Author: scrooloose

I've been a gamer since a young age, my first experiences were with my old Atari 2600. Nowadays I'm mostly a PC guy but I also play board games when I have the group for it. And I love wrenching on cars besides.

Disney Pulls The Plug On Marvel Heroes

It was announced a couple of days ago now that the free to play Isometric MMO, Marvel Heroes will no longer be supported by Disney as they have "...ended [their] relationship with Gazillion Entertainment...". Of course this quote from Disney doesn't outline any detail toward the situation but does go on to say that Marvel Heroes will "...shut down".

Sad news for those of us who enjoyed the Diablo-esque ARPG for sure but not a huge surprise to those who've kept close tabs on the game its projects. Gazillion have been keeping up with updates and new content related to the newest Marvel movies and TV shows for as long as Marvel Heroes has been around. That support suddenly stopped a short time ago and folks started putting two and two together to make the assumption that there was, at the very least, a serious problem.

In fact servers will shut down on December 31st and in-game purchases are being removed now. That means that for rest of its existence the game will be 100% free to play. R.I.P. Marvel Heroes. You had a decent free to play formula and pretty dang fun game play. I will personally mourn my own Captain Marvel. Together we irradiated and captured countless criminals and villains via her near limitless celestial powers. You will be missed.

Such A Late WRUP

Well, apparently we all have lives or some such and the WRUP got delayed. I've got friends moving away so I was hanging with them. Dr. S. has one of these "girlfriends" I keep hearing about so he was busy. I don't know what Cody was doing but he's got Moviepass now so I bet it had to do with the cinema. Greywolfe might or might not be "gone fishing"...

So I'm here now around 9:30pm rambling about why this WRUP is late. I'm enjoying Wolfenstein 2 quite a bit so far. Except that I can't record it or take screenshots. So if I do write about it I probably won't have much in the way visual aides. The game runs amazing I will say that. Frame rates in the hundreds all the time even on the highest of high settings, of which there are many. Anyway here's what we're playing this weekend. What are you playing?

Greywolfe: i dunno. i _was_ playing a whole bunch of stuff - dream daddy, space quest 5, kyrandia 2 and so on, but right now, my head isn't really in a gaming space, i guess? so i've been terrible and haven't played those at all in a while :P - on the plus side, i can get very distracted by nanowrimo. ;) [write a 50k novel during the month of november.] - if anyone else is doing that, too, good luck :)

Yoda: Dice Masters. Photoshop. Dice Masters. Photoshop. Adobe Illustrator. Linux MultiMedia Studio. And Hopefully a scary time at some point... God damn there's too many things to do lol

Dr. S: stuff on mobile or the switch, because i'm in the middle of nowhere and destiny is out and i want to play destiny not being stuck in the middle of nowhere and life is unfair and WHY NO DESTINY ON THE SWITCH!!!! Oh, right, I won't have internet either, so even Destiny on Switch wouldn't work for me...

Andrew: Probably Costume Quest. I seem to play it right around Halloween every year. Also Resident Evil VII.

Scrooloose: Divinity OS2 is getting close to the end and it's been so good you guys. I'll certainly have to write about it. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus has been really great so far as well. There's intriguing plot that picks up where the last left off and it runs glass smooth. However just like Doom, I can't seem to record any footage. OBS and ReLive don't pick it up. I got ReLive to work the very first time I tried while testing settings but since then all I get is the desktop with game audio. OBS just locks up like it did with Doom. But hey, no hard system locks at least.

 

Stuff I’m Looking Forward To

So I'm sitting here drinking a locally brewed Whisky Barrel Brown Ale thinking to myself about how I'm excited for some new games that are coming to PC soon; and just some games I don't have yet that are out already. I figured -Hey I'll write about that so we have something more than WRUP articles. Read more

WB Backpeddals on Shadow of War DLC

Okay so we've all heard a ton about this Shadow of War "Forthog" DLC and the really backhanded way WB decided to honor late executive producer Michael Forgey. I'll sum up real quick. The DLC is meant to honor Mr. Forgey by creating an allied Orc character with his visage that will show up and save the player from death here and there. WB originally set the DLC price at $4.99 with a portion of the money from sales going to the family of Mr. Forgey.

That sounded great on it's face and was probably actually a well intentioned move by the folks who genuinely loved the man. The problem is that the money from sales was only going to be donated from 43 of the 50 states in the U.S. and nowhere overseas while the rest just went into the already cavernous pockets of Warner. WB themselves had said that they would in no way profit from the sales of this DLC but that made no sense at all since the money collected for donation was going to be very limited. Where would the rest of that money go? That DLC couldn't have been prohibitively expensive to make, at least not so much that WB wouldn't make their money back on the numerous sales taking place outside the donation areas. Of course this knowledge sparked a fair amount of outrage including here in our own team space where much eye rolling and fist waving has taken place.

Well according to Polygon, WB has now decided to provide the Forthog DLC for free to everyone now and just make a donation to Mr. Forgey's family directly. Those who already purchased the DLC will receive a refund for the cost. Finally some good news from this whole thing. In all fairness, WB has owned up the mistake.

What do you guys think though? Was this a moment of realization for WB? Or was it just enough pressure and bad PR to make them shift their decision? Either way a pretty flawed and seemingly greedy move to make sales on the loss of a beloved producer and actual human person has been corrected. Whether it was intentionally designed that way or not.

WRUP Destiny

Well Destiny 2 is out. Yoda streamed some of the beta pretty recently and it looks like it's much better than it's preceding title. Of course there's microtransaction controversy which is a plague for full priced AAA titles that's not likely to go away any time soon. I don't have it, not sure I will have it but if you're playing it let us know how it is. If you're not playing that then what are you playing?

Dr. S: won't be around this weekend, so probably some Mario & Rabbids on the Switch

Greywolfe: exploring all the stories of stories. plus, some more dream daddy - starting out on the first couple of routes from my list. larry 6 is...going. it's larry and it's terrible and i wish my eyes didn't bleed every time i played it. and, finally, more kyrandia 2. the plot twist is slowly arriving. :)

Andrew: China Warrior! (And also those games I said I was going to play last weekend but never got a chance to.)

Scrooloose: Well I finished Dawn of War III and I'm still working in Prey slowly. I also installed and started Bayonetta and I can imagine I'll enjoy it's ridiculousness quite a lot. Platinum sure knows how to make an action game.

Yoda: Gonna clock in some Rocksmith and see if I can get through a round of XCom2 without people dying lol I've also been really liking Paragon, and I may have to do a write up on it soon