Gaming Thread 11/3/2013

Yesterday kicked off Extra Life 2013, where people get to the Twitch for gaming marathons to raise money for the Children's Miracle Network. Can't believe how fast this thing has grown in just a few years. Will be interesting in seeing how much they raise this year, hopefully $5 million plus.

Find a stream, watch and donate

stuff below

• Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital wants Microsoft to spin off Xbox and Bing.

• Sony's stock is still in the junk status crapper. (disclosure: I still own Sony stock...don't ask, long story)

• Nintendo improved sales of the Wii U from 160k to 300k in the last quarter but still in a bad spot. Iwata still sees nothing wrong and doesn't think they need to reorganize. And they kept their initial forecast of 9 million Wii U units for the year.

• Since they deferred profits from GTAV, Take-Two's profits are down.

• Even with strong sales of Monster Hunter 4, Capcom didn't have a great quarter. The do expect to ship 1.2 million copies of Dead Rising 3 in the next quarter.

• GungHo's (Puzzles & Dragons) revenue drops.

• Oculus is throwing in Android support for the Rift. Still would be nice to get a consumer release date.

• Would you like a new game in the 7th Guest series? Well, they're asking for money on kickstarter

• South Park: The Stick of Truth gets another delay. Now it's has a release date of March 4th.

• A teaser trailer for The Walking Dead: Season 2. Apparently you play as Clem. After finally playing 400, I dunno if I want a season 2 to be frank.

• With the delay to Kinect Rivals, MS doesn't really have anything to show off the Kinect gaming wise so they're throwing out the Waveracing event for free at launch as a time trial (there are prizes and what not that you can win)

• Long time coming but upcoming FPS Puzzler, Reset gets it's teaser trailer. It was worth the wait, it's a pretty good trailer

• Anyone else remember the under-rated SNES game, Blackthorne from Blizzard? Well, they're now giving it away for free through Battlenet.

• Tiger Woods Golf from EA is no more as they end their relationship. Hopefully they dust off the Links name.

• Peggle 2 is missing the XONE launch, will be out in December

• New Sony rewards program. Spend $6000 for $60 in credit.

• New Privacy Statement for Xbox

• This isn't really gaming related but this is just cool

• In the midst of the Ouya flames, CEO Julie Uhrman is delusional in thinking people will support the system just because

• New trailer showing off Orchid and announcing Spinal which makes 7. They also let it out that the eighth character will be *surprise* Fulgore since the stream on Friday, all of Orchid's winning quotes dealt with Ultratech which is Fulgore.

• No, I don't understand why they bothered with a Heavenly Sword DTV movie either. Still have a Ratchet & Clank movie trailer to come....oh joy

• Steam hits the 65 million users milestone. Didn't know there were that many TF2 botters.

• Microsoft and EA signed a deal to keep the first TitanFall as an exclusive, that didn't make Vince Zampella (co-founder of Respawn) happy.

• If rumors are correct, AMD won't be holding the crown in GPUs for more than a few weeks as the leaked benchmarks from a few places puts the 780ti above it. Also, it's rumored that there will be 6GB and 12GB variants of it. And to top it off, there might be a special edition of it dubbed Black. A 12 gig version is totally overkill at the moment but man, so much epeen

• Minecraft jumps onto the integrated Twitch streaming wagon. I can't wait to see how hard Twitch falls down on the job when everything comes online with a League of Legends tournament being played, their infrastructure is still a POS.

• Well, it came out of nowhere but a new Typing of the Dead came out last week to hit Steam's Halloween Sale. Game is pretty good though it needs some new dictionaries. This is a writeup on how it came to be.

• Scumbags take advantage of nice guy Dave Gilbert's promotion of giving away the fourth game in his and his wife's Blackwell series

• Squad is trying to angle to get their Kerbal Space Program into more classrooms with their kickoff of the KerbalEdu program.

• Cool article on the making of Destiny. They're hoping to get a million people into the beta in hopes that they don't run into the same problems that Grand Theft Auto Online ran into.

• Sony released a big ass FAQ about the PS4 for at least launch (stuff changes). It's a long read but worth doing so if you're buying one this holiday season.

• Out of the FAQ, we finally get an actual launch day lineup and not this nebulous thing.

Physical releases:
Knack
Killzone
Angry Birds Star Wars
Assassin's Creed IV
Call of Duty Ghosts
FIFA 14
Battlefield 4
Just Dance 2014
Injustice: Gods Amongst Us
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes
Madden 25
NBA 2K14
Skylanders Swap Force

Digital:
Flower
Resogun
Sound Shapes
Contrast
Pinball Arcade
Super Motherload
Tiny Brains
Warframe
DC Universe Online

Wish I saw the footage from the XONE (720p) and PS4 (900p) before I started playing BF4 on my PC to have a more forward opinion as frankly, I think they're both pretty fugly in that comparison. As for it being on consoles, I don't think either are that bad looking, especially since I expected a bigger gulf considering the hardware disparity. Though that might have been rare optimism from me as you're still looking at two low budget PCs (more so than any other next gen comparison). Guess the adage that has been true for the last 10 years stands, buy a console if you want exclusives and sports (outside of the Football Manager and OOTP series) games, if you want eye candy, buy a PC. Some reason though with the launch games looking that they are, I don't even know if we will get a year out of launch before people start bitching about consoles holding back graphics on the PC.

As for COD Ghosts running at 720p on the XONE and 1080p, your guess is as good as mine as what they've shown, that game doesn't look good on any platform (PC included).

I totally agree with Richard Leadbetter though: "Microsoft itself has made the story about parity with the competition, when highlighting what makes Xbox One unique in terms of exclusive games, services and functionality - along with more effort in returning some of the magic to Kinect - may have served Xbox One more effectively in the run-up to launch."

Call of Duty: Ghosts (everything under the sun) - Another year, another Call of Duty game. Considering how hard this game has started to slide on sales, this should be interesting.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Collection (360, PS3) - Well, you can play two of the worst Castlevania games (it includes a Lords of Shadow 1 and a HD remaster of 3DS game, Mirror of Fate). God I really miss Iga.

The Guided Fate Paradox (PS3) - Like Z.H.P for the PSP, this isn't exactly your standard SRPG as it's more Roguelike than a typical NIS game. It's not supposed to be super hard but I'm a sucker for these type of games.

XCOM: Enemy Within (PC, 360, PS3) - With the advent of cutting up expansion packs piecemeal to be sold as DLC, it's kinda refreshing to get one again. A bunch of new stuff is being added. If you wanted more of everything, you're getting it.

Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies (iOS, PC) - Though a bit limited in mission variety, I really dug the first game. More stuff to blow up, this time set in the Pacific Theater. They've said that they dropped the IAP so it's just a single price for everything.

Avadon 2: The Corruption (PC) - This totally came out last week but I don't care, I'm mentioning it anyways. The games that Jeff Vogel and company makes are rare releases these days and it's a shame. I'm only a few hours into this one but it pretty good and so far you don't need to have played the first one to not be lost (though you should since it's good and the history in the world will be deeper). And it's only $10 retail.

That's it, I'm done. Send hatemail here
The Dude

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 03:52 PM

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