It's the waning days of Summer and video games are hitting a relative calm before the storm of Autumn releases, but that hasn't stopped this from being an interesting time in the land of video games! Come talk shop about what you've been up to in this week's Tuesday Game Room!
What have you been playing this week?
I've gotten stuck into Diablo III this week, and come out of the fires of Hell... well, surprisingly unscathed.
Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun as I've finished the game, Reaper of Souls and started to get stuck into Adventure Mode, but I was incredibly surprised how easy it was. I started off on Hard, something I rarely do in games that aren't the Halo series, and by the time I started the expansion content I was desperate to crank it up to Expert, and even then, I never died during the story - hell, I only used a handful of health potions throughout my run. It wasn't until Adventure Mode's Nephalem Rifts started throwing a few curveballs at the start that I died, and even then it's been rare. Aside from the shocking storytelling (A Blizzard game with problematic writing? Quelle surprise!), it's my only real complaint about the game. Otherwise it's still a fun distraction to see those big yellow numbers flinging about everywhere.
New Releases!
It's pretty quiet this week, but there's a few releases of note. First off is Infamous: First Light, a standalone accompaniment to this year's earlier PS4 exclusive, Second Son, starring the neon-powered Fetch. The big release for retail this week though is the latest american footballing hijinks for the Madden Franchise, with Madden NFL 15 punting its way to Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4. Joining it at retail though is Metro: Redux, the next-generation HD remaster of the two Metro shooters, out on PS4 and Xbox One as well as the PC. The US also finally gets to see the crossover shenanigans of the Puzzle master and the Ace attorney themselves, in the 3DS release of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Hurrah!
Aside from that, it's a handful of smaller digital releases - we have Hyperdimension Neptunia Re:Birth on PS Vita, Super Time Force Ultra on the PC after a short stint of Xbox exclusivity, OlliOlli on PS4, and Azure Striker Gunvolt on the 3DS eShop.
And now, the News
Once again it's time for a few select picks from the last week of Gaming news, via Eurogamer:
- PSN suffers more downtime after a weekend of DDoS attacks - Barely recovering from the weekend's attacks, Sony suffered some more fallout with PSN downtime for both PS3 and PS4 users today. The attacks, which also targeted Battle.Net, Riot's League of Legends servers, Twitch and a whole host of MMOs, came from 'hacking' (insomuch as you can call DDoSing 'hacking') group 'Lizardsquad', who even escalated their trolling by seemingly calling in a fake bomb threat to the plane Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley was travelling on yesterday. Hopefully now that these idiots have gone as far as to get the FBI involved, they'll be caught sooner rather than later.
- Has the entire Smash Bros. Roster leaked? - Speculation abound earlier this week as supposed footage and screenshots from an ESRB rating build of the upcoming Super Smash Bros. title for the 3DS hit NeoGAF, revealing some... well, let's say surprising additions to the game's roster. I know there's a lot of people excited for Smash here, so I won't name any newcomers here, but if you're excited and don't mind taking a peek (and a pinch of salt, these are far from confirmed), take a look at the link.
- Nintendo announces Namco Bandai arcade collaboration with... Pokémon? - Yes. You read that right. There's going to be a Tekken-style arcade fighting game staring Pokémon. It's called Pokken. Just let that sink in a little.
- Amazon has acquired Twitch for $970 million - although perhaps ancilliary to gaming news, it emerged late yesterday that the games-focused streaming site had been scooped up, not by the heavily rumoured google, but Amazon. With streaming becoming a huge part of video game communities, and even with the feature built-in to next-gen hardware services, it'll be interesting to see what the retailing giant does with Twitch.
We'll be back this time next Tuesday for more gaming discussion, but for now, sound off in the comments with the games you've been playing, and what you're looking forward to this week - and don't forget to join us on Steam!