Karnage with friends

Two more months. Just two more months.

That's what I have to keep telling myself while agonizing over the release of Mortal Kombat X. As someone who logged nearly 7,000 matches into the last Mortal Kombat, and still plays Injustice from time to time, any new?? info is good news, and NetherRealm has recently dropped a lot of details on the game's online modes.

Let's dig in.

Mortal Kombat X (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) 
Developer: NetherRealm Studios, Showtime Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: April 14, 2015  

If you spent any significant amount of time with Mortal Kombat 9, you remember the Challenge Tower. Consisting of 300 challenges, the tower would test and frustrate you to wits' end as you worked your way up to the top. Mortal Kombat X's Living Towers fill a similar role with ke??y differences.

The biggest changes are that the towers are now split in three, and the challenges in each will update with new content. To start, you have your quick tower comprising of only five challenges, but it updates every two to three hours. The daily tower carries an intermediate level of difficulty, and updates its eight fights every 24 hours. For those more than confident in their fighting mastery there is the premie?r tower, built with long-form challenges and events in mind that will run for a few days or even a week, depending on how special the event is.

Unlike the Challenge Tower, the Living Towers don't determine which character you can fight with. So if you're like me and only learn about four fighters, you won't find yourself awkwardly trying to learn characters on the fly as everything moves at double speed and the bombs come raining from the sky. That's another major difference -- Living Towers consist entirely of regular fights with various modifiers. Where Injustice's S.T.A.R. Labs and Mortal Kombat's Challenge Tower had silly stages where you'd break into a museum as a cat, or shoot a hor??de of zombies, these stages have none of that. A change for the better if you ask me. My biggest knock against S.T.A.R. Labs was how often the mission would turn out to be awkward platforming sections or some other distraction from the core fighting. 

More noteworthy still is Mortal Kombat X's Faction Wars, a macro-level approach to traditional online clans. When you first boot up your copy, you are going to be promp??ted to join one of five factions, all based on series lore: Lin Kuei, White Lotus, Black Dragon, Special Forces, or the Brotherhood of Shadows. Once you choose a faction, it really tries to become your game's identity. Menus, interfaces, and even loading screens, will become themed after your faction. So Lin Kuei members may get scenic snowy forests for a main menu, while the Brotherhood of Shadow loading screens will greet you with images of the fire and brimstone Netherrealm.

From there, everything you do in?? both multiplayer and single-player will give you faction points, which feed into your faction's total score. You can clear sections of Living Towers, complete faction-specific challenges, or even face rival factions in online battles. Again, all of this feeds into the collec?tive faction war effort, as well as your individual faction progress.

The faction war is platform agnostic as well, so fellow White Lotus accomplishments in the PlayStation 4 version will fe??ed the White Lotus on PC and Xbox 360. The winner at the end of each week-long faction war will be rewarded with anything from profile icons to faction-specific finishers. And if you are the type to swap sides, just know you will not be able to bandwagon to the winning faction. Once a war starts, you are locked into your group, and switching after a war means losing all of your current faction rewards and progress.

Of course, what's a fighting game without great fighters, and fight I did. Ermac and Reptile were not available in this build of the game, but all other announced characters were. That did not seem to matter though, as I spent nearly all of my time playing with the Buzz Saw variant of Kung Lao. For those unaware, every fighter has three variations to choose from, each variant adding its own moves to a characters base moveset. Buzz Saw is far and away my favorite. This is the rush-down, in-your-face Kung Lao that you either loved or hated in Mortal Kombat.

While Buzz Saw is more focused on projectiles with the classic hat throw and ground hat, it's not in the interest of zoning. Both the ground hat and regular hat tosses are slow, much slower in fact, than in Mortal Kombat ?9. The real fun here is to throw out the hat and close the distance.

A basic example of this would be to toss it, which does a great deal of stun as your opponent is trapped in an animatio??n of getting buzz-sawed in the chest,?? and close the distance with a dive kick. Basic I know, but even in my limited time, I honestly felt like Buzz Saw will be the variation of choice for those who previously enjoyed Kung Lao's breakneck pace. Of course you could also try out his Hat Trick variant, which focuses on controlling the hat as an independent entity, or Tempest, which emphasizes control and spacing with his signature spin. 

While I still have lingering questions about Mortal Kombat X, what's been shown so far has been great. Living Towers' direct approach to ch??allenges is good fun, and the Faction Wars (all hail White Lotus!) is something I already know will turn into a time sink for me. The last taste before launch has been a good one. Now I just need to hold out for two more months for the real meal.

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Not my granpappy's Halo

I am not opposed to change. While certain circles of Halo fans find it popular to hate Halo 4, I've always appreciated what 343 Industries did with that game. Sprint was a logical next step to character movement, while loadout abilities such as shielding, dexterity, and promethean vision felt like natural additions to Halo's formula.

With Halo 5: Guardians, well, I'm not quite so excited with what 343 is doing. During my time with Guardians I often struggled to find that feeling of playing a Halo game.

Halo 5: Guardians
Developer: 343 Industries
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Release: November 2015 

From the moment I sat down with Halo 5: Guardians, it was clear that the game has a big focus on player movement. If you thought Halo 4's universal sprint was blasphemous (again, you're wrong), enter a Halo game with le??dge climbs, running melee's, air stomps, and slides. All of thes??e new abilities are made possible by your thrust pack.

Take the running melee for instance. When doing a normal sprint, your thruster will kick in after a few seconds, sending your spartan into a terminal velocity where your melee becomes a running charge that kills in one hit from the back, and your crouch turns into a slide. The ground pounds are similar to the air stomps in Crysis. To initiate a ground pound, you simply jump, aim by holding down the melee button, and a cursor?? will appear on any surface below, allowing you to smash down with speed. I do wonder how effective a technique the ground pound will be though, as the entire time you're aiming midair, you hover with the thruster pack, making yourself a painfully obvious target. 

In exchange for the extra maneuvers, your shields take a hit, never recharging until you come out of your thrust-fueled abilities. It's quite the trade off, and after more than an hour of play, one that I still hadn't quite gotten the hang of. It feels as if 343 was trying to create some sort trade off between mobility and safety, perhaps even trying to find a middle ground between fans that enjoy sprint and those that long of Halo 3's slow?er pace. In any case, it led to many instances where I would feel like I was being punished for trying to escape a double team.

One of the odder additions has to be the clamber sy?stem. Essentially a ledge grab and climb, clambering allows you to vault up platforms that are just out of reach of your standard jump. Playing Slayer on the map Truth, a remake of Midship, I must have killed and been killed three times trying to jump to the platform ring where the energy sword rests, as it was oddly just out of standard jump range. Finally, we had all wised up to the fact that the clamber was necessary to make it to the top.

A relatively small, inoffensive change to be sure, but more and more I started to feel its implementation was forced. The issue I had with it is that most platforms that seem within jumping range are always just out of reach. Playing on a brand new map, Empire, I found many situations where I would expect to be able to make a jump, only to fall just short without the clamber mechanic. It created this weird chicken or the egg feeling where I'm not sure if clamber is the solution to a problem, or maps were intentionally designed to justify the mechanics existence. My time playing on T?ruth seemed to suggest the latter, as having this new ability on a well known map never opened up any new or interesting routes, or ways to interact with the map.

For those of you who keep up with NeoGAF and its various leaks, you make have heard that Halo 5 has aim down sights (ADS). Well, yes, it does, and yes, ADS doesn't feel good in Halo. Whi??le there is no movement penalty, aiming down does narrow your field of view, as it does in all other games.

The problem here is that aiming down is a feature that works best, and only in games where weapons by design are inaccurate from the hip, and guns are meant to kill almost as soon as you can land your cursor over an enemy. Halo games do neither of these things. Losing your field of vision with no significant accuracy gain is redundant, and at worst, I felt the narrow view caused me to lose my beat on an enemy. Frustrating in a game wh??ere it takes five head shots on average to score a kill. 

So that covers the new mechanics, but what about the modes? Apart from Slayer, the only other mode available was the all new Breakout. In Breakout, you and your team of four take on an opposing team, racing to win five rounds. Each player has one life per round, is without shields (not unlike in SWAT), and starts off wit??h an SMG. Their are only two Battle Rifles and two Assault rifles between eight players. It's quite a tense mode, and like Grifball or Zombies, can make for good bouts of quick fun.

After I had finished my 90 minutes with Halo 5: Guardians it was clear that 343 wants this game to be more energetic, faster, and physically dynamic. I fear, however, that in their quest the good people of 343 Industries have changed so much that what's left can not be properly identified as a Halo game.

That, in summation, is my problem with Halo 5: Guardians. The sinking pit-of-my-stomach feeling that I left with as I thought to myself, "This is not a Halo game." On a more hopeful note, the upcoming December/January beta the is earliest that a beta has launched in franchise history, and 343 made it very clear they want fans to help them make meaningful changes. So if you have an Xbox One and a copy of Halo: The Master Chief Collection (which you should because that game is amazing),?? participate, be vocal, and keep you?r fingers crossed for the next year. I know that's what I'll be doing

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Shoot the flesh, whip the wounds

"Behind every great man is a great woman." Screw that, says Nisha. While Handsome Jack is sitting in a climate-controlled bunker, cowering from the awesome might of the Vault Hunters and bandit gangs, Nisha fights her enemies head?? on in the gritty streets of old west Lynchwood.

When duty called her to moon, she answered with nothing but her bullwhip, arsenal, and wits. While Athena hides behind her shield, Wilhelm turn?s himself into just another Hyper?ion machine, and Claptrap continues to beg for us to like him, Nisha goes through hell and back the same as when she entered. So back off everyone, this cowgirl is all mine. Dibs on Nisha.

She has the most badass skills.

Nisha's skill trees all build to??wards her basically becoming death incarnate. With a good enough pistol, the One for Each of Ya skill almost makes her a Gunzerker like Salvador, except that she never has to put the second gun away. The Third Degree boosts her melee to near Zer0's Bloodshed levels of melee carnage. Now pair all this up with with her action skill Showdown, and Nisha will be bullwhipping and auto aiming bodies until they drop like flies.

And for anyone thinking Nisha's lack of team assisting skills is a negative, be honest with yourself, only the team me??mbers desperate to be liked bother with t?hat. Athena can revive three people at once? That's cute, try reviving yourself when I effortlessly land six shots in your cranium. Also, I hear she sings annoying road songs just to piss people off. Claptrap can buff team stats? Sorry, we still don't like you Claptrap, nobody likes you. Except Brett, but I've seen him wear socks with sandals.

Finally, a cowgirl.

Seriously, why has it taken so long for there to be a cowboy type character in a Borderlands game? The first Borderlands took place almost exclusively in desert plains and arid settings fit for a John Wayne flick. If we can have ninjas in tundras, how?? did cowgirls in the desert get overlooked? It's alright though, I'm willing to forgive and ?I'm sure you all are too, because now, we have cowgirls in space.

Midriff.

That's right, Nisha is bringing an exposed midriff to a gunfight. Why does this sound familiar? Oh, maybe it's because one of the most famous gun-toting badasses of videogame history rocks the midriff. The midriff sends a message to Nisha's enemies: she doesn't? need any arm??or because they will be dead before they can get a shot off.

Sure, Doom guy did it first, but Nisha one-ups him, because not only is she confidently marching into battle with her vital organs as vulnerable as possible, but she is doing it in the near-vacuum of a moon without atmosphere. That just seems unnecessarily dangerous, but Nisha doesn't care about that. In fa??ct...

She just doesn't give a fuck.

Look deep into Nisha's eyes, and see the cold gaze of a psychopathic gun nut. That is the look of a bona fide badass, and that's saying something when half the enemies on Pandora fancy that title for themselves?. Look, anyone working for Handsome Jack is probably pretty crazy. Nisha though, easily tops the Hyperion crazy charts with her puppy killing ways. When she was running the town of Lynchwood, all of the 200+ laws were punishable by death. Perhaps not the best way to run a town, but you can't argue that a bullet to the head isn't a more efficient way to deal with littering than a ticket.

Even in death, as you stand over her corpse, feeling so proud of yourself for turning Lynchwood's sheriff into another notch on your gun,?? you don't realize that Nis?ha is having the last laugh. Just look at that death pose. You know what kind of corpse falls like that? The kind of corpse that just doesn't give a fuck.

The post ?To all you would-be Borderlands cowboys and cowgirls, I have dibs on Nisha appeared first on Destructoid.

Just hoping Gearbox brought the Chemical X

When Battleborn was first ann??ounced, there were certain trigger words my mind immediately connected before I had read a single word about the game. "Gearbox, shooter, color. Oh, I wonder what the loot drop rate is like," I said to myself. Then all the MOBA comparisons started, and I didn't know what to make of the game.

After roughly two hours worth of a hands-off presentation, it's clear that ??Gearbox is back to their genre-blending ways. Whether lightn??ing can really strike twice remains to be seen, but I'm intrigued so far.

Battleborn (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Release: TBA 2015 

Battleborn takes place at the end of the universe, at a time when all but one star, Solus, has died out. All of the space-faring races of that time have descended on the last life-sustaining solar system, creating conflict as each faction fights for territory and resources. Times get worse for these desperate races as the Verelsy, beings from another universe who are causing all the stars to go dark, show up to finish what they started. Enter the Battleborn, a coalition of the remaining surviving races set on driving back the interdimensional?? invaders.

It's a dramatic set up, to be sure, but Battleborn definitely does not carry a serious tone. Despite the end-of-days premise, there are constant little interactions that reinforce the game's humorous slant. Characters like the soldier Oscar Mike shout battle dialogue like, "Be advised, this place creeps the hell out of me" or "Hippie down!" In one missi??on, an NPC character will mumble something about hacking a??n encrypting computer, while she is actually just punching around some unlucky captured enemy. 

There has been a lot of talk about Battleborn being a pseudo-MOBA, so let's set the record straight. Battleborn is a first-person s?hooter. It does carry influences from MOBAs, but the moment to moment combat is largely first-person gunplay. Every time you play a competitive match or a cooperative mission, you will grow from a base level to max level within that game, with each game estimated at about thirty minutes.

The multiplayer Incursion mode is where Battleborn's MOBA sensibilities shine most. In this five-on-five mode, two teams fight to conquer different objectives across the map, working through enemy grunts and opposing players as they try to make their way into their base. Again, all of this is happening in first-person combat, so you probably won't be directly translating your League of Legends strategies. 

Battleborn also brings a considerably large roster for a cooperative shooter. Each player character comes from one of Battleborn's five playable factions. The Jennerit are a vampire-looking race, coming from a culture that respects power over all else. The katana-wielding Rath was the representative in our demo, looking like a cross between a vampire and a samurai. The Peacekeepers are Battleborn's riff on the standard soldier class, home to such colorful characters as the hulking, chain gun-w??ielding Montana, and the soldier Oscar Mike.

Rogues are the unaffiliated free people of Solus. They are less structured than others, but every bit as vicious. The Eldrid are basically space elves, revering the natural order of the cosmos. As studio writer Aaron Linde puts it, "They respect nature but nature doesn't have to mean life. They're not the tree-hugging hippies you might think." The Eldrid also deliver a distinctive purpose in combat, being the main faction for magic-based combat. Finally, we have the robotic LLC, an aristocratic group of war profiteers. Think of them as the 0.001 percent. They want to arm everyone in this conflict, so long as they make a nice ??profit. The longer the war runs on the longer they can feed their materialistic needs. 

Each character comes with their own skill sets too, though these are not the branching skill trees of Borderlands. Skill upgrades in Battleborn work down a single path, each stop asking you to choose between one upgrade or the other. Do you want a red dot sight for close-range engagements, or a scope for long-range fights? Maybe you want extra damage resistance or an increase to damage dealt. Beyond that there are mutations on each of th??e augments, further branching off how each character plays, although that was not big part of our demo. Between all the different characters, upgrades, and mutation options, Gearbox is touting around a million possible builds. It seems the studio's affinity for large numbers remains intact.

Past the upgrades, each character quickly unlocks unique abilities at level 7. For example, the peacekeeper Montana gains the ability to grow a metal skin coating, playing further into his heavy/tank role. Oscar Mike has his airstrike, and the living kung-fu fungus Miko can poison enemies. You will probably want to find a solid balance when running with your team too, as Battleborn has no second wind or revive mechanic.

At this point I honestly don't know where I stand with Battleborn. Admittedly, I'm not much of a MOBA player, so there could be some deeper intricacies to the genre fusion that have gone over my head. That said, seeing the game in action has left me hungry to know more, but mostly, I want to get some hands-on time with Battleborn. Gearbox does appear to be on ?to somethi?ng here. Whether that something is going to be great, I just can't seem to tell yet.

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But terrible platforming

There's a new game coming out based on everybody's favorite television show, Adventure Time! You know what that means right? Go on and grab your friends, because we're going to some very distant la---actually, yo?u might want to re??think going on this adventure.

Adventure Time Game Wizard's biggest strength is in its content creator. Using the iPad camera, you can scan in any level you've drawn ou?t on a piece of graph paper, or you can draw directly in-game. From there, you can choose a themed backdrop based on the show including the Snow Kingdom, Candy Kingdom, and others.

There's a set of simple shapes and outlines you can draw, each corresponding to a type of platform. Want a lava pit? Just make two vertical shafts with zig zags in between. Need a moving platform? Just sketch out a striped rectang??le.

There are a good number of platform types you can draw and combine to create your own levels, and Game Wizard offers?? an intuitive guide for all the shapes you can use. They never get more complicated than what you can trace on graph paper, and even when I didn't draw perfect lines, the scanner was always capable of translating past those errors.

So the level editor sound cool, huh? Unfortunately,?? the rest of the game drops the ball.

Adventure Time Game Wizard is a platformer with awful controls, and a platformer with awful controls cannot carry itself very far. Out of all the different ways we've seen platformers played on a touch display, Game Wizard opts for a virtual d-pad setup.

Simple commands, like switching directions, felt needlessly janky. Didn't matter whether I slid my finger over the d-pad or tapped it -- there was a noticeable pause in the time bet?ween hitting a new directional button, making the experience frustrating when going through t??he story mode. You can just imagine how unforgiving it can feel when playing on amateur fan-made levels.

I like Adventure Time and would really dig a good game based off the show, so it hurts that this handles the way it does. Despite the rather ingenious level editor, Game Wizard is just par for the course for licensed games.

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The beauty of simplicity

Confession time: I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to the indie game scene. I love me some Nidhogg, Samurai Gunn, and Crawl, but it's not uncommon for me to have only heard about these games just before release or later. With that track record, you won't be surprised to hear that I knew nothing about Titan Souls before sitting down with it at PAX.

I am so glad that I did, though. Between the music, art, and the brilliantly challenging combat, Titan Souls is far and away one of? my most anticipated releases.

There are no real enemies or objectives outside of taking down the bosses that inhabit the world. After a short introduction to the controls, I was immediately thrust into an overworld?? pitting me against four bosses, taking on each at my own leisure.

The bosses themselves are ??incredibly simple to understand, and monumentally challenging to beat. Each requires just one hit to their weak spot to kill. Getting that spot exposed is another matter -- every boss comes? with its own system of defenses.

One boss, a massive ice cube, immediately hones in on you, and proceeds to slide around the temple until your guts paint its hallowed halls. To get to the fleshy one-hit center, I needed to lure the cube over to one of f??our pressure switches, each activating a torch that would melt the ice once I managed to get my arrow to catch its fire.

_{[Gameplay courtesy of RedPandaGamer.]}

Like the bosses, the mechanics in Titan Souls are similarly minim?al. There is a button to roll, a button to shoot your arrow, and the same button to shoot will send your arrow flying back to you.

Lets talk about that last part. In Titan Souls, ??you only have one arrow to shoot, and it is your only means of attack. As you can imagine, this makes timing and managing you shot very important, but the game takes it bit further by making a mechanic out of your limited ammo.

Say you miss your initial shot; you can summon your arrow back, hitting anything it touches on its the way back to ??you. This skill was especially useful during one of the early bosses, a giant gelatinous blob that required multiple hits to whittle down to the fleshy one-hit-kill heart.

For all of the challenge that the game offers, it's worth mentioning that I was never frustrated with the game. Maybe that speaks to how w?ell it communicates its objective. By my first or second death, I understood exactly what it was that I was doing wrong, or needed to do better. Everything else was a matte??r of execution.

Whenever you die in Titan Souls, you will know that it is o??????????????????????????nly because you are not good eno?ugh, and that's fine. With the gameplay feeling so tight and responsive, and every boss being one or two hits away from defeat, I found myself willing to try things over and experiment with new tactics until I'd finally taken down a boss.

Honorable mention goes to the music as well. Whenever I found myself slipping into frustration, its soft, mellow tunes would snap me ba?ck to sanity.

When I got up to finish with Titan Souls, I noticed one gentleman working the booth was keeping tally of all my deaths and kills. After seeing my 30+ deaths to take down four bosses, I asked the man at what point in the game this demo took place in. He turned to me, smiled, and said this was just the tutorial. I am really damn excited to see what the rest of Titan Souls has in store.

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So close you can taste the gunpowder

Telltalle has been a busy beehive lately. Having wrapped up The Walking Dead Season 2 and season one of The Wolf Among Us, this fall will bring us right into the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Darren seemed positive on the game when he saw it at E3, but for a series like Borderlands that built its name more on its genre fusion gameplay than ?it's setting, I didn't know what to expec??t or hope for going into this demo.

After it was over, I came out with confirmation that Telltale is still the best at what it d??oes.

Tales from the Borderlands (PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 [preview], Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation Vita)
Developer: Telltales Games
Publisher: Telltale Games
Release Date: Fall 2014

Tales from the Borderlands doesn't stray from the formula seen in The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. You move around the world, interacting with characters and making decisions that affect your story and how others react to you. The writing takes an interesting appr?oach to player choice. The story in my demo was told t??hrough flashbacks, one from the perspective of the Hyperion agent Rhys, and the other from his cohort Fiona.

Playing as Rhys, we follow him and his coworker Vaughn on their way to purchase a vault key from a shady individual. While his side of the story starts out believable enough, it starts to get a bit fantastical as he rips out peoples hearts and makes a daring escape from Zer0, who also seems to be after the vault ke??y. Eventually Fiona calls him out on his story, and she begins to tell her side, which is unfortunately where the demo ends.

The interesting thing is that Rhys' actions during his flashback were all decisions that I was making. I could have ripped that man's heart out, or I could h??ave tried to be diplomatic. I could have told the group that I had to escape a Vault Hunter, or I could have chosen a more believable option. Considering that players will be making these choices in both present day and flashback sequences, I'm pretty excited to see how Telltale wraps? up what could essentially lead to twice as many story threads. Of course, what I played is just a slice of episode one, so there is no saying that the entire season will use flashbacks.

The choices and consequences in Telltale's game would not be half as meaningful were it not for the writing. Telltale seems to have little problem going from the dramatic Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us to the slapstick silliness of Borderlands. The game even takes small shots at its gameplay formula. Later?? in the demo, Rhys and Vaughn are looking to get through a locked door as one of them says, "If we randomly just found it someplace that'd be amazing."

After finding the key (surprise, it was just lying around), we are reintroduced to Shade, the incredibly insane and lonely shopkeeper introduced in Borderlands 2's Pirate Booty DLC. As is his modus operandi, Shade has propped up the dead bodies of past Borderlands characters in his own museum-like showcase, complete with narrated bios. Commandant Steele, killed by The Destroyer. Boom and Bewm, defeated by the V?ault Hunters. Professor Nakayama, killed by stairs.

So yes, Tales from the Borderlands is a Telltale game, and if you like their last few games there's a good chance you'll like this one. Though Telltale is handling the writing, the Borderlands humor is intact, and? if you have been following the series there are a good amount of in jokes calling back to previous games. This is a trip to Pandora worth getting ready for.

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Origins of the rings

[Writers Note: The original story was amended because of number of f?actual inaccuracies. My sincerest apologies to anyone who was confused by the original article.]

It won't be long now until Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is released. Here at PAX Prime, we've been afforded one last look at the game, and while Alessandro and Dale covered the gameplay nitty gritty of the Nemesis system and Assassins Creed style traversal, we've finally been gi?ven a short, albeit sweet look at the game's campaign mode.

Monolith is digging deep to tell the lesser known tales of Tolkien's universe. Get ready for a l??ot of nerd speak.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 [previewed], Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC)
Developer: Monolith
Publisher: Warner Bros. Games
Release Date: September 30, 2014

You play as Talion, a ranger of Gondor who survives the first wake of Sauron's attack on Middle-earth. While Sauron's return has marked a return of evil, his presence also awakens the spirit of Celebrimbor, the master forger of the Second Age who helped Sauron forge the rings of power. Celebrimbor's spirit ties itself to Talion, giving him powers similar to those of the ring wraiths, including mind control, mind reading, and enhanced tracking. More than a justification for game mechanics, Celebrombor is the vehicle driving Shadow of Mordor's deep dive into Tolkien lore.

In our demo, Talion is on a mission that has him crossing paths with Gollum, the One Ring's long time bearer. Because of the deep connection Gollum has with the ring, he notices the wraith spirit of Celebrimbor clinging to Talion. After recognizing the master forger, we're tr??eated to a flashback of a living Celebrimbor during the second age as he's creating the rings. Celebrimbor's spirit does not remember much of his mortal life, so the mystery surrounding his living days are a journey we'll take with him. As a person who's only real knowledge of Tolkien's work comes from films, I find there's something very pleasing about seeing this history unfold in front of you. While this information does exist in wikis and lesser known works, it's nice to see this side explored on a bigger stage.

Our demo also included a look at Talion's powers, watching a sequence where Talion needed to use his wraith form to track Gollum. While the wraith  vision displays in the same smokey black filter as the films, the actual tracking is similar to what we've seen in Assassins Creed's eagle vision. The environment goes dark, while enemies and persons of interest are highlighted in bright colors. The combat also takes queues from the Batman Arkham series' free flow system. You have a button to attack, a button to counter, and a button to dodge. There is also an equivalent to Batman's cape stun, allowing yo?u to hit an enemy with a flurry of attacks.

While some games do come around that lay the blueprint for how things will work in a genre, Shadow of Mordor errs on the side being samey. That's not to say that the combat and traversal isn't still fun. On the plus side, if you completely blow a stealth run like I did, you have a g??ood combat system to fall back on. Traversal is functional, but when you hit the open parts of the world, not being able to summon a mount makes for lots of plodding through grassy plains. It's the story really that looks like the star of the show.

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What's the scouter say about current-gen power level?

Another year brings another Dragon Ball fighter, but this time, the series has new hardware to play with. Dragon Ball Xenoverse is the next entry of Dragon Ball Z arena fighters, bringing the fran??chise to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, in addit??ion to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

If you played any of the Tenkaichi or Raging Blast games, you know what to expect here. These games are large arena fighters that focus on aerial combat, all?? ??in order to let fans relive moments of the show. A new character is teased in the trailer though, so go nuts with that if you will.

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My tin foil hat told me it already does watch us

Remember when everyone was mad at the idea of a game console that comes with an always on, always watching and listening camera? Well thanks to this Watch Dogs easter egg, w?e have a nice visual representation of what the?? NSA has probably been watching since November.

Discovered by Eurogamer, you can find the Easter egg at any time after unlocking the bunker hideout in Watch Dogs. By flipping through the random ctOS v??ideo logs, you can come across a 20-something male having a particularly rage-filled gaming session. In the upper-hand corner, you can see the video feed is being provided courtesy of the "Kinekt" camera.

Watch Dogs - Kinect Easter Egg - Eurogamer [Eurogamer]

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Let me know there's at least one person reading this that cares

Amongst all the E3 hubbub about games like, Mortal Kombat X, Destiny, and Halo 5, let's not forget that August will bring us our annual Madden. Teasing what will be brought to the show, the Madden 15 E3 trailer i??mplies, to me, that this year's game will h??ave a particular focus on defense.

Featuring the lauded Caroline Panthers' middle linebacker Luke Kuechly, the video plays a radio casting of the Panther's January playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers, while Kuechly swears to not fail next season. The actual gameplay clip in the trailer shows the Panthers going up against the Seattle Seahawks, who were statistically the best defensive team in the 2013 ??season. A lot of defense going on.

In other news, Madden 15 will feature athletes' tattoos which were oddly missing in previous games in recent years. According to Polygon, EA is really trying to cover its legal bases, requiring NFL players to have their tattoo artists sign waivers before featurin?g their designs in-game. This ??apparently was in response to legal cases where EA was being periodically sued by tattoo artists whose work would show up in games uncredited.

Why tattoos are just now ??returning to Madden with M?adden NFL 15 [Polygon]

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The difference between a game with set tracks, and an open world

So it seems Forza Horizon 2, unlike Forza 5, will not be running at 60 frames per second.

While it will still display in 1080p, the open-world nature of Horizon doesn't seems to?? play nice with the idea of a locked 60fps rate, especially considering the game will be streaming and loading in data constantly. Playground Games and company have instead adopted a zero-tolerance policy where frame rate dips are c??oncerned, in order to ensure a consistent driving experience.

Some of you may remember that the first Forza Horizon was also locked at 30 frames per second. Speaking to IGN, creative director Ralph Fulton explains, "I think what we did on Horizon was demonstrate that, and this is really important, a locked frame rate that's absolutely solid and never drops is the most important thing for our game, 30 [frames per second?] actually enables us to realize that expe?rience."

Still, the team is not oblivio??us to the fact that some will be miffed at this news. "I thi?nk I remember that's always a hot-button topic, until a game comes out and people go, 'Oh, this actually really works.' But 1080p was an absolute must for us; it's the benchmark for next-gen."

Forza Horizon 2: Resolution, Framerat?e, Music, & More Detailed [IGN]

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A new challanger approaches

After spending a good amount of time teasing, Team Ninja has announced Female Tengu for Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate. Sporting a pair of wings and a devilish demeanor, she reminds me of Devil Jin quite a bit. ??More than the design too, she even rocks a similar windmill kick.

The wings aren't just for show though. Female Tengu is described as a trickster character, focusing on aerial movement. You can see this in the clip where she fights on the beach, using her flight to get past her opponent's ?low attacks, presumably opening them up for a whiff punish. Female Tengu will be available in Japan later this month as part of an update, in addition to a costume pack. No word on when she will be seeing ??release elsewhere.

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One might say its pretty gr8

Like many before them, Asus has taken a stab at making their own Steam Machine, and from the spec end, it seems they've hit a pretty good mark. Boasting an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti graphics card, Intel Core i7 processor, and Windows 8.1, the ROG GR8 seems? pretty beastly at first glance. ??Those of you worrying about the device being Windows 8.1 powered need not worry, as a SteamOS powered box will be coming out, but at a later date.

There are still a few specs questions I'd want answered though, such as how much RAM will the box carry??, and whether it's DDR3 or higher. Any info on how many cores the i7 will c?arry would be nice too, though even if it's only a dual core, the i7's hyper-threading should make up for quite a bit. A price point would be nice to.

Asus also announced a new line of PC gaming accessories and parts. The ROG G20 desktop will run similar specs to their Steam machine, except for the 780 card in favor of the 750Ti. The ROG GK2000 gaming keyboard will be using mech??anical Cherry MX Red switches for maximum responsiveness, and Ares III graphics card will run Radeon Hawaii XT GPUs, in addition to a water cooling unit and 8 gigabytes of ?GDDR5 RAM.

Asus will be releasing a set of motherboards, the ROG Maximus VII Impact, and t??he ROG Crossblade Ranger. The Maximus is a Z97-based mini-ITX board, while the C??rossblade Ranger is based on AMD tech.

Finally there's the ROG GX500 laptop, which is the latest in gaming ultrabooks. At 19mm thi??ck and 4.8 lbs, it can still boast an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M card and Intel i7 processor. It also carries a 4k display and smart dual-fan cooling system. C??urrently my ultrabook runs a NVIDIA GeForce 730M and dual core i7 with 8GB DDR RAM. Yet somehow, I feel like I could be tempted by a non-4K variant of the ROG GX500. For a full break down of Asus new products, you can check out the full release in the link below. 

Asus Republic of Gamers [Asus]

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Faster than a speeding bullet

After watching a great deal of the week long Awesome Games Done Quickly charity livestream, I've gained a new appreciation for the ingenuity and thought process of speed runners. Still, it's crazy how many new tricks are being discovered for decades old games. The latest discovery comes for 1991's Super Mario World, in w?here you can set off a glitch that triggers the end cutscene, by hitting a series of very specific requirements on the first level.

A game that's months o??lder than m??e and we're still shaving seconds off of completion times. Amazing.

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Spoiler alert, kind of, sort of...not really

If you are playing, will be playing, or don't care either way about Ultra Street Fighter IV, the game's story is probably not what comes to mind whenever it's brought up. That said, it hasn't stopped Capcom from creating anime style prologues and endings for each of Ultra's five additional characters. While Elena, Rolento, Hugo, and?? Poison are a??ll known quantities, I have to admit I was curios as the just who the heck Decapre was. While her appearance basically tells us a great deal (surprise, she's an evil Cammy), her ending and prologue do add a bit more.

I'm still waiting for the day when fighting game studios that still bother with story go ahead and ripoff Netherrealm's formula. Honestly, Mortal Kombat 9 and Injustice gave us the perfect road map, just follow it.

See How Decapre and Her Fellow Newcomers Fit Into Ultra Street Fighter?? IV’s Story With These Prologue and Ending Videos [Shoryuken]

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Watch with me if you want to live

So middle school for me involved many brain-rotting activities, not the least of which was the countless amount of hours spent watching machinima videos. While I don't have the free time that I used to, it's still a joy to watch a really well done short, like this Grand Theft Auto V video from Youtuber John Chapman.

While not an exact shot for shot remake, t??he video is an almost perfect recre??ation of John Connor's escape from the T1000. 

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*fingers crossed*

[Update: The Steam database entry for Dead Rising 3 was removed shortly after this posting.]

It's not uncommon to see a highly touted console exclusive make its way to PC, and it seems that Dead Rising 3 is next.

Via a posting on Steam's database, users have found a listing for the game, which, according to the database logs, has a listing history of at least two months. It wasn't until today, however, that the listing type was changed to "Game," with the full title to boot. It's not the first time the series has been ported over, as Dead Rising 2 saw a PC release.

Say what you want about the Xbox One, but its launch lineup was substantially better (I liked Ryse, don't judge me) than the PS4's, with a great deal of that having to do with Dead Rising 3. Hopefully Capcom will offer ??up some official news at E3, but until then, it looks li??ke a pretty sure thing.

Dead Rising 3 spotted on Steam Database [NeoGAF]
Walking [Steam Info]

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What's the phrase about shutting up and taking money

It's been about four months since we first got the news that Irrational Games would be shutting down, and as some expected, some former staff have regrouped in a new studio called Day for Night Games. The studio boasts some bigger names from Irrational too, such as Joe Fielder, who wrote the Burial at Sea DLC, and artist Robb Waters, whose c??redits include the designs of Andrew Ryan, Sander Cohen, and the splicers.

Their first title is The Black Glove, which casts you as a artist performing out of a theater called The Equinox, where you will use your powers to travel back through time in order to improve the quality of the work you've presented at the theater. There's a good amount of mind bending craziness, such as the theater, which is described as being able to exist in the past, present, and future. I just about got a headache the first time I sat down to discuss the ending of Bioshock: Infinite.

Speaking to Polygon, Fielder describes the ultimate goal is to, "satisfy the whims of the creator, the critic and the crowd. You're trying to improve the use of these creators' works in the present by changing their past." You will have to read character reactions too in order ??to figure out what you should change in the past, though that will not be the only method players will have to figure out what? should be changed. As you might expect, actions taking place in the past will affect the story.

Oddly enough, The Black Glove is being announced before it's planned Kickstarter campaign, which will be launching in July. You can expect to learn more when the Kickstarter launches with the customary con??cept video.

The Black Glove ?is coming from Bioshock vets at Day for Night?? games [Polygon]

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That Departed trailer looks like someone's been watching a lot of Tarantino

Tomorrow sees the release of the Invasion map pack for Call of Duty: Ghosts, so how about we get one last rundown of the new maps. In Mutiny, you'll fight in what's essentially Tortuga, shooting off almost as many bullets as one-liners about Davey Jones locker and other pirate schtick. Departed is probably the most interesting looking map, as it offers a unique killstreak, turning you into a dual revolver wielding mariachi of death. You can get a closer look at Pharaoh here.

Finally, we have Favela, a remake of one of my favorite maps from Modern Warfare 2. The trailer brings back nostalgia feel goodies too, as it's a near perfect remake of Modern Warfare 2's first multiplayer teaser. My, how time flies.

Call of Duty: Ghosts Invasion releases tomorrow for Xbox One and the Xbox 360.

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Sing us a song, you're the piano man

Ninja Theory, the studio behind DMC: Devil May Cry and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, seems to have had one of their tech demos leak. Entitled, The Beggars Opera, it's not known if this was ever meant to be the studio's next game, rather it looks more like an internal project to get the team familiarized with Unreal Engin?e 4.

Apart from Unreal Engine 4, the tech demo was made using Maya, Photoshop, Zbrush, UV Layout.  As far back as last July Nin?ja Theory has been hiring staff for an expected AAA game using Unreal Engine 4, so it's not crazy to think we could getting more concrete info sooner, possibly even an proper unveiling at E3

Interesting as the video is, what I find most intriguing is the title. The Beggars Opera was a three act ballad by John Gay, dating back to 1728. It was a semi-political satire, taking jabs at upper class and the more traditional Italian style of opera. Ninja Theory has a history of taking project inspiration from more obscure sources, such as Enslaved, which was based on a Chinese folk tale few in west are familiar with. Again, the video is more likely to be a tech demo than an actual project in development, but at the least, I'm ready for what Ninja Theory has in store for?? the ?new consoles.

Ninja Theory's Next-Gen Consoles Unre???al Engine 4 Tech Demo "The Beggars Opera" Leaked [DualShockers]

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Action figures never looked so badass

From the painstaking artistry at work, to my upbringing with films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, there's a reverence that I'll always have for stop motion animation, even if the final product isn't amazing (looking at you Frankenweenie).

Youtuber counter656 has a whole channel dedicated to keeping the art alive, and his latest work reminds us why this lesser used form is so great. Using around 1,500 photos in a production that took 10 days, counter656 brings together Alphonse Elric, Fate, and the MKII Gundam to battle a big boss baddie from Guild Wars 2. Enjoy!

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Hoping this is an appetizer for E3

After missing it's expected launch release date, Driveclub retreated into the dark before resurfacing recently. Driveclub continues its coming out party this week, releasing four new videos. The first three are the expected race demos, featuring a Pagani Zonda R racing in India, Maserati Gran Turis??mo in Chile, and a Pagani Huayra on a Canadian track. Visually, these videos deliver some very nice eye candy The Maserati and Pagani Huayra in particular have some pretty amazing cockpit views.

The final video is a showcase of Driveclub's audio design, showing the differen??ce between the engine roars when you're in third-person vs. cockpit views, and even subtler sounds like gear changes.? Can't wait to see what will be showing at E3.

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He does it so hard, and almost gets done harder

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of Deadpool. It's not that I dislike his humor or self-aware, fourth-wall breaking schtick. Rather, it's that I feel too few people can actually utilize said sc??htick into anything interesting. Too often I feel lik??e there's a huge reliance on his self-awareness and eccentricities as being comedy in and of itself.

YouTube cosplayer D Piddy, however, ?is one of the few. Great work Piddy, your rendition of the Merc with the Mouth had ?me from start to finish.

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Everyone's getting a piece of this mud pie

Nearly a month after Alamogordo, New Mexico saw the unearthing of the biggest stain on the videogame industry's past, the city commission had decided to sell 700 of the 1,300 dug-up E.T. cartridges. First though, the city has voted to donate 100 of the cartridges to documentary produc??tion companies Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment, with the rema?ining 500 distributed amongst local museums.

The hope is to create a tourist landmark, not just at the museums that will be preserving the carts, but also at the ??dig site. The carts were reportedly buried nearly twice as deep as originally thought, making the excavation crews dig 30 feet instead of the expected 18. While the New Mexico space museum is charted with appraising the cartridges, word on how or where to buy them will come at a later date.

Just putting this out there, if any auctioneers want to buy?? Dtoid HQ's copy of E.T., I'm sure Niero will be all ears. I mean, just look at how well preserved he kept this thing.

Unearthed E.T. Atari games wil?l be curated by New Mexico space museum then sold [Polygon]

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