The Witcher 3’s latest patch pulls the frame rate down on consoles, and did Kojima intentionally foreshadow his split from Konami in a Ground Zeroes mission?
If you play games on PC through Steam, chances are you have a pretty significant backlog of games you haven't finished. Now, there's a website that lets you know how long it'll take to finish your backlog. It will also tell you if you will survive to see your library completed given your current rate of play.
Called , the website uses Steam profile info to compile statistics for playtime. It shows the total amount you've played and the total amount of time the games would take to finish. For example, I have a library of 104 games. I've played 179 hours so far, but if I wanted to complete 100 percent of every game I own, it would take another 4500 hours, or 6 months of nonstop play.
My Steam library stats
The website also has a tool called the "Steam Survival Calculator" which takes the amount of hours you normally play per week and tells you if you'll live long enough to complete your backlog. At my average of about four hours on Steam per week, I'd be able to clear every game and still have 34 years left to live.
There have been some apps like this before, but How Long To Beat Steam also breaks down the time to beat by category. In addition to showing how long it would take to achieve 100 percent completion, it also presents the time needed to simply finish the main goal of each game.
It's a pretty neat tool to visualize the time spent on playing games, even if it puts it in terms of your own mortality. How many hours have you played and have left to play to complete your backlog? Let us know in the comments!
The company behind the game Cards Against Humanity is known for doing funny things. It sent coal to everyone who signed up for its 2013 promotion 12 Days of Holiday Bulls**t. It made a bigger box to hold all the cards from the base game and its expansions, and marketed the box with blatant innuendos. If you signed up for 2014's CAH holiday promotion, you received a list of your senators' campaign contributors.
But the new Cards Against Humanity phone line is one of the most ridiculous things the company has ever done.
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Cards Against Humanity is a card game in a similar form to Apples to Apples, except its cards are full of explicit themes. If you don't want to buy the game, you can print out the cards for free from the CAH website.
When some people have a baby, they buy a handful of things for a new nursery. Others--or at least one guy--go a different route and instead construct an elaborate nursery themed around , the year-and-a-half-long project features a variety of physical items throughout the room. This includes Lakitu (inside of his cloud) holding up a finish line and a mobile comprised of McDonald's Happy Meal toys. Best of all is the kart-riding Mario on the ceiling, which is designed to look like the anti-gravity version of the karts from MK8. It even has lights built into the kart itself.
You can see more of the nursery in the video above and the image gallery below.
Compare the original release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on PC with High settings using Unreal engine 3 with the new version released on PS4 using Unreal engine 4.
Sam Mendes' second James Bond movie, Spectre, is likely to be his last, the director has revealed.
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He noted in the BBC interview that his decision to return to the franchise after his declaration earned him some grief from friends: "I said no to the last one and then ended up doing it, and was pilloried by all my friends. But I do think this is probably it."
Considering that Skyfall and Spectre have taken a total of five years to make, you can't blame Mendes for wanting to do something new. "It feels almost, even though we've just finished shooting it, like one big experience and it was a fantastic life-changing thing," he said. However, he described the process as an "enormous undertaking," adding, "It really is more a lifestyle choice than a job."
Skyfall is the highest-grossing Bond movie of all-time, so it's no surprise that producers wanted Mendes back for Spectre, the 24th official entry in the film franchise. Unfortunately, he wasn't joined by Skyfall cinematographer Roger Deakins, who was responsible for making the last movie arguably the best-looking in series history.
A theme song for Spectre has not yet been unveiled, though Mendes teased that it's already been recorded and we should be hearing more about it soon.
Spectre is due out on October 26 in the UK, and will be followed by a worldwide release on November 6. It's a direct sequel to the last three Daniel Craig-starring films, and features Christoph Waltz and the apparent return of SPECTRE, the villainous group from the Bond novels and early films.
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Giant monsters annihilating skyscrapers! Colossal lizards roaring at winged titans as they battle to the death! Humanity on the brink as its leaders play political mind games as they struggle to cage the threat! It is is the stuff of our kaiju-laden dreams; what could possibly go wrong?
The answer: so very, very much. Godzilla commits so many game design sins that they become impossible to count, but the greatest horror of them all is that such giant monsters could be so boring. Smiles turn to snoozing almost from the get-go of the branching campaign, known as God of Destruction mode. As the titular King of the Monsters, you march out of the sea and begin your rampage, seeking to destroy up to three power generators in each level whose energy feeds your growth. All the while, a G-Force operator shouts out your arrival and commands choppers and tanks to stop you before you can wreak too much havoc, for all the good it does. (Hint: it does none--at least, not for the cities Godzilla demolishes.) She also announces opportunities for ground crews to collect data at particular points, which requires you to click a stick, at which point the camera zooms out to show you a cinematic view of the creature's flailing.
Here is the bulk of the campaign: beating up power generators.
The entire setup is dumb on the face of it. You're playing as a giant monster--but simultaneously as the defense forces, a bizarre narrative contradiction that culminates when the operator mourns her losses while triumphant music plays and you are granted a victory. The game isn't silly or joyous enough to turn this nonsense into camp. ("The tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic," as one Simpsons episode describes it.) You shouldn't play Godzilla for the ironic entertainment; it is not a "so bad it's good" kind of experience, in no small part due to Godzilla himself. That he feels so huge as you lumber through the game's spaces isn't a problem. But those spaces are too small, the animations are too lengthy, and the invisible walls are too prevalent for you to ever feel like you are unleashing might on a vast city. Leading Godzilla into the fray is like steering a backhoe through an aquarium. He's heavy, sure, but he's in no way fun to maneuver.
And so you charge forward, swing your tail, and bash buildings to keep yourself occupied as you trudge towards the generators. Over and over again you do it, until you finish the campaign 20 minutes or so later, and realize you have to repeat it many, many times over to reach the true ending and gain the currencies needed to enhance Godzilla and the game's other playable monsters. The game is built around unlocks and upgrades, which come at a horrendously slow pace. The menus seem to offer a lot of options, but this is a transparent, manipulative ploy to make a game with a paltry amount of content look loaded with possibilities. That the game is sold at full price is ludicrous.
Press X over and over to win.
Oh yes--the other monsters. The game's best moments aren't related to gameplay, but to the stirring visuals of seeing Rodan or King Ghidorah appear and clash with Space Godzilla (or whichever kaiju you control at the time). This occurs during many campaign missions, and the King of Kaiju mode is a series of contextless confrontations of this sort. When the fracas begins, textureless structures collapse in an explosion of sparks and smoke, King Ghidorah spews forth a stream of electricity, and the attack knocks Space Godzilla onto his back. Such events may mirror Godzilla films, but actually taking part in them reveals a laughable array of awfulness.
Balance is one of the biggest problems. Some monster combinations are hysterically inept, such as when you take control of King Ghidorah and face almost any other kaiju. Ghidorah can take to the air and perform a descending attack that devastates the enemy, and in many cases, you can repeat this attack over and over again, beating your enemy without taking a lick of damage. If you want to be ultra-cautious, force Mechagodzilla against an invisible wall and watch him float into the air as his animations struggle to complete. Battra is powerful as well; like several monsters, he can surge through the air to safety, then return for a hit-and-run attack, exploiting your opponent's exhaustively slow turning speed. Facing a larva-stage Mothra as an airbound Battra, meanwhile, is one of the most tedious and broken things I have ever done in a video game, given how only my strongest attack, which is governed by a heat meter, was the only consistent way to do damage. It was another layer of monotony on top of an already-boring slog.
The best mode has no action at all.
Here's an interesting detail: to turn, you hold a shoulder button, even though you move forward and back with the analog stick. It's a workable system but a bizarre design choice nonetheless--though it's not the control quirk that stands out the most. That honor belongs to the weird auto-targeting, which might send you charging towards your opponent even when you've turned 60 or 70 degrees away from it, and intended to rush away. Other elements aren't just weird: they're flat-out busted. You face Super X aircraft in the campaign, but some attacks have Godzilla clipping right through them without doing damage. And should you be tempted to fight one or two other players in VS mode, crippling lag and timeouts might have you reaching for the power button. That's a shame: the most enjoyment I've had with Godzilla was winning a three-kaiju free-for-all with only a smidgen of health remaining.
Winning a multiplayer match is inherently rewarding, however, so I hesitate to give too much credit to Godzilla for that smidgen of enjoyment: I was playing as Battra and exploited my way to victory, locking opponents into animation loops and then flying away before they could retaliate. And so it goes in this overpriced and unattractive game, whose finest mode is one in which you place unlockable action figures on a diorama. Indeed, looking at static monster figures in fighting poses is a lot more fun than actually participating in battle. The worst news of all is that if you want more figures, you have to play the game, and no virtual action doll is worth that many yawns.
The Witcher 3’s latest patch pulls the frame rate down on consoles, and did Kojima intentionally foreshadow his split from Konami in a Ground Zeroes mission?
Compare the original release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on PC with High settings using Unreal engine 3 with the new version released on PS4 using Unreal engine 4.
Watch extended gameplay footage from Godzilla featuring the Giant Bomb crew.
Even though CD Projekt RED haven’t released official modding tools for The Witcher 3 yet, here are a bunch you should still definitely install.
Check out some amazing combos and super moves from Edge, Vlad, Talos, Crow, Chela, and Dauntless in Rising Thunder.
Check out this teaser trailer for Rising Thunder, a new fighting game from Radiant Entertainment that was revealed at EVO 2015.
Check out this reveal trailer for Necalli, a brand new character coming to Street Fighter V.
Rob and Jake take a look at the new 1.07 patch for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
This week in news, the gaming world mourns the passing of Satoru Iwata, Konami further excludes Kojima, and Witcher 3 DLC returns!
