Right on schedule, NetherRealm today released a new trailer for Injustice 2 that focuses on the super-fast superhero, The Flash. The video spotlights some of The Flash’s moves as he fights against a number of villains, including Gorilla Grodd. Also on display are some of the fighting game sequel’s stages, which look pretty impressive.
Here’s the trailer, and be sure to let us know in the comments what you think of The Flash’s moves.
In other news about Injustice 2, NetheRealm released the fourth chapter in the game’s Shattered Alliances series last week–watch it here. Additionally, NetherRealm has confirmed that the next Watchtower broadcast is coming up this week. The stream may have something to do with the character Scarecrow, given NetherRealm told fans to “Never FEAR…”
Former Xbox and EA exec Peter Moore has recounted the opposition he faced in trying to make Sega come to terms with its declining relevance during the Dreamcast era. In the midst of his battles he even went as far as telling Yuji Naka, the creator of Sonic, to “f**k off” when evidence that Sega’s brand was fading was refuted.
At the time, Moore was Sega of America’s chief operating officer and, in an interview with Glixel, he described the challenges he faced in trying to make the company understand it was seen as the “grandad” of the industry.
“We did a focus group here in San Francisco, I’m trying to think what year this would be, probably late 2001, early 2002, because I needed to prove to the Japanese that our brand was starting just to fade away,” he explained. “And so we asked [a] focus group, a bunch of 18-, 19-year-olds, a classic question, ‘If a video game publisher was a relative or a friend, who would they be?’”
Rival company EA was described by the focus group as the “arrogant quarterback” and Rockstar was the “drunken uncle” that is “the life of the party for a little while, and then he disappears for a long time.” Sega, however, was perceived as “your grandad,” who “used to be cool, but even he can’t remember why anymore.”
Moore filmed the focus groups where these discussions were had and presented them to the Japanese side of the company, which included Naka and Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki.
“[Naka] and I have a love/hate relationship on a good day. And we show him this, and it’s subtitled in Japanese, and when it comes to that piece he just [slams his hand on the table], ‘This is ridiculous. You have made them say this. Sega is the great brand, nobody would ever say this, you have falsified!’ He just gets in my face.
“So I said to the translator, ‘Tell him to f**k off.’ And the poor guy looks at me and says, ‘There’s no expression in Japanese.’ I said, ‘I know there is.’ And that was it. That was the last time I ever set foot in there.”
Moore noted that he loved, and “still loves” Sega, but added that its most prominent developers weren’t able to see “the world was changing around them,” and therefore instigating a change in identity was difficult.
“I rarely get upset, but to be accused of doctoring a video, because there’s none so blind as those who will not see, right? I loved Sega, still love Sega, but it was dominated by the developers to the extent where Sega as a company couldn’t move if Suzuki, [Nights: Into Dreams developer] Nakagawa-san, [and Jet Set Radio developer, Kazuma] Iguchi weren’t into it.”
Moore’s desire to transform Sega’s identity came in light of shifting trends within the industry, which were steered by games like Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 3 and Sony’s PlayStation, which courted maturer gamers.
“That was, to me, this inflection point. Once the tech started to get more powerful, the creative elements that would come over from Hollywood and from television all of a sudden–that was what gave us Rockstar, and what the Houser brothers, to their credit, did for games. I mean, you look back on the history of this industry, you can point to these moments and say, ‘That’s when everything started to change.’”
Shortly after his meeting with Sega, Moore was approached by Microsoft, which was looking into challenging Sony’s living room dominance. At the time, Microsoft had been working on Xenon, which would go on to become the Xbox 360. Moore agreed to join the company and was instrumental in the success of the Xbox 360.
After his time at Microsoft, Moore joined EA, most recently serving as its chief competition officer. However, in February he announced he would be leaving the company, and the games industry, to take up the role of chief executive officer for Liverpool FC, the English football team that Moore has been a lifelong fan of.
Uncharted’s upcoming spinoff, The Lost Legacy, might be over 10 hours long, according to developer Naughty Dog.
In an interview with IBTimes UK, the company’s head of communications, Arne Mayer, said “we couldn’t keep it short.”
“Years ago, when we were asked if we were ever doing a single-player expansion for Uncharted we always said, ‘Well, we don’t have the self-discipline to do that,’” recalled Mayer. “If we tried to do that we’d create a full game.
“There’s no way we could constrict and restrain ourselves, and that’s exactly what was happening here. When we were doing story pitches, we were coming up with a game that would be over ten hours long and so we suddenly realised everything we said was true and we couldn’t keep it short.”
While the final length of The Lost Legacy was not revealed, Mayer’s comments suggest Naughty Dog was not able to shorten the story’s length and it therefore may take some time to complete.
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy stars series favorites Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross, and it doesn’t feature Nathan Drake at all. It’s an expansion, of sorts, to Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, though it is standalone, so you don’t need to own Uncharted 4 to play The Lost Legacy. Naughty Dog previously made a standalone expansion to The Last of Us, titled Left Behind, though that originally launched as DLC and only had a runtime of around three hours.
Persona 5 has finished top of the UK physical games chart in its first week on sale, as Mass Effect: Andromeda tumbles from No.1 to No.5 in the week ending April 8. Altus’s title is the first JRPG to top the UK chart since 2013’s PlayStation 3 exclusive Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, and it’s the biggest Persona launch ever in the UK.
The rest of the chart is made up of many familiar faces; check out the full list below courtesy of sales monitor Chart-Track. Note this table does not include digital sales data, and so should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.
“Persona 5 is a game that shouldn’t be missed,” said our reviewer, Lucy James. “It’s stuffed to bursting point with gameplay ideas and presentation flourishes–there’s an overwhelming level of artistry in every part of Persona 5, making it a truly standout entry in the series. It’s a refined, effortlessly stylish RPG that will be talked about for years to come.”
The Microsoft Store in Sydney, Australia will this week launch Xbox Academy, a series of free game development classes in collaboration with the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE), a multi-national and non-profit college focusing on game development, animation, and visual effects. The move is timed in conjunction with Australia’s Easter school holiday period, in an effort to encourage school-aged children to discover what the process behind game development entails, and get a taste of what career paths are available to them in the field once they graduate.
The program will feature three different courses led by AIE tutors, which cover different aspects of the game development process: Game design, game programming, and developing games on the Xbox One. Each course is intrinsically linked to a similar course taught by AIE, which allows for an obvious path for further education should attendees seek to pursue it. All workshop costs covered by the Microsoft store, and each course runs for three hours.
GameSpot recently had a chance to attend a media session where we got a taste of the contents for each course. For the duration of the class, each student is provided with a Surface Tablet for note-taking, drawing, and programming tasks, as well as a development-ready Xbox One S.
The game design course focuses on the conceptual stage of development, with the goal of equipping students with the terms and tools to be able to analyse and speak about aspects of a game’s design, as well as workshop the specifics of a burgeoning game concept before even beginning to program it.
In our condensed version of the course, each student began by writing a short pitch on a game we wanted to develop. From there, the class moved between desks to provide feedback and iterate on the concepts of other students, in order to give new ideas and perspectives in terms of its themes or mechanics. We then refined our original ideas and were given guidance into how best to communicate these game ideas to different audiences, how we wanted our games to make the player feel, and think about the business side: how to best pitch a game to potential investors.
The game programming course revolved around giving students a primer on the cross-platform game engine, Unity. We were taught the basics of using Unity’s graphical interface by populating a 3D world with solid planes of ground, introducing shapes and objects, and giving those objects properties that would allow them to physically interact with the world in ways we desired.
We were simultaneously shown how to write and apply basic code to these objects in a text-based scripting interface, learn how these two types of creation tools interacted, and gained some understanding to how team-based game development can work between programmers and designers. AIE representatives told us that the full, three-hour class would also cover some basic artificial intelligence application and program deployment.
The Developing Games on Xbox One course also involved learning cross-platform game programming skills, but dealt with techniques specific to coding on Microsoft’s wide-reaching Universal Windows Platform, which covers PC, Xbox, Hololens, and mobile platforms. Our concise version of the course involved tinkering with a prefabricated project, learning to code variables to assign movement parameters and Xbox controller configurations to an image of Master Chief, and then deploy the final product onto an Xbox One for live testing, which was a satisfying and motivating result to see first-hand.
The emphasis is that students can easily continue to pursue the skills and programs they learn during the Xbox Academy courses at home. Unity is a free download, and every Xbox One can easily be turned into a development kit. Participants of the Xbox Academy program will be able to save any work done at the Microsoft Store onto a complimentary USB flash drive and continue working on their projects.
A Microsoft Store representative told GameSpot that they expect to teach up to 120 prospective students throughout the current holiday period, and that the Xbox Academy program is something they hope to continue hosting in future.
The current series of Xbox Academy classes will run from April 10 until April 22, 2017. Interested students can apply for Xbox Academy workshops on the Microsoft Events page.
United States box office estimates for the April 7-9 weekend have come in, showing that the animated movie The Boss Baby continues to dominate, while Ghost in the Shell fell significantly.
The Boss Baby, which features the voice of Alec Baldwin in the lead role, made $26.3 million to stay at No. 1 for two weeks running, according to Entertainment Weekly. Coming in just behind it was Beauty and the Beast, which made $25 million to add to its already-huge domestic haul of $432.3 million. Worldwide, the live-action remake has now made an incredible $977.4 million; it is 2017’s highest-grossing movie so far.
Rounding out the top five were Smurfs: The Lost Village ($14 million), Going in Style ($12.5 million), and the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell ($7.4 million). Ghost in the Shell‘s box office numbers in the US dropped by 60.6 percent compared to week 1. Globally, the film has now made $124.4 million against a $110 million budget. A previous report said the film could end up losing $60 million.
Another notable new release was the Anne Hathaway monster movie Colossal, which made $125,809 from only four US theaters. That’s an average of $31,452 per theater, the highest of any movie this past weekend.
The full Top 10 highest-grossing movies in the US for the April 7-9 weekend follow below (via Entertainment Weekly):
A major World of Tanks professional gaming event, the WGL APAC Season II Finals, was held today in Taipei, Taiwan. EL Gaming beat Team Efficiency convincingly in the finals, winning by a score of 7-1, and claiming a big prize of $50,000 USD.
EL Gaming started off strong, winning games 1 and 2 easily, but Team Efficiency came back with more decisive and spirited play in Game 3 to make it 2-1. EL Gaming stormed back in Game 4, losing just one tank in another victory. Game 5 was the most competitive. The match came down to the last minute, with EL Gaming claiming victory to make it 4-1. This felt like a turning point in the match, as EL Gaming stormed through the next three games to win overall 7-1.
A victorious EL Gaming holding their trophies
EL Gaming beat Horsemen 7-1 in the Semifinals yesterday, while Team Efficiency took down Caren Tiger in its own Semifinal round by a score of 7-4.
The WGL APAC Season II Finals had a prize pool of $100,000 USD, with $50,000 going to EL Gaming. EL Gaming and Team Efficiency move on to the Grand Finals in Moscow later this year.
In an interview following the match, EL Gaming players discussed their victory. Here is a rundown of what they said, as relayed through a translator:
They prepared hard for Team Efficiency.
They are now preparing for their match at the Grand Finals in Moscow
They grade themselves an 8/10 for their performance this weekend.
How do they plan to celebrate? By eating and sleeping well.
And here is the moment that EL Gaming captured victory today, securing back-to-back wins at the event:
He and Carrie Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, gave the go-ahead to Disney to use “recent footage” of Fisher in Episode IX, Todd said.
“Both of us were like, ‘Yes, how do you take her out of it?’ And the answer is you don’t,” Todd Fisher told the New York Daily News. “She’s as much a part of it as anything and I think her presence now is even more powerful than it was, like Obi Wan–when the saber cuts him down he becomes more powerful. I feel like that’s what’s happened with Carrie. I think the legacy should continue.”
In January this year, Lucasfilm released a statement to say that it has “no plans to digitally recreate Carrie Fisher’s performance as Princess or General Leia Organa.”
“Carrie Fisher was, is, and always will be a part of the Lucasfilm family,” the statement continued. “She was our princess, our general, and more importantly, our friend. We are still hurting from her loss. We cherish her memory and legacy as Princess Leia, and will always strive to honor everything she gave to Star Wars.”
“I think the problem is, we’ve really targeted our min spec in a way that we would have to revisit performance and how to get on that platform,” he told Express Online (via NeoGAF).
In addition to that, Kaplan said it’s already no small task to support Overwatch on three platforms–PC, Xbox One, and PS4–so adding a fourth isn’t something Blizzard could necessarily do right now.
The game director also talked about how he’s happy that his team has been able to patch Overwatch on all systems at around the same time. Bringing on a new platform in the Nintendo Switch “would make that difficult,” Express Online reported.
Overall, however, Kaplan doubled down on his earlier comment, saying Nintendo Switch remains a possibility for Overwatch sometime down the road.
“Just because we’re not on a platform right now, it doesn’t mean we won’t reconsider it in the future, so we stay aware of all these things,” he explained.
