Today, there's more choice than ever in how you play RuneScape, with the EoC/Legacy Mash Up � a set of interface and gameplay options fresh out of the beta.
Previously, you had the choice of playing RuneScape with the Evolution of Combat system and complex, customisable interfaces, or in Legacy Mode, with old-style, low-intensity combat and traditional, fixed interfaces.
Now, you can pick and choose your favourites in any of four combinations, straight from the Combat Settings interface:
Enjoy! This is just the first of a number of updates coming your way from . If you haven't already, get involved! It's the best way to have your say in some of RuneScape's most crucial updates.
The RuneScape Ninja Team & Mod Roy (Honorary Ninja)
Solomon's Store - Shadow and Fire Drakes
Solomon's roster of legendary pets just got hotter with the shadow drake and fire drake!
There's no more ferocious friend to take on your adventures than one of these winged beasts, who � like all legendary pets � have three stages of growth, plus emotes and a load of useful abilities.
The shadow drake is available for a limited time only, so it's sure to become a rare sight. !
On top of this, Solomon's reduced the price of legendary pets � the exclusive shadow drake excepted. Pet collectors rejoice!
If you need more RuneCoins, you can redeem in-game, or .
Congratulations to Sailthree � the winner of our recent shadow drake competition � who was first to suggest the winning name of Fury. This is now immortalised in-game as a pet name option. if you entered and want to see if you were a runner up � your shadow drake is winging its way to you!
Legendary Pet Improvements
To accompany the release of the two drakes, we've revamped the way that legendary pets work.
Legendary pets can now have up to three abilities active at one time. These are equipped in slots, which are unlocked as your pet reaches new growth stages.
Six new abilities are available for you to equip on your legendary pets:
Note that life saver, slayer finisher, repair item and fertiliser aren't available for Ironman accounts.
Also, the existing abilities have been improved:
Treasure Hunter � Spring Cleaner & Prize Management
A number of changes have been made to the , making it easier and more worthwhile to use:
The new Treasure Hunter Prize Management Interface is just the thing if you've accumulated prizes and aren't sure what to do with them. Talk to Alice or click the hammer and wrench icon in Treasure Hunter. The interface:
New Streaming Schedule
From this week, there's a brand new streaming schedule for you to enjoy, with regular slots for our Developer Q&A and Community streams.
Every Tuesday, 16:00-17:00 UTC (Game Time)
Our weekly developer Q&A will be your chance to ask questions to our team of developers, about recent updates, upcoming plans, and any other burning RuneScape-related questions you may have.
Hosted by Mod James, our panel will include:
You can , or using the #RSDevQA hashtag on Twitter, or on Reddit.
So tune in at 16:00 UTC this Tuesday on Twitch to get your first taste of Q&A action!
Every Tuesday, 20:00-21:00 UTC.
Here's where we get to have some fun. Each week we'll be bringing you something different, fun, and showing off content you won't have seen before.
Hosted by the Community Team, it's the perfect accompaniment to your daily Scaping.
This week's stream: opening 10,000 Easy Clue Scrolls with Mods James and Wolf.
Check out the loot and work out the drop rates - all coming up this Tuesday on . Be there!
Have a great week of Scaping, and over on the forums.
Starting a new year at Giant Bomb means a lot of excitement but also involves a fair amount of preparation. We usually exit the previous year with hair on fire and arms flailing as we finish up Game of the Year content. I've been producing Game of the Year videos for almost a decade and every year it winds up being a race to the finish line. A lot of it has to do with the timing of releases, managing resources for Game of the Year content against daily site content, and just plain project management.
When January rolls around we have our work cut out for us. On the production end we begin with archiving and collating all our Game of the Year assets. There are a lot of pieces that go into the videos and we want them archived and tucked away so we can make room on our work machines for the following year's content. We recently switched from using Final Cut Pro to Premiere, so our project management has changed a bit and we're figuring out what we want to keep and how we want to keep it. We've got some extra footage that we'll be putting up for Premium members in the near future.
While that is going on we've got to transition our 2014 archive system to 2015. This means taking our 22TB 2014 NAS offline and putting our new 22TB 2015 NAS online. We also want to clear off our work machines of 2014 content so we spend more time making content and less time managing free disk space. We prune our machines and offload everything in pretty little folders to last year's NAS archive, and take it offline.
This usually involves a footage audit to make sure we haven't accidentally deleted something we might want later. Then we have to make sure everything is backing up and transferring correctly. We make daily backups and transfers of footage. Our producers are our ops team as well when it comes to video, so this year we decided we should probably document the whole process. I'm about nine pages into a document that covers most of what the transition between years involves. Since we don't have a big team we rely on technology and automation to make sure that when we have to clear space on a computer to record two hours of UPF we can delete old footage with the confidence that it is backed up somewhere.
Then comes the inventory audit. Again, we don't have studio managers. One usually discovers a broken piece of cable or gear minutes before a production starts. Sweating ensues. Frantic replacing of equipment and testing takes place. By the end of the year there's usually a pile of broken or questionable "stuff" in a corner of the studio. Mic clips break. Cables mysteriously stop working. Windscreens are eaten by goblins. You can start the year with eight mics and four cameras and finish the year with two working mics and a tin can.
We have to go over what is working and what is broken. Once we have that list we can put together a list of new equipment we would like for the coming year. This is usually generated by technology and content needs. Do we have what we need to make the content we want? Is there a better or more efficient way to be doing what we're doing? The answers are usually "No" and "Yes" in that order.
I then work with the production team to make a general budget for the year and focus on specifics for the coming quarter. While I'm working on this Jeff is usually going over travel and events budgets with the editorial team. Again, with a small team we try to be smart about technology to make things possible. How can we do a better live show without adding more producers? What's the best way for one person to record footage in the field? WHY IS THE AUDIO STILL OUT OF SYNC?!
Meanwhile, also happening in the first weeks of January is a content audit. We look back at what we did and how we used our time. What worked? What was a good use of time and what wasn't? What did we want to do but couldn't? Then we try and see what the next year might look like. Since we're part of a large organization this has become more formal than having some beers over a long lunch. Presentations and phone calls are needed. Though it takes more time, I actually find it more useful to have to present this stuff formally. Seeing the actual costs and numbers is really interesting, though obviously never tells the whole story. Something like Game of the Year is a good example of something that takes a lot of man hours and numbers-wise we would probably generate more traffic if we just recorded Quick Looks during that entire time. But Game of the Year gives us a chance to do some really dumb, fun material. It's some of my favorite content. So numbers are interesting to look at, but I still love making entertaining video, not necessarily balanced spreadsheets.
Then we've got this whole NY Studio to do. Construction is still on-going, but I've been told we can start putting stuff in it, so that's what I'm going to do. We'll be setting it up for a bit, and will be continuing to set it up for the indefinite future. But at least content should be coming out of it very shortly.
It's a really interesting job. Part of my day is filling out spreadsheets, then I get up and build a studio, edit some video, open a terminal and write bad Linux scripts, and possibly play a video game or two. The part that makes it onto the internet is usually the last few links in a long chain that begins January 1st. Well, January... 2nd, 3rd, 4th-ish. From what we've been talking about so far, it seems like it will be a really interesting year and I'm excited about getting all the pieces in place. As a very loud, but wise man once said "Buckle up, motherfuckers."
Hey, one last Game of the Year thing before we sign off for the rest of 2014. JV and DLeazy hooked up in Chicago to lay down a little lyrical magic about the year in video games. Here's what JV had to say about this...
"Instead of doing a typical top 10 list this year, Dave and I drank a bottle of rum and recorded this song for you guys. We think it is pretty stupid and hope you do, too. :-)
...And special thanks to Justin who let us use one of the beats he did for Ballers back-in-the-day. You are, and will always be, one of the most talented producers in Hip Hop.
So there you go. Johnny V and Lang finishing it off with a Just Blaze beat. Classic material.
I just want to say thanks to everyone who contributed to our guest lists this year, and thanks again to Alex for corralling it all. We tried to make some unexpected moves with the lists this year while also sticking to some of the past favorites. Hopefully people dug it. And, of course, thanks to Jason, Drew, and Vinny for handling the production on our videos. Hope everyone liked those, it was fun to put that stuff together. Oh, and thanks to Brad for handling all those podcasts. Those things can be monsters. Thanks to Patrick and his future employer for sticking it out with us over this last stretch here to get the Game of the Year stuff finished up, too. And thanks to you all for listening and watching. Have a great rest of the year, everyone, and let's get it in 2015!
For as picky as people can get when you say that you don't like something, saying that you are interested in something is what really brings 'em out of the woodwork. Usually that's because you're talking about something you like and someone else wants to know why your list or podcast or whatever didn't include whichever game they're positively rabid about. This manifests in weird ways, from subtle digs to full-on lash-outs.
With all of that in mind, there's no way to build a list of upcoming games that have me wanting to know more without trigging a similar response. But I still found myself wanting to say a few things about upcoming games. These are games that I hope come out in 2015, but these days it's impossible to know, right? While it's weird to say that I hope these games are good--ultimately, I want every game to be great because as someone who plays a lot of games I'd rather not play bad ones--these are projects that I'm currently keeping an eye out for. These are games I want to see more of. There are still plenty of questions surrounding most of these--some more than others, as you'll see--but something about what's already been shown or the potential at hand has me interested enough to say a little bit about it here. I didn't want to limit it to 10 games or some other arbitrary limit, but I also didn't want to go on forever about every single announced game that has at least one interesting feature in it.
So here's what's top of mind for me these days:
Every few months I go through a phase where I remember that Memory of a Broken Dimension is an announced project, and go hunting for more information. I'm hesitant to classify MOBD, but there's a released build that we looked at awhile ago that has elements of text-prompt hacking mixed with a beautiful, glitched-out first-person situation that appears involve the solving of puzzles, in a sense. But that was a while ago. Since then, the game has gone through Steam Greenlight and is said to be on track for a 2015 release on PC, Mac, and Linux. I love the look of this thing. I could stare at it for hours. Assuming it makes it out this year, I fully intend to stare at it for hours.
Blendo Games' Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving are games I sort of perpetually keep meaning to play. Having skipped those (so far), it might be a little weird that I'm really looking forward to Quadrilateral Cowboy. But the concept--rigging up heists and hacking your way around security systems by writing little bits of pseudocode--sounds amazing. Considering Quadrilateral Cowboy has the same art style as those other games, I should probably spend the time I have left catching up on Blendo's past works.
I guess this is just "Crackdown" right now, and it's not much more than an E3 trailer. Can you reboot a franchise after only two games? Whatever, it hardly matters. Crackdown interests me for a few reasons, but I guess my main feeling is one of curiosity. Can a superpower-focused open-world game work in the wake of Saints Row IV, which basically out-Crackdowns Crackdown? Is the Agility Orb still an effective collectible, or have other open-world games with zillions of paper-thin side missions and trillions of trinkets to grab soured the concepts for everyone else? I certainly wanted to enjoy Crackdown 2. I even played that weird, location-based Crackdown game for Windows Phone that no one else has probably even heard of. I'd like to think that a new Crackdown could still be fantastic cooperative fun. We'll see.
What do we know about this new version of the sequel to Maniac Mansion? Nothing! Is Day of the Tentacle one of the best adventure games ever made? Yes, absolutely! By the time Grim Fandango was released I had already moved on from the adventure genre and I was pretty squarely focused on covering console games for a living at that time, which ate into whatever time I had to play PC games. So I have zero connection to it and the announcement of a new version of that isn't something I can get excited about. DOTT is my wheelhouse. DOTT is fantastic. I was thinking about playing this again anyway, so I might as well save my left-handed hammer for... whatever this new version ends up being.
DID YOU KNOW that WKRP's Richard "Les Nessman" Sanders provided the voice of Bernard in the original game? And that the game was sold in two configurations, a floppy disk-based version without voices at all and a CD-ROM with the magic of real speech? It's true!
Let's assume that, after a year off, EA is going to get Ghost Games back on the hook for a new driving game for 2015. The Need for Speed franchise has been up and down several times over the decades, and 2013's NFS Rivals was a disappointing game that came close to being great. It's time for the franchise to reposition itself, and you'd like to think that taking 2014 off will give everyone enough time to get it right. I'm in the mood for a game that features real cars but doesn't take itself ultra-seriously like a Gran Turismo or Forza would. The Crew was most definitely not the game I was looking for.
I do not worship at any Metroid-shaped altar, whether first-person or third. But Tom Happ might. Casting his game, Axiom Verge, as a simple Super Metroid clone would seem to sell it incredibly short, though. It certainly takes cues from that seminal work, but goes further. As someone who has certainly loved games of this style before (Symphony of the Night, Shadow Complex), Axiom Verge seems to be making some really interesting moves while straddling a great-looking line that recalls the retro style of the 16-bit era without sticking to it too slavishly. At least that's what it looks like from a distance, anyway. I've kept away from preview builds of it so far and look forward to playing it for myself. Sounds like it's on for Spring?
Mortal Kombat X is going through the same, slow character reveal process that Mortal Kombat 9 did, but I feel like it's not hitting as hard or stirring up quite as much fervor as the previous game did. Perhaps that's because MK9 was such a solid return to form for a franchise that took some serious twists and turns throughout the PS2/Xbox era. MKX is taking some neat-looking risks, both with its roster and with how it uses those fighters, with stance choices prior to a fight that give you three different takes on each fighter. It's also a chance for the franchise to introduce a big batch of new characters, which is perhaps why these character reveals seem so sluggish. It's hard to get excited about a new character like D'Vorah until you get to play with it for yourself. It's especially difficult when you start to think about the new characters brought in during that MK5-7 stretch and how MKvsDC and MK9 felt like strong reactions designed to get away from Bo' Rai Cho, Hsu Hao, Hotaru, and all those other forgettable additions to the roster. Hopefully Ferra/Torr, Cassie Cage, Kotal Kahn and the rest of MKX's new additions will fare a bit better.
Dear 17-Bit Games,
Please stop moving to Kyoto or whatever it is you're doing and finish your game.
Yours, Jeff Gerstmann
In playing bits and pieces of Galak-Z over the years, I've really come to appreciate its classic anime-influenced style and the way it moves. The developers also talk very big about its procedurally generated nature, which is something that's a little harder to see during a short demo, but is something that should help make this thing pretty rad when it's released. Whenever that finally is.
Just Cause and the recent Far Cry games occupy a similar space in my mind. Just Cause, obviously, is a bit more destruction-focused, but both games thrive when things get chaotic, and the moments that emerge from said chaos transforms these games from fairly standard twists on the open-world formula into something incredibly special. Hopefully Just Cause 3 will keep all of that up and running. Throw in a few awful/amazing accents along the way and multiplayer that supports thousands of people doing a bunch of weird shit and you've ticked almost every box on my Just Cause Sequel Sheet. OK, the multiplayer probably won't come as a part of the core release, but... well, JC3 had better be just as moddable as its predecessor was, how about that? OK?
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
I get a knot in my stomach when I think about Mario Maker. It's the thing I always wanted and it might not come together the way I've always wanted it. I hate being in this situation, because it feels like I'm picking apart a thing that'll probably get 90% of the way there, at least. But tools to easily make, play, and share your own Super Mario Bros. levels are some of the most powerful tools in the world. You're essentially being handed the building blocks, the original scriptures of modern gaming and told to "do whatever."
But it comes with caveats. Physics! The game will feature different tile sets from different Mario games but the early word makes it sound like they'll all feel the same. Nope. That's the wrong move, all the way. Make the SMB1 tileset feel like that game. Make Mario World feel like Mario World, damn it. Make sure that people can create packs of levels, functional pipes, new warp zones, and all of the trimmings. Essentially, if you're going to do this, Nintendo, please do it right. Please.
You wouldn't necessarily expect Nintendo to get behind a multiplayer shooter, especially one about splats, platoons, and... spittoons? I don't know, I played a few matches of this at E3 last year and thought it controlled really well, offered a unique take on competitive shooting, and offered some unique tactical options with its weird ink/squid moves. Painting territory to gain ground on the enemy is a cool idea, and the whole thing looked great. It also controlled a lot better once I turned off the tilt controls, which didn't make aiming much fun. Hopefully it'll be good enough to draw in a steady community of players when it's released later this year.
The Tony Hawk franchise deserves a proper reboot. with Tony Hawk getting out on Twitter awhile ago and then recently reconfirming his upcoming console game at Sony's CES keynote (and saying that it'll come to PS4), it looks like 2015 will be the year for this return. But what is it? Who's making it? Robomodo? Some other, unnamed studio? Will it be a big disc game? Will it have Activision's Sierra logo stamped onto it and ship out as a downloadable? I'm excited to hear the answers.
You know what? Forget all those games. What about the sequels and games that people should be making? You know the ones. Let's cover a few, and I'm sure you have plenty of your own to add.
Tony Hawk is coming back, EA. Bring back Skate and reignite the weird competition between two franchises that had vastly different goals while both sort of simulating the same type of activity! It'd be worth it for the big, dumb opening FMV sequence alone, wouldn't it? The Hall of Meat commands you to find whatever's left of Black Box (didn't some of them end up on the Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare team?) and buy those people a half-pipe for their office.
Dear EA,
Fucking come on already.
Yours, Jeff Gerstmann
I am not a businessman. You can tell by the way I just implied that someone like Harmonix should get back into the plastic instrument business. This is perhaps a weird one, since there's technically nothing stopping me from playing more Rock Band 3, and there's plenty of DLC for that game that I never purchased, but something that works with the consoles I actually have connected up at home and a renewed effort to go and secure even more DLC would be much appreciated. Or I suppose we could just wait for the inevitable Guitar Hero resurgence.
Mercenaries 2 was a fucking wreck that bore little resemblance to the original game. Make an actual sequel to the first Mercenaries, that'd be pretty cool. Maybe something like Just Cause 3 scratches this itch a little too well these days, I'm not sure. But the first Mercenaries was pretty rad.
Again, I am not a businessman, but it sure would be cool if Chair/Epic walked away from the zillions of dollars that Infinity Blade brings in and made a full-scale Shadow Complex sequel. Maybe I'd feel less strongly about this if I enjoyed Infinity Blade, I don't know. It just never clicked with me at all.
In conclusion, I'm looking forward to 2015. I'm hopeful. Optimistic, even! OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch. But there are clearly some interesting games coming along this year and they're once again coming in all shapes and sizes, from teams big and small, on a good variety of platforms. I'm sure some of it will get canceled. And some of it will get pushed into 2016. But for now, it's looking pretty good.
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight! I, @zombiepie, am honored to be your host as always! As most of you are already aware this week will mark the glorious return of the Big Live LIVE Show: Live! The event will start on the 29th of April at around 11:00 A.M. PDT. Mr. @rorie and the rest of the staff would like to inform you that that any users that live in the California Bay Area can attend. If you are interested then please , but understand that the event is only for users that are 21 or older. Please be aware that commenting on the after-party information thread IS NOT considered to be an R.S.V.P. Moving on to site bugs: If you had issues switching your color scheme on your mobile phone or iOS device the engineers suspect that clearing your cookies will remedy the problem, but if you still have issues report them . Also, the issue with pop-up prompts disrupting commenting and posting on the site has been . Thank you for your patience regarding that issue. With that let's get on with the latest edition of the Community Spotlight!
Halo: Spartan Strike came out this week and is the recent release that features an informative wiki page worth checking out. Donkey Kong 64 and JoyJoy on the other hand both got re-released this week and luckily BOTH have massive wiki pages worth scanning and checking out.
2014 is probably not a year I'm going to remember very fondly. The reasons for that are manifold and largely very personal, but honestly I can't think of too many years over the course of my life I've so eagerly this is literally the introduction to my list from last year. I hate that I am writing these words again. I hate that they feel so appropriate.
If there's been a prevailing theme in this year's Game of the Year lists, it's a feeling of exhaustion. 2014 took a lot out of people from all corners of the industry. Any discussion of the year's events feels tinged with a palpable level of dread. Even Brad Muir's list starts off with a somber tone. I didn't even know you could bum that guy out, and I wasn't happy when I learned that you could.
If there was another prevailing theme in this year's lists, it was a cautious amount of hope. Some people think that 2015 can be a different story. Of course, us being days from a new year doesn't guarantee an improvement in condition. There are a lot of unpleasant things still happening in this community. The same challenges and problems that have defined 2014 don't just vaporize the second January kicks in. I guess I have a reputation for being a cynic, but deep down, I see reason to hope. I see some amazing games on the horizon. I see some amazing creative voices developing and persevering. I see a lot of wonderful people making wonderful things and advancing both the medium, and the way it's covered. Some, but certainly not all, of those people contributed to our Game of the Year coverage this year, and I'm thankful for their participation.
Anyway, I just wanted to express that before launching into the ol' top 10 list. Hopefully you enjoyed our Game of the Year coverage. Here's to a more uplifting year in 2015.
There was no part of me that was expecting a new Wolfenstein game to entertain me, let alone leave a lasting impression on me. This should have been just another stump-stupid Nazi shooting bloodbath. Franchises like this aren't supposed to grow a brain. They're not supposed to tell you a story that means much of anything. They're not supposed to matter beyond the cheap, ephemeral thrills they're typically built to provide.
All the credit in the world due to MachineGames for surprising the hell out of me. The New Order is still very much a Nazi shooting bloodbath, but underneath all the exploding viscera, the developers installed a soul. The team (which includes ex-Starbreeze devs) brought The New Order's characters to life in an unexpected way, instilling them with enough personality, enough nuance to actually make you care about their plight. For fuck's sake, it turns BJ Blazkowicz, who had up to this point essentially been a ham hock with a gun taped to it, into a character with believable motivations outside of the usual "Nazis are evil, so let's kill them" thing.
The New Order has its issues--its tonal shifts can be awkward, and it does drag in a few places--but its accomplishments are greater. It turns Wolfenstein from another rote FPS into a pulpy, piquant adventure. The shooting's pretty good, too.
This year we lost R.A. Montgomery, who most folks who grew up around the same time I did may remember as a prolific writer of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of novels. I loved a number of those books very dearly as a kid. I imagine a lot of kids who played video games growing up probably did. After all, what were those books but text adventure games embedded in pages, instead of software?
A couple of games I loved most this year reminded me a great deal of the kinds of experiences I had reading those books growing up, and The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo, by Michael Lutz and Kimberly Parker, was one of them.
A good horror story finds a way to take something mundane and twist it into something unsettling. The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo takes an old chestnut--a kid you know claiming to have a family member that works at Nintendo, usually falsely--and turns it into a basis for a terrifying little adventure. It's a short enough game that I think skimping on plot details is permissible (you should just go play it yourself). Really, it's the writing that stuck out for me here (though I dug Parker's illustrations as well). It managed to evoke just enough of what I remember about the video game-fueled sleepovers I had as a kid, while darkening those memories with a compellingly supernatural undercurrent.
If I'm honest, this game mostly sits on my list by virtue of the Nemesis system. As an open world game, Shadow of Mordor is a very good culmination of mechanics and design tropes cobbled together from other games. Its story is mostly terrible, hamfisted nonsense that often feels out-of-step with Lord of the Rings lore. If it weren't for the Nemesis system, I doubt very highly I'd have delved as far into the game I did.
Because of that Nemesis system, I found myself having a wealth of intense, sometimes hilarious, usually blood-soaked experiences in Shadow of Mordor. It's one thing to have a powerful character in a game defeat you time and time again, but it's quite another to have that character remember that event, to rub their superiority in your face. Early on, I was quite bad at surviving encounters with the game's tougher orcs, and so I found myself in that position quite a bit, listening to various orcs talk surprisingly creative smack about me time and time again. Once I got my bearings and gained a few abilities, I started crafting elaborate revenge scenarios, stalking the guys who had killed me most often, looking for ways to infiltrate their territory and slay them once and for all. As someone who typically likes to run at things while mashing the stab/shoot button, that Shadow of Mordor was able to inspire me to think carefully about each enemy encounter is something of a minor miracle. This is a concept I can't wait to see applied to other games in the future.
I think just about every write-up of Shovel Knight this year has commented on how done-to-death retro aesthetics in indie games have become, and how Shovel Knight manages to transcend that feeling of retro fatigue. I absolutely agree with this sentiment, but more than its value as a painstaking tribute to the likes of and Mega Man and DuckTales, I think Shovel Knight is just a really well-designed platformer. Yacht Club Games not only nailed the NES-style visuals, audio, and storytelling, they also managed to design a game that's near-perfect in terms of difficulty balance. It's an exceptionally challenging game that still feels conquerable. It made me angry at times, but in the way the best classic platformers do. You sometimes hate it, but you don't stop playing. That's a difficult line to straddle, and Yacht Club did it brilliantly. I can't wait to see what they do next.
At the outset of the year, no part of me would have expected Mario Kart 8 to find its way onto my top 10 list. Not because I didn't expect this game to be good--I still love Mario Kart more than most people should by this stage of their life--but because I just expected there to be other, better games out there that would shuffle this off the list. After all, it's just more Mario Kart, right?
Sort of, but it also happens to be the best Mario Kart has been in a very long time. The core gameplay is as frenetic and exciting as it's ever been, and the strong online play--frankly shocking for a Nintendo game--has kept me racing long past the game's release date. Also, in a year where the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were supposed to boast a cavalcade of graphical showpieces, Mario Kart 8 still managed to stand out as one of the absolute best looking games of the year. Nintendo makes the games Nintendo is supposed to make very well. Mario Kart 8 is one of the best examples of this you will ever find.
I still watch South Park on a weekly basis. I don't really know why. The worst episodes of modern South Park are often, at the very least, odd. It keeps doing enough to hold my attention week-to-week, occasionally sprinkling in gems like the Game of Thrones-flavored "Black Friday" trilogy to remind you that this show can be really sharp when it puts its mind to it. The Stick of Truth felt close to one of those sharp moments from the series. It felt like the best of South Park, only slightly awkwardly baked into a lightweight RPG. Unlike just about every game that came before it, The Stick of Truth excels at beingSouth Park.
There were a lot of reasons to doubt it. Obsidian's checkered history with the functionality of its games. Original publisher THQ closed shop mid-development. The publisher that picked it up, Ubisoft, delayed the game not long after. And, of course, the show's history with games was poor. South Park games used to be a sad bullet point in the long list of disappointing games based on popular licenses. The Stick of Truth goes a long way toward correcting that standing.
It felt like a game that was a long time coming. I'm glad it finally did.
I have to extend thanks to a number of the contributors to our guest top 10 lists this year. Before I started editing these, 80 Days was completely off my radar. This is why I love that we do these lists. I keep discovering games I'd otherwise be completely oblivious to.
This iOS adventure tells its own version of Jules Verne's classic novel Around the World in 80 Days. It coats its story in steampunk conventions--airships and automatons abound--yet tells its story in a way that makes those conventions feel fresh. You play as the ever doting (or not) manservant to an adventurous English gentleman, who takes a wager to try and circumvent the world within the 80 day time frame. The path is plotted by you, and there are a wide variety of paths to choose from. The script by Meg Jayanth is tremendously effective at engrossing you in each step of the journey, painting rich back stories for a great many of the cities and characters you'll encounter along the way. Even the resource management game it tosses in is fun. Who knew babysitting a middle-aged man through constant mortal peril could be such a good time?
If you do decide to try 80 Days, make sure to try out the recently added North Pole route. Maybe not for your first trip, but eventually.
If this were a list dictating the games I spent the most hours in this year, Hearthstone would beat everything else by several orders of magnitude. This was not supposed to happen.
I don't play CCGs. I briefly tried to understand Magic: The Gathering in junior high, but it never quite did it for me. I also haven't played World of Warcraft in six years. My level 36 dwarf rogue, Dolemite, is a year away from being declared legally dead. By all manner of reason and history, this was absolutely not supposed to happen.
I don't understand entirely what this game does to my brain. I worry sometimes it might be Blizzard's version of that weird virtual reality disc-cone game from that one Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. You know the one. Ashley Judd was in it. I don't know what Blizzard would command me to do. Maybe buy more Hearthstone cards. I've done that a few times.
All I know is that I've built a deathrattle-focused warlock deck I've grown to enjoy using, and I'm still making at least a couple of arena runs a week. Hearthstone has consumed the vast majority of my free time this year. I'm not great at it, and I absolutely do not care. Some people hate the game's emphasis on luck. I adore it, even when I'm on the wrong end of it, which I often have been.
The recent expansion content has made competition in Hearthstone even more wild and woolly. Some interesting new decks have emerged, but mostly people seem to be just trying all sorts of stuff out, and it's a ton of fun seeing how that experimentation plays out. I never expected to get into card battling in any form, ever. Now I'm poking around wikis reading about paladin strategies and wondering if I should blow up my current, divine-shield focused deck. I spend large chunks of my precious, ever-dwindling life throwing merlocs at people for fun. There is a roughly 100% possibility that I have taken a break from typing this very write-up to play a round or two.
This was not supposed to happen. Oh well.
I have been asked several times this year why I didn't finish the original Bayonetta. I don't have a satisfactory answer for this. I remember playing a chunk of it when it first came out, enjoying it, and then setting it aside in favor of other games. It seemed very good, but I did not go back to it. I regret that, especially after playing Bayonetta 2. Holy shit, what a game.
I think Patrick and I share similar feelings on character action games in general. They sometimes feel too much like fighting games to me. You may or may not know this about me, but I am rather poor at fighting games.
Bayonetta 2 is an excellent blend of accessibility and depth. The crazy juggle combos are there if you want them, but you can make do if you're bad at memorization. For my part, I wanted to learn the combos, just to see what increasingly strange animation would come as a result. The action is vibrantly weird, yet immensely satisfying. I never got tired of engaging witch time and just wailing away on one of the game's numerous grotesque enemies, which are uniformly strange and amazing.
Bayonetta 2 is beautiful and insane and exciting in equal measure. It's probably my favorite Wii U game to date.
I was absolutely certain something would come along this year and knock Jazzpunk from the top spot on my list. I loved Jazzpunk from beginning to end, but I did not foresee a three-hour long non sequitur-dispenser to be my defining gaming experience of 2014. And yet, here we are.
I get kind of exhausted just trying to write about Jazzpunk. It's why my review of it earlier this year was on the shorter side. It's tough to explain why it's so great without just rattling off jokes, which is just about the worst thing you could do to a potential player. Its comedy holds up upon repeat plays, but it is best experienced first without any idea of what's to come. It's bizarre stuff, seemingly nonsensical but impeccably timed. It feels like very dumb comedy made by very smart people.
I laughed at every single stupid thing Jazzpunk did. I played it again and laughed at all the same bits. Maybe it's not the technically "best" game of the year, but it's the one that brought me the most joy in 2014. I am glad for its existence, and I look forward to playing it many times more.
I sat next to a dude from Ford at the Microsoft E3 press conference a few years back. Seemed like a nice person, and as far as I could grasp, he was basically Ford's "game guy," making sure that the brand is well-represented in games and protecting it from... I don't know, rogue Chevy enthusiasts or something. Hot brand synergies don't just happen all by themselves, people.
I have nothing left to add to that amazing anecdote, but seeing that the Ford Twitter account was the place to state that Forza Motorsport 6 was going to be available at some point in the near-future made me think of him. Oh, by the way, there's going to be a Forza Motorsport 6. Ford's new 2017 Ford GT is going to be on the cover and in the game. The car was officially unveiled today at the North American International Auto Show and will be sold in the back half of 2016 for more money than you probably want to spend on a car. The game has no announced release date (but we're probably looking at Q4 2015).
The other newly announced Fords, the Shelby GT350 Mustang and the F-150 Raptor, will also appear in the game. As a former Mustang owner, I damn near bought another one when I was car shopping a couple of years ago. I like the look of the modern Mustang, they've sleeked it up a bit compared to the '97 GT I drove for over a decade. But I couldn't double down on the Mustang after that long. Needed a change, ya know?
Anyway, here's a short video that Microsoft put out to confirm the news itself, complete with a confused-looking dude in the cockpit of one for a brief second.
The press release that slid out alongside this video confirms the game as being "exclusively for Xbox One" and that gameplay will be shown at E3 this year, but the rest of the release is full of the same sort of big talk about car lovers and gamers and the intersection between the two that you've heard out of them for the past few games. As someone who came away from Turn 10's last game more than a little disappointed, I'd hope that there's more planned for Forza 6 than continuing to double down on the same talk.
April, 2013 saw what was believed to be the last installment in Harmonix's ludicrously long-running DLC support of its Rock Band franchise. With the release of Don McLean's "American Pie", the studio ended its five-year run of weekly downloadable song updates, seemingly putting the franchise itself on ice for the foreseeable future as well. It was a sad, but poignant conclusion to the plastic instrument craze that gripped seemingly the whole of video games for like a solid four or five years.
Except that it wasn't a conclusion at all. Today, we have learned that Rock Band wasn't dead, but just biding its time, waiting for the right moment to reemerge and rock once again. Finally, the developers at Harmonix have found the songs intended to reinvigorate the brand and return the plastic instrument genre to its former glory.
OK, probably not. In reality, Harmonix has randomly decided to toss out a trio of new songs from the likes of Avenged Sevenfold, Arctic Monkeys, and the Foo Fighters. The new tracks--"Shepherd Of Fire", "R U Mine", and "Something from Nothing", respectively--will retail for the usual price of $2 on the Xbox Live and PlayStation marketplaces, starting tomorrow (January 13).
When asked if this new release would be the start of a continuing trend of new Rock Band DLC releases, Important Harmonix Spokesperson (and, for disclosure's sake, former co-worker of mine) Eric Pope rubbed his spokesburns vigorously and hastily changed the subject to how trim my figure looks of late. So, perhaps this is just a random, one-off thing, or maybe Harmonix is looking to test the waters and drum up interest for something else Rock Band related in the future. Given the rumors kicking around of Activision wanting to bring back Guitar Hero, it would make a certain amount of sense.
Sometime all the way back in 2013, I was approached by Christopher Grant of Awesome Games Done Quick and presented with an interesting opportunity. He suggested that I should come down to the event and do a speedrun of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. This is a game I have some history with, you see.
The idea of speedrunning the worst video game ever made sounded amusing, but I had no idea how that would even work, and somewhere between the initial suggestion and last year's event, communication lines got weird (my fault entirely), and it didn't come together. Then he found me at PAX this past year and suggested it again. I asked him to send me some info on what a Big Rigs speedrun entailed, and he sent me this video. He wasn't joking. There is an official method for speedrunning Big Rigs.
I felt sort of weird about the idea still. I have no involvement in the speedrunning scene, and while I'm always down to help out with charity, I felt like I might be intruding on this cool thing that the AGDQ team has been putting together since 2010. I felt like kind of an interloper, you know?
Ultimately, I got over it and agreed to take a brief jaunt down to Virginia this week for the purposes of Big Rigs-ing for fun and charity but mostly charity, if we're being honest here. I'm really glad I did. Despite finding myself unable to run the game properly on my own PC--thus preventing me from getting much of any practice in whatsoever--I turned in what I'd consider a respectable run, had some laughs with the folks that came to watch the event live, and stuck around to watch some other folks' runs during the remainder of the Awful Block. I watched a man blow through Radical Rex while painstakingly describing every single way in which that game is broken and terrible. I discovered that Beethoven's 2nd is depressingly lacking in any Charles Grodin whatsoever. I learned for the first time what Town With No Name is, and I am forever changed by the discovery.
I also learned that a bunch of you out there are mighty generous. In what I can only assume was intended to be a jokey inclusion, a bidding mark of $3000 was offered, which would require me to show off the "infinite speed" glitch in Big Rigs. You know, it's that thing that happens when you hit the "reverse" button in that game and just keep it held down for a while. Not exactly a difficult task, but y'all hit the donation target with ease. That's super rad.
Awesome Games Done Quick is still going as we speak. They've got stuff lined up through this weekend, and thus far have raised over $500,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
There's a good chance this is both the beginning and the end of my speedrunning career. If that's the case, I'm glad I got to do it for a worthwhile cause. Thanks again to the whole AGDQ crew for having me out. And thanks to Sean Lee for capturing my run, along with the embedded chat. You can check it out in the video below, if you're interested.
There hasn't been a Friday the 13th game since LJN's occasionally terrifying (but mostly just annoying) NES adaptation of the slasher film franchise from 1989. If EGM and Friday the 13th creator Sean S. Cunningham are to be believed, that may change later this year.
Cunningham dished to EGM late last week that a new game based on the film was in the works at "an experienced game studio" that, for the time being at least, is going unnamed. The game is targeted for an October, 2015 release, and sounds as though it will be aiming for a multiplayer-focused take on the predator/prey gameplay most recently utilized in Alien: Isolation. Perhaps Turtle Rock's Evolve might be a more apt comparison, as the game will feature a team of "resourceful survivors" going up against the series' unkillable, hockey-mask sporting big bad, Jason Voorhees, in an asymmetrical cooperative/competitive multiplayer environment.
The game seems timed to coincide with the upcoming Friday the 13th TV series (and a new, 13th film, which Cunningham says is in the planning stage). Though it's been 26 years since the last game in this series, there's been a recent uptick in similarly styled horror games of late. Apart from the previously mentioned Alien: Isolation, Supermassive Games' Until Dawn is basically a single-player slasher flick, and the Kickstarter-funded Last Year sounds almost exactly like what this Friday the 13th game intends to be, with some of the game's concept art very clearly calling back to Jason's iconic look.
The EGM story notes that the studio working on the game will be "announced in the coming weeks." In case you want to revisit what Friday the 13th games used to be like without actually having to play one, you can always go watch this classic episode of Spookin' With Scoops.
Today's BTS video covers the EoC/Legacy Mash Up � the option to play with your chosen combination of interfaces and combat mechanics from the EoC and Legacy modes. Mod Asherz is here to tell you more.
Next up is Mod Pi, bringing you the latest on all things .
Finally, Mod Raven joins us for a preview of this year's RuneScape Road Trip, where you'll have the whole of May to complete a set of Gielinor-trotting tasks for some sweet rewards � including a new, seasonal aura!
to follow the latest RuneScape videos.
Mod Asherz and Mod Raven return for today's podcast. Representing the technical developers and content developers respectively � while presided over by Mod Matthe - they go head-to-head to show who really makes RuneScape tick.
. Alternatively, head to or .
Scape hard, Scape often, and � crucially � have fun this weekend. See you on Monday for the EoC/Legacy Mash Up, and more!
Microsoft will be dropping the price of its Xbox One console to $349 starting January 16th, the company announced today.
The price drop, which is described as a "promotion" in the announcement, doesn't come with an end date. If this sounds confusingly familiar, that's because Microsoft instituted an identical price drop over the holiday season, which ended as of January 3rd. If you bought an Xbox One at the $399 price in the roughly two weeks between then and the upcoming drop, I bet you're really, really happy right now.
Most of the announcement and accompanying video involves touting of sales numbers--noting that the system was the best-selling console over the months of November and December in the U.S. according to NPD--and some brief overviews of things on the horizon, like screenshot functionality and new apps for the system. You can read/watch the entire thing here.
I suppose you could file this under "another sign that the end times are upon us." Or you could file it under "people who might put in hundreds of hours of work on something might now be able to support themselves while doing so." Kinda depends on your perspective, I guess.
OK, so the shadowy organization known as Valve sent out an update today to inform the world that the Steam Workshop for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim now has support for paid mods. If they so choose, mod creators can set a price, or even a range of prices, and start charging for their work. Personally, I'm still a little shocked that people still care about Skyrim mods, but if you think about it, that segment of people may very well be the sort of crowd that doesn't like to buy a lot of games and instead tries to get zillions of hours out of one product. Like kids, for example. They don't have their own money! They're kids! Right?
Or, at least, I hope they're kids. The idea of fully formed adults posting the predictable slew of pasted-in ASCII middle fingers that seems to be shitting up the comments section for some of these paid mods is a little disconcerting. Here's a fun screenshot of said slew!
I suppose I should state for the record here that I love ASCII middle fingers.
Anyway, I go back and forth on this. On one hand, the people who create huge, sweeping mods for games probably spend a whole lot of time on that stuff. And if they can be compensated for that work, that sounds kind of cool. But, considering this is Steam, it'll probably go the route of Greenlight and it'll fill up with garbage. Maybe we'll see dirtbags trying to charge 20 bucks for "remove all weight limits" mods or some bullshit like that. Valve seems to have anticipated the potential for abuse on the creator end, and has instituted a 24-hour return policy on all paid mods. Of course, that money goes into your Steam Wallet, and not your bank account, so the money is still trapped up in Valve's system.
Considering that the only Skyrim mods I would be interested in would be ones that would insert Randy Savage or other unlicensed properties into the game, and those are still technically not allowed into the Steam Workshop in the first place, this whole thing seems somewhat benign at the moment. But let's wait and see what happens when other games jump into the circle, which Valve says will happen "in the coming weeks." I bet Cities: Skylines is one of them. The Workshop support has been one of that game's biggest boons, and I bet some of the people crafting new buildings in that Workshop would be interested in doing that for a bit of money.
Skyrim mods are certainly still popular, right? I guess I have to believe that they are, because would these chuckleheads still be doing a "Top 5 Skyrim Mods of the Week" video series if people weren't still watching it? And people wouldn't watch it if they weren't still interested in Skyrim mods... right? OK, maybe I'm digging too deep. I'm going to punch out before I get too close to the truth or something.
Uh... OK, I think this poll widget is mainly for use on Comic Vine, but let's test it out and see if it works over here, too. Like I said, I kinda go back and forth on this. It's one of those "realities of the world" vs. "the kid in me wants everything to be free always and let's never change anything ever because change is scary" sort of situations in my head. Anyway, try voting and let's see where you stand. Think it over!
If you've been a member of Nintendo's Club Nintendo rewards program, you may be disappointed to learn that Nintendo has announced the eventual end of this program. Then again, if you've been a member of Club Nintendo for any length of time, disappointment is probably a familiar feeling.
According to the announcement, North American players will have until March 31st to sign up for the service. Any product released as of today, January 20th, won't be available to register on the website. "Elite status" members have until May 1st to pick up an elite status gift, while all other game/merch redemptions must take place prior to June 30th. After that, any remaining coins on your account will be deleted.
The shutdown applies to all regions, though the dates are slightly different elsewhere. European and Australian Nintendo releases will stop including registration cards as of April 1st--though the New 3DS and 3DS XL models, which release on February 13th, reportedly won't include them either--and points must be redeemed by September 30th. Japan's version of the service will also end on September 30th.
In theory, Club Nintendo was designed to gift neat tchotchkes and free games to loyal Nintendo product purchasers. Members could input pincodes from various Nintendo products into a website, fill out some surveys, and redeem the earned coins for whatever stuff Nintendo had up at a given time. It's existed in Japan since 2003, and eventually came to Europe in 2007, and North America in 2008.
The problem was, apart from things like Virtual Console games and the occasional Mario hat, the American version of the service rarely had much in the way of worthwhile junk to redeem. As of right now, you can redeem points for a game called Grill-Off With Ultra Hand, a Super Smash Bros. poster set, Mario & Luigi or Nintendogs greeting card sets, and a bunch of Virtual Console games (including some bonafide classics like Super Metroid and The Legend of Zelda). That list will refresh in February, if none of that sounds terribly appealing. Meanwhile, here's what's available in the Japanese store. I don't know how Europe's store typically was, but it always seemed like Japan got the better rewards.
Nintendo reportedly plans on replacing the service with something new, but didn't give any indication as to what that service might be, or when it might launch. Hopefully it will offer more in the way of things people might actually want. You know, like hats. Way, way more hats.
Editor's note: This article originally stated that digital purchases do not automatically sync to your Club Nintendo account, which is incorrect. The article has been updated to remove this bit.
Load up on new protean logs this weekend! These stackable supplies can be used to train Firemaking or Fletching, or turned into protean planks for Construction training � perfect when working on your aquarium.
From (game time) on the 24th of April until on the 27th of April, protean logs will be available on Treasure Hunter.
If Construction's what you're after, take your protean logs to a sawmill (either portable or the one near Varrock) to change them to protean planks for 5 coins each. Click on these and enjoy the XP!
If Firemaking or Fletching takes your fancy, simply click the logs and choose what to train. If you'd like to train both at the same time, first select the Fletching option (the knife tool) � then 'Fletch and Burn' to split your XP gain between both skills.
Note that you can train on 60 logs or planks before you must click again and restart the process. You can make up to 500 planks at a time.
As a bonus, some of the other protean items on Treasure Hunter have been replaced with protean packs this weekend. These let you choose the items you'd like, giving you more freedom in your skill training.
We've made some improvements to existing protean items, too:
Protean bars:
Protean traps:
Join us in World 23 for a Skill and Chill Mod Event featuring protean logs! Meet us at Burthorpe Bank at 14:00 game time on Friday 24th April - be there or be square!
FC: Mod Events
Whatever your chosen skill, you can be sure of some great big gains this weekend with protean items. Have fun with your training, and give us your feedback on the forums.
The RuneScape Team
is a minigame � playable from within RuneScape - where players use to claim in-game items as prizes. These range from useful resources to rare weapons and exclusive gear.
Playing Treasure Hunter is simple � click the treasure chest icon that pops up when you log in. If you've not played before, just follow the on-screen guide.
Everyone gets at least one Key per day, and get two. You can , or stock up by redeeming .
If you�d like more, you can also , or by clicking 'Buy Keys' within the Treasure Hunter interface in-game.
Giant Bomb recently conducted a incredibly rigorous scientific set of polling to determine our readers' games of the year for 2014. We opened up voting around January 1st so as to not overlap with the efforts of thatfrood, who has conducted a set of forum-focused polls over the last few years; you can find his poll's results for this year at this link. (For reference, the staff's top ten is at the bottom of this article.)
We thought it'd be interesting to create a profile list-based method of conducting these polls, as well, and sent out notifications to community members via Twitter and Facebook around the time that the polls went live. You can find more info on how this went down via my forum post over here. We'll take a closer look at getting something more elaborate done when the time comes next year!
Some quick facts before we begin:
Here's the top ten games by number of votes received, regardless of position in the top ten list. (I'll post the full spreadsheets in a forum thread in a bit if you data nerds want to see the complete lists.)
In this list, games are weighted by position in the list of the reader who voted for them. Votes are weighted with a value of (1/slot position), such that a first-place vote is worth a whole vote share, while a game ranked in tenth place would only receive a tenth of a whole vote for the purposes of this list.
It's interesting to compare and contrast with ThatFrood's weighted list. The top three games are unchanged; people sure did like Shadow of Mordor in 2014, including the Giant Bomb editors, who likewise voted it their game of the year. The big winner on our weighted list is Bayonetta 2, which jumps up four spots from its position on ThatFrood's community list; the biggest loser is Transistor, which drops out of the top ten games when you sort by vote weight. It's replaced by Hearthstone, which wasn't even in the top ten total vote-getters. Apparently enough people who did vote for it placed it high enough on their lists to bump it into the top ten games when sorted by weight.
For what it's worth, two games appeared on the staff list that didn't appear on either ThatFrood's top ten list or this weighted top ten list: Jazzpunk and Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight came in at position 12 on our weighted list; Jazzpunk ranked number 14.
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight, and I am honored to be your host once again! As all of you will quickly discover I took to heart a lot of the input that many of you provided about improving the format and readability of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight. As always please continue to provide more advice as this is a feature for YOU and always has been.
Anyways in terms of the housekeeping for the site there are a few items worth going over. Firstly Dan is selling a signed "" sign from Wrestlemania with all of the proceeds going to charity over here. Friend of the site Dave Lang wants to inform any Giant Bomb users that did NOT receive your Extra-Life rewards from Iron Galaxies to drop a comment over here. The engineers have located the problem behind the CSRF Token errors! It all traced back to the spam attacks earlier this and last week, and a fix has been deployed. Speaking of the spambot problem @edgework would like to inform you that the anti-spam measures that he designed sometimes target regular users. If this happens to you please refer to, and create an alternate account as a remedy. Finally...you all really need to check out the PAXAMANIA.com site that @marinocreated.
The first clip comes from BTNS from YouTube/Tumblr who has been using the Giant Bomb Quick Look intro to sharpen his animation chops. Check out his best attempt at animating the intro below! The second "clip" is a fairly amazing animated .gif from @fobwashed and showcases his attempt to cross Dan's love for all things Waluigi and Metal Gear Scanlon. Fobwashed also created a wonderfully hilarious clip featuring Drew's bafflement with MGS3's Fury boss battle.
As some of you may recall last Sunday was Wrestlemania, and for those of you that did NOT watch the event our very own Dan perpetrated an invasion of the event by promoting his doofy face, Air Force Gator, as well as his pro-Waluigi propaganda. Don't believe me? Well here's the proof:
This week we are honoring the continually awesome work that @mento makes to improve the wiki pages to numerous Japanese only games that few of you have ever heard about. Might I also provide a friendly reminder that this is all part of his latest Wiki Project that you can read on his latest blog, and that you are all capable of similar feats as well!
At a Windows 10 event held today, Microsoft made a number of announcements, including a new, wearable technology the company is calling Hololens.
Hololens is a headset device that's built around augmented reality technology. It creates 3D holographic images that wearers can interact with. Hololens is a standalone headset device--its CPU, GPU, and "Holographic Processor" are all on-board--that exists within a larger platform called Microsoft Holographic, an initiative the company says is intended to further blend your digital life with reality.
There is no projected price, nor exact release date yet for the Hololens. Wired has an extensive write-up of the device that's absolutely worth reading if you want to get a picture of what Microsoft envisions for this thing. You can also see the company's demonstration video embedded below.
Elsewhere in the event, Microsoft discussed Windows 10's applications in regards to its home gaming console, the Xbox One. Microsoft will integrate Windows 10 into the Xbox One in the future, though Xbox head Phil Spencer did not have specifics on how that integration would function. He did, however, offer a demonstration of Windows 10's new Xbox One streaming technology. Xbox One owners will be able to stream any game from their library to any Windows 10 PC or tablet.
Spencer also confirmed that the Xbox One will have its own Windows 10 app, allowing users to see games you've played on Xbox One and PC devices, and access your friends list and messages. Lastly, it was revealed that Lionhead Studios' upcoming online co-op game Fable Legends will also be coming to Windows PCs, with cross-platform play built in.
Windows 10 is expected to roll out later this year, and will be offered as a free upgrade for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 users for its first year.
