The biggest digital store and the most popular game client in gaming isn’t enough for Valve. Last year, Steam announced the launch of their own operating system, controller and Steam-branded Steam Machine gaming PCs for the living room. Now, Steam is taking on Twitch with its latest project.
This week, Steam announced Steam Broadcasting, a new streaming service that will let you watch people play games in and through the Steam client.
Anyone that follows my writing over on etg. sister site The Lowdown Blog knows that I’m a racing fanatic. Two wheels, four wheels, even more wheels (European truck racing is surprisingly awesome), road courses, ovals, dirt, I can settle down and watch anything. So naturally, I had a lot of toy cars growing up and had a lot of toy car races.
This brings me to Toybox Turbos. While many people liken the game to a modernized callback to Codemasters’ Micro Machines, their first iconic racing game, I thought of Toybox Turbos to be just like the toy car races on the floor at home. But does a childhood call back, whether it’s to a video game or little plastic or die-cast cars, make a great game.
About six months ago, Electronic Arts was caught in a controversy over homosexual characters in The Sims 4 which saw the game get an adults only rating in Russia.
This week, EA is having another fight with regulators over the content of its games. One day ahead of the launch of Dragon Age: Inquisition, EA was forced to cancel the release of the DA:I in India because the game would have violated Indian laws because of the inclusion of a prominent homosexual character.
It’s not often that I will follow an annual franchise through year-to-year but it’s interesting to see what work goes into a franchise as the developers change calendars. Most gamers look at the likes of Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty and write them off as being a fresh coat of paint and a change of venue but not much else. Sports franchises have a reputation for being an annual roster update and not much more.
Having played Football Manager 2014 and comparing it to this year, there’s a bit more to this year’s update to Football Manager than the rosters. There are a whole host of changes to the game that I think makes it a bit more new and casual gamer friendly as well as a few tweaks for those who are far more into the minutiae of football than I am.
Two big Triple-A games had their review embargoes lift on Tuesday. One of those was Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that game out a week from this Tuesday, which already has the overwhelmingly positive reviews that you’d expect from BioWare of old. The other game was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity, a game that came out on Tuesday with some early and midnight launches but had a Noon EST review embargo.
In the latest of a series of avoidable gaffes, Ubisoft has again insulted the consumer. This time, they embargoed their top franchise’s annual offering’s review until after the game was released in an abuse of the system.
Well, I’m an idiot. I completely forgot to do up a post for today. So here’s a little weekly post we run over at et geekera. It’s a look at the best video game trailers from the last seven days in the Game Trailers Roundup. In total, there are twelve trailers for you to watch today.
As we near or have reached their releases, we have launch trailers for F1 2014, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. There are also trailers for Football Manager 2015, LittleBigPlanet 3, Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. And we close with a whole host of Ubisoft trailers for Far Cry 4, both Assassin’s Creed games and The Crew (whenever that comes out).
There are many licenses that I wouldn’t want to be put in charge of but Sherlock Holmes would likely be at the top of the list. There is a great disconnect between the cognitive abilities of Sherlock Holmes and me, for example. He can look at a person and some clues and quickly deduce what happened as new evidence arises. Translating that ability to video games has apparently been quite a challenge for developers who have only seen mixed reviews, at best, for their Sherlock Holmes adventures.
For their latest trip to 221B Baker Street, Frogwares takes mysteries in the style of the classic Conan Doyle adventures and updates them with some of the tricks that have become popular on BBC’s Sherlock. Is that enough to make Sherlock Holmes a hit in the video game space to go with the recent explosion of popularity on TV and the silver screen?
When there’s a game that I’m interested in reviewing, I reach out to the public relations officers at the publisher of the game (or their contracted PR firm) to see if I can get a copy for review. More often than not, I don’t get a copy of the game. Usually, I can wait for a sale and pick up a copy to play it through but usually that’s not for several months that it gets down to a price within my budget.
In the case of Murdered: Soul Suspect, I was figuring that Steam’s Holiday or a spring sale would bring it down to a price where I would buy it. Then I got it for $15 from the Humble Store in early August. Two months after the game was released, I’m already getting it for some 70% off. While I know it was a big enough flop to force developer Airtight Games out of business, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
Telltale Games had a bit of an up-and-down reputation prior to the release of The Walking Dead. That game completely changed the way that most thought of Telltale and many critics felt that they set the bar for storytelling in games. After the numerous game of the year awards for TWD and a critically acclaimed launch for The Wolf Among Us, Telltale’s second comic book adaptation, The Walking Dead: Season Two was one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014.
The problem with a game with all that hype is that it occasionally bogs down under the weight. The problem with a sequel is that they struggle to balance the needs of new gamers to the franchise with the desires of people continuing the story. There were times when TWD:S2 caved to these pressures as Telltale tried very hard to copy what made Season One so loved but missing the emotional mark that Season One hit. However, once Season Two came into its own, Telltale had put out another stellar experience.
Coming into the second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, one of the big things people were talking about is how the game would be able to continue with Clementine as the protagonist. After all, she’s just a little girl. She couldn’t fill the shoes of Lee.
Well, literally, Clem couldn’t fill his shoes. Figuratively, once we got all the character introductions out of the way and got into character and plot development, this season took The Walking Dead to heights surpassing Season One. Sure, the episodes are shorter and maybe the illusion of choice isn’t quite as strong as the first season but amazing story and character writing made this game one of the highlights of 2014.
Now we reach the end of Season Two and boy, does Telltale give this season a spectacular send off.
The Lowdown 