Though it’s only been out a month or so, the cyberpunk shooting adventure game Deus Ex Mankind Divided (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC) is already getting a story-driven expansion. But while Deus Ex Mankind Divided System Rift (also Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC) isn’t a radical departure from the main game, it is a short but challenging one-off mission that has all of the elements, and all of the engagement, of the main game.
In a recent interview (which you can read here), Bungie’s Community Manager Deej said that while their first-person sci-fi shooter Destiny is focused on multiplayer, “Lone wolves are welcome in our living social world. We’ve even made adjustments to the paths that lead to the top of the power scale to accommodate players who prefer to go it alone.” Well, as someone who doesn’t play well with others, I decided to test this by playing the Destiny Rise Of Iron expansion — which is available both digitally (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) and in Destiny The Collection (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) along with the rest of the game — solo to see how well this game works if you are a lone wolf who prefers to go it alone.
Between the introduction of Ms. Marvel, the gender swapping of Thor, and Captain Marvel getting her own movie, it’s a good time to be a woman in Marvel Comics. But it’s also a good time to be a fan of those ladies and pinball thanks to Zen Studios, whose newest tables for Zen Pinball 2 (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4, Vita), Pinball FX 2 (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC), and Zen Pinball (iOS, Android, Amazon) are the Marvel’s Women Of Power Two Pack, which feature the ladies of A-Force, Ms. Marvel, and Spider-Gwen, as well as a host of bad gals.
With the strategy game Halo Wars 2 (Xbox One, PC) not coming out until February 21st of 2017, fans of the Halo games are undoubtedly going through withdrawal. Thankfully, Gallery Book has a fix in the form of Halo Fractures (paperback, digital), a collection of short stories from such sci-fi writers as John Jackson Miller (Star Wars: A New Dawn), such Halo novelists as Tobias Buckell (Halo: The Cole Protocol), and even such Halo game writers as Brian Reed, who co-wrote Halo 4 and was the lead writer on Halo 5: Guardians, and also penned the comic books Halo: Initiation, Halo: Escalation, and Halo: Fall Of Reach, the graphic novel adaptation of Eric Nyland’s prequel novel, Halo: The Fall Of Reach.
To find out more about the stories in Halo Fractures, I posed (mostly) the same questions to three of the books contributors: Matt Forbeck, who wrote the novel Halo: New Blood; Halo: Last Light writer Troy Denning; and Christie Golden, who’s new to the Halo cannon, but has written novels based on the StarCraft games as well as the worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek.
Funko have announced that they’ll release POP! toys of characters from the Call Of Duty games this November.
Along with the satisfaction of knowing you have good taste, people who buy the excellent new racing game Forza Horizon 3 on Xbox One or PC — my review of which is here — who’ve also played either Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Halo 5: Guardians will get a free M12S Warthog CST from AMG Transport Dynamics they can use in the racing game. Even cooler, the Warthog actually handles better in Forza Horizon 3 than it ever has in a Halo game, and even has its own race events. Sort of.
In real estate, the three most important things are location, location, location. But in the open world street racing game Forza Horizon 3 (Xbox One, PC), location is just one of many important things that make it the best racing game of the year, and one of the best overall games of the year as well.
There are some things you just shouldn’t rush. Fixing a car. Baking a cake. And, as is made painfully clear by the third-person, open world, action/adventure game ReCore (Xbox One, PC), making a video game. Because while ReCore could’ve been a gripping sci-fi shooting adventure, its considerable kinks, easily avoided problems, and seemingly unfinished bits make it feel like something that needed more time to, well, bake.
At first, the video game Tetris seems simple enough. When you really get into, though, you realize there’s a complexity to it that may be subtle, but it’s also substantial. Not surprisingly, the story of how Tetris came to be also seems simple enough at first, but not when you real dig in. It’s a story told in the new book The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized The World (hardcover, digital), written by CNET editor Dan Ackerman (who, I should point out, is someone I’ve known for years from going to video game press events). But in talking to him about his book, it seems it wasn’t just a love of the game that made him want to write something this substantial about Tetris.