Sometimes, a game comes out of absolutely nowhere to take the world by storm. Shortly before it was launched, Rocket League became the hot game in the gaming sphere thanks to developer Psyonix getting the game in the hands of popular let’s players and streamers. Now, it’s cemented in the top games on both Twitch and Steam (in both players and sales).
So how does this little indie juggernaut really stack up when you go beyond the hype?
One of the advantages of being a private company is that you are not required to publicly file your annual financial statements. That won’t stop people from trying to figure out the financial health of your company.
A market data firm called SuperData has prepared a report on the revenues of Valve and Steam. Their calculations indicate that Valve made $730 million in revenue in 2014.
I’ve never really understood how Telltale can be so good at writing these episodic narrative arcs but be so completely incapable at writing the second episode of those stories. They go from great starts to non-existent follow-up and that certainly dampened my enthusiasm for the third episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Fortunately for Telltale, they aren’t too bad at bouncing back from a subpar effort and certainly did with this episode of TFTB.
The most recent NASCAR game that I played prior to picking up NASCAR ’15 was EA Sports’ NASCAR 06: Total Team Control. Before and after playing that, I regularly played NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. NR2003 is over 12 years old at this point but it’s still considered the best NASCAR sim ever made and still has a fairly healthy community.
So when Dusenberry Martin Racing announced that they acquired the NASCAR license, I was pretty excited. Their leadership includes a veteran of those classic Papyrus Racing Games NASCAR games so I was hoping this would be a sign of good things to come from NASCAR ’15.
Then DMR mentioned that this year’s game was a carryover from previous license holders Eutechnyx who had already started development on NASCAR ’15 when they acquired the license. If you know the name Eutechnyx, you may recognize them as the developers of Ride to Hell: Retribution. Oh my.
After the last episode of Game of Thrones (A Telltale Game Series), I lamented the fact that it felt like the story was far too on-rails for my liking and that the Forrester clan were getting no hope spots in their continuing battle to save their House from being crushed by the combined forces of House Whitehill and the various Bolton and Lannister forces. While the latter doesn’t really change that much (it is a Telltale game after all), we finally see a glimmer of hope and a little comeback from Team Ironrath.
Given that we’ve been beaten down emotionally by Game of Thrones on TV and in the game, it was nice to have that little bit of hope.
Experimental games are a hit or a miss. I’m not entirely sure that you will ever find a near universal opinion on any game but games that find themselves outside the standard mould are especially prone to that. People will either absolutely love new and different games and mechanics or they will resoundly reject them.
I use that as the intro to this review because experimental is an appropriate catch-all term to describe Her Story. It’s a mystery game that sees you dig through old police interrogation videos to determine the truth in a 21-year-old case.
It might not have a proper win state. It might rely on FMV in the style of a, well, 21-year old video game. It might be a game that’s only combat is your brain against itself. But it’s easily the best game I’ve played this year so far.
I know these episodic reviews of Telltale’s games aren’t exactly the most timely but the increasing length of time between Telltale’s releases aren’t exactly speedy either. We’re getting to the point where I’m not exactly sure that Telltale will be able to complete Tales From The Borderlands during this calendar year since the gap between releases is just over three months.
So some three months after it was released, I’ve finally gotten around to reviewing the second episode of Tales From The Borderlands. It would have been a lot easier to review this is I felt any passion for this product but I’m not entirely sure that I don’t feel a little more passion than Telltale does.
During Steam’s Monster Summer Sale, I noticed something during the Tom Clancy franchise sale. The price of the upcoming Rainbow Six: Siege is $80 CAD. The US dollar price is $60. If you were to pay for the game in USD and have your credit card company convert it to CAD, a Canadian customer would spend $73. That’s an inexplicable loss of $7 as a sort of living in Canada tax (when no sales tax is charged by Steam in Canada) from a company whose biggest development studio is in Canada and receives subsidies from various levels of Canadian government.
It’s not just the Canadians who are losing out for not living in America. According to the Steam All Region Price Checker extension, British customers are being charged the equivalent of $80 USD and others in the EU will be paying the equivalent of $68 USD.
So why are certain countries paying more than other and who is at fault for the price discrepancies?
When we first found out that Final Fantasy VII was coming to the PS4 as an HD remake, people were extremely disappointed. After all the hope that came with the Final Fantasy VII PS3 tech demo from 2005, people have been clamoring for a full remake of the game in the style of the Final Fantasy: Advent Children movie. Instead, December’s PlayStation Experience event showed the original Final Fantasy VII slightly cleaned up for PS4.
It’s funny what Square Enix had up their sleeve to be played six months later. Sony scored a major coup for the PlayStation press conference at E3 with the surprise reveal of a major remake of Final Fantasy VII.
From a gaming perspective, the big announcement at Microsoft’s E3 press briefing was that they are bringing backwards compatibility to the Xbox One. If you were looking for the next wave in technology and just general spectacle, Microsoft stole the show with a live on-stage demonstration of their HoloLens technology while playing Minecraft.
The Lowdown 