The actors who will play Destiny’s Ghost next
Added: 16.09.2015 22:00 | 196 views | 0 comments
The malleable nature of online games means nothing is sacred, no aspect is safe from influence or enhancement. Even the recorded performance of an actor such as Peter Dinklage is a piece to be plugged into a game like Destiny - or unplugged, if someone better or with a more compatible schedule comes along.
Nolan North is taking over duties as the Ghost, your chatty companion orb in Destiny, after just one year. His role could be timeless, sure ... but nobody’s perfect. And as long as Destiny isn’t perfect, Bungie might as well put a revolving door on the Ghost’s recording booth.
Let’s cast for a spell, shall we?
“Xur, the odds of successfully surviving a moon wizard attack are approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one!”
As the body, voice and soul of C-3PO, Anthony Daniels has some verified experience in playing a verbose, eternally consternated robot. There’s no shortage of horrid things to fret over in Destiny - The Vex, The Hive, that grumpy Mr. Crota - and no way to avoid countless firefights and spooky Martian caverns. He’s going to hate it, and his only R2 companion is the one that fires a loud gun.
As her stellar work in Orphan Black has shown, Canadian star Tatiana Maslany can blend into any role - an inhuman ball of talkative space minerals won’t even register as a challenge for her. You’ll totally forget it’s Maslany playing the Ghost, right until people start complaining about the fact that she hasn’t won an Emmy for it yet. Why hasn’t she won an Emmy yet? Seriously.
Troy Baker, or Nolan North 2, as he’s known among casting directors, should have little trouble compressing his considerable talents to fit inside the Ghost’s shell. He’d knock it out of the park, we know this, but there’s one other reason Troy Baker’s ubiquitous voice is an apt and inevitable part of Destiny: It’s a video game, and it’s illegal to release one without him.
Though 343 Guilty Spark has struggled to break out of menacing future-orb roles - does anyone remember his cameo as “Fancy Security Camera” on CSI: Cyber? - it might be time to fall back on what he’s best at. 343 Guilty Spark also has an in with Bungie, having worked with the studio on multiple Halo games and lore-heavy motion comics. There were some regrettable things said between parties after writers killed him off in Halo 3, of course, but he’s smoothed things over since then. Besides, if you really want to earn a grudge from Bungie,
“That pelvic sorcerer came from the moon!”
Chris Pratt is almost too cool for a video game, but Activision’s army of negotiators make a strong case when they all show up at once, in an actual case, in groupings of $10,000 or more. It’ll be money well spent to get a Ghost with all the qualities of Hollywood’s current go-to hero: inescapable charisma, a carefree embrace of adventure and some wild sex appeal.
Mmm, sexy, sexy Ghost man. Why don’t you place a nav beacon to my spaceship’s private quarters?
Forget the subservient AI routine - maybe we want the Ghost to be odd, unsettling, commanding, weird. Maybe we want Destiny’s main chatter to go through a Tilda Swinton filter, coming out in a skewed way, tingling in our ears like the demonic whispers of a dark universe throbbing just beneath our own. With every word, Tilda-bot shatters the bones of our conceptions, reducing our understanding of Destiny’s lore and our universe to a gently quivering blob. Now Destiny is an eldritch horror that we can never escape.
Shia LaBeouf does just fine as ol’ Ghosty, as we’ll come to call him around Destiny Year 4, but the important part is that he, well, did it. Standing in the mirror for a solid week, never once sitting or showering or eating, LaBeouf willed his dream into reality by shouting motivation phrases at himself. Do it. Do it. Become someone important! In Destiny, the video game!
We’ll look back fondly on this version of the Ghost, which proved that sometimes our aspirations can pay off, and that sometimes you just gotta kill Nolan North with your bare hands to get the gig. DO IT!
What’s he doing these days?
Think of how delightful Mrs. Potts was, and how adept Jessica Fletcher was at solving mysteries and corralling killers. That sounds like the kind of companion, eloquent yet inquisitive, you’d want alongside you in the fight against The Darkness. Lansbury’s considerable experience on film and stage makes her all the more fit for a Destiny Ghost - and there’s not a single grimoire card that says Jessica Fletcher wasn’t reincarnated as a whipsmart robo-sphere after she wrote all that murder. Bet you missed that aspect of the plot, didn’t you?
With the specter of George Lucas floating over every instance of a creator re-doing their work, fans will inevitably demand the return of the original Ghost from Destiny’s good ol’ days. “Dinklebot was better,” fans will say. “Perhaps we were too harsh on him,” critics will write. “Can you please kill Tyrion already and free up Dinklage’s schedule,” Bungie will whisper into George R.R. Martin’s ear. “And maybe it wasn’t entirely his fault.”
Tags: Hack, Evil, Trek, Thief, With, North, Black, Space, There, Croft, Shop, Ghost, Yeah, Destiny, Though, Chris, Bungie, Peter
From:
www.gamesradar.com
| SSX: We miss you. Please come back, just like this
Added: 16.09.2015 19:00 | 93 views | 0 comments
SSX for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is only three-and-a-half years old, but let’s be honest: we haven’t had a proper, joyous SSX about bright color, big music, and even bigger air in over a decade. Starting with the original on PlayStation 2, EA Sports Big’s snowboarding game took the glutted extreme sports genre and revitalized it with a splash of wonderful absurdity. No real world snowboarder could pull of the aerial feats commonplace in SSX, let alone in the middle of a cloud of fireworks, but the series had an intense tangibility in its best moments. At its peak, nothing else felt like SSX and we miss it terribly.
We want you back, SSX. This is everything we loved about you that we want to see in you on modern day machines.
SSX3 was the game that paired the smooth momentum and deep satisfaction of pulling off tricks in SSX and Tricky with an evolving mountain you could explore at will. SSX 3’s open range remains distinct, revealing depth through alternate routes and by connecting individual races and challenges into a seamless whole. By the time you hit the All-Peak race, you know every dip, every jump, and every tree intimately. Today when seemingly every game is an open world, a new SSX with the structure of 3 would be damn refreshing. Just imagine the weather.
The soothing voice in your ear as you tricked your way down the mountain at breakneck speed, Atomika always had your back. His updates and announcements made you feel like the peaks were all part of a single, connected space, with your rivals racing down Happiness while you’re practicing your grinds in Snow Jam. The tunes Atomika spins were the perfect complement to your snowy stylings, pumping you up and urging you to go faster, soar higher. (Though the ability to remove certain songs from his playlist was particularly helpful whenever “Jerk It Out” came up.) The Junkie XL remix of Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” will always evoke the adrenaline rush of catching really, really big air and nailing that perfect trick, and is there a better song to race to than N.E.R.D.’s “Rockstar”?
For all of SSX 3’s openness, it was still tightly designed. If you could just go anywhere on the mountain, the races wouldn’t have felt so driven. This isn’t a real mountain after all. If it was, Elise would pull off a sweet grind, head off into the woods and then get stuck in mud and rocks. The game smartly laid out boundaries marked by irregular blue signs and if you strayed too far it set you back on the path with only a slight penalty to score, time, or race placement. SSX 2012’s mountain, while bracingly sharp and chilly in its capturing of real mountains and weather, also sadly forced you to restart every damn event if you went out of bounds. Obviously a modern SSX can offer even more space than the classics thanks to technological advancements, but an ideal sequel would balance realism with the flexibility and intelligence of those old boundaries.
SSX 3’s soundtrack is sublime. Just a perfectly curated collection of beats, bass, and soothing, atmospheric ambience. It fits and amplifies the game’s breezy, airy, giddy vibe of extreme fun without limitations in a gloriously jubilant, blisteringly eclectic way. It’s bona fide landmark in licensed video game soundtracks that has still, 12 years later, not even been approached in terms of quality or creativity. But you know what makes it even better? The damnably clever - witty, even - way that the game’s dynamic audio design squeezes every last drop of exhilaration out of every track in its roster. Thread and weave through a tight, shimmering cave or tunnel, and the bass and reverb will crank up, surrounding you with your environment by piping it directly through your ears. Launch into a big air, and the heavier elements will drop away, until eventually the entire track falls to the earth below your skyborne feet, replaced only with clean breezes and birdsong. Until that is, you hit the ground and the party kicks back off once more.
SSX3’s track design is a masterwork of intricacy, instinct, pacing and pathfinding. Where other racing games will present their depths by way of lines to be perfected, apexes to ace in order to shave fractions of seconds off race times over weeks to come, SSX at its best is at once more open and free, and far more creatively demanding. Traverse an area a couple of times, and you’ll think you know it. But you don’t. You’ve only seen its surface layer. The greatest success (and fun) does not come from honing. It comes from exploring. Hit that grind-rail you hadn’t previously noticed, and you might spot a pylon cable if you leap off it just right. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could grind that? Guess what. You can. Then there’s that railway track that you’ll find if you crash into that secret tunnel, from that hidden rail, from that hidden jump, from that secret shortcut between buildings. Actually forget exploration. SSX is more about hacking a track, peeling it apart like an onion and finding new track upon new track hidden in plain site in the same space. That’s what we need from a new SSX. Let’s scale it up even further and forget the last game’s mountainside vagueries.
Characters in sports games - the ones that aren’t modeled after real-life athletes, that is - tend to be fairly interchangeable, but the boarders of SSX 3 have distinct personalities and styles. You don’t choose your in-game representative based on their stats or gear, but on their swag. For me, the perfect SSXer always be Elise, whose easy confidence never falters, even when a beefed landing leaves her face-deep in powder. “Take myyyyy picture!” she yells whenever she does something really brag-worthy, which is exactly how we’re supposed to feel as we master SSX’s slopes one by one. SSX’s characters are a marvelously diverse assortment of superstars, misfits, jerks, and cutiepies that don’t feel like they were designed by focus groups. Keep it that way.
Maybe it seems strange to single out snowboarding as one of the best things about what is ostensibly a snowboarding video game, but SSX’s signature sport got lost under some cumbersome accoutrements as the series went on. On Tour’s skiing wasn’t unwelcome. Nor were the wingsuits in SSX 2012. With every new accessory, though, SSX lost some of the perfect balance in its core flow of movement on a board. Carving a line, hitting a buttery jump and spinning as it crests. That’s the good stuff, not buying an extra pick axe or air purifier in a menu for microtransaction cash. And not that it’s a worry at this point in popular development, but the sooner we all forget SSX Blur’s atrocious motion controls, the better.
SSX’s smooth, weighty boarding isn’t just about broad-strokes, downhill spectacle though. The half-pipe trick competitions of the series’ earlier entries are damnably satisfying, desperately strategic timesinks, and we need them back. Like everything in a good SSX, it seems simple at first. Two big jumps sitting opposite each other, a timer, and a bunch of points to score. But like everything in a good SSX, you’ll be discovering the hidden depths of cleverly stacked design in minutes. Momentum leads to bigger jumps. Bigger tricks lead to more boost, which leads to extra air, which in turn leads to hidden means of launching yourself, even whole new, airborne pipes. And then there are the various trick and point boosters carefully ‘littered’ around the arena, which you’ll soon learn not to hoover up willy-nilly, but to collect methodically, at exactly the right time, as you plan your route to carve across the pipe to hit them at just the instant needed to really make your biggest moments sing.
In the age of modern PCs, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, monumentally fast computing machines across the board, speedy loading times remain an issue in most games, particularly those sporting big open spaces to play in. If SSX brings us back to the mountain top, graphical fidelity, scope of the mountain, and fancy real-time weather effects should all be balanced around giving you swift, instant access to events and free boarding on the mountain. Every entry in the SSX series, from the pinnacle of SSX 3 to the awkward modernity of SSX 2012, suffered from painfully long loading times.
Look, we get that big, connected, internet-powered video games are a thing, but sometimes that stuff just gets in the way. A new SSX has to focus on what made the previous games great. Namely focus, presence, and ownership of the environment. To that end, we don’t want certain events - or even areas - fenced off into the online-only realm, nor do we want a particularly vast swathe of the game to be online-enabled at all. Races, leaderboards, and ghost downloads. That’s it, please. And give us the ability to participate or deactivate that stuff at will. We don’t want to be cruising the mountain, taking in the air and the vibe to the delicate sounds of Royksopp, only for some wayward stranger to invade and bump us off the lip of a crest. Those wastrels have no place in SSX, and nor does that behaviour
Tags: PlayStation, With, Jump, Xbox, Live, Every, Xbox 360, Sports, Keep, Elite, Launch, Though, Today, Tale, Xbox One, Jedi
From:
www.gamesradar.com
| Is Dark Messiah one of the best WRPGs ever?
Added: 14.09.2015 13:17 | 48 views | 0 comments
GE writes: Dark Messiah of Might Magic is a spin-off of the well-known franchise by the same name, Might Magic. Though I am not familiar with the main franchise, I have played most of the Heroes of Might Magic games, and I love them. And then I heard of one of the many spin-offs called Dark Messiah. And unsurprisingly too many, it was a great game that I really enjoyed playing through.
From:
n4g.com
| Tearaway Unfolded Review | Analog Addiction
Added: 14.09.2015 9:17 | 38 views | 0 comments
Jamie Briggs, Analog Addiction. "When Tearaway released on PlayStation Vita in 2013, Analog Addiction fell in love. Not only did we call it the killer application for the Vita, but we also expressed how this is an experience that couldnt be replicated on any other platform. With that being said, Tearaway Unfolded brings an adaptation of the original release to the PlayStation 4. Though there are many similarities between each release, Tearaway Unfolded has been able to expand on the original in almost every way; though this isnt always for the better."
From:
n4g.com
| Lost Dimension Review | IGN
Added: 12.09.2015 16:19 | 35 views | 0 comments
IGN:
Lost Dimension is greatly held back by its inability to keep up the pressure of the disappointing betrayal system and its poorly written story. Still, this RPG manages to find its footing with its excellent combat system and interesting character abilities. Though the enemy balance frustratingly swayed from time to time, it was genuinely fun to come up strategies to overcome each levels challenges
From:
n4g.com
| Debut Duds: The Worst PlayStation Launch Games
Added: 12.09.2015 7:17 | 28 views | 0 comments
Though Sony's console brand would build a legacy, the launch lineup wasn't exactly batting a thousand.
From:
n4g.com
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