America, 1961. The assassination of Nazi General Deathshead was a short-lived victory. The Nazis maintain their stranglehold on the world. You are BJ Blazkowicz, aka “Terror-Billy,” member of the Resistance, scourge of the Nazi empire, and humanity’s last hope for liberty.
Next year GDC 2018 runs from Monday, March 19th through Friday, March 23rd. Applicants who are chosen to be Conference Associates will be given pre-conference assignments and asked to attend a required orientation dinner on Sunday, March 18th. This is a paid position, so you must be eligible to work in the United States.
Furthermore, those accepted into the program are expected to be on-site during conference hours from the start of your pre-conference assignments through the end of the conference on the evening of Friday, March 23rd.
What will you be doing, you ask? CA duties may include guarding doors and scanning badges, monitoring sessions, answering attendees’ questions, and more. In your free time, you will be able to use your All-Access pass to do things like attend talks or visit the Expo floor.
To apply, head over to the GDC 2018 CA application page and read the instructions. The deadline for applications closes at 11:59 PM PDT, December 22nd, 2017! Applicants will be notified if they are accepted (or not) by January 11th.
Applications submitted after the positions are filled will be offered the opportunity to be put on the waiting list. Applications will be accepted up until 11:59 pm (Pacific Time, UTC-8) on March 13th for the waiting list.
November’s Games with Gold Are Full of Action and Adventure
Welcome to another month of Games with Gold! With a mix of racing, adventure, and platforming challenges, Xbox Live Gold members are sure to have a blast via November’s Games with Gold on Xbox One and Xbox 360.
Available starting on November 1, the arcade racer Trackmania Turbo comes to Xbox One followed by the fantastic adventure game Tales from the Borderlands. Then on Xbox 360 — and Xbox One through Backward Compatibility — enjoy the critically-acclaimed classic platformer Nights into Dreams and the adventure-filled first-person shooter Deadfall Adventure.
All games will only be available for a limited time as part of Games with Gold, so get Xbox Live Gold today to get in on the action.
Trackmania Turbo Do you have what it takes to post the fastest lap time? With four gorgeous environments, multiple difficulty levels and 200 tracks, there’s a ton to see and do. There’s also the unique Double Driver mode in which two players control the same car! And let’s not forget the excellent soundtrack that reacts to your driving style.
Tales from the Borderlands Play all five episodes in this hugely entertaining comedy adventure taking place in the Borderlands universe. Play as both Rhys, a cyber-enhanced dope, and Fiona, an ambitious con-woman, who are thrown together by fate as unlikely partners in their quest for incredible riches. Naturally, plenty of complications like bad guys, gang warfare, betrayal, revenge, explosions (so many explosions) stand between you and riches you can only imagine.
Nights into Dreams The renowned classic platformer Nights into Dreams returns to Xbox! Save the land of Nightopia from Wizeman the Wicked by gathering orbs to unlock stolen emotions and battle his powerful minions. With enhanced graphics, leaderboards, and levels from Christmas Nights, this beloved title is better than ever.
Deadfall Adventures Become an adventurer, travel the world, and hunt for treasure in Deadfall Adventures. The year is 1938, and you’re James Lee Quatermain, son of the renowned adventurer, escorting Agent Jennifer Goodwin to recover an ancient artifact in an Egyptian temple. In this first-person action-adventure game, immerse yourself in the lost world of Mayan ruins, forbidden cities and the deserts of Egypt.
Talking Point: What Games Are You Playing This Weekend? – Halloween Edition
A couple of weeks ago we brought WGAYPTW™ back here on Nintendo Life, and everyone seemed to have a jolly time. With Halloween right around the corner it’s time to pick it up once again.
Of course, a certain incredible game is out now, so plenty will be playing that – but it’s the spookiest time of the year and there are lots of amazing games available. We can all multitask? Right?
So, as promised the series is back in the swing of things and a handful of our team share their gaming plans below.
Tom Whitehead
Well, having reviewed and indeed binged on Super Mario Odyssey I won’t be playing it this weekend. I know, controversial.
Instead I’ve picked up The Mummy Demastered for Switch, especially as it seems to share some of the strengths of forgotten classic Aliens: Infestation. That’ll likely be my main game, but I also plan to get back into The Walking Dead Season One on PC; I progressed quite far a while ago but the save corrupted and I gave up in a huff, but I’m giving it another chance in order to then move onto the various sequels and spin-offs that are already lurking in my Steam library. Oh, and just for the heck of it I’ll fire up the SNES Mini for a bit of Super Castlevania IV.
Those seem like suitable games for the season, in any case.
Ryan Craddock
In what is a truly (not at all) shocking turn of events, I’ll start my list off with Super Mario Odyssey. I imagine almost every single colleague of mine will give it a mention this week so I won’t gush about how excited I am for it too much. My Friday has mainly consisted of waiting by my front door, hoping for a visit from my soon-to-be best friend Mr. Postman.
Luckily, my current, almost unhealthy, need for 3D platforming fun has been kept under control this week by Poi: Explorer Edition. We’ll have a review for you soon enough but my early time with the game has been a really pleasantly surprising experience; I can’t help but be reminded of Super Mario Sunshine’s pure awesomeness at every single turn and, as soon as I’ve eaten this very tasty looking slice of toast, I’ll be getting right back into the action!
Liam Doolan
As I seem to note every year, Australians are slowly beginning to embrace Halloween. What has recently been brought to my attention though is that the country is now also celebrating the Mexican holiday – Day of the Dead – which honours family and friends who have passed away. My own observations aside, this year I’ll be playing Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts on my SNES Classic Mini. Having recently watched the first season of the Castlevania Netflix series, I’m now keen to check out one of the more classic video game entries – which I’m ashamed to admit I did not play much of back in the day. Super Ghouls’n Ghosts is another game I’m looking forward to revisiting, and if I get the chance I might also do a time trial on Ghost Valley in Super Mario Kart.
Ron DelVillano
Between carving pumpkins and eating too much pumpkin-shaped candy, I’m planning to spend my Halloween weekend playing some spooky gaming classics. Just kidding! I’ll be playing Super Mario Odyssey with the rest of you! And probably some Fire Emblem Warriors if I need a break from Odyssey and want a change of pace. Besides, I still don’t quite trust Cappy…
Morgan Sleeper
This weekend, like most of the Nintendo Life family, I’d wager, I’m planning to spend some quality time curled up with the Switch and Super Mario Odyssey! I haven’t had the best track record with sticking with Mario games over the years – Super Mario Land 2 is the only one I remember finishing! – but Odyssey’s globe-hopping theme has got me seriously excited, and I can’t wait to see what‘s in store! When the Switch needs to recharge, I’ll happily hop over to my 3DS. I’m playing (and very much enjoying) the ‘other’ Odyssey – Etrian Odyssey V –for review, and I’ve been having a great time working my way through Layton’s Mystery Journey case by case as I get the time. It’s rainy and windy and fully Fall up here in the Pacific Northwest, so a good mystery and a cup of tea sounds just about perfect!
Lee Meyer
This weekend, I’ll be diving head-first into my most anticipated game of the year, Super Mario Odyssey! This amazing slice of video game goodness will likely take up most of my gaming time, but I’ll try to continue playing the devilishly challenging (for me, at least) Knight Terrors. As a fan of endless runners, I enjoy Knight Terrors’ aesthetic and just-one-more-try gameplay, as well as the unlockable modes and items. Overall, it’s a great time to be a Nintendo fan, and this weekend is the culmination of almost a year of Switch hitting it out of the park.
Jon Cousins
Mario Odyssey, without a doubt. It’s been twenty years in the making, but it looks like I will have the true successor to Mario 64 in my hands. Taking nothing away from Sunshine, Galaxy or 3D World, but nothing has captured my imagination like Mario 64. I played Odyssey at a demo event last weekend, and for the 15 minutes of play time (and the two moons) I got, I feel like it could have been three hours and I still wouldn’t have achieved anything, such is the pure joy of just walking around and discovering things. Aside from that, I’ll probably dip into Splasher. Billed as a cross between Super Meat Boy, Portal and Splatoon, I played it on Switch at TGS and it’s super slick, vivid and fun.
Those are some of our plans. Hit up the comments below to let us know what you’ll be playing!
Feature: Take A Tour Of The UK’s Most Incredible Retro Game Store
As one of the UK’s top tourist destinations, the walled city of York attracts millions of visitors each year, most drawn to its fascinating historic architecture, excellent shops, fantastic tea-rooms and – of course – its majestic Gothic cathedral, which is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe. Among the myriad delights tucked away in its narrow, maze-like medieval streets you’ll find an unlikely retro gaming nirvana; located on Gillygate, a stone’s throw from the aforementioned York Minster, lies Sore Thumb Retro Games. Small yet unmissable thanks to its bright-yellow paint job, this remarkable store could well be the UK’s best retailer of old-school and vintage games, hardware and memorabilia.
I don’t pass that judgment lightly, either. I like to think I know my retro. I started collecting back in the mid-’90s, before retro gaming was even really a “thing”; one of my local game stores was selling off Japanese Mega Drive and Super Famicom titles for £5 a pop and I happily snapped up several games I’d pined over during the earlier part of the decade but had never been able to afford; now these systems were unfashionable thanks to the arrival of the PlayStation, Saturn and N64 so collecting was cheap. From there, my haul grew over the decades and I cast my net further afield, heading down to London on several occasions to visit the legendary Rathbone Place CEX store as well as its dedicated – but sadly short-lived – retro outlet a few streets away (this was long before CEX shifted away from imports and into the realm of DVD and mobile phone sales, it should be noted). The arrival of the web saw me purchasing the vast majority of my burgeoning collection via eBay or other online resellers, and until very recently I’ve struggling to find any brick-and-mortar stores which can match the glory days of the ’90s – until now.
(Click to enlarge any of the images on this page. Trust us, you’ll want to.)
I happened across Sore Thumb Retro Games entirely by chance; I’d recently taken the family to York for a short break and – as is my usual custom – I did a quick check on Google to see if there were any decent video game stores in the city. Sore Thumb popped up instantly, accompanied by some intriguing photos of glass cabinets packed with rare titles, both western and imported. My interest was piqued, and one day I left the rest of the family shopping and ventured underneath the shadow of York Minster, through the weather-worn city gate and BANG – there was Sore Thumb’s bright storefront to greet my eye.
The window was packed with retro gaming goodness, including boxed NES consoles, home micros and even a full-size Star Wars Stormtrooper, emblazoned with the sign “I’m not for sale”. My heart was beating in a way it hadn’t since the days of my London retro gaming shopping trips as I pushed the door open, but the pessimist in me felt the need to curb my enthusiasm, as I’d been in many similar stores lately and come away disappointed.
Disappointment was not something I’d need to worry about here. Stepping into Sore Thumb was like walking into a gaming paradise; every available bit of wall space was covered in games, accessories, consoles and merchandise from the past five decades of gaming history. In one corner sat an Atari 7800, surrounded by cabinets packed with rare Zelda and Pokémon items, as well as a fully-boxed PAL copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night priced at £250 (the European version sold poorly but came bundled with an art book and CD, making it highly desirable these days). At the front of the store two opposite walls are reserved for Nintendo and Sega; as you walk in you’ll find NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube titles in abundance to your left, while on the right there’s a massive selection of Master System, Mega Drive and Saturn titles to peruse. Hanging from the ceiling are controllers of every type and description, and as you delve further into the store you’re faced with a massive wall of black – hundreds of 32-bit PlayStation games, with their (rather boring) uniform case spines.
Opposite to this is the “import” section; a little bit of Japan in Yorkshire. Japanese games for the Famicom, Virtual Boy, Neo Geo MVS, N64, PlayStation, Game Boy Advance and Super Famicom rub shoulders with anime figures and other collectables – the perfect place to lose a few hundred pounds of cash in a heartbeat. The aforementioned cabinets draw your attention to the rear of the shop, their contents being the most valuable in the whole store. Gaming collectables such as Sonic toys and fully boxed Tamagotchis (I couldn’t resist buying one for my son to keep his 20th anniversary one company) take pride of place next to some of the rarest PAL, North American and Japanese releases, including some choice Japanese Saturn shooters and a Sega Mega Jet, a portable (but screen-less) Mega Drive which was installed on Japan Airlines flights in the ’90s.
This is a truly stunning store, and is owned by Lee Cunningham – with Roy Pearson employed to man the shop and impart his wisdom where needed. I sat down with both men to talk about the history of the store and their love of retro.
Nintendo Life: Can you give us some background on your gaming history? What machines did you start playing on?
Lee Cunningham: My first memory was playing a Adman Grandstand console. My dad worked at a scrap yard and he brought it home from a skip in maybe 1982. We could never tune it in correctly but me and my brothers would play the hell out of ‘Tennis’ and ‘Soccer’ – Pong derivatives, basically. In around ’86 when I was 10 I got my own gaming machine. It was a Spectrum 128k with 100 games on only 10 cassettes. I remember spending all Boxing Day coding the Union Jack flag. With this machine I must have doubled my parent’s electric bill as games such as Dizzy had no save facility so I had to leave it on during school time! With the Spectrum I had the ability to save my pocket money and go down to WH Smiths and buy a £1.99 game, and for birthdays a £7.99 one.
During this time I loved playing games such as Lords of Chaos with my mate, Lords of Midnight, Bomb Jack, Joe Blade – just some of my faves. I then jumped to Commodore, seeing a world of colour that I had never seen before, and then to my best machine, an Amiga 500. With games such as Ultima, Moonstone, Midwinter and a all-time favourite Speedball 2 I really got into solo gaming and the ‘big campaign’ kind of games. I was always a WWF (WWE these days, of course) fan, so I bought a Mega Drive to play WWF Super Wrestlemania, and fell in love with Road Rash, Risky Woods and Mega Lo Mania. In my home town only the posh kids had Nintendo so I didn’t get to play one till ’96, when I was shown WWF Royal Rumble on the SNES.
Roy Pearson: The first time I tried any type of game was when my sister received one of the old Atari consoles for Christmas – the VCS, the one with a wood finish. I think the first game I played was probably Space Invaders. Straight away I was really intrigued. It wasn’t till I was about 12 that I received my very own gaming machine and that was the mighty Spectrum 128K. Man, I loved that machine! Games were so cheap too, and there were bloody loads of them. When you can buy something as awesome as Manic Miner for £2.99, who can complain? One of my favourite franchises at the time (and still a little bit now) was the Dizzy series by Codemasters. Sure, the first one was rockhard, but since then I have loved the platforming genre. The only problem was sitting there for 10 minutes waiting for a game to load and then sometimes it crashed and you had to rewind the cassette and try and load it again.
My next gaming machine was when I made the proper move to consoles – it was a Mega Drive. I received one for Christmas with Sonic 2. I did get a SNES a few years later and that’s when I realised that out of all the gaming companies out there, Nintendo is my favourite. Sure, they can treat the UK a bit rubbish sometimes (although things are much better nowadays) but when they create games featuring such memorable characters as Mario and Link I just have to forgive them for any silly decisions they may sometimes make. Since I received my SNES, I’ve owned at least 1 or 2 of the popular consoles during each generation. I currently own all current machines of this generation and lots of the older machines. I also collect shmups, RPGs and platforming games. I am abit of a hoarder! I have just recently purchased an old Amiga 600 at a great price and am loving that too – I have even managed to find a few Dizzy games. Talk about reliving your youth!
Can you give us a brief history of the store?
Lee Cunningham: For 20 years I worked for Royal Mail. Around 8 years ago I started selling on eBay, and this led to me to doing events such as Comic Con, other gaming expos and finally setting up a website. Around 3 years ago I was offed redundancy from Royal Mail, and I used this to set up a market stall which then led to a temporary shop in York. Due to the popularity of the pop-up shop, I found some permanent roots, which is where we are now.
York is one of the UK’s top tourist destinations – does the high footfall coming into the city help you in terms of sales?
Lee Cunningham: Definitely, I get customers from all around the world that are visiting York. Also, the amount of UK-based tourism has been increasing, which is great for the city.
How do you source items for your store? How tricky is it to find desirable games in the era of online reselling and eBay?
Lee Cunningham: It all comes down to price. I have a network or use carbooters, skip rats, house clearance and so on. As long as I can pay what they want I get the gear. It’s tough, though; everybody nowadays thinks they are online business people because they have a eBay account and everybody can look a ‘listed prices’ for items. With CEX starting to sell retro this has made it harder for indie shop like myself.
You’ve devoted a large portion of the shop to Japanese imports and items. Is there a big demand for these?
Lee Cunningham: I wouldn’t say big, but its a very cool niche. I think this puts us on the map, as I have a mini Akihabara here in York! For consoles such as Saturn you really need to play the Japanese games to see the full potential of the machine. Plus, Japanese games always look so much cooler than PAL games. It’s as if they decided that the Brits are dull so we got grey/black machines and standard game art! But in Japan, it’s a kaleidoscope of cool.
When it comes to pricing, most retailers will admit that you can’t compete with online sellers. How do you approach this aspect of your business? Do you try to match prices with eBay, or do you have another means of gauging how much something is worth?
Lee Cunningham: Any trader that says they don’t compare prices to eBay is lying. As a business we look at the ‘sold price’ and take a top average. I feel the fact that you can look and feel the item gives us the right to go ‘top average’. You will always get punters that will enjoy being in the shop and walking down memory lane, but then troll you about being more expensive than eBay. These people need to realise that this is a living museum we run; it isn’t funded by the National Lottery and we have to make money at some point.
What would you say is the most expensive or outlandish item you’ve ever sold in the shop?
Lee Cunningham: We recently sold the Nintendo 64DD to one of your readers actually; with only 10 games in the library it’s an easy one to complete. We have had Panasonic GameCubes boxed and Famicom hotel units. I think the most expensive game was Hyperduel on Japanese Saturn.
Do you still attend any of the retro events around the UK? Are they handy for spreading awareness of your store?
Lee Cunningham: For the past 3 years we have attended every gaming market, Comic Con and expo North of Birmingham. I know that for every 100 flyers handed out you might only get 10 responses, but it’s very important to get out and build your brand and let gamers see what you’re all about.
Do you find you get a typical type of customer in your store, or does it attract a mixture of gamers?
Lee Cunningham: In our shop we get a wide age range, from 7 years to 60 years, I would say. The fact that we don’t sell anything semi-modern keeps our contact with mainstream Call of Duty and FIFA gamers to a bare minimum.
Retro gaming is a massive business now; as gaming moves towards a digital-only future, do you think the market is going to shrink, or grow?
Lee Cunningham: I was worried that this new age where people wouldn’t want anything physical. But I have seen a growth in people owning items – be it vinyl, laser discs, retro games, etc. I would say that my business has a sell-by date, as it is built on nostalgia and memories. But I will keep evolving as a business.
What does the future hold for Sore Thumb? Do you have plans for any other stores? Will you be taking your business online, or are you keen on preserving the face-to-face approach?
Lee Cunningham: I have neglected my website for the last couple of years. I have always been a one-man band so the web store was placed on the back burner. I now have a good team in place so we are currently modernising the shop, which will lead to the website opening again for trade and a second store elsewhere in Yorkshire. You can’t beat dealing with people face to face, but the truth of the matter is people shop online, so we need get on board.
If you’re ever in the vicinity of York then you owe it to yourself to drop into Sore Thumb and soak up the atmosphere, even if you don’t intend to buy anything. However, leaving without something is a true test of willpower.
For the past few months we’ve been busy working on significant improvements and additions to the Steam Curator system. There’s still some work to be done before we can roll these out, but we wanted to share a bit about why we see Steam Curators as a crucial component to exploring Steam, and what changes we’re making.
Why Steam Curators?
We’ve heard from many of you that you want to have a more curated experience when shopping Steam; where the titles that are surfaced and recommended and highlighted are picked by humans that you know and trust. But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it’s unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can’t be the only form of curation in Steam – we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.
So, we’re focusing on how to support the streamers, journalists, critics, content creators, writers, enthusiasts, and friends that you already know and trust to be able to help you find your next favorite game. By following a few Curators on Steam, you’ll not only start to see their recommendations appear prominently when browsing the Steam Store, but you can also explore each of their customized spaces within Steam and see all the titles they have reviewed.
Using the Steam Curator features on Steam is an opt-in thing. If you’re not interested in the opinions of human beings helping you find games that are worth your attention, then we also have some powerful features coming just for you. We’re hard at work on significant improvements to the core recommendation engine which algorithmically suggests games for all Steam users. We’re anxious to talk in depth about that technology too, and will do so in a future blog post.
What changes are coming?
Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives. We’ve heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it’s trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers.
Players
This system really only works if players find value from following some Curators. So we’re adding to the kinds of content that Curators are able to create, and increasing the places within Steam where that content can be seen.
Recommendations provided by Steam Curators can already appear in the main featured spot on your Steam Home page as well as in a dedicated space on your home page. We’re building on this so that recommendations by Curators you follow will also show up at the top of tag and genre pages. This means as you explore, say the Free To Play page, you’ll see recommendations from your Curators for Free to Play games. If you are browsing RPG games, you’ll see RPG games featured from Curators you follow. And so forth.
Many Curators create videos to accompany their reviews, so we’ll now start embedding those videos in a few places alongside the curation. This means that when you click through a recommendation, or when you browse a Curator’s page on Steam, you’ll be able to watch their videos in-line.
We also know that some Curators will review games within certain themes, genres, or franchises. So, we’re adding a new feature for Curators to create lists of games they’ve reviewed that go together. These can be used to create lists such as “best couch co-op games”, “games with amazing Workshop support”, “games by my favorite designer”, “10 games to play while waiting for Witcher 4”, or any other set of interesting ways to organize groups of games.
And if you are looking to find new new Curators that share your tastes, or offer unique information about particular kinds of games, you can explore the ‘Recommended Curators’ or ‘Top Curators’ lists. We’re fine-tuning the ‘Recommended Curators’ section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you’ve been playing.
Curators
One of the pieces of feedback we received from Curators was that they felt it needed to be more rewarding and meaningful for a Curator to spend the time it takes to build and maintain their curation. So there are a few new things we’re building to tackle this.
As we mentioned above, Curators that produce videos as part of their reviews will be see those videos embedded right next to their review in Steam. If you’re a Curator who’s already doing work to create content elsewhere, we want you to be able to use that work in your Steam curation. This means a few of the most popular video formats such as YouTube, nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com will appear right in Steam where players can easily watch them.
Curators will be able to customize and brand their home on Steam by selecting games, lists, and tags to feature and by uploading a personalized background.
We all know that graphs solve everything, so yes, we’re adding more of them. In particular, Curators will be able to see how their reviews impacted their follower’s behavior in the Steam store.
We are helping connect developers with Curators that are most likely to have relevant audience of followers for the developers’ game. More on this below.
Game Developers
We’ve heard from many developers that they need a way of getting their game in front of Curators that have the right audience for that game, and to be able to do it in a way that is easy and secure. We’ve also heard from Curators that it can be a challenge to reach out to developers, who are often swamped with requests that they can’t easily filter through. So we’ve built a whole new system that we are calling Curator Connect.
With Curator Connect, developers can search for appropriate Curators, and then send a copy of their game directly through Steam. We’ve added a number of tools for finding relevant Curators and for identifying the forms of social impact that Curator may have. To start with, developers will be able to search the listings of Steam Curators, narrowing results by name, OS, language, or tags that the Curator indicates they focus on. In the results, developers will be able to see a snapshot of each Curator, including follower counts and any linked social media accounts such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, which can help verify that the Curator is truly who they claim to be. The developer can then build a list of the Curators they wish to send their game to, include a message describing their game, and hit ‘send’.
Curators can then browse a list of games that have been sent to them and can choose to accept or decline as they wish. Accepted games are added to that Curators Steam library to play and review. No need to mess with keys or e-mail.
Next Steps
Today we’re starting a closed beta with a few dozen Steam Curators of different sizes, niches, and languages. This gives us an opportunity to gather feedback and suggestions from Curators and gives those Curators an opportunity to use the new tools to prepare and personalize their store pages ahead of full release. The Steam Curators that are invited to participate in the beta are free to share their thoughts publicly, so you may see some screenshots or write-ups from these Curators as they explore the new features and discuss them with the community.
We’re aiming to run the beta for at least a couple weeks with just the Curators before releasing the update to everyone. Hopefully this blog post helps you understand what we’re trying to do, and why, which we believe will help everyone to have a fruitful conversation.
As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.
Play XCOM 2 for Free This Weekend Only with Xbox Live Gold
Ignite a global resistance to reclaim our world and save humanity! This weekend only, all Xbox Live Gold members can enjoy 2K’s turn-based strategy hit, XCOM 2 for free as part of Xbox Live Gold’s Free Play Days.
Beginning at 9:00 a.m. PT on Thursday, October 26 and running through to 11:59 p.m. PT on Sunday, October 29, Xbox Live Gold members in Xbox One markets will get a special opportunity to fight for the future of humanity.
During the week, you’ll also have the option to purchase XCOM 2 or XCOM 2 Digital Deluxe from the Xbox Store at 60% off. Should you decide to return to the fight later, all of your achievements and saved-game progress will be waiting for you.
You can download XCOM 2 starting at 9:00 a.m. PT on October 26 by clicking on the Gold Member area on the Home Dashboard or downloading directly from the Xbox Store. Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for all the latest Xbox news.
Mega Cat Studios Unleashes Spooky NES Treats In Time For Halloween
Mega Cat Studios is getting in the Halloween spirit with a trio of NES-themed offerings.
Creepin It Reel($39.99)is a NES chiptune album with “officially licensed Dancing Pumpkin Man dance moves” and a fully playable pachinko game, while Creepy Brawlers (from $59.99) “marries monster movies and boxing” with an achievement system, counters and even enemy evolutions. Finally, we have Justice Duel(from $59.99)a four-player couch co-op game with a sizeable campaign, “mech-eagles in top hats” and loads of weapons to collect. It’s even being offered in a bundle with a Multi-tap so you can rope three other friends into playing it with you.
As a bonus, you can order Creepy Brawlers in a special NES cart shell which is perfect for this time of year.
Challenge your mercenary company against a fearsome Lindwurm, an adversary of legend, home to the wild parts of the world and fiercely defending its hoard of treasure.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 10-29-2017, 04:12 AM - Forum: Minecraft
- No Replies
This week in Minecraft — October 28th
Minecraft News
Minecraft 1.13 snapshots have finally begun this week, “After a very long time in development, we’re ready to start snapshots for Minecraft Java Edition: 1.13”. This first snapshot brings Data Packs and an upgrade to LWJGL 3.
Dinnerbone shares what we can expect from future 1.13 snapshots, “The command system will be in a later snapshot, as it’s not ready yet. The great big block ID changes will be in an even later snapshot.”.
In celebration of Stranger Things Season 2, “…Prepare for some spooky retro adventures as you go investigating the shocking arrival of the new Stranger Things skin pack!”. Check out the previews here on Minecraft.net, or watch the trailer below.
An update has been released this week for Minecraft: Edition’s, including PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch and Wii U. This update includes a Halloween Tumble arena, a custom game type for the Battle Mini Game and a custom game type for the Tumble Mini Game.
The release date for Story Mode Season 2 episode 4, “Below the Bedrock”, has been announced, arriving on November 7th.
