Business Insider (via My Nintendo News):
Target had its biggest online shopping day ever on Thanksgiving.
“Demand outpaced 2014’s record Thanksgiving performance, making it Target’s biggest day for online sales yet,” the retailer said in a release.
The record-breaking sales online were driven by three items: the Apple iPad, Apple Watch, and Wii U gaming console, the company said.
Justin McElroy, in a short and sweet dual-review with Dave Tach at Polygon:
For example: New weapons and items unlock at what feels like a glacially slow pace, but that forced me to focus on becoming competent with the items I had on hand and genuinely improving. Compare that to Call of Duty, where I tend to flit between the shiny objects I seem to unlock after every round and never really live with one long enough to become deadly. For a casual fan like myself, that’s a big plus.
Admittedly, that slow pace (along with the lack of weapon customization) left me without the compulsive burning desire to play “just one more game” only to see what new trinket was right around the corner. It’s an impulse that games like Call of Duty and Destiny have down to a science, but science isn’t always a great substitute for fun.
I want to play more Battlefront because it’s just that: It’s fun.
I vividly recall spending hours with the original Star Wars: Battlefront for PS2. An hours more with Star Wars: Battlefront II. They were unlike any shooter I had ever played. And surprisingly for a licensed game, they were fun.
Back to the piece. Dave Tach:
With the notable exception of Boba Fett (and even he has a bizarre and unwieldy control scheme), I have much more fun as an anonymous Rebel or Stormtrooper. Their modes are much more interesting than the movie hero power trip.
I recall feeling initially jarred when diving into the original. I had come in with the expectation that I’d be questing as one of the franchises heroes, and it turned out to be my first experience of the Star Wars universe outside of the perspective of said heroes. I quickly became fond running missions in anonymity. I had an avatar in the Star Wars universe with no preconceived story arc. In turn, anonymity only amplified my desire to continue playing.
I’ve been looking forward to the Star Wars: Battlefront reboot for a long while now.
On occasion, usually during App Store visits, the question whether Fireproof Games had released the (by my standards) highly anticipated third entry of The Room series bubbles up. Admittedly and shamefully, I don’t follow Pocket Gamer or Touch Arcade with any sort of regularity. (Changing that now.) To my surprise, I had come to find out about the release of The Room Three in Ben Kuchera’s argument as a gamer for switching to iOS:
The release of The Room 3 finally broke me. Last night I went to my local AT&T store, suffered through the inevitable awful wait, and traded in my Galaxy Note 4 for an iPhone 6S Plus.
Let this in-and-of-itself give credence to The Room. And not just the third entry, but the series as a whole.
The Room series stakes its claim on connected hyper-schewmorphic puzzles, set in a Myst-style photorealistic environment, all for the sake of solving a mystery. You crank gears, adjust mirrors, light fires, slide latches, and flick switches in an attempt to find out where the hell you are, how the hell you got there, what all of these cryptic symbols and anicent references mean, how deep the rabbit goes, and what pathological nut case is stringing you along. For a symbolic, deep-meaning, puzzle junkie such as myself, it’s perfect.
In the first entry, the player was tasked with getting to the center of a box. Said box rests in “the room”. To open the box, you must solve the puzzles of the box. The more the player digs, the tricker puzzles become; the deeper the mystery gets.
The Room Two expands beyond the box, donning the player with a special eyepiece to see hidden messages scattered about. This sequel also expands movement, allowing the player to scour rooms for clues and secrets. It dabbles deeper into the classical elements (earth, wind, water, fire) to find The Null.
The Room Three takes movement and depth one step further with the addition of areas (levels) to explore and a new lens addition for your eyepiece; one that allows the player to dive deep into the miniature mechanics of the machines seen about. To use a mechanism for one puzzle, you must solve the puzzle within the mechanism.
I found there to be a bit of repetition with the puzzles, not to mention some overly obvious and seemingly pointless tasks. (Yes, I will slide that thing to the left because I have no other option to do anything else.) But that’s the charm of The Room. It always has been. Sticking a key in a whole won’t do anything unless you turn the key, right?
The mysticism and cryptic nature of The Room Three felt a bit lackluster. Not many otherworldly references or hair-raising messages. (Granted, it’s been two years since I’ve spent time with The Room Two. Maybe this was the case there as well.) It felt hallow. Not necessarily that the dark charm and personality had been altogether lost, but maybe that the developer was too fatigued with adding puzzles to a world so large that depth took a backseat to time.
Which brings me to the awe inspiring essence of The Room series. Regardless of the charm falling flat or the occasional overt obviousness, the mind-bending machines and realism Fireproof Games continues to dream up is inspiring to the point that it’s excruciating. There is dazzle and surprise around every corner; astonishing cleaverness in every puzzle; perfectionism in art direction and machanics.
Predictably, The Room Three was a delight to solve. Truly a treasure through to the end. Though sadly, it was the end that finally kicked the cleverness up to my desired notch. I continue to think on what mad scientists and otherworldly designers continue to craft such detailed experiences.
Review events are a reality of the industry, and in the case of multiplayer-oriented titles, they make sense — it’s very difficult to organize 20-40 people in different locations remotely at the same time, and we introduced provisional reviews this year to account for server uncertainty. We’ve attended review events this year when it made sense to do so, including events for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and even Battlefield Hardline.
But we will not participate in review events that tie our hands in ways that restrict us well after the general public has full access to the game in question. With that in mind, we’ll be playing the full version of Star Wars Battlefront on EA Access this week, along with many of you, without support from EA. As we have not agreed to any advance access or accepted any coverage restrictions, our provisional review will be live once we are confident in the opinions of our pair of reviewers.
Nerdist nabbed an answer to a question in my previous post. It’s Garona.
From WoWWiki:
Garona Halforcen is a half-orc half-draenei quest giver for the Horde in the Twilight Highlands. Like most others, she believed she was half-human until the truth was revealed to her. She is an assassin and a spymistress.
From the Nerdist interview, it appears Garona is half-orc half-human, which, in the visual language of the Warcraft Movie, seems to justify her unanimated self. I don’t think it works and still lends itself to an awkward visual balance.
Daniel Wu, playing the part of Gul’dan:
If they don’t seem real, it’s going to be hard as an audience to get into the character. But they are very real. And they are very compelling as CG characters. Like two minutes into the film, you forget that they’re actually CG characters.
They don’t seem real. However, I said the same of Avatar. And after a few minutes into that film, I was onboard.
