been fans of games since we were kids, and we thought it would be fun to create one of our own inspired by our favorites," Avenged Sevenfold singer M. Shadows said. "There are so many cool and innovative indie games being developed today, and we realized we could design and build the kind of game we'd love to play on our own. It is coming together amazingly well, and we can't wait to share it."</p><p dir="ltr" style="">Various Avenged Sevenfold songs are featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops titles, most recently with "Carry On" in <a href="/call-of-duty-black-ops-ii/" data-ref-id="false">Call of Duty: Black Ops II</a>. Check out a gameplay trailer for Hail to the King: Deathbat <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68qYR5qaACk&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow" data-ref-id="false">right here</a>.</p><p dir="ltr" style=""> </p> Mon, 23 Dec 2013 09:10:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/articles/metal-band-avenged-sevenfold-launching-mobile-game-in-early-2014/1100-6416843/ http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/ <p style="">Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.</p><p style="">It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.</p><div data-embed-type="video" data-ref-id="2300-6416370" data-width="100%" data-height="100%"><iframe src="/videos/embed/6416370/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe></div><p style="">The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.</p><p style="">This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.</p><figure data-align="left" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406835"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406835-0001.jpg"></a><figcaption>For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!</figcaption></figure><p style="">Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses "meticulous" and surges straight into "gaudy."</p><p style="">Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.</p><p style="">Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.</p><blockquote data-align="center" data-size="large"><p style="">This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.</p></blockquote><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406836"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406836-0002.jpg"></a><figcaption>Oh God. Just... Oh God. </figcaption></figure><p style="">And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of <em>Science Magazine</em> from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.</p><p style="">Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his <a href="/battlecruiser-millennium/" data-ref-id="false">Battlecruiser</a> series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine "Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.</p><figure data-align="right" data-size="medium" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406838"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_medium/416/4161502/2406838-0004.jpg"></a><figcaption>Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.</figcaption></figure><p style="">That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p><p style="">Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.</p><p style="">It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.</p><figure data-align="center" data-size="large" data-img-src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842" data-resize-url="" data-resized="" data-embed-type="image"><a href="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg" data-ref-id="1300-2406842"><img src="http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/416/4161502/2406842-0003.jpg"></a><figcaption>According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. </figcaption></figure><p style="">Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.</p><blockquote data-align="left"><p style="">A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.</p></blockquote><p style="">Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: "Is it a bug or a feature?"</p><p style="">The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.</p> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/
