Fallout launch day used to be such a pleasant affair, a holiday to celebrate family and love and all that’s good in the world. And now? Such rampant commercialism. Worse than Christmas, even.
This week: Best Buy wants to sell you socks, Resident Evil gets its voice back, Ubisoft waves its hand and turns Uplay into Ubisoft Club, Battle.net adds voice chat, and more—it’s gaming news for the week of October 19-23.
Jill sandwich
Somebody modded the original (awful) voice acting from Resident Evil back into Resident Evil HD. The mod comes courtesy of Resident Evil Modding Forum user Bunny, who painstakingly edited over 500 audio files to create this unholy mix of 1996 and 2015. It’s uh…it’s really something.
Uplay in Club clothing
“Everyone hates Uplay, right? So why don’t we get rid of Uplay?” says one executive.
“I’ve got a better idea. Instead of getting rid of Uplay, why don’t we just rename Uplay? To something ultra-generic like ‘Ubisoft Club’?”
“Pop the champagne, we’ve got a winner.”
Cold war
Ubisoft’s up in arms this week though, thanks to some aggressive moves by Vivendi, who you might remember as the supervillain that owned Activision Blizzard up until 2013. Having divested itself of most of its Activision stock, Vivendi this month has acquired 10 percent of Ubisoft and hinted at wanting more more more.
Standing on the ramparts, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot gave a rousing speech (read: leaked email obtained via GamesIndustry.biz) to employees calling Vivendi’s investment “unsolicited and unwelcome.”
And the sun rises and the sun sets, and hastening to its place it rises there again.
This is not Scribblenauts
5th Cell, the developer you probably know best for Scribblenauts, launched a crowdfunding campaign through Fig this week and…well, it’s definitely not Scribblenauts this time. The game’s called Anchors in the Drift, and it’s a free-to-play action-RPG “set in a universe where an inter-dimensional empire known as The Domain has invaded Earth—collapsing time and causing islands from different civilizations to be spread across a quantum ocean known as The Drift.” Trailer/pitch video below:
War has changed
Sega pegged Total War : War hammer with a release date, this week: April 28. I would, of course, caution against preordering because of the whole “Rome II was busted” debacle, but…do what you will.
Gibs
The DOOM alpha runs this weekend, so hopefully you got selected to participate and aren’t stuck working or “enjoying the outdoors” or in church or something. If you are, or if you simply weren’t chosen (better luck next time), you can get a glimpse of the hot alpha action here:
PS4 2017 Edition
What’s the difference between a PC and a console? Well, increasingly the answer is “Nothing,” since apparently consoles are determined to become more and more like their desktop brethren. This week, Sony’s Masayasu Ito said in an interview that releasing a higher-performance PlayStation 4 is something that hypothetically could happen in the future. So, uh… (4Gamer, by way of a DualShockers translation)
Wouldn’t it be nice
Battle.net is getting built-in voice chat, thanks to Overwatch. The shooter’s upcoming beta will “test voice chat functionality,” according to an official post by Blizzard.
While voice chat is currently limited to Overwatch, the hope is of course that it’ll make its way to Blizzard’s other games i.e. StarCraft II. To which Blizzard says, “With voice chat still in its early development and testing stages, it’s too early to say which Blizzard games will be supported and when.”
More Fallout
Okay, let’s talk about this week’s Fallout 4 marketing blitz.
1) If you preorder the game from Best Buy you’ll receive socks, presumably as punishment for still shopping at Best Buy.
2) If you preorder on Steam, you get a Dota 2 announcer pack featuring lovable robot Mister Handy. And uh…that’s it. So if you don’t play Dota 2, I guess you’re better off with socks.
3) There’s another one of those S.P.E.C.I.A.L. videos. The last one, actually.
4) There’s a Fallout -franchise Steam Sale this weekend, so you have two weeks to purchase and play all five games before Fallout 4 hits.
Fire on high
Avalanche put out this 360-degree Just Cause 3 video this week, which is kinda-sorta like playing the game six weeks early. A little bit. If you like, get drunk and forget how a controller works. Cool video, though—and it’s in 4K, if you’ve got the bandwidth.
More reading
- Microsoft says Halo 5 on PC is “not out of the bounds of reason.”
- Sword Coast Legends is a decent framework for what could’ve been a much better game.
- I played six hours of Rainbow Six Siege last week, and had some thoughts.
- You can now test out DirectX 12 at home, if you’re willing to purchase Ashes of the Singularity.
- I’m in love with the Xbox One Elite Controller—so much so that I replaced my well-worn 360 controller.
- And I went hands-on with Myst’s spiritual successor Obduction—though unfortunately you won’t be able to play it until early 2016.