Reboot: This Week In Games: UnXboxing, "Games Launch Rock" and Clown Zombies
Gaming is complex, catch up.
Image via Complex Original
Gaming is complex, so catch up each week with the short and dirty in Reboot: This Week In Games.
This week saw Oculus VR pulling in big names to staff-up its Dallas office. John Carmack was named at CTO, responsible for bringing in developers for the company. Do we need a reason to be more excited about the Oculus Rift? Probably not but Oculus can never be too awesome, can it?
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified released the final of its live-action trailers The Aftermath which captures the horror aspect of this XCOM release; It doesn’t get any scary than zombie clowns kids.
We also got our first UnXboxing and began to covet the thing that's going to be eating our money for the next couple of years, if you’re of the Microsoft persuasion that is. It's just so damn pretty!
RELATED: New Xbox One Details Revealed in First Unboxing (Video)
RELATED: Reboot: This Week In Games; Oculus Jerk, EA Lawsuit and Carmack Explains it All
RELATED: Reboot: This Week In Games; Battelog, Kanye and the End of Fez?
If you bring Carmack, they will come.
John Carmack decided to diversify a bit more this week by joining Oculus VR. Apparently being the creator of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Rage, and the dude who owns his own aerospace company just isn't exciting enough. While Carmack will retain his place at id Software he's taken the title of Oculus' Chief Technical Officer, responsible to hiring developers for Oculus' growing company.
Speaking of companies getting themselves in order, Nintendo this week dropped a ton of news about upcoming games during its ongoing Nintendo Direct presentations. One of the most exciting being The Wonderful 101 extended preview, maybe the best reason yet to buy a Wii U.
Nintendo, after recent success in Japan, opened litigation against console hacking company HackYouConsole.com. Nintendo claims that the R4 cartages, now outlawed in Japan, are a blatant infringement upon its copyrights to the Nintendo DS systems.
Oribit the clown zombie.
2K wrapped up its live-action series Burn Roomin the run-up to the release of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The Burn Room series, directed by Henry Hobson and starting Dominic Monaghan as agent Ennis Cole, follows the first encounter with the Outsider invaders in the small town of Pima. The invaders have destroyed agent Cole’s family and town; with nothing left to lose he throws himself into a hopeless battle.
2K also released a mini-game this week called HungoverX, showing us a glimpse our morning after the August 20 release of The Bureau. Battle through your office while dehydrated and twitched-out on spiked energy drinks and off-brand malt liquor to achieve further employment. Stock-up on water before the release.
Neil Druckmann revealed in an interview that the original storyline for Naughty Dog's critical and commercial hit The Last of Us was more tame than the one that made it into the final game. The final, controversial ending was unpopular at first but over time Druckmann was able wear down the developers and get it to the final release, thanks Neil.
Now we can't even pretend to be A-Rod.
Everyone's favorite dog-fighting (former) Eagles (current) quarterback, Michael Vick, has been selected as the Madden All-25 Team that ranks the greatest Madden athletes of all time at the height of their virtual greatness and places them at your disposal.
While Vick seems to have redeemed himself in the eyes of fans, or at least Madden, New Yorker's favorite complaint, Alex Rodriguez, is not only facing a ban from the MLB but now he’s facing a virtual ban. MLB 13 The Show has pulled A-Rod from its weekly rosters. Given the amount of MLB banning and suspensions being handed down right now it presents an interesting question for video games with MLB licenses. To be banned literally is also to be banned virtually?
The domination just got a little better in NBA 2K14 as 2K Sports has announced the introduction of dunk blocking. That's right, we can finally swat the ball away from your opponent's hand when he goes in for the slam, sucker.
Makes excellent boots.
A Dota 2 gamer visiting Valve's offices snapped a photo that seems to suggest the existence of Left 4 Dead 3 and the Source 2 engine. Shot by a member of the Dota 2 Reddit community who were invited to visit Valve for the Dota 2 International this week the screen shows correspondence of current projects. It's hard for use to believe that Valve just lets tourists saunter up to computers and snap pictures but hey, maybe this is the big news coming up from Gamescom in Germany.
While most of the animals we'll be hunting in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag remain a mystery, the developers released some awesome footage of hunting Great White Sharks. There's no word yet if we can ride a multi-shark chariot while attacking Sperm Whales but that should be a thing, along with our pet one-eyed dolphin.
Speaking of better times in whale hunting, some of the developers of the crazy-scary F.E.A.R. went underground for the last year creating the black and white, creep fest Betrayer where players try to uncover the secrets of a lost British colony in Virginia circa 1500 by primarily battling conquistador ghosts. Yikes this looks as scary than when grandma took us the colonial Williamsburg haunted house; it was just hardtack and smallpox.
UnXboxed
This week saw the first unboxing of the Xbox One, an UnXboxing let's say. Yep it's all there, plus it was revealed that every Xbox One comes with an included headset and HDMI 4K cable for 3D movies and - we guess - 3D games at some point.
Amazon joined every other company on Earth when it was leaked that they too are creating an Android Console. There are officially enough Android consoles now for every man, woman and child to have a completely different one, fantastic. We're sure Amazon's going to take over this market, other companies have had trouble getting users to spend money on the system but if Amazon can produce it cheaply enough, it probably won't matter. They’ll just snuff out the competition with their huge library of games and apps.
It's important to take a step back from the current console buzz and look at some simple launch facts. Eloquently put together in this School House Rock parody, Game Launch Rock! serves up a slice of humble pie to the game companies and puts past releases in some perspective, so before you pre-order, just take note.