I've been sick the past week and a half thanks to both a virus and an excess of pollen this fall, so I'm going to give a brief catch-up.
1. Resident Evil 6 is out now. No one seems to be able to decide if its shit or not. I frankly sit in the "it's not shit, you're just missing the point". And it apparently has at least shipped more copies than any other game in the franchise, so if it doesn't sell well... well, expect lots of discount copies. Also, seriously, if you call that a Michael Bay film in videogame form, you clearly haven't actually had to sit through Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen.
2. Minecraft is getting a longer documentary. Yes there was an earlier one, look it up on Penny Arcade.
3. Just Cause 2's multiplayer is big enough that there may be more players in some areas than there are NPCs. And they aren't even done increasing the player cap. What happens when you eject from a plane, and then land on five thousand versions of yourself walking around beneath you? I wonder how long until we find out.
4. Terraria is on consoles. Terraria fans get in outrage over nothing changing whatsoever other than console players getting a chance to play a game that could be run on a DS at 20 FPS.
5. Bioware is having a mass exodus. I wonder if that's a sign that maybe internally the company isn't so much like what it used to be and maybe anyone with common sense is looking elsewhere. Or maybe it's just a coincidence. I mean it's not like one of the most heralded RPG developers is making a F2P Command & Conquer game that has story and singleplayer as its least important priorities.
6. Mirror's Edge 2 still might exist at some point. I bet if they ever do, the pre-order bonus will include a "Yep, we seriously even managed to release this game before Half-Life 3 and Beyond Good and Evil 2. We're just as amazed as you are!" t-shirt.
7. Game Informer has begun regularly doing livestreams. In other news, Game Informer is still clearly learning how to do livestreams. In other other news, Game Informer thinks its a funny idea to make trivia questions about Football, MMA, and Metal Gear during a livestream for Borderlands 2, a game that has nothing to do with -any- of those things. No Minecraft or Dark Souls Trivia, even though those actually get clearly referenced in the game, but sure, Football, a sport that, based on the chat stream, maybe 15% of your audience knew something about, and about 5% of them knew the actual answers.
8. Mass Effect 3 has new DLC coming out. Retaliation, in which some how magically Collectors come back to life for payback. Not only is there this but two knew characters will be unlocked -- effectively giving Turians every class but Vanguard and Adept. The characters be unlocked "through the week", so in other words they haven't even finished working them out and are buying time. On the upside, something genuinely new to shoot in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. In fact, we should encourage this strategy from Bioware. Maybe next, make the Hurlocks from Dragon Age be an enemy since we're already taking from Mass Effect 2 and the Geth from Mass Effect 1. Maybe throw in the generic mercs from KotOR with the generic mercs in Mass Effect 1-2 to make them be a "Super Merc" faction? Oooh, and then make a Sith faction. And as a pre-order bonus for Dead Space 3 -- Necromorph faction.*
*I'm serious about that last one. Give me a few DS unlockable weapons for my characters and a necromorph faction, and I will be a happy man.
9. Speaking of Dead Space, a new 17 minute long dev walkthrough showed gameplay and some of the story. Confusingly, unlike the E3 trailer, now Isaac seems to in fact not be in charge of the group looking to find a way to stop the Markers permanently. There's horrific things, and there's solid gameplay, even if the guy playing in the walkthrough clearly couldn't beat the second half of Dead Space 2 on casual difficulty. Idea, why not actually try offering a full blown co-op specific campaign as DLC or an expansion pack. I'm thinking along the lines of something like Extraction or Dead Space Mobile. Also, where the hell is that horde mode from the mobile game? If Iron Monkeys (now Fire Monkeys) can do it, I bet a team with a far larger budget and staff can.
10. Sony has officially bundled every franchise besides Uncharted (although technically you can get the first two bundled together) and Crash Bandicoot. Rachet&Clank, Jak&Daxter, Resistance, Killzone, InFamous, and Kratos' Mass Murdering Rampage are all available between twenty and forty dollars. As someone you has a few of the games in these collections (besides GoW), they are worth it. Sony may make tediously frustrating hardware decisions, but they do always fund good exclusives. Also, most of these games come with strong singleplayer components so if you're one of those "offline only" types of gamers, then you're in luck.
11. Someone's seriously making a game that comes with a PSP and Vita version. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you and they've barely released anything but a long name.
12. X-Com the shooter is still alive. It's probably going to be third person and looks like it'll have more in common with Mass Effect than Bioshock now. It also may turn out to be a 30 dollar budget title for download. I can't really make a joke about this because everyone has thrown so much hate at the game, I'm just happy its still alive.
13. Game Informer called the fact that you can't pause when opening a menu in Resident Evil 6 a "weird Japanese developer" thing. Because we all know Dead Space, which has the same thing, was developed in Japan and that whole thing about EA Redwood in California making it was just a rumor.
And this last one's a spoiler and a little behind but I'm betting some of you still haven't gotten it yet, so:
14. Mass Effect Leviathan. To paraphrase Batman Beyond: And kind of like a kid who peaks at his Christmas presents, I must admit it's sadly anti-climatic. Behind all the broken memories and whispers and backwards talk, all you Reapers are is a bunch of egotistical robots who can't stand something stepping out of line because you think you are doing what you were told to do and you can't think of anything else. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetically cliche. Oh what the heck, I'll laugh anyway.
Yeah... that's the big plot twist. The Reapers were made to keep the galaxy in "order". Just like CLU. Just like the robots in I,Robot (the movie), and just like in so many other stories. Ten dollars for that.
*Sigh*
Okay, glad to have those bases covered. I've unfortunately been having a bit of a writer's block (for some reason specifically when trying to write stories) but I am hoping that once the last bits of sickness pass that I'll be able to get back to it.
