As we told you back at New York Comic-Con, Ellen McLain, the voice actor behind Portal's GLaDOS, has a role in Guillermo Del Toro's upcoming Pacific Rim. Playing an AI.
As you can see in this new trailer, what this means is that, basically, she's playing GLaDOS in all but name. Well, all but name and maniacal intent.
Also, GLaDOS cameos aside, holy shit does this movie look amazing.
Gaming Heads has been working away on a line of enormous Team Fortress 2 statues for literally years now, and are only now moving onto their fourth one. But that's OK. When they turn out as nice as they have, it's worth the wait.
The latest is my second-favourite Australian in the TF2 universe, a man whose accuracy and ability to pull of wearing a silly hat more than makes up for his slender build.
The Sniper should hopefully be out in Q2 2013, and will retail for $220 (or $235 for a slightly fancier, limited edition variant that comes with an African shield).
The Sniper [Gaming Heads]
If the Video Game Awards are actually an awards show, and not just a keynote for promoting upcoming games, then the big news from last night was The Walking Dead: The Game. Eminently quotable analyst Michael Pachter said before the show that if this title, a downloadable self-published game, took home Game of the Year, he'd eat his hat. To his credit, Pachter later tweeted out a request for one, presumably to consume.
But the surprises don't just stop there. The Walking Dead won Game of the Year coming out of the Best Adapted Game category. Except for 2003, the first year of the VGAs, when things were very different from today, only two adapted games have even been nominated for GOTY: Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and neither won. This is a different time in games development, with publishers looking for games whose characters and stories they fully own.
Some might look to a licensed or adapted work and consider that the game derives its significance, or at least the attention given to it, because it draws on some other franchise in popular entertainment. So it's strange that a licensed, adapted work reminds us that story, and characters, and choices, and the memorable experiences they create, matters most.
Here's another surprise nugget: The Walking Dead: The Game earned its makers five Video Game Awards. The next big winner? Journey, with three (including a nomination for Game of the Year.) Borderlands 2 also took home three awards, the best haul for a traditional boxed console game.
So if you're thinking this might have been a different Video Game Awards, in its 10th year, you're probably right. Had the show given more attention to that purpose—only a handful of these awards were actually presented in the broadcast—we might be pondering it as a landmark year. The VGAs are often accused of being an industry popularity contest, but maybe this year they acquired recognizable critical heft. We'll have to see what happens next year, and the year after.
So here are the 25 winners of the 2012 Video Game Awards, plus the Game of the Decade. Two fan-voted awards gave Character of the Year to Claptrap from Borderlands 2, and Most Anticipated Game to Grand Theft Auto V.
Telltale Games
Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey, Mass Effect 3
Also nominated: 343 Industries, Arkane Studios, Gearbox Software
Microsoft Studios/343 Industries
Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored
Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany
Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored
Nintendo
Also nominated: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles, ZombiU
2K Games/Firaxis Games
Also nominated: Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight II
2K Games/Gearbox Software
Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3
Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios
Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Darksiders II, Sleeping Dogs
Electronic Arts/BioWare
Also nominated: Diablo III, Torchlight II, Xenoblade Chronicles
2K Games/Gearbox Software
Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Guild Wars 2, Halo 4
Electronic Arts/EA Canada
Also nominated: Hot Shots Golf World Invitational, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, WWE '13
2K Sports/Visual Concepts
Also nominated: FIFA 13, Madden NFL 13, NHL 13
Electronic Arts/Criterion Games
Also nominated: Dirt: Showdown, F1 2012, Forza Horizon
Also nominated: "Castle of Glass" (Linkin Park for Medal of Honor: Warfighter); "I Was Born for This" (Austin Wintory for Journey); "Tears" (Health for Max Payne 3)
Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany
Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3.
Microsoft Studios/343 Industries
Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey
thatgamecompany
Also nominated: Dust: An Elysian Tail, Fez, Mark of the Ninja
Atlus/Arc System Works/Atlus
Also nominated: Dead or Alive 5, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken Tag Tournament 2
Sony Computer Entertainment/Queasy Games
Also nominated: Gravity Rush, LittleBigPlanet (PS Vita), New Super Mario Bros 2
Also nominated: Emma Stone for Sleeping Dogs; Jen Taylor for Halo 4; Jennifer Hale for Mass Effect 3
Also nominated: Dave Fennoy for The Walking Dead: The Game; James McCaffrey for Max Payne 3; Nolan North for Spec Ops: The Line
Telltale Games
Also nominated: Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Game Studios
Also nominated: Leviathan for Mass Effect 3; Mechromancer Pack for Borderlands 2; Perpetual Testing Initiative for Portal 2
Telltale Games
Also nominated: Fez, Journey, Sound Shapes
Jellyvision Games
Also nominated: Draw Something, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, SimCity Social
Valve Corporation
Also nominated: Batman: Arkham City, BioShock, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Mass Effect 2, Portal, Red Dead Redemption, Shadow of the Colossus, Wii Sports, World of Warcraft
As promised, LEGO movie-maker extraordinaire Kooberz has finished the first part of his epic re-telling of Portal 2 via the wonders of stop-motion animation.
This opening part runs for over five minutes. The amount of work that must have gone into this makes my head want to go lie down independent of the rest of me.
Lego Portal 2 Part 1/2 (Machinima Interactive Film Festival) [YouTube]
Yes, this is real. Yes, you can download it. No, I'm not excited that you use a TI calculator every day and no, I can't just be happy for you. In my day we did actual math in math class. I want cool things, too! Hmph.
Portal on a TI calculator! (new video) [YouTube via Reddit]
Glorious, glorious madness. You just gotta love mash ups that put two insane games like these together.
This mod recreates the dungeon layout of The Binding of Isaac in a TF2 map, including locked rooms and even some horrifying bosses. My favorite part has to be how the players go deeper into the "basement" in this mod, too.
It's impressive, and might be just the thing to tide you over before Team Meat's upcoming Binding of Isaac remake—which lets you play co-op. But I'm assuming that version of The Binding of Isaac won't include as many people as this TF2 mod... or, you know, stuff like guns. So this might be more preferable to some folks.
You can try the mod out here, if it happens to come into the map rotation. Judging by the other available maps, which feature Smash Bros and A Link To The Past themes, it won't be so heartbreaking if you have to wait a while till you get the Binding of Isaac map. Just an FYI.
Brilliant-Looking Mod Mashes Up TF2, Binding Of Isaac [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]
Two weeks ago Valve opened voting on the second annual Saxxy Awards, celebrating cinematography in Team Fortress 2 and the Source Filmmaker tool released earlier in the year. Last night, voting ended, and winners in four categories were crowned. You may see them here in this gallery.
The overall winner has not yet been named. It will be revealed, and shown, during the 2012 Video Game Awards on Spike TV on Dec. 7. For now, kick back and enjoy the winners from these four categories.
(See the other nominees for Best Replay.)
(See the other nominees for Best Drama.)
(See the other nominees for Best Action.)
(See the other nominees for Best Comedy.)
I like to say that the couple that games together, stays together. I'm not alone in that sentiment, either. I'm sure there are tons of couples who integrate gaming into their day-to-day interactions and manage to get along just fine.
But just because I like to say it... well, that doesn't make the statement true. Unfortunately, I only know this through first-hand experience.
My husband and I met online, like a lot of people do these days, and he liked to say that he fell in love with me on that very first date.
I have a habit of hiding behind a gaming handheld when I'm really nervous with someone new. It wasn't long into that first meeting when I dug into my purse. I pulled out my Nintendo DS, and just kind of fell into it for a couple of minutes before closing it and going back to him. He swears that that moment, right there, was the moment he fell in love with me.
I still don't know what he saw in me at that moment. Was my nervousness merely indicative of the sort of unshaped person he was looking for? Did it make me look more submissive, perhaps? Maybe he just wanted someone who played more games than he did. I haven't really gotten an answer, and that's okay. I'm not looking for answers these days.
This year, we separated, and the divorce process has yet to really get underway, despite the fact that we're both pretty happy with other people at this point. What I realized most recently about our separation is that the way we played together this year said a lot about where we were in our relationship.
Two games managed to show me it was all over. There wouldn't be any turning back. No rolling a new character for a fresh start, no "maybe I'd be a lot happier in this marriage on ‘Very Easy.'" These games, which were very different from one another, weren't the problem, but they were certainly illustrative.
I wasn't an idiot. I knew when the snowball started rolling down the hill. After one of our (increasingly common) serious talks that left me bawling, I told my husband that we needed some time to ourselves. We needed a couple of hours away from the distractions (read: other people) just to see if there was anything to salvage. I wanted to make it a weekly thing, even.
Okay, so I wasn't an idiot then, but I sure was stupid to think that a couple of hours was going to do a lot for us. Maybe hope kills brain cells.
I wanted counseling. He said no. So, us being us (or perhaps me just being me), we picked a recent downloadable PlayStation 3 release to play together—The Simpsons Arcade. He'd played it a lot as a kid, since he could visit an arcade on a semi-regular basis. I hadn't ever managed to play it before, but the show, as well as the game's genre, are among my favorites. The best part (to me, for this occasion) was that it was all co-op. No fighting each other allowed, only working together.
In a sense, going back to this kind of game was the perfect thing to do. We were going back to basics, trying to figure out the essence of "us," whether that was particularly painful or not.
Here, the pain was minimal. We actually finished the game in about half the time that was allotted in our schedules, but we didn't want to go back and do it again so soon, so we perused the menus and that was really just... it.
I don't think playing something together really "worked," but then again, I don't know what I expected. We came, we played, we went back to our (increasingly separate) lives. Honestly, we never even spoke about the nothing that happened again.
And playing together weekly never happened, either. That time would be the next-to-last.
The absolute last time we played a game together was the Diablo III launch. He'd been waiting the better part of a decade for this game and I'd only been waiting the better part of a year. The way he talked of high school LAN parties made its predecessor sound like the ultimate in companionship gaming. Bonds were forged, and loot was had. I wanted in on this.
I got my chance during the game's press preview for the beta. I could finally get a real sense of what the game was like (and find out just how well it would run on my MacBook Pro). I installed the game and started playing while my husband watched, and man, it's like something was just weird in that room all of a sudden.
I didn't deserve to play, he said. Mostly because of the fact that I'd never touched a Diablo game in my life. Does that really compute? I'm not sure. I offered him my computer and told him about that last open beta push before the game's release, but I don't know if he ever went for it.
In any case, we finally made it to release night, and after his late-night gym excursion, which could bring him home well after midnight most nights at the time, we booted up, avoided error messages (perhaps due to blessings from Deckard Cain himself), and went for it.
I made my gal a Demon Hunter named Ariadne (named after my similarly-classed WoW toon), he got started with a Barbarian, and off we went.
Since I'd already done all of this before, I was directing things pretty well, but trying not to be too overbearing about it. It was, in my opinion, so, so cute to see my husband so excited about exploring New Tristram. We went on for about an hour, and then it happened.
He let me die.
In co-op, enemies scale with you and the size of your group. When I'd played before, there wasn't much of a problem (with the exception of that damn Skeleton King) because my enemies were scaled for a single-player game.
So, here we are, fighting our way through the very beginning of Act I and we separate and all of a sudden I manage to aggro everything in a pretty large radius and I don't know how that happened and they're attacking and oh my god sweetie I don't wanna die hey can you help me they're killing me um seriously can you help because I can't get range and I'm mostly good for range attacks and... dead.
He let me die. In a room where we would often simultaneously play our respective MMOs with chairs sitting literally next to one another and desks that were touching, he let me die.
With me verbally asking for help, he still let me die.
Yes, it's just a game. Yes, I could come right back to life and keep going (and I did). But I still cried that night before I went to bed because he. Let. Me. Die.
Yes, he was wearing headphones, but he heard me. I confirmed as much later, when we were done for the night. Oh, "it's just how you play," he said. Oh, so it was normal to ignore your partner. It's just "normal" to not even deviate from your loot-grabbing activities to save your wife from monsters. I gotcha. (Except everyone I've ever told this story to who has any Diablo experience is always as shocked as I was.)
I guess it's too much to expect "‘til death do you part" to extend to the virtual world, to avatars that aren't even programmed to express the sentiments behind such vows.
While Ariadne came back again, prepared to handle the onslaught alone, part of me didn't. We were over. Really over, and nothing could save us. It wasn't until after this moment, though, that I really accepted that as fact. It wasn't just that He Let Me Die, it's that he was so nonchalant about it, even while tears ran down my face.
I left our home the next week. I've spent the majority of this year in the kind of depression that you really only seem to get after someone very close to you dies and there's nothing left to take its place. Once I left, things got better, but I've really only been replacing one kind of sad with another.
There is a spark in my life, thankfully. If there wasn't, I probably wouldn't have made it to today, to be honest. I have a boyfriend now (and I've had him for over a year now, so you do that math—I'm a cheating cheater (my husband had been, too), and while that isn't the only thing that made us fall to pieces, it certainly is among the reasons).
I'm not like Patricia Hernandez, who wrote not too long ago that she just plain doesn't list gaming as a thing she's into on her OkCupid profile anymore. It's there, it's something I'm open to talking about, but if you're creepy as hell about it, I'm just going to ignore you. My guy... he's not a gamer. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. He's pretty "meh" about most games these days, despite still fitting in the occasional Age of Empires game (and this is the very first version of the game). He has a Wii, but who doesn't? The thing's ubiquitous.
So, okay. He doesn't play a lot of games. That's fine. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. But when we first started getting a little more serious, or at least as serious as an online long-distance relationship can get while you're still married, he did mention having a copy of Portal 2. This, by the way, was the best thing ever.
I'm a Portal maniac. I love GLaDOS' acerbic humor more than almost any game character as a whole. She may be what amounts to a sentient operating system, but still, my point stands. Best character. Oh, and the part of Portal where you play with portals is pretty good, too.
So I knew Portal 2 pretty well by this point. Hell, after my town was flattened by a tornado and I used the game as a bit of a way to return normalcy to my life, I wrote to the game's co-writer, Erik Wolpaw, to thank him. (His response was to say thank you, "but you didn't actually say the game was any good." For the record, sir, it's excellent.) I had been through the co-op campaign with someone else, but I didn't know it like the back of my hand yet.
So it was only natural that I bugged him to play it with me. After a lot of IMs, he finally installed the game and it was on. Part of the beauty of online play is that despite having about 1,300 miles between us at the time, it only felt like mere inches.
We stumbled, together, through it again. What struck me most was the fact that this time, it felt truly cooperative. My first partner, to whom I'd lost my co-op virginity (gasp!) was smart enough and well-versed in game design, so if we were stuck, he almost always figured it out. When I tried to play with my husband, it fizzled out after about a half-hour, because the portal mechanic just isn't his thing. I get that. (Sort of.) Also, I don't think he liked taking too many directions from me. (It's possible that this theme may have existed for a while.)
You know, he and I hadn't even met in person yet. But here we were, handing off edgeless cubes and hitting buttons and being willing to try things even if they don't work. I was able to actually teach him some things about the game—no, you can't carry things through the emancipation grids—and, as a bonus, the game did feature voice chat. So it was a fantastic Skype replacement, too.
Playing with him just felt right. I don't know how else to explain it. Maybe I should just say it was like having the knowledge that there's someone out there in the universe who just understands you. Maybe this means more to me as a woman, but if things weren't clear, he would wait for me to explain them and ask questions until he completely understood whatever task was at hand. Like, oh my god. Dream guy.
It wasn't long after that first play session before he decided to ask me something. This something was prefaced as a "weird" something, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.
He wanted to know if I would have his children.
And perhaps this sounds stupid, or like an uninformed product of lust and at-the-time completely unfulfilled sexual tension, but I... uh, I said yes.
I said yes not just because I love him, but because while we were playing, I literally had the thought, "Huh, this feels like real teamwork. I honestly think I could have kids with this guy if this is how well we interact."
It'll be quite a while before I have to live up to any of that, sure. That is, if both us as a couple and the plans for everything that happens before kids shake out. But over time, I've felt like a game—a silly game about screwing with physics—is really a better litmus test for relationships, having children with someone, and other serious endeavors than anything else I've encountered (you know, aside from actually doing any of these things). It's puzzling, challenging, and occasionally you just want to throw up your hands and give up. All of that sounds like parenthood to me. Except for the part of parenthood where you don't get to sleep. I hear that's a thing.
Ultimately, I think we can learn something about ourselves and our relationships with others when we take the time to play with other people instead of against them. Maybe you don't always like what you see, sure, but it's worth the effort. How's that competitive personality going to work out with another person? Are you the sort who gives up control too easily on a shared screen? Does that translate to you giving up control in your life? It's something to examine, for sure.
As for me, well... I'm ready to learn some more about the people I love. Just as long as it doesn't involve Diablo III. That one still hurts a little.
Tiffany Claiborne is the former news editor at GamingAngels.com. You can reach her on Twitter at @kweenie, or by email at tiffanydaniellec@gmail.com.
Supremely talented custom toy builder Jin Saotome is back with another masterpiece, this time featuring the Half-Life series' most sharply-dressed bad guy, the headcrab zombie.
Standing 7" tall, the headcrab comes off to reveal a zombified skull inside. He's also got a busted-open chest and some great blood detail.
The good news? He's for sale! The bad news? He's up on eBay, so the bids might get a little out of control.
Custom HEADCRAB ZOMBIE Half Life 2 [eBay, via Gamesniped]
Well, file this USB Portal turret under "Things you can get me for Christmas that I'll only use once but will still totally love."
You can buy one for the Portal fan in your life (or for yourself) for $40 at Thinkgeek.
(Via John Davison)
