Ubisoft had a very positive 2017. Sure, For Honor had one of the roughest launches for an online game in recent memory, but the year quickly turned around for Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed: Origins boasts some of the best reviews since Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, setting the series on a more positive course. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was hailed as an unexpected success on the Switch. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon opened to tepid review scores, but updates and patches have transformed the game. Ubisoft has also had success this past year with the release of South Park: The Fractured But Whole and Far Cry 5. Can Ubisoft’s presentation get even better than last year’s? How will they capitalize off a year of success and keep fans excited for the future?
Square-Enix, despite being a long time publisher and developer with dozens of franchises under their wing, has spent very little time with E3 press conferences. Their last E3 showing was three years ago, where they showed trailers that were already shown at Sony’s conference that year. With two long-awaited titles in Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy VII Remake finally happening (eventually), Square has a lot to show, with room for plenty of surprise announcements. If fans are expecting something on the level of Microsoft yesterday or Sony later tonight, they’re going to be disappointed. After watching the event, even fans with tempered expectations were most definitely disappointed.
Bethesda’s theme at E3 this year was “create”. They wanted to create something unique and new that nobody was expecting them to do. And while some things like Rage 2 had been leaked beforehand, there were still plenty of huge surprises Bethesda had yet to show off. I, for one, can’t wait to play Skyrim on my Etch a Sketch.
Microsoft, and in particular the Xbox brand, has struggled to get a leg up over the competition throughout the current generation. The Xbox One was controversial out of the gate, and even with continuous effort from Microsoft to improve user experience they aren’t keeping their customers. With previous major releases like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 underperforming and potential system sellers like Scalebound getting cancelled, Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up. With only Crackdown 3, another Gears of War, another Halo, and another Forza on the horizon, Microsoft needs to make some major announcements of big, and most importantly new, exclusives to get people back on Xbox.
This week, Steam announced that it no longer plans on moderating any content put on it’s store, barring things that are “illegal” or “trolling.” What this means is obviously open to interpretation, with legality varying from country to country and trolling being possibly the most vague term they could have chosen.
The latter half of 2017 and the fist few months of 2018 were very eventful for Electronic Arts. Visceral Games was shuttered, and EA acquired Respawn Entertainment. The company almost singlehandedly launched a wave of government regulation because of the loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront II. A Way Out was released and was very positively received by critics and players alike. More recently, the trailer for Battlefield V stirred controversy by showing a woman fighting in WWII (the gall of them).
‘Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn’ is a joke of a game. It wears the fact it’s a joke game on its sleeve. Unfortunately, the joke isn’t very funny. The gameplay is dull and repetitive, with no salvation in sight from the blandness of mashing a single button. The writing and art style are horribly dated, and not in a charming way. The music exists. And the length is an absolute joke for the cost, but even if there was more of it, it would just be terrible. Even under seven layers of irony, there are no redeeming qualities to make it worth a purchase. Finally, to add insult to injury, the game crashed at the very end during the final boss. The game got refunded after that. Do not purchase this game under any circumstances.
Overall, there was a lot of developments in this episode with the student’s demeanor and how the school is now being perceived by the public. It is a unique situation in a show for the heroes to be in a negative point of view. However, there is hope for our protagonists to still show that heroes will always prevail. As always, I am excited for next week’s episode.
'Detroit: Become Human' is an ambitious interactive sci-fi drama where your choices have a drastic impact on events, making them more satisfying than other games in the genre. Though I wish the story wasn’t so heavy-handed with game's motifs, I still enjoyed the subtlety conveyed through its tech and performances. Much of the gameplay could have been improved by giving more options with the mechanics, like the detective mode, and providing reminders of the choices I had already made. But I would still recommend this game for people looking for a story-driven game with branching paths.
Last year’s 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference was marked by the announcement of the Homepod as well as a new configuration of the 10.5 inch iPad, updates to the Macbook line and the all new iMac Pro. This year’s WWDC 2018 has taken a much more software-focused approach.
‘Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon’ is a perfectly portioned appetizer to the upcoming main course of ‘Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.’ The game looks great, sounds great, and plays exactly like it should. The 'Castlevania' influence flows through all parts of this product, and despite my personal distaste for the original 'Castlevania' games, this game makes the right improvements on the gameplay to keep it fresh, fair, and fun. It even delivers a shocking amount of length for a game of this style. ‘Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon’ reaches ‘Shovel Knight’ levels of perfectly nailing the feel of an NES classic.
