Category: Game

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.

The closest thing to a Nintendo PC port you’re gonna get Nintendo has launched a Super Mario Maker-themed wallpaper creator, expanding the game’s level creation to the PC and mobile devices.
While the functionality of the wallpaper designer — or, if you prefer, Super Mario Maker wallpaper maker — is more limited than its Wii U counterpart, it’s a fun riff on the in-game feature. Design options are available for both PC desktops and mobile screens, with various pixel resolutions to choose from. It’s completely in Japanese, as this tool comes courtesy of the Japanese Mario Maker website, but it’s intuitive enough to follow without understanding the language.
After selecting a platform, the creator offers tools akin to those available in Mario Maker. There are different Mario game-themed backgrounds and level packs to choose from, as well as a small set of objects to surround Mario with.
The only thing that’s really missing is the ability to play through the tiny level you create, but that’s what the Wii U game is for. With Nintendo’s recent addition of web-based course searches to Mario Maker, it’s become easier to share and find players’ designs, too.
We were big fans of Mario’s 2015 marquee console title, which we named our fourth favorite Game of the Year.

When Comcept CEO Keiji Inafune announced a third delay for the game Mighty No. 9, he knew it was time to take his licks. He’d been there before.
He’d seen the goodwill cost of pivoting when you have crowdfunded money from 67,226 fans in your bank account, and he was ready to do it again. So he wrote a letter to fans, pointing to his team’s “miscalculations" in finalizing the game, saying "we have no excuses for disappointing our fans and especially our backers once more."
In a Polygon news story covering the delay, readers responded quickly.
"At this point I don’t think I care anymore," wrote Polygon user Imerty.
"This is insanity, and has shaken my faith in Comcept more than any of the previous shenanigans," added FiXXXerX.
In 2013, Inafune was a crowdfunding poster child, a top example of a brand-name developer going an alternative route to make a passion project. In 2016, he’s become a symbol of crowdfunding "shenanigans" that include delays, unclear messaging and changed plans.
Yet while this has been happening, Comcept has also been running a busy non-crowdfunded business. While not generating the same sorts of controversial headlines for it, the team has worked on a wide range of mobile, portable and console projects. And currently, it’s overseeing one of Microsoft’s big 2016 titles, the action game ReCore, amongst others.
A few days after Comcept’s recent five-year anniversary, Polygon met with Inafune to look over the company’s progress to date.

Keiji Inafune

Inafune’s approach
For many, it’s hard to separate Comcept and Inafune. He started the company, runs it and serves as its public face, often appearing at game industry conventions and doing press interviews. But in some ways, his role is different from those of other well-known game industry figures.
Even going back to the early days of his career, Inafune says he’s taken an unusual path, starting as an artist and working his way up through Capcom over more than 20 years.
"When an artist starts out, they’ll actually tell you that eventually you’ll hit this wall that you can’t ever get over," he says. "For me, that kind of stuck in my head."

Mighty No. 9
Inafune says that idea motivated him to work his way out of being "just an artist," so he dabbled in game design and production before becoming the producer in charge of the Mega Man franchise, and eventually overseeing all game development teams at Capcom.
Because of his different roles, his specific contributions to games can be hard to pinpoint. Many call him the "creator" of Mega Man, which isn’t true — he worked on the original game as an artist, and says the best way to define his role is that he "nurtured" the Mega Man franchise, taking it over after creator Akira Kitamura and others left the team.
People also credit him for the Onimusha, Lost Planet and Dead Rising series. But some fans take issue with that, often citing a 2012 tweet from former Capcom coworker Hideki Kamiya saying, " is a businessman. Not a creator." Given Kamiya’s phrasing, some saw the tweet as an insult, an implication that Inafune focuses on the wrong parts of his job.
Kamiya, who often tweets literally, followed up with messages saying that he meant the statement as a clarification of what Inafune does rather than how he does it, and that he respects Inafune’s skill as a producer on the business side. Later Kamiya posted a photo of himself with Inafune, giving a thumbs up.
Regardless of Kamiya’s intent, the comment gets at the issue of how to define the role of a producer in the game industry, and specifically how Inafune approaches it. At some companies, a producer focuses primarily on business aspects like budgets and schedules. At others, they play more of a creative role. Some prefer for a producer to largely stay out of the creative side of development. Inafune thinks that’s the wrong way to approach the job.

Twitter trouble
In 2015, three years after his quote about Inafune being a "businessman," Hideki Kamiya (above) again took to Twitter to talk about Comcept. This time, his target was Mighty No. 9, which he called "a copy" of Mega Man and "an insult to their old home," referring to Inafune and others at Comcept formerly working at Capcom.
"You know, that’s his opinion, and he’s free to say what he wants," says Inafune. "However, I’m not sure if making negative comments towards another game creator is necessarily a good thing, because we’re all in the same boat. We’re all in the same industry, working together. …
"Also, I’m not sure if he had played the game when he wrote those tweets. Because if he’d actually played the game after it came out, and then said something like that, then I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure. That’s what you think.’ But at this point, I don’t think he’s played it yet. And maybe that’s why he said it’s a copy of my old game. But hopefully when the game comes out, he’ll play it and have a different opinion."

"I didn’t pay too much attention to comment, because as a game creator you have to think about both the creative and the business sides," says Inafune. "Neither of those can survive without the other. I’m the kind of person who thinks about both sides. And if he thinks that I’m more of a businessman, that’s fine."
In practice, Inafune often spends a lot of time developing a game’s creative concept up-front, and then brings in others to help see it through.
This is one of a handful of philosophies Inafune brings up in his interview for this story, theories that he says define Comcept’s approach to making games. They include collaborating with external studios — Comcept is a design and production team that aligns with other studios to make games, rather than a team that does everything internally — developing its own game ideas rather than taking work-for-hire jobs, working on multiple games at once and working on a variety of game types rather than specializing in a specific genre.
Those last two points, Inafune says, come from a survival mentality.
"Making multiple titles at the same time, it’s not because I’m greedy or anything like that," he says. "I have to do it for my company to survive. Because I myself, I’m not a director or an art director or anything like that. I’m a producer and the CEO. So I have to look over my company as a whole."
He gives a similar response for why Comcept jumps between different sorts of projects.
"I want the company to have lots of flexibility," he says. "Because nowadays when you think of a company, you might think ‘If this company is doing this genre of game, it should be trustworthy.’ But I think that’s kind of dangerous, because if people stop liking those sorts of games, that company is done for, period.
"So I don’t want Comcept to have that kind of reputation. I don’t want people to think, ‘If Comcept is doing this kind of game, it’s good. But if Comcept is doing this other kind of game, it’s kinda bad.’ I want the company to be flexible and able to produce any sort of game, because when a company can do that, it’ll survive for a long, long time. That’s the philosophy I’ve had for a long time, even going back to when I was at Capcom."

Comcept at 5
To date, Comcept’s output has been consistent in its inconsistency — by design, Inafune says.
Its list of released games includes a batch of of mobile titles aimed at the Japanese market, a PSP visual novel game called Sweet Fuse, an experimental 3DS minigame called Bugs vs. Tanks and others. Each game a collaboration with a different development studio, and each game in a different genre, for the most part.
The two highest profile games on that list are Soul Sacrifice, a Monster Hunter-style cooperative multiplayer action game that was successful enough to lead to a sequel, and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, a stylish side-story in the Ninja Gaiden hack-and-slash series that sold and reviewed poorly. Even in the latter case, though, Inafune says he’s proud of the result.

"There are a lot of reasons why that game didn’t become successful, but I think the timing was a big part of it," he says. "That game came out right as the console transition was happening, and people were moving from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, for example. I think that was one of the biggest reasons the game didn’t do too well. But as a game, gameplay-wise, I think it’s pretty damn good."
"Reviews these days are kind of confusing, because leading up to the release we saw a couple different reviews from the media, and they weren’t all bad," Inafune adds. "Some of them were actually good. So it gets kind of confusing, because we see good reviews and then we see bad reviews, and we really can’t come to a consensus. Some of the user reviews were bad, so that could be what people thought in the end. But I don’t usually look at reviews too much, because they can confuse you."
Yaiba was a collaboration between Comcept, Japanese development studio Team Ninja and Western team Spark Unlimited, which shut down shortly after the game’s release. Craig Allen formerly served as CEO of Spark, and has plenty of good things to say about Inafune’s approach in spite of how things turned out for his team.
Spark originally signed on to work with Inafune on Lost Planet 3 back in Inafune’s Capcom days, and then about halfway through the project, Inafune left the company. Allen says the team felt a substantial change when he left.
"I think that there were still some very good people that we worked with at Capcom, but I think you saw after he left a big change in their development strategy. As any change of regime leads to, it was not necessarily the same environment to create what we had been creating under Inafune-san’s guidance. … The priorities around the business definitely shifted back to going deeper on a few core brands as opposed to supporting external Western development. So a lot of the projects that were started by Inafune, and some of them that weren’t necessarily publicized, were changed significantly or were canceled. So he definitely was missed."

Comcept included Beck from Mighty No. 9 as a bonus character in Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z.
Allen speaks highly of Inafune’s process in general, saying he’s heavily involved in the early stages setting clear goal posts for the team, then steps back in the middle to let the studio find their way before coming back towards the end to help pull things together.
"The analogy would be, if Kennedy said, ‘I want to go to the moon,’ there were a lot of things that had to happen to get there, but you knew you weren’t going to Mars," he says. "… And then it’s just a question of working the problems to get there."
"I think, is a great way for a creative executive to work with a team, because the team finds its own space in the middle," he adds. "Good management is kind of setting where the goal posts are, so that people know where they need to go to be successful. And if you’re doing too much micromanagement, it’s really hard to do that from afar without leading to a lot of frustration and disappointment."
Allen says he also likes Inafune’s willingness to take risks, and to back projects that feel right, even if they haven’t been commercially proven. And thus far at Comcept, Inafune and team have tried a mix of proven and unproven concepts, spreading their bets into different buckets and seeing different reactions from players to each.

The next five years
Now five years in on his plan for Comcept, Inafune says he’s happy with how things have been going, despite a few setbacks.
Asked to rate Comcept’s success thus far, he says, "I can’t say we can give Comcept , but I think we’re doing alright as a five-year-old company. We haven’t had to take any work-for-hire jobs, and we’re actually making our own IP in this day and age. I think that’s kind of rare in the industry."
With Mighty No. 9 and ReCore scheduled to release this year, and Red Ash — a spiritual successor to the Mega Man Legends series that went through its own chaotic crowdfunding attempt before finding a publisher — in the works as well, Comcept has a lot on its plate.
As time goes on, Inafune hopes players will focus more on the games themselves and less on the crowdfunding hiccups — both so players can enjoy the work, and so he can continue to make the kinds of games he wants at Comcept.
"I always like to challenge myself, so when I think about making a new game, I don’t think about putting a spin on an established genre. I think about making a totally different game," Inafune says, perhaps exaggerating slightly. "I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, and I’ll probably keep doing this for the rest of my life."
Photography: Jonathan Castillo

Someone get on the Batphone to Sony Many PlayStation Network users are currently reporting problems using the service, including issues with signing into the network and accessing the PlayStation Store.
We booted up a PlayStation 4 and were unable to load the PlayStation Store, check out our friends list or profile, or even see the trophies we had earned. The store is also currently inaccessible via a web browser:

Some NeoGAF users are saying they’re seeing a message notifying them that the PSN is currently offline for maintenance on both PS4 and PlayStation Vita. The downtime appears to be affecting users in North America as well as Europe, according to that NeoGAF thread.
For what it’s worth, Sony’s PSN status page says as of this writing that “all services are up and running." The network was down for about 12 hours on Jan. 4, and Sony later extended PlayStation Plus subscriptions by one day as a make-good for the outage.

It’s like a stimpak for the game Fallout 4 developer Bethesda Game Studios is releasing a new patch for the game this week, an update that includes fixes for bugs of all kinds — both annoying and beneficial ones, the company announced today.
The patch, which brings Fallout 4 to version 1.3, is now available for the Windows PC version of the game and will be available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later this week.
Update 1.3 delivers a few PC-only features, such as a new ambient occlusion setting known as HBAO+, but the bulk of the patch consists of bug fixes. If you’ve been bringing MacCready to firefights just because of his game-breakingly good Killshot perk, well, you’ll have to find a better justification for keeping him around — he’ll no longer provide a guaranteed 95 percent chance of nailing headshots. Companions also won’t get stuck in a down state, or in a state of perpetual radiation poisoning, anymore.
An entire section of the patch notes for update 1.3 is dedicated to quest fixes, some of which solve issues that had prevented players from being able to complete quests. Such quests include “Underground Undercover," "Human Error" and "Tactical Thinking." Other fixes involve companions, like Preston Garvey and Dogmeat. The final section of the patch notes addresses the workshop, which now allows players to see provided power and build workbenches in their Diamond City house.
Check out Bethesda.net for the full patch notes. You can read our Fallout 4 review for more on the game.