By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 11:29 pm
We haven't seen Alienation since Gamescom 2014, but the top-down shooter is looking pretty good in a recently released video. The video, posted to developer Housemarque Games' YouTube channel shows an early pre-alpha, three player cooperative session. It's still a work in progress, but Alienation seems like a mix of two of Housemarque's previous games. On its website, Housemarque describes Alienation as a spiritual successor to the top-down zombie shooter Dead Nation, and it does seem to share similar characters and level design, but it also looks like it has the fast pace action and weapon types of Super Stardust HD. Alienation is a four-player action game with drop-in drop-out multiplayer exclusive to the PlayStation 4. It will have cooperative, single player, and player-versus-player modes. Housemarque has yet to announce a release date, but the game's official site says it's "coming soon." Sony also previously confirmed the game for a 2015 release.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 10:26 pm
Realistic racing game Project Cars will have 110 courses and 30 locations at launch, developer Slightly Mad Studios has announced. The courses and locations are based on real tracks from around the world, including famous spots like Nürburgring in Germany, Zhuhai International Circuit in China, Chesterfield in the United Kingdom, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. Most locations will have multiple layouts for different types of races, which is how Project Cars reaches the impressive 110 courses mark. The California State Route 1, for example, has five different configurations. You can find the full list of courses and locations on Project Cars' website. Following a succession of delays to the project on at least three occasions, the racing sim is now due to ship in the Americas on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on Friday May 6. The UK market will get the game on May 8. Developer Slightly Mad Studios has plans to ship a version on Wii U, but details on the release date for this remain vague.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 10:22 pm
 The NBA playoffs begin today, and if you're so inclined, you can skip the next two months of professional basketball. The Golden State Warriors will be the 2014-15 NBA champions, at least according to an NBA 2K15 simulation. As all sports game makers do (see: EA with Madden and NHL 15), 2K has used its latest game to predict the outcome of the playoffs. The Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers--the two favorites, at least according to betting odds--will meet in the Finals, with the Warriors coming out on top in a six-game series. 
You can see the full bracket above for how things turned out. There weren't many upsets--the Spurs are favored over the Clippers in real life despite being the lower seed--or surprises, perhaps save for the Nets actually winning a game (keep in mind, I'm a Knicks fan). Despite being a weak defensive team in real life, 2K notes in its full summary of the simulated playoffs that it was the Cavs' defense that helped them to top the Atlanta Hawks in the Eastern Conference Finals. That defense wouldn't hold up, even in 2K's sim, as the Warriors' Steph Curry would score 40-plus points in the fifth and sixth games of the Finals--a Warriors loss and a win, respectively--to win the NBA Championship.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 09:38 pm
The first patch for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V has been released, and it resolves a number of issues players have been reporting this week. The fixes in this patch are truly wide-ranging--they deal with everything from crashes in the launcher and frame rate issues to much stranger things, like birds not flying properly in Rockstar Editor clips and players' eyebrows and facial features being changed when they're transferred to PC. Patch 1.01 also addresses the bizarre issue that prevents the game from installing and running properly if you have anything but a letter or number in your Windows username. Rockstar offered a workaround for that earlier this week--basically, make a new user account and name it only using letters A-Z and numbers 0-9. If you did so, Rockstar's support website has been updated with details on how to continue your progress from the new Windows account on your old one. Other problems that continue to exist aren't things Rockstar can necessarily fix--for instance, to not lose your vehicles from the Xbox 360/PS3 versions of GTA Online, you need to log in to the game from that console before initiating the PC transfer process if you haven't played since December 2013. For more details on that, Windows Media Player problems, and other issues, check out our list of workarounds. Read on for the full list of 1.01 patch notes. - Fixed an issue where the GTA V Launcher would use an abnormally high percentage of CPU and sometimes crash
- Fixed an issue where frame rate would drop when left-clicking the mouse while driving
- Added a grid to the Golf mini-game to show the topology of the green while putting
- Fixed an issue where a character's eyebrows or other facial features could change erroneously when transferred to PC
- Fixed an issue where a some players were asked to transfer their GTA Online character while a transfer was already in progress
- YouTube uploads via the Rockstar Editor will now correctly resume if Internet connection is lost during the upload and later restored
- Fixed a rare issue where the game could crash while using the Rockstar Editor
- Projects containing deleted clips will now load properly in the Rockstar Editor and warn the player of the missing clips
- Fixed an issue where birds were not recorded correctly in Rockstar Editor clips
- Corrected an issue where certain characters in Windows usernames would cause the Launcher to fail to load or other undesired game behavior. For details, see this page.
- Fixed an issue where players with one garage would not be able to replace an existing vehicle if the garage was full and the new vehicle was purchased from an in-game website
- Additional fixes to prepare for iFruit support
- Crew Tire Smoke can no longer be purchased if you are not in a Crew
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 09:20 pm
 Star Wars: Battlefront won't use Battlefield's server browser and social network Battlelog to connect players to online matches, one of the game's developers has confirmed. Writing on NeoGAF, DICE producer Jesper Nielsen said that while Uprise, the Swedish Electronic Arts studio responsible for Battlelog, is working on Star Wars: Battlefront, the game won't use the same service you've come to know in the recent Battlefield games. "While Uprise has been doing Battlelog, does that automatically mean that we will do Battlelog for Star Wars Battlefront?" Nielsen asked. "No, it won't. That can only be an assumption, and I can tell you, no, there won't be Battlelog for Star Wars: Battlefront." Over on Reddit, another DICE producer said that whatever system Uprise is working on for Star Wars: Battlefront, it will be built from scratch. If you haven't played Battlefield games in recent years, Battlelog is an in-browser portal that allows players to find matches, connect with other players, and configure loadouts across multiple Battlefield titles before launching a game. Electronic Arts and DICE announced a ton of details about the upcoming first-person shooter Star Wars: Battlefront at the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, California yesterday. To catch up with all the latest news, check out our story that rounds up everything you need to know about Star Wars Battlefront.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 08:22 pm
After a lengthy wait, Grand Theft Auto V is finally available on PC. To coincide with its release earlier this week, Rockstar is now giving away a one-of-a-kind desktop computer that is... sufficient for running the game. Allow me to be more specific: This thing likely blows what you already have out of the water, as it comes equipped with a six-core Intel i7 5930K, a 750 series SSD (the size wasn't specified), 32GB of DDR4 RAM, two Nvidia Titan X cards, and liquid cooling. Those specs comfortably surpass even the recommended hardware for playing GTA V, and Rockstar says you'll be able to run the game at 4K and 60 frames per second. That's certainly the ideal way to play, as we've already seen how beautiful the game can be at that resolution. And, as you no doubt noticed in the picture above, the case sports GTA V's "V" logo on the side and some subtle green LED lighting, though that's controlled through software and can be changed. Built by PC seller Digital Storm, this truly is a one-of-a-kind system, and winning the giveaway is your only chance of getting your hands on it. You can enter from now until May 1 at the Rockstar Social Club website. The full rules can be found here, but you will need to be 18 or older to win. For more on the PC version of GTA V, check out GameSpot's review.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 07:23 pm
 Matthew Armstrong, creator and franchise director of the first-person shooter series Borderlands, has left his position at developer Gearbox Software. Armstrong announced the news on Twitter. "Things changed," he said. "No longer working at @GearboxSoftware. I will always love Gearbox, but it's adventure time." Armstrong told Game Informer that he's not quitting out of anger and that he wasn't fired. Instead, Armstrong explained that now that Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, the Claptastic Voyage DLC, and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection have all shipped, he found a rare moment where he was "temporarily non-vital," and decided to leave. "It's just time for new adventures," he said. "I'm an inventor. I'm ready to make something new. Not just new to me, but new to everyone." Armstrong didn't say where he was headed next. In February, Gearbox announced that is ready to start working on and is already recruiting a team for the next Borderlands game, which is being made specifically for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (and PC, presumably). Earlier this week, we found out that Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel developer 2K Australia is shutting down, letting go of all of its employees.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 04:30 am
 Destiny gets patched, pay what you want for Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and here's where you can play Star Wars: Battlefront early!
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 02:34 am
With the reboot in 2011, Mortal Kombat matured from a curious fighting game series to one that's worthy of tournament-level competition, and with Mortal Kombat X, we get the next step in the evolution of its fighting system. New features such as fighting-style variations and a stamina meter enhance the chaos, giving you more to consider before and during a fight. As much headway as Mortal Kombat X has made in regards to the fighting system, the series' other mainstay trait has grown in step. Fatalities and other gruesome attacks are the series' goriest yet, and while not all of them fall into the slapstick category, there are plenty that make you laugh due to the absurdity on display. Mortal Kombat X upholds the series' legacy, which is evident in the story mode and the return of a dozen classic characters. Once again, the focus is on the battle between realms, elder gods, and humanity. The introduction of a few new faces on the side of Earthrealm, the good guys, freshens things up, although not as much as you would hope. The inclusion of the offspring of legacy characters, like Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade's daughter, Cassie, may prove to be intriguing for die-hard fans of Mortal Kombat's lore, but with the exception of Takashi Takeda (Kenshi's son) and Kung Jin (the younger cousin of Kung Lao), most of them are too similar to their relatives and ultimately fail to stand out in a meaningful way. What are you looking at?!There are also a handful of new bad guys, though "fresh" may not be the best word to describe their grotesque visages. Characters such as the insect like D'vorah and the gunslinger Erron Black inject new personalities into the series' aging roster and introduce new fighting styles. D'vorah strikes with spider-like arms that spring from her back, Erron Black uses firearms, and the fighting duo called Ferra Torr is comprised of a little girl who commands a hulking brute from atop his back. The new characters on each side of the battle fit into their respective factions, but it's the bad guys that are most notable, largely because they are original creations, rather than derivations from pre-existing characters. If you care about Mortal Kombat lore, you will get a lot out of the story mode, which has excellent voice acting and a handful of unpredictable developments that affect long-standing relationships. It's not a story that everyone will relate to, sadly, with only a couple of scenes that deliver emotional moments. Cassie Cage may be a boring character, but she provides the necessary motivations for Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade to explore their feelings, and ultimately, grow as people by the time the credits roll. Good luck, Takeda!Even if you don't care about the made-for-fans story, it's hard not to appreciate the new fighting engine, which is the smoothest the series has ever seen. It's not a sea change from the last game, but you quickly appreciate that combos are more fluid and that animations are more nuanced. The meter you charge by taking hits and doling out special moves returns from the last game, allowing you to power-up special attacks, break enemy combos, and perform an x-ray attack, which reveals the insides of one opponent while the attacker breaks them into pieces in slow motion, accompanied by excruciating moans of pain. The introduction of a stamina bar limits your ability to spam dashing maneuvers, which makes it more difficult for you to rely on spacing alone to win a fight. Likewise, the interactive elements in each stage, which allow you to pummel your opponent with a background item, or escape a corner by leaping off of a large object, can only be used if you have enough stamina. This particular meter recharges on its own, but it takes long enough--relative to the pace of a heated battle--to make it an important consideration during high-level matches. Local battles are great fun, but online matches are where modern fighting games thrive in the long run. Chances are, the best players in the world don't live on the same street, leaving online matches as the true test of one's skill outside of tournaments. The netcode that drives Mortal Kombat X's online matches is fine, meaning that it will sometimes offer an experience that feels proper, but that you should expect laggy matches from time to time. When you get into a fight with a poor connection, you may as well exit and search for a new opponent, because it will be difficult to pull off simple combos and special moves. At that point, its a competition between man and machine. Thankfully, this is a rare occurrence. One of the great aspects of Mortal Kombat X is the amount of non-traditional fighting game content. Towers are back, providing an arcade mode-like challenge, as well as a series of other themed battles that offer a wide variety of combat conditions. The Test Your Luck tower puts you in a series of fights with randomly selected modifiers, which mix up everything from terrain to physics to keep you on your toes and alter the way you approach a fight. The modifier-driven fights are also the crux of the new living towers, which offer fixed modifier sets and challenges, but are remixed every hour, every day, and every week, depending on the specific tower. Everything you buy in the Krypt is a gamble, making it easy to lose hard-earned koins.Mortal Kombat X also marks the introduction of factions, or teams, that compete on a worldwide scale. Joining a faction is the first thing you do after booting up the game, and as you fight in the game's various modes, you earn points for your faction and level up. Eventually you hit milestones that open up faction kills, which are essentially simpler versions of fatalities. Every week, a faction is chosen as the winner and its members earn a reward in the form of a faction kill or a cosmetic item. Once in a while, an invasion occurs and factions compete to fight a character with extreme rules, and the more you play, the more you contribute to the team's efforts. The faction system isn't the sort of feature that will grip your attention, but invasions are nice because they make you feel like you're contributing to a concentrated effort, rather than the long-winded score chase of the weekly faction war. As you play Mortal Kombat X, you earn currency in the form of "koins." Koins are used to unlock movelist details for secondary fatalities (by default, secondary fatalities don't have inputs listed in the movelist menu), brutalities (another form of finishing move), fan art, and character skins, to name a few. You find these items in the Krypt mode, which is a first-person dungeon crawling game. The Krypt is composed of a handful of areas that are populated with tombstones, sarcophaguses, and other treasure chest-like containers. You need to spend koins to get at the treasures within, but there's a catch: you never know what you're buying until you've purchased it. This adds an air of suspense and tension to each purchase, because you're either going to get something cool, or something lame. This would be easily dismissed if koins were more plentiful than they are, but they're currently doled out in small doses. One trip through the story mode nets you enough koins for but a small fraction of the items on display, and other modes are less generous, making the chase for unlocking the entire Krypt a long and arduous one. Like factions, it's not something worth focusing all of your effort on. Save that for learning characters and fighting styles, and go to the Krypt only as needed. Don't worry, when you're ready to cough up some cash to unlock a character that's finished at launch, you'll know right where to go.There is another option: you can pay real world money to unlock every item in the Krypt. All you need is $20 to bypass the slog of earning koins, but that isn't exactly cheap. Then again, neither is time, so it's a bit gross that the koin distribution is balanced in such a way that you are tempted to spend real world cash if you want to unlock brutalities and the like. Mortal Kombat X is a great fighting game with a wonderfully demented world and cast of characters, but when you're pressured into spending money, it's easy to lose focus on the positives. You can always ignore the options to buy items with real world money, such as awards that allow you to perform two button fatalities and the aforementioned Krypt unlocks, but the biggest item on the main menu of the game is a link to the game's store, with items you can purchase or look forward to purchasing in the weeks and months to come. You're teased with DLC for characters that you fight within the story mode, as though you aren't going to put two and two together and realize what a despicable bait and switch that is. There's so much to love about the new Mortal Kombat that it's a shame to see such blatant monetization practices overlap with your experience, whether you're looking for it or not. You can always choose not to pay out of pocket for anything, but you know in the back of your head that you're likely missing out on something. Mortal Kombat X's lesser elements exist outside the most important part of the game: the fighting. A great roster with a wide range of diverse fighting styles and variations gives you plenty to play around with, and the new fighting mechanics add the right amount of depth to nudge Mortal Kombat X ever higher on the list of respectable fighting games. There's also the gruesome creativity, which is entertaining for its absurdity but shocking for its emphasis on acute torture. Although you can't escape it, Mortal Kombat X's violence doesn't come at the cost of great gameplay design; it's either your punishment for failure, or your reward for mastering the art of kombat.
By Anonymous on Apr 18, 2015 02:05 am
 Watch extended gameplay footage from Domestic Dog Simulator featuring the Giant Bomb crew.
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