Kingdom Come: Deliverance has frequently drawn comparisons to Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim, and while that’s apt to some degree–they are expansive, open-world games that present you with a great deal of freedom–there are other areas where they greatly differ. There’s of course the complete absence of anything magical in Kingdom Come, which seeks to deliver a world based more in history than fantasy, but combat is also quite different.
Put simply, there’s a lot more to account for during a fight in Kingdom Come. There’s much more going on than simply hacking away with your weapon–you have to bear in mind the type of armor your enemy is wearing, the type of damage your weapon deals, and more if you hope to be truly effective.
In the video above, we walk you through some tips on how to excel at combat in Kingdom Come. We look at the different weapon types, leveraging combos to deal extra damage, pulling off perfect blocks and master strikes, and some other useful tidbits. One thing you’ll want to always do is stay on the move, both to keep your opponents off-balance and to ensure you’re in proper position to attack. Unlike many games, you’ll be unable to swing your weapon if doing so would cause it to go through a nearby wall.
Kingdom Come launched recently on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. It’s an experience not without its faults, but those don’t necessarily mean it’s worth overlooking. As our Kingdom Come review states, “It’s an impressive and unflinching look at the medieval era that transports you inside the compelling story of a real person caught in the middle of a civil war. As such, this is one of those rare, memorable games that stays with you long after you stop playing. While quirks and bugs can certainly be frustrating, none of these issues interfere much with the unique and captivating nature of the overall experience.”
Persona fans have a new reason to be hyped up for the upcoming rhythm game spin-offs; Japan’s PlayStation Blog has revealed that both Persona 3: Dancing Moon Night and Persona 5: Dancing Star Night will be PSVR compatible. There were no details as to what exactly the virtual reality portions entail, just an addendum on the blog post saying that these games will support PSVR. All we can really do is use our imagination, and at least hope that we’ll get to either stand atop Tartarus as we watch Mitsuru and Akihiko bust their moves, or get down with Morgana and Makoto at Shibuya Crossing.
Persona 3 originally released in 2006 for PlayStation 2, but also had a re-release with Persona 3: FES that added new content. Persona 3 Portable came to PSP in 2010, which added the option to play as a female lead where dialogue, social links, and characters were improved to fit the new protagonist. With the new dancing game, we see the return of our old friends from Gekkoukan High School, but with all new 3D character models in the same vein as Catherine and Persona 5. Many of the songs we know and love are included in the game along with some new tracks and remixes.
The ultra-stylish Persona 5 came to the West last year and featured one of the greatest original soundtracks in games. Series composer Shoji Meguro fused several genres like acid-jazz, metal, and downtempo to create music that was both unique and empowering. It’s no surprise that a rhythm game was going to follow; we definitely saw it coming. Plenty of amazing songs from the game make their way into the Dancing Star Night tracklist in addition to new remixes.
Both games will not have a traditional story campaign, but there will be a mode that features original settings and character interactions. However, developer and publisher Atlus hasn’t revealed much of the new mode.
Those that buy the “Persona Dancing All-Star Triple Pack” for PS4 will get both new games in addition to a downloadable version of 2015’s Persona 4: Dancing All Night, which was previously a PS Vita exclusive.
For more details on both games, you can read our previous article covering the different editions available and what’s included, and their full tracklists. Persona 3: Dancing Moon Night and Persona 5: Dancing Star Night are set to release in Japan on May 24 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. There’s currently no release date or window for North America and Europe.
Video cards might be incredibly expensive right now due to the cryptocurrency mining bonanza, but a few options for the other key component to a good gaming PC are going for cheap right now. Both flagship consumer CPUs from AMD and Intel are on sale for well below MSRP. The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X can be snagged on Ebay via Newegg for $300 USD, and the Intel Core i7-8700K is available on Walmart for $313.
The Ryzen 7 1800X CPU, which released in March 2017, sports eight cores and 16 threads and is the top-end processor to show off AMD’s new Zen architecture at the consumer level. It runs a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and a boost clock speed of 4.0GHz, but it’s capable of reaching higher frequencies given the right cooling system and hardware configuration. Note that only motherboards with the X370, X300, or B350 chipset allow for unlocked overclocking. The 1800X originally launched at $500 and it was an example of unprecedented value by offering more CPU cores at an affordable price. Now it’s even more cost-effective at just $300.
Intel’s 8th generation of Core CPUs (Coffee Lake) was the company’s answer to AMD’s Ryzen family. With the Core i7-8700K, Intel bumped up the core count of its consumer flagship processor (from four to six) for the first time since the Core line started in 2008. In terms of performance, the 8700K made noticeable strides in terms of performance from past generations by virtue of being a six-core 12-thread CPU. Its base clock speed sits at 3.7GHz, and it can bump one core up to 4.7GHz or two cores to 4.6GHz through Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. However, the CPU requires motherboards with a Z370 chipset, which means the 8700K is not compatible with any previous motherboard. The 8700K launched in October last year for with an MSRP of $360; now on sale for $313, it’s one of the better deals we’ve seen for this processor.
Both CPUs prove to be great for gaming, although Ryzen CPUs tend to fall a bit behind their Intel counterparts in benchmarks. AMD does offer a higher core count for a lower price, which makes Ryzen an attractive option for those who multitask and do a lot of video production/encoding and image rendering. If you want to learn more about how these CPU perform, be sure to read through our Ryzen 7 1800X review and Core i7-8700K review.
When Warcraft, the live-action movie based on the MMORPG video game series and novels, arrived in theaters in 2016, it was neither the box office or critical hit that many had been hoping for. Now, nearly two years later, the movie’s director is explaining why that may be the case.
In an interview with Syfy to promote his new Netflix movie Mute–which is also being hailed as something less than a smash hit–Duncan Jones is very open about the troubling production. From the sound of it, filming of the movie sounds incredibly contentious.
“Warcraft was a political minefield as far as filmmaking goes. And I think a lot of the rewriting in that, over the course of making the movie was really, really difficult and at times disheartening,” he says. “Just being forced to make changes and compromises just due to the politics and the nature of that film. So, that was a real heart-wrencher. But I’ve learned a lot and I’ve become more mature and able to deal with those kinds of situations because I’ve been through it now. But at the time, that felt pretty traumatic.”
At the heart of the issue, Jones believes, was turmoil at Legendary Pictures–the studio producingWarcraft. “It was mainly studio politics. You know, Legendary had an incredibly turbulent period while we were making Warcraft,” he says. “They were associated with Warner Bros. They left Warner Bros. and joined Universal. They were sold to Wanda, this Chinese conglomerate. They lost or replaced a number of their producing staff halfway through our movie.”
Jones also points out the importance of the Warcraft brand to Blizzard, the studio behind the game. “We were also working with Blizzard, who understandably were very careful about what happened with the movie because their bread and butter was the game Warcraft, which was bringing in a billion dollars a year for them,” he explains. While he admits that the movie’s returns would likely be “small potatoes” compared to what Blizzard makes from subscriptions to the game, it was still very protective of its brand. “It was really a very active political landscape,” he says.
Still, the experience of making Warcraft hasn’t necessarily turned Jones off to doing approaching another big-budget property. However, he would certainly approach it in a different way. “I’m a lot wiser now,” he says.
Although there’s no new mainline Fable game announced, you can return to the land of Albion right now. Fable Fortune, the collectible card game based on the fantasy series, has fully launched on Xbox One and PC.
Fable Fortune has been playable through Microsoft’s Game Preview program since last summer, but developers Mediatonic and Flaming Fowl launched the 1.0 version of the game this week. As with other collectible card games, Fable Fortune is free to play, but it offers additional card packs for purchase.
For the launch version of the game, the developers have also added a bunch of new features and implemented changes. These include Achievements, co-op voice chat, new cards, and deck-building tips. Additionally, low-cost cards have been rebalanced to reduce their effectiveness in swinging the course of a match.
Finally, the developers are also holding a bunch of temporary events to provide rewards like double XP and free cards. There will be a new event each week for the next five weeks; you can read more about Fable Fortune’s upcoming events here.
According to Deadline, Boyle is working on a script for Bond 25 with John Hodge, who wrote the screenplays for several of the director’s movies, including Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and 2017 sequel T2 Trainspotting. Boyle had an idea for “a very specific 007 movie,” and that this script is separate from the one by veteran Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
The site states that Hodge’s script won’t be complete for a couple of months, at which point it will be delivered to MGM. The studio will then make a decision about which script to go with; if the Hodge script is chosen, then Boyle will direct it. If not, he will step away and a new director will be hired to direct Purvis and Wade’s screenplay.
Earlier this week, Christopher Nolan ruled himself out of directing the next 007 film. Despite meeting with producers last year, the Dunkirk and Dark Knight director stated: “I won’t be the man. No, categorically. I think every time they hire a new director I’m rumored to be doing it. They don’t particularly need me. But I’ve always been very inspired by the films and would love to do one someday.”
Sometimes a sci-fi movie just barely misses the mark. Maybe it didn’t hit quite the right tone, or it failed to provide satisfying answers to the thought-provoking questions it proposed. There are plenty of science fiction films that we enjoy despite their flaws, because there’s some good in them, too. And then there’s Mute.
From Netflix and Duncan Jones, Mute promised to be a return to form for the director and writer behind the instant classic 2009 mind-bender Moon (and, more recently, the less-than-classic Warcraft). Unfortunately, Mute is a cartoonish, nonsensical, tone-deaf, derivative, outrageously awful nightmare without a single redeeming quality. Bummer, right?
From beginning to end, Mute is simply hard to watch. It starts when a young Amish boy named Leo suffers a terrible boating accident that leaves his vocal cords permanently shredded. As an adult, Leo (Alexander Skarsgard) has emigrated to Germany. A brief fly-by on a newspaper clipping clumsily tells us that the German chancellor invited American Amish to relocate there en masse to bring a sense of “tradition” back to the country, and that’s all the explanation we ever get for that.
After several early scenes of drippy, melodramatic flirting that would make Tommy Wiseau cringe, Leo sets out on a mission to find his missing girlfriend, a blue-haired cocktail waitress named Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh, whose acting is ridiculously, terribly over the top). Meanwhile, Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd, sporting an absurdly huge handlebar mustache) is an AWOL American soldier who does under-the-table surgeries for the mob in the hopes of getting papers for him and his daughter to return home. His friend Duck Teddington (Justin Theroux in an insanely bad wig) is also around, for reasons that become horrifyingly clear as the movie progresses.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Leo being Amish has absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever, and so boils down to a pointless, distracting, silly quirk. He works as a bartender, where he doesn’t hesitate to skillfully beat up drunk guys who hit on Naadirah. He uses technology, albeit reluctantly. In other words, he could have been any random schmuck and the only thing about him they’d need to change is his suspenders.
Leo being mute doesn’t really affect the story either; it just makes many scenes unnecessarily long as we wait for him to scribble his side of each conversation on a notepad. His lack of speech carries no thematic weight, and it never even hinders him plot-wise. It does have one positive effect, though, at least for Skarsgard: He doesn’t have to say any of the lines in this terrible script.
Here’s a small sampling of actual lines from this movie, all from relatively early on since the entire thing is like this and at a certain point you have to stop transcribing every single thing that every single character says:
“That’s a real sexy hood ornament you’ve got dancing up there tonight.”
“If my mom tried to stop me talking, I would f*** her up. And she’s in a wheelchair.”
“He doesn’t need words. He’s kind. Why wouldn’t I love him?”
“School girls, babe. Itty bitty titties and smooth little p***ies. Then they grow up.”
That last is said with a big sigh by Justin Theroux’s character, a pediatric surgeon who’s also a pedophile. The line is accompanied by an actual upskirt shot of a nearby school girl, the camera lingering on her behind as she bends over to pick up a bowling ball.
Mute treats Duck’s preference for young girls as a joke for the movie’s first half, like Matthew McConaughey’s famous quote in Dazed and Confused about how high school girls always stay the same age, no matter how old you get. Except Theroux’s character is literally filming pre-pubescent young girls in their underwear at his practice. The only thing that will make your stomach turn more than that fact is the flippant way the movie plays these scenes, almost as if it’s supposed to be funny.
Halfway through, this subplot seems like it’s about to take a major turn. Cactus–who has a young daughter–confronts Duck about his pedophilia, telling him firmly that he has just got to cut it out. Then they go to the mall, where they get drunk and steal some peanuts, like the previous scene never happened. As they leave, Cactus screams a homophobic slur at a security guard who confronts them.
Go ahead and re-read those sentences a couple more times and let them sink in. Now consider for a second that the entire movie is this bad. The biggest mystery is how Jones convinced these actors to go along with any of it.
Mute‘s futuristic setting itself has some promise, but it’s utterly squandered. The movie doesn’t have a single original idea, simply ripping shamelessly from great sci-fi and cyberpunk films that have come before it. Flying cars? Grungy neon? Sexy robots? Drones? A seedy city underbelly populated by prostitutes in crazy pseudo-futuristic outfits? Check, check, and check–although Mute could have easily been set in the present, or even in the past, since not one of these shallow sci-fi trappings has a single tangible effect on the story.
As Mute‘s plodding, meandering two-hour length comes to a close across multiple increasingly nonsensical climactic showdowns, nothing else will strike you so much as the baffling, swirling, inexplicable, disgusting mess of it all. Nothing anyone in this movie does makes a shred of sense, either logically or emotionally. Every single character is a one-dimensional caricature with no redeeming qualities. The effects look cheap. The score is forgettable. It’s casually offensive, vulgar, gross, and mean for absolutely no reason. And it’s unabashedly unaware–or uncaring–of the fact that you shouldn’t play scenes about pedophiliac pediatricians and domestic abuse with the same weightless flippancy as a joke about robot strippers or a less-than-subtle cameo from Moon‘s Sam Rockwell.
And by the way, the fact that Mute and Moon apparently take place in the same “universe” doesn’t make Mute any better (although this movie’s existence may retroactively make Moon seem worse).
Mute is a bad joke about itself, the movie version of a Weird Al Yankovic song (an “Amish Paradise” sequel set in the future?), only if the filmmaker wasn’t aware it was supposed to be a parody. It’s like Mute underwent so many rewrites that the scenes and characters no longer match up–or like it’s a first draft that never underwent a single edit, though considering how long Jones was trying to get this made–12 years!–the former seems more likely. At least now we have an idea why he had such a hard time.
The Good
The Bad
Paul Rudd is kind of funny once or twice
Nonsensical, stupid plot
Poorly written script filled with cringe-inducing lines
Ugly, unoriginal world
Cartoonish, one-dimensional characters
Totally derivative without a single original thought
[UPDATE] The PlayStation Network’s issues have now been sorted out, it seems. The PSN Status page shows that all PSN services are now back up and running normally.
The original story is below.
The PlayStation Network, the online service that powers PlayStation products, is running into some problems right now. The PSN’s official Status page shows that “Gaming And Social” elements of the service are experiencing some hiccups currently.
“You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features,” reads a line from the page. “Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience.”
The service interruption is affecting PlayStation 4 alone, the page says. All other PSN services, including Account Management, PlayStation Now, PlayStation Vue, PlayStation Store, and PlayStation Music, are working normally, the support page says.
We’ll report back with more details on this latest PSN service interruption as new details become available. It is unclear how widespread the issues may be or how long the interruption will last. As always, your mileage may vary. Keep checking back for more.
2017 may be over, but the video game industry is not yet finished celebrating the year’s best games. The 21st DICE Awards took place this evening in Las Vegas, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took home the highly coveted Game of the Year award.
Breath of the Wild won four awards in all tonight. In addition to Game of the Year, it won Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Game Design, and Adventure Game of the Year.
In addition to these awards, DICE honoured Nintendo’s Genyo Takeda with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He was instrumental in the development of the Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii.
You can see a full rundown of DICE Awards categories, nominees, and winners below. The winners are in bold.
21st D.I.C.E. Awards Winners
Game of the Year
Cuphead
Horizon Zero Dawn
PUBG
Super Mario Odyssey
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Outstanding Achievement in Animation
Cuphead
For Honor
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Horizon Zero Dawn
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
Cuphead
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Horizon Zero Dawn
Little Nightmares
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Outstanding Achievement in Character
Assassin’s Creed Origins – Bayek
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice – Senua
Horizon Zero Dawn – Aloy
Star Wars Battlefront II – Iden Versio
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy – Chloe Fraiser
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition
Retailer GameStop has announced a big new sale coming up this weekend. On February 24, GameStop will hold its “Pro Day Sale,” with discounts on consoles, games, and more. The big catch is that you have to be a Pro or Elite Pro member to take advantage of the offers.
If you’re in the market for an Xbox One X, GameStop is selling the console with a free copy of PUBG and an extra controller for $500. Additionally, all new Xbox One S consoles are marked down by $50, while controllers are up to 50 percent off when you meet certain trade requirements.
Other hardware deals include a nice discount on the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PlayStation VR bundle, which is going for $350 instead of $450 during the sale. Additionally, GameStop is offering 50 percent off the game Invisible Hours when you buy any PlayStation VR headset bundle. On top of that, the HTC Vive bundle is marked down to $500.
GameStop’s Pro membership costs $15/year, while Elite Pro subscriptions cost $30/year. You can learn more about the packages and their benefits here on GameStop’s website. You can see the full GameStop Pro Day Sale flyer here on GameStop’s website.
![PSN Is Having Some Issues Right Now [UPDATE: FIXED]](https://playerschoicegames.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/3356201-screen2Bshot2B2018-02-232Bat2B4.27.072Bpm.png)
