Gaming

Rainbow Six Siege has introduced themed pairs of operators for some time. These new characters come from the same country, organization, and often have history together. The new Australian operators, Gridlock and Mozzie, follow that trend. These two characters are part of the upcoming update, Operation: Burnt Horizon. Operators serve as the faces of Rainbow Six Siege, and Ubisoft has taken care to craft a diverse range of characters. Tori “Gridlock” Tallyo Fairous and Max “Mozzie” Goose come from Australia’s SASR. According to the official backstory, they met during a robot fighting fest, but they are on opposite sides of the Siege battlefield. Gridlock is an attacker, using anti-vehicle caltrops called Trax Stingers to control maps and lock down areas. Mozzie, a defender, has a “Pest,” an anti-intel measure meant to stop the attackers from learning where their opponents hide. A full reveal of the characters, along with the rest of Operation: … [Read more...] about Rainbow Six Siege introduces two new Australian operators

Nintendo dumped a bunch of surprise news yesterday during its first Nintendo Direct presentation of the year. Both a totally new Tetris game and a Final Fantasy classic launched on the Nintendo Switch eShop following the streamed event, big-enough headliners to make this a good week for the console. Tetris 99 is a free downloadable game that’s exclusive to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. It’s what folks call a battle royale-like version of the classic puzzle game, pitting 99 players against each other to clear their Tetris boards. If it sounds exhausting and anxiety-inducing, hey, it is! Final Fantasy 9 also launched after the Nintendo Direct, making it the first remastered game in the RPG franchise to hit Switch. Next up are Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 10-2, followed byFinal Fantasy 7 later this spring. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch Online’s collection of NES games grew by two, with Kirby’s Adventure (yay!) and Super Mario Bros. 2 (an acquired taste … [Read more...] about Nintendo Switch eShop is full of great, big surprises this week

Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9 and Elysium, has released a new short film called “Conviction” set in the world of EA’s upcoming RPG, Anthem. While EA is calling it a short Anthem story, it doesn’t focus much on story at all. It’s more like a live-action trailer for a movie that doesn’t actually exist. The short follows several pilots as they use their Javelins, Anthem’s small personalized mech suits, to protect Fort Tarsis, a stronghold built to protect the rebellion’s survivors. The pilots find a mysterious girl out in the forests that are often patrolled by alien factions. The girl seems to have some kind of strange power that attracts the attention of someone who might be a rogue Javelin pilot who’s fighting against Fort Tarsis and its defenders. It’s all a little unclear. The trailer comes from Blomkamp’s Oats Studios production house, which focuses on small experimental projects. This isn’t the first … [Read more...] about District 9 director releases new Anthem live-action trailer

Open-world video games struggle with a major problem: motivation. It’s difficult for developers to keep us playing for dozens of hours, especially as the context for our actions can become disjointed, forgotten, or simply lost in a sea of explosions. I’ve often forgotten that I’m supposed to be saving the world, as I embark upon a side mission to kill 50 similar things that will allow me to unlock a slightly better weapon. This design issue didn’t exist in 2007 — because the genre as we currently know it didn’t either. Open-world conventions and series that we now take for granted, such as Assassin’s Creed, didn’t yet exist. Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PlayStation 2 in 2004. There were few established standards for controls, menus, mechanics, or even basic structures and narratives for open-world games at this point. However, one game solved the problem of keeping players motivated in open-world games almost … [Read more...] about Crackdown fixed open-world games before anyone knew they were broken

Hearts of Iron 4 is one of the most complex games I’ve ever played. The World War II-themed grand strategy game, just like everything else from Paradox Interactive, has been continuously updated since its release in 2016. But this next bit of downloadable content, titled Man the Guns, may be its most controversial yet. In a daring bit of counterfactual history, Paradox will allow players to revive the Confederate States of America, commonly known as the Confederacy, and lead them into war against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. This tidbit isn’t featured prominently in the launch trailer. Instead, it’s listed at the top of the bullet points in the formal description of the DLC’s content, alongside the opportunity to decolonize the British Empire. Paradox refers to the political party as the Old Confederacy, but there’s no beating around the bush here. The group is intended to be successors to the same white supremacists who fought to preserve the … [Read more...] about Hearts of Iron DLC lets players revive the Confederacy, decolonize the British Empire