By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:56 pm
Microsoft's latest weekly sale on Xbox One and Xbox 360 games for Xbox Live Gold members has begun, and it's one that's focused almost exclusively on the Call of Duty series.  Unfortunately, this sale doesn't entail the latest Call of Duty game, Advanced Warfare; instead, it's older games like Ghosts and Black Ops II that are discounted. If you're not in the market for a Call of Duty, you've got only two other choices: Xbox One's Never Alone and We Are Doomed are the only other games on sale, with the latter's 10 percent discount only offering savings of $1. Read on for the full list of deals, which are available from now through April 27 and require an Xbox Live Gold membership. Xbox One:Xbox 360:
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:46 pm
In a different 1995, a company called Uexplore began offering cost-effective trips to a distant planet. Upon arriving at their destination, private citizens piloted miniature ships known as Small Craft as they explored peaceful environments on the planet Spectaculon, taking in the alien sights and claiming territory for their own. After three days, a ship picked them up, and they returned home to tell others of the grand adventures waiting at the edge of the universe. Affordable Space Adventures is the story of one pilot--you--who is nearly done enjoying an excursion to that same distant planet. Suddenly, everything goes wrong. The carrier ship you are supposed to ride home in crashes and leaves you stranded until you can find a functioning communication pod and send a distress signal. Unfortunately, the surrounding environment isn't nearly as hospitable as the promotional videos led you to believe. You need to use every function your diminutive vessel possesses if you want to live to enjoy a bright tomorrow. The planet is beautiful, even when it's trying to kill you. At a glance, Affordable Space Adventures doesn't look particularly unique. It could easily be mistaken for a horizontal shooter like R-Type or Gradius, only with better graphics. However, the emphasis here is on solving puzzles rather than explosions and high scores. There's no thumping soundtrack, only ambient noises and the occasional bit of piano work that barely even registers. Truly intense moments are quite rare, but the experience is likely to stick with you for a long time because it doesn't feel like a hollow imitation of classic digital journeys you may have already taken. The game's interface deserves much of the credit for that accomplishment. Using the gamepad, you control the Small Craft with the left analog stick while the right one aims a spotlight that can also scan for potential hazards or fire flares. That's basic enough, but your vessel improves over time as its features come back online. You soon find yourself monitoring thruster levels, stability, and even gravity controls. Eventually, you're able to switch between engines on the fly and activate boosts. The various options are presented on the gamepad screen in a manner that feels like part of the experience rather than just a generic control scheme, and this setup is used in some interesting ways as the adventure unfolds. Some of the visual design just plain rocks.Early stages lead you through verdant environments, but you soon head beneath the planet's surface to explore dangerous interior areas patrolled by sentries and floating pods. If you attract their attention, they'll swiftly take you out of action, which means you must make frequent adjustments to sneak by them undetected. In the opening areas, changing from one engine type to another is often sufficient because you put out less electricity or noise. Later puzzles grow increasingly demanding, though, and you sometimes have to get more creative and take bigger risks. In a vertical shaft, for instance, you might need to briefly kill your engine so you can drop past a drone that is alerted by sound, but then you want to bring your thrusters roaring back to life in time to avoid dropping across the path of a nasty laser beam. Most stages aren't especially large, but there are plenty of them to traverse. Checkpoints are placed at reasonable intervals, which is important given how easy it is to meet a premature end. If you clear a puzzle, you're seldom forced to do so repeatedly to try your hand again at an obstacle further down the line that is giving you fits. Affordable Space Adventures is by no means an easy game, but it's also not overly concerned with putting you through the wringer for no good purpose. Once you have a feel for things, you can probably get through everything in a couple of hours without much fuss, but your first trip through could easily take several times that long, particularly if you refuse to take advantage of the option to lower the difficulty between levels. They say some chain will do you good.  Returning to Affordable Space Adventures down the road should be easy because you can save up to three adventures at once. You can also revisit any stage you've already cleared by selecting it from a map. There are only a few tutorials throughout the experience, each limited to a few quick text prompts, so you won't have to wade through a bunch of filler if you decide to take another run at it. Another reason to revisit the campaign is to enjoy the game's multiplayer support. Any time you load a save file, you can assign second and third players their own tasks on Wii remotes and Wii U pro controllers. One player can control the ship, another can direct the spotlight, and a third can make internal adjustments on the gamepad. By nature of the game's design, teamwork and careful coordination are required in order to find success. Whoever has the gamepad at the moment also has a lot of power, and may find it difficult to resist killing the engine in the middle of a daring maneuver, with disastrous but short-lived results. Eventually, everyone will surely agree that it's time to do things right, and reaching an area goal together without too many mistakes always feels satisfying. It's a refreshing option, though it naturally wreaks havoc on the sense of isolation that the single-player mode so beautifully establishes. Although the game generally does a good job of anticipating and avoiding basic technical issues that might have dampened the experience--the controls are suitably precise, and the action is silky smooth, at least when your ship isn't sputtering through the early areas after recovering from early damage--it's still not without occasional faults. A couple of the later areas are overly demanding on the default difficulty setting, requiring precise timing and quick finger work for more extended periods as you are forced to stealthily navigate corridors stuffed full of floating sentries. The need for frequent adjustment can get tedious, particularly because the ship's settings revert to a safe default whenever it is taken out of commission. If you're retrying an area and you want to take another run at a particular gauntlet, you have to make a bunch of tweaks before you're even in a position to engage the engine. That slows down the pace and can make gameplay monotonous, but it's fortunately the exception and not the rule. Finally, in a few instances, load screens wear out their welcome, including the one that lingers when you first boot up the game, but those delays aren't persistent enough to ruin the experience. Perhaps someday, space travel really will be cheap, safe, and available from a company much like Uexplore. That day probably won't come during our lifetimes, though, which leaves us to seek our thrills in movies and games instead. Affordable Space Adventures is a great way to do precisely that, and it's especially welcome if you've been looking for a Wii U title that uses the hardware to offer a genuinely unique and reasonably substantial experience. Are you looking for a journey into the digital unknown that won't break the bank? If so, then is the one that you should embark upon.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:30 pm
 Watch extended gameplay footage from Box Boy! featuring the Giant Bomb crew.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:16 pm
The competitive gaming scene for shooter games is dominated by Call of Duty and Counter-Strike, but could Nintendo's new family-friendly shooter Splatoon ever join the ranks? It might seem like a stretch. But producer Hisashi Nogami told GameSpot that the non-violent Wii U game where you shoot ink instead of bullets has been designed to support a variety of playstyles--including ultra-competitive.  "The guiding impulse for making Splatoon was not to say, 'Let's make a shooting game for beginners, but a game that people are going to be able to enjoy with a variety of playstyles, variety of skill levels,'" he said when asked if he thought Splatoon would be a good fit for professional competitive gaming. "And so it's not outside the realm of possibility that the game could be enjoyed in that way." "Personally speaking, I feel like there is sort of a sport element to Splatoon in that you're constantly adjusting to situations on the battlefield; looking, 'Oh this space is open here, let's attack,' or, 'Oh, we need to defend here.' So there's this offense-defense dynamic," he added. "And in that way [it] resembles a sport." Splatoon, however, is lacking one major feature found in almost every other competitive shooter: voice chat. The game won't support this communication method due to toxicity concerns, co-director Yusuke Amano said previously. Instead, Nintendo suggests that players use the bird's eye view on the Wii U GamePad to determine their strategy. A family-friendly twist on the classic arena deathmatch formula, Splatoon challenges players not necessarily to shoot opponents directly all the time, but to cover as much of the level in their own team's paint color. For more on how the game works, check out the video below. We also quizzed Nogami about the origins of Splatoon. He said the idea was born within Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development (EAD) division, which is also behind iconic games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. "The concept was making a game that wasn't tied into any of our pre-existing franchises and that was going to be its own thing," Nogami said. "And we started by at first getting our team together; and at that point there were a lot of different competing ideas but Splatoon was the one we ended up going with."  From within this starting point, Nintendo designers built a prototype for what would ultimately become the octopus-themed shooter that GameSpot critic Peter Brown contends could be Nintendo's next big thing. The team wasn't dead-set on ink being a central part of the game from the outset, however. "It was going to start as a competitive, team-based game in which people would shoot ink and be able to hide in that ink, compet[ing] against each other by spreading territory and taking territory," Nogami said. "And that's the next step from that initial concept phase." "That isn't to say we started by saying, 'OK we're going to make a game in which you spray ink.' More that, in wanting to make a strategic, team-based game, exploring the game logic that arose from that desire, the ink was just sort of the medium that naturally arose from that exploration that they made on the team." Splatoon arrives May 29 exclusively for Wii U. Nintendo has also teamed up with Best Buy to offer a $300 Splatoon-themed Wii U bundle that comes with a copy of the game.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:14 pm
Just days after the release of its first patch, Grand Theft Auto V for PC has been updated once again, resolving more of the issues that have been cropping up for players during its first week of availability. Among these are continuing problems with appearance changes when transferring GTA Online characters from consoles to PC. Last week's patch included a fix for a problem where your "eyebrows or other facial features could change erroneously," which has the makings of a hilarious (if obnoxious) bug. Today's patch 335.1 addresses a problem where facial features don't save after transferring from Xbox 360 or PS3.  Another fix involves an issue where players would get "stuck in the clouds" (where you wait between online matches) when they voted to quick restart the Humane Labs heist. Given that's a common thing to do after failing a heist--which isn't hard to do if you have even one person make a mistake--and how long GTA Online's load times can be, this was potentially a very frustrating bug, as funny as it may sound. Also of note in this patch is the addition of a benchmark test in the main menu, as well as a resolution for the Windows Media Player problem. Players that didn't have WMP installed were unable to install GTA V, but following this patch, it's no longer a requirement--instead you'll only need Windows Media Foundation. Read on for the full list of patch notes, courtesy of Rockstar's support site. If your issue is not addressed, check out our list of workarounds. - Players can no longer purchase more vehicles than their properties can store.
- Players can now launch a video card benchmark test from the main menu.
- Fixed an issue where facial features would not save correctly when transferring a character from Xbox 360 or PS3 and changing genders while editing the character's appearance.
- Fixed an issue where players could become stuck in the clouds when voting to quick restart the Humane Labs Heist.
- Fixed an issue where markers in the Rockstar Editor could not be deleted with the mouse.
- Fixed various audio recording issues with Rockstar Editor clips.
- Fixed an issue where the Yacht would not appear in some recorded Rockstar Editor clips.
- Fixed a rare issue where some Rockstar Editor clips could not be opened for editing.
- Fixed an issue where the GTA V Launcher would not display the correct amount of time remaining for file downloads.
- The Steam overlay has been moved to prevent it from covering up Launcher buttons.
- Fixed an issue where the game would not save your settings when restarting in some instances.
- Fixed a rare issue where the Steam version of the game would crash right after launching.
- Windows Media Player is no longer required to install GTA V. Instead, Windows Media Foundation will be required.
- Fixed an issue where the game would show the pause menu without player input.
- Fixed an issue where the max frame rate would be incorrectly low in rare cases.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 11:00 pm
 Watch extended gameplay footage from I Am Bread featuring the Giant Bomb crew.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 10:47 pm
Destiny fans eager to learn more about the upcoming expansion, House of Wolves, don't have much longer to wait. Publisher Activision announced today that Bungie will hold a special livestream event tomorrow, April 22, where the developer will give viewers a virtual tour of The Reef, one of the new social spaces coming in the House of Wolves expansion. On-hand during the livestream event will be Bungie community manager David "Deej" Dague, creative director Christopher Barrett, and a community member who goes by the name Gothalion. In addition to showing off The Reef for the first time, they will talk about other new content, vendors, and more coming to Destiny through House of Wolves. The Destiny livestream event will take place at Bungie's Twitch channel starting at 11 AM PDT / 2 PM EDT. You can watch a teaser trailer above, while some new House of Wolves screenshots follow at the bottom of this post. Also below you'll find a timeline for when Bungie will share even more details about House of Wolves, with descriptions courtesy of Bungie. House of Wolves--which will not include a new raid--launches May 19 for all platforms. It's included with the $35 Destiny DLC pass or can be purchased by itself for $20.    Destiny House of Wolves Announcement Schedule:- Wednesday, April 22 -- "Walking tour of the The Reef, with a live discussion about the upgrade paths for your gear."
- Wednesday, April 29 -- "Reveal and live gameplay of Trials of Osiris and its collection of end game gear."
- Wednesday, May 6 -- "Reveal and live gameplay of Prison of Elders, a brand new three-player cooperative multiplayer arena."
- Friday, May 8 -- "Stay tuned!"
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 10:39 pm
League of Legends developer Riot Games is nearly set to move into the new campus it announced in 2013, and it's sure to make you jealous. Located in western Los Angeles, CA, the new campus isn't far from the studio's previous offices in Santa Monica. It is, however, much larger--the new space is a whopping 284,000 square feet. Back in 2013, the LA Times suggested the 15-year lease Riot signed could have been Southern California's largest in half a decade.  Although it's yet to fully move in, Riot shared some pictures on its blog of what its employees will be coming to work to every day. That includes the entrance pictured above, which features Annie and Tibbers from League of Legends, as well as screens showcasing fan-made artwork and cosplay. Elsewhere, there's a play area, complete with computers and various arcade games. There are also almost 100 breakout rooms, four atriums, and an outdoor area that appears to feature a large-scale chessboard where the pieces sit on the ground. You can check out more images in the gallery below. Riot--which has been named one of the best places to work in the past--says it'll continue to share more from the new campus as it gets settled in.      
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 09:46 pm
We already know about four characters coming to Mortal Kombat X as downloadable content, and it sounds like even more may be on the way. Series creator Ed Boon, never one to shy away from teasing things on Twitter, recently responded to a question asking about certain characters being added to the game. Specifically, he was asked whether we'll see non-playable characters from the game's story mode made accessible to players. To this, Boon responded, "[You] mean like a 'Story Pack'?" Rain in 2011's Mortal KombatThere are a number of characters who have been playable in previous Mortal Kombat games, like Baraka, Rain, and Sindel, who are not only present in the game's story mode, but are challengers that you'll have to fight. Despite this, they aren't playable, although a modder recently got these characters working on PC to some extent. Boon's tease didn't make it explicitly clear that a Story Pack would be released as premium DLC, although after learning that microtransactions were available for the game's easy Fatalities, it's hard to blame anyone for making that assumption. Still, developer NetherRealm Studios and publisher Warner Bros. aren't entirely averse to giving stuff away; the most recent patch added a free costume, something that will be the case with every patch going forward, according to a tweet from Boon.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 09:30 pm
 In part two of our three part series we explore the world of the Witcher 3. We detail its multiple open areas, and reveal its vast map. We tell you how it runs on consoles and give you insight into the types of monsters you'll be slaying in this varied open world RPG.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 08:30 pm
 Go behind the scenes with Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones), who takes on the role of Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, leader of the Empire of Nilfgaard in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 08:21 pm
 This opening featurette introduces Creative Director Matt Korba and Producer Lindsey Rostal, who leapt at the opportunity to bring the unforgettable storytelling, puzzles and wit of the original games into a new era.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 07:30 pm
 The Evil Within: The Consequence is now available on PSN, Xbox Live, and PC.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 09:31 am
Assassin Shao Jun really wants a box. Apparently, the box holds a precious artifact left from the time of the First Civilization, but it is simply the ultimate in MacGuffins; it's the Maltese Falcon, the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, and the Ark of the Covenant. What it does is irrelevant and never elaborated upon, at least not in this story, for its purpose is to kick an adventure into action--in this case, a beautiful and ultimately boring trek that cribs from Mark of the Ninja but can't capture the earlier game's cleverness or excitement. It's tempting to praise Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China for squeezing the series' signature elements into two-and-a-half dimensions, and for making stealth gameplay more vital than it has been in an Assassin's Creed game for years. But Chronicles rests on being pretty, adding new mechanics over time but flattening the pace and allowing exploits and glitches to suck out the rising tension. If a game must rest on being pretty, then at least Chronicles makes the most of it. This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty. In one level, an impossibly large, bright moon rises in the sky, shining through the mist and illuminating willow trees in the foreground, which have the natural smudges and brushstrokes you would expect to see from the Qing masters. Elsewhere, a distant waterfall glows of its own accord, as if pure moonlight had been mixed into the paint that created it. Each scene comes to life with an inviting softness; even simple gray walls depict hushed details, like an underlying paperlike texture, where darker rings reveal where water droplets might have landed on the canvas. It doesn't matter why you're there. What matters is where you are. It's a gorgeous style, relegated to an atmospheric role; Chronicles' wan storytelling, which mostly occurs in hand-drawn interstitials, doesn't engage in much world- or character-building, leaving the art to provide the game's aesthetic, along with an unobtrusive, string-heavy soundtrack. As Shao Jun, a silent killer trained by none other than Assassin's Creed II hero Ezio Auditore, you move through these spaces, sneaking past patrolling guards and avoiding their vision cones; they cannot see more than 20 feet in front of their own faces, and will not notice you at all when they engage in conversation with each other. Avoidance means slipping behind a pillar with a flick of an analog stick, hanging from a front facing ledge, spidering along a ceiling, or tumbling into a pile of hay. (Of course, in Assassin's Creed fashion, you will occasionally make a leap of faith into one of these bales, an action as satisfying to perform in two dimensions as in three.) You make your way from one array of guards to another, sometimes flinging your rope dart towards an overhang and swinging towards the camera (or away from it) and into a different adventuring layer. Chronicles makes good use of these layers, giving its best levels a sense of depth. You spend more time, however, navigating past the guards that bar your way, either by sneaking around them, stealthily assassinating them, or, rarely, by directly confronting them. My favorite approach was assassination, because it is in silent assassination that Chronicles stays truest to the games that preceded it. When you plunge your hidden dagger into an enemy from behind, you hear an eerie crunch as metal permeates flesh; your target grunts and falls to the ground, and blood seeps across the corpse and dissipates as if soaking into the paper upon which the game is drawn. Performing an assassination while hanging from above is even more enjoyable, thanks to the way Shao Jun points her blade downward as she falls, as if absolving herself by letting gravity perform the cruel deed. Later on, you can sprint forward and slide into unaware guards, which makes for a smooth and rewarding way to combine momentum and quiet butchery.  In a few levels, you can hide in a crowd, but the people vanish in a puff of smoke if you're caught. The game awards you the most points for complete avoidance, yet it is when skirting around your enemies that Chronicles' flaws most often surface. In most stealth games, there is intrinsic reward in sticking to the shadows--or in this case, slipping into a dark doorway, or dropping into crevasses that guards ignore unless you've alerted them to your presence. Yet over the game's four-hour (or so) running time, the challenge rarely grows. You earn upgrades to your stealth repertoire as you progress, such as a limited ability to flit from one cover position to the next as if you were a ghost on methamphetamines, but there is no sense of rising anxiety. The puzzles don't noticeably increase in complexity, keeping pace with your new moves but not pushing beyond them, and a few ideas--wind chimes that jingle if you don't crouch under them, for instance--appear too rarely to invigorate any given level. In time, you discover ways to exploit the AI's limitations, rushing out of guards' view if you alert all of them, and waiting to return until they resume their patrols just a few seconds later. Of course, you could accuse many stealth games of allowing similar exploits, but in Chronicles, each guard is leashed to such a limited area that the ease with which you can simply sprint away and wait it out makes the entire setup feel contrived--quite a feat in a genre that, by nature, can feel particularly game-ish. And occasionally, the game doesn't know how to respond to your reactions and glitches out. At one point, the AI remained on high alert even though I'd escaped the area and was no longer in view; at another, two guards got stuck in place as they searched for me, halting the game and forcing me to leap out of hiding just so I could put the adventure back in motion.  This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty.
Going toe-to-toe with the enemy is an option, yet an unsatisfying one. Combat has never been Assassin's Creed's strong suit, but swordplay has always featured an understandable rhythm. In Chronicles, you are meant to avoid combat if possible; perhaps battle was made to be purposefully awkward, so that you avoid it when possible. Design choice or not, fending off patrolmen is hardly fun. It's possible to escape with your life if you are incredibly careful and alert, even when flanked on both sides by multiple sword- and gunmen, but the entire affair is clumsy, and death is quick in many of these situations, regardless. There is no cadence to enemy behavior, nor do the fiddly controls invite fluid motion. Direct confrontation is best circumvented, making a boss fight that requires combat all the more mind-boggling. Another boss fight puts to use your throwing knives, one of a few gadgets you have on hand for solving Chronicles' super-easy pseudo-puzzles. You can distract and lure enemies by whistling or throwing a projectile, and momentarily stun them with fireworks, but the predictability of level layouts and ease of AI exploitation means that your strategies can remain the same from start to finish. Ironically, this stealth game's finest moments arrive when it allows you to break free and sprint ahead in order to flee encroaching danger, such as a blazing fire. In no way do these escape sequences match those from the recent Ori and the Blind Forest, but they are the closest Chronicles comes to delivering the series' signature freerunning. You vault over obstacles and slide into shellshocked guards, cutting them down as you rush from danger, watching Templar baddies succumb to flames and crumbling infrastructure. It's a lively diversion in a game that is otherwise mostly devoid of forward momentum. You know the end is about to arrive because the cutscene narration tells you as much, and because the music's tempo has increased, but the gameplay hasn't built to this moment. The credits roll. The game is over. But there was no more excitement in that finale than there was in the opening minutes. Collectible shards fill up the meter that powers your ghostly sprinting. Chronicles' passive pacing is a shame, because the pieces, combat notwithstanding, are mostly strong. Furthermore, the exquisite environments craft a setting that makes me eager to see the two upcoming sequels--Chronicles: India, and Chronicles: Russia--in action. If they follow in Chronicles: China's footsteps, they will be beautiful to behold. I hope, however, that unlike the first entry, they take the leap of faith required to make them play as boldly as they look.
By Anonymous on Apr 21, 2015 09:30 am
 A player learns the art of the assassin
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