A journey for vengeance takes one man down a wild path that he can't overcome on his own.
He needs to be trained. In the ways of the...Fruit Ninja? Why a Fruit Ninja? Because think of all the incredible puns you can be making, that's why!
You laugh now, but you'd probably be quite the killer ninja if you could slice fruit up the way creator Justin from binxfilms does in this fan-made film trailer.
After two years of playing console ports with virtual control pads on my iPhone, I think I'm starting to grasp the future of team sports video games on mobile devices. And it is nothing like what I play in my living room.
It's more like what I expect to play on Facebook, and Big Win Hockey, though it is a little more fully featured than that, is still a free-to-play, pay-to-really-play management simulation focused more on outside-the-lines choice than gameday action.
In it, you'll manage a team of players performing under a limited contract, similar to the forced turnover in the Ultimate Team modes of Madden, NHL or FIFA. Winning games allows you to purchase packs of cards which contain either more players, power-ups to help you win, or other boosts to keep your team strong. Gameplay is entirely background simulated, though you may watch it in a real-time representation if you wish. There's nothing to control, you're just gazing down at your team from the skybox.
The path is simple: Winning games acquires more currency which makes you a better team to win more games. The incentive to do so is limited only by your ego and your competitiveness. And your team's energy. You can only play so many games in a certain span of time—I think I played about a dozen after picking up the game, then had to wait 10 minutes in between games as my team's "energy" bar refilled. This, probably more than anything else, is why Big Win Hockey feels like a Facebook game.
It's where we are headed, however. Look at Gridiron Heroes, the so-called Tecmo Bowl MMO that recently got backing to build a Facebook game. Its basic construction sounds a lot like Big Win Hockey's—assemble a team, implement broad strategic choices before a game, lay those cards against another opponent's ratings, and hope for the best. You can watch a full match of Big Win Hockey (three periods takes about five minutes) or just skip to the end and see if you won and how much loot you got, plowing those proceeds back into your team. And those choices are the real gameplay here.
The sales of and reaction to mobile ports of console staples like Madden and NBA 2K show that this platform prizes simplicity and choice over action and depth when it comes to sports. The tradeoff is that, while you can get the base application for free, in the end you must pay to really play.
Sure, he's a founding member of the Justice League, but does the Justice League have a Hollywood blockbuster film in theaters? If there's one thing Bruce Wayne knows, it's where the money's at. Too bad he doesn't know Instagram.
Boo Ya Pictures' latest Avengers short raises some compelling questions about the whole Marvel / DC Comics relationship. For instance, in the rare instances when the two continuities have crossed over, Batman is always pit against Captain America instead of Iron Man, I get the whole wholesome versus dark thing, but wouldn't it be great to see two ridiculously wealthy playboys beating the tar out of each other?
I suppose it's a moot point now, stupid Instagram.
Amazon.com is celebrating Star Wars Day with a day of deals on saga swag, including Star Wars: The Old Republic, Razer's The Old Republic gaming mouse, and tons of collectible crap. Go look. [Amazon]
We've seen lots of Portal cakes floating around the Internet. Usually with expected taglines of "the cake is a lie."
But this cake is absolutely exceptional, and it's certainly not a lie. It's not often you find the famous Portal cake caught in the never-ending bounce between portals, a fun activity for both baked goods and quirky robots.
If you look closely you can see that the portals themselves are made out of what looks like LED lighting. That part is certainly not edible. Don't eat that part.
Given recent sales trends, Nintendo probably isn't that worried about the PlayStation Vita posing any kind of a threat to their own 3DS. But that doesn't mean that haven't thought about Sony's device.
Over at Edge, an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto has the Nintendo game design legend praising the specs of the Vita but also finding fault with the device's launch so far:
"It's obviously a very hi-spec machine, and you can do lots of things with it… But I don't really see the combination of software and hardware that really makes a very strong product."
To be fair, he also says that the 3DS faced similar challenges at its debut:
"When we launched the 3DS hardware we didn't have Super Mario 3D Land, we didn't have Mario Kart 7, we didn't have Kid Icarus: Uprising. We were striving to have all of these ready for the launch, but we weren't able to deliver them at that time. We were kind of hoping that people would, nevertheless, buy into the product, find 3DS hardware promising, but looking back we have to say we realise the key software was missing when we launched the hardware."
That last bit speaks to the kind of following that Nintendo's built up over its decades of handheld gaming dominance. A chunk of their constituency is will to invest in new hardware with the understanding that the games—usually the iconic first-party franchises—will come. Sony hasn't built that kind of faith in the handheld market yet and it's clearly hurting them.
The much-hyped Ridley Scott movie Prometheus isn't the only big Aliens-related project that might change the way we think of one of sci-fi's best series.
The next Aliens video game counts. It's canon. And the people who are making it think it might finally solve some key mysteries in the film—and even make the films a bit better.
"It's all connected together," Randy Pitchford, head of Gearbox Software said to me recently, as we sat down in a convention hall in Boston to chat about Aliens: Colonial Marines, the big new game his team has been working on for several years.
Just before we chatted, another Gearbox developer had played an early part of Colonial Marines in front of me, blowing my mind a bit as he controlled a post-Aliens space Marine boarding the massive Sulaco. You might remember that ship from Aliens as the final battleground between an angry alien queen and a furious, mech-driving Ellen Ripley. The Marine was a member of a battalion that will be featured in the new game. He's attached to a recovery crew that links their ship to that huge, famous ship, the USS Sulaco. The Sulaco is floating in space above LV426, the planetoid on which much of James Cameron's Aliens and its predecessor, Ridley Scott's Alien, occurred.
The Marine heads into the loading bay, where the bottom half of the android Bishop lies, last seen when the alien queen ripped him apart at the end of Aliens. In this early bit, our Marine chats with some of the other recovery personnel in the bay. He heads past some monitors that just might hold hints to what really happened—what moviegoers were never told—to Ripley, Hicks and Newt between Aliens and Alien3. That's still a big question. What did happen on the Sulaco between the movie that ended with those three in cryo sleep and the next, which left two of them dead and Ripley, impregnated by Alien, ejected from the Sulaco onto the prison planet of Fury 161?
The Prometheus Connection Trailers for Ridley Scott's Prometheus movie have shown what appears to be the Derelict ship from Alien but the filmmaker has been cagey about how neatly his new movie fits into Alien lore. "On the one hand, you can feel the DNA of the Aliens franchise in it," Pitchford said of the upcoming movie. "If you ask Ridley, he'll tell you he's certainly borrowed things from the universe… He's not developing it as true canon. There are some inconsistencies that he accepted in order for his film to be the good story he wanted to tell there. To the extent that it is part of the Aliens universe, it's prequel material. We're sequel material. Having said that, the endpoint of our adventure is the Derelict which is also the starting point on LV-426 with the Space Jockeys. There is a bit of a link there."
"To make the sequel to Aliens as a video game was our prerequisite," Pitchford told me, grinning. And the studio behind the movies, 20th Century Fox, obliged. "The commitment they made was, 'Yes borrow the franchise for the purpose of doing the next story in the succession of those storylines.'"
While Pitchford stresses that his team "wants to tell a new story" and won't re-tell the films, he can't help but have the game intersect. We will board the Sulaco; we will be joined by a synthetic who was the same model as Bishop and will therefore look like and be voiced by Bishop actor Lance Henriksen; we will head down to LV426; we will check out the ruins of ruins of Hadley's Hope, the human colony set up by the Weyland-Yutani corporation after the first Alien and whose residents were annihilated by the aliens just before Aliens begins. Those aliens came from the mysterious Derelict, the space-ship seemingly driven by something called the Space Jockey and filled with alien eggs, as seen in Alien.
"We don't treat the fan-service as the point," Pitchford said. "It's not the center of it, but it's there." It's there because Aliens: Colonial Marines really does sound like the logical tale of what would happen next. It's a shooter but it is seemingly also going to be a detective story.
How it all fits together
Pitchford and his team have a very good grasp on Alien series lore. They've absorbed the films, spoken to Ridley Scott, discovered back-stories that didn't make it into the films and identified what's canonical. They know What Happened and that helped them shape their story.
Here's Pitchford, with some asides from me, walking me through the fiction of Aliens and Alien3 while zeroing in on the mysteries he hopes to help players solve with the new game.
"At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop go to sleep and are presumably going home. At the beginning of Alien3 something happened. We never knew what or why. But something caused them to be ejected from the Sulaco and they ended up on this prison planet.
"The Sulaco is there at the prison planet." [Note from Stephen: Right? It's definitely not over LV426, which is where it appears to be in the start of Colonial Marines. Logically, it'd be near the planet it ejected Ripley onto.]
"Everything that Ripley dealt with on the prison planet ends with her martyring herself as Weyland-Yutani is trying to collect the specimen." [Note from Stephen: That's the end of Alien3, of course.]
"Weyland-Yutani actually … boarded the Sulaco." [Note from Stephen: I did not know this, but it makes sense. Menacing corporation that sets up Hadley's Hope and wants to retrieve alien queen embryo would obviously track down the Sulaco and search it.]
No Easy Bug-Hunt Video games tend to have higher body counts than even the most violent movies, which relegates many movie-related bad guys in games to cannon fodder. But Gearbox doesn't want to turn the fearsome xenomorphs of Alien and Alien3 into easily-swattable bugs. "We're going to need to defeat some things but we are also going to need to feel the deadliness of them," Pitchford said. "The actual game is pretty lethal. The skill test is anticipating or reacting. If you are good at anticipating and reacting you will be killing lots of xenos and you will be effective at it. You have the tools to do it. But when they get you, they frickin' get you. You'll die. You'll die a lot. I don't know if we're as far as Dark Souls. We're still tuning it, but it's going to be pretty brutal."
"Something happened before that Ripley doesn't know about that led to the ejection [from the Sulaco.]. If Weyland-Yutani can't get the specimen from Ripley, and they are on the ship, what would their next step be? It would be to turn the ship around and go back to the source, LV426.
"So the Sulaco gets back to LV426. Now, [in the game], we're part of the contingent that's the rescue crew. Remember, Ripley asks how long before we're overdue can we expect a rescue and Hicks says 17 days. And Hudson says something like, ‘17 days? We're not going to last 17 hours, man.' That creates the opening for the ship that's going to go deal with the fact that something happened. Now the Sulaco is reported destroyed. They didn't send it in 17 days, but they are going to investigate. 17 weeks later, Weyland-Yutani has had plenty of time on LV426.
"Now, LV426 is actually a moon around a ring planet. It's actually not a planet itself. But it's a big one. It's a shake-n-bake colony, so there's a bit of an atmosphere. The atmosphere processor blew [Note from Stephen: during Aliens]. That is about 3 kilometers away is where Hadley's Hope is, and it's taken a lot of damage because that was about a 40 megaton blast. About 1000 kilometers away from that is where the derelict was. That's the big ship that had all the eggs in Alien.
In this deleted scene from Aliens, a family of colonists from Hadley's Hope inspects the Derelict crash site and makes first, terrible contact with the aliens. We'll be heading out there in the new game.
"We know where Alien begins, there's a Derelict on this alien planet and we also know from Aliens that, when they finally found Ripley and Burke sent a report, that got the colonists out to see what is this. [They were told:] ‘Go to this grid point, see what's there.' And that's when they stumbled into the eggs and that's when Hadley's Hope was taken over."
I thought I knew the movies well, but much of what Pitchford told me here went over my head the first time. Hadley's Hope? That was were Newt lived, right? (Right.) The Derelict? We never really saw much of that, just glimpses, right? (Right.) But the more I thought about it all, the more I looked over what Pitchford told me, the more neatly it all clicked together.
Trailer for Gearsbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines which is slated for a late 2012 release on the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii U
"One of the things we're really proud about is that there were some things that fans like us always believed were inconsistencies between Alien3 and Aliens," Pitchford said, "But as we dig into it, as we work with filmmakers and kind of understand it all and think about it from a logic problem point of view, there is actually a truth there that makes more sense. When we are able to use it to stitch it together, Alien3 is actually a better movie."
This is a sequel that matters. That's clear. Hopefully, it is one worthy of the films it ties together.
Welcome to Kotaku's official forum, known affectionately as Talk Amongst Yourselves. This is the place where we gather on a daily basis to discuss all things video game and existential. Want to talk about new games, old games, games that aren't even out yet? Knock yourselves out!
The well-off gentleman of the 17th century gets turned into Mario's evil doppelganger, thanks to InvadingDuck . Don't know how Wario got all that bread and gold but it must have involved a lot of smooth moves. Get it? (Sorry.)
You can do funny things with pictures, right? Want everyone on this fine web forum to see? Here's what you do. Post your masterpieces in the #TAYpics thread. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of Talk Amongst Yourselves glory. Grab the base image here. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of TAY glory. The best ones will be featured in future installments of Talk Amongst Yourselves.
After two years of playing console ports with virtual control pads on my iPhone, I think I'm starting to grasp the future of team sports video games on mobile devices. And it is nothing like what I play in my living room.
Given recent sales trends, Nintendo probably isn't that worried about the PlayStation Vita posing any kind of a threat to their own 3DS. But that doesn't mean that haven't thought about Sony's device.
"At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop go to sleep and are presumably going home. At the beginning of Alien3 something happened. We never knew what or why. But something caused them to be ejected from the Sulaco and they ended up on this prison planet.
Welcome to Kotaku's official forum, known affectionately as Talk Amongst Yourselves. This is the place where we gather on a daily basis to discuss all things video game and existential. Want to talk about new games, old games, games that aren't even out yet? Knock yourselves out!
