Author: Thomas Ortsik

Founder and Kinda-Editor-In-Chief at Twinstiq.
Also known as Dr. Strangethumb

Uncharted 4 isn’t coming out this year

Neil Druckmann just made a post over on PSBlog stating, definitively, that Uncharted 4 will come out next spring. He's aware that "the extra wait will be excruciating". While I don't have too much to add to the matter, I can't say that this surprised me at all. The timing isn't a coincidence either. The Order didn't exactly set the world on fire and with so many games coming out half-cocked last fall, it is safe to say that Naughty Dog isn't willing to leave anything to chance and are making their case for more time early (rather than waiting). Good for you Sony and Naughty Dog. The newest industry trend is the delay (j/k).

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Source: PSBlog

Xbox Deals With Gold: 10th – 16th March 2015

This week, Xbox Deals With Gold has a smattering of discounts for you. First up, Murdered: Soul Suspect is on sale for both Xbox One and Xbox 360. The discount is 67% on the former and 75% on the latter. The other One games on sale this week include Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, also at 67% off, and Ryse and Dragon Age: Inquisition which are both marked down to 40% off.

Head past the break to see more of this week's Deals With Gold.

Xbox One
Discount
Xbox 360
Discount

This week also features a separate Xbox 360 Publisher Sale. The following games have been marked down for that one:

Xbox 360
Discount

If all of these discounts still aren't enough, you can visit Major Nelson's Blog for the complete list of deals.

[Image: Square Enix]

Andrew J Amideo

Tales From The Borderlands Episode 2 Coming March 17th

Telltale Game Studios has announced that the second episode of Tales from the Borderlands will land on Consoles on March 17th. Carrying on immediately after he first episode, it carries on the journey of Ryhs and Fiona. The Ghost of Handome Jack also makes a swift appearance.

If you already own the Season Pass, you can get this completely free. If not, you will have to pay $4.99 / €4.99 / £3.99. There are still three more episodes after this one. At the current rate, it isn't likely to be complete before the summer.

Take a look at the trailer after the jump.

Steam Machines set to arrive in November, 2015

If you're not sure of which console to buy, because they're all trying to sell you games at 60 frames per second, perhaps it's time to consider another route? Maybe you should be putting a PC into your living room instead.

Valve certainly have banked on this particular idea, with the concept of the Steam Machine moving along at a [for Valve] rather brisk pace. You might be able to pick one up as soon as November, 2015.

The Valve Store page now includes listings for Steam Machines that ought to debut then. Some of the prices are pretty reasonable [$400 or so] while others are downright crazy [$5000].

Given these prices, though? You're probably better off just custom-buying your own machine.

Feel free to follow along past the break for the list of potential third party vendors:

The three big names throwing their hats into the ring are, naturally, Alienware, Asus and Gigabyte, while others have signed up to make some beautiful looking machines.  Here's the list with links to each store page:

Alienware - $479+
Alternate - $1099 - $1999
Asus - $699+
Digital Storm - $699
Falcon Northwest - $1999 - $4999 [!]Gigabyte - $599
iBuyPower - $459
Maingear - $849
Material.net - $899
Next - $799 - $1299
Origin - $899 - $4999 [!]Scan - $999 - $1299
Syber - $499 - $1399
Webhallen - $949
Zotac - $999

Far Cry 4 teams up with Reinhold Messner and visits the “Valley of the Yetis”

The new DLC for Far Cry 4, which gets released today for Xbox One/PC and tomorrow for PS4, puts you again into the shoes of Ajay Ghalilulelo, who crashes with his helicopter on top of the Himalayas (Zzz).
You will have to capture a camp (Zzzz), complete side quests during the day (Zzzzzz) which allow you to upgrade said camp (Zzz…Wait, what?) and defend it against waves of enemies at night (oh, so it’s every survival game since Minecraft…)


There are some legends, some secrets, a cult yadda yadda yadda…AND ACTUAL MOTHERHUGGING YETIS! Yes, YETIS! DLC of the year!

Read the full press release after the jump.
London, UK — March 9, 2015 — Ubisoft announced that Valley of the Yetis, the new add-on content for the award-winning shooter, Far Cry 4, will be released tomorrow, March 10, 2015 on Xbox Live for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PC, and on March 11 on PlayStation Network for the PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment systems.

Players have to explore and survive a valley on top of the Himalayas in Kyrat after Ajay’s helicopter crashes and leaves him stranded on a perilous ridge. In order to stay alive, players must capture a camp for shelter and guard it from a mysterious cult. But even if you successful against the cult, they must keep a look out for the fabled and dangerous yetis that populate the territory.

The Valley of the Yetis DLC includes:

  • A New Open World: Explore and survive a new environment in Kyrat. The beautiful and majestic top of the Himalayas await.
  • Defend and Upgrade Your Camp: Capture an enemy relay station to use as a safe house. Players will need to fortify the camp by completing side quests during the day, and defend it from waves of attackers at night.
  • Uncover the mystery: A mysterious cult inhabits this valley and now hides a secret based on ancient legends. Discover the secret behind the cult of The Awakened Ones and survive the yetis.


Valley of the Yetis is available as part of the Far Cry 4 Season Pass or can be purchased separately. The Season Pass includes Valley of the Yetis as well as The Syringe, Escape from Durgesh Prison, the Hurk Deluxe Pack and Overrun.

The Far Cry 4 Season Pass is available from PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, uPlay, Game, Amazon, and selected games retailers.

PSA: Club Nintendo still closing, last day to add coins is March 31 

Just in case you forgot (much like I did), you will only be able to obtain Club Nintendo coins until March 31. That's the end of this month. If you are like me, you have lots of surveys left to take. Once that is out of the way, you will have until June 30th to actually trade them in for a selection of eShop titles and a few nifty physical goodies. Those in the EU regions, who are used to stars (instead of coins), will be able to register and redeem until September 30th (unlike in the US).

Image: Nintendo

Dying Light, still shining bright in the UK

The new UKIE software chart for the week ending March 7 was released yesterday and it has Dying Light clinging to its first place for another week.
 GTA5 snatches back 2nd (up from 5th) and FIFA 15 also made it back into the Top 3 (up from 6th).
Zombie Army Trilogy debuts on 8 and Saints Row IV Re-Elected/Gat Out Of Hell makes it back into the Top 20 by placing 18th.


On the downward spiral we find Dragon Ball Xenoverse, which dropped to 5th (from 3rd), Evolve, already down to 9, AC Unity barely managed to stay in the Top 20 and The Order? Down to 7 after only 3 Weeks.

The full list after the break.

Opinion:  Some perspective on being an older gamer

Words by Greywolfe

I was born into a world of rotary-dial telephones. Back then, “technology” meant the distinction between having an eight track tape and regular magnetic tape. Vinyl as a means for distributing music was still a going concern and the war between VHS and Betamax was in full swing.

The point I’m really making is, that I have been around the block a handful of times. I have seen different computer standards come and go. I have witnessed the rise of home consoles and I was there when the arcades started to crumble.

I am what you might politely term an “elder gamer.”

My perspective on the hobby might be very different to yours. And I think that’s worth discussing.

In the bad old days, we used to use rotary telephone systems.  This meant that to dial a telephone number, you needed to pick the number and

Hello? Is it me you're looking for?

As you get older, things change

While there are a number of fantastic new games that utilize some very old ideas – Shovel Knight springs readily to mind in this context – a lot of the new games trying to emulate old games aren’t quite the same. For those of us who were there and saw the evolution of computers, we know when – in the example above – Shovel Knight stretches just a little so that it can do things no NES could ever hope to try.

So, technology advances and evolves, but other things are rather different, too. When I was younger, I had more time and less money. So, when I wanted to buy a game, I had to pick which game to get rather carefully. My anticipation levels around a particular release were far higher.

The minute I put down King’s quest III, all I could think about – in terms of gaming – was what new advances King’s Quest IV would bring. I would pour over magazines – a now-outmoded method of gaming news delivery – in search of scraps about that particular game. I would discuss it with my friends. We would make up stories around the game. Things we wanted to see. Things we were hoping would never happen. All of these things are functionally gone.

They’re now discussed on message boards, of course – people trading links about the latest Final Fantasy iteration, or discussing the patch notes of World of Warcraft, but the spinning out of ideas is mostly gone.

So, I didn’t have a lot of money for buying games. This meant that the games I did buy meant a lot. I would play them for hours, because that was my allowance and I was investing it in an entertainment product. And if that entertainment product was a bit iffy, well...it didn’t matter. I’d sent my “hard earned” allowance on it.

In those days, I never had a backlog. Games were such a rarity that I would invariably only buy a handful in a year and those that I bought, i would play endlessly – spending long summer nights trying to work out the riddles in Conquests of Camelot. Or sitting in our empty house as we were moving, desperately trying to get my spells to the level cap of two hundred points in Quest for Glory 2.

Now, I have a backlog that I could never hope to finish in my lifetime – games that I have picked up on either a whim, or old-standing recommendation that I never played through in the before-times. I own every Police Quest for the sake of completeness, but refuse to play past the third game. That’s one item on my great, big checklist that will never be marked off, because the shift in tone from the third to the fourth game never got me interested enough to even play it past the first ten or so minutes.
Information overload is a common problem in a lot of jobs.  It's also a problem in entertainment, where - often, there's just too much reporting happening about a single product, making buyers /well/ aware of what they're getting into before they even get it home.

There are so many games to play now...which do I even choose?

Information Overload

One of the most interesting things about the modern era is the idea that there’s almost too much information about a game before it even hits store shelves. So much so, in fact that bullet points have started to have no meaning at all. Why are you trying to sell me on your game by telling me it runs at 60 frames per second? That's not a feature. That’s better technology.

Gaffes like this aside, in the past, there were only rather controlled press releases – and games publications that were rather tied to the publishers.

This is – most assuredly – not the case now. There are people playing games on the internet that you can watch, folks who are offering their opinions on blogs [like this one], connected friends on all sorts of systems that can share gaming recommendations. In short, there are lots of ways of getting your gaming news – which – to some extent, makes figuring out what to buy even harder. The news is now so overwhelming and about so many different topics that sorting the wheat from the chaff is increasingly more problematic.
Butterflies are great signifiers of change.  They start off as one thing and end up another - humans are the same.

In the end, everyone changes.

You are not the same person

But the biggest difference as an older gamer is that you are not the same person. The same motivators don’t drive you.  When I was a lot younger, I wanted to see what silly death would befall Roger Wilco [from Space Quest] next. This was one of those guiding principles of that series: Always make the deaths be funny – and – certainly – they are funny, but I want more from my games, now.

I want my games to tell engaging stories. I want to care about the characters. I want to have mechanics that help the story. I want to have different, unique protagonists. I want to have so many things that so many games aren’t doing. Does this make me less of a gamer? Not really, no. It just makes me a gamer in search of more substance to my games.

Do I not want there to be games like Mario Kart anymore? Or would I want Diablo to no longer exist? I think those types of games are absolutely important, but I want more experiences. I want more “To the Moon” – stories that tell themselves through games. I want more “Fez” where the mechanics mean a great deal to the game, where the game is more than just the zeroes and ones that exist on the screen. I want more stylistically intriguing games like “Child of Light.” Or games that imply a story like “Journey.”

All of these games make me feel things that go beyond “this is a fantastic game because it controls so well.” And I expect that – as I grow older, I will want even more meaning to come in the form of game-based stories. This is such a unique medium and it is being so under served.


Images courtesy of Pixabay
http://pixabay.com/

Freedom Planet Coming To Liberate the Wii U

Retro indie platformer Freedom Planet has been announced for release on the Wii U. "...Sometime near the end of the year", according to creator Stephen DiDuro's twitter account.

Freedom Planet started out as a fan tribute to the Sonic the Hedgehog games of the Sega Genesis. It later evolved into its own unique, but strongly influenced property. DiDuro's development studio, GalaxyTrail, released the game last year following a successful Kickstarter. It is currently available on GOG, Steam and the Humble Store.

[Image: GalaxyTrail]

Andrew J Amideo

M-M-M-Mo-Mo-Mo-Monster Weekly Webcomic Wrapup

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I recently had a brief conversation on twitter about my first multiplayer gaming love: Arena shooters.

Especially Unreal Tournament saw a non-trivial amount of life-force sapping through my adolescent pores and while the “cool” kids argued whether the puny AWP Sniper in Counter Strike was OP, I was perfectly content with the inclusion of thermonuclear explosions in UT, courtesy of the Redeemer.

One fateful day however, even I succumbed to the siren song of walking slowly, peeking around corners and shooting people with underwhelming projectile weapons, aka. “The Realistic Modern Military Shooter”. Mind you, I am not talking about the philistine kind that Counter Strike embodies.
Sir! No Sir! My treachery goes even deeper.


I am embarrassed to admit it, but yes, I played America’s Army. Why? Hell if know, but it certainly helped that it was free to play, or as we knew it back then: Freeware.

And this is where the circle closes and this little anecdote finally gets to its point:

Unreal Tournament 4 is out. Actually it’s in pre-alpha, but you can play it and you should and it’s free and 12 year old me will finally crawl out of my subconscious and I will be able to enjoy life again to its fullest and people will find peace and the world will unite and we will no longer destroy gaming by fighting over who is destroying gaming and here are some webcomics!


Critical Miss (The Silence)
MGDMT (Five Years of MGDMT)
Ready Soup (Just Saiyan)
Nerd Rage (Longer Than The Namek Saga)
Actiontrip (
Gamers Have Their Own VR)
Dark Legacy Comics (The Unspeakables)