Category: Game

Only having three characters makes for an intimate setting Even though 10 Cloverfield Lane, the sequel to the 2008 paranormal movie Cloverfield is due out in just over a month, there’s still a cloud of mystery surrounding it.
J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, released the surprise trailer to the film earlier this month. Although he didn’t say much about it, Abrams did tell Collider that 10 Cloverfield Lane was a “blood relative" to the original film and added they held back on releasing it for as long as possible.
The "veil of secrecy" surrounding it, as star Mary Elizabeth Winstead told Entertainment Weekly during the SAG Awards this past weekend, was in place during the beginning and continued throughout the film’s production. According to Winstead, they made the movie in "this little bubble where no one really knew what we were doing."
Much like Abrams, Winstead wouldn’t provide any details on the movie’s plot, but did offer a little insight into what people could expect from the film. The actress said most of it will focus on the relationship between the three characters forced to live with one another in a bunker and their relationships with one another as they begin to question what’s real and what’s not.
"There’s really only three actors in the whole thing, so it kind of felt like this really intimate experience," Winstead said.
Winstead said she knew from the beginning she wouldn’t be able to really talk about the movie until it was released. The actress said even though Abrams was producing 10 Cloverfield Lane at the same time he was directing Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he never revealed information from either to any of the actors he was working with.
10 Cloverfield Lane, which is being directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is slated to hit theaters March 11.

Metal Gear Online, the competitive online multiplayer mode for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, is getting a big dose of downloadable content next month, including the addition of a playable Quiet.
Quiet is coming as part of a batch of paid DLC for the Metal Gear Online, which also includes three maps — Azure Mountain, Rust Palace and Cradle of Spirits — and a set of new emotes called “appeal actions." According to Konami, Quiet is a scout class character in Metal Gear Online and will come with her butterfly sniper rifle and the ability to cloak herself in combat. She’s "super powerful," according to Robert Peeler, online community manager for Metal Gear.
Konami hasn’t announced pricing for the March downloadable content.

In addition to paid DLC, Konami will also release new options, tweaks and balance changes to Metal Gear Online in March. New background music from series like Boktai and Zone of the Enders are coming to the game, as are adjustments to rocket launchers and a combat knife that can be used as a secondary weapon.
Konami is also introducing a new ranking system that appears to be based on player skill. A new Survival Mode, inspired by a similar feature from Metal Gear Online for PlayStation 3, is also coming. Peeler also teased a new gameplay mode will be added to Metal Gear Online sometime in March.

Panthers get out to a three-score lead, then have to come back against Broncos The Carolina Panthers will defeat the Denver Broncos 24-20 in Super Bowl 50, Madden NFL 16 predicts.
Characteristic of earlier games against Seattle and New York this year, Carolina will take a 17-0 lead into the half before Denver rips off 20 unanswered points to seize a fourth-quarter lead. Madden 16 says the game will come down to the final play, a run by Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.
If that sounds a little too convenient, remember that last year Madden NFL 15 picked the exact score of Super Bowl XLIX (Patriots 28, Seahawks 24) and the deciding touchdown (Julian Edelman, catching a pass from Tom Brady). Madden NFL 15 also came within a whisker of predicting the passing and receiving yardage totals for both players, too.
Newton, the favorite to be named league MVP on Saturday, will be the Super Bowl 50 MVP according to Madden NFL 16, passing for 216 yards and one touchdown. Peyton Manning, in what may be his swan song, will throw for 241 yards and two touchdowns, says the video game.
Last year, Madden predicted the exact score of the Super Bowl
Since its introduction in 2004 with Super Bowl XXVIII, EA Sports’ simulation has correctly picked the Super Bowl winner in 9 out of 12 contests. Moreover, it’s been solid against both the point spread and over/under lines Vegas bookmakers have set for the game. Madden is 8-4 against the spread, and has won against the over/under the past four years straight.
After opening as 3.5-point favorites, Carolina is now giving up anywhere from 5.5 to six points at the major sports books. The over/under is 45 or 45.5 points. So for those interested in such things, take the under and the Broncos to cover.
This simulation is admittedly unscientific, the computer controlling both teams in a game run just once on Pro difficulty. But EA Sports is justifiably proud of how well its marquee game has done predicting the Super Bowl. (And it is literally impossible to outdo last year’s call.) Other than last year’s perfecto, Madden also came up big calling victories in 2013 for Baltimore, then a 4.5-point underdog to San Francisco, and in 2010 for New Orleans, a 5-point dog to Indianapolis.
Other games have taken a shot at calling Sunday’s championship. A mod of Tecmo Super Bowl, done by TecmoBowl.org, also called a Panthers’ victory, 17 to 7.
Last week, Madden NFL 16 was added to the EA Access “vault" of free games available to Xbox One subscribers.

Slot it into your calendar Bethesda Softworks will return to Los Angeles in 2016 for its second pre-E3 press briefing, the publisher announced today on Twitter.
Bethesda’s E3 2016 press conference is scheduled to start Sunday, June 12, at 7 p.m. PT. The company did not specify a venue.
Last year, Bethesda held a pre-E3 showcase for the first time, also on the Sunday of E3 week. During the show, the publisher announced the long-rumored Fallout 4, unveiled and released the mobile game Fallout Shelter, went into a deep dive on Doom, announced Dishonored 2, and more.
This year’s event could focus on Doom and Dishonored 2 — neither of which has a confirmed release date beyond 2016 at this point — as well as downloadable content for Fallout 4, which Bethesda has announced is on the way but hasn’t detailed. The company is also working on the free-to-play game BattleCry.
Bethesda’s show will begin six hours after Electronic Arts’ keynote, which usually takes place Monday afternoon but will kick off at 1 p.m. PT on Sunday this year.

Out of the trash compactor, into the fire. Captain Phasma did not meet an untimely demise in a garbage chute, actress Gwendoline Christie confirmed on the 2016 SAG Awards red carpet.
“I will be in the next Star Wars movie. I think that’s an exclusive, actually," the actress told People Magazine.
Captain Phasma’s chromed stormtrooper armor and inimitable style (the cape! the walk!) grabbed fans’ attention very early on in the media blitz surrounding the new Star Wars trilogy. But in the end, her appearances in Star Wars: The Force Awakens were far smaller than many had hoped. Her lines were few and far between, she never even appeared without her mask and in the end Han Solo, Chewbacca and Finn literally threw her in the trash.
Of course, there are three movies in a trilogy, and just because a character doesn’t feature heavily in the first doesn’t mean we won’t see more of them later — provided, of course, that Phasma survived her close encounter with Starkiller Base’s sewage system.
Fortunately, it appears that she has. Christie was frank about how excited she was to be reprising the role, not least for breaking the barrier of becoming the first prominent female stormtrooper on screen.
"I also just liked this notion of a female stormtrooper," she told People. "I felt it encouraged diversity and it was doing something new and it was an interesting bit of casting for women, and I hope that in something that was such a mainstream success it would breed more of those kind of opportunities for other women."
Star Wars: Episode VIII will premiere Dec. 15, 2017.

Where previous sequels to XCOM games have failed, XCOM 2 — the sequel to 2012’s reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown — succeeds.
Stand down, Terror from the Deep. Sleep softly, Apocalypse. Resquiat in pacem, Freedom Ridge. Your watch has ended. Firaxis, XCOM’s newest steward, is here to relieve you.
XCOM 2 is bigger, stronger and more capable than XCOM: Enemy Unknown in every way. And in spite of a few lingering technical issues, it may be the best XCOM game ever made — and a fitting tribute to those that came before.
“XCOM’s last remaining soldiers, scientists and engineers wage a guerrilla-style war without an end in sight."
XCOM 2 takes place after the first game’s alien invasion and the governments of the world’s attempts to stop it. 20 years later, humanity has fallen to the alien invasion, Earth’s militaries are routed and the original XCOM project overrun. The aliens, who now call themselves Advent, have taken control of the planet’s last remaining urban centers and remodeled them in their image. It is a police state, where order is ruthlessly maintained by heavily armed hybrid soldiers. Outside these futuristic urban centers mankind ekes by without running water, power or security of any kind.
What remains of the XCOM project has retreated inside of the hulk of an advanced alien UFO, constantly moving around the world to avoid detection. From this mobile base XCOM’s last remaining soldiers, scientists and engineers wage a guerrilla-style war without an end in sight.

What XCOM 2’s premise provides are opportunities to build characters, not the least of which is you —€” the Commander —€” who are dramatically welcomed into the narrative during the game’s tutorial mission. There’s Central Officer Bradford, your Jiminy Cricket from the original Firaxis game now hardened by 20 years of struggle. There’s An-Yi Shen, the daughter of your head of engineering in the 2012 game as well as Dr. Richard Tygan, who spent years as a slave before escaping the aliens and joining XCOM. They all give evocative digital performances and provide the game with its heart.
Traditionally the meat of any XCOM title are the turn-based, isometric battles. As in Firaxis’ first outing, in XCOM 2 they are fantasies about the kind of perfect, real-time information that allows remote commanders to order individual troops to pull their triggers from a comfortable distance. In practice players watch over their soldiers’ shoulders, march them into the dark parts of the map, push back the fog of war to activate hidden aliens and put a bullet in their brains.

Multiplayer
XCOM 2 features a peer-to-peer multiplayer mode, allowing for head-to-head battles between squads composed of mixed Advent and XCOM forces. Using a points-based system, players purchase units and then select the game type and the kind of terrain they’ll fight on. It features public and private games, ranked matches and options for playing over a local area network.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get enough experience with the mode before 2K’s embargo lifted. We’ll update this review with impressions of XCOM 2’s multiplayer mode in the next few days.

In that way, XCOM 2 plays like every other game in the franchise that’s come before. Except for the times when it doesn’t.
Much of the time it’s your troops that are hidden and lurking in the shadows, and it’s the aliens who are drawing aggro from you.
XCOM 2 is about the art of the ambush. A clever concealment mechanic means that during many missions your soldiers will be able to sneak up on the enemy without alerting them. This one change breathes new life into the formula. Suddenly there were twice as many tactical options, and twice as many different kinds of missions as there were before.
Firaxis has also added mission objectives to the mix. In addition to simple extermination, most have a thematic timer counting down. Not a can of "meld" sitting in plain sight but a piece of intel rigged to explode, or an off-map assault craft closing in to shoot down your ride home. XCOM 2 has search and destroy missions, rescue missions, covert sabotage missions, asset retrieval missions and good old-fashioned heavily armed assaults.
The incredible scenario variety, and the procedurally generated maps themselves, gives the gameplay an organic, deliberate kind of pacing. The progression from offense to defense, from reconnaissance to assault kept my attention. As importantly, where other XCOM games were a slog from start to finish —€” lengthy bug hunts bracketed by total party kills —€” XCOM 2 uses its different mission types to create a narrative arc that simply hasn’t existed in the series before.

The strategic layer of the game has also been completely overhauled. What was essentially a resource-optimization game, a race to unlock the next scientific advance, is now something on par with a finely tuned worker placement board game. You’ll assign engineers to specific tasks by hand, carefully pushing your mobile base to its limits. The Avenger itself will need to go on errands here and there, all while avoiding detection. You’ll travel to one corner of the world to launch a daring raid behind enemy lines, and the next moment you’ll swoop in to defend a resistance cell at their hidden base.
It’s as if the same kind of tension found in XCOM’s tactical layer has finally trickled up to the strategic layer, and XCOM 2 is all the better for it.
When the administrative work is done and missions are unveiled, they’re not rushing you from location to location to put out random fires. Instead, the game regularly feeds you goals and objectives that focus on supporting your civilian allies in the resistance and striking strategic blows against Advent military installations. It teases at plot points, it foreshadows climactic battles and provides solid feedback —€” in the form of in-game currency and loot, but also cinematic cutscenes — that make the effort worthwhile. In motion, XCOM 2 makes the original reboot from 2012 and its DLC expansion look amateurish by comparison.

Unfortunately, XCOM 2 suffers in overall fit and finish. For instance, placing grenades and rockets precisely where you want them will still devolve at times into a hunt for the perfect pixel. The game’s bullet-time effects are gorgeous, except for the times when there’s a wall in the way that completely obscures the action. More than a few times messages popped up over units without any text inside, and the game has a nasty habit of grinding to a standstill while the AI considers its next move, while someone fires a gun or merely takes a step forward.
The most irritating thing I discovered in XCOM 2 was the ghost of an annoying save game bug found in the Enemy Unknown. If you have too many save files it jumbles them up and gets their timestamps wrong. While I never lost a save as a result of the bug, it was challenging to find where I left off from day to day. The only solution was to selectively delete saves every so often to keep them at a minimum, but in this day and age that shouldn’t be something I have to worry about.

The maps
The environments in XCOM 2 are richly detailed and much more diverse than those found in Enemy Unknown. That’s in part because they’re procedurally generated to be different every single time. But they also benefit from an exceptional amount of set decoration. The spots I enjoyed the most were the ruined suburban spaces, because they told the story of what’s happened to humanity over two decades of alien rule. Makeshift wood gas fuel cells power broken-down SUVs. Burned out buildings sulk below sunken roofs. Rain barrels huddle next to salvaged solar panels.
Every once in awhile I would catch a glimpse of tattered XCOM posters pinned to bedroom walls or a bit of inspirational graffiti. By keeping my Avenger flying I was giving the people of Earth hope for a better future, and the game world reflected it.