Alien: Isolation release date revealed by Creative Assembly

Bursting from Sega's chest on Xbox 360 and Xbox One 7th October 2014

In space, no-one can hear you scream. Luckily, that's not the case for announcing release dates, as Creative Assembly has today announced the launch date for the eagerly anticipated Alien: Isolation, confirming that the game will release on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One from the 7th October.

What transpired was that Creative Assembly were after what people thought the Alien from the original movie was like, and spent their resources trying to make him less like a man in a rubber suit, and more of the hyper-mobile deadly hunter that springs to mind when you think "alien killing machine." More details - including some information on the Alien AI - were revealed earlier this week.

http://www.totalxbox.com/

Card game roguelike Hand of Fate coming soon to PS4 & Vita

Expect deep dungeon combat brought to you by experts in the genre

Salutations PlayStationers! The team at Defiant Development are thrilled to announce that our Kickstarter-funded table-top roguelike deck builder, Hand of Fate, will be coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita!

For those of you who haven’t heard of Hand of Fate, it is a roguelike that blends table-top card gaming and video game magic.

Inspired by tarot and fantasy, all bets are off as you create your own journey by building a collection of cards used to deal out a boardgame-like dungeon teeming with enemies, treasure and adventure. Upon entering combat, the cards come to life as the player is propelled into a beautiful 3D environment to brawl it out with the foes of the land. Draw your cards, play your hand, and discover your fate.

Being a roguelike, Hand of Fate’s strength is its nearly endless combination of cards and ways to play. The deck builder lets you determine a mix of combat, chance and equipment cards for your deck before you set out on your quest. Equipment selection ramps up replayability as the player is introduced to a slew of artefacts, weapons and armours that modify gameplay. The player has the freedom to choose their cards, but how and when they are dealt out is purely up to The Dealer.

Hand of Fate is lovingly made by a talented team of board game, RPG and roguelike game enthusiasts. So it’s a real treat to see our passion being brought to a new audience thanks to Sony.

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/

Halo 2 Anniversary on Xbox One would need "fantastic" multiplayer, says Microsoft

Multiplayer would be the most important thing in a Halo 2 remake, says Microsoft exec Phil Spencer.

Rumours about the existence of a Halo 2 Anniversary edition refuse to go away. The game is said to be coming out for Xbox One later this year, and now Microsoft exec Phil Spencer has spoken about what he thinks the most important feature of the game--if it exists--would have to be: multiplayer.

"In this fictitious world where that game existed," said Spencer in an interview with IGN, "it’s an easy answer: it has to be just the multiplayer experience that we all found in that first Halo 2 game."

Halo 2 launched in 2004 and, due to its beloved multiplayer mode, became the poster boy for Microsoft's fledgling Xbox Live service. The multiplayer mode featured map playlists, peer-to-peer matchmaking, and a ranking system, which were all seen as pretty revolutionary at the time.

"If you think about what happened in the franchise," continued Spencer, "and what were the hallmark moments--when did duel wielding come in, when did another playable character that wasn’t Master Chief come in?"

"All the things that you and I know about the evolution of the franchise, if you’re going to say one thing about Halo 2, you’re going to talk about real multiplayer. I think you just have to nail that in just such a fundamentally core way. Frankly [we'd have to do it] probably better than we did with Halo 1 Anniversary."

"I thought the multiplayer in Halo 1 Anniversary was good, but Halo 1 never had multiplayer in the truest sense, so it always was going to be something different."

"If there were something called Halo 2 Anniversary," says Spencer, "I think the multiplayer would have to be fantastic."


Microsoft has told GameSpot that it will publish a new Halo game this year. But will it be Halo 2 Anniversary?

http://www.gamespot.com/

"We were going to let Gears sit on the shelf for a decade or more," says Epic

Black Tusk Studios to the rescue!

Attention, Gears fans. Before you read on, you may wish to face in the direction of Black Tusk Studios, fall to your knees and utter a few words of gratitude. According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, the company had planned to park the Gears of War franchise for "a decade or more" before Microsoft bought the IP and put Black Tusk in charge of it.

"We've gone through a long process of figuring out the games we're going to build at Epic worldwide in the future and we concluded that we weren't going to be building any more Gears of War," Sweeney told Polygon at the Game Developers Conference last week. "As much as we love the game, we're heading in a new direction."

"The core Gears values are really tied to being big event-based, single-player console games with awesome cover mechanics and other things that really didn't translate into the future approach we were taking with online games, and competitive and cooperative multiplayer," he explained. "Because we weren't planning on building any more Gears games we were just going to let that sit on the shelf for a decade or more, in case it had any future value to us."

Egad.

Microsoft, thankfully, had other ideas. "It was one of those rare moments when both Epic and Microsoft were able to make a business that was obviously best for the community," continued Sweeney. "Much better to have Microsoft building Gears games than for it to be sitting on the shelf unused by Epic.

"Selling an IP like that is a rare thing. Most companies look at it as their crown jewels but at Epic we had a practical view of it: we weren't going to build it and we realized the world wanted more Gears of War."

http://www.totalxbox.com/

Far Cry 4 set in the Himalayas, has elephants - report

Pack your trunks, we're headed to the mountains


Sources close to Eurogamer have claimed that Far Cry 4 will be set in the Himalayas and - get this - feature rideable elephants.

The folks at Eurogamer say that "people familiar with the project" have told them that the game is set for an official announcement during Ubisoft's annual press conference at E3 this year. An Xbox One version is in the works, but it's as yet unclear if there will be an Xbox 360 edition as well.

Despite the radical change in location and temperature, the gameplay will be similar to Far Cry 3's, the sources claim, and the world's map will feature outposts for you to liberate.

Ubisoft is currently aiming to release it in the next year - before the end of March 2015. How about those rideable elephants though.

http://www.totalxbox.com/

Deception IV: Blood Ties Out Today for PS3, PS Vita

It’s safe to say that no other game in the world contains as many ways to kill and hurt enemies as Deception IV: Blood Ties, which is out today on PS3 and PS Vita. More than 100 different traps allow you to slice, hit, launch, trip, and otherwise torment your victim in a variety of imaginative ways. Dropping a flower vase onto the head of a powerful hero as a giant high heel descends from the ceiling to crush him is not the kind of experience you can have in most other games.

Besides the traps that you can select and place yourself, you can also take advantage of stage traps. In one stage you can set up a launching trap to hurl your victims into the Car Wash, and in another you can roast them alive inside a Brazen Bull.

But while Laegrinna and her Daemons show neither mercy nor restraint toward their victims, we’ve worked hard to keep Deception IV: Blood Ties from getting too graphically violent. Dismemberment, for example, is never shown. Because more than anything, we wanted it to feel rewarding when a trap combo is successful, and for this we felt it was necessary to achieve the right balance between serious and comical.

This emphasis on the feel of trap combos affected our decisions in all areas of the game’s development. For example, the way enemies react when hit by a trap had to be satisfying not only on its own, but as part of a chain of traps and reactions, which means we had to keep the flow of the combo as a whole in mind when designing the scale and tempo of each reaction.

To be able to watch a victim stumbling around with a jack-o-lantern over his head, launched into the air by a springboard, knocked aside by a hammer, squished by a rolling boulder, and then finally attacked in the groin from underneath by a sharpened wooden horse is something that players can’t get from a comedy movie or TV program, so we wanted to make sure we did it right.

The difficulty of developing so many possibilities for different trap combinations in Deception IV: Blood Ties is more than words can express, but so is the happiness we feel when we see our fans’ enjoyment.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/

Halo: Spartan Assault goes cheap for Xbox One and Xbox 360

$9.99, £7.99 or $13.45 AU

Microsoft has slashed the price of the already cheap and cheerful spin-off Halo: Spartan Assault across Xbox 360 and Xbox One - it'll set you back $9.99, £7.99 or $13.45 AU. The manufacturer has also announced that Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, Thief and the Standard and Hardened Editions of Call of Duty: Ghosts will be on offer for Xbox One players this weekend.

Originally released for Windows 8 tablet, Spartan Assault is the story of Spartan commander Sarah Palmer, otherwise celebrated for being an acutely humourless kicker of Promethean arse in Halo 4. Queue up your Xbox One download here, or click this for the Xbox 360 version.

Log wasn't massively impressed by Spartan Assault when he reviewed it in January, deeming the game a "decent twin-stick shooter that uses the touchstones of Halo combat effectively, but lacks the longevity or depth to warrant the price tag". Now that the price tag's less of a problem, you might want to take an interest.

Ghosts, Tomb Raider and Thief will be reduced from 28th March to 30th March. Fire up Major Nelson's blog for more.

http://www.totalxbox.com/

This new zombie/monster/robot shooter for PC promises a "fresh and thrilling" experience

Free-to-play Zombies Monsters Robots (ZMR) coming to North America this year from studio formerly known as Epic Games China.

Tera developer En Masse Entertainment today announced that its free-to-play PC shooter Mercenary Ops 2 will be released in North America this summer as Zombies Monsters Robots (ZMR). The game launched in China in 2012 and has attracted 30 million players so far.

In development at Yingpei Games (formerly known as Epic Games China), ZMR is a third-person shooter set in an alternate world in which Earth finds itself under attack. Players will use "guns, guts, and gear" to fight their enemies in the multiplayer games.

"We are excited because ZMR brings a fresh and thrilling experience to PC shooters. Playing the huge variety of co-op missions, facing crazy monsters and boss battles, and the intense PvP is going to keep gamers coming back for more,” En Masse Entertainment CEO Chris Lee said in a statement.

ZMR features a variety of game modes, including a co-op campaign and wave-based survival missions, as well as a head-to-head competitive mode. The game's co-op mode supports up to eight players, while the competitive mode lets up to sixteen players duke it out. New content will be released for the game on a monthly basis, the company said.

An alpha test for the game will be available in April before ZMR's full launch "early" this summer.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch

http://www.gamespot.com/

Killer Instinct developer "still aiming" for March Fulgore and Story Mode update

"I can only say we're trying to land it"

Microsoft creative director Adam Isgreen is still hopeful that he'll be able to get Killer Instinct's long awaited Story Mode update out the door for a promised March release date. That's despite the fact that the clock is ticking and there aren't that many days left in March. Godspeed, buddy.

"We are still aiming for March for the big Fulgore/Story/Lobby release," Isgreen wrote on a post on NeoGAF. "Yes, that's risky, because the update is chock full of content and we're 13 days from April. I can only say we're trying to land it. If we're delayed out of March, it's only because we're being extra-careful to find and address any issues with this major content update."

"The Fulgore trailer is coming together nicely, too," he added, just to tease us all. "Needs a few tweaks, but it's close, and damn he's fun to play."

The Story Mode, which has been a much missed component to an otherwise pretty damn good fighting game debut, should hopefully add a bit of flavour and backstory for players who missed the last Killer Instinct, which came out over 17 years ago.

http://www.totalxbox.com/

Dark Souls II Collector's Edition Unboxing by Mista Fioth

My friend Mista Fioth an excellent gamer and a good friend unboxing the collectors edition of dark souls II. Enjoy.

                                        

Ascend: Hand of Kul - Souls for... money...

As i am writing this article i am playing Ascend: Hand of Cul. I am so fucking angry about the hole idea of the game that i want to go to a church and destroy every picture of Jesus Christ that i find with a Skull Hammer. The hole idea of this game is based on buying souls and upgrate your shitty weapons. Thats right. They make this fucking game so difficult to force you buy souls to upgrate your shitty weapons that they are destroyed all the time. After some hours of gaming i didn't find the whole idea not even a little funny. And i dont find it entertaining to go back and kill the same monsters all the time to harvest souls to upgrate my shitty  weapons.... If i make some mistakes in the writing of this article you can go to your nearest church with an axe and hit all the christians you can find inside as many times you want....

FilipposCorfu for the blog: Video Games Study

Dungeons and Dragons Online Screenshot of the Week #164

A Shadar-kai seeks to escape the domination of the Netherese in our 164th DDO Screenshot of the Week! Thanks, Satyriasys, for sending in this cool-looking screenshot!

http://www.ddo.com/

League of Legends: Beyond The Rift (Cinematic)

League of Legends: Beyond The Rift (Cinematic)

League of Legends 'Vel'Koz' Cinematic Trailer 2014 【HD】

League of Legends 'Vel'Koz' Cinematic Trailer 2014 【HD】

League of Legends 'A Twist Of Fate' Cinematic Trailer 2013

League of Legends 'A Twist Of Fate' Cinematic Trailer 2013 

Dungeons and Dragons Online Update 21 first impressions

So, Update 21 came out a couple of days ago with new content and that’s pretty much what all my ddo time has been about ever since. The good thing about the new content is that is quite complex which makes every quest a long run. They’re very interesting so even if you spent four hours trying to complete Aurgloroasa’s Lair on epic elite, you just don’t want to quit.

Update 21 introduces three new endgame quests, one of which is a regular quest and the other two are raids. It also introduces ingredients, named loot and a  whole new crafting system; The Thunder Forge.

The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar

This is the new regular quest and it is located below the north-east bridge of Eveningstar, close to where the old entance to the Storm Horns was. The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar is narrated by the creator of the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood, and it is divided in three versions of the same quest (I honestly didn’t expect that it would remain like this once lamannia was over, but I’m glad it did). On your first run of the quest, you will do the short version of the Halls (standard version) which is not short at all, really, you can still explore the dungeon for about an hour without getting bored for a second. The Halls are a very interesting environment, something completely unique in the game, kind of like a mix between the Catacombs and the Waterworks put togheder in a level 28 quest. It has some very deadly traps (I’m actually happy that I had a reason to get a trapper when farming this quest) that can wipe an entire party if they don’t know what they’re doing and it has many rooms, secret doors and halls. It is the home of kobolds but not kobolds like the ones in the harbor, these ones are smarter and they can’t be killed in two seconds by just running straight to them spamming cleave or fireball which was a nice surprise to see. Monsters you will find are also, ghosts, statues (new), humans, skellies, helmed horrors (new), and more (don’t wanna spoil it). Once you finish your first run, you will unlock the two other versions of this quest, Extended and Extended with commentaries. I strongly recommend that you try out these versions since they offer a new and more exciting endfight, one of which I assure you that you won’t expect to find in such a dungeon. If you are soloing, go ahead with the commentaries version and you will run the quest listening to Ed Greenwood and the story of the creation of the Realms, even while I don’t really care about anything dnd related, I found it quite interesting. However, if you are in a party, just run the regular extended version, you don’t want to have Ed talking over your vent. Also, his voice gets bugged (a lot) and if you dare to interrupt him by recalling, you will have to listen to him until you relaunch ddo which is a pain. The named loot of this quest is quite good (I’m wearing one of them right now on my sorcerer) and it can be upgraded by just running this quest and gathering the ingredient that drops from it, Black Stones. I would recommend just farming these in the quest and to not buy them or anything, everything that drops from the Halls is highly overpriced, I actually sold 50 stones for 600 AS yesterday. Overall, an interesting, relaxing quest that will keep you entertained for awhile and you will find that party coordination will make things a lot easier.

Temple of Deathwyrm

My favorite quest of the new update ever since Lamannia went up. This quest brings a strange dichotomy. In one hand, the quest is very fun and intense but in the other hand, it has so many bugs and it’s so laggy that it takes most of the fun out of it. Turbine has never been my favorite gaming company when it comes to ingame support and having to wait over an hour for a response from a developer just to get our ticket closed for no reason was not fun at all. It just makes me sad that hundreds of players are going to run their first shadow dragon raid with so many bugs that they’ll just give up and hate the quest.

However, if you decide to run it and you don’t find any bug that impedes your party’s progress, you’ll have lots of fun (and dying). The quest is basically a big castle in which there are six floors, the objetive of the raid is to solve the puzzles in every floor in order to reach the summit of the temple and fight the boss, Aurgloroasa.

The raid contains a series of pretty unique puzzles, some are randomized and require a lot of observation and others are static, so after a few runs they’re just a matter of memory. The quest is very fun and takes a long time to complete (some of the first groups to complete it on elite were inside the quest for about six hours) which is something I really like since it proves that it’s not so easy content (and that it’s buggy). Party coordination is also important in this quest, some must focus on the puzzle while some others have to take care of the trash, and the puzzles inside the castle require that everyone cooperates, so there is no real time to pike unless you’re doing normal which is when the mobs don’t spawn so often.

It has the most unique endfight in the whole game and it was a very nice surprise when we ran it for the first time. Any party doing this will have a very fun and intense time.

Fire on Thunder Peak

This is the second raid introduced in the new update and it’s a very intense fight, but that’s it: it’s just one fight. It doesn’t feel like a raid other than the difficulty, there are no puzzles, no story, no dungeon developement and it has hardly any map to move around. This is my least favorite quest of update 21 and it was really disappointing to run.

While it will keep you entertained for the whole fight, it’s just too simple for me to enjoy it a lot. It doesn’t have as many bugs as Temple of Deathwyrm and you won’t have any ticket issue but this really seems to be the kind of quest you run for the ingredients rather than the fun you get from it, which is something I don’t like about certain quests in this game. If they came out with a box that gave people the ingredients you find in this quest kind of like how they did with Caught in the Web, I’m sure that in a couple of months nobody would run this quest anymore. In the other hand, if I had a full stack of every single ingredient found in Deathwyrm, I would continue to run it as much as I can since it’s a very complex quest, nothing compared to Thunder Peak.

Other than that, it’s a very intense fight, for the first runs you will have some trouble running it because of certain quest mechanisms that are able to wipe any unexperienced party which is not bad at all. If you are looking for a straight up solid fight, go run this raid and you’ll have a fun but don’t expect any raid complexity of any kind.

Those are the three new quests in the new update and they’re all unique in their own way. They’re not so easy to complete which makes me happy and I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time running them. Also, all the named loot is totally overpriced (as I’ve said before), so hurry up and farm it and make thousands of astral shards while you can.

Article was taken from the blog:

The Portable Hole: 

http://theportablehole.com

Dungeons and Dragons Online screenshot of the week #163

Charmont gets a great view of an airship in our 163rd DDO Screenshot of the Week! Thanks, Charmont, for sending in this cool screenshot!

http://www.ddo.com

Personal Profile on Raptr (FilipposCorfu) over 1000 reward points

My personal profile on Raptr over 1000 reward points.

League of Legends: All-Star 2014 heads to Paris, France

We're excited to announce that the 2014 League of Legends All-Star event will be held in Paris, France. Taking place from Thursday, May 8 to Sunday, May 11 at Le Zenith Arena, a new format will feature the All-Star Invitational and All-Star Challenge. With these changes, the event will showcase competition from both the top teams and the favorite pro-players from each region in four days of competition.

The Format

The All-Star Invitational

Serving as this year’s main event, the All-Star Invitational will bring together the regional winners of the NA LCS, EU LCS, LPL, GPL, and OGN Champions. These five teams will duke it out in group stage play, with the top four advancing to a best-of-three semifinal. The winners will meet in in a best-of-five final to compete for the $50,000 winner-take-all prize.

The All-Star Challenge

At the beginning of each day of competition, players will be able to watch The All-Star Challenge, a series of games featuring two mixed region rosters. Players will not only elect two pros from their region to play in the Challenge event, they will also vote to influence aspects of the modes that the pros play. Player Voting begins on Sunday, March 30, so mark your calendars!

A Call to Action: AMA with Riot

Want to learn more about the All-Star process? Join us on Reddit for an AMA on Monday, March 10 at 10:00am PST.

Tickets will go on sale soon, and be sure to check out lolesports.com in the coming weeks for more information including a detailed schedule and voting information!

http://eune.leagueoflegends.com

Warframe: PRIME ACCESS: RHINO PRIME EDITION

Add the power of ancient Orokin technology to your Arsenal with Prime Access: Rhino Prime Edition! Gain instant access to the newest Primes - Rhino Prime, Boltor Prime and Ankyros Prime - plus exclusive Rhino Prime Avatars and the Noru Prime Syandana!
Speed up your in-game progress with 90-Day Affinity and Credit Boosters, collect double the resources with the high-capacity Distilling Extractor Prime and stock up on Discounted Platinum with these exclusive Prime packages.
Packages include:
NEW RHINO PRIME WARFRAME
With strength and fortitude, the golden-gilded Rhino Prime joins the ranks of elite Prime Warframes.
NEW PRIME WEAPONS
Make Boltor Prime and Ankyros Prime yours instantly!
EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE DRONE
With twice the capacity of the regular Distilling Extractor, the exclusive Distilling Extractor Prime will collect double the resources when you're away from the game!
EXCLUSIVE SYANDANA AND PRIME AVATARS
Be the best dressed Warframe in the Solar System with the Exclusive Noru Prime Syandana and show your Rhino pride in-game and on the Forums with Rhino Prime Avatars.
DISCOUNTED PLATINUM
Stock up on Platinum at a great price.

https://warframe.com

Hell Yeah! Wrath Of The Dead Rabbit OST: The Bunny Song (feat. Clotilde Chevalier) (Cute Zone)

Hell Yeah! Wrath Of The Dead Rabbit OST: The Bunny Song (feat. Clotilde Chevalier) (Cute Zone)

Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit Gameplay Trailer

Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit Gameplay Trailer

League of Legends 05/03/2014 Patch Update

Just a few bugfixes.

Fixed an issue that caused players to see a black screen instead of Champion Select
Restored compatibility with XP Service Pack 2

leagueoflegends.com