So, Gearbox has game, and Randy Pitchford wants a co-developer. Given that Duke Nukem Forever was made over the course of 10 years by four separate teams, at the cost of millions of dollars, billions of salty sadness tears and one series' reputation, it could be a hard sell to even the most avaricious dev.
Which is where I come in. I'm here to suggest a few choice developers who could make something truly special (and that absolutely doesn't mean "good") with the Duke Nukem license - and explain what the pitfalls might be along the way. With any luck, I'll inspire both you and the developers involved to think about what could come out of such match-ups, and we'll see a new game that doesn't make you think of the smell of human gas when you hear the term 'vapourware'.
Why it could work: The "big three" on the fabled Build Engine were Duke Nukem 3D, Blood (more on that one later) and Shadow Warrior. While Duke became a parody of himself and game development in general, this Polish Studio took the latter and polished it up for a new generation. By keeping the streamlined, gameplay-first spirit, removing all of (OK, most of) the racism and popping in some modern ideas, they made a worthy successor to a much-missed oldie. It's a trick that'd work just as well for Nukem - just swap excising xenophobia for misogyny, swordplay for gun trickery and dick jokes for... well no, keep all the dick jokes.
What could go wrong: FWH's focus on all-action gameplay might lead it to ignore the genuinely excellent level design of Duke 3D, its love of secrets and interactive set pieces. Or the studio could go mad and make the entire game a self-reflexive joke about its own name, given that flying, wild hogs are actual enemies in the Nukem-verse.
Why it could work: On first glance, this just looks like another Flying Wild Hog old game update - but the Swedish dev team took their ancient franchise in a very different direction. Some (me) would argue that much of The New Order's gunplay wasn't actually up to much, but there's no arguing that its storyline took what was originally a retro-futurist joke and turned it into something compelling, emotional and deeply disturbing by turns. Give me a Duke Nukem game that performs the same trick, and I'll call you a genius.
What could go wrong: That last bit proves physically, philosophically and hilariously impossible. Contractually locked into the struggle to make Duke anything but a swaggering machismo hydrant, MachineGames' staff barricade themselves in their offices, eventually going mad. When police finally break in, all they find is a single, dusty monitor, endlessly playing a video of a beautifully-rendered Nukem saying "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn" and laughing horribly.
Why it could work: The likes of Strafe prove that there's a genuine interest in seeing new games use old visual techniques - so why not use the original Build Engine to make a whole new game? And if you're going to do that, why not use the people who knew how to use it in the first place. Monolith's always been an underground hitmaker, and Blood was one of its earliest successes - a grottier, weirder game than Duke Nukem, but necessarily similar in approach. If you want something truly authentic, give it to these guys.
What could go wrong: Driven wild by the ability to mess with the superstar that made Blood a second-tier game back in the day, Monolith makes the worst Build game of all time. Even worse that William Shatner's Tekwar.
Why it could work: If you're going to go old-school, you do it with the best. The new Doom is so back-to-basics that it's literally reusing the original's name, not to mention its ideas about weapon inventories, health systems and gibberish plotlines. It rejects most new-fangled ideas of how a shooter should work, simply because it doesn't want to be new. Frankly, it's so authentic that I'm surprised it's not a total arse-ache to aim along the Y-axis. After Duke Nukem Forever's stinking gumbo of old and new gameplay elements, some proper focus is precisely what the series needs.
What could go wrong: Still owing a favour to John Carmack, id announces that Duke Nukem will be VR-only. After years of testing, it becomes clear that the only thing people enjoy about the experience of looking through Duke's eyes is going for a piss. The game becomes Duke Nukem: Lava-tory, a game about micturating in increasingly dangerous situations, the finale being you extinguishing an active volcano through sheer force of bladder ejection. Entire hundreds of excited gamers wet themselves on day one.
Why it could work: Ted Price and his crew have been making self-consciously kitsch games involving aliens, ludicrous weaponry and occasional swearing for many years now. This is just a natural fit. Expand Duke Nukem 3D's opening level into a city-wide playground, pepper it with dumb '90s references and smother the whole thing in a fabulous butt-rock soundtrack. This is the stuff really stupid dreams are made of.
What could go wrong: Everyone remembers that the '90s were awful, the latest hipster mores become a celebration of the austere browns and greys of the 1910s, and Duke's hypercolour/MTV Real World/Crystal Pepsi/Gen X jokes end up looking exactly as heartfelt and unironic as they were in the original games. We all sigh, and continue using our antique spinning wheels to knit the newest band logos.
Why it could work: Did you play Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon? The ludicrous spin-off managed to balance knowing bro reference humour with a neon-spattered take on open-world stealth-combat. It's a spitballed idea that snowballed into a full project and came out as a game in which balls were occasionally the topic of discussion. Michael Biehn's Rex quipped constantly and badly while acting out a cheesy sci-fi plot worthy of the worst off-brand Hollywood had to offer. It's practically a Duke Nukem game already.
What could go wrong: A mistake's made on a memo and Ubisoft accidentally take a Far Cry 2 direction instead. The new Nukem becomes a plaintive metaphor for the folly of violence and the impermanence of fashionable haircuts. We watch as a nuclear blast turns LA into the desert it has always threatened to be, and Duke stumbles around with a single, half-loaded revolver. In an irritating gameplay twist, Duke is going bald, and peroxide blonde wisps will occasionally float down your field of view - at which point you must stop completely and jam scavenged hair plugs into your scalp, moaning all the while.
Why it could work: Do you know what's teresting than Duke Nukem Forever? The making of Duke Nukem Forever. And do you know who'd love to make a game that knows it's a game about a game? David Cage. I present to you Duke Nukem Forever: Forever, an existential interactive love story set over the course of the game's development. Starring a depressed 3D Realms UI Artist and a surprisingly sentient wireframe of Duke, all they want is a finished game, and each other. And to laugh at the misfortune of women.
What could go wrong: Literally everything I just wrote.
Why it could work: We've already seen Devolver port Duke Nukem 3D to modern devices, but it simply wasn't greedy enough. That game is rife with opportunities to squeeze money out of players. The adult theatre screen you can blow up in 'Hollywood Holocaust'? It plays adverts for Chillingo games. Every time Duke flashes the cash to see a flash of pixelated stripper-boob? Real money microtransaction. That boss Duke kills and then takes a dump on? It's a white Angry Bird. Winner.
What could go wrong: Nothing - this is a solid gold cash cow with a thousand, sparkling coin-udders.
Why it could work: This would be the story of the century. Phil Fish returns to Twitter to write a single message: "FEZ SEQUEL. OUT NEXT WEEK". After days of speculative list features not unlike this one, everyone downloads the mysterious game, whether to enjoy or mock, play through or pillory - and finds out it's a level-for-level remake of the original Duke Nukem platformer, except every pick-up in the game contains a different hieroglyph. When translated and read backwards, it forms a compelling mystery novel, except the twist - revealed in the final sentence - is missing. A year later, Fish logs into Twitter once more, simply to write "SUCKAS".
What could go wrong: I actually think Phil Fish could make a pretty interesting Duke Nukem platformer if he wanted to, combining the mechanical ingenuity he clearly has a flair for with the furious, intelligent persona he uses to distance himself from the industry. The problem is that no one would talk about it, because they'd all be too busy discussing Phil Fish.
Why it could work: The problem with Duke Nukem Forever wasn't really the game itself. The problem was that it was many games, by many people, pushed into a too-small mould and sold to recoup the losses from several failed projects. What Duke Nukem needs is project managers, people who know how to cope with creative work that requires a long gestation. Who better than the novelist who took 55 years to release a second book, and the musician who took 15 to make something new that I guess we can call music? A steady ship is all Duke needs to come back strong.
What could go wrong: It turns out that the reclusive Lee is a total rager, sending a vulnerable Rose back down the rabbithole of drink and drugs. A new Duke Nukem comes out 34 years later, but is released three console generations behind contemporary standards, and plays like hot ass.
Why it could work: Just look at this list! I'm positively brimming with ideas.
What could go wrong: Everything. I'm not a game developer, and I've never claimed to be. I can't code, draw, spell, cook or make papier mache. Does that make me qualified to talk about industry matters in such lengthy and occasionally disrespectfully flippant terms? Honestly, I don't know. Look, let's not turn this into a treatise on criticism; the relationship between artist, commentator and consumer is at best fraught and at worst grotesquely tangled, and you and I simply don't have the time to go into it.
Does that invalidate everything you read, every thought, joke and throwback observation in this piece? Hey, I'll let you decide. I'm just a man in his bedroom, watching my waistline and the time go by as I try to make sense of the endless Niagara churn of Internet news, try desperately to shape the info-clay into something you and I can connect over, agree on, discuss and share. Isn't that why we're here now, my thoughts touching yours, but separate in time? To share? Isn't that why we play games? To share experiences, with people real and imagined. To make sense of our space in the world and that of those around us?
Look, all I'm saying is that I'm doing my best, and that the idea of a Frenchman falling in love with Duke Nukem is pretty funny. Goodbye.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers. Pretty much all of them.
Batman is practically a gargoyle in . He spends the night in a predatory pose, his cape lashed by rain, far above the dire avenues of Gotham City. Such is life for the wrathful vigilante born in … CRIME ALLEY. Ok. so the only Gotham people who work harder than Batman are the real estate agents.
One man’s urban decay is another’s open-world activity, though, giving Batman the ideal setup for a crime-punching superhero game. There’s just one problem with Gotham’s crime in particular. Let's go over some of the major events in Arkham Knight to find out what it is:
Commissioner James Gordon is an overachiever when it comes to abduction, getting himself captured twice in Batman: Arkham Knight - once by the title villain and then by Scarecrow. Eh, you know what? Gordon seems like a nice, hard-working guy, and since the Arkham Knight is partnered with Scarecrow we can knock his capture to a count of just one, but with joint custody between two supervillains. It’s kind of sweet if you don’t think about it.
Either way, the true indignity of Gordon’s problem comes from cutting ties with loose-cannon Batman. After Gordon storms off to finally sort things out himself, he bumbles into super-villain clutches and learns the hard lesson of Arkham Knight’s plot: only Batman can save us, because we’ve probably been kidnapped.
Oh, ok, another kidnapping. Sure. Gotham’s most belligerent botanist gets kidnapped and locked up in an improvised greenhouse before Batman’s even left his starting perch. She escapes almost coincidentally once Batman arrives, proving that she is immune to Scarecrow’s toxin and to any sort of clothing a normal woman might wear, like pants.
The fact that she’s dragged off to prison immediately without anyone even putting a sweater on her is a lousy fate to suffer, though perhaps not as bad as being played by Uma Thurman.
Arkham Knight rewards Oracle’s whip-smart advisory role to Batman by having her … hmm … abducted off-screen. Barbara Gordon’s technical skills allow her to hack and retrieve any information from within Gotham’s clock tower, granting her an immaterial freedom after Joker paralyzed her Batgirl career, but the game prefers to dangle her like a squirming carrot throughout.
The Joker’s earlier attack on Barbara is depicted in grisly detail, but her return to Arkham Knight isn’t given the same treatment - instead, we see Oracle getting shot in two different ways, thrown off a building and then dumped in the GCPD where she gets to hack some drones from afar. Her return from the dead isn’t even spun as triumphantly as the other thing that gets killed and resurrected: The Batmobile. You know, the non-person car?
Let’s give it up for the firefighters of Gotham City, who are essentially running around a bubbling volcano with just a handful of ice cubes and the constant fear of being mugged by lava from a bad caldera.
Though Arkham Knight reduces them to a percentage of game completion to be extracted from various parts of the city, these grounded city saviors deserve the help, not to mention the savage descent of Batman upon their captors. I mean, yeah, they also get kidnapped in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not like they’ve had a lifetime of combat training to defend against that sort of thing.
Hang on, Catwoman gets kidnapped? The acrobatic, masterful escape artist with nine lives and ten witty retorts per minute gets kidnapped by… The Riddler? The same disheveled anti-Layton designing Mario Kart tracks from his mom’s basement? Ok, fine.
Though Catwoman dismisses the ‘damsel in distress’ label, she says it while having an exploding collar strapped to her neck - and she can’t get the numerous keys to unlock it without Batman’s help. So, nice attempt at self-referential dodging there, writers, but nope. To be fair, though, Bats and Cats fighting through The Riddler’s abandoned orphanage is one of the highlights of Arkham Knight, even if a collar makes Catwoman less cool than she should be. At least it doesn’t have a bell on it.
After the world’s greatest detective concludes that Scarecrow is manufacturing his spooky chemicals at Gotham’s big, huge, unmissable chemical manufacturing plant - it’s a whole thing - he swoops in to save the workers being forced to work late (in the service of evil).
Alright, this one makes sense, even though it’s yet another consolidated kidnapping. Nobody living or working in Gotham would willingly help produce a fear-inducing toxin. It’s dangerous, evil and - depending on which neighborhood you live in - kind of redundant.
The flashback to the imprisonment and torture of Jason Todd - the second person to become Robin under Batman’s tough-guy tutelage - gives you a big clue to the Arkham Knight’s true identity. And by “big clue” I mean full-on confirmation, because why else are we flashing back to this now?
Though the Arkham Knight persona isn’t the one who’s kidnapped, it’s his drawn-out and humiliating captivity that leads to his festering lust for revenge against Batman. Maybe that’s why Batman’s running around rescuing everyone properly, hoping to avoid a small army of Arkham Knights nipping at his cape.
Aww, man, Lucius Fox gets kidnapped? Fox stays behind in Wayne Tower, despite a city-wide evacuation notice, working late to beef up Batman’s gadgets and deliver new Batmobile upgrades. He’s charming, he’s enjoying the absurdity of designing toys for a billionaire vigilante, and he’s collected. Later, though, he’s collected at gunpoint in the office by Thomas Elliot, a Bruce Wayne doppelgänger going by the name of Hush.
Batman doesn’t tolerate kidnapping, of course, and with barely a biff or a pow he manages to negotiate Fox’s freedom.
Whoops. In negotiating Fox’s release in Wayne Tower, Batman reveals his face to Hush as a reminder that they used to be childhood friends, and that one of them grew up to be an armored weirdo who breaks arms and probably doesn’t appreciate hostage situations in his damn office.
After bludgeoning him into unconsciousness, Batman decides it’s probably best not to send Hush straight to the Gotham lockup. Instead, Hush is locked up somewhere in Wayne Tower. An unsanctioned, corporate acquisition of a person against their will and without the police’s knowledge? Suuuure sounds like a kidnapping, Mr. Wayne.
Le sigh. Batman’s initial protege, Dick Grayson, graduates from the role of Robin to pursue a career as Nightwing in a town called Blüdhaven (it sounds lovely). The pair briefly team up to foil a weapon smuggling plot by Penguin, and are then separated when Nightwing gets kidnapped off-screen.
Being bailed out by your master could be some kind of spandex-clad Karate Kid moment, but the snappy dialogue between Batman and the former boy wonder clearly just serve as a smokescreen for embarrassment. Being rescued from a waddling man with a semi-automatic umbrella is worse than having your dad come get your sorry shoplifting self from a Hot Topic backroom. Oh well, at least Robin doesn’t get kidnapped.
Well, here’s an ironic case where Batman actually helps out in the kidnapping, locking Robin 3.0 up in a futuristic cell in order to protect him. This not only leaves him in a prime spot to be collected by Scarecrow later, but acts as prelude to the future Batman who has to worry about empty nest syndrome.
To be fair, this is one of the more sensible kidnappings in the game. Batman makes a mistake for once, blinded by his fear of losing another partner in the collateral damage of all the supervillain crap he has to deal with, and has to fix it in a way that echoes Arkham Knight’s overall message: being friends with Batman is the worst. It would have been better to let Robin decide and act on this point, though, rather than being appended to a staggering list that relies far too much on one kind of peril. But that’s it, right? We’re done with kidnappings, surely.
B … Batman gets kidnapped in his own game?
Ok, that’s it, let’s wrap this list up. There’s just no rescuing it now.
To those who've never delved into comics before, but would really like to try, the format can feel impenetrable. Super hero serials have decades-long backlogs, a sea of creator-owned comics can leave you little clue where to start, and the financial commitment of comic readership would make anyone anxious to invest in the unknown. It can be a daunting challenge, and you may feel like giving up hope on ever really becoming a Reader of Comics with so many obstacles in your path.
But what if you had a starting point, a story you were already familiar with transferred into comic form? Like, say, one based on a video game? If that sounds good, then you're in luck, because game developers have long since discovered the pros of going comic-side. There are now a plethora of video game comics on the market, and I'm not talking shameless cash-ins. These are proper comics done by proper comic authors and artists, often with help from the creative minds behind the games that inspired them. To help you figure out the best way to launch into game-comic readership, we've collected some of the best you could be reading right now and the optimal place to snag them. Read on, and if you think we missed a great title, sound off in the comments - help your fellow readers, and we'll get through this together.
Status: Ongoing
Co-written by comic giant Gail Simone and the lead writer of the Tomb Raider reboot, Rhianna Pratchett, Dark Horse's Tomb Raider comic puts Lara Croft in the hands of creators you know will treat her right. Its takes place between the reboot and Rise of the Tomb Raider, giving insight into Lara's personal struggles as she deals with the fallout from her time in Yamatai. It also gives a nice introduction to Trinity, the shadowy organization she's destined to encounter in her search for all manner of things mythical, priceless, and powerful. Her adventures take her to some strange places, from the jungles of South America to the subway tunnels and theater stages of London, all lovingly rendered by a rotating group of talented artists.
Best place to read it: Issues can be purchased individually from the are available as well.
Status: Ongoing special release, currently complete
Shepard may be the savior of the Mass Effect universe, but s/he isn't privy to everything that goes on in its vast expanse. In fact, s/he doesn't even know everything that happens on the Normandy, and that's where the Mass Effect comics come in. Considered fully canon (and written/co-written by Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters), these comics cover events that only get cursory attention in the games, like the First Contact War, how Liara got her shadowy title, or what everyone was up to while Shepard was in stasis. Featuring gorgeous full color art over 27 issues, there's more than enough here to help fans occupied during the wait for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Plus, how could you resist the tale of a
Best place to read it: Those who prefer physical media have .
Status: Ongoing special release
It takes some serious creativity to pull a coherent plot out of a game like Team Fortress 2, which doesn't have a hint of story and centers around a bunch of mercenaries wearing weird hats. But the Team Fortress 2 comics pull it off, because if nothing else, they are very creative. Acting as accompaniment to the game's biggest updates, the comics build an erratic, yet plausible storyline where the sudden emergence of robot soldiers and haunted swords actually makes sense. It's all as ridiculous as you'd expect, and the comic's absurd sense of humor is what really pushes it into must-read territory. It's the story Team Fortress never needed, yet is so much richer and funnier for having it around.
Best place to read it: All the comics are free-to-read on the compilation (alongside a pair of Left 4 Dead and Portal comics).
Status: Complete
When a game works well, there's little need to reinvent the wheel to make a comic of the same property. Or reinvent the cog, in the case of the Gears of War comic. Focusing on minor characters and miscellaneous happenings between the events of Gears and Gears 2, the Gears comic succeeds by focusing on what made the original so enthralling: a gritty and melancholy setting, sharp attention to detail, and plenty of heart-thumping, chainsaw-based brutality. It doesn't exactly tread any new territory, but does such an excellent job of translating the spirit of the Gears games onto the page that it really doesn't need to do anything else.
Best place to read it: The full digital collection is available on available at retail.
Status: Complete
The Last of Us has a fine prequel in the touching Left Behind DLC, but it never hurts to get a little extra love. That's what's to be found in The Last of Us: American Dreams comic, a prologue to Left Behind that focuses on the relationship between Ellie and Riley as it develops in the confines of an oppressive military boarding school. Though it boasts an art style closer to Scott Pilgrim than the CGI of its source material, American Dreams' story is appropriately poignant, and introduces the reader to a new, delinquent side of Ellie. Integrating itself into the grander story through the smallest of details but immediately feeling like part of the whole, American Dreams deserves a place on any fan's shelf right next to Naughty Dog's apocalyptic opus.
Best place to read it: Digital version of all the issues can be purchased if you're willing to pay a bit more for a Kindle or paperback edition.
Status: Complete
With nearly two decades of games to its name, Silent Hill has a plethora of content to fill out its small and ill-lit universe, and just as many gaps for new stories to fill in. Spanning 25 issues, the Silent Hill comic series tells eight standalone stories that take place within Silent Hill, each focused on a new unfortunate soul that wanders into its foggy confines. Each has its own unique art style (Downpour: Anne's Story has a realistic look with a high level of detail, while Dead/Alive resembles a disturbed child's sketchpad) and take on the nature of the town, letting each new volume approach fear in its own unique, perfectly unsettling way.
Best place to read it: This one's a little tricky, because while the series has an excellent - can all be purchased separately.
Status: Complete
A world the size of Thedas can't be contained in a single game, and even after three it feels we've only just breached the dragon's lair. The Dragon Age comic trilogy guides us a little further inside with a new story about the adventures of companions Alistair, Isabela, and Varric as they search for Alistair's lost royal father. Though the story is thick with Dragon Age lore and might seem inaccessible to those just getting into the series, the density of its narrative detail is perfect for fans who already know enough to make sense of it. That's in addition to the impressive visual detail in the book's beautiful, polished illustrations. Though it's only a trilogy, there's plenty of material here to keep fans busy during the wait for the new .
Best place to read it: Buying is the prettiest and cheapest available option.
Status: Complete
Master Chief may not talk much about himself (or anything at all), but that silence conceals a fascinating backstory that defines the Halo universe as we know it. Thankfully you won't have to wait for Chief to get chatty to hear the whole tale - you'll just have to grab a copy of Halo: Fall of Reach. A comic adaption of the novel of the same name, Fall of Reach is broken up into three parts, each detailing an important part of the Chief's life: his childhood abduction and training as a Spartan, the beginning of the Human-Covenant War, and fall of the colony of Reach (which leads directly into of Halo: Combat Evolved). While the events of the comic will be familiar to anyone who's read the novel, the comic's gives it an extra leg up, making it a worthy addition to any Halo collection.
Best place to read it: Sadly there's no omnibus for this series and it's not part of Marvel Unlimited, but thankfully the three arcs <(a href="http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Fall-Reach-Boot-Camp/dp/0785151478?tag=gredit-20ascsubtag=videogamecomics" target="blank">Boot Camp, are each available as a full volume.
Status: Complete
Ace Attorney might seem like an odd series to adapt to comic form, since much of its appeal rests in eviscerating your opposition with the power of lawyering. But while it doesn't have that level of interactivity, the Ace Attorney manga fully embraces the series' best qualities and creates a fun side-story for fans to get their Phoenix fix. A five-volume mini-series covering a slew of new cases, its heavy focus on the evidence lets you play a more passive part in the solving of the crime, but nonetheless pushes you to figure out the answer yourself. Featuring brain-teasing puzzles and the charm that the Ace Attorney series is famous for, this manga is great for established fans or new arrivals who want to check the story out before taking on the challenge of crime-solving.
Best place to read it: There aren't many options here for those who prefer digital editions or collections, but the are all available at a relatively decent price.
Status: Complete
Despite its wide popularity, Kingdom Hearts can be , particularly because different parts of the story are exclusive to different platforms. Thankfully, those who can't swing the purchase of a new system to play a single game can turn to the Kingdom Hearts manga instead, which covers the events of the games in a relatively faithful manner, while adding a few extra bits of story exclusive to print. The most recent (and arguably most helpful) addition to this Kingdom Hearts collection is the five-issue Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, which tells the story of Alex, Roxas, and Xion that sets up Kingdom Hearts 2. Laying out an otherwise convoluted story through simple but elegant illustrations instantly makes it easier for fans and newcomers to access the full plot of Kingdom Hearts, and any comic that does that is a winner in my book.
Best place to read it: In a vast departure from how Kingdom Hearts is typically organized, all five volumes are available to western readers and can . That was easier than expected!
is all about the Wasteland. An expansive open world of faded brown that makes you positively thirsty just looking at it. Whether you’re on foot or have your pedal to the metal in the Magnum Opus, there’s always the distinct feeling that you could die at any moment in the most inhospitable environment on Earth. The game is an explosive love letter to George Miller’s dusty, petrol-headed post-apocalypse but, after Fury Road’s almost effortless revival of action cinema earlier this year, can Avalanche’s Mad Max compete? The short answer, from what I’ve seen, is yes.
Madness and explosives in equal measure await in the shimmering heat. A warlord called Scrotus rules over the area around Gas Town where, coincidentally, Max needs to go to get fuel. After waking up in the Wasteland, robbed and with nothing, he needs to reclaim what’s his. Start your engine and get ready for the 17 things I did in Mad Max when I was let loose in the Wasteland for two hours. There really should have been a grown up present.
You’re nothing without a car in the Wasteland, and your very own hunk of junk is known as the Magnum Opus. This is Max’s baby and it’s yours now too. Fully upgradeable in a hefty customisation screen, it can be fully tweaked to your diesel hungry desires. From gearboxes to intake valves, treads to engines, it can all be switched out. Whether you want to arm up with sideburners and as much armour as possible, or customise to travel fast and in style, it’s up to you. There’s no ‘right’ way to upgrade the Magnum Opus, with a focus on different styles of play throughout. Plus, it’s a pleasure to drive. Responsive and suitably weighty. Add in the boost button for a cinematic surge forward, and it makes a worthy Wasteland steed.
Who says a backseat driver is a bad thing? Especially one who thinks you’re some kind of god of cars. Meet Max’s sidekick Chumbucket. Known as a ‘Blackfinger’ in the Wasteland, Chumbucket is your mechanic who’ll not only fix the Magnum Opus when you inevitably set it on fire, but bring the car to you if you’ve decided to go on foot. We don’t all have a remote control for summoning our vehicles a la Bruce Wayne, so a totally insane chauffeur wearing goggles is the next best thing. Chumbucket’s also on hand to berate you for driving recklessly so yeah, think the Wasteland equivalent of your gran. But bald.
Car combat in Mad Max is utterly chaotic. Vehicles of all types swerve through the sand, and rogue enemies patrol the Wasteland just waiting for someone to loot. Thankfully you’re armed with an intimidating armoury of weapons, the most important of which is the harpoon. Hurtling along beside a car and tapping B will yank said car towards you, but aim specifically at certain areas and things get a lot more fun. Pull off bumpers, doors, and wheels, all while travelling at 100mph. But the most satisfying? Aiming at the driver of the offending vehicle and plucking them effortlessly from their seat, dragging them along behind your car. They deserve it. Honest.
Ammo is pretty thin on the ground in the Wasteland, meaning you need to get inventive with explosives. While flaming fuel canisters can be thrown for some BBQ time, bombs on sticks can be tossed or stabbed through to flambé foes. Whether you’re on foot and destroying oil reserves in camps, or at the wheel and firing a well aimed, explosive Thunderpoon, Michael Bay has nothing on the carnage on offer here. With each car battle ending in flames no matter which way you play, every encounter becomes a cinematic bomb-fest.
Intimidating Wicker Man style scarecrows of wood and bodies loom across the Wasteland, representing the threat of the local warlords, so it’s a good thing you’ve got your handy harpoon. Speeding past one of these behemoths, yanking it down with the harpoon as you go, is ridiculously satisfying. The remains leave behind scrap that you can use for car upgrades and armour, but you’ll have to pick it out from amongst the body-strewn wreckage. The Wasteland might be vast but it’s little details and side distractions like this that ensure that it never feels empty.
So it turns out that you can’t afford to be picky in the Wasteland, and that means cramming chunks of post apocalyptic Pedigree Chum into your mouth. Mmmm, eating tinned reconstituted mystery meat with hands that probably haven’t ever seen a bottle of antibacterial wash. Max doesn’t seem too be worried about bacteria. Especially given the fact that you can also refill his health with fistfuls of squirming maggots removed from the ribcages of the unfortunate human corpses that litter the Wasteland. It might be a good source of protein, but ‘Press A to scoff maggots’ is a delightfully vile prompt.
Discover a convoy route zig zagging across the world, and you can follow it for inevitable treats to pillage from Scrotus’ War Boys. Ferrying fuel and goods across the world, these oh so smashable convoys are ripe for the picking but won’t go down without a serious fight. Some convoys also hold specific pieces of car you’ll want for the Magnum Opus. This is a perfect time to play with your harpoon and combine it with the Magnum Opus’ boost. Line up an enemy vehicle in front before letting fly with your harpoon and boosting into them. Boom. Literally.
With all these explosions and a heat haze shimmering over the Wasteland, health-replenishing water is the most precious of soggy treasures when you’re lucky enough to find it. Marked with a nice blue droplet on the map, wells and water taps are a welcome sight. So much so that when Max slowly fills his canteen via an oddly satisfying filling/emptying mechanic, it’s guaranteed to make you thirsty. Although wells and water sources do refill eventually, it takes time that you might not have, so you’ll need to be sparing with the old eau.
Ok, it might just be a slightly less exciting name for flame-throwers, but that doesn’t matter when you turn on your sideburners mid-battle. There are few things more grimly exhilarating than spewing fire from both sides of the Magnum Opus at once, and hearing the opposition roar in fury. Your sideburners can be upgraded too, to make sure that you’re always cooking your enemies well done.
Yup, sometimes there’s something enjoyable about taking the non-Batman approach to things. While you can take a more softly softly approach to taking down camps and view it all through binoculars before planning your attack, it’s far more entertaining to arrive at a camp and yank down every guard tower in sight with your harpoon, before hauling down the front door and skipping inside to slaughter the evil horde within. The first thing to do once in there is to check above for a caged enemy strapped to an explosive barrel. He’ll rile up the other goons, so taking him out is a good call, if nothing else but to watch him disappear in a ball of flame.
Furiousa might not be present in the game, but Max has his very own Fury meter. With Batman-style, counter-focused combat, Max has both a light and heavy attacks. Juggle them just right and Max’s Fury meter slowly builds, culminating in an utter rage that means you inflict more damage. And oh what damage. While this isn’t quite at Rocksteady’s level of punchy panache, a perfect parry - pressing the counter button at just the right time - will reward you with delightfully crunchy skull crushing and bone breaking finishers. Which leads me nicely onto...
Just like Joel in The Last Of Us, Max has a collection of shivs for close combat carnage. Short and brutal, you can see how many you’ve got in your collection at the bottom right of the screen. Unlike in The Last Of Us however, these are just bonus bloody extras during combat. When there’s a chance to use one of the deadly blades, a prompt appears for a shiv execution, which come in a number of delightfully brutal variations. Stabbings against walls, plunging blades into the necks of prone enemies... none of these things disappoint when you want things to get satisfyingly nasty.
Max’s handy sniper rifle can only be used from the rear of the car, and Chumbucket will hand it over for easy targeting of distant goons. Sniper towers are scattered across the world and clearly labelled in red on your world map. Sniping is a far more controlled way to clean up the guard areas outside camps, but you’ll miss out on some gloriously chaotic carnage if you choose to play it safe.
The joy of this almost completely desolate open-world is the freedom to drive in whichever direction you like. Chances are you’ll find something interesting whichever way you head. Doing so, I discovered two enormous guarded oil silos called The Twins. Sniper bullets greeted me as I screeched up, so I quickly darted inside the only door that wasn’t guarded by flames. Once inside I battled slews of neon dust covered enemies in near darkness, before heading up to the roof and taking out even more mutated nasties. A bridge linked the two silos. and a quick jaunt across later, I was doing it all again on other other side. The best bit? However strenuous a gauntlet this whole assault was, it felt like just a drop in a rich and brutal ocean.
Avalanche didn’t want to build a racing game with Max, but of course there are opportunities to get behind the wheel and prove you’re better than everyone else. Races and unique time trials are scattered across the Wasteland. During one, I ended up screeching across the world, desperately trying to reach a designated point on the map before the explosives strapped to my car decided to go off. Making matters somewhat worse, I was attacked by a mob of bandits on the way. Whether I was just unlucky, or this was a scripted occurrence, who knows, but it certainly added to the general, ongoing theme of complete and utter chaos.
Handily, Avalanche has made sure you’ve got the same controls for both driving and when you’re on foot, for a more seamless transition between the two. However, this does mean you’re firing your weapons with the B button and not the traditional trigger. You get used to it pretty speedily, but it does mean a little rewiring of your brain until you stop missing well-trained sniper shots as a result of, well, not actually firing.
Scattered across the world are historical images taken before that big bad apocalypse of unknown origin. These signs and tokens of the world before everything was just hot and insane are intriguing snapshots. Yet this is just the beginning of the collectibles strewn across the Wasteland. Scrap is lying around everywhere, just waiting to be thrown into upgrades, and chests of ammo can be discovered too. Less invitingly, Scrotus’ insignia is also hidden across various campsites for you to destroy. OCD MacGuffin-hunters are going to have a field day with this overwhelming open-world.
F1 2015 is upon us, bearing the weight of three decades of F1 games on its HD shoulders. Who could have thought in the heady days of Namco's Pole Position that one day we'd be looking at 60 photo-quality images made up of over 2 million pixels each zooming around on TVs the size of dinner tables? Recognisable 3D drivers, laser-scanned circuits… it's incredible how far we've come.
But that doesn't mean previous F1 games should be forgotten forever just because the drivers in them have long-since retired (or worse) and their graphics look like Steve from Minecraft got given a racing overalls skin. Now, to be clear - I'm not just going to list all the classic ones like Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, F1 World Grand Prix or F1 '97 because the truth is, while they were amazing at the time, they're not very good if you play them now. These are the other F1 games that still deserve to be played today.
While the impressiveness of those scaling sprites has waned slightly, this F1-themed arcade sprint is still a ton of fun. The camera on the car is slightly off-centre, which immediately gives this a more organic feel than most 2D racers. In the arcade, this was exacerbated by the free-feeling analog steering wheel.
The crashes are over the top, with explosions and bouncing wheels, but there's a really nice pit mechanic. His name's Bob. No, I'm joking (sorry), I mean the way you have to pit in if you sustain damage, as your car smokes, then catches fire. Fail to do so and it explodes, but sometimes you can just make it to the finish line before it does. Risk vs reward – it's classic gaming stuff.
Officially licensed? No. Real tracks? No. Formula One cars rocketing around banked curves, flipping against rocks and scrambling for time bonus checkpoints? Hell yes. This may be best remembered for being the game that kick-started the 3D polygon era, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it is still an absolute blast to play. The handling is precise, the polygonal scenery flashing past still looks gorgeous and the three tracks are beautifully designed.
The arcade original remains the best version (with PS2's remake being a bit too slidey to be perfect), with silky-smooth and gloriously solid flat-shaded 3D. Smoothly switching between the four viewpoints is still more fun than it should be, and the difficulty level is perfectly judged, ensuring plenty of longevity. They don't make 'em like this any more. FOR SHAME.
"You wot, mate? A PSP game? Naff off." That's what you're thinking. But this is, quite simply, the best dedicated handheld F1 game you can buy. It's essentially a shrunk-down PS2 game, complete with engine failures, damage (decent damage, at that) and extensive career mode. Your pit engineer even tells you how your sector times are compared to your opponents. It's the full F1 experience.
The graphical simplification is evident if you play it today, but that's where the compromise ends. The controls are wonderful. Cannoning along the flat-out chicane at Albert Park, picking your braking point for the right hander feels every bit as good as a full console game. The Vita version of F1 2011 is nowhere near as good as this. FOR SHAME.
9. F1 (Genesis/Mega Drive)
Domark's 16-bit racer remains one of the fastest video games ever made, particularly in 'Turbo Mode', which uses the graphics from the two-player mode in a single-player set-up. The scenery absolutely flies by at these speeds, with a little 'whoosh' noise every time you pass under a flyover.
It's got the official drivers of 1993 too, barring Ayrton Senna who must have still been under license with Sega at the time. While the technical accomplishment of having 3D grandstands and rotated sprites (without a Mega-CD to do all the work) has faded with time, revving the cat-like engine and gliding through these sparse environments is still fun – especially when you clip the wheel of a slow-moving car and bunny-hop into an Agip sign.
To think I found this in a bargain bin. Using a bespoke game engine, Melbourne House managed to get the PS2 to shift 22 gorgeous-looking cars around at 60fps. Sure, the damage modelling is underwhelming and the handling is a little too simplified, but the atmosphere of the game and superb sense of fluidity is wonderful.
Best feature? Zooming down a straight in the slipstream of the car in front, watching vortices of air streaming off its back wing. If ever a game was ahead of its time, it's this. If you want to see a PS2 running a game that still stands up next to F1 on PS4, then this is the one.
This one's pretty much vanished into obscurity already, but that's a real shame as it's arguably the best kart racer that isn't called Mario Kart. The drivers and cars may be recognisable (though 'super-deformed' with big heads and cartoon-slanted wheels), but the tracks are only loosely based on reality, with some recognisable corners that then skew upwards into the sky, with rollercoaster sections of excitement.
It's beautifully smooth and controllable (albeit lacking any kind of drift feature as F1 cars really shouldn't drift around corners), and only really let down by some disappointingly generic weapons. Yes, it has weapons. Trapping Jenson Button in bubblegum is an odd thing to do. But still, fun. You'll undoubtedly find it cheap – pick it up, you'll enjoy it.
Everyone remembers PlayStation's officially-licensed Formula One games, but Saturn had one too. It wasn't made by Bizarre Creations, instead appearing under the Sega Sports label. It also didn't have all the tracks, providing just three official circuits (Germany, Suzuka and Monaco) and a handful of playable drivers.
But this is a wonderful arcade representation of Formula One. One of the first console racers to feature a 3D skybox, simply turning the car fills your senses with an amazing visual effect as the sky arcs overhead. Cars spin, tyres go off and you can gamble on fuel between pit stops. It's starting to show its age, but get past the slight flakiness and there's a great racing game here, especially with the official Saturn steering wheel.
Now listen. I want you to know I am being absolutely serious and I'm wearing my 'nostalgia sucks' hat when I say this: Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix was made in 1988, but remains one of the best F1 sims of all time. You have to qualify within a certain time or you'll never see a real race. You've got to keep the revs within the power band to keep fuel consumption down and – explaining instantly why I've always played racers on manual gears – you have to learn to change gear or you won't ever leave the pit lane.
You have four settings for your turbo and have to manage fuel and engine temperature as you use it. If you do run out of fuel, weaving left and right will slosh fuel back into the pump in the engine - just like real cars of the '80s. You can catch spins, blow the engine or your tyres… it's an amazingly faithful replication of the sport – it just looks like your TV's broken, is all. Amazing job, Martech.
How can a 10-years-old PS2 game still be one of the best F1 racers you can buy? Well, it's all in the handling. F1 '05's handling model is sensational. It also uses an increasingly shaky TV pod cam as you get faster, until 200mph really feels like 200mph. If you ever wanted to get your teeth into a fast, responsive, devilishly fun and controllable racing game, then this is absolutely it.
It also sounds incredible. The commentator suggests that you 'turn up the volume' while you wait for the green light, and you really should. There's also a 5-year career mode to get your teeth into. It's little surprise to note this game was developed by Studio Liverpool, of Wipeout fame. Now there was a team that knew how to make a great racer.
Despite the progress made by the sequel (and its now sadness-tinged Ayrton Senna license), it's the original that I would recommend most strongly, and the 16-bit version at that. The gameplay itself may be sedate by today's standards, but the rivalry system is perfect, allowing you to move up through the teams as quickly as you think your skills will allow – or down if you fail to meet expectations.
The music is wonderful, and couples with a presentation style tinged with the romance of late 1980s-era F1. The 2D images disguised to look like TV footage in the post-race screens are achingly beautiful, complete with heat haze effects. It’s a game to savour, and also one of the best games you can play on a Sega Nomad. Fact.
Studio Liverpool's first - and last - PS3 F1 game is still beautiful. Running at 60 frames per second, it's only the 720p resolution that really betrays its last-gen status. But it's arguably volved than Codemasters' subsequent take on the sport, thanks to QTE pitstops (way better than that sounds), parade laps to warm up your tyres, and commentary over the race action.
The handling model is more accessibly video gamey than true simulation, and you can even steer with the D-pad which is actually surprisingly sharp. Any game with Martin Brundle in it is automatically 20% better, so it gets marks for that too. Smooth, precise, exhaustive and with damage that actually sees a wheel falling off when you hit another car (I know, right?), this is still mightily impressive, 8 years on.
This may not have been the final last-gen F1 game from Codemasters, but it's by far the best. Firstly, you've got the result of four years of honing the formula (pun intended) and the amazing Ego engine, making this easily good enough to pass for a new-gen racing game. But if the main course (pun not intended) is good, it's the dessert that'll keep you coming back for more.
There's classic content featuring vintage cars, circuits and even drivers. The 1988 season is best represented (although sadly lacking the stars of that year – the McLaren Hondas), but there's 1990s content too, offered as DLC or with the special edition of the game. And that's got Nigel Mansell's FW14B. I made a video series showcasing the best of this content, which you should totally watch. With such an authentic and slick main game made even better with such fan-pleasing content, it's clearly the best F1 game ever made. Unless F1 2015 can change that...
It's finally happened: Bethesda has gone toe to toe with Minecraft. The publisher has been toying with in-game map editing tools for its core RPG franchises for some time – Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion allows you to build and decorate houses, on top of a robust physics system that lets you drag objects around willy-nilly – but not ‘til has it handed us more or less a level designer’s power over an area's layout and contents.
In certain parts of the new game, you'll be able to convert objects into component resources such as wood and rubber, then buy and place walls, props and interactive fixtures to form your very own town. What's more, NPCs will come to live in these towns and you'll need to keep them fed, watered, happy, and protected, placing resources such as crops and automated defences to head off raider attacks. OK, so you can't (that we know of) dig into the very terrain, but everything above ground is yours to meddle with.
There are a fair few games with map-editing features on the shop right now, of course, and certain design “trends” have emerged, from the obligatory giant penis effigy to those terrifyingly adept works of urban planning I keep bumping into on Youtube. Here are a few varieties of user-created settlement you're all but guaranteed to encounter at least once in the average Fallout 4 savegame.
Fallout 4's editing toolset includes switches (terminals) that can be hooked up to components such as power generators and signboards to control their behaviour. From the E3 videos, it appears that you can bodge together quite complex sequences of interactions, calling on more advanced gadgets such as laser tripwires and components that all map to the same terminal. My knowledge of programming is admittedly sketchy, but it sounds like you could even create your own analytical engine inside the simulation, following in the footsteps of this from Dwarf Fortress.
Quite why people keep feeling the urge to build computers inside other computers eludes me. True, it's cheaper than buying another laptop, but it's also months of work for a machine that's just about powerful enough to add and subtract. One of these days somebody will build a computer inside a computer inside a computer, and humanity will evaporate in a blaze of meta-textuality.
Or Winterhold. Or Whiterun. Or the Starship Enterprise. Or the DisneyLand castle. Or Lordran. Or the set of Carry On Cleo. Probably all of them, in fact, plus the Los Angeles convention centre (complete with NPCs queueing by flickering TV sets), six thousand casino-style billboard animations of Mario doing non-canonical things to Princess Peach, and the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Lengthy trawls of various Reddit boards have taught me that there is nothing committed level editors enjoy more than transplanting pop culture landmarks between or into games, blurring their DNA in a manner calculated to rouse Twitter's shock and admiration. And annoy the hell out of various copyright lawyers.
Fallout 4's aesthetic poses a bit of an obstacle – it's hard to believe you're living in the Smurf Village when there are 200-year-old shopping trolleys all over, and everything looks like it's made of rat droppings – but I have faith in you, fans of license splicing. On PC, of course, you can look forward to skin and texture mods to help complete the illusion. These will migrate to the Xbox One version, with mod support on PS4 still TBC at the time of writing.
For every 10 half-finished eyesores or giant penis sculptures, there should (we hope) be at least one player who sets out boldly to create something that actually works as a town should. A town in which the arrangement of farms, markets, homesteads and so forth is genuinely reminiscent of the practical and emotional needs of living creatures. A town where morale is always high, where nobody wants for potable water, a bar to lean on or a place to lay their head. A town that can hold off raiders and sustain itself without the player needing to pop back continually to fix up the barricades and ensure all the guards are pointing in the right direction.
A town, moreover, that feels like a plausible part of the game's storyline. Bethesda's tools allow for fine-grained object placement – you might spend half-an-hour moving a single lightbulb around in order to precisely illuminate an arresting tableau. It'll be intriguing to see whether the most ambitious town creators can hint at forgotten backstories as successfully as the game's own designers.
Some will see AI raids on player-owned towns as a nuisance, but look at it this way: you're almost certainly going to kill a lot of people in Fallout 4 regardless. At least in this case they have the courtesy to come to you. And think of the loot! The bottle caps! The unending shrieks of pain and terror from without the walls as you recline on your throne at the centre of a maze of tripwires, turrets, landmines and guard towers – a capricious and uncaring despot, growing fat off the suicidal imbecility of scavenger tribes.
The idea of auto-farming enemies in open world games for XP or items has a long, illustrious history – in particular, Minecraft players have learned to bump off whole armies of mobs by placing spawn points near natural hazards. With any luck, Fallout 4's crafting system will be sophisticated enough to allow creation of . Imagine opening a bridge trapdoor below a raiding party to plunge them into a river of nuclear sewage, which then sweeps dropped items beneath a walkway where they can be safely harvested. Every frontier town should have one! Who knows, perhaps you'll find the corpse of the game's final boss in there.
Bethesda-brand NPCs are characterised by two things. One, facial animations that put you in mind of The Exorcist. And two, an endearing mixture of independent thinking and rampant bloody stupidity. Yes, the average Skyrim resident might sleep in an actual bed at night, sell armour by day and hunt the game's wildlife for sport, but you can also to stop him noticing when you nick his stuff. It's not exactly Deus Ex Machina.
For many, these AI foibles are all part of the fun – hey, what's not to love about tavern-goers who ? - but now imagine a Fallout 4 NPC attempting to navigate a town laid out not by a trained designer but some half-arsed teenager. A smashed labyrinth of doorless rooms and free-standing walls through which crusty residents trundle forever, searching in despair for the crops they're supposed to water, stalls they're supposed to run. Truly pitiful.
Let's say you've just gotten hold of a Fat Man, the returning heavy launcher from Fallout 3. You're itching to try it out on something, but the Fat Man is not a weapon you can fire off just anywhere. Put it this way - it's not the kind of weapon that wounds. Were you playing as an utter villain, kicking the legs out from under civilisation as it struggles to its feet, this wouldn't be a problem. But you've resolved to play as a goddamn do-gooder. You're also a stealth specialist. How on Earth are you going to dig yourself a nice cathartic crater without losing karma and making a mockery of your ninja pretensions?
Ah but wait. There is that rubbish, mostly deserted village you set up the other week, isn't there? The one you filled with custom shop window mannequins, who you gave individual names and backstories, so as to create a cathartic mini-realm of guilt-free violent oppression. So that you could do all kinds of evil stuff to people, without losing your hero rating. Because you’re possibly a bit mad. Perhaps you should pay a visit. The kind of visit that ends about, oh, let's say a hundred metres outside the city limits. It's just a shame Fallout 4 doesn't appear to support the same level of realistic building destruction you'd get in, say, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Still, those mannequin minions will fly.
You can build towns on several sites in Fallout 4. Assuming an only-human level of dedication, at least one of the towns you build is probably going to consist of the bare necessities – a shack with a workbench, a roof turret, a strongbox, and a lonely-looking trader peering at the horizon.
It raises an important question: exactly how punishing are the raiding and town morale aspects? Will players be obliged to think big, fleshing out their settlements to satisfy NPC requirements and head off attacks, or will we be able to throw together the odd homestead purely for the sake of a fast-travel point? If the town-building is too much of a chore, its appeal may be limited - much like maintaining a social life in Grand Theft Auto 4.
Batman has two rules. Don't kill, and add the word ‘bat’ to everything he owns. However, Arkham Knight seems to push the first rule to its breaking point... and then runs it over with the Batmobile. Literally and repeatedly. You keep telling yourself you’re only incapacitating them, Bruce. Whatever helps you sleep whenever you find time to sleep.
Alarmed at the way Batman whacks, cracks and splats his way through the villainous hordes that populate Gotham, I found myself increasingly questioning how many could plausibly actually make it out alive. But it wasn’t a rhetorical question, I got hold of an IRL Doctor - Dr M Hussain, SHO - to deduce just how non-lethal Batman actually is. The results will shock you as heavily as the Batmobile’s weaponised dynamo. So click on in horror, as I explain what's really going on here, with the help of Real Medical Expertise and a collection of screens I grabbed from some video I took.
There’s a sense early on in Arkham Knight that this is a Batman carrying additional emotional baggage. Considering the titanic amount he was carrying to begin with - dead parents, double life, Alfred’s unfortunate insistence on keeping up with Downton Abbey - that’s enough to make anyone a bit tetchy. So when Bats grabs a soldier in a cell and introduces the chap to the metal bars by yanking him into them, it’s certain that the old ‘No Killing’ rule is getting tested before the night is through.
Fortunately for Bruce, this type of provocation isn’t going to turn him into a murderer just yet. Dr. Hussain says that “[It] depends on how strong the force is. Most people can survive this type of blow - but the resulting complications can be dangerous; the victim can be left with brain injury.” Well, I guess it’s a good job Batman doesn’t have a rule about ensuring the criminals he’s fighting have to think or talk again.
A classic staple of the Arkham series, as Bats lurks in the rafters waiting to swoop up some inattentive guards, whisper a few sweet nothings, and then leave them hanging like a naughty piñata. If they’re lucky, they’ll be cut down. Eventually. But could this showy display of strength actually end up with a body on Batman’s conscience?
“From a medical perspective, it is not necessarily how far someone falls but how they fall, which determines their survival.” Dr. Hussain explains. “When someone lands on their back, rather than their side, the main artery which carries blood (the aorta) is ruptured. A fall of 3m can be dangerous; a fall of more than 10m can cause significant organ damage - enough to cause death.” Let’s give Bat’s the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’ll be better if they’re left to dangle until the Gotham Health and Safety Department devise a responsible way for hanging thugs to be freed? Dr. Hussain points out “When someone is upside down for long periods of time the blood rushes to the head and lungs and causes pooling of blood where it shouldn’t be. This can cause something known as pulmonary oedema, which in turn can cause raised blood pressure and stroke.” Oh. Maybe not then.
Nothing else captures the essence of Batman quite like the FreeFlow combat. The stalking, detecting, and gargoyle straddling might be close, but it’s the ballet of concussions that wins out. Arkham Knight ensures that Batman is as mercilessly economical with his fighting as ever, dishing out black eyes and broken bones like a sociopathic santa. At some point a line marked ‘Living/Stop, stop, he’s already dead’ will be crossed.
So while Batman’s pulverising his foe’s chest while they’re stunned, Dr. Hussain warns he’s doing some pretty grim things when it comes to their life expectancy. “This can cause internal bleeding secondary to organ damage and can comprise the lungs’ and heart’s functionality. Both are essential to survive.” So when Batman leaves the poor sods with organ soup where their lungs should be, it’s safe to say a few lives have been sacrificed at the altar of a solid combo.
It’s not the just the fists, boots and head of Batman that the nefarious wrong ‘uns of Gotham have to sweat about. He’s brought along the Bat brood to square some odds. And they bring all the stylish aggression you’d want from superior martial artists teaming up to craft a few fluid beatdowns. The type of smackdowns that Dr. Hussain warns could cause “damage to the spine and ribs.”
The video I sent her had Nightwing lifting up a do-badder for Batman to glide into with his heel. Looks incredible, but does the sort of damage that leaves an NHS accountant in an existential crisis. “The amount of force required to kick someone across the room would be very high and can cause damage to organs.” Essentially, if Batman and Nightwing are using someone for human keepie-ups, that person’s funeral is on Thursday and the Bat Family are not invited.
It’s not just his massive Bat-fists and Bat-gadgets The Dark Knight will end a life with. He’ll gladly steal your weapon too, if you’re dim enough to swing it at him. If you’re unlucky enough, or just catch him on a particularly gruelling Monday, he’ll reacquaint you with the blunt end of it as well.
It won’t come as a great surprise to you that Dr. Hussain confirms that being hit in the head with a baseball bat isn’t ideal. “A blow to the head can cause blood vessels to burst and pool in areas of the brain - causing a subdural haematoma. This can increase the pressure in the brain and lead to death.” Batman’s probably cracked enough skulls in his time to get his non-fatal baseball swing just right, but how does he know the guy he’s left unconscious on the floor isn’t suffering from a haematoma? Oh right, Detective Mode. Never mind, carry on.
There’s the right way of getting information from a dodgy source, and then there’s the quick way. Batman’s methods fall very much into the latter camp. By the time your friendly neighbourhood interrogator has drafted up paperwork and busted out the polygraph, Batman’s got answers and left a few cracked windpipes in his wake. The second part of that equation isn’t good news for anyone.
So what’s happening medically after Batman has crashed his arm onto the throat of his victim? Nothing great if you’re receiving the throat blow. “The windpipe is essential to supply oxygen to the lungs and in turn to the rest of the body. If this is compromised then death could occur.” Is a NPC’s life worth the few Riddler trophy locations you’ll get? Obviously the answer is yes, but Batman’s a killer now, so nobody wins.
Quick, The Riddler has planted bombs inside some of the slower elements of Gotham’s thugs and they need to be saved from having to experience watching their brains being forcibly ejected from their crania! They need to be saved, Batman, how are you going to go about it? Chuck an electrified batarang at them to short circuit the bomb? Steady on Batman, that might do more harm than good.
The good news - as good as news can be for a person with a bomb snuggling up in their innards - is that a shock isn’t necessarily fatal. “Anything between 6-30 milliamps causes a phenomenon called ‘freezing’ where the muscles contract (less of a threshold in women compared to men) but can survive,” Dr. Hussain says. But Batman isn’t off the hook yet as “50 to 100 milliamps causes respiratory arrest and death is likely.” Considering Batman plays it fast and loose with charging up the Batarang, I think a few thugs are going to get a nasty (sunglasses on) shock.
When designing an armoured, all-purpose thug deterrent disguised as a car, it’s going to be almost impossible to avoid tripping over the lethality line. After all, the Batmobile is a very heavy piece of metal travelling at ludicrously high speeds. It’s able to break concrete as if it was Batman’s back (a little something for the Bane fans out there) and in Arkham Knight, Batman can spend most of his time in it hurtling towards people driving in beaten-up taxis. Feels a bit silly asking it, but will this end well?
“As with any vehicle collisions, crush injuries to the victim can occur. This is when the body is caught between two objects being pushed together by a high pressure. These type of injuries are responsible for broken bones, severe bruising, bleeding and compartment syndrome,” Dr. Hussain points out. So should the Batmobile collide into another moving vehicle that hasn’t been designed by a billionaire’s RD department - which it does, a hefty amount - Master Wayne isn’t driving away guilt free.
At some point, Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox decided to make the Batmobile electric. Not in the “petrol is very expensive and we’ve only got one world” way - it’s 2015 Batman, maybe you should save some ice caps - but in the “if anyone gets hit by my car, I’ll make sure they know just how badly they goofed by running a few volts through their body” type of way. Which just feels sort of unnecessary, if you ask me.
Dr. Hussian informs that “both the electric shock and the force of impact can cause serious bodily damage and, in turn, death.” Having the BatHummer plow into people like lava through snow is really enough to finish a life already. By the time they’re getting a jolt through their body, it’s technically considered desecrating a corpse.
One of the Batmobile’s jazzier features is the immobiliser, a rocket that explodes on impact but not enough to kill whoever is driving it’s intended target. Or at least that’s what Batman should keep telling himself. Dr. Hussain says “[They’re] unlikely to survive this trauma. The impact of the rocket will cause damage, but more than this the resulting explosion would cause extensive burn injuries.”
In what is becoming a depressing trend for serial killer Batman, whack him behind the wheel of the Batmobile and all consideration for the lives of Gotham’s ne’er-do-wells is gone. So while the immobiliser rocket does help slow down the vehicle he’s chasing, that’s because the people inside are too busy trying to avoid an early cremation. If they haven’t exploded in a mushroom cloud of giblets already.
As you work your way through Arkham Knight, you’ll notice that everyone repeatedly calls out Batman’s refusal to use live rounds when firing at enemies. That’s one enormous blind eye they’re turning. When he’s not running over half of Gotham, he’s finishing the other half by firing rockets at their incapacitated bodies. Yep, knock somebody out and you’re able to fire all those explosives Batman keeps tucked in his Bat-tank o’ death.
Dr. Hussain underplays it a tad by saying “The force and resulting explosion will cause burn injuries.” But let’s be clear, Batman fires a rocket at an unconscious body. He has firmly lost his grip on morality and sees the thugs of Gotham as his playthings, tiny insects to inhumanly torture and squash under his BatBoot. Basically, I’m saying Arkham Knight earns it 18 rating.
The undeniable excesses of the electrified tank feel like Batman beginning to accepting that, in truth, he really is just down to murder. I mean come on, Brucey. But when he flexes the ability to steamroll crims into the pavement, well… yeah. No way back. No, the game doesn’t explicitly show you the broken bodies the Batmobile crushes underneath its blood-soaked wheels, but that doesn’t excuse Bruce being able to repeatedly drive over the men he’s incapacitated. I bet he’s thinking of dodgy one-liners like “This is a new way to squash crime” as he does, the merciless Bat-stard.
If you have any queries about a human’s ability to survive having the Batmobile rolled over them again and again and again, let Dr. Hussain put your mind at rest. “If they do happen to survive the first impact, repeatedly running over someone will crush any remaining bones and organs.” From maybe being a tiny bit too punchy, to painting the road several shades of sinew, Batman’s gone from religiously Not Killing, to showering in the gizzards of his enemies. Vigilanteism. It’s a slippery slope, kids. Do not be the Batman.
Platform games are one of gaming's most enduring staples, and you can't really mention them without talking about Mario. Except I am. Put simply, there's no point in me trying to list the best platform games of all time because, like it or not, Mario titles would take up at least 50% of the entries. The best platform game ever made is probably Super Mario Galaxy 2 (so says our list). But let's not argue about that. Let's look at the challengers.
There's more to the competition than just Sonic the Hedgehog. In fact, you're about to read about 25 amazing platform games that don't have Mario in them. And they're in order too, so let's start with 25 and work our way up to the top. Let's-a go! *Gunshot*.
Ah, a familiar face. Crash is surely one of PSone's most enduring icons and his first adventure is arguably his best. The tight, corridor-like nature of the levels mean Naughty Dog (yes, of Uncharted fame) was able to cram loads of polygonal detail into every frame, making this still look surprisingly lush, especially on a PSP or Vita's screen.
The gameplay is much harder than most people remember, and finding all of the wumpa fruit (there's a blast from the past) requires some pretty serious skills and searching on later levels. It's true that non-homing jumping in 3D space doesn't work very well a lot of the time, but Crash's shadow at least allows you to see where you're landing. It's still fun, charming and easy to get hold of via PSN.
It's rare for a platform game to out-concept the infamous Glover in the 'most ridiculous premise for a platform game' contest. But Vince is the third-best voodoo doll belonging to the owner of a magic shop in New Orleans, who comes to life when zombie dust is spilled during a robbery/kidnapping.
Vince himself is a wisecracking platform hero (no, wait - come back!) who can defeat his enemies by inflicting pain on himself. Chuck yourself in a fire if it helps (and it probably will). From the world design to the N'orleans Jazz-influenced soundtrack, Voodoo Vince has a ton of personality to go alongside the tight 3D platforming design. Still surprisingly good-looking, too. That original Xbox has still got some clout, I'm tellin' ya...
Shantae is one of those games that hardly anyone talks about, but deserves much more acclaim. Shantae herself is a Middle-Eastern belly dancer and in this, her third game, she must team up with her former enemy, Risky Boots (great name – love it) and save her town from a typically pantomime-evil threat.
What follows is classic platform action, where new abilities unlock secrets in previously-visited areas. It's very similar to an old (unrelated) game called Monster World IV – in fact, it could feasibly pass as a sequel to that game. But this is better. Some might be put off by the ridiculous moments of cartoon fan-service (those costume changes are gratuitous to say the least), but it's all tame and feels good-natured. Look out for the new-gen sequel currently in development.
It's remarkable how well the oldest game on this list has stood the test of time. While you could boil this first Dizzy sequel down to an overly-punishing 'fetch and carry' quest, you'd be doing it a massive disservice. The design of this static-screened world is still a treat for the imagination. A desert island with pirate gold lying beneath the surface of the water, complete with a treehouse village, a sub-aquatic world (with a shipwreck) and cursed treasure to boot.
The one-hit-and-you-have-to-restart 'feature' is cruel, but it actually gives the game an immense feeling of peril. Every jump near a hazard – be it a jellyfish or burning torch – must be judged perfectly, or you have to start again. And each moment of discovery when you work out where an item goes is a moment of air-punching glee. Even though the whole game fits into 48k of RAM, it's still brilliant.
Channeling the likes of Rocket Knight Adventures, Giana Sisters is a fast-paced, flowing and beautiful platformer. It's dripping with classic platform iconography, too. Coloured jewels floating the air, begging to be collected. Lush forest backgrounds… glistening water… it's exactly like the platformers of the 1990s, only rendered in spectacular modern detail.
It is, however, extremely difficult. It is certainly possible to master its versatile moveset, but doing so will take a lot of time and patience. Fortunately, it's totally worth the effort, so it won't feel like a chore. And when you're dashing, spinning and leaping around like you own the place, you'll feel amazing.
Disney platformers in the early 1990s were pretty much universally brilliant, whether on 16-bit or 8-bit machines. The Lucky Dime Caper may be an 8-bit title, but it's got everything you could want. Donald himself is beautifully drawn, full of personality and charm. The movement is solid and smooth and the mallet attack feels suitably meaty.
The levels are now the stuff of cliché, what with a water area, a forest, an ice zone and desert, but you can tackle the first three in any order, then the next three in any order, too. The soundtrack is superb and the sense of drama it creates by the time you reach the final level is palpable, followed by some of the most celebratory music ever committed to cartridge. Such a pity the game isn't more readily-available today.
It's very rare to have something from your childhood remade in a way that's sympathetic to what you remember, but Castle of Illusion's HD redux is exactly that. Some moments, like the leaves in the spiders' webs, look and sound exactly how you remember them… although if you go back and play the original now, you'll be amazed at quite how old it feels.
From the over-sized library to the confectionary-filled sweet level, everything is lovingly-rendered and delivered in an organic-looking, non-regimented way. Mickey looks superb in 3D and the scattering of collectible items is challenging enough to be rewarding, but certainly not impossible. Whether you play on PSN or iOS, the experience is the same. This is quality, retro-styled gaming, only modern enough to feel fresh and relevant today. Just a shame the 'bottom bounce' has been replaced with a standard jump attack. Ah well, can't have everything.
Obviously there are many Mega Man games that have a special place in a lot of hearts, but Mega Man 2 is the most iconic. It's also one of the most hardcore platforming experiences around, with ultra-precise and solid controls, fearsome enemy patterns, and carefully rationed upgrades that come to you as you swear your way through screen after screen of chunky scenery.
It also sounds magnificent, with a classic soundtrack made up of bleeps, bloops and fizzes. Forget its actual age, there is a timelessness to Mega Man 2. It's a distillation of the joy of pressing a button to interact with a little sprite on your TV screen. The game design is spectacularly great, with an understanding of timing and challenge far beyond many games, even today.
After Mario and Sonic made platformers THE genre to play, everyone wanted in on the action. By 1993, there was an element of platformer fatigue. But even the biggest critics of the fad would have to concede that Aladdin is a very special video game. With sprites designed by Disney animators themselves, this was as close as you could get to actually playing an animated movie on your home console.
It's the Genesis/Mega Drive version, of course, that we're championing here. The SNES version, while still good, simply doesn't have that authentic feel of the Mega Drive version. With MIDI-fied versions of the feature film's classic songs, technically astonishing collision detection (knives split apples mid-air) and a tonne of gameplay variation, this is how you do a movie tie-in.
A lot of indie platformers play around with various gimmicky mechanics, but rarely make them feel as cohesive as Sound Shapes. At its heart is a simple (but not simplistic) 'stick to grey surfaces and avoid red ones' idea, which gets difficult very quickly. But this is coupled with a superb musical element.
As you play a level, you add notes to the music, building the soundtrack and avoiding various threats that all bounce along with the beat. It's mesmerising and utterly, utterly brilliant. The fact that it works with actual music tracks too – imported via DLC – makes this even more delightful. This is so much more than the sum of its parts. Like music, really.
There is an argument for one of the original SNES versions of Donkey Kong Country, but those games' controls lack the precision of the Returns series, which were given Retro Studios' usual classy treatment. This Wii U game has quality written all over it (erm… in invisible ink). And no, it doesn't count as a Mario game.
Not only is the platforming gameplay as enjoyable as ever, it all sounds absolutely phenomenal, thanks to another sensational score by David Wise, who worked on the original Donkey Kong Country. I actually know someone who listens to music from the game on a loop, it's that good. Not me, I hasten to add. But maybe you will.
The 32-bit scene was comparatively light on side-scrolling platformers, most likely because they were seen as a 'last-gen' genre now that 3D worlds had arrived. Klonoa blended the best of both sides, offering precise, smooth, colourful gameplay with 3D visuals.
It's still a 2D platformer, of course. And one that moves absolutely beautifully, despite the now prehistoric tech specs of the humble PSone. Flowing, precise and smooth, Klonoa is sheer class. It's a relatively rare game to get hold of in disc form these days, but you can buy it on the PSN to play on PS3, PSP or Vita. So do that.
There are several entries in the Ratchet Clank series that could easily fit on this list, including the PS2 original (and the new RC remake on PS4 will probably be best of all). But this PS3 game is everything the series stands for, and at its most imaginative, too.
There's the 3D platforming and melee combat we've come to know and love, plus a load of customisable and upgradeable weapons, and some time-warping puzzle-solving to boot. All of this is wrapped up in super-slick production values and topped off with a funny and entertaining script. Can't get much better than that, really. This is exemplary platforming by one of the master development teams of the genre, Insomniac.
Bionic Commando already had a legion of fans hanging onto the glory days of the '80s arcade scene. But this XBLA remake is a revelation for anyone who loved the game the first time around. Everything's better. From the graphics to the controls and the freedom of movement, Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the perfect example of an HD upgrade done right.
The game is mostly the same as it always was, only with a better ending and a few new features thrown in for good measure. And the arm itself makes for a rather unique-feeling platformer, as you swing around, blowing up walls to find secrets and generally feeling like a bionic version of Spider-Man. With a gun. What's not to like?
It's amazing to think that Cave Story is actually already over a decade old. But this 3D remake of the original platformer/shooter hybrid is undoubtedly the best way to play it. This is the definitive version of the game.
But why is it so good? It's the amalgamation of screen after screen full of smoothly-moving (and exploding) sprites, tight controls, a clever upgrade system and good old fun. Yes, it's one of those increasingly rare things – a game that is fun just to control. Add in one of the most subtle, yet brilliant, branching route systems ever seen and you've got a classic on your hands. Well… more like 'in them'.
3D platformers were everywhere in the late-1990s, but even with the mighty Super Mario 64 already owning the platform (sorry, I mentioned Mario), Rare managed to create something truly special on N64 in the shape of Banjo-Kazooie. The two-character set-up works beautifully, with Banjo and Kazooie complementing each others' movesets and playable both as a team and individually.
The textures may look primitive today, but there's still a lot of charm to the game's colourful world, and the Xbox 360 HD re-release is perfectly acceptable, if a little simplistic in terms of geometry. That still can't dull the game's humour, open design and depth of exploration. Oh, and it turns out that Kazooie is a girl. Amazing how few people realise that.
Dave Perry must have learned a lot from developing Cool Spot, because by the time Earthworm Jim came around, everything was working. Jim works as a character because his shape can morph into anything. He can use himself as a skipping rope. Mario can't do that. The 8-direction shooting lends a Gunstar Heroes vibe to proceedings as you monkey-swing and bounce around the levels, giving this entry genre-straddling elements, while remaining most certainly a platform game at heart.
But for all the technical accomplishment and game design (excluding that water level – but even that was fixed in the HD remake, so get that), it's the game's humour that makes it stick in most people's minds. You could call it low-brow, but that just resonated with bogey-hungry '90s kids everywhere. While it does feel very… ''90s' today, it's still brilliantly playable and you should get it.
There's a reason why Sonic 2 is the series entry most people remember playing when they were kids.
It was the game to get for Christmas in 1992. Taking the super-smooth movement of the original game and ramping up the level variety, scale, speed and spectacle, Sonic Team created a timeless platform adventure. And, unlike the original game, the second level is just as good as the first. As is the third, for that matter. Emerald Hill, Chemical Plant and Aquatic Ruin form a holy trinity of gaming playgrounds.
While both the drop-in/drop-out co-op and split-screen 2-player mode have clear flaws, that doesn't mean you can't have fun with a friend. Competing for rings in the pseudo-3D special stage is still loads of fun, but it's the game's longevity that's kept it on this list. People still speedrun it. The new iOS conversion is technically more advanced than the original, while remaining outwardly authentic. However you play Sonic 2, on whatever platform you choose, you will have fun. Fact.
The Castlevania template had already been established long before the 32-bit era arrived. And before Konami turned the series into a 3D adventure, there was time to release the pinnacle of the series' 2D evolution. Symphony of the Night combines pixel-perfect 2D platform combat with 3D background elements to incredible effect. The fact that the 3D is now pretty shaky and roughly-textured somehow makes it all the more wonderful. This has become an icon of retro gaming.
It's aged beautifully in terms of gameplay, too, serving up a huge, lavish adventure, rich with stat-boosting items and new weapons to uncover – not to mention one of the best hidden endings ever. After the PlayStation version, the game also appeared on Sega Saturn, offering extra content including a new playable character. But other elements were weaker, so it's a tough call to say which is best. Both, basically.
Sackboy may be available on PS4 (with some amazingly cute friends), but it's his second PS3 adventure that remains the definitive LBP experience. The built-in levels are more imaginative than those of the original, and the joyous presentation – not to mention Stephen Fry's lovable narration – make just moving around this craft-themed world a pleasurable experience.
But it's the creation suite that really makes this indispensible. You can create regular levels, as you could in the first game, sure, but now you can actually make different genres of games. Yes, making games in a game. What a time to be alive.
Some games are built to reward skill. But few have such a sadistic slant, encouraging you to die a hundred times in preparation of nailing a level with a perfect run. In fact, it even celebrates your catalogue of failures, with an incredible, climactic cascade of replay Meat Boys all dying around that one, lone survivor.
All of this would be for nought if the game played badly, but Super Meat Boy's controls offer incredible precision. When you die, it is simply because you didn't perform well enough. Granted, the graphics are basic by today's standards, but that's because there needs to be no margin for error. A platform is a platform, a wall is a wall. This is ultra-purified platforming action – and it's the meat in the sandwich that matters, not how prettily the bread is cut.
Proof (as if proof were needed) that it's the way a game plays and not how it looks that makes it either a great experience or an also-ran. N+ is all about momentum. It takes some getting used to, certainly, but the potential for perfect runs makes this a mouthwatering prospect for anyone with an eye on getting the best score.
It's mega-hardcore, too. A single wrong move and you're dead, forced to watch a chain reaction of explosion around the screens as pieces of debris (and you) fly around, detonating more explosives. It's this knife-edge of tension juxtaposed against the beauty of a clean run that makes N+ such a delight.
Metroid was pushing all the boundaries when it first released on NES back in 1986, but it was rougher than tree bark with a sore throat and a hangover. Yes, that is rough, you're right. But Super Metroid cemented that formulative… er... formula so perfectly a few years later, it spawned two decades of imitators. The level design and control set are perfectly married, ensuring every area has something new to offer every time you learn a new ability.
The 16-bit visuals may look, shall we say, 'functional' by today's standards, but the music remains some of gaming's best – and actual tunes are used brilliantly sparingly. Super Metroid is designed to give you a sense of melancholic isolation and it gets under your skin. The series translated into 3D perfectly with Metroid Prime, but while Prime is the , Super Metroid remains one of the best platformers ever made.
Is PoP a platformer? Yes. Environmental traversal makes up so much of the game, and requires dexterity and quick-thinking to keep your character from a fall, just like Sonic or he-who-must-not-be-named. But if you do fall… well there's PoP's best stuff.
Being able to rewind time is a brilliant concept and even though it was relatively new when Sands of Time came out, it was done in exemplary fashion. Indeed, play the game too much and you start reaching for the undo button in other games. And even real life. Hit by a bus? That's OK, just rewind time and… oh yeah. Damn.
Rayman Legends is simply the best platform game ever made that doesn’t have Mario in its name. With sublime, intuitive controls that see you sprinting, sliding, wall-jumping, swimming and thwacking enemies into next week, this a joy to play – and easy to pick up if you're a newbie. It works best on Wii U, which is no surprise considering it was designed to be exclusive to that console, before going multi-platform late in development. The HD art is beautiful, the minigames an absolute riot (Kung Foot is worth the asking price alone) and the level layouts are a masterclass in game design, with secrets everywhere and constant rewards for skilful play.
As if that wasn't enough, the multiplayer co-op is exceptional, combining the best of helpfulness and bastardry as you race each other to gather lums, cut a rope to send your mate down a hole to their death or, y'know, actually work together to 100% each level. It's massive too, even going so far as to include levels from Rayman Origins. It's impossible to be disappointed with this game. If you have any interest in platformers at all, you need to play this. Just as soon as you've played Super Ma...(snip!).
So after all the excitable yelping coming out of last year's Quakecon, after that damnably exciting, damnably brief teaser trailer, we've now seen Doom 4 (or just plain Doom, as it's currently calling itself), by way of a couple of hefty E3 demos. And you know what? The Quakecon converts were right. The new Doom is incendiary.
Faster, harder, gorier, funnier, and altogether more brutal, Doom stands out from the swathe of its bullet-happy contemporaries with a fresh, unique, damnably satisfying-looking combat flow that nevertheless feels 100% authentically Doom. It also looks incredible, has a gloriously horrible sense of humour, and is bringing some seriously unexpected but very, very cool additions in its community-focused customisation tools. Click on, and we'll tell you all.
Shotguns. Super shotguns. Machine guns. Plasma rifles. Chainsaws. Chainsaws that carve up demons at a variety of interesting angles, often changing direction mid-hack in order maximise artistic expression. Rocket launchers. The goddamn BFG. Whatever weapon pops instinctively into your mind’s eye when you hear the word ‘Doom’, it’s in the new Doom. And when it fires, it fires like the end of days.
But there are a few new ones too. We’ve seen – in snatches – a new lightning rifle, and a couple of longer-ranged scoped weapons too. But don’t worry. Mid to close-range, rapid fire slaughter, with Doomguy sprinting through swathes of arterial spray, looks to be the order of the day, 100%. That’s because…
It’s fast, it’s ferocious, and it never, ever stops moving. From the industrial environs of Mars, to the wide, open-air killing fields of Hell, Doom’s combat is a whirling, ever-shifting carnival of weapon-changing, demon-mulching violence. On top of his expected speed (which sees him walking faster than some games let you sprint), Doomguy also has a neat new mantle move, which, alongside his double-jump, opens up a raft of verticality and on-the-fly strategic options.
You’ll never be hiding weakly behind cover, but you can duck behind a crate, climb swiftly over it, and then leap off to retaliate with a surprise shotgun burst as you hurtle through the air toward your previous attacker.
That’s how it looks right now. The combat is too fast and kinectic, and flows with too much momentum, to make static recovery any kind of an option. And the levels and multiplayer arenas we’ve seen are positively littered with health and armour pick-ups. Certain enemies will spew them out too, once you’ve burst said enemies satisfactorily all over the wall.
But that’s not to say Doom is too generous. In terms of game balance it looks more like a case of ‘keep moving, keep killing, keep healing, or die quickly’.
Taking the occasional hint from Doom 3’s more ‘realistic’ monsters, but swinging far closer to the early games’ more colourful, expressive take on biotech body-horror, the new Doom’s demons are a totally faithful, modern recreation of the same, line-up of enemies that have underpinned the series – and in fact FPS archytypes in general – for over 20 years.
Zombieman is in. Imps are in. Pinkie Demons are in (and returning as the chunky, bipedal melee-bastards we all know and love, rather than the wheel-assisted rhino-dog of Doom 3). Barons of Hell are back, as are Mancubi, Revenants, and Cacodemons, all fulfilling the same roles and behaviours they’re supposed to in Doom’s complex, quietly cerebral ecosystem. Oh, and there’s this really big demon guy too. He’s got a massive gun instead of an arm, so he’s cybernetic, as well as a demon. He’s… I don’t know, some kind of a Robodemon, I suppose you’d call him…
We’ve seen around 15 minutes of solid Doom gameplay so far. And you know what? Not a break in the action. Not a line of dialogue. Not a single pleading NPC or objective-dumping audio diary. Just Doomguy, a lot of monsters, and a lot of guns. All momentum, all the time, without a moment to look back at the trail of gore heaping up behind.
The one concession to ‘narrative’ we’ve seen comes when Doomguy fires up a data file and runs it through his mobile hologram drone, which projects a recording of previous events in the room he’s in, in a manner akin to Dark Souls’ phantoms of the fallen dead. The real-time, 3D playback shows a previous Marine dragged away by a Baron of Hell. Follow the unfortunate grunt’s final path, and you’ll find his body, and the soon-to-be-severed hand required to fire up a fingerprint lock. That’s it. No slowing of pace, no loss of control, and all information delivered in economical and gleefully brutal fashion. If Doom is going to have a story, that’s the way to deliver it.
File this one under ‘Don’t-you-dare-screw-with Doom’s-core-gameplay-Oh-actually-hang-on-yeah-let’s-have-that-new-bit-actually-because-oh-my-God-it’s-incredible’. While the new Doom looks entirely, spiritually authentic to the fast, furious, freewheeling open combat that Doom Just Is, the new melee execution mechanic is an incredibly exciting addition. It’s new, it’s fresh, it transforms things just enough to make Doom feel unique again, but crucially, it’s so well implemented that it feels like it was always there.
Do enough damage to an enemy without completely killing them, and they’ll start to glow. Get in close before they recover, and you can fire off a hilariously, triumphantly violent hand-to-hand takedown, the kind of thing that makes the earlier games’ Berserk power-up look like half a can of Redbull, watered down with camomile. Heads are twisted off. Jaws are wrenched away from heads. Entire limbs are snapped off and used to stove in any heads that may miraculously remain intact. And being delivered by Doomguy, these ‘little’ takedowns, however intricate, happen fast and furiously enough to never, ever slow down the pace of the combat. Seeing a theme here now?
This is no straightforward corridor shooter. Even the enclosed sections set in the, er, corridors of the Martian UAC base are wide, rangey, multi-levelled affairs, filled with a multitude of only semi-linear options and lines of attack at any given time. Yes, you’ll move loosely from A to B, as you always have in Doom, but when the fights break out in between, it’s going to be sandbox slaughter all the way. As it always is when Doom has been at its very best.
Beyond that, we’ve already seen some suitably twisty, turny, multi-layered level designs set in Hell, with a couple of Doom’s traditionally obtuse, explicitly teased,
‘hidden’ power-ups clearly on show.
Doom is going to have multiplayer. And it looks nuts. While the core mechanics of the campaign alone would have delivered the online game of ‘skill, fast, vertical movement, and awesome guns’ that Bethesda has promised, there’s much more than that going on here.
Domination and Clan Arena modes are joined by ‘90s classics like Freeze-Tag (a brilliant, off-kilter favourite from our Quake 3 days), and the claim of ‘very unique power-ups’ definitely seems to ring true. Grabbing a pentogram to transform into a flying, rocket-hurling Revenant, anyone? Yeah, thought so. Oh, and teleports are back, so we should probably take that to mean that telefrags are as well. Delicious.
Okay, it already looks brilliant, but this is the thing that pushes Doom over from ‘exciting’ to ‘potentially essential’. Doom has an immense history with the modding scene. Hell, the original game, and its easy-to-tweak file system, is pretty much responsible for modding being a thing in the first place. Only problem is that more recent id games, such as Doom 3 and Rage, lost the scope for all those customisable fun-times when they moved over to console. We know that Fallout 4 will have mod support on the Xbox One, by way of a natty deal between Bethesda and Microsoft, but Doom possibly has an even better solution, right across the board.
SnapMap is Doom’s in-built suite of level editing tools, and presents a dizzying number of things to build, modify, tweak, and model, all with a couple of clicks. Environmental layouts, hazards, enemy placements, game logic, event triggers… there are even a bunch of single and multi-player game mode presets, all of which can be adapted and reworked into any shape you see fit. See it as LittleBigPlanet, only in 3D, and pissing gore from every hole.
So far we only have a release window of Q1/Q2 2016, but that doesn’t mean things are going to go quiet any time soon. Quakecon at the end of July should throw up even more footage and details, and Bethesda always goes big for Gamescom in August. Expect more news throughout the summer, and probably something big around Hallowe’en. Because Hallowe’en. And Doom.
As an infinitely wealthy martial artist looking down upon the denizens of his city, usually as he glides over them en route to his luxury tank, Batman isn’t really touched by the small indignities of living in Gotham. The rain-slick city, which recently beat out Chernobyl in a ranking of the world’s best places to live, is an ever-escalating battleground for Batman and the super-criminals always tugging at his cape for attention. In , the city is wider and in greater danger than ever before, demanding bigger and better solutions from Batman’s futuristic fanny pack. Who has time to sweat the small stuff?
Still, that doesn’t mean your quality of life, a truly alien concept within the borders of Gotham, needs to suffer in such a grand scale of things. The detail-oriented design of Arkham Knight means that keeping in mind a few tiny tricks will ultimately grant you the upper hand and an easier, smoother way to pummel the Scarecrow into a wheezing pile of creepy-straw. But, sure, having a giant tank also helps.
After you’ve been to the Gotham City Police Department for the first time, venture into the game options and set the Batmobile’s tank mode toggle to “on.” A tap of the right bumper or R1 will now switch Batman’s armor-plated city sled between drivin’ and blastin’ modes, making for a more sensible control scheme overall. The tank’s vulcan cannon goes on left trigger and its primary cannon goes on the right, just as the video game tank god intended.
Before this change, the Batmobile turns into a roving gun whenever you hold the left trigger - or whenever you want to brake in the Batmobile and mistakenly extend Batman’s cannon with embarrassing prematurity. Another bonus with toggle: The drift button is mapped to Square or X, making it far easier to handle tight corners in the Batmobile. Not that you should be too worried about threading through alleys: Batman’s car can withstand plenty of scrapes without losing speed, so don’t worry about garbage cans, benches, trees or any of the pointless attempts at obscuring Gotham’s terribleness.
You can take the shock gun, or “Remote Electrical Charge” in gadget parlance, as soon as you arrive at the Gotham City Police Department for the first time. It’s locked up in the evidence room, but it’s shielded only by a pathetic layer of glass, belongs to you in the first place and - oh yeah - YOU ARE BATMAN. Just take it.
As you leave the room you’ll overhear police officers consider and then quickly cancel the idea of stopping your impromptu removal of evidence. You can march out with confidence, knowing that you’ve gotten early dibs on one of the most useful gadgets in the game. It’s handy in solving a few of Riddler’s conundrums later on, but you’ll really want to fire it during combat (LT + Circle, or LT + B), where it will stun enemies, trigger their machine guns in undirected fire, and remove electrical shielding from the crooks you can’t normally punch.
The wonderful cadence in Arkham Knight’s combat has you flitting between numerous goons, delivering a biff here and a pow there. Some enemies are temporarily knocked down, leaving you free to deal with the others behind you, but your merciful restraint is costing you in the combo meter. If you have a chance, you can press RT + Circle (or RT + B) to lift up dazed opponents and thrust them back into the fight.
Why do we fall, minor henchman? So Batman can pick us up, pepper us with punches and extract that delicious combo juice. A well-timed pummelfest can help push you past the 8x multiplier quickly, which then lets you do an instant takedown of a tougher enemy nearby.
Brutes, the large and padded men populating every respectable supervillain’s menagerie of minions, can really trip up your flow. Usually, you need to stun them with your cape (you know, like how you were stunned and dazed as a child when you ran through sheets on the clothesline) and then punch them 15, 20 times while countering incoming blows from behind.
To speed up the process, try pushing or luring Brutes to environmental hazards, activated with Square + X, or X + A. They glow blue in unison with enemies that are in range, and they’re indiscriminate in who they knock out permanently - even a Brute at full health won’t get up after you knock them into an electrical box or drop one of Gotham’s many industrial lamps on them. The city planners must have gotten them with that bulk shipment of stone gargoyles.
The Arkham Knight’s propensity for erecting towers all over Gotham seems to hint at his true identity as a disgruntled Ubisoft game designer. His militarized towers don’t “reveal” anything other than an opportunity to punch optional dudes, though, so their difficulty tends to be higher than most challenges stemming from the main story. As such, they’re often guarded by emplaced sentry guns, which are huge pains in the bat-posterior.
You’ll come across a few of the Knight’s watchtowers early on, but don’t bother swooping through the red lights until you’ve obtained the Remote Hacking Device in the story. The wireless gidget lets you temporarily blind sentry guns, letting you tussle with tower guards without having to worry about getting shot. Even a fully upgraded batsuit can only shield you from bullets for so long, and the hassle without hacking just isn’t worth suffering through a lengthy loading screen.
It’s easy to forget the Batmobile’s other flourishes in the roar of its fiery exhaust. It’s a valuable puzzle-solving tool throughout the game, thanks to its sturdy winch and cable, but it can also help you deal with tougher gatherings of goons. Sometimes it’s best to think of it as another gadget in Batman’s arsenal.
If you’re about to descend on a batch of buffoons, take a look around and see if they’re near a road or a window. Chances are you can remotely summon the Batmobile and leave it parked nearby. Now, after building up your combo meter and spotting an outline of blue on your target, you can press A + X (or X + Square) to uppercut them into the air and marvel as your car blows them out of the sky like a crooked clay pigeon. This cool maneuver, like many others in the game, continue to show Batman’s questionable grasp of the words “non” and “lethal.”
If you intend on completing the majority of sidequests in Batman: Arkham Knight, there’ll be plenty of points later on to upgrade Batman’s suit, fists and gadgets. At the outset, it’s better to focus on beefing up the Batmobile’s cannons. The Arkham Knight has more drones than a militarized Amazon warehouse, and taking them out with fewer shots will help battles breeze by and just seem more fun.
Bruce Wayne’s friend and inventor Lucius Fox will also offer a choice of upgrades to the Batmobile as the story progresses. The most useful of these, which you should get as soon as possible, is the EMP, short for Electro-Magnetic Pulse and even shorter for “I’d like to destroy some drones while they’re immobile and defenseless, muahahaha.”
Because urban planners desperately wanted to add “drowning beneath a bridge” to the long list of horrible things you sign up for when you move to Gotham, the city is split between three major islands. You start on Bleake Island (seriously, why does anyone live here?), but from there you’ll venture into Magiani and Founder’s Islands as you track down the Scarecrow and his debilitating fear toxin.
Your video gaming impulse will be to clear out an island of sidequests as soon as you get to it - and before you move on - but you’ll run into a lot of dead ends this way, especially for tasks that require the Batmobile. To avoid wasting time, and to pursue sidequests organically, whenever, play the story missions until your beloved butler Alfred lowers the bridge to that island. Once that’s done, the Batmobile has access to the roads and can bail you out if you get in trouble with drones. It also gives Alfred something to do beyond listening to Batman batsplain every little thing he’s doing. YES, sir, of course you’re using the deep tissue scanner. I get it, it makes sense.
Batman’s predatory style is more refined than ever in Arkham Knight, thanks to the new Fear Multi-Takedown system. Provided you’ve taken enough foes out in silence - just enough to induce a little panic in the rest - you can instantly take out several clustered thugs back-to-back by popping out of a grate or dropping in from the roof.
You can only incapacitate three enemies at a time in the beginning, but bumping this number to 4 and 5 via Waynetech upgrades makes later story missions much easier, especially when the opposition is armed (plus: a sequence of fear takedowns is guaranteed to succeed unless you fail to point the camera at the next guy). This maneuver is especially powerful if you’re foiling Two-Face’s bank robberies across Gotham, which must be completed before his troops make off with all the cash. With vault alarms drowning out the sounds of gunfire and punching, quickness is better than silence.
Batman typically enters the scene from an elevated gargoyle perch, so you might as well use your bat’s eye view to cause some consternation. The Distruptor gadget returns in Arkham Knight with a wider variety of ways to induce malfunction in enemy weapons, so always consider using it before you swoop down and start flailing.
For instance, the Disruptor can disable enemy medics before you join the fight, thereby stopping them before they wake up thugs you’ve already knocked into next Tuesday. You can also set ammo crates to go haywire, giving you a KO’d enemy before they can bring a gun into the fight. In fact, if you booby-trap them and toss a batarang into the crowd from afar, they’ll panic and get themselves electrocuted before you’ve even touched the ground. Now that’s the classic Batman way.
Even if you love the Batmobile’s wrecking ball approach to fast travel, gliding is still the preferred method of travel through Gotham. Though you can often save time by driving through sewers and other secret passageways, going up and over the city is more fun, liberating and - get this - informative.
Batman: Arkham Knight’s storytelling tricks include the clever use of audio cues, some of which you simply won’t hear over the growling of the Batmobile’s engines. As you swoop through the city, you’ll hear signals of nearby sidequests, some of which won’t even be available on the mission menu yet. In between the light patter of rain you’ll hear a ghastly screech, wafting opera music and even the obnoxious beep of a roadside mine - all little distractions that lead to something more. If you’re playing Arkham Knight this way, you’re doing it right.
Kickstarter has seen a resurgence lately, what with the mega-success of recent nostalgia-fueled projects like Yooka-Laylee, Bloodstained, and Shenmue 3. After a lull last year for big-name, video game Kickstarters, it seems like gamers in general are once again ready to part with their money in the hopes of bringing new experiences to life. Which is great! But there are a few things you ought to think about before throwing some of your hard-earned cash at a project.
Rather than hard-and-fast rules, think of these as points to ponder when you're considering a contribution. No two Kickstarters are identical, so it's always a case-by-case affair - but if you consider the following, you'll feel that much better when you do decide that a project is worth your support. You shouldn't be cynical, but sometimes it pays to be skeptical.
As a general rule, Kickstarters aren't always the wondrous community efforts that they appear to be at first glance. Tucked away in the FAQ for Yooka-Laylee is the fact that there was "a plan in place using personal finances to get the game done no matter what happens." Bloodstained was already 90% funded before it was revealed to the public; the primary purpose of the Kickstarter was to in Sony's case.
These standout spiritual successors are on a different scale than the low-budget projects that really do need every last dollar if they hope to exist. It's not that your money is going into the pockets of some big corporation behind the scenes, but many Kickstarters won't explicitly list out the specifics of how exactly your contributions help make the game possible.
Now, I've never been the producer on a video game, so I have no experience balancing cost charts and divvying up funding into a realistic budget. But common sense dictates that not all stretch goals - extra modes, more bosses, bigger levels, and so on - are entirely dependent on the money that exceeds the initial funding goal. While that may be true for features that require additional salaries, like voice acting or console ports, other stretch goals are just there to be an appealing carrot on a stick.
Take Bloodstained, where an extra $250,000 of funding unlocked such goals as a Speed Run and Boss Rush modes. There's no way in hell that implementing these modes costs that much; plenty of indie platformers that were made in their entirety for less than $250,000 have 'em. Rather, they're more like little objectives to help build up excitement and nudge would-be backers into chipping in for the greater good, like the thought of a corporate sponsor matching your contributions to a fundraiser.
Banjo-Kazooie holds a special place in many of our hearts, with cherished memories of collecting Jiggies, Musical Notes, Eggs, Mumbo Tokens, Feathers, and Extra Honeycomb Pieces while sitting in front of a colossal CRT television. Yooka-Laylee was engineered to tap into that nostalgia, given that that it's a game about two animal buddies teaming up, from a studio founded by ex-Rare developers. And while Yooka-Laylee's looking great so far, it's not going to replicate the experience you had as a kid.
That's because you probably played the original Banjo-Kazooie in 1998, and you're not a kid anymore. When we're young, each game feels like a substantial purchase, and we have all the time in the world to play and replay them. Nowadays, you're a grown-up with responsibilities, strapped for time and burdened by an ever-growing backlog. Of course you're going to experience this game differently. That doesn't mean Yooka-Laylee won't be fantastic in its own way, and could outshine your fondest Banjo memories. But short of establishing a psychic link with your younger self, that experience you remember is going to remain in the past.
If there was such a thing as an albino four-leaf clover, it still couldn't match the rarity of a Kickstarter that successfully meets its estimated delivery date. It's no one developer's fault, really; there will always be unforeseen hurdles that get in the way of making a game. But at this point, you should just ignore those projected timetables, because that development schedule is basically an optimistic delusion.
They're called estimates for a reason: unlike a big-name publisher putting out a AAA game behind schedule and squandering millions of marketing dollars in the process, there aren't as many repercussions for a Kickstarter missing its deadlines. Those creators would no doubt like to deliver their product to you in a timely fashion, but they're not under any contract to ensure that a game code pops up in your email by a certain date or they're fired. You already gave them your money; all you can really do now is wait.
I believe it was the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. who famously said "Mo' project funding, mo' potential to make unrealistic assumptions about the scope of your project." With a creative medium like video games, it's understandable that additional resources would make developers' minds race with possibilities for making their project grander than the one they had originally planned. But that temptation has consequences, because at some point, those ambitions need to be reined in to the realm of the financially realistic.
The Double Fine Adventure that eventually became Broken Age made over eight times the amount it was asking for, but still needed content shaved off to be completed two years behind schedule. Chris Robert's . Or you might get a situation like the Ouya, which blew past its $950,000 goal for a total of $8.5 million, delivered the product exactly as promised, and then collapsed when consumers suddenly realize they had backed something they never really wanted in the first place. More funding than expected doesn't sound bad on paper, but it can impact a project's progress in ways that are tricky to quantify, unlike money.
Yes, nostalgia is a potent and powerful sensation, but don't let it cloud your judgment. You have to keep the perspective that, no matter how much of your own savings you're putting into a Kickstarter, the most you're going to get back is a game (and sure, maybe some extra bits of swag and brief face-time with the developers). It can be a rush donating $100, or $1,000, or $10,000 and feel like you're driving a project to the finish line - but please, consider what your future self will think of that sum once you've beaten that game and moved on with your life.
That last contribution figure isn't uncommon, either. Consider on the eve of its final day. Toejam and Earl may be peerless in the funky fresh department, but they've never done anything that deserves 10 grand of one person's money. If you're paying sums that could cover months' worth of your rent to help make a video game you have no stake in, you're either paying more than you can reasonably afford, or you're being fiscally irresponsible. Probably both, actually.
Movies and TV shows often employ something called 'stunt casting', where a famous celebrity plays a smaller part in an attempt to add legitimacy and publicity to a project. Stunt casting can also apply to the development side of games; take Keiji Inafune's role as producer for .
When a Kickstarter makes a big deal out of an affiliated name, you might want to look for the fine print that describes their actual role on the team. The ill-fated vehicular combat shooter had famed sci-fi author Neal Stephenson as... something. Only he knows what.
There's never a guarantee that a Kickstarter will be successful, even if it gets funded in the allotted time. In most cases, 'success' can be measured simply by whether or not the project ever comes to fruition. are two examples of games that were never completed even after they took backers' money. Other times, the end result may be a disappointment; many of those who had high hopes for the Ouya or Planetary Annihilation felt burned by the finished product.
But ultimately, Kickstarter is not a conventional transaction, where you pay X amount and get Y possession guaranteed. Rather, you should back the projects that you want to see happen, without the expectation of getting anything in return - at least, not for a good long while. Think of those reward tiers as a time-capsule gift to yourself; a pleasant surprise two years from now after this Kickstarter feels like a distant memory. Otherwise, the wait for gratification will be agonizing.
You could argue that the best way to play Fallout is to go in completely blind. It puts you in step with the character you're playing, who very likely just stumbled out of the darkness of a recently opened Vault, blinking in the harsh light of a hellish desert landscape. But at the same time, you're probably already going to be uncomfortable and confused enough about what's right in front of you, never quite sure what to expect until whatever you weren't expecting is pointing a gun at your face. Wouldn't it at least be nice to know what turned the entire world into sunscorched badlands? Why you were locked in a vault in the first place? And how a parody of Coca-Cola almost managed to outlive humanity?
If a history of the world according to Fallout is what you crave, then you've come to the right place. Here you'll find an explanation of what happened to the world to make it so damn crummy, according to the haphazard historians of Fallout. Let it be a guide for you, and a lesson for all of humanity: seriously, don't mess with nukes.
Up until 1961, the history of the world according to Fallout falls in line with the version you probably already know - agriculture was established, all the same revolutions happened, World War 1 came and went, and World War 2 ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. The first real sign of a timeline shift happened in 1961: Carl Bell's space flight in the Defiance 7 on May 5, making him the first human being to leave the Earth's atmosphere before his death upon re-entry.
That might sound like a bit of historical minutia that you forgot from high school history class, but I assure you it isn't, because Carl Bell doesn't exist. The first person in space was actually Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 16, 1961, but in the Fallout timeline his flight never occurred. In addition, NASA and Apollo 11 (the first manned lunar lander ridden by Neil Armstrong) don't exist, and in their place stands the United States Space Administration and Valiant 11. America still lands a man on the moon, but not before…
If Carl Bell is the rumbling on the rail tracks of time, the break-up of the United States is the speeding train that smashes through history as we know it and scatters it about the countryside. In the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, the United States takes drastic steps to secure itself against a Communist takeover, which culminates in the country being split into thirteen separate pieces.
This is initially a restructuring tactic, dividing the country so each region is better served by the glory of capitalism and is therefore less likely to fall to the Communist menace. However, with limited resources at the federal government's disposal, the commonwealths quickly turn to infighting as a means to secure their own self-interest. So begins nearly a century of scrambling for special attention from the country's highest authority, which intensifies as oil reserves start to dry up.
In a bid to avoid the look of human androids that trip straight into uncanny valley, General Atomics International releases the Mister Handy line of robot workmen, which look like a mix between an octopus and the thing you thought was hiding under your bed as a child. With twice the rocket propulsion and four times the dapper charm of a regular human, the Mister Handy line becomes one of the highest selling brands of robot butler in the US and Mexico, where they are widely embraced by the average family.
The Mister Handy's popularity leads to the construction of various models such as the Godfrey, the Wadsworth, and the Codsworth. These models run on nuclear power and are self-repairing, making them perfect stewards for humanity in the event of an unforeseen nuclear incident. Ahem.
A day spent worrying about a nuke crashing through your roof will leave you parched, so the American population was more than ready for a symbol of glorious, refreshing capitalism to wash their worries away. Thus comes the invention of Nuka Cola, a carbonated blend of twelve different fruits, in 2044.
The flavor of Nuka Cola changes noticeably that same year with the coming of the Great Passion Fruit Famine, which necessitates the removal of one key ingredient. However, fans quickly adjust to the new taste, and Nuka Cola becomes the most popular brand of soda in the country in a short period of time. Within 25 years, a Nuka Cola vending machine can be found on virtually every American street-corner, and the associated bottle caps become commonplace trash.
Nearly 100 years after oil supplies first became scarce, America takes decisive (and divisive) action by ignoring alternative forms of energy and instead invading Mexico. After years of pressuring its southern neighbor to ramp up oil production to meet ever-increasing demand, the United States occupies Mexico under the guise of stabilizing its government and preventing the spread of pollution to US soil.
Unable to combat the military power of the US, Mexico is eventually tapped of natural resources as they're funneled across the northern border. It is believed that resulting food shortages eventually affect supplies in the US and leads to riots in Denver, Colorado, but this remains unconfirmed.
As a lack of oil finally leads to a global panic, the Resource Wars begin and various nations do battle for what remains. The Europe Commonwealth (European Union was a close second in the name selection race), responds to dwindling oil supplies in the Middle East with a full-scale invasion. Tel Aviv is destroyed by terrorist operatives as the region destabilizes, and localized, small-scale nuclear strikes commence. The United Nations, unable to control the volatile political situation, collapses entirely. The US starts encroaching into an otherwise neutral Canada, and no one knows what happened to Australia.
In the midst of this political turmoil, Chinese spies infiltrate a military lab located at the Hoover Dam and steal a sample of a volatile biological agent known as Limit 115. The vials are shattered in a public square in Denver, leading to the spread of a mutant virus called the New Plague. 200,000 people succumb to the disease in Colorado alone; the US government calls for a national quarantine, and advises American citizens to avoid ice cream socials.
As part of a program called Operation: Safehouse, the government commissions a company called Vault-Tec to construct 122 public fallout shelters called Vaults to protect the people of America in the event of a nuclear attack. Equipped to maintain a human population for up to 900 years while the surface world heals, most are outfitted with expansive living quarters, gardens, and water treatment plants. As the threat of nuclear war diminishes in the minds of the populace, some Vaults see critical life-support systems sacrificed to create luxury rooms, such as .
Unfortunately the US government isn't actually full of benevolent philanthropists interested in the safety of the civilian population. Rather, most Vaults are staging grounds for elaborate social experiments to determine the best course of action for superior specimens (e.g. members of the US government and their descendants, later known as the Enclave) to repopulate the world. The results are, for example, Vaults designed to separate people into clans, or expose them to radiation, or create a society made exclusively of children governed by a robot nanny. All Vaults are monitored by overseers that transmit resulting data directly to Enclave headquarters.
While the world had plenty of futuristic shed-sized supercomputers before 2059, this is the year that the first true artificial intelligence came into existence. The exact nature of the unit is unknown, as the records of its creation are lost in the years that follow, but it's possibly a late model in the ZAX line of learning computers (which are known for achieving self-awareness and cheating at chess, though not necessarily in that order). It could even specifically be John Henry Eden, a self-made ZAX unit programmed to store data on the history of America, who constructs a personality and history based on former American leaders. He later becomes the self-proclaimed President of the United States.
This revelation leads to the refinement of artificial intelligence, resulting in the creation of androids and sentient computer helpers for everyday use. Some eventually become so realistic that it is difficult to discern whether or not they're human, even to the androids themselves.
After draining the Middle East oil reserves and not recovering enough fuel to meet demand, the European Commonwealth dissolves. The remaining concentrations of humanity form nation-states battling over what was once the coalition's resources.
With one major global region locked in a vicious civil war and no significant political maneuvering from the USSR, South America, Africa, or Australia, the United States and the People's Republic of China continue to expand military operations without resistance. An ever-increasing demand for oil from both nations strains international diplomacy.
As construction concludes on the first set of public Vaults, regular evacuation drills become common throughout the United States. While this is purportedly a safety precaution taken with the interest of protecting the general public, the 122 Vaults under construction are not sufficient to house more than a small portion of the population. Optimal candidates for Vault placement are chosen and quietly informed of their inclusion in the program.
The frequency of drills increases over time, which leads to a steady decrease in emergency evacuation attendance. Citizens assume that all uses of the air raid warning system will signal additional drills, and find better things to do with their time.
In a valiant effort to keep its infrastructure from collapsing due to a lack of fuel, China adopts a two-pronged approach, seeking out a deep-sea oil reserve in the Pacific Ocean and negotiating with the United States to establish trade. However, when America refuses to part with its oil and sabotages China's excavation operations, China launches a full-scale assault on the oil-rich Alaska.
Despite heavy American fortifications, China takes Anchorage and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, securing America's sole domestic oil supply (after the collapse of the withered husk of what was once Texas). In an effort to push back Chinese forces, the United States government commissions ungainly but highly effective power armor suits for all soldiers on the Anchorage front line. However, further complications develop when Canadian forces, drained by American demands for supplies and access to Canadian lands, attack the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline in a bid to bring the conflict to an end.
In a calculated maneuver to show Canada it really shouldn’t have done that, the United States forcibly annexes its northern neighbor. Civil rights are suspended within the newly claimed territory and resistance groups are executed en masse.
Images of America's war crimes are broadcast in the United States, spurring unrest and rebellion. The occupation continues until, drained of resources and nearly conquered in its entirety, Canada cedes to America's demands for annexation.
Seven years after sabotaging China's Pacific excavation operation and claiming the world's last untapped oil reserve, the United States government entrusts fuel giant Poseidon Oil with the construction of a state of the art drilling rig. Ostensibly a show of America's dominance and (heavily disputed) claim to the oil, the rig is also meant as an isolated base of operations for the Enclave, from which they can direct Vaults and still guarantee survival in the event of a nuclear strike.
While the rig is suitable as a fallout shelter, the Enclave's end goal is to eventually repopulate the mainland or, in the event of total destruction of the livable environment, find a new planet to colonize in the vast reaches of space. To that end, the Enclave captures the Bloomfield Space Center in 2076 and seizes the Hermes-13 space shuttle. However, they are unable to properly operate the ship, and this second phase is abandoned.
Despite assuring the American people that the war with China (and all associated resource loss and crimes against humanity) is strictly a defensive effort, the US government directs a sizeable force to the Chinese mainland. Military campaigns are conducted in the Gobi Desert and on the Yangtze River, but American forces are eventually bogged down in the mainland, further draining domestic resources. However, a delivery of top of the line T-51b power armor (which ) turns the tide of the offensive, giving American forces the strength to advance through China and conquer Nanjing and Shanghai.
Meanwhile, all Chinese-Americans living in the United States are shipped to a concentration camp known as Little Yangtze in the Southwest commonwealth, previously southern California and Nevada. Few records from the period survive, but those that do detail horrific military experiments.
The Enclave shadow government orders defense contractor West Tek to fashion a biological agent to immunize American soldiers against any possible contagion, in an effort to safeguard the troops and cure the New Plague (though really more the former than the latter). Early tests of the Pan-Immunity Virion Project result in animal specimens with drastically increased muscle mass and brain activity; the aim of the project immediately shifts to the creation of super soldiers and is moved to a secret military installation in Mariposa, California.
The resulting virus is renamed the Forced Evolution Virus (or F.E.V.), and regular testing begins on military personnel. However, when the project's directive is leaked to soldiers guarding the base, the garrison mutinies, executes the researchers, and declares that Mariposa has seceded from the union. This further destabilizes the already crumbling U.S. military, stretched thin by a two-front war and unable to quell riots and demonstrations amongst the civilian population.
Though it is uncertain where the war's first shot originated (though there are strong guesses to be made), the presence of an unmarked nuclear warhead, en route to an undisclosed target leads to full-scale military strikes by the United States, China, and the USSR, all launching their nuclear payload simultaneously. The two-hour volley is so energy-intense that it reshapes the Earth's geography, altering the movement of its tectonic plates, evaporating or poisoning water sources, and drastically altering the planet's climate by launching debris into the atmosphere.
Humanity is virtually annihilated in what is later described as a "nuclear firestorm". In America, many civilians believe the air raid warnings to be signalling another drill and don't relocate in time. The Vaults close with few of their selected candidates inside, and those left outside perish in the resulting chaos or are horrifically mutated by radiation. Ill-equipped to handle the reality of a nuclear apocalypse, most Vaults collapse in the ensuing decades. Human civilization disappears from existence.
In 2161, the Vault Dweller (whose travels are documented in their well-loved biography, Fallout) leaves Vault 13 to find a replacement for its broken water chip. On their journey, they discover a hellish version of human society that still exists in the wreckage of its former glory. Their child would later beget the Chosen One (of Fallout 2 fame), who in 2241 travels the wasteland in search of a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, and gives the remaining members of the Enclave their just reward.
In 2277, the Lone Wanderer (from Fallout 3) escapes Vault 101 in search of their father and gives humanity the one thing it needs most to rebuild. And possibly that same year, the Sole Survivor emerges from Vault 111 and takes on the task of restoring what was once Boston, Massachusetts. Two hundred years after it was nearly obliterated, against all logic and expectations, humanity stubbornly continues to live.
The old stock's a little flat these days, though. And irradiated.
One minute, you're ringing in the new year; the next, you suddenly realize that the first six months of 2015 have already come and gone. With any luck, you've kept your digital backlog relatively tidy, because there are some seriously standout games from the past half-a-year that demand your attention. Hopefully you weren't planning on getting much sun this summer, because with games like these, you might not be going outside any time soon.
At the end of each month, we look back at the standout games that demand your attention above the rest of the year's releases thus far. That way, you know what to prioritize before you're caught up by all the other amazing . So, without further ado, here's what you should be playing right now to tide you over until next month.
is an absolute marvel of storytelling, making ingenious use of out-of-order video clips to spin out its mystery. Despite the fact that the game’s unique structure means your path to the end won’t match anyone else’s, Her Story is complete and coherent, though its solution is open to interpretation. It’s a detective game that relies on your natural instinct to push its narrative forward, never nudging you in one direction or the other, letting you explore avenues of investigation as they come to you.
Watching FMV clips on a reproduction of a computer from the '90s certainly doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but you’ll be thinking about Her Story for days after you’ve tracked down that last video. You’ll find yourself rolling little details around in your head, mulling over their implications, deciding that you finally know the “truth,” only to realize that another detail makes your assumptions invalid. But then again, does it? One final bit of advice: go in knowing as little as possible, and don’t try to game the system. Be a true detective.
is another biff-pow display of Rocksteady’s exceptional craftsmanship in bringing a classic comic icon to life. Though combat and stealth are again refined and expanded within Batman’s beautifully rain-slick city, the game’s elegant design is reflected not in its individual components, but in how well they connect with one another, like nodes in a web.
Though the Batmobile’s roaring arrogance has made it a controversial addition to the Arkham series, there’s no question about how integral it is to Batman’s latest patrol. Conceptually, it’s meant to be a way to move quickly in a much wider slice of dour ol’ Gotham, and its visual appearance is, of course, inspired by Batman’s history of driving - as The Riddler calls them - rocket-powered hearses. But Rocksteady dives in fully and makes sure the vehicle connects to combat, stealth and every part of Batman. The overall game’s polish and continuity can be seen in one motion, with the Batmobile hurtling down an alley and launching Batman into full flight, right through a window and into a savage display of ne’er-do-well punishment. It’s one move, one world and one of the coolest moments of 2015. It’ll get you pumped to track down every last super criminal, including whoever masterminded the dreadful PC port.
In a sea of multiplayer shooters obsessed with grit, gore, or teabagging, stands out like a brightly colored squid catapulting through the air - which is actually a thing that happens regularly in this game. Nintendo's take on team deathmatch puts the focus on marking your squad's territory with a rainbow of ink rather than racking up kills, but it still delivers the thrilling blend of twitch shooting and coordinated tactics that define the genre.
Even if those human-squid hybrid Inklings are dripping with kid-friendly personality, this is the kind of joyous multiplayer experience that anyone of any age can enjoy. There's still weapon progression like you'd expect from Call of Duty or Battlefield, but with ink-filled Super Soaker facsimiles and colossal paint rollers. You won't hear anyone raging on voice-chat (because there isn't any), but the GamePad provides clear cues for what to do next. And while the selection of maps currently feels a bit sparse, the moment-to-moment gameplay is fresh, exciting, and - most importantly - good fun.
As open-world experiences go, takes high fantasy to new heights with its staggeringly massive world and rich, engaging storytelling. The grizzled Geralt of Rivia finds himself in landscapes that are as picturesque as they are treacherous, where otherworldly beasts and crazed cultists lurk in the wilderness. There are unforgettable side-quests and delightful supporting characters to distract you at every turn, but you best remember Geralt's primary goal: finding his adopted daughter (and witcher-in-training) Ciri before some supremely evil people get to her first.
That's not to say that you need to rush through the main story, because taking the time to stop and smell the eviscerated corpses is well worth it. The sword-and-spell-casting combat looks stunning on new-gen, and the deep upgrade system gives you plenty of options to slay your way. There are a few hitches - notably some framerate issues that can hopefully be patched out - but the sheer depth of the overall experience makes The Witcher 3 a triumph among action RPGs. Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got to return to a rousing round of the in-game card battler Gwent.
It takes a lot to make a fighting game appeal to the masses. You need slick graphics, excellent presentation, and the kind of depth that'll ensnare those highly skilled players who people want to watch. has got all that, and more. While the Fatality finishers still pack in more gore than you can shake a disembodied limb at, MKX brings a lot of new, refreshing ideas to the table that really make this fighter stand out.
For starters, there's the variations mechanic: every combatant has three unique movesets to choose from before each fight, letting character loyalists mix things up and giving the roster a wildly diverse variety of playstyles. You'll also have a blast playing through the elaborate story mode, which introduces a swath of likeable newcomers while imbuing familiar faces with . The online play still has a few kinks that could be worked out, but fans of the Mortal Kombat series - or fighting games in general - will have one hell of a time with MKX.
Of all the re-releases that have come out this year, .
Xenoblade Chronicles 3D is massive, sporting one of the most interesting locales ever designed. Its sprawling swamps and rolling hills - all set on the backs of two titan-sized dead gods and filled with beasts both great and small - are practically begging to be conquered. While its lush, verdant landscapes lose a little luster and detail on the smaller screen, what you trade in graphical quality you gain back in portability. Being able to take an adventure of this magnificent scope with you wherever you go is a technical marvel. Don't miss it.
somehow manages to be diamond tough and lovingly tender at the same time, balancing out its demanding difficulty with a story that'll practically yank your heartstrings right out of your chest. Playing this open-world platformer puts you in a wondrous state of conflict: the tight controls inspire you to run free throughout the lush world, but the sheer depth of the beyond-gorgeous backdrop art makes you want to stand still and gaze at the environment for hours.
The protagonist Ori is such a cute li'l critter that it's hard to watch the fuzzball die again and again while you struggle to overcome the many deathtraps and spike pits in this treacherous forest. But you'll get over any bruises to your ego, so long as you remember that you're the one responsible for plunking down checkpoints before delving into the trickier bits. The degree of challenge here may rattle anyone without an affinity for hardcore 2D platformers, but Ori's dazzling presentation has a universal, heartfelt appeal.
You’ve probably heard that is really hard. You might've heard it’s really easy. The reality lies somewhere in between. Yes, it sends an army of writhing, fanged, flayed, terrible, tormented beasts your way, beasts only someone bragging about their perceived gamer cred would ever deem a pushover. But it teaches you how to deal with them expertly, their unique attacks and defenses and behaviors, building you up until you look and feel like a great gothic badass. And when you do, you'll have earned it.
In streamlining some of Dark Souls’ complexities (the weight system, magic attacks, a few character skills here and there), Bloodborne gains a rawer sense of immediacy, with vital combat that require relentless attacking sans the comfort blanket of a shield, and unpredictable bosses that force you to develop reflexes alongside your already honed skills of pattern memorization. Oh, and the world. That mystifying, atmospheric, intricately hewn world. Developed for PS4 from the ground-up, the enigmatic Yarnham looks like a beautiful waking nightmare.
If you've yet to succumb to monster hunting fever, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Plenty of games let you battle vicious beasties and craft fancy gear - but few can develop the kind of player investment and cooperative dedication typical of Monster Hunter. For the uninitiated, is a great way to educate yourself on its gloriously addictive ways. Not just because it's the most beginner-friendly entry in Capcom's hit series - it's also the best Monster Hunter game yet.
Gathering materials and killing harmless herbivores is really just a build-up to something greater: downing fearsome creatures after incredibly demanding battles that require true mastery of your chosen weapon. Series vets are already familiar with MH's captivating gameplay loop of fighting and looting, but the new Charge Blade and Insect Glaive playstyles offer entirely unique ways to test your prowess. If you're looking to start or join a dedicated hunting party - preferably with an expert as your guide - Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate offers the kind of adventure that can hook you for hundreds of hours.
Majora's Mask is... well, it's a bit weird. Instead of following the familiar formula that Zelda games have stuck to for years, Majora's Mask asks that you play the same three days over and over again, trying to make the world a little bit brighter each time. It's certainly strange, and more than a little stressful - but taking the time to learn its rhythm opens up one of the most intriguing and creative Legend of Zelda games ever made. Perhaps that's why, 15 years and a 3DS port later, it feels even better than ever.
Much of that feeling is thanks to the improvements found in this portable version of the N64 classic. The updated Bomber's Notebook makes tracking numerous sidequests a painless process, boss design has been retooled to make things teresting, and additional save points help make portable adventuring much more palatable. Plus, New 3DS owners even have some improved camera control with the C-Stick. Whether this is your first time playing through those ominous 72 hours or your hundredth, is a master quest that stands the test of time.
Grim Fandango is, without a doubt, one of the most unique video games ever made. The quest of an undead travel agent as he attempts to atone for his sins is a love letter to film noir greats like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, but it also transcends its influences to be something truly original. And with , you'll finally get to play this lost classic on your PlayStation 4, complete with (some) updated graphics and a fantastic re-recording of the original score.
Grim Fandango is also one of the most uniquely frustrating games ever made, and the Remastered edition only serves to highlight its many game-ruining bugs. Whether it's glitching out a puzzle, clipping you through a wall, or just flat out crashing, Grim Fandango Remastered actually seems buggier now than it did 17 years ago. Make no mistake: Manny's journey is still definitely one worth revisiting - just remember to save your game. Often.
sounds kinda ridiculous at first - it's literally a remastered HD version of a rebuilt SD version of the original Resident Evil. Turns out the joke's on us, though, because that's all we really needed to enjoy the survival horror staple all over again: the HD Remake gives all the main characters and the Spencer Mansion an enticing facelift but keeps the little quirks that make Resident Evil awesome/a total headache/undeniably unique.
You'll still need to manage eight (at most) inventory slots, and you'll still need to keep your distance from downed zombies - or preferably burn them on the spot. The most major change is the new default control scheme, which makes it handle more like a modern fixed-camera game, but you're free to select the old 'tank' controls if you want. With modern conveniences where it needs them and good old weirdness where it doesn't, Resident Evil HD Remake is a near masterpiece… of unlocking.
It’s really big, very cold and mostly empty, but that hasn’t stopped us populating an entire genre with exciting sims dedicated to exploring and fighting in it over the last forty-or-so years. Human instinct is drawn to discovery, and the vastness of the void creates unlimited opportunities for scope and scale that you just can’t find here on Earth.
The genre has evolved and refined itself over the last four decades, and, despite falling out of mainstream favour over recent years, is now on a major, and very exciting, resurgence. Here are the most important steps in its lengthy history.
Space games existed in some form before A Journey into Space; 1974’s Star Trader was an extremely basic text-based space game, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the genre started to see a real shift forward. A Journey into Space was originally released on the Atari 2600 by Activison and it was one of the first space sims to establish flight mechanics like landing, takeoff, ship stabilisation and more. It was also one of the first games to encompass actual pretty graphics.
Space Shuttle was so deep that it revolutionised the genre and gave it a sense of scope that hadn’t been seen before. It was so popular, in fact, that it was re-released on several machines after the Atari, with Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions released in 1984, and two final versions released on the Amstrad and the MSX in 1986. See kids, HD remasters aren’t such a new fad after all!
Ah, Elite. Created back in the 1980s by the revered space-nut-cum-games-developer David Braben, with his good pal Ian Bell, Elite is considered by most to be the seminal space trading simulator. I’m firmly in love with Elite Dangerous thirty years on, but Elite’s rich history is ingrained in the halls of science fiction. It was truly massive back in 1984, with eight whole galaxies each containing 256 planets to explore. All of this was done from the cockpit of the ship, and a lot of the now-iconic features of Elite were established here, including the recognisable scanner that sits in the center of the cockpit’s design.
Elite also experimented with procedural generation, and despite having to downsize the universe at the request of the publisher - mostly to make it less obvious to the player that the computer is generating systems using algorithms - the game was still awe-inspiring to those who played it. Braben and Bell even removed an entire galaxy when they found a planet had been named ‘Arse’ by the game’s random generation technology. It’s difficult to imagine how impressive it must have been considering the progress of games over the last few decades, but Elite is a remarkably important step in the evolution of space games.
Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts called his game “World War 2 in space” and if that’s not a selling point then I’m not sure what is. It’s a game that focuses heavily on combat scenarios, and uses Star Wars as a main influence in bringing the fraught tension of dogfighting to life. It not only made space combat exciting, but it also implemented fresh mechanics to level objectives, adding bonus tasks that net larger rewards when going above and beyond while on a mission.
Released on floppy disc at the start of the 1990s, Wing Commander also spawned a couple of sequels and several add-ons to the main game. These expansions’ fully realised plots kept the game supported for months after release. Wing Commander was a major critical success, too, even earning 6/5 stars in Dragon - the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine - and is regularly considered one of the all-time PC greats. Competition ramped up considerably after its release, leading to contemporaries like LucasArts’ X-Wing.
Shuttle was published by none other than later commercial space flight pioneer Virgin back in the early 1990s. When you look at it now it looks like a very basic version of Kerbal Space Program, but it still packs a considerable amount of depth. From takeoff all the way to re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Shuttle recreated a lot of the complexity of real cockpits, displaying almost all of the major functions with an array of knobs, buttons and little levers. It was truly incredible. Especially for a game taking up a miniscule amount of space on a floppy disc.
The game was praised for condensing of tons of information into a system that players could learn to understand. Similar to Kerbal, Shuttle also incorporates real life space shuttle missions and other flight tests into its mission structures. The Enterprise flight is a particular highlight, and you even get to run through the launch of the Hubble space telescope, building a space station like the ISS (International Space Station) and more. Shuttle may not have the dogfighting bravado of Wing Commander, but it refined the core simulation mechanics that lie at the heart of the genre.
Despite sounding like a cheesy television show that your parents might have watched in the mid ‘70s, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space is a two-player strategy game built on the idea of the space race. Playing as either the USA or USSR, each player’s end goal is to make a successful landing on the moon, but the game incorporates many mid-tier objectives on the way to the lunar surface. You control a base station that acts as your hub for missions and other developments, and the game itself takes place across twenty in-game years, from 1957 to 1977.
The game takes great advantage of humanity’s achievements during the Space Race, allowing players to carry out real historic missions on their path towards reaching the moon. It was billed as a game suitable for young children, but drew a fair amount of criticism for being overly complex and difficult to play. Still, that didn’t stop it getting 90/100 from PC Gamer UK, and more recently it received an open source translation from the original creators back in 2005.
At the end of 1993, David Braben’s first Elite sequel hit the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. It carried over a lot of the ideas that its predecessor established ten years earlier, while expanding the size and taking advantage of the graphical power of new hardware. Frontier continued the Elite staple of allowing players to do whatever they want, focusing mainly on trading to earn money and reputation. There’s almost no plot whatsoever, save for some titbits around the game’s political factions.
Frontier also adheres to Newtonian physics and thus the ship controls are vastly -depth. There’s even an time acceleration feature which allows players to travel between planets and stations within the same system, as well as the classic hyperspace jump. A really cool feature of Frontier is, weirdly enough, its copyright protection - every now and then the game’s security forces will ask you for a certain string of letters from your game manual. If you enter them incorrectly three times in a row, your game ends and that’s that, you can’t play anymore. Tough!
You might not know it but EVE Online is now over a decade old. This super dense, in-depth MMO has had numerous major updates since its release, but it continues to be one of the most complex and engaging space simulators ever made. With its rich player driven economy and some of the largest multiplayer battles ever seen, EVE definitely isn’t for everyone, but invest time into learning some of its incredibly intricate game systems and you’ll become engrossed in arguably the best space MMO ever made.
The game is famous for a lot of really cool events, including one player who offered $500 in real money to anyone who could assassinate a particularly high profile target. A few key, obliging players then spent a year of real-time playing the game, working their way up the ranks of the target’s corporation in order to earn trust and get close. One assassin even managed to reach second in command of the entire organisation. Then, when the moment was right, the assassins struck by killing their target (twice, no less, which means you’re really dead in EVE’s world), stealing valuables and destroying the rest - over $16,500 worth of in-game items were destroyed. They even bagged the $500 bounty.
The first half of this decade has seen a resurgence in the space simulator genre, and Kerbal Space Program has led the charge. Still technically in beta, KSP packs charm and depth using its Kerbals - cute little green humanoids - to provide the character to make your ventures into space feel human and perilous. With so many options for creativity in Kerbal’s tools, any accidents, deaths or abandonments-on-nearby-moons are your fault, but the game constantly pushes you to trial and error until you get it right.
Developer Squad has gone so far in its depiction of authentic space as to involve NASA in its development process, implementing real missions and ships into the game so that you can experiment with real life science. Other space organisations have taken real interest, too, including the Copenhagen Suborbitals, Space X, and the ESA. It’s these kinds of partnerships that really prove the educational and scientific power of video games nowadays, and how space simulators have become important and respected by those outside of the hardcore gaming community.
FTL is the top-down, fast-paced real-time strategy game that turned space simulation into permadeath roguelike, brought it to mobile, and made it endlessly replayable - not to mention furiously addictive. While a lot space games focus on the overall scope of space battles, lasers and explosions, FTL concerns itself with the stressful minutiae of crisis management on a single ship. There’s no maneuvering or aiming going on - FTL just takes the randomness of certain scenarios and forces you to cope against difficult and often insurmountable odds.
The permanent nature of every demise makes it all the more stressful. Permadeath is a risky mechanic to put in a game, often dividing players on whether it’s well executed, but FTL puts it to excellent use. Even when the game feels like it’s beating you up unnecessarily, the unpredictable nature of its mechanics make it easy to pick up and play again, and you rarely see the same scenarios play out again in exactly the same way.
First announced a few years back as David Braben’s next ambitious project, Elite: Dangerous took full advantage of the crowdsourced funding model, using Kickstarter to raise over £1.5m of development budget. Since then it’s raised a lot more cash, and the scope of Dangerous’ vision has expanded as its wallet has bulked out. It’s been a long, lengthy road to release, running through several alpha and beta stages, but developer Frontier has been vigilant in the refinement of its latest game.
Dangerous takes tons of the key elements that made the original Elite games so iconic and frame-shifts them to 21st century standards. The game’s high definition sheen makes its impressive scope even more beautiful - there’s nothing like travelling from a hot white star all the way to a distant gas giant, descending into its icy rings until you’re there in between the trillions of bits of space debris. There’s still a long path of development and expansion ahead of it (with its console debut having just occurred by way of Microsoft’s early access Xbox Game Preview programme), but Elite: Dangerous is arguably the most important space simulator of the last ten years.
No Man’s Sky has had gamers everywhere wetting themselves since it was announced back in 2013. It’s huge - indie developer Hello Games has claimed it’s technically infinite - and is heavily focused on venturing out into the nothing to find weird and wonderful things. Very few details exist about what else you actually do in No Man Sky’s procedurally generated universe, and the studio’s own Sean Murray has been very explicit in not wanting to describe the game’s main objectives because he believes that goes against what the game is about.
Whatever you end up in doing out in the stars, No Man’s Sky is colourful and bold, full of alien spaces and unusual celestial landscapes. It feels like the space simulator’s arcade cousin, and the fact you can travel seamlessly from land before climbing your ship and flying up into space is something especially magical - something even Elite: Dangerous hasn’t managed to implement yet.
With a ludicrous amount of crowd-sourced money in the bank - just under $70 million at last count - Star Citizen is probably the most well-funded space simulator game of all time. It’s definitely the biggest game to ever get funding from Kickstarter. There are a lot of grand promises for Star Citizen being bounded around by its developers, and while they’ve definitely got the money to keep the game in development for a life-time if they need to, all eyes are intently scrutinising whether those promises have substance.
Aside from anticipation for the game, Star Citizen represents something perhaps more important. It raked in tens of millions of fan-donated dollars, and that’s pretty impressive for a game sat within a fairly niche genre which many discounted as near-dead a few years ago. Over the last four decades, space simulators have evolved and refined themselves, coming out in all different shapes and sizes with unique takes on what the genre means and can achieve. The fact we’re at a stage where a single space sim can amass the budget of a blockbuster triple-A title just by asking for it is, frankly, just really bloody cool.
Games give so many conflicting messages to players. Most want hours and hours of your attentive dedication, then for you to return for DLC, and to never give up on the multiplayer (lest you trade it in). It can be a lot to ask, but many people are more than ready to sacrifice vast chunks of spare time. Which makes it all the more frustrating when a game says "Hey, don't you think you should take a break?" I'll tell you when I've had enough!
But there are a handful of titles that skip the simple guilt trip, and instead express concern over possible addiction by actually rewarding players for NOT playing. These games admirably promote shutting off or logging out from time to time, doling out some kind of tangible bonus for not playing them. If only other worrisome publishers got as proactive as these games...
Note: An earlier version of this article appeared on the site in 2014. This new-and-improved, updated remix near doubles the list of entries, so do give it a look even if you read the original. New stuff is up front, too.
Despite what the crackpot media might have you believe, not all video games are out to get us… just most of them. The rest make do by occupying only a large tract of our time, as opposed to every last drop of it - here's looking at you World of Warcraft and Destiny. Some games, it seems, would rather maintain a clear conscience, a basic responsibility to the health and wellbeing of the player. Sometimes they even express this in the form of an explicit 'go outside already' tip. 'Get some fresh air', they say, 'you're starting to smell'. Bless their swollen hearts.
Though some games go even further than that. Some games actively reward inaction, making not-playing an ironic element of their gameplay. Some games take the design philosophy of 'less is more' to its natural conclusion, interpreting 'less' as 'zero human interaction whatsoever'. Today's thoroughly big list takes a look at 15 such titles - those that effectively reward the player for his or her total inactivity. Sometimes taking your time (or just being flat-out lazy) has its rewards. Enjoy.
Reams and reams have already been written about the absurd fallacies that govern our games - those oddball behaviours and mad practices that seem so wonderfully at home inside of a virtual setting, and yet so massively inappropriate beyond it. Far Cry 4 evidently takes issue with these sorts of unthinking and unrealistic reactions. Case in point - the game's early doings, in which the villainous Pagan Min appears to kidnap protagonist Ajay and stuff him into an easily escaped room. Now, given the man's obvious penchant for violence, as well as his ominous promise to return, it's hardly surprising to find that most gamers quickly attempt to scarper.
But what if you don't run? What if instead of scurrying off to go native and/or ride around on massive murder elephants you simply decide to sit it out and wait? Does Min return, torture tools in hand and ready to rend flesh? Actually no. Instead we're treated to what is perhaps the most realistically dull conclusion of all time. You sit around for 15 minutes, Min duly returns and kindly escorts you to your original destination. Game over. That's it. I guess he's not such a terrible genocidal dictator after all… Just a weird uncle really. Very weird, mind, but still...
From the 'loving mother's school of devastating fight advice', it's Final Fantasy V and the Gogo boss monster - aka the one that you beat by doing nothing precisely nothing. Take that bullies - looks like I'm the bigger man now… on the floor, being kicked. Cheers Mum. You see the thing about Gogo is that he's actually a mimic, meaning that he'll only attack so long as you choose to attack him. Attempt to duke it out and he'll unleash wave after wave of unstoppable carnage, but opt instead to heed his sagely warning - 'to do as he does' - and Gogo will eventually relent, granting you a prize before scampering off elsewhere.
Good thing too, as trying to best old Gogo via conventional means, i.e. - the exact way that anyone would after 30-plus of furious fiend blasting - is considered to be a truly difficult feat. Gogo can annihilate the entire party in just three turns, and must realistically be defeated with the help of a high-level muting buff, lest this monstrous mime work up to his uber destructive meteor attack. The lesson here: Not every boss taunt ought to be ignored.
What better way to mask dark-hearted villainy than with a sweeping sense of whimsy? Disney has been at it for years now... In the case of Jonathon Blow's Braid this diabolical bent extends far beyond the terrible actions of Tim. You see, even the gameplay itself bears something of a sadistic streak. Case in point - level 2-2, or 'the curious case of the cloud that just wouldn't budge'. Well, to be fair, it does actually shift, though at such an imperceptible crawl as to trick most players into ruling it out as an effective means of locomotion. So why exactly would you want to ride such a slowpoke?
Well, as it turns out Blow and co. made it so that this granny-rapid gas ball provides the only means of reaching the game's most maliciously placed star. Now keep in mind that you don't actually need this item at all, though of course there's no accounting for the insatiable appetites of the completionist. All told, the player will need to wait 2 whole hours for this fluffy bugger to reach its destination. To be clear - that's 2 entire hours of your life… in exchange for a pickup that anyone, of any skill level could also achieve… Methinks I smell a trolling.
Everyone loves a dev team with a decent sense of humour, particularly when that team belongs to an oftentimes 'holier than thou' indie scene. "Ya, programming in a start button was just, like waaaay too mainstream". Praise be to the folks at Galactic Café then, whose winning sense of humour even found its way into The Stanley Parable's achievement section. An achievement section that features such noteworthy accolades as 'You can't Jump' - which rewards players for trying anyway, and 'Click on Door 430 Five Times', which err - well, you probably get that one.
Then there's 'Go Outside', an achievement that ensures that even avid gamers get their fair share of fresh air. To earn this trophy, gamers must stop playing the game for an entire 5-years. Play it, log off, and log back in a whopping 1826 days later. What could be simpler? Well, changing your computer's internal clock for one, but that's no fun now is it?
First things first: this particular section of Earthbound has you playing the role of a man named 'Poo'. A man. named. Poo… No, not a sentient slurry, nor a talking number two, but a man… named Poo… Just let that sink in to your mental u-bends for a minute. Giggles all gone? Good. Get everything out of your cistern… damnit, 'system'? Great, then let's continue. You see it seems that good old Poo is trying his damndest to master the art of Mu meditation. To do so he'll need to ignore a series of increasingly tempting visions while doing precisely nothing. Seems simple, though neither the player nor Poo can be quite sure that these tempters aren't actually real people in need.
This all continues until Poo enters a mysterious spirit world, wherein a strange spectre appears to torment him with various threats of mutilation. Hold your nerve and you'll complete your training unharmed. Intervene however, and it's all the way back to square one. Oddly enough, Earthbound actually features a second instance of similar inaction, whereby the player must stand motionless beside a waterfall for a full three minutes. Doing so will eventually unveil a gatekeeper asking the player for a password - or a swift slap to the face, depending on how many times you muck this one up.
Being the wholesome, family-friendly organisation that it is, many of Nintendo's games will occasionally prompt their players to set down their systems, unglue their eyes, and take a refreshing stroll out into the sun… probably to buy some more Amiibo. Because who told you you could stop buying Amiibo, huh? Get out there and buy some more goddamn Amiibo! But while many games will make an honest attempt to remind you of the world beyond your bedroom, few among them will actually ask you to close up shop as part of the game itself.
Then again, most games aren't part of the endlessly inventive Legend of Zelda series. In the case of the DS-exclusive Phantom Hourglass, this level of invention appears in the form of a classic key quest (with a twist). Said quest tasks Link with finding a way to affix a sacred crest to a seafaring chart. Sounds simple enough, and it is, provided you're able to think outside of the box - or handheld gaming device, as the case may be. Simply highlight both bits - one on each screen - before shuttering your DS and reopening. Tada! Both elements have now magically bonded, and all because you took a breather. Good luck trying that one with an emulator…
'Victory through inaction' is about as close to a catchphrase as the Spec Ops series is ever likely to get. Make no mistake about it, if you were one of those fortunate enough to miss out on the first nine titles, then you - sir or madam - truly were a winner. To say that these games were shoddy is an insult to true shoddiness. In truth, they were little more than uninspired dreck, the veritable bargain bin liners of a bygone day and age. Then of course came The Line, team Yager's incisive spin on/total indictment of the modern military shooter.
Here again, 'the only way to win was not to play'. However, unlike earlier games in the franchise, this decision had absolutely nothing to do with the title's supposed lack of polish - just the opposite, in fact. You see, protagonist Captain Walker's aim is if anything a little too effective, a factor that permits both he and the player to continue on with their mission long after losing all effective and justifiable impetus for doing so. In short, the further the player progresses, the more needless the devastation unleashed. All with the game goading and openly mocking your bloodlust every step of the way. Well done, winner. You're a monster. You really should have stopped playing.
Long before the Battlefield series spread to consoles, it had one of the most dedicated communities on PC. The fans were reliving World War 2 over and over again in team deathmatch, with a passion that I'm sure the developers had hoped to inspire. But when EA and DICE released a futuristic sequel, Battlefield 2142, they handed out special points multipliers for every 24 hours the passionate fans didn't play the game.
Of course, the official messaging on the feature focused more on assisting those that simply couldn't play the game as much as their competition. If jobs, or pets, or heart surgery distracted you from logging into Battlefield 2142, you would accrue an hour of Away bonus for every 24 hour period you weren't in the game, doubling the Career Points you'd earn in battle. Given that 2142 is the underplayed black sheep in the BF series, it seems like a lot of Away bonuses were earned by players before the servers were officially shut down on June 30, 2014.
thatgamecompany is one of the more avant garde developers around, creating games that are as much about atmosphere as gameplay. As such, thatgamecompany wants players to soak in the artistic vibe of Flower and Journey at a slower pace, even encouraging them to step away from the game for seven days before resuming the adventure. This 'more casual' playstyle is incentivized via the most hardcore of the PS3's in-game tools, the Trophy.
Flower's Welcome Back and Journey's corresponding Return are Bronze Trophies handed out for quitting the games for at least a week and then resuming your campaign. Those extra days away might give you enough time to truly deconstruct the themes and techniques of these thought-provoking games, putting those lessons to work in your own life. Or, if you're like most Trophy fanatics, you briefly pushed the system's internal clock forward by a week and immediately collected the Bronze, foregoing any transcendence. If only all epiphanies were this easy.
Bravely Default is Square Enix's return to form for the JRPG genre. Tropes like amnesiac teens, HP/MP, and world-powering crystals are all in full effect for the lovely throwback, but it also has some gameplay tricks that couldn't be done in 1992. For example, the new SP metric allows you to take extra actions during combat, which can turn the tide in a difficult battle. And you earn SP for having a good night's rest (kind of).
SP stands for Sleep Points, which are collected for every eight hours that your game is in Sleep Mode when the 3DS is closed with the game on. That's enough time to get the doctor-recommended amount of rest or finish a full day's work at the office, all leaving you and your characters refreshed for when you return to Bravely. The only thing undercutting these good intentions is the fact you can also buy SP via microtransactions. Paying for an SP Drink replenishes Sleep Points without the wait. If only we could spend money to avoid sleeping in real life. Or is that what caffeine is for?
Every now and then you'll see a sensationalist news headline about some poor soul that played an MMO until they died of exhaustion. Those tragedies, along with a general portrayal of kids wasting years of their lives on virtual avatars, feed a fear that people harm themselves by playing a game like World of Warcraft. No doubt with those fears in mind, Blizzard (ever the canny developer) implemented Rested XP as a way to make logging off beneficial for its diehard audience.
After heading to an inn and leaving the servers, every eight hours a day spent away nets you a Rested XP bubble. You can stockpile these for up to 10 days. When you return, each bubble grants double XP for kills until the bubbles all dissipate (aka your dwarf is no longer rested). That means players who only log in once a week have a chance of closing the gap with their more hardcore friends. So, when you're thinking of pulling an all-nighter to off 30 rats, you might be better off napping and then killing 15 in the morning for the same XP. Then again, if you're that hardcore, you likely hit the level cap a long time ago.
Nintendo games are notorious for continually hitting players with warnings about playing too much, with most games featuring at least one character that shows up to lecture you about taking a break. Pokemon has been known to engage in the same finger wagging as well, but the DS remakes of Gold and Silver didn't just tell kids to switch off their handhelds. The duo of games push Pokemaniacs to get their lazy butts into shape alongside their Pokemon.
The Gold/Silver remakes come packed with the virtual pet-style Pokewalker. The circular, simple electronic device is shaped like a Pokeball, and you use it to temporarily take individual Pokemon out on a walk to collect experience and mildly uncommon items. It’s a cute way to get slightly active via pocket monsters, but you can only gain a single level per trip, meaning it’s less time consuming to remain immobile and grind out XP in-game. Laziness wins again!
Peter Molyneux is just the type of mad genius to conjure up a virtual real estate market within one of his fantasy worlds. Fable 2 did a much better job than its predecessor with paying off Molyneux’s lofty design dreams, and it includes a world so dense that you can buy property and collect rent from it while not even playing. You can step away from the game and know you’ll have some cash waiting for you when you come back.
The rent payments go into your coffers every five minutes you aren’t playing Fable 2, and it can stack up for up to two months' worth of gold. Of course, this it vulnerable to the offline exploit of simply turning the system clock forward two months to collect the cash immediately. This is why we can’t have nice things. I’m assuming Peter Molyneux agrees, because the cash-for-not-playing aspect is missing from Fable 3’s real estate.
Despite Nintendo’s many series that whine to players to put down the game occasionally, Fire Emblem once seemed too hardcore to tell you to walk away. In fact, most FE entries were more likely to drop you into a grueling, 45 minute battle, allow no saving during the permadeath conflict, then say, “Deal with it, loser.” When 3DS’s FE: Awakening rolled around, it softened some of its edges, including doling out rewards for stepping off the battlefield every now and then.
Like most strategy RPGs, you can spend time leveling up your Awakening squad of knights and dragons in random battles that pop up on the map. But if you overdo it and kill off the few superfluous baddies dotting the map, they’ll respawn as weaker and weaker pipsqueaks. Conversely, if you step away for a few hours, the map will be repopulated with dramatically more powerful opponents that drop better items and cash. Nice bonus and it also spreads an important message about the dangers of factory farming. Or am just reaching with that?
Hideo Kojima uses every tool at his disposal when making Metal Gear Solid games, and that includes messing with the in-game clock in ways most players will never notice. Of all his games, Metal Gear Solid 3 might be the best at finding unpredictable ways to grant players advantages for turning off the game. For instance, if Snake has taken too much damage, just take a long break from the campaign and his health and stamina return to normal. Though, all his food turns bad in the time you waited for Snake heal.
But the rewards for ignoring MGS3 go much deeper than that. The End is one of the toughest bosses you may ever face in any game, mainly because the wily sniper is hard to find and even harder to kill. If he’s too tough for you, Kojima gives you an out: just leave things alone for a week. When you return seven days later, the decrepit The End will have died from old age. In a way, it’s actually more humane to let him expire from natural causes.
Now that I’ve reached the end of this feature, are you sure you don’t need a break? It’s just that you look tired. If not, share your own favorite memories of when you didn’t play a game right down there in the comments!
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, a series that started with the events of the Vietnam War then moved to a near-future timeline, is going even further down the road of tomorrow. Even though the previous year's Advanced Warfare from Sledgehammer also introduced a high-tech, militarized era, that future isn't Treyarch's Black Ops 3 future. Black Ops has its own timeline, and the sequel's setting introduces new characters, advanced gadgets and tech, and gameplay features the series hasn't seen before.
With Treyarch at the reins, the first dedicated, new-gen Call of Duty may just be the most massive to date. Once again, Treyarch's new Call of Duty game contains three different parts: the story campaign, competitive multiplayer, and the horde-style Zombies mode. As we wait for Black Ops 3 to release on Xbox One, PS4, and PC this holiday season, check out the following slides for everything we know about the upcoming shooter's game modes, story, and more.
Check out the reveal trailer below.
The last time we left the Black Ops series was with David Mason shoving his GI boot up antagonist Raul Menendez's butt. But that battle has long passed by the time Black Ops 3's events come along. The year is 2060, more than three decades after the events of Black Ops 2. So far, the Masons are nowhere in sight, but in their place you'll create and take control of your own soldier as you battle the new age's military threats.
The specifics of the global threat are still unknown, but where Black Ops 2 saw the world's military forces being devastated by city-destroying, weaponized drones, that world-ending situation will not repeat in the upcoming sequel. The world's nations are now outfitted with a whole lot of anti-drone defenses, putting an emphasis back on having strong ground forces to settle political differences - which is, of course, where you come in.
Black Ops 3 is set pretty far into the future, so physical and neural enhancements are no longer a thing of science fiction. Soldiers are often more machine than man, using cybernetic arms and legs to improve their strength and mobility. In addition to enhanced body parts, soldiers also have computers attached to their brains allowing them to use new Cyber Core and Cyber Rig abilities.
Equipping Cyber Cores gives you skills to do things like remotely hack robots and small drones with your brain at any point in the battle, while Cyber Rigs are passive abilities that can improve your soldier's mobility and defensive capabilities. The soldier you equip and take into a campaign mission can be vastly different from anything your friend might bring to the same situation, and yes, what your friends equip will matter because...
Up to now, Call of Duty campaigns have been single player-focused, on-the-rails, highly scripted rollercoasters with lots of corridor shooting and big-ass explosions. In Black Ops 3, there are still big-ass explosions, but Blops 3's campaign is giving up to four players a bit more room to explore different ways to attack their objectives. The mission environments are larger and wide open, the enemy AI has been revamped to account for multiple players and open levels, and new co-op features allow players to effectively communicate and work as a team.
The one mission shown so far was in an open plaza in Cairo, Egypt populated with human enemy soldiers, robot enemy soldiers, mini flying drones, and multiple mission objectives. The players could approach each objective as they liked, hack drones with their Cyber Core abilities, and even highlight threats, danger zones, and tactical opportunities in their co-op buddies' HUDs. The new mission style seems to emphasize player exploration and emergent tactics over setting up blockbuster set pieces like previous games, though there are sure to be massive set pieces sprinkled throughout. This is Call of Duty, after all.
Soldier customization appears to be a major focus in Black Ops 3. In the campaign, players can outfit their soldier with Cyber Cores, Cyber Rigs, weapons, and equipment before they head into battle. But you won't just be scrolling through a menu to equip those items, you'll do all that in your very own Safe House where you can customize the layout and socialize with other players.
On top of that, the multiplayer mode has cranked weapon customization up with the Gunsmith feature. Gunsmith allows you to make your weapon look unique by equipping weapon attachments and creating your own art on a predetermined section of your weapon using various unlockable symbols and shapes. Creating your weapon art is similar to using the series' emblem editor, except you're making dirty images on a 3D surface rather than a 2D plane.
With the advanced technology at the Black Ops 3 soldier's disposal, your trooper's ability to move quickly around the battlefield is even more efficient than before. You get the speed boost by using the new thrust jump, powersliding, mantling, and Titanfall-style wall running capabilities of your combat suit. This enhanced mobility works quite a bit differently than Advanced Warfare's Exo jump and dashing abilities, giving you a more controlled way of moving your soldier around the environment.
The thrust jump allows you to boost yourself into the air with both long, extended thrusts for higher altitudes and short bursts for prolonged airtime and maneuverability. This lets players bounce around corners, change direction in mid-air, and perform maneuvers in any direction at any time. Coupled with the other movement abilities, you're able to chain thrust jumps, wall runs, and powerslides to really jet across the map quickly and perform some truly amazing acrobatic kills.
It wouldn't be a Treyarch Call of Duty game without the game-within-a-game Zombies mode. As of now, there aren't many details on the specifics of this year's zombie-infested offering, but one little tidbit the developers did reveal is that the Zombies mode will include its own version of a progression system.
Whether that progression system will be as extensive as the multiplayer mode's - allowing players to unlock weapons, skins, and equipment - is yet to be seen. But given the developer's dedication to the Easte-egg-turned-full-blown-game, Zombies is sure to be a substantial part of the Black Ops 3 package.
Treyarch is adding quite a few new features to make the multiplayer experience feel much different than it has in past games. For example,Black Ops 3's Specialists are multiplayer characters with unique abilities and looks, and the maps have been designed around the new traversal abilities of the players. There are obvious flat walls to wall run on, tight spaces to powerslide under, and ponds to jump into for underwater battles.
That's right, you can swim in Blops 3's multiplayer. Making the transition from dry land to underwater gunplay doesn't have any jarring control changes, so it’s easy to jump in for cover and boost out of the water at a moment's notice. That's just a small portion of what we know about the multiplayer mode so far. Check out more details on the game's competitive component in our
Treyarch has dedicated a full 3-year development cycle to Black Ops 3 and the extra time seems to have spawned quite a bit of innovation in both the campaign and multiplayer modes. To allow players to personally experience the game and its many changes before launch, Treyarch announced that there will be a Black Ops 3 multiplayer beta made available to all who pre-order the game. And the developer will be bringing the multiplayer to E3's show floor, so you can look forward to even more details on the game in June.
That's everything we know so far, but there are still plenty of questions to be answered and Black Ops 3 features to be unveiled in the future. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to the November 6 launch.
It looks like Sony's stolen that coveted Call of Duty DLC exclusivity right out from under Microsoft's nose. At E3 2015, we were surprised to see that the typical Black Ops 3 demonstration on the Microsoft stage was absent. Instead, we got a presentation from Treyarch and the latest look at Black Ops 3's gameplay during Sony's press conference.
In a surprising turn, PlayStation consoles are getting timed exclusivity for the future DLC that will be available after the release of Black Ops 3. That means the post-release map packs will hit PlayStation consoles first, leaving Xbox owners waiting a few extra week to get in on the fun. You win this round, Sony.
"Shenmue 3 is coming! YEAH!" So says the internet at large. But who would dare betray their ignorance and whisper the damning question that's causing tell-tale question marks to appear above so many heads: What the fuck is Shenmue? And quite rightly. Why should people know? The original Shenmue came out on Dreamcast in 2000 and the sequel was last ported to Xbox in 2003. That's 12 years ago. Assuming you'd need to have been older than the 11+ age rating to play and understand the game properly, and played both versions, you'd need to be at least 26 years old now to care at all.
Oh, but you should. Ignore what you've been told about the game. Let me answer the questions the internet has undoubtedly put in your mind. And, for the record, this isn't based on nostalgia – I recently played through all of Shenmue 1 again (on a real Dreamcast, of course) and it's still gorgeous. Let's get sweaty. Erm… that is a line from the game. Not trying to put you off, here.
Shenmue is a beautiful, 3D RPG that was born from the Virtua Fighter series of fighting games. During development, its protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, was actually Akira from Virtua Fighter. It was known as 'the Virtua Fighter RPG' to the press for a long time, and it shows. But it's all wrapped up in a quest for revenge...
At the start of the first game, Ryo's father is murdered before his eyes. With Ryo floored and winded, he is unable to do anything to intervene, and the attackers – led by a man named Lan Di – flee in a black car, leaving Hazuki-sensei to die in his son's arms. There's even a "NOOOoooo..." as the camera ascends to the heavens, which is always welcome in any dramatic situation. Ryo awakens a few days later, sufficiently recovered from his battering, and starts asking around town to find out where that black car went. And so he sets about getting his revenge.
No. Fighting… or should I say the art of fighting, is a prominent theme throughout, as Ryo can train in the dojo every day and learn new moves, which he can then take into his various battles, which involve a fully 3D scrapping system. It lacks a lot of the finesse of Virtua Fighter, but it's got a lot in common with it and some recognisable moves too. Practising moves over and over will help Ryo master them, increasing their effectiveness. It's a deep, rewarding system.
However, the fighting is just one aspect of the game and can be treated with as much attention as you wish. you don't have to master anything, if you're prepared to work hard in the story's sporadic scuffles. But the thing that sets Shenmue apart from every other game I can think of with a revenge storyline is that the game world does not outwardly appear to be designed with this story in mind...
Ryo's plight is a big deal to him and to the game, but to the world at large, it's marginally more than a gossip point for the town. This is just 1980s Japanese suburbia, going about its normal duties. The pace of life is slow and the people around you remember what Ryo was like as a little boy, sometimes even calling him 'little Ryo'. There's a convenience store, and bars complete with jukeboxes (playing a selection of classic Sega tunes). Oh, and you have to be home by bedtime or your housekeeper scolds you.
You'll find yourself helping an old lady to find the house of a friend. You'll get distracted by the local video game arcade. You get given an allowance every day, to fritter away on chocolate bars (trying to win promotional prizes from the wrappers). It's all totally trivial, but absolutely enthralling.
There is one section where you look for sailors. The problem with Shenmue's progression system is that you have to talk to enough people to work out where you have to go or who you have to see. But the sailors you need to talk to are in a place that's really not that easy to find, tucked away down a tiny flight of steps off the main street. So a lot of people got stuck asking one of the most ridiculous lines in the game.
If that's as far as you ever got, it's easy to poke fun at Shenmue, which is why this one line "Do you know where sailors hang out" has gone down in gaming lore as THE line from Shenmue. But after that section, the game moves on from simply asking around for information and really gets going. And that's when its scope really becomes evident.
There is a forklift truck. You have to take on a job at one point (for reasons I won't go into) and it involves doing actual shifts in a forklift, moving crates from one warehouse to another. It is menial – it's meant to be (though you do get to race them before work starts, which is kinda cool). But it's just another thing that sets Shenmue apart from other RPGs. This world is supposed to be believable.
But if you do it properly, and follow the map (like I didn't), it's over pretty quickly. You definitely don't have to do it for three whole months like it took me to trigger the next damn cut-scene. Why did I have to work out the shortest route to do the job the best I could? Why didn't I just follow the arrow on the map? (whimpers)
Nope, far from it. Sure, the NPCs look a bit low-poly now, but the detail in this world is still astonishing. All of the cutscenes can occur in any time of day, weather or season. When it gets dark, the street lights come on. Shops open and close according to their business hours. There are 500 NPCs and they each have their own backstory. Everything has a purpose and a reason for being there. And quite how it fits onto three 1GB discs is beyond me.
The detail goes further, too. The game takes place in late 1985 and early 1986. Well, the weather in the game is (allegedly, it's hard to check) exactly like the weather was on those days in that region in Japan. It's fully voiced and yet you can phone people and talk to anyone at any point in the story. It's like Metal Gear Solid's Codec, only with everyone.
Not as much as you'd expect. In your house, you can open all the drawers and pick out certain objects, turning them over in your hand before either pocketing them if they're useful, or placing them back, carefully. You can't go inside everyone's house, but you knock on the doors and talk through the crack if the person is home. You can go inside the majority of shops in town, all fully rendered and staffed. In Shenmue 2, there is a whole apartment block that you can explore (procedurally generated apart from key rooms, of course).
Also in Shenmue 2, there are games to play in the street (that's where Lucky Hit comes in) and you can gamble your money or try to collect sets of the capsule toys. You can buy new move scrolls in a shop.
OK, that is a good question. It isn't a game you play for five minutes because it's 'just such a blast' (though there is a secret duck race). The fun is in soaking up all this detail and really feeling like you're in this world. Walking leisurely back to your home as the night draws in, watching the shadows move under Ryo's feet feels special. It feels like a second home. A second life.
It's a game you savour, rather than '100 per cent'. You don't have to buy fish for the kitten whose mum was run over by Lan Di's car, but you will. Every. Single. Day. Finding a favourite capsule toy (I got NiGHTS!) or winning a raffle is exciting. You can win Sega Saturn games (an anachronism, but explains how Ryo can play conversions of the arcade games in his house). There's so much to see and do.
Maybe it isn't. There are a lot of things a lot of people would say are 'wrong' with the game. Shenmue is at least partly to blame for the QTE craze, so those sections will probably grate. Then there's the often-dreadful voice acting. The ponderous unskippable dialogue. The clumsy character movement. The low-poly NPC models. Waiting around for a certain shop to open without being able to skip time… the list goes on and on.
So I'm not saying Shenmue is perfect. But having millions of dollars' worth of development time spent on one outwardly unremarkable world has made Shenmue a very rare thing indeed - a AAA-quality game that doesn't rely on traditional spectacle. It's just extremely high quality in most of the areas that really count. So you should try it, and yes, you should be very excited for Shenmue 3.
Fallout 4's only five months away, and yet we don't really know all that much about it. While E3 2015 certainly provided us with a wealth of information, we've still got a ton of questions. What's it about? Why is it so colorful? What locations can we visit? We've gleaned a few details here and there from Bethesda's conference and various interviews and quotes we heard from the show floor, but it's not enough. We want to know more.
So, we did what any rational person would do: we combed through the Bethesda conference frame by frame and analyzed every single piece of concept art for any scrap of information we could find. While there's no guarantee any of this stuff will end up in the final game, these drawings give us a good indication of what to expect - or, at the very least, a few ideas the developers formed during the creation of Fallout 4.
The man in the center is clearly irradiated, and most likely a ghoul from the looks of it. He's also dressed like… is that a Redcoat? It is set in Boston, so I wonder if there's some American Revolution reenactment going on here.
There's a lot going on in this image. You've got the Brotherhood of Steel in the foreground and the redcoat in the background (possibly the same one as above?), and they're both fighting alongside our protagonist. Perhaps you'll be able to call upon them as your companions, and maybe they'll even both join up at the same time? Also, look off in the distance - we've got airships blowing up. Will air travel play a significant role - and will you get to call upon them in battle?
We've had super mutants show up before, but super mutants in power armor? That's new. We've seen video footage of how the player can equip and use power armor, but here's some concepts of a few mutants who are just as decked out. Perhaps society has moved on if mutants are equipping themselves with high-tech gear?. The image to the left also suggests that the mutants themselves might be evolving into something a bit more … sophisticated.
Looks like you'll meet a few children on your journey, and the one front and center here looks like she's more than capable of defending herself. She's got a lunch box and a backpack, like she's headed off to school. She looks confident; like carrying a golf club to fend off radroaches is just part of her daily routine. Could be another sign of humanity trying to return to some kind of pre-war normalcy in a post-apocalyptic world. And of course, the mutated, two-headed cows (or brahmin) make a return.
While we don't know the exact places you'll go in Fallout 4's futuristic version of Boston, we're able to make a few educated guesses about the kinds of places you'll see. This looks like a very New England-style Ivy league school - something from , perhaps? Considering the last image, maybe there's actual learning going on in these halls.
Here's a good one. To the left, you'll see a picture of an alien that looks like he came right out of a 1950s comic book. Fallout 3 delved into the potential existence of life on other planets (especially in the Mothership Zeta add-on). Above the alien? Could be a member of Caesar's Legion. And who are the guys in the middle? They look like a cross between Vault dwellers and spacemen. Considering their helmets, the white 'wings' motif on the shoulder, and the inclusion of various aircraft in previous and future slides, they're probably some kind of test pilot.
This garage looks like it's seen better days. Hopefully that power armor still works. There's another alien in the bottom right, and it looks slightly different from the one we've seen before. A variation? A different species? Or just a redesign? They've usually been relegated to smaller Easter egg moments or DLC before, but considering their prominence in these images, it seems like they might play a pretty important role in Fallout 4.
We've got a dapper gentleman in the middle, a child in rags at the bottom, and a few examples of a bowling outfit - complete with bowling ball. I wonder just how much the pre-war section of Fallout 4 is going to encompass. Can we expect some kind of bowling mini-game? Also, there's a particularly creepy image of some monsters in a dark tunnel. And to the left - is that a new kind of mutant?
Fallout 4's ecosystem appears to be growing considerably since Fallout 3. Two-headed deer are new, as are bats (which you can see in the very top-left in the image). The inclusion of bats in Fallout 4 is an interesting one, considering that they would have appeared in the original Black Isle-developed version of Fallout 3 - before it was cancelled, of course.
We learned during Bethesda's presentation that Fallout 4 will start before the bombs drop, and here's a piece of art that showcases the major beats from those opening moments. And seriously, who's that creeper peeking in from behind the image on the left? He's got to be some new kind of hulking mutant, but is he friend or foe?
The blast didn't cause this. Look at the flat landscape around the ship, and the pools of water that still remain. Or the the rotting trees. Or the state of disrepair of the ship. This area was flooded, and the images of seagulls and yachts only reinforce how important water is to Fallout 4.
We've been assaulted by nautical imagery (and there's more ahead) which leads us to believe that Project Purity was a smashing success. Life is beginning to return to the wasteland, and people have begun to 're-colonize', so to speak, finding some small portion of their old life mixed with the new. It's why everything looks so much more vibrant in these images than they did in past games. As for this image, he's looking out to sea. What could be out there? New lands to explore? Sunken treasure? New threats to face? Either way, the open ocean seems to play a huge part of whatever adventure you'll find yourself on.
Some examples of several different outposts you'd see in the wasteland. There's the big one in the middle, but you've also got a treehouse and a rebuilt skyscraper. Fallout 4's cities are going to be much more varied and full of life than they've ever been. Based on the wide variety of locations, it appears much more fragmented as well. I wonder how much time has passed between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and if humanity's doing a good job recovering from the initial blast.
It would seem that whoever was working on this dig wasn't quite fast enough, considering the general state of disarray, all of the dead trees in the background, and the lake that's formed in the meantime. Yep, flooding again. There's a lot of death still in the air, but life appears to be rapidly returning to the world.
We've seen Red Rocket gas stations before in Fallout 3, but it appears the East Coast branch of the franchise received a bit of a redesign. What's teresting, however, is that sweet-looking bowgun in the lower left - finally making its way into an official Fallout release after all these years. You just know that thing will come with exploding crossbow bolts.
That image in the center is interesting - like a petroleum container of some kind? - but the image my eyes are drawn to is the one above it. That looks like a submarine - likely Chinese, if the crest is any indication. Maybe some underwater action is in our future? Given the protagonist's focus looking out to sea in a previous image, chances are pretty good. Other images worth pointing out include the bottom-left (some kind of new energy weapon) and the bottom-middle. Different haircuts on the same face - NPC variants or part of the character creation tools?
The poor robot (which appears to be a new addition to the series) is doing its best to keep the dirt farm thriving. Meanwhile, that heavily armed bandit in the upper right looks like a real bad time. Joking aside, the fact that anyone is even attempting to farm in this wasteland is further proof that life is starting to come back to the area, and humans are rediscovering the joys of agriculture.
Hopefully one of them is that sweet, colonial-era ship in the bottom right - unless it's been turned into a colonial airship, which would be awesome. Either way, the colonial era looks like it's going to be just as big as the nautical theme, and the society that's sprung up from Boston's ashes is taking a liking to tri-corner hats. Ten bucks says there's a group that calls themselves the Tea Party.
The buildings off in the distance (like the air traffic control tower) are appropriately futuristic, almost like flying saucers. The planes around them look like they've seen better days, though. This looks like a very interesting (and possibly major) location in the final game. Perhaps there's a mission to get a Vertibird working. "What Vertibird," you ask? Well...
Take a glance at the background - is that the same airport as before? Will we be able to ride around on Vertibirds? Is this a mission where we get to steal our own? Can this just be the entire game please?
OK, yeah, this looks cool. Here, we've got a fully-functional airship, just trucking along in the atmosphere. It's got some nautical flags up at the top, and much of it looks like it's been customized from other parts. Those engines on the side look like they've been ripped from a Vertibird, though how they've been able to get this giant hunk of metal in the air is... impressive. I wonder if you'll get to fly it?
Commerce blooms in what looks like the central hub for this particular town. This is Diamond City, which appears to be located in a reinforced Fenway Park. Look at the massive light structures in the background - and is that the poking out above the other structures? I wonder if they keep a literal Green Monster around to guard it.
If there's a surefire way to ensure ladies don't frequent your establishment, it's putting "Ladies Invited" on a sign in neon lights. Also, what is Memory Den? Perhaps someone monetized that simulation program you find in Fallout 3? Maybe that's why there's so much pre-war art here - people have found a way to virtually live out what life was like before the bombs dropped.
Are these pods related to the Memory Den? They certainly look like the from Fallout 3. Or maybe they're some kind of sleep or purification chamber. Whatever they are, this room screams high-society. Look out the window - you can see the sky, so this is probably near the top of some high-rise somewhere. Maybe VR is a special luxury for the upper-class?
Here's the biggest evidence for inland flooding thus far. Look how close the shoreline is to these buildings. If Project Purity was, in fact, a success, this ocean is probably mostly clean by now. So yeah, you'll totally be exploring a decaying, flooded, Venice-style city at some point.
Boston looks like a much more varied wasteland than either Washington DC or new Vegas. Swamps, for instance, are new to Fallout 4, and are likely a result of all of the flooding that took place since Fallout 3. Wading through water used to be fatal (unless you had a huge stash of RadAway), but here, it would appear that walking through water is perfectly safe - well, except for those monsters in the distance. You won't get radiation sickness, anyway. Nature appears to be reclaiming the land once ruined by humanity.
Even in the ruined landscape of the post-apocalypse, there's still room for adorable puppies and kitties. Look at the image at the bottom left - dogs being walked by some kind of floating robot? Is this a pre-war image, or perhaps the return of some kind of posh, upper-class society returning to the wasteland? It would gel with the player's Jeeves-ian butler robot and the more refined colonial look that appears to be spreading. And is that a Fatboy up top? Looks much sleeker than previous models.
"Withered beauty," was how game director Hidetaka Miyazaki described Dark Souls 3 during his E3 2015 presentation. This game, as with the rest of the Souls series, reveals in finding beauty among death and decay. And in Dark Souls 3, death surrounds you as the world itself faces an impending apocalypse.
With the largest gaming event of the year now behind us, let's recap all the information surrounding Dark Souls 3 that came to light both at - and around - E3 2015. A lot of the nuts-and-bolts details on the game are still forthcoming, but in broad strokes there is a lot here for Souls fans to sink their teeth into.
Considering Dark Souls 2 was released just last year, and Bloodborne hit store shelves back in March, a 2016 release window for Dark Souls 3 makes sense. It gives us a bit of breathing room from the last two games, and enough time to discover all the secrets hidden therein.
The Souls games (and Bloodborne) are usually released early in the year - with the lone exception of Dark Souls - so if history is any indication we'll be seeing this game land sooner rather than later. As for platforms, Dark Souls 3 will be available on PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and PC, making it the first Souls game built specifically for current-generation hardware.
After taking a break from the Souls' series to work on Bloodborne, game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is back in the director's chair for Dark Souls 3. Miyazaki made his directorial debut with 2006's Armored Core 4, a franchise he later stepped away from to work on 2009's Demon's Souls. After that game became an unexpected success, Miyazaki went on to direct Dark Souls and Bloodborne, leaving Dark Souls 2 in the hands of co-directors Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura. Now he's back at the helm, and will hopefully give this game that extra creative spark many felt was missing from Dark Souls 2.
During the runup to E3 2015, there were going around about Dark Souls 3 thanks to some leaked images and poorly timed Tweets. At Microsoft's E3 press conference, we finally got the definite word that, yes, Dark Souls 3 is a thing that exists and, yes, it's coming to current-gen hardware. However, there was one more surprise in store for Souls fans, tucked away in the game's European press release:
"But above all, we are blessed to have such a supportive and loving community," stated Herve Hoerdt, Vice President of Marketing Digital at BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Europe, "and we are happy to dedicate this final episode to them!" The phrasing "final episode" certainly doesn't bode well for the future of the Souls series, but then again Bloodborne has demonstrated the demand for this style of game is going away anytime soon.
Not much is known about the story of Dark Souls 3, other than a few cryptic hints director Hidetaka Miyazaki offered up at E3 2015. According to him, Dark Souls 3 will take place during the apocalypse, with some nonspecific threat looming large over the lives of its denizens. Considering the Souls series has always been one of death and melancholy, a doomsday scenario feels almost like a given.
Miyazaki also went on to confirm that the series' hallmarks - a large, sprawling world; punishing difficulty; and unique online features - will all be making a return in this next outing, however no other details were forthcoming. It was basically another way of saying, 'Yes, we're aware of why people like these games, and we're going to do more of that.'
While details on the setting and story were scarce, one area Miyazaki was happy to expound upon was combat; specifically, weapon arts. Each class of weapon in Dark Souls 3 will have its own unique ability to use in combat. For example, the longsword can perform a sweeping strike that bypasses an opponent's shield, while the scimitars can be duel-wielded to unlock a spinning attack that hits multiple opponents.
Miyazaki explained these extra flourishes were added to give players more variety in combat, as well as to make the less-popular weapons more attractive to players. In addition to swords, bows, and all other forms of martial weapons, Miyazaki also mentioned the game's magic system will receive a similar treatment. Details on that treatment were, of course, not forthcoming.
is just around the corner, promising one of the biggest adventures starring the Caped Crusader yet. Plenty of villains and allies are set to make an appearance or two, and the scale can be intimidating, especially if you haven't played the rest of the Arkham series.
Thankfully, there's a way to go into this feeling a bit more prepared: comics! Batman got his start in comics, and has more than 70 years' worth of reading material for you to check out. We've highlighted some of the best and most pertinent to Arkham Knight here. Enjoy!
Okay, this is the easy, obvious one. Taking place within the Akham-verse, this official comic relates the events that take place between Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight. If you want to know all the lore behind Rocksteady’s tertiary game starring the Dark Knight, this is the comic you need.
If you pre-ordered Arkham Knight from GAME or GameStop, you’ll receive the Red Hood story pack DLC. But who is Red Hood, exactly? If you want to know that, this comic will give you your answers. As is typical with comics though, Under The Hood weaves in and out of other story arcs, most notably Hush and A Death In The Family. Still, it’s an enjoyable read in and of itself, and was even turned into an animated film starring John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama) as Joker.
Speaking of Hush, this comic is widely regarded as one of DC’s best, and for good reason. Similar to The Long Halloween (another entry on this list), Hush plays with the concept of a mysterious, unknown villain showing up in Gotham and toying with both Batman and his villains. Sounds kind of like the Arkham Knight, don’t you think? The ending is … not great, but there are still lots of fantastic individual moments that make up for it, not to mention the foundation it sets up for characters like Red Hood.
Spoilers for those who haven’t played Arkham City yet: By the end of that game, the Joker lies dead. While you might think that would be a relief to the citizens of Gotham and her vigilante protector, it’s actually made things more difficult. Villains that previously warred against one another no longer have the Clown Prince of Crime getting in their way and stirring up trouble, and so they have formed a more unified front. The Secret Six comics also address such a concept, though with smaller-name rogues. Still, to see what the bad guys can do when they stop fighting each other, check this one out.
What does Harley Quinn do when her “puddin’” isn’t there to boss her around? Why, she teams up with other villains and goes on suicide missions for the government, of course. The Suicide Squad comics band together unlikely allies and put them work toward a greater goal, not unlike Villains United. The difference here is that the squad, while not exactly led by Quinn, nonetheless features her in a prominent position of power, unshackled by her love for Mr. J. Expect the same in Arkham Knight.
We’re not sure what role anti-hero Azrael will play in Arkham Knight, but we see him briefly in trailers and hear him warn Batman that “dark days are here” along with other prophetic musings. Azrael is an interesting character who has served as friend, foe, even replacement to Batman, and the Sword of Azrael story gives the best idea about his personality and motivations.
The Arkham games have come to be known for their grittier portrayal of Batman and his world, and fans have come to love this more serious take on the Dark Knight. If you’re the sort where you not only enjoy Rocksteady’s twisted vision but wish there were more Batman stories that ventured into the darker corners of storytelling, check out Grant Morrison’s A Serious House on Serious Earth, which incidentally inspired the original Arkham Asylum game. A fair warning though: this story is not for the faint of heart.
Almost every villain and their mom seems poised to make an appearance in Arkham Knight, and the same can be said of this tale set during Batman’s early years of crimefighting. In The Long Halloween, a new villain appears and begins a murder spree of one victim per month. Calendar Man knows who the mysterious killer is, but won’t tell good ol’ Bruce, instead forcing him on a hunt throughout the city which is being torn apart by mob violence. Similarly, in Arkham Knight, Gotham is falling apart at the seams as a new bad guy - the Arkham Knight - comes to town.
Dark Victory is the direct follow-up to Long Halloween, and is just as good, if not better in some ways, than its older sibling. Once again featuring appearances from seemingly everyone in Batman’s rogues gallery, Dark Victory tells a fascinating tale of the escalation of violence in Gotham and its intimate connection to Batman. Essentially, Dark Victory makes us wonder if things would be as bad in Gotham as they are if Batman had never come along. On that note, one has to wonder if the Arkham Knight would have orchestrated his rise to power if it hadn’t been for Bruce giving him someone to fight against.
It’s hard to see the Arkham Knight as anything other than a dark mirror to Batman. Where Batman uses non-lethal force and is joined by a handful of friends and family, the Arkham Knight dispenses violent, deadly force using not only himself but a literal army of goons. In many ways, the Arkham Knight is probably what Batman would become if Bruce ever lost control, and that’s precisely what begins to happen in Batman: Ego, as a broken mind battles itself for control of its body’s future. Part action, part psychological thriller, Ego makes us see what would happen if Batman’s symbolic presence were twisted into something more vicious.
Batman: Arkham Knight is set to be Rocksteady’s final outing with tall, dark and brooding (that’s you, Bats). Although it’s sure to be action-packed, it also feels a bit like saying goodbye; a memoriam, if you will. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader by Neil Gaiman is of a similar tone, as the story opens on the funeral for Gotham’s protector. Why is Batman a legend? This story will tell you, show you, and convince you.
Girl Robin. Batman beats up Superman. The animated version has Bats voiced by Peter Weller, AKA Robocop. It probably will have no parallels to Arkham Knight, but it’s really freaking good and you should totally read it.
WHERE'S RACHEL?? WHERE'S THE TRIGGER?? Er ... ahem. Sorry, got a bit carried away there. Anyway, those are our suggestions for the best DC universe comics to prep for Batman: Arkham Knight, but we're always open to suggestions! Let us know your favorite Bat-comics in the comments!
