Category: Game

Playing Quantum Break feels like watching a mildly entertaining TV action-pilot on Fox while stopping every now and again to play a familiar shooting game. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
At a recent Xbox promotional event, I spent a few hours with Remedy’s game. It’s fun. I’m certain I’ll play the whole thing when it comes out, even though there are elements of it that I find confusing and disagreeable.
The story is draped around a decent sci-fi apocalypse theme and the action is solidly arranged. Like previous Remedy games such as Alan Wake and Max Payne, it seeks a merger between the traditional linear narrative model and gameplay elements such as shooting, exploration and puzzle-solving. It displays a clear desire to emulate the explosive TV drama while delivering a standard third-person action game.
In many ways its early sections come up short in their attempts to ape TV drama, but clever dovetailing of game and exposition sections make this look like a promising addition to the growing ranks of video game dramas, though with some caveats.

The tale opens with Jack Joyce (Shawn Ashmore) entering a research facility operated by his old friend Paul Serene (Aidan Gillen). Something not-entirely kosher is going on here, but the player is encouraged to go along, by both literally and fictionally pressing buttons that progress the story. (Push this lever to make something, anything, happen.)
It becomes apparent that Serene is mucking around with time travel. Enter Jack’s brother Will (Dominic Monaghan) waving a gun around and demanding that the madcap experiment come to an end.
The whole thing goes belly-up. Mean security guards burst onto the scene firing weapons. The brothers effect an escape. Jack shoots and kills a bunch of guards. Like, lots of them.

You can see how if feels like standard prime-time action fare. Imagine Quantum Break as a 30-second trailer for a TV show and it works just fine. It has a shape that is often missing from some of those big third-person adventures that set themselves up as stories, but are really just multiple missions jammed together.
There’s a compelling drama inherent to this story, of one brother’s unwitting empowerment of the villain, and the other who understands the danger. The whole time-travel thing is just the sort of high concept gimmick we’ve come to expect from TV networks that regularly churn out shows about superheroes, demons, tech conspiracies and portals to other realms. Quantum Break feels a lot like TV.
The characters even have generic macho drama names, including yet another leading man TV ‘Jack’. And there are lots of guns, an ever-present staple of TV drama.

In terms of actual player participation, the early segments slice down into three parts. First, there’s just plodding along and following the story. You literally walk behind the bloke who is talking and listen to what he says. You open doors and you push keys.
Then, there’s the shooting bits. Hide behind cover, pop out, drop a bad guy, move around a bit and repeat. This is augmented by time-based super-powers like being able to zip forward at lightning speed or throwing a time-disruption grenade at enemies. In the early sections, these are difficult to use effectively, and only available in limited quantities, but they become a bigger part of the game as it goes on.
Finally, there’s a time-based puzzle of the sort we saw multiple times in Life is Strange. If I stand on this platform it sinks to the ground. It is no use to me. But if I time-freeze the thing, it stays raised, so I can use if to move forward. You can see how this sort of puzzle is going to get plenty of use as the game progresses. My guess is that some of these puzzles will be satisfying, as you’d expect from a smart design team like Remedy.
But on the whole, the game looks like a very familiar third-person action adventure with lots of ‘press Y to see another story element appear’ moments. The key element of difference is in the story, which makes much of time-manipulation in order to deliver exposition. Jack walks around a room looking for stuff, and witnesses events that happened there in the past. It’s a neat story-telling trick, a cascading stream of flashbacks that flow into the game itself.

The reason why Remedy games attract notice is that they generally look and feel good, that thing the PRs like to call “high production values." Ashmore, Gillen and Monaghan give solid performances within the constraints of motion-capture technology. So do the actors playing secondary characters, such as Lance Reddick, Patrick Heusinger and Courtney Hope. Their faces tell us a lot more than the dialog, which itself is written sparingly and effectively.
But taken alone, the drama (at least in these early scenes) falls short even of standard TV fare. Unusually for TV, there are no women, until about an hour in, when a security guard called Beth gives Jack a pass. Beth is obviously going to be a significant secondary character. But she’s at least fourth on the character pecking order for the first hour of the story. I can’t think of a mainstream TV show that would do this, unless it was really about a male environment, like a WWII U-boat story.
When women do appear in the early parts of the story, they are mostly there to support or illuminate the more active men. One is a victim, another a flirtatious co-worker, another a wife who is annoyed at her husband’s workload.
This tired use of secondary characters is pretty disappointing, as is the lack of interesting leading women who set up the story’s potential. I’m surprised that Remedy, obviously keen students of fictional forms, haven’t picked up on this.

The game’s plot begins in entirely linear fashion There’s the whole thing going down at the research facility, and a sense of previous not-terribly-interesting relationships between both the Joyce brothers and Serene (he’s not the splendid chap you think him to be, bro). We also witness the inevitable signals of fascistic over-stretch by the evil research company, but that’s about it. No secondary character arcs. Not even a flashback.
This is very much in the mode of video game stories, and a long way from modern TV drama, which generally offers multiple character stories right from the start.
I spoke to Quantum Break’s senior narrative designer Greg Louden. "You’ve only seen the beginning of the game and I think it evolves in a lot of ways," he said. "The opening part of the game is very atmospheric"
He then went on to talk about how, for him, watching linear stories always makes him want to be in on the action. This is the core pitch of the game’s proposition. "Whenever I watch superhero stories, I’ve always been like, I’d rather play this. When I saw the latest Avengers, I’d rather be fighting Iron Man in the woods than watching it happen. So to create a superhero story you can participate in, I think it’s great."

Of course, even in the most malevolently violent superhero movies, the central character doesn’t mow down law enforcement professionals by the dozen, as Jack does here. Having killed a bunch of human beings, Jack seems to have no feelings or opinions on the matter worth sharing. It’s another jarring example of characters who seem pretty normal, but then turn out to be cold-blooded killers. As we saw with recent Tomb Raider games, this murderous body-count is just assumed to be okay with both the player and the character.
It would be ludicrous to expect every video game character to stop for a moment to wrangle internally over the morals of their actions. But in a story that’s about timelines and the consequences of individual actions, the lack of any introspection looks like an omission here. I want to see this character react when he guns down a few dozen people, especially when he has previously been presented as an every-man.
One significant quirk of this game is its introduction of four, 22 minute non-interactive episodes that are designed to be watched in-between playing the game. While the game focuses on the hero, the episodes focus on the villains. This gives us those separate arcs, but not within the game itself, only as part of its non-interactive annex. Players can influence these films via a series of binary choices that multiply into a variety of outcomes.
It’s here that we see some interesting approaches to the story, offering up alternative perspectives and human sub-plots. But it’s also a reminder of how far games have to go as a story-telling platform. Where the playable section is a gormless straight line from A to B, the TV section jumps around playfully, with various points-of-view as well as all the usual dramatic beats, such as sex, car-chases, fist-fights etc. It’s a vastly more sophisticated medium for delivering human stories, and, frankly, it makes the game’s efforts to do the same look childish.
We end up with three different versions of major characters. There’s the one who runs around in gameplay, then the one you see in mo-capped cut-scenes and finally the live-action actor. The suspension-of-disbelief required to hold them all as the same person is further stretched by the massive differences in the way each section is shot. In the game modes, we sit behind Jack as he spends long periods walking around and shooting stuff. In the filmed section, the camera is stationary and cutting between characters every few seconds. These are two, very different things.
Stopping one activity to begin another is, by definition, disruptive to the experience. Yet despite its clunky strangeness, watching these TV sections does add something to the richness of the world once the game starts up again. I think it’s more in the detail than in the stories themselves. I was constantly noticing things in the game that I had seen in the TV section and thinking, "oh yeah." It’s a shame the same effect can’t be achieved within the framework of the game itself.

Louden said that players who decide to skip the story sections will enjoy the game just fine, but will not enjoy the full experience. "If you want to skip through and get the game experience, you can. But you’re lacking this undercurrent, this subplot tour."
I agree with him, but it says something about games as story vehicles, that a massive production from a well-respected team requires that you step outside its walls for 20 minutes at a time, to really deliver all that it wants to tell. The TV sections feel like a crutch for the narrative ambitions of the game’s makers. Not content with the emotional pull of efficiently shooting people, they want us to understand a wider framework, which is fine. But the experience is vaguely disconcerting, almost an abrogation of gaming’s ability to do the same job through environment, dialog, cut-scenes and even action.
Quantum Break is a big budget, prime-time piece of popular entertainment wrapped inside a lot of familiar video game activities. It’s out on Xbox One and Windows 10 on April 5.

Disney’s toys-to-life franchise will focus on new play sets There will be no Disney Infinity 4.0 released in 2016. Instead, Disney announced today, the company will continue support of Disney Infinity 3.0, which came out last summer.
Prior to this year, Disney has released a new version of its open-world game annually since Disney Infinity’s debut in 2013.
Continued support for 3.0, said John Blackburn, general manager of Disney Infinity, will come in the way of new play sets and new characters released throughout the rest of this year and timed to the biggest events coming from Disney. The company’s 2016 theatrical slate, from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, includes Zootopia, The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Finding Dory, Doctor Strange, Moana and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
In our review of Disney Infinity 3.0, we called the latest iteration “a deeply complex system of games, an aspirational creation that strives to do many things well.
"In essence, Disney has finally thrown open its vault of treasured characters and stories and wants you to play," we said. "What better way to do that than laying on the floor side-by-side with your child, laughing until you’re sick, creating not just video games, but memories."
We also noted that the game was plagued by some lesser issues including long load times and creation tools that could use some work.
When the game released, it included support for all of the previous figures and added the Star Wars universe to the series.

Make sure to check back with us a bit later today for a full run-down of the news and what it means to the franchise.

It’s eight hours into the Xbox Spring Showcase, a day-long Microsoft event in San Francisco. I’m sitting across from Xbox head Phil Spencer, who has spent a large portion of his day fielding questions from journalists. Eventually, our one-on-one discussion leads us to game creation on Xbox One, and the various ways Microsoft strives to remove road blocks for developers.
“You mentioned making development on Xbox One as easy as possible," I say. "This is kind of a niche question, but I remember in the early days of the Xbox One, there was talk…"
Spencer leans back in his seat and laughs.
"You know where this is going, huh?"
"I know where this is going. You’re gonna get kicked from over here!" he jokes, gesturing to the PR managers flanking him.
"So, this idea that the Xbox One would eventually become a dev kit, that every Xbox One…"
"That’s a good idea, right there! That’s a good idea!" Spencer laughs.
Then, his answer: "I cannot update on that front right now, but I think the idea that you’re talking about is a perfect example of … way back in the day, third-party publishers paid thousands of dollars for console dev kits. That clearly kept you and I from starting a game company, because it would soak up most of our money just buying the dev kits."
"Then, indies were embraced — Sony did a great job, I’m not saying we were unique on this — we had our ID@Xbox program where, when you’re accepted, we sent you two dev kits. Which was a way to say: "Go start building games!" Spencer says. "We don’t want the price of the hardware to be a barrier. And you can distribute them digitally so you don’t even have to deal with all the retail stuff and make that work."
Still, he says, the idea of every Xbox One functioning as a dev kit is one he continues to find compelling. "The idea that you and I might just want to riff on something on our own at home and see if we can create something very very easily even before we submit to ID — that makes a lot of sense to me."

Bucking a trend that had new editions of the game hit every year, Disney today announced that Disney Infinity 4.0 won’t be released in 2016. Instead, the company will continue to support and grow out its current game, Disney Infinity 3.0, which was released last summer.
The good news is that it means there’s no need this year to buy a new starter disc, which typically sold for $65 with a hub and new figures, or spend $30 for the game alone.
The bad news is that it means there won’t be any major overhaul to the game’s core systems, hub world or Toy Box mode.
Instead, Disney is riding on the framework of Disney Infinity 3.0, using it to support at least four more playsets and a stream of new figures.
“For all existing fans, this is great news to them," said John Vignocchi, vice president of production at Disney Interactive. "For people on the fence about buying into the game, we’re giving them a chance to take another look.
"We’ve always positioned Disney Infinity as a family gaming platform and brought some of the best developers to work on it, and we feel like we have achieved a level of quality with 3.0 that is indicative of the Disney brand."
That said, news today that Disney won’t be investing in another major update to Disney Infinity this year does come on the heels of the company’s earnings report earlier this month that showed the game isn’t selling as well as expected.

"At Games," according to the financial report, "growth was due to higher licensing revenue from the success of Star Wars: Battlefront, partially offset by lower Disney Infinity results. The decrease from Disney Infinity was due to higher inventory reserves and lower unit sales volume."
When I asked Vignocchi if the two were connected, he said they weren’t, and maintained that Disney is still deeply invested in its Disney Infinity games.
"We are number one in this category," he said. Disney’s earnings report "did not have an influence on whether to put out this year.
"The company has been completely behind Disney Infinity. If you look at all of the creative content coming out this year, you can see they are still proud and still 100 percent behind us."
Recent promotions within the company do seem like they could work well for Disney Infinity.
James Pitaro, the new co-chairman of Disney’s consumer products division, is also the president of Disney Interactive.
"He’s been a big supporter of Disney Infinity over the years," Vignocchi said of Pitaro. "Jimmy’s appointment as chairman is significant because it shows our company’s commitment to the merging of physical and digital content together."
Disney Infinity meets Power Stone

The biggest evidence that Disney is still behind its series of open-world exploration and creation games is the flow of content the company announced during today’s video event.
The 15-minute video laid out plans for four new playsets, each delivering unique gameplay to Disney Infinity 3.0 and a number of new characters.
"Disney Infinity will support all of the major events and theatrical releases at Walt Disney in 2016," Vignocchi told Polygon. "This year we will release four new playsets, each introducing unique gameplay for the platform. Each of the playsets will represent new content from our core properties."
Those properties, he said, are Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
The first playset is the one we already know about. The Marvel Battlegrounds playset, which hits March 15, brings with it four-player rumbles using any of the previously released or yet-to-be-released Marvel characters.

Vignocchi likened the game to Capcom Dreamcast classic Power Stone, and said it would include destructible environments, a light story and level transitions.
The March release of a Marvel playset leaves Disney, Pixar and Star Wars for the remaining three playsets, though Vignocchi declined to talk about them.
The new characters kicked off today with Judy and Nick figures from Zootopia. The Marvel Battlegrounds playset will include Captain America figure in a Civil War-inspired costume. Disney will also be releasing Ant-Man, Vision and Black Panther in Civil War costumes on March 15, along with Spider-Man in his black suit. Black suit Spider-Man was previously available only as part of a starter pack.
Finally, March 15 will see the release of Baloo, tied to the Jon Favreau remake of The Jungle Book.
"With all of the content we are releasing this year, this will be the largest Disney Infinity release to date," Vignocchi said.
What won’t change
While Disney Infinity 3.0’s core game mechanics won’t change, that doesn’t mean there won’t be additions to the game outside of the playsets and toys.
"There will be elements added inside the hub throughout the year," Vignocchi said. "We will be running a bunch of Toy Box TV content to support the releases."
He said the team will also be designing playable games and levels that can be accessed through the hub’s Toy Box mode.

What won’t be changing is the face of the hub. The design of that central world, like the game’s mechanics, won’t be getting any sort of upgrade while Disney Infinity remains at 3.0.
"The hub is designed very specifically as an onboarding mechanism to help players fully understand the breadth of content inside of Disney Infinity," Vignocchi said. "Doing any changes to that would change the overall flow of the hub."
All of today’s news was announced during something called Disney Infinity Next, a video that is designed to not just lay out the future of Disney Infinity, but also to give viewers some insight into the process of making Disney’s games, movies and other content.
"There will be more episodes coming this year," he said. "We haven’t determined the cadence yet; it needs to line up with retail and releases."
And there seems to always be more news to share for a game that stretches across so many different properties.
BB-8, Darkwing Duck, VR and AR
I asked Vignocchi about the strange absence of Star Wars: The Force Awakens fan favorite BB-8 from the current roster of Disney Infinity’s Star Wars figures.
Is there a BB-8 figure in our future?
"We are absolutely investigating BB-8," he said. "It’s a challenge because BB-8 is a totally different sort of character than we’ve done before; he’s not a vehicle, not a biped or even a . We’re looking at what we can do for that particular character. We will release it when it makes sense, if we’re going to."
Darkwing Duck, a long-held personal favorite of Vignocchi’s, is also still not in development as a figure. At least not yet.

Disney Infinity continues to poll fans for their favorites, and Darkwing Duck is high on the list, though that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s coming to the game as a figure.
Finally, I asked Vignocchi about virtual and augmented reality.
With VR or AR headsets planned for many of the platforms on which Disney Infinity 3.0 is available, is the company looking at bringing the game to these different reality headsets?
"We are looking at the technology," he said. "Finding ways we can leverage technology to provide new and compelling experiences for our fans is a priority to us at Disney."

If you haven’t seen our big feature yet, you may have missed the good news: We’ve played a lot of Dark Souls 3 already. Like, four hours of it. We’re not allowed to share all of our footage from that playthrough, but we can let you sneak a peek at the first 30 minutes of the game.
To maximize what we could show you, we cut out the opening cinematic, since that’s already been released. This footage covers character creation, the tutorial area, the first boss fight and stumbling into Firelink Shrine, Dark Souls 3’s new hub area. It also ends, appropriately, on our first death during the playthrough.
If you’re looking for more info, check out our lengthy feature on Dark Souls 3. You can also see more footage of the game, including a montage of our favorite moments from the first four hours and an explainer for the new FP system, on our YouTube playlist.

Defeat the gangs of New York to take back the city Tom Clancy’s The Division arrives a week from today, and you can get caught up on the game’s story and setting in a launch trailer released today by publisher Ubisoft.
The Division takes place in a post-pandemic New York City, with chaos reigning in the aftermath of a virus that has decimated the city’s population. The game’s title refers to a plainclothes military unit that is activated in an attempt to restore order. The Division plays out in a one-to-one virtual recreation of midtown Manhattan; the pandemic has cut off access to the other boroughs, even though we’ve seen them in previous trailers.
Developer Massive Entertainment has run multiple betas for The Division, with the most recent one, an open beta last month, drawing more than 6 million players. You can check out our beta impressions, which included thoughts on the Dark Zone PvP mode, in the video below.
The Division launches March 8 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. It was announced at E3 2013 and was originally scheduled to be released in 2015.

Playing Quantum Break feels like watching a mildly entertaining TV action-pilot on Fox while stopping every now and again to play a familiar shooting game. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
At a recent Xbox promotional event, I spent a few hours with Remedy’s game. It’s fun. I’m certain I’ll play the whole thing when it comes out, even though there are elements of it that I find confusing and disagreeable.
The story is draped around a decent sci-fi apocalypse theme and the action is solidly arranged. Like previous Remedy games such as Alan Wake and Max Payne, it seeks a merger between the traditional linear narrative model and gameplay elements such as shooting, exploration and puzzle-solving. It displays a clear desire to emulate the explosive TV drama while delivering a standard third-person action game.
In many ways its early sections come up short in their attempts to ape TV drama, but clever dovetailing of game and exposition sections make this look like a promising addition to the growing ranks of video game dramas, though with some caveats.

The tale opens with Jack Joyce (Shawn Ashmore) entering a research facility operated by his old friend Paul Serene (Aidan Gillen). Something not-entirely kosher is going on here, but the player is encouraged to go along, by both literally and fictionally pressing buttons that progress the story. (Push this lever to make something, anything, happen.)
It becomes apparent that Serene is mucking around with time travel. Enter Jack’s brother Will (Dominic Monaghan) waving a gun around and demanding that the madcap experiment come to an end.
The whole thing goes belly-up. Mean security guards burst onto the scene firing weapons. The brothers effect an escape. Jack shoots and kills a bunch of guards. Like, lots of them.

You can see how if feels like standard prime-time action fare. Imagine Quantum Break as a 30-second trailer for a TV show and it works just fine. It has a shape that is often missing from some of those big third-person adventures that set themselves up as stories, but are really just multiple missions jammed together.
There’s a compelling drama inherent to this story, of one brother’s unwitting empowerment of the villain, and the other who understands the danger. The whole time-travel thing is just the sort of high concept gimmick we’ve come to expect from TV networks that regularly churn out shows about superheroes, demons, tech conspiracies and portals to other realms. Quantum Break feels a lot like TV.
The characters even have generic macho drama names, including yet another leading man TV ‘Jack’. And there are lots of guns, an ever-present staple of TV drama.

In terms of actual player participation, the early segments slice down into three parts. First, there’s just plodding along and following the story. You literally walk behind the bloke who is talking and listen to what he says. You open doors and you push keys.
Then, there’s the shooting bits. Hide behind cover, pop out, drop a bad guy, move around a bit and repeat. This is augmented by time-based super-powers like being able to zip forward at lightning speed or throwing a time-disruption grenade at enemies. In the early sections, these are difficult to use effectively, and only available in limited quantities, but they become a bigger part of the game as it goes on.
Finally, there’s a time-based puzzle of the sort we saw multiple times in Life is Strange. If I stand on this platform it sinks to the ground. It is no use to me. But if I time-freeze the thing, it stays raised, so I can use if to move forward. You can see how this sort of puzzle is going to get plenty of use as the game progresses. My guess is that some of these puzzles will be satisfying, as you’d expect from a smart design team like Remedy.
But on the whole, the game looks like a very familiar third-person action adventure with lots of ‘press Y to see another story element appear’ moments. The key element of difference is in the story, which makes much of time-manipulation in order to deliver exposition. Jack walks around a room looking for stuff, and witnesses events that happened there in the past. It’s a neat story-telling trick, a cascading stream of flashbacks that flow into the game itself.

The reason why Remedy games attract notice is that they generally look and feel good, that thing the PRs like to call “high production values." Ashmore, Gillen and Monaghan give solid performances within the constraints of motion-capture technology. So do the actors playing secondary characters, such as Lance Reddick, Patrick Heusinger and Courtney Hope. Their faces tell us a lot more than the dialog, which itself is written sparingly and effectively.
But taken alone, the drama (at least in these early scenes) falls short even of standard TV fare. Unusually for TV, there are no women, until about an hour in, when a security guard called Beth gives Jack a pass. Beth is obviously going to be a significant secondary character. But she’s at least fourth on the character pecking order for the first hour of the story. I can’t think of a mainstream TV show that would do this, unless it was really about a male environment, like a WWII U-boat story.
When women do appear in the early parts of the story, they are mostly there to support or illuminate the more active men. One is a victim, another a flirtatious co-worker, another a wife who is annoyed at her husband’s workload.
This tired use of secondary characters is pretty disappointing, as is the lack of interesting leading women who set up the story’s potential. I’m surprised that Remedy, obviously keen students of fictional forms, haven’t picked up on this.

The game’s plot begins in entirely linear fashion There’s the whole thing going down at the research facility, and a sense of previous not-terribly-interesting relationships between both the Joyce brothers and Serene (he’s not the splendid chap you think him to be, bro). We also witness the inevitable signals of fascistic over-stretch by the evil research company, but that’s about it. No secondary character arcs. Not even a flashback.
This is very much in the mode of video game stories, and a long way from modern TV drama, which generally offers multiple character stories right from the start.
I spoke to Quantum Break’s senior narrative designer Greg Louden. "You’ve only seen the beginning of the game and I think it evolves in a lot of ways," he said. "The opening part of the game is very atmospheric"
He then went on to talk about how, for him, watching linear stories always makes him want to be in on the action. This is the core pitch of the game’s proposition. "Whenever I watch superhero stories, I’ve always been like, I’d rather play this. When I saw the latest Avengers, I’d rather be fighting Iron Man in the woods than watching it happen. So to create a superhero story you can participate in, I think it’s great."

Of course, even in the most malevolently violent superhero movies, the central character doesn’t mow down law enforcement professionals by the dozen, as Jack does here. Having killed a bunch of human beings, Jack seems to have no feelings or opinions on the matter worth sharing. It’s another jarring example of characters who seem pretty normal, but then turn out to be cold-blooded killers. As we saw with recent Tomb Raider games, this murderous body-count is just assumed to be okay with both the player and the character.
It would be ludicrous to expect every video game character to stop for a moment to wrangle internally over the morals of their actions. But in a story that’s about timelines and the consequences of individual actions, the lack of any introspection looks like an omission here. I want to see this character react when he guns down a few dozen people, especially when he has previously been presented as an every-man.
One significant quirk of this game is its introduction of four, 22 minute non-interactive episodes that are designed to be watched in-between playing the game. While the game focuses on the hero, the episodes focus on the villains. This gives us those separate arcs, but not within the game itself, only as part of its non-interactive annex. Players can influence these films via a series of binary choices that multiply into a variety of outcomes.
It’s here that we see some interesting approaches to the story, offering up alternative perspectives and human sub-plots. But it’s also a reminder of how far games have to go as a story-telling platform. Where the playable section is a gormless straight line from A to B, the TV section jumps around playfully, with various points-of-view as well as all the usual dramatic beats, such as sex, car-chases, fist-fights etc. It’s a vastly more sophisticated medium for delivering human stories, and, frankly, it makes the game’s efforts to do the same look childish.
We end up with three different versions of major characters. There’s the one who runs around in gameplay, then the one you see in mo-capped cut-scenes and finally the live-action actor. The suspension-of-disbelief required to hold them all as the same person is further stretched by the massive differences in the way each section is shot. In the game modes, we sit behind Jack as he spends long periods walking around and shooting stuff. In the filmed section, the camera is stationary and cutting between characters every few seconds. These are two, very different things.
Stopping one activity to begin another is, by definition, disruptive to the experience. Yet despite its clunky strangeness, watching these TV sections does add something to the richness of the world once the game starts up again. I think it’s more in the detail than in the stories themselves. I was constantly noticing things in the game that I had seen in the TV section and thinking, "oh yeah." It’s a shame the same effect can’t be achieved within the framework of the game itself.

Louden said that players who decide to skip the story sections will enjoy the game just fine, but will not enjoy the full experience. "If you want to skip through and get the game experience, you can. But you’re lacking this undercurrent, this subplot tour."
I agree with him, but it says something about games as story vehicles, that a massive production from a well-respected team requires that you step outside its walls for 20 minutes at a time, to really deliver all that it wants to tell. The TV sections feel like a crutch for the narrative ambitions of the game’s makers. Not content with the emotional pull of efficiently shooting people, they want us to understand a wider framework, which is fine. But the experience is vaguely disconcerting, almost an abrogation of gaming’s ability to do the same job through environment, dialog, cut-scenes and even action.
Quantum Break is a big budget, prime-time piece of popular entertainment wrapped inside a lot of familiar video game activities. It’s out on Xbox One and Windows 10 on April 5.

Last week, Polygon’s offices were sent a big pack of press materials about the 30th anniversary of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. The accompanying information said that it looked forward the recipient’s editorial coverage of the occasion, and that it hoped “you have your own Frank Miller story to tell." Opinion

This is the usual boilerplate for this kind of thing. It’s not like I get on social media or draft a big story for every email asking for coverage or every box of comics that arrives on my desk. But the irony of the situation struck me.
"The 80-page giant comic cost 25 cents, but I bought it anyway."
The more I chewed it over, the more I did want to write something, about how I was born the month the final issue of The Dark Knight Returns hit shelves. About growing up with a Batman who’d never not been influenced by Miller’s work.
So, here’s my Frank Miller story.
I’m 11 and I’m at a Barnes & Noble. My mom says I can get one book. Lately my interests have been drifting down a thin, lazy creek — from the Richard Donner Superman films to Superman: The Animated Series to Batman: The Animated Series — and they’re about to hit a mighty, rushing river I’ll be following for the rest of my life. Standing in the graphic novel section (this is 1997, so it consists of a magazine rack on top of a single column of shelves), I pick up a book called Batman: Year One.

I’m not sure I like the art inside. Every scene sort of looks like somebody put a different color of cellophane over the lens of a camera. But the back cover says it’s about the first year of Batman’s history, and I instinctively know that I’m not allowed call myself a fan of a comic book character unless I know literally everything about them first. I get my mom to buy it for me. It is the first American comic I have ever consciously purchased.

There are some parts of the book I won’t understand for years, like what it means when Catwoman’s pimp says "That vice I smell? That crazy vet bit — thas old, man," after a disguised Bruce Wayne approaches one of his girls. I carry the book around in my 6th grade backpack for weeks. I practically memorize it. Every panel of David Mazzucchelli’s art still instantly inspires feelings of deep nostalgia for me. "Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on, none of you are safe," I can still recite it from heart.
The nearest comic book shop is two towns over and there’s no such thing as a wiki yet, so I start ordering trade paperbacks and graphic novels on Amazon and devouring every superhero comic in the public library. They’re in Non-Fiction, on the same shelves with the How To Draw books.
I’m 12. I read The Dark Knight Returns and it scares me. Batman uses guns. The Joker calls him by pet names and applies his own makeup. Alfred dies. In the end Batman is raising an army of youths to fight the… government, I think?
But it’s got a girl Robin and I like that, even if there is a weird scene where she hugs Batman when he’s completely naked. Everything says that it’s the book that made people realize that superheroes can be for adults, and at the age of 12 that’s a hill I will die on. I decide that if it scares me, it’s probably supposed to be scary.

I’m 15, and just starting to look at colleges. No campus visit is complete until I check out the local comic book store. I read Miller’s sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, as it comes out. The art is weird. The colors are nuts. Superman and Wonder Woman have mid-air sex so hard that volcanoes erupt and it’s the goofiest thing I’ve ever seen. I decide it’s got a few good fight scenes in it, some good one-liners and mostly forget about it.
I’m 18 and the Sin City movie is in production, so I ask for the first volume for Christmas. I imagine how desperate Goldie must have been to go to someone as clearly violent and emotionally stunted as Marv for protection, and shudder. I go see Sin City in theaters. "Is every woman in this film a sex worker?" I wonder. I remember the exception: Marv’s lesbian parole officer — she’s forced to watch as Elijah Wood eats her severed arm and is later murdered by the police.

I realize that I have never read a Frank Miller book with an original female character who didn’t fall into two categories: sex worker — or victim of a brutal beating or murder. Even the first female Robin gets sliced up by a bad guy in the climax of The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Come to think of it, Miller also seems to enjoy characterizing his extra-creepy male villains as having ambiguous sexuality or gender. You’re not threatening, it seems, until you’re sexually threatening to a straight guy.
I’m 19 and I pick up All-Star Batman and Robin #1. The first scene is one in which journalist Vicki Vale complains at length about Bruce Wayne’s ethics but drops everything to go on a date with him as soon as Alfred, not even Bruce, calls her to arrange it. It includes a double page spread of her trying on different outfits in pink lace lingerie, babbling about how she can’t believe she’s going on a date with Bruce Wayne. It might be the first time since I began buying monthly comics that I decide a Batman story isn’t worth reading.
I’m still 19 and Frank Miller announces Holy Terror, Batman, a book he wants to write where Batman "kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass." I can’t even begin to articulate all the reasons why that sounds like a terrible idea. While speaking to NPR about his personal reaction to the September 11th attacks a few months later, Miller would say: "For the first time in my life I know how it feels to face an existential menace." I think that I’ve never heard something so white, straight, male and sheltered. He will eventually repackage the idea as simply Holy Terror, after jettisoning any reference to the superhero.

I am 20 and I’m majoring in Creative Writing, because I want to write comic books for a living. 300 is out, but I’m waiting for it to hit the local discount theater so I won’t have to pay more than a penny per Spartan soldier to see it. My roommate is double-majoring Pre-Med/Classics and loves terrible movies, so she drags me along. We roll our eyes when the Spartans make fun of Athenian men for being "boy lovers." Years later, I’ll read the original 300 and be shocked only by Miller’s audacity in writing an effusive comic book love letter to what he characterizes as a culture of peak masculinity — while erasing the extensive evidence that homosexuality was not merely commonplace in Grecian militaries, but occasionally embraced as tactically sound. Instead, he codes Xerxes as the Sissy Villain.
I’m 24, I’m in my first year of managing a "nerd entertainment" news site and a guy I’m dating gives me a collection of Miller’s early work on Daredevil. I read it because I know it was Miller’s first big break, and to widen my knowledge base in Marvel comics.

Elektra is introduced, glorified and murdered in a single volume. At this point I don’t even bat an eye. I know the character’s history from years of osmotically accumulating comics knowledge. Like Catwoman in Batman: Year One, she’s another iconic comic book badass-lady-until-she-wants-the-hero-as-a-boyfriend with a Frank Miller-penned origin. Like Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke, she’s brought into an iconic story arc about a male character in order to take the brunt of a terrible act of violence, and other writers will work for decades to reclaim her agency and humanity in her universe.
My copy of Batman: Year One contains an introduction written by Miller in 1988, a year after the comic first hit shelves — and two years after I was born. In it, he describes being eight years old, standing in a supermarket and flipping through his very first Batman comic. He paints a picture of his young self being immediately drawn to a dark, damp and beautiful Gotham City, full of terrors … but a Gotham in which the scariest monster of them all was on our side.

"A madman laughed wildly, maliciously. The laughter echoed forever … Glistening wet, black against the blackened sky, a monster, a giant, winged gargoyle, hunched forward, pausing at a building’s ledge, and cocked its head, following the laugh’s last seconds," he writes.

"The 80-page giant comic cost 25 cents," he concludes, "but I bought it anyway." The copy of Batman: Year One that I flipped through in that Barnes & Noble in 1997 was $9.95 ($13.95 Canada).
I’m 11 and I’m at a Barnes & Noble. My mom says I can get one book.
It’s hard to imagine Frank Miller anticipating that his story, with that introduction, would ever fall into the hands of an 11-year-old, mixed-race girl, much less that it would ignite in her a life-long passion not simply for Batman or superheroes but for comics as a whole.
Miller doesn’t mention who wrote, who drew, who edited the book that made him a fan, the book that gave him an obsession that he was lucky enough to turn into a successful career — a career that, for better and for worse, has made an indelible impact on the history of comics.
And a part of me wishes that I could forget, too.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization.

Welcome to another exciting installment of CoolGames Inc, where each week, myself and my dear friend Griffin McElroy take your one-line video game pitches and gently massage them until we find one worthy of our creative powers.
In this week’s episode, we delve into the dark truths behind Pokéball metaphysics, reminisce about the time Jonathan Blow DDoSed GameFAQs and explore the untapped concept of ‘social permadeath.’ Justin McElroy guest stars.

Links to subscribe to CoolGames, Inc. in iTunes, your podcast player of choice or to download an MP3 are all a click away, tucked inside the buttons below today’s episode.

Theme song: “Social Science" by Maxo

Want your game idea to be featured on a future episode of CoolGames Inc? The best bet is to follow us on Twitter: I’m on there as @babylonian and Griffin is @griffinmcelroy. Once a week, we’ll put out a request for your pitches! Stay vigilant!
Before we go: a huge thanks to everyone who shared our first episode and left us a review on iTunes! Our launch week was a doozy, and the response was overwhelming and flattering. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll be back next week with another!

@griffinmcelroy you get home to make dinner but you bought hammers and not the chicken your partner wanted.
— Aaron J. Amendola (@ImAaronJ) February 3, 2016

It fixes some King’s Fall bugs, too Destiny’s February update includes a host of tweaks to how the Crucible works, including a new option for lone-wolf play and an attempt to insulate players from people who have laggy connections, developer Bungie announced today.
First up is an ammo adjustment. In an effort to increase the use of primary weapons in the Crucible, Bungie is changing all three-on-three gametypes (Trials of Osiris, Skirmish, Salvage, Elimination and any rotating playlists) so that players will no longer spawn with special ammo — they’ll have to wait for it to appear.
The next change appears to be inspired by player complaints about last week’s Iron Banner event, which featured the Rift gametype. Since Rift requires cooperation between teammates, solo players grouped onto a squad tended to fare poorly when matched up against a fireteam. Bungie is introducing “freelance" playlists, which will be accessible only by players who aren’t in a fireteam. They’ll be available for both three-on-three (Elimination, Salvage, Skirmish) and six-on-six (Clash, Control, Rift) matches.

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Bungie details Destiny’s Crimson Days event, including ‘Hotline Bling’ emote

Bungie debuted connection-focused matchmaking settings during the last Iron Banner. That matchmaking update is now active for Control, Rumble and Skirmish, and will be implemented for Trials of Osiris starting tomorrow. However, Bungie said it’s limited by its Destiny tools: The studio can only enable the new settings on five playlists at a time. Crimson Doubles — the new mode for this month’s Valentine’s-themed Crimson Days event — and Clash are next on the list. In a future update, Bungie plans to apply the settings to all of the Crucible.
The final Crucible update in Destiny’s v2.1.1 patch is something Bungie is calling "Damage Referee." The feature is designed to ensure that players with good connections have a good experience, while players with poor connections have a bad experience. At the moment, people stuck playing opponents who have slow connections sometimes find that the game unfairly prioritizes the latter group.
"If your connection is bad, we’ll be giving you even more reasons to improve it," said Paul Lewellen, a networking engineer at Bungie. "Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection, but at least you’ll receive fewer angry messages in the meantime."
Destiny’s February update will also fix some problems with the King’s Fall raid: namely, a camera bug in the Daughters of Oryx fight, and an issue in the Oryx encounter with Ogres that teleport. The update will go live Feb. 9, and Crimson Days will begin once it does.