Your Source For All Things Gaming
Teaser Video for PS4 Console Release, Eyes Will Be Squinted
Today Sony released a teaser video to give us a “look” at their upcoming PS4 console. And I use quotations here to emphasize how ridiculous it is to try and and decipher the blurred images and quick cuts of black plastic into something that might be called a console.
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Dawngate, New MOBA from EA, Gets Video
Ever since Warcraft started to become popular, the MOBA genre has been growing, hitting a massive explosion in recent years with the advent of the “free-to-play” era of games. From the megahits like League of Legends and DOTA, all the way down to games like this, Dawngate, an upcoming MOBA being published by EA, possibly just to capitalize on the current trends in the industry.
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Review - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
Back when this game was first announced, and was still in development under the moniker of Metal Gear Solid: Rising, the idea of playing a game as the more badass incarnation of Metal Gear Solid 4 was quite tantalizing. And the slicing mechanic that I was able to first experience when I played Afro Samurai got me even more excited. But then it just disappeared. I wondered if it would ever come out, much like many other people were doing. The cycles of grief came and when, and then I forgot about it for a long time, until word came down the grapevine that the name was being changed into the current, and oft insulted Revengeance and the development was being shifted over to the very talented team over at Platinum Games.
This got me ready to go again, as I had loved both Bayonetta and Vanquish to death and the idea of the cyber ninja being handed over to those folks who made smooth gameplay their calling card left me buzzing with excitement.
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Ea Wins Second 'Worst Company in America Poll'
This is the first time in the 8 year running of the poll that a contender has managed to rack up two “Golden Poos”, let alone consecutively.
And while the business practices of EA might not be totally agreeable, saying that they are the worst company in America because of micro transactions, or bad DLC practices cries of entitlement and is tinted with ridiculousness, especially when pitted against entities like Bank of America.
Splinter Cell Blacklist Will Come to Wii U
This does not come as too much of a surprise, as the game has been rumored to be in development for the Wii U after it appeared on multiple developer CVs and retailer websites, but this is the first official confirmation.
Nintendo said, “Showcasing enhanced game-play features using the Wii U GamePad controller, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist allows players to operate innovative gadgets, take out enemies and move through the environment, and intuitively switch between weapons, among other features. The GamePad touch screen, along with motion-based inputs, are sure to immerse fans and gamers alike in this thrilling modern-day adventure.”
There Will Be No Paid Power-Ups In iOS XCOM
Speaking to IGN, he said “Oh God, please… no. I’m not sure I would be able to sleep at night. My food would taste like ashes in my mouth.” So it sounds like there will not be these kinds of micro transactions within the game.
The game is a port of the full console and PC versions, just optimized for smaller mobile devices. It comes pack with some nifty motion controls, and they look to be able to do some pretty interesting things for another play through.
There has not yet been any word either on pricing for the game or if the game would ever make the jump over to the Android platform, but we are sure that sometime within the next couple of months more details will be revealed.
Review - Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel
When I think of an Army of Two game, I am not necessarily thinking of some great gaming masterpiece put together by the gods of the third person shooter. In fact, it is much more likely that I am thinking of a less than serious brofest through enemy territory with a huge amount of unlockable and upgradable guns and some really fun co-operative play. So it is fair to say that when I started to play The Devil's Cartel, that was what I was expecting to get.
Unfortunately, this game did not really feel like an Army of Two game to me at all, in fact it felt like but a shadowy imitation of the very fun shooter that used to bear that name. Sure there was co-operative play, and sure there were some guns that you could upgrade, but the game felt like a pale image of what it used to be and that makes me sad, as I had a whole hell of a lot of fun playing those games with my friends.
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Papo & Yo is Available for PC Pre-Order
Even though Papo & Yo has been talked about for several months, and it aims at a goal a little more lofty than simple fun gameplay, you now have an incentive to pre-order the game. You can pre-order the PC version of the game on one of several different download stores, like Desura, Amazon, Steam, or more, with a 10% discount to $13.50 through April 17.
And if you take the leap and purchase the game through any of these places before it is released on April 18, you will also get a free copy of the soundtrack, a $5.99 value when it is available for purchase.
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Microsoft Files for Trademark on 'Glacier Blast'
Microsoft recently filed for a trademark for the name “Glacier Blast” with the US Patent and Trademark Office under the classification of game software. This goes hand in hand with the fact that Microsoft registered the domain glacierblastgame.com in late March, although that URL currently directs the user to a Bing search.
With that evidence, it doesn’t take much thought to guess that this will be an upcoming game for either the Xbox 360, or more likely, the next Xbox, possibly even a launch title for the system. We will just have to wait until E3 to find out what it means.
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D To Include Lower Difficulty and New Content
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, the upcoming 3DS remake will have several new features that will hopefully make the game more attractive to its new target audience. Included with that is local co-op and an easier mode that will give your characters three hearts instead of the normal two, although Nintendo has not yet elaborated on the specifications of the multiplayer.
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Mega Man 1 Soundtrack Now Available for Purchase
If you have been aching to own the digital version of the OST for the original NES Mega Man for the last 25 years, then you have to wait no longer for Capcom has taken the first step in an effort to make all of the original NES Mega Man soundtracks “legitimately available in the West.”
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Lego Batman 2 Wii U Given Launch Date
Before now, we knew roughly what time Lego Batman 2 would hit store shelves for the Nintendo Wii U. It was coming this spring, we just din’t know the date. But thanks to some new listings on Amazon, Gamestop, and Best Buy, the game will be out for the Wii U on May 21.
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Character
To continue a series that we started many a moon ago, but abandoned due to extraneous commitments, the staff here at Games Cave would like to extend a hearty apology along with the release of this iteration in the What it Does series. Unfortunately, due to an increasingly demanding series of commitments, we have not been able to pay as much attention to the site as we would like. But now we would like to change that for the better, and to do that, we are going to try to talk about how the characters that a game has can affect the game, both positively and negatively, in both their writing and design.
The last time we looked at a gameplay mechanic, we talked about dialogue and how very important it is to the immersion that a player feels while interacting with a game and characters. But no matter how well written the dialogue is, without a good cast of characters to delver those lines, they will still fall flat and fail to bring the player into the game. And the most common failing that a studio encounters when putting a character into a game is that they rely too heavily on stereotypes without acknowledging this fact.
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An Apology
We started this site to be able to talk about the things that we love to the people that share our common interests. We wanted to stand on our own soapbox, no matter how small it was, and shout out to the world what we thought about different things within the video game world. But just when it started to pick up a little bit, and when we started to get a few people coming back to us, we walked away from that soap box for a while, leaving you just standing there.
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Games As Porn
Now, before we start to explore concept a little bit more, I just want to justify it a little bit. I am referring to the majority of large, AAA games that the majority of consumers are talking about when they refer to "video games". Games like Call of Duty, God of War, Gears of War, or Street Fighter. Just humor my suggestions a little bit and entertain a tiny amount of suspension of disbelief for me.
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Shroud of the Avatar Grabs Over $1.9 Million on Kickstarter
This morning, the new fantasy RPG game that Richard Garriott, Lord British of Ultima fame, is planning on making ended its run on Kickstarter. Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues pulled in $1,919,275 in funding from 22, 322 different backers, making it another in a long line of successfully funded video games on the site.
The game aims to be another project like his very famous Ultima series and the Kickstarter page claims “to tell a story even more compelling than Ultimas IV-VII, create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII, develop deep rich multi-player capabilities beyond combat akin to Ultima Online, and offer a bold new approach to integrate them with ‘Selective Multi-Player’ ”.
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Best Buy Has Arkham City Wii U, Far Cry 3, AC 3, and Black Ops 2 on Sale
This week at Best Buy, if you somehow already haven’t got your hands on this game, you can pick up a copy of Batman Arkham City: Armored Edition for the WIi U for a measly $20. And if that somehow doesn’t satisfy you, you can also get the phenomenal Far Cry 3 for PS 3 or Xbox 360 for $30, and Assassin’s Creed 3 at the same price. Or if you are one of the few people that doesn’t yet own Black Ops 2, you can get a copy of that for PC, PS 3, or Xbox 360 for $40.
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Aliens: Colonial Marines Wii U Port Canceled
In a move that should surprise no one after the dismal response to the recent release of Aliens: Colonial Marines, Sega has told Gamespot that they have canceled their work on the Wii U version of the game.
The developer said, "Sega can confirm that the Wii U sku of Aliens: Colonial Marines is no longer in development," Considering that the multi platform version of the game is sitting at around a 45 on Metacritic, and the Wii U version of the game was slated to come out in march, Sega’s cancellation of the project comes as no surprise.
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New America's Army Will Launch this Year, Now Drafting Beta Testers
The next game in the America’s Army series will be launching this year, as the United States Army has announced on its Facebook page. And if you are interested in being able to play the game before it comes out, the developers are taking applications to become a beta tester.
The game will be titled America’s Army: Proving Grounds, and it is just another iteration in the series that first launched in July of 2002 as a free PC only FPS/Recruiting tool, with the most recent update, America’s Army 3 coming out in the summer of 2009.
Sega Studios Australia to be Shut Down Later This Year
As part of the continuing process of restructuring that is going on within Sega, later this year, Sega Studios Australia will be shut down. And while the name might not be recognizable at first, they are the studio responsible for several Total War games and London 2012: The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games.
This news was told to Kotaku via a representative of Sega, and also says that the studio used to be known as Creative Assembly Australia, which might account for some of the difficulty in recognizing it.
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Metal Gear Solid V Officially Revealed
After a very complex run off partial announcements, fake studios, and wispy half ideas for games, Hideo Kojima has decided to finally enlighten us on his master plan and tell us about Metal Gear Solid V. We all remember Ground Zeroes, and the ensuing mess surrounding Moby Dick Studios and The Phantom Pain, which was under control of “Joakim Mogren”. Needless to say, for the last few months, the internet has been in an uproar to try to find out what has been going on.
Joakim could be rearranged to spell Kojima, several members of the Moby Dick team were seen sitting inside of an VIP area intended for Konami staff, the Moby Dick domain name had only been registered two weeks before the announcement, and the title “Metal Gear Solid V” could fit inside of the space above Phantom Pain.
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New Unreal Engine 4 Tech Demo Sneaks In
While at GDC this week, Epic decided to capitalize upon their opportunity and show off a little bit of the muscle behind their new Unreal Engine 4 with the spectacular Infiltrator demo. And apparently this high tech showing is running in real time off of a single off-the-shelf Nvidia GTX 680. And while that may be a bit much for most people, the level of graphical fidelity they manage to squeeze out of it is simply phenomenal.
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Unreal Engine 4 Will Not Support Wii U
Ever since the fourth iteration of the Unreal Engine was announced, there has been speculation to whether or not it will be able to run on the Nintendo Wii U console, but unfortunately for hopeful fans, Epic Games Vice President and Co-Founder, Mike Rein, has said that the latest engine from the company will not support the Wii U. This information was revealed at a recent GDC panel and reported by Kotaku.
He was quoted as saying, “We have Unreal Engine 3 for the Wii U. And Unreal Engine 3 is powering all kinds of amazing games, still lots of games are being made with Unreal Engine 3. We announced today about a new Unreal Engine 3 license. Unreal Engine 3 doesn’t disappear because of Unreal Engine 4.”
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Battlefield 4 is Not Looking At Wii U
According to the General Manager of DICE, Karl-Magnus Troedsson, Battlefield 4 will “release on the platforms that we feel are suitable for the gaming experience that we have.” From this, we can extrapolate that he means those powerhouses of the next generation, the Playstation 4 and Xbox “720”, along with the old standby of the PC. But what does that really mean about the Nintendo Wii U.
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Left 4 Dead - A Love Story
By now, every so-called "Hardcore Gamer" knows where the modern video game came from. Everything we know was spawned from the cultural phenomenon known as Dungeons and Dragons. It introduced us to the concept of the modern role-playing game. It gave us the idea of a persistent character and dungeon crawling epics. From there, the video game scene exploded. CRPGs flourished until the advent of the video arcades, which popularized the quarter crunching games of the eighties and nineties.
But looking at a modern game, it might be hard to see the influence of these early games. But if you dig deeper, you can find these mechanics that have lasted generations. But if you were to look at a game like Left 4 Dead, it might be a little bit harder to find these influences. But deep down, the ember of these ideas still smolders on.
For those of you who somehow have not heard of the phenomenon that is known as Left 4 Dead, it isn't exactly the most plot driven game. Instead it is a nonstop fest of bullets and bodies as you try and fight off the hordes of the undead trying to feast upon the avatar of your character.
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