Cybexx

I was initially expecting that maybe they were trying to make the other FOX Engine game that Kojima seemed to be planning where you would play as the real Big Boss but this makes sense as something they could put out faster. We need to see how they've tweaked the gameplay but this doesn't sound like a terrible concept just one that I don't have a lot of desire to play.

I mean I kinda got my fill of MGSV gameplay in the 80ish hours I played that game. It was great but since there was so much filler I've played as much of it as I want to play without them drastically shaking up that formula and I am not sure that some new survival elements thrown in will be enough to freshen that up. Though a new landmass will help, MSGV desperately needed another location.

I'm optimistic that there are still good developers at Konami that could pull through and make this a surprise hit but this is the first new Metal Gear game since Portable Ops Plus that isn't a guaranteed purchase for me.

Wow that is basically perfect. Bravo random number generator, bravo.

I played through Realm of Shadows yesterday and really enjoyed it. The story is reminding me of The Long Halloween a bit, the Bruce and Oz relationship reminds me of Hush but the whole Wayne family mystery feels fresh. I like how the Catwoman relationship is handled, how they kind of let you define it but they cut through the secret identity business right away.

The cast is really strong. I think Troy Baker's augmented Batman voice is a good way to handle that in a post-Christian Bale interpretation. I think Richard McGonagle is the most compelling Carmine Falcone.

The action stuff is well handled, feels improved from what Telltale has done before. It is quicktime events but it takes inspiration from the Rocksteady combat. The investigation mechanic is neat and I hope they push it further in later episodes.

I did run into one weird bit of writing after the torture sequence where I managed to avoid doing any real harm to the merc other than pushing him into the wall once. I got my information just through intimidation and the game registered that Gordon thought I had taken a non-lethal approach but then I got chewed out in the next scene by Alfred for being too violent, which was weird.

From a technical aspect, I played the episode on PC and it ran really smoothly for me. I have a beefy rig that I upgraded recently to be an ideal system for VR but I noted that it ran smoother than other recent Telltale games I had played on the same system (Michonne / Game of Thrones) with some of the notable loading hitches I was used to cleaned up. I did run into one bug where I got stuck in a screen during a batcomputer sequence but that has apparently been patched. I did load the game up after last night's patch and noticed they had added a "Please update your Graphics Drivers" dialog to the main menu. This is the first Telltale game where you have to chose between a Windows 7 and Windows 8+ versions and they are pushing their graphics further than they have ever before so I have to wonder if this was a case where most people are not used to a Telltale game being on the bleeding edge of driver requirements, which I've been keeping up to date due to VR demands.

Overall this is one of the most compelling Batman stories I feel we've had in awhile. At least since Scott Snyder's Zero Year and I can kind of guess where some of the threads are probably going but it is unpredictable in a way Batman stories rarely are.

Called it. Though not that hard to call. I'm just happy that Patrick wasn't off to somewhere else entirely different forcing me to focus on yet another site. The Vice Gaming site leaves a lot to be desired right now but I am excited to see where Austin takes it.

I've met Patrick at the last two PAX Primes and he has been working for someone else each time so I can't say this is a surprise.

I would love for him to come back to Giant Bomb but he has a real desire to push the journalism part of his job and GB prioritizes content creation over journalism so I would say Patrick is much more likely to be heading to Vice Gaming. I think Patrick and Austin would make a pretty awesome team.

That bundle is crazy. It even has a 40% off voucher for XCOM 2 thrown in.

Battleborn is inevitably going to free-to-play soon though I imagine Gearbox is watching Evolve very intently right now to see how that goes before jumping in themselves. The thing is that 2K will probably handle the transition like Evolve and allow people who own content in the original version of the game to unlock that content in the free-to-play version. So $15 to unlock all the base heroes is not a bad deal considering the average pricing of free-to-play games.

Also nice to have some Steam copies of games I enjoyed on Xbox 360 like Darkness 2 or Spec Ops: The Line.

I would say that Generations throws a lot at you without necessary explaining itself much better than MH4U. If you are planning to mostly play solo then I would definitely go with MH4U since it has an actual story with scripted sequences and cutscenes. Generations is just walls of text and very much feels like the stopgap game before the next real entry. That and for some reason Generations leans even heavier into the gathering missions for the early quests which are really boring.

Generations is great if you spent a bunch of time last year playing MH4U with friends and you are looking for a bunch of new content and willing to put up with the grind again, it feels like a standalone expansion pack. I would not play it first.

Warcraft - 4/5

Needed a lot more character development and the human acting can be a bit wooden which undermines some of the melodramatic scenes but overall I really enjoyed the film. The Orc characters are really great, the effects work does a good job of invoking the look of the games while also being its own take. The story is surprisingly true to the story of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, or at least the version of that story that Blizzard themselves retconned for the benefit of the later games and the deviations make sense.

The story strikes a real tonally grey area that makes you think about it in a way that is much bolder than what you find in summer blockbusters, there are real consequences and major characters die. If you are not familiar with the Warcraft universe or your brain just instantly shuts off when it encounters fantasy terminology I could see how the story might be a bit hard to follow, since it just continues to bowl forward with not a lot of breathing room.

So I think Duncan Jones does an admirable job attempting to create an interesting movie out of Warcraft's First War which is no easy task. The TV-grade cast he could afford does him some disservice but veteran mo-cap actor Toby Kebbell does a great job as Durotan. You could criticize the movie for ending on a bit of a cliffhanger (since the event of Warcraft 2 basically start right away) but the setup is there for some really interesting sequels that will hopefully be greenlit thanks to the success in China.

That was a pretty good series of demos. God of War seems like the exact right kind of reboot, the kind that is rare is see these days. Horizon Zero Dawn continues to look great, little bummed that isn't this year. Resident Evil was a nice surprise and Capcom pulled a Lost Planet and released their E3 demo on PSN (though not up for North America yet). Nice to see that the Insomniac Spider-man game was not just a rumour, the big white spider on the suit is a bit weird but the gameplay reminded me a lot of Treyarch's Spider-man 2 but more polished which is good because I really grew tired of the direction that Activision took that series. Detroit is Heavy Rain meets Blade Runner which makes sense, I can enjoy a David Cage game. Days Gone looks okay, the setting is a bit outplayed at this point but I'll give Sony Bend the benefit of the doubt since their work on PSP and Vita was pretty good.

Farpoint is being made by friend of mine so I guess I don't get to have an opinion on that.

The other VR stuff looks very like varying degrees of "Hey we stuck a VR camera in our triple-A game." Which I mean I can't blame them for since that is exactly what I did when the studio I was working for got an Oculus Dev Kit 1 but I didn't try to ship that stuff. Resident Evil definitely looks like it will be nauseating for some people though totally fine for people like me who are mostly fine with stuff like Windlands.

Seems to be working fine for me now on Chrome.