gammerscafe: 2017

Sunday 31 December 2017

Reader Discussion – Which 2018 Release Are You Most Looking Forward To?

This past year will be hard to top, with blockbusters like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn blowing us away. We can only hope that next year will offer us plenty of gems too. Looking at 2018, what game release are you most excited about, and why?

Is it the next entry in the Far Cry 5 series, that has you fighting against a religious cult in Montana? Or maybe the new Spider-Man? Perhaps God of War's drastic changes, such as putting focus on a father-son relationship, have you intrigued?

You can check out our growing list of games that have firm release dates in 2018 by heading here.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi Surpasses $1 Billion Worldwide

In less than three weeks since its release to theaters, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. So far, during New Years Eve weekend alone, the film has pulled in $120.4 million globally.

The Last Jedi is the fourth blockbuster this year to haul in $1 billion worldwide. It had the second-biggest movie opening ever in North America with its weekend debut grossing $220 million, It came second only to its predecessor, The Force Awakens.

For more, you can watch this short featurette that shows the cast learning complicated moves for the movie's action sequences.

[Source: Variety]

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Bleak government spying sim Beholder has a sequel out next year

You're tasked with climbing the career ladder in a shady government department.

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Miyamoto Gives Insight Into Nintendo's Hiring, Says He Looks For "Designers Who Aren't Just Super Passionate Game Fans"

Nintendo has had an incredibly strong year, with not just bestsellers like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, but also with introducing the Switch, which quickly became one of the hottest gadgets of the year. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Shigeru Miyamoto sheds light on that success, giving insight into what kind of potential employees he looks for at Nintendo.

Miyamoto explains that he looks for energetic, young designers. "More and more I am trying to let the younger generation fully take the reins," he says. He attempts to hire people with well-rounded skill sets, and looks for those who may not be gamers at all.

He says he looks to bring in fresh perspectives to create new ways to play, rather than perfect those that already exist. “I always look for designers who aren’t super-passionate game fans,” he says. “I make it a point to ensure they’re not just a gamer, but that they have a lot of different interests and skill sets.”

For more on Nintendo, read about how the Nintendo Switch is the fifth-bestselling tech product of 2017.

[Source: The New York Times]

Our Take
Breath of the Wild is an example of Nintendo moving away from the idea of just perfecting ideas that have already been done, and instead trying something that feels different. This proved incredibly successful, and having members of staff that think outside the box is significant for making strides in game design.

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Dead Cells getting an Early Access price bump in January, devs 'far from finishing the game'

Last chance to get it for $12.74/£10.49.

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Shadowverse: Chronogenesis expansion out now, adds 138 cards to the CCG

Expansion also includes a new class called Portalcraft.

from PC Gamer http://ift.tt/2CiBA0U

Were our 2017 PC gaming predictions accurate?

Looking back at what we thought would happen in 2017, and what actually happened.

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Mass Effect 2 and 3 DLC bundles finally pop up on Origin

No more Bioware points...

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Firefly Studios’ MetaMorph is coming to the PC Gamer Weekender

Use the code chr1stm4s to knock 20 percent off tickets before January 5.

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PC Gamer's biggest news stories of 2017

Endowment sliders, the FCC, and several tales about PUBG.

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The PC gaming lows of 2017

2017 wasn't a perfect year for PC gaming—here are the games and moments that disappointed us.

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Saturday 30 December 2017

Learn How Games Swap Character Models Before Your Eyes In This Youtube Video

In order to work the way they do, video games employ hundreds of little tricks and sleights of hand while you're not looking. Sometimes, though, they pull tricks right in front of you in ways you hopefully won't notice.

Youtuber Shesez profiles one of the most common tricks of this kind: Model swaps. Because games have a limited processing budget to work with, they often have to swap out the detailed character models we may see up close for lower-resolution models when the camera pulls away, in order to make larger spaces easier to render in real time. To learn more about how developers do it and see a few instances of it in classic games, check out the latest episode of Shesez's series, Boundary Break.

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Left 4 Dead, Half-Life Actor Jim French Passes Away

Voice actor Jim French, who's voiced several popular characters in Valve games, has passed away this week at the age of 89.

French's most notable was Bill, one of the playable characters in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Other notable roles include Father Grigori in Half-Life 2, Elder Titan in Dota 2, and The Fisherman in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.

French was also a noted radio producer and host for several years, creating the show Imagination Theatre for Seattle's KIRO station and later its KIXI station. He also created a production company, also called Imagination Theatre, which created several other radio programs.

Game Informer offers its condolences to French's family and friends.

[Source: Gamasutra]

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Alternate history mech game Iron Harvest details destructible environments in new video

Set in a post-1920s nightmare.

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The Looties: PC Gamer's random selection of other 2017 GOTY awards

These are awards, but also jokes.

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Orwell: Ignorance is Strength will have fewer, more complex episodes than the original

Story will have "more choice on how to advance than before".

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Predicting the big stories of 2018

What's next for PC gaming?

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Black Mirror gives us a VR roleplaying nightmare

We explore the fourth season's game-y episode, 'USS Callister'.

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Last Man Sitting is a daft physics game about firing rocket launchers from your office chair

New trailer shows absolute carnage.

from PC Gamer http://ift.tt/2CseUrQ

The prettiest screenshots of 2017

Our favorite snaps from 2017's best-looking games.

from PC Gamer http://ift.tt/2Ejr2Mc

Analyst Predicts Nintendo Switch Is The Fifth-Best Selling Tech Product Of 2017

The Nintendo Switch is the fifth-best selling tech product of the year, and is estimated to sell over 15 million units in 2017.

The estimate comes from Daniel Ives of GBH Insights, a market research firm. The portable/console hybrid had a number of things going for it this year: Both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey released to critical and commercial success, a slew of indie games found success on the console, and major companies having begun porting their current-gen games to the less powerful portable.

All of these factors could have contributed to making the console the best-selling dedicated gaming device of the year, but it was no match for more mainstream and diverse devices. The four tech products that are estimated to beat it are:

iPhone (223 million units sold)
Samsung Galaxy 8 and Note 8 (33 million units sold)
Amazon Echo Dot (24 million units sold)
Apple Watch (20 million units sold)

[Source: USA Today]

Our Take
It's impressive the Switch was able to make the list at all, and a testament to the console's popularity. But it also goes to show just how dwarfed it is by phones and tablets, which is why the company's recent move to publish games on them makes so much sense, even if the products haven't been all that good.

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Watch five minutes of Fe, a good-looking platformer where you connect to nature by singing

Free a giant deer made up of trees.

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Resident Evil 7 gets a permanent 40% price cut (and a 20% sale to boot)

New base price is £24.99/$29.99.

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In Jason Rohrer's One Hour One Life, you spawn as a baby and another player is your mother

Latest game from the developer of The Castle Doctrine.

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Enjoy tabletop games at the PC Gamer Weekender

Use the code chr1stm4s to knock 20 percent off tickets before January 5.

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Which game have you snuck off from your family to play during the holidays?

Sometimes you need to escape.

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The PC gaming highs of 2017

2017 was full of highlights for PC players. Here are ours.

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Friday 29 December 2017

Capcom Producer Promising 2018 Will Make Ace Attorney Fans Happy

Capcom producer Motohiro Eshiro has promised that Ace Attorney will have some presence in 2018 in an interview with Japanese site 4Gamer.

“I believe we’ll continue working on something that will make Ace Attorney series fans happy," Eshiro told the website. "We’re also currently coming up with a new title, so personally speaking I think it’ll be a challenging year.”

It is another hint that Capcom has not been subtle about dropping in the last few months. Last month, Capcom chief operating officer Haruhiro Tsujimoto outright said to expect a sequel to Ace Attorney on the Switch in financial year 2019, which runs from March calendar year 2018 to April calendar year 2019.

With both Ace Attorney Investigations games hitting mobile phones, it is likely whatever title is coming is being made for both.

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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Hits Three Million Concurrent Players (And Half As Many Bans)

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the battle royale game that has taken the world by storm, hits a new milestone with three million concurrent players on PC alone.

Now that the game has officially exited Early Access on Steam, it makes sense that its numbers would jump up. In September, the numbers exceeded Dota 2's at one million. In October, they exceeded two million. Now, with a new map and vaulting, the game number of players tops three million.

These numbers has been floating around for a while, but were proven fake before today. SteamDB confirmed the actual milestone on twitter.

A more concerning milestone, however, comes from anti-cheat service BattlEye, which announced that 1.5 million accounts have been banned from Battlegrounds. Of the approximately 26,370,071 owners, that means 5.688266823399907% of the player base has been banned from the game for cheating or abusive behavior.

Our Take
As PUBG's popularity raises, presumably the ban number will also raise proportionally. It will be interesting to see if it can break that dynamic at any point.

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Take A Look At A New Leon Statue Based On Resident Evil: Vendetta

Kotobukiya's latest Resident Evil statue is based on the CG animated film, Resident Evil: Vendetta. This version of Leon S. Kennedy makes him look like a Gap model trying to pull off a Han Solo fsahion, but he's actually dressed as a Division of Security Operations agent. Kennedy is equipped with his custom Sentinel Nine firearm, and the pose comes from one of the film's bigger battles against a horde of zombies. The stand features a cartridge, shells, and a spray of blood.

No price has been given yet, but Kotobukiya plans to release this statue in July 2018. Vendetta takes place in New York, and partners Kennedy with Chris Redfield and Rebecca Chambers. Here's hoping we get statues of these characters at a future date.

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Police kill Kansas man while responding to an alleged 'swatting'

The 28-year-old was shot and killed when he answered his door.

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Man Killed By Police After Call Of Duty Argument Results In Swatting

Police in Wichita, Kansas shot and killed a man after what a Call of Duty community is claiming is the result of a disagreement over a Call of Duty match.

A report from The Wichita Eagle stated that police were called to the victim's home on December 28 following a phone call that reported a homicide and hostage situation at the residence. When a man opened the door, one of the officers fired on him. The man, who wasn't identified by police, was pronounced dead at the hospital. His family has identified the victim as Andrew Finch.

In an interview with local news, the Wichita police department chief Troy Livingston confirmed that they are investigating whether the incident is the result of a fake phone call was part of a Swatting prank. Swatting is when a perpetrator phones in false information designed to get police and crisis units to a home under the presumption that lives are in danger, causing them to be on heightened alert and more aggressive at the target address. It has in the past gotten property destroyed, pets killed, and now people, as well.

The strangest part, however, is that it's possible the victim had nothing to do with the argument in the first place.

In the hours following the news of the shooting, users on Twitter pointed to a UMG Gaming Call of Duty match as the genesis of the incident, a wager-based match of Search & Destroy. Two teammates who go by the handles "Miruhcle" and "Baperizer" got into an argument following a loss over public Twitter posts and private direct messages with each other. Baperizer brought in a third party, a user who calls themselves "Swautistic," to threaten a Swatting against Miruhcle

For whatever reason, Miruhcle upped the ante by taunting Baperizer and Swautistic by providing them with an address in Wichita, implying that the address was his. When police arrived, Andrew Finch was shot dead in his own home despite there being no evidence he even knew any of the people involved with the argument. The mother of the victim, Lisa Finch, told the Witchita Eagle that her son is not a gamer, a claim echoed up by the rest of the victim's family.

In the wake of the tragedy, the Call of Duty community has come out with numerous screencaps of and charges against Swautistic, who many people claim has a long history of sending SWAT teams as a prank. The twitter account for professional CoD player Tommy "ZooMa" Paparatto posted screencaps of Swautistic threatening Paparatto and his girlfriend. Paparatto also suggested Swautistic was behind the bomb threats that forced evacuations at CWL Dallas earlier this month, a claim many in the Call of Duty community reiterated since last night's incident.

In a now-deleted tweet, Swautistic claimed no responsibility for the attacks, stating “I DIDNT GET ANYONE KILLED BECAUSE I DIDNT DISCHARGE A WEAPON AND BEING ASWAT MEMBER ISNT MY PROFESSION [sic].”

The officer who fired the shot has been placed on paid administrative leave while the incident is being investigated. We have reached out to the Wichita police department for comment and will update the story as it changes.

Our Take
I hated writing this story because I hate that this can happen. I hate that people have this power to ruin someone's life or even outright take it. It is too easy to say "This was one person that was disturbed" or "This doesn't reflect us as a gaming community," but at some point that just looks like denial. The culture that lead to things like this being okay, that lead to not one but two people thinking this was a valid avenue to escalate an argument, and a third person hiding behind anonymity to put someone else in the line of fire, none of it should be okay with the gaming community as a whole. When a prank has a body count, it is time to look at how such a thing ended up being considered a prank at all.

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The best mech games on PC

From anime mecha to rusty 100-ton warmachines, who doesn't love giant robots?

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Destiny 2 has the same glimmer farming cap as the first game

The cap limits how much glimmer you can earn in combat, but it's not actually new.

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Best of 2017: Game Design Deep Dive: Creating believable crowds in Planet Coaster

"10,000 guests was what we targeted, and simulating each seemed like a challenge. This was where using flow/potential fields became very appealing." - Owen McCarthy, principal programmer at Frontier. ...

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Best Visual Novel 2017: Butterfly Soup

In a year when visual novels came out of their cocoon, Butterfly Soup was the best.

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Best of 2017: Game Design Deep Dive: Creating believable crowds in Planet Coaster

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Rumor: New Destiny 2 Expansion Leaks On PSN, Adds New Enemy Faction

An accidental PSN page going live has given details on Destiny 2's second expansion, titled Gods of Mars.

The listings have been deleted, but a reddit user with the curious name of GodsofMarsLeak grabbed a few screenshots of the the listing, which have now been deleted along with the account. The listing details the expansion by explaining that the guardian will be exploring the Frigid Vale of Mars. Guardians will go up against Charlemagne, who has imprisoned Rasputin after reawakening on Mars. Players are tasked with freeing Rasputin and defeating Charlemagne.

The PSN page states that a new enemy faction, but does not directly name them. Charlemagne's remnants are a good guess, considering he appears to be the main antagonist of the expansion.

New gear, story missions, bosses, co-op and competitive activities, and more are also listed for the Gods of Mars. You can read our review of Destiny 2's first expansion, Curse of Osiris, right here.

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Get a job: Insomniac Games is hiring Engine Programmers

Insomniac Games is looking for mid to senior level Engine Programmers to work with the team to design, add and modify features of both runtime and tools components of the engine. ...

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Battlegrounds surpasses 3M concurrent players on Steam

Fresh out of Early Access, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has surpassed 3 million concurrent players on Steam. ...

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Battlegrounds surpasses 3M concurrent players on Steam

Fresh out of Early Access, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has surpassed 3 million concurrent players on Steam. ...

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Some mobile games now report TV viewing habits back to advertisers

A number of mobile games and apps now use a smart device's microphone to track the shows or advertisements its players see on TV. ...

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Gamasutra's Best of 2017: Brandon Sheffield's top 10 games hidden in other games

"I'm talking about games tucked away within published games. Specifically I'm interested in games that have little to nothing to do with the games they're hidden in." ...

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Gamasutra's Best of 2017: Brandon Sheffield's top 10 games hidden in other games

"I'm talking about games tucked away within published games. Specifically I'm interested in games that have little to nothing to do with the games they're hidden in." ...

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Godzilla Height Comparison Shows Newest Kaiju's Immense Size

A size comparison of all the Godzilla heights has been making the rounds on the internet and shows off how ridiculously massive the newest monster is.

The image, made by renowned artist Noger Chen, shows the Godzilla from the new CG animated movie, Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters. The newest Godzilla is way bigger by a magnitude of three to six times other Godzilla heights and it definitely shows.

The bigger Godzilla comes from Godzilla: Planet of Monsters, which has aired in Japanese theaters despite being created and funded by Netflix. In the movie, humanity has declared Earth a wash after kaiju after kaiju appears and humanity has no choice but to seek another planet to live on. This turns out to be a terrible idea when the new planet is also uninhabitable but for different reasons other than giant monsters, so a team returns to try and take Earth back, only to find Godzilla has evolved and become the top of the food chain.

The movie is coming internationally in early 2018 and is the first of a trilogy, with Godzilla: War of the Monsters and Godzilla: King of the Monsters coming after. You can find a Japanese trailer below.

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