Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Tanya Valdez via Video Game Examiner

The bomb dropped last week as we learned that Bungie had decided to discontinue work with voice actor, Peter Dinklage, in the Destiny franchise. The news continued on to declare Nolan North as a replacement for Ghost in The Taken King expansion for Destiny.

For those who do not know who Peter Dinklage and Nolan North are, they are predominant voice actors in the gaming industry. Dinklage is also a well-known actor who many remember as Miles Finch in Elf, Eddie in Pixels, and countless other characters in big Hollywood movies. Nolan North is a beloved video game actor who’s known for voicing Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series, David in The Last of Us, and so many more. He has worked so tightly in the gaming community that he even voiced a character named after himself, President Nolan North of The United States of America, in Saints Row IV.

While that news was circulating last week, we were only left to speculate reasons for Dinklage’s removal from the upcoming expansion. Today, Bungie shares why this decision was made. Executive producer Mark Noseworthy shared that it was basically over his unavailability. He shared with Game Informer that the decision was mainly due to “Hollywood nonsense”.

“Dinklage was awesome to work with but we needed to work with someone who is more available. Nolan is a pro, this is his thing,” he explained. “You can just call him up and say ‘hey, next week we’re doing this internal play test and it would be great to get some Ghost dialogue in there’. And he’s available.”

IGN reported that Dinklage’s availability for his role in The Taken King is apparently crucial because Ghost will now be “more important in the game’s story, offering lore when bits of the environment are scanned,” they explained. “Additionally, missions from the original Destiny are being reorganised to unlock along more logical quest lines. As a result, having someone on-call to re-record their lines if needs be was a high priority for the developer.”

So, while many believed it was due to the heat Dinklage got for his “unenthusiastic performance in Destiny”, this was definitely not the case. Nolan North will now be re-recording all the old lines as well as the new ones. The Taken King expansion for Destiny is still slated for a release date of September 15, 2015.

by Dave Thier via Forbes

We have seen some impressive Xbox One bundles in the past, but this one takes the cake, at least for now. Best Buy has announced a back to school sale that that combines Microsoft’s 500 gb Xbox One (with either Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Assassin’s Creed: Unity+Black Flag) with a 40-inch Samsung TV, aimed at incoming college students. The TV costs $429.99 on its own, which, when assuming $30 (could be slightly higher, could be slightly lower) for the bundled game, puts the price of the actual Xbox One hardware at $40. This is of course the logic of the bundle, which assumes that you would have bought all the of individual components for full price separately, but still, if we assume that, that’s an Xbox One for $40. That’s not bad. That’s not bad at all. The deal will run Sunday Aug. 9 through Sunday Aug. 15, so look for it then.

There are other ways of quantifying this deal, of course: you could say that its $280 off of the complete package, or it’s a 40-inch Samsung HDTV for $150. But I obviously prefer the one that considers the Xbox One at $40, if only for sheer hilarity’s sake. On the other end of the spectrum, you could pay $500 for the Xbox One Halo 5: Guardians Bundle, with no TV included.

“It’s the perfect college student deal, as a gaming console like the Xbox One is a college essential and a 40-inch TV is a great size for a dorm room,” Best Buy said in a statement.

If this sort of thing is on the table, it might be just the beginning. Microsoft was very aggressive about its bundles last holiday season, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t do the same thing this year. The Xbox One is still trailing the PS4 by a significant margin, something that I don’t think Microsoft has quite made peace with. I’d expect the tech giant to bring its considerable marketing resources to bear in an attempt to make this the Xbox One’s turnaround year. The PS4 might prove insurmountable at this point, however. Install base and momentum are hugely important in this industry, and Sony has firmly established itself as its market leader. I know I’ve convinced at least one friend to get a PS4 instead of an Xbox One for the sole reason that we’d be able to play Destiny together.

Keep an eye here for more video game deals as the holiday season gets underway.

by Dave Smith via Business Insider

There’s a pretty strong correlation between male game players’ sexist remarks towards female game players and how bad those men are at playing games, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One last week, which also sheds some light on the behaviors and attitudes of men that act anonymously online.

Jeffrey Kuznekoff and Michael Kasumovic — researchers from Miami University and University of New South Wales, respectively — watched how male players treated female players during 163 sessions of “Halo 3,” a popular Xbox 360 first-person shooter game that debuted in 2007. The game has an online multiplayer mode that enables actual human beings to speak with each other live, in real-time.

According to researchers, players only spoke in 102 of the 163 total matches, but in those games, “a total of 189 players spoke…all of them were male. This is not to say that women did not play, just that they did not speak.”

Unbeknownst to the players, the researchers had connected an audio playback device to their Xbox controllers, which allowed them to “broadcast pre-recorded audio clips to other players as if they were speaking to each other through the real-time voice channel.”

There were three experimental “manipulations”: a control, where matches were played as normal, as well as male and female manipulations, where the researchers broadcast pre-recorded phrases made by male and female voices to the players over the real-time voice channel on Xbox Live.

“These prerecorded phrases were identical in the male and female condition, harmless in nature, and designed to be inoffensive,” the researchers said. “Phrases included: ‘I like this map’, ‘nice shot there,’ ‘I had fun playing that game,’ ‘I think I just saw a couple of them heading this way,’ and ‘that was a good game everyone.'”

You could probably guess what the researchers concluded. Here it is, from the discussion in their paper:

We found that skill determined the frequency of positive and negative statements spoken towards both male- and female-voiced teammates.

In addition, poorer performance (fewer kills and more deaths) resulted in more negative statements specifically in the female-voiced manipulation.

We thus argue that our results best support an evolutionary explanation of female-directed aggression. Low-status males that have the most to lose due to a hierarchical reconfiguration are responding to the threat female competitors pose. High-status males with the least to fear were more positive, suggesting they were switching to a supportive, and potentially, mate attraction role.

(Flickr/Rachel Johnson) “The idea that video games may be reinforcing such gender segregation as the norm for many teenagers is troubling given the fact that a significant proportion of them are gamers,” the researchers said. “Such ideas have the potential to spill over in real-life interactions and promote socially unacceptable behaviors such as sexism.”

What’s perhaps most interesting about this experiment is that the study’s conclusions could be applied to other settings where online users are allowed to act and say things anonymously — like Twitter, or Reddit. Here’s more from the study:

Our results support an evolutionary argument for why low-status, low-performing males are hostile towards female competitors. Dominance is tightly linked to fitness in men…Low-status and low-performing males have the most to lose as a consequence of the hierarchical reconfiguration due to the entry of a competitive woman. As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank. This idea is reinforced by the fact that higher-skilled males that should not feel threatened by a female increased their number of positive comments.

While the researchers note it is novel for male players in their data set to play with females in a male-dominated shooter game like “Halo 3,” they still hope it could show some young male players — and perhaps male online users, too — that “losing to the opposite sex is not socially debilitating.”

The whole study can be found here; it’s really an interesting read. We first saw this study mentioned on The Washington Post.

Three years after console’s debut, Microsoft racked up 55,000 scratching complaints

by David Kravets via Ars Technica; Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

No matter how hard Microsoft tries, it can’t defeat a judicial order requiring it to face a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that the Xbox 360 renders gaming discs unplayable because the console scratches them.

The decision (PDF) Monday by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage either for litigation over the allegations or a Supreme Court showdown.

As we’ve previously described, here’s what the flap is all about:

The suit claims that vibrations or small movements of the gaming console can cause the optical drive to scratch discs. Microsoft was accused of knowing about the alleged issue before the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. A Microsoft manager, Hiroo Umeno, said in a court document that the company was well aware of the damage that could be caused to discs when players repositioned their consoles. “This is … information that we as a team, optical disc drive team, knew about. When we first discovered the problem in September or October, when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what’s causing the problem,” Umeno said.

Three years after the console’s debut, Microsoft racked up some 55,000 complaints about the issue. Microsoft, which said that gamers’ misuse was the cause, argued that the case should be dismissed because 0.4 percent of console owners reported problems.

Microsoft also maintained that aggrieved gamers could bring a suit individually instead of collectively.

The San Francsico-based appeals court originally ruled (PDF) 3-0 against Microsoft in March. The court on Monday set aside Microsoft’s renewed plea for the court to rehear the case—which seeks economic damages—with a larger panel of 11 judges. No judge on the nation’s largest federal appeals court voted in favor of a rehearing.

by Michael McWhertor via Polygon

At funeral services for Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who died this week at the age of 55, the company’s senior managing director and current co-representative director, Genyo Takeda, delivered a memorial address for his former colleague, pledging to continue Iwata’s legacy.

Takeda, a 43-year veteran of the game maker, spoke to both Nintendo employees and members of Iwata’s family in attendance in his eulogy, offering his condolences and prayers.

Nintendo released a translated transcript of Takeda’s remarks from Iwata’s memorial service, which you can read in full below.

“As we gather here today for a joint funeral with Nintendo Co., Ltd. and Mr. Iwata’s family, I would like to share my heartfelt condolences. President Iwata, allow me to call you Iwata-san, just as I always used to.

Iwata-san, you left us far too soon. Having just chaired our shareholders’ meeting the other day on June 26, the news of your sudden death has left all the employees overcome with a deep sorrow. The late Yamauchi-san passed the baton to you in naming you the president of Nintendo in 2002, and the two Senior Managing Directors of the company, Shigeru Miyamoto and I, have been assisting and working alongside you. Being rather short-tempered myself, the thing that I am most deeply struck by is that you were a true leader in every sense of the word, overflowing with compassion for people. You always maintained a two-way dialogue, even with the next generation of employees, or with much younger members of the development and marketing teams, or with employees outside of Japan whose different customs and cultures can make communication challenging — sometimes even admitting your own mistakes to them. You demonstrated this through your belief that people could eventually come to understand one another, and your strong conviction that the best way for us to grow is through patient communication, even if it took several times, a dozen times or even seemingly endless discussion.

You succeeded in planting the seed in employees’ hearts that, in order to solve an issue, there is a fundamental cycle whereby you make a hypothesis, execute the plan, see the result and then make adjustments, and by which you have caringly nurtured these seeds to sprout and mature into plants.

Until now, our successors and the younger generation would take a few first steps and then look back at you for guidance because they could not tell if they had chosen the right path. Today they cannot ask for your guidance anymore.

However, I am sure that they have already made the firm determination that they will continue on their own, making the hypothesis, executing the plan, seeing the results and reflecting on the results to improve and adjust by themselves.

In the face of your unbelievable passing it will surely take some time before we can emerge from this deep sorrow. Please know, however, that the seeds you have planted, and the plants that have sprouted will put forth small flowers as they bring smiles to the faces of people around the world, blossom into a grand flower bigger than even you, our leader, Iwata-san. Together with Miyamoto and others of our generation, we swear in our hearts that we will continue our efforts so that, someday, we can report and present to you the blossoming of these flowers. May you continuously watch over and guide us managers, our employees and your family.

On behalf of all of us, I would like to offer my heartfelt condolences and sincerest prayer. May you rest in peace, Iwata-san.”

by Timothy J. Seppala via Engadget

Microsoft’s removed the Xbox-to-PC game-streaming restrictions and now anyone with Redmond’s latest console and Windows 10 can play Sunset Overdrive or attempt to jump into a few online Halo: The Master Chief Collection matches on their device. More than that, some pretty big new features are hitting the Windows 10 Xbox app including party chat and tweaks to how screenshots and video clips are shared via the Game DVR.
Perhaps most impressive is how the My Games functionality within the application works now. Sure, your games purchased from the Windows Store automatically populate under the banner as you’d expect, but that’s extending to “a large number” of older games you might’ve bought from other sources too. You can manually add titles if they don’t appear as well, and Microsoft says it’ll keep track of what you’re adding so the automation improves with time. Of course there are plenty more new additions to the service, so be sure to check out the Xbox Wire post to read all about ’em.

by Adi Robertson via The Verge

Rocksteady’s Arkham games have turned into a kind of Batman franchise hall of fame. You haven’t really made it until whatever villain or costume or gadget you created gets tucked away in some corner of the games’ massive worlds. And next month, fans of Tim Burton’s take on the character will be able to rest easy. Anyone who bought the $40 “season pass” to Batman: Arkham Knight (yes, on top of the $60 game) will soon be able to swap their Batman for one from the 1989 film, and they can turn their Batmobile into Michael Keaton’s slick retro ride. Except that Michael Keaton couldn’t also use his car as a tank.

Arkham Knight already includes a number of extra skins and Batmobiles, including a ’60s Adam West costume. While some of them are available for everyone, publisher Warner Bros. parceled others out as “exclusives” across platforms, retailers, and game editions. You basically need a chart to keep track of them. But 1989 Batman is just a way to reward people who paid for six months of extra maps, designs, and missions after the game’s launch. Today also marks the release of Arkham Knight’s first real extra storyline, starring Batgirl. Sadly, this is all moot for PC owners; the game’s many technical problems aren’t supposed to be fixed until fall, and the lost souls who already bought it will have to wait on Batgirl.

It’s also not the only new costume coming in August. There are three more Batmen (a ’70s version, an “iconic gray and black” one, and one from prequel Arkham Origins), as well as Robin from the “One Year Later” comics arc; the slightly more emo version of Nightwing from older game Arkham City; and a purple, non-Michelle Pfeiffer ’90s Catwoman. They’re all featured above, but frankly, you might want to wait for the chart.

by L.W. Barker aka ‘Sarge’

I was watching a movie with my family yesterday evening when I glanced down at my phone to see a post from my Sr. Editor, Reuben Karnagerulz Juarez baring the sad news of Satoru Iwata’s death.

My heart dropped like a rock as I reacted…and so strongly was that reaction that my wife paused the film. I was in anguish and totally saddened by this latest Industry loss. It seems so unfair for someone who was on the verge of realizing his biggest ‘NX’ dreams to just be dead! But then I gathered my thoughts and began to write.

Iwata-san, as he was honorably known, was a giant in our Industry who has left behind foot prints on gaming that will be analyzed, admired, and hopefully copied for as long as there are gamers. He was a man with a vision for Nintendo and even through harsh criticism for the few failures in his tenure as CEO, he remained calm and kept that vision going. And not because he was stubborn, but because he believed in his company’s brand and its unwavering ability to deliver quality products to his fellow gamers. A trait that won him Industry-wide respect and made him legendary within our community.

Now with his death, that vision will not die. The essence of Satoru Iwata lingers in the games he created, the memories we share of him, and even in projects yet unborn. Thank you Iwata-san for a job well done. Your enduring legacy is forever.

by Doug Bolton via Belfast Telegraph

A German court has fined a 23-year-old man after he admitted to giving his girlfriend a sedative so that he could keep playing video games with his friends.

As reported by The Local, a court in Caxtrop-Rauxel, a town in eastern Germany, heard that the man’s (now ex) girlfriend had arrived home while he was playing games with his friend one night in August last year.

Keen to keep playing after she came home, the man put sedative in her tea, causing her to sleep until midday the next day.

He told the court: “I only put four or five drops into her tea.”

Even when she awoke from her sleep and heading to work the next day, she said she was still nodding off from the effects of the drugs.

The man admitted what he had done the day after the crime, and she told the court that he had been on drugs at the time – something which contributed to their break-up a few days later.

Ordering the man to pay a €500 fine, the judge said: “Your girlfriend slept long and deeply, which didn’t harm her, but his is certainly a premeditated bodily harm.”

Speaking to the Westdeutche Allgemeine Zeitung, the man said he was now on a straighter path – off drugs for 10 months, and soon beginning an apprenticeship.

by Paul Tassi via Forbes

Once upon a time, companies other than Nintendo thought that the Wii U might replicate the success of its predecessor and become a hit. They thought it was worth it to design exclusive games for the Wii U in the hopes of creating new, lasting franchises incorporating Nintendo’s unique control scheme. This story does not have a happy ending.

One of those companies was Ubisoft, who today has pulled nearly all of their series from the Wii U from Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry, but way back when in 2012, they were one of the system’s biggest supports. They developed what remains one of the only critically acclaimed, non-Nintendo-related games for the system, ZombiU.

Now, three years later, it seems that ZombiU is coming to Xbox One and PS4 as well. Previously, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot complained that despite their best efforts to create a solid product, ZombiU was not profitable due to the Wii U’s install base. Now, they’re hoping the combined ~20-30 million PS4s and Xbox Ones out there will allow the game to rise from the dead.

The hitch here is that the news has not been officially confirmed by Ubisoft yet, but there are a number of signs that indicate this is happening. In both Taiwan and Australia, ratings boards have already passed judgement on the game’s PS4 and Xbox One additions, which naturally can no longer really be called “ZombiU” and is now simply known as “Zombi.”

It’s unclear what kind of visual update the game might get considering it’s jumping to better-performing hardware, and we have no screenshots from the new versions yet. It’s also interesting to note that the original game was very much designed with the Wii U’s gamepad controls in mind, but again, that’s a problem that’s probably easily fixable with a few new menus/minimaps in a more traditional format using Microsoft and Sony ’s traditional systems.

Zombie U’s 77 on Metacritic didn’t exactly make it a GOTY-contender at the time, but for a Wii U game that had no Nintendo involvement whatsoever and was from a Western developer, it’s a solid score, and the game included many unique concepts including permadeath where your old character would turn into a zombie if they died and you’d spawn as a completely new civilian in a safehouse.

This resurrection is a pretty unusual step, as it’s not quite a remaster the way we’ve seen with other games. That process is usually reserved for outright hits, while ZombiU, as Ubisoft said, doesn’t meet that definition. Rather, this is an attempt to salvage a creative project that went nowhere, with many blaming the hardware itself for the failure.

It will be interesting to see how even a revamped version of the game is received on Xbox One and PS4. It’s a problem of standards, where what was considered a solid third-party game near the launch of the Wii U may not look as good two years into the lifecycle of the PS4 and Xbox One. There’s no way on earth I can picture this being a full $60 box title, but Ubisoft has yet to announce anything about pricing, or even its existence, for that matter.

Many will likely compare it to Dying Light, a multiplatform, open world zombie title that is a few ticks lower on the Meta-scale at 74 for PS4 and Xbox One. It’s much larger in scale, but less creative in concept than ZombiU, and not enough of a smash hit to make interested PS4 and Xbox players ignore the new (old) zombie title, most likely.

Nintendo, meanwhile, obviously needs to get back to a place where developers can trust them again to bother making exclusive games like ZombiU. Nintendo is obsessed with creating a “better way to play,” and have mentioned that philosophy will carry through to the NX as well, which will probably experiment with some kind of new control scheme as the last two consoles have. But for two generations now, there have been precious few third party hits on Nintendo consoles. There were a few on the Wii, but almost none on the Wii U, so developers like Ubisoft are going to be wary of being burned again after previously futile efforts.

We’ll see what about Zombi has changed from ZombiU when Ubisoft finally confirms the existence of the new release, which will likely be soon after these leaks.

Update: As everyone is now reminding me, Bayonetta 2 is probably in fact the best non-Nintendo Wii U exclusive. I forgot that series went Nintendo-only for the sequel, and I’m generally not a fan to begin with so it slipped my mind. But if we’re going based on scores and general fan sentiment, yeah, Bayonetta 2 is probably on top here. I wonder if there’s any chance the sequel could go multiplatform if Nintendo’s deal with the developer expires.