Sony’s revolutionary new service that allows you to stream titles direct to your console hit PS3 today. While the pricing still makes you scratch your head, one can only hope that heavy adoption will get pricing to align with consumer expectations. It is worth noting that the games are priced at roughly $1 a day, which is cheaper than Red Box. The announcement highlighted that you can play “Ultra Street Fighter 4”, “God of War: Ascension”, “Infamous” and more. You PS3 owners checking it out?

Square Enix dropped the latest trailer for “Final Fantasy XV”. While the game is still without a release date, this trailer makes XV look to be the Final Fantasy we’ve all been hoping for. Even if it is some teenage road trip across some unkown world, it looks like it will be a beautiful teenage road trip. Welcome to next gen.

An exciting email written in mostly caps was sent out to Twitch subscribers today. Chromecast now supports direct streaming of Twitch from Chrome, Android, and  iOS devices. For those of you watching game streams more than the normal American watches television shows (me), this is huge news. You can now pull up any stream currently happening and shoot it to whichever screen is attached to the magic stick. There is a software update required on the Chromecast first, so it will require a few minutes of patience before you binge watch “Destiny” streams. But seriously, how awesome is this news?!

This trailer for “The Evil Within” hit for the Tokyo Game Show, to say that the game looks more than slightly unnerving is an understatement. Hitting shelves 10.14.2014 this could possibly be the scariest game to date. I guess October is getting ready for the spooky stuff.

“Doorways: The Underworld” releases on Steam today. Playing as psychic agent Thomas Foster, players trudge through the deepest depths of human depravity to bring criminals to justice. This mission, however, could prove to be his last. “Doorways” is the latest game from Argentinian developer Saibot Studios. The story follows the Doorways organization which is known to the world as a charitable organization, but truthfully the organization hunts down dangerous and elusive criminals instead.  “Doorways” also supports Occulus Rift, hows that for terrifying? Launch trailer below:

Microsoft is expanding its video game empire, buying the wildly popular Minecraft and the tiny production studio that designed it for $2.5 billion. It’s easy to be cynical, and it’s hard to imagine Microsoft will run Mojang without trying to use Minecraft as a weapon against competitors Sony, Apple and others. However, given the stance of the ever present rabid Fanboy, many are already crying R.I.P. Minecraft.

Fanboys’s lunacy towards their preferred brands makes them want to destroy every other competitor just so they can say Sony/Microsoft won this so-called war. The internet is an avenue for both great encouragement and for lots of destructive attitudes. We have a choice to filter out those negative responses. If you obtain great success from the internet, chances are? You will also be getting backlash from those who are envious. Its not a one way street.

The REAL truth is: there is no war, there is market and competition. Sony doesn’t want to destroy Microsoft and even if they did there’s no way they, or anyone, could do it. The same goes to Microsoft. Exclusives exists because both consoles are pretty much the same (performance-wise) and the only differential are the games they have to offer. Kazuo Hirai couldn’t care less about how many XBOXONE’s were sold out there, if their console is doing well that’s all there is to it. The same goes to Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Of course that they’ll make sure their product has the upper hand, but that doesn’t mean that they have as a personal goal to put the other company out of business. That’s fanboy talk.

It’s not like Microsoft can stop what Minecraft has already become. They can ‘ruin it’ from now on, but they won’t be able to stop what’s already out there. Minecraft is much more than a game. It seems that Microsoft is trying to buy into the what Minecraft has become, which is a cultural phenomenon. It’s the third largest IP ever, selling 54 million copies and counting. It has crazy amounts of merchandise that fly off the shelves because it’s pretty much cornering the demographic of young gamers, along with a movie on the way. There is no other game you can compare Minecraft to really in how it’s penetrated the mainstream audience. And that’s without a real mobile version and a ‘watered down’ console version.

There are always more sales in the world, the fact that it’s at 54 million shows more than just your average gamer is playing this thing to begin with. The eventual true sequel could be crap and it would still sell like crazy just on the name and anticipation alone. This game is something completely different than we’ve ever seen in gaming before. As an older gamer, I’ve honestly never seen anything like it. The game is bigger than anything you can think of.

I’m happy for Markus ‘Notch’ Persson & Co and the stupidly big payday they’re getting. Because that’s the dream, right? You make something, it becomes huge, you get paid, and then you’re financially secure and can just work on ISHT you love for the rest of your life.

I love creating. I’m sure that the creative process of making a game is truly rewarding, and that the stress from building a company and a support system behind the success is a whole different side of it. Outside looking in, I’m sure it can be stifling for the creative process. Maybe he wanted the freedom to just do his own thing again and not think about success or failure. And after making a few hundred milly-billy off of it, he can say it is not about the money. He has it already. But if he were you walk away from, cash out what you can. There is nothing wrong with that.

Everyone I know would have done what he did – make no mistake about it.

-Dagobot



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While this announcement has been building up steam for weeks, Microsoft made it official on the Xbox Wire. Minecraft and Mojang are officially parts of Microsoft which means all future development will be exclusive to their consoles. Microsofts CEO Phil Spencer wrote a post explaining his thoughts on the acquisition which you can read here. MINECON is still happening next year with no interruption to continue the “creativity of YouTubers, Bloggers, innovators and players.” And they will be making more announcements in the future. 

During the GameStop Expo Nintendo announced 3 new skins for the 3DS XL yesterday and they became available for pre-order through their respective retailers today. 

The first to release will be the Smash Bros. System in Red or Blue, which releases September 19 at the usual retail of $199.99. You can snag one of these to prepare for the October release of Smash Bros.

My personal favorite is the NES skinned system available exclusively through GameStop. It will retail for the standard $199.99 and will be available Oct. 10, 2014. 

The final design is the Persona Q limited edition which will be available November 25, 2014 for the same price as the other special systems. It is also a GameStop exclusive and does not come bundled with the game.

Do any of these new designs tickle your fancy? Or will you be holding out to see if the NEW 3DS hits shelves in the U.S. next year? Sound off below!

Vourtron is back with another Pax Prime 2014 column, enjoy:

Well, Another PAX down, and another quest for the next shmup.

This year and last, there were hundreds (I’m just throwing that out there) of good and crappy homemade games, and not one of them was a shmup. That’s two years in a row. Man oh man! Whoa is me! *swoon*  faint*.

I better go over some terms first, so you all can catch up on this stuff:

1. Shmup: Google shmup. It’s basically anything like 1942 and beyond, but not very far beyond. Other words for this incredibly tight game style are “Bullet Hell”, “Danmaku”, “STG” (that last one is Japanese for ShooTing Game.)

2. Nerd: Here’s the equation for nerd, INCREASED PASSION + DECREASED EMPATHY = NERD. Here’s the hints to tell if someone is a nerd.

a. If anyone’s eyes ever glaze over while they start talking louder and faster for a long time.

b. I thought they liked shmups, but apparently that’s not a qualification.

c. This decreased empathy makes for an underdeveloped sense of embarrassment, so maybe I’m just going to embarrass myself with this article.

d. You might have to be a nerd to LIKE shmups, so trying to get some coherent info out of these nerds was almost impossible.

e. And I checked with the nerds over at shmups forum (Google it), but since I’m a nerd for shmups myself, I’m just going to give my own version here.

After two years of no shmups at PAX, I got the notion that maybe there was a repeat of the 80’s Atari story. As I know it, in the 80’s, Atari printed a cartridge called E.T., and they made so many of them, that every store had a few copies on the shelf that they couldn’t sell (and the common opinion was that the game sucked), and from that, the preconception about Atari in general was, “Don’t carry Atari products in your store, they won’t sell”. (I did hear, during my research for this article, that Atari had mismanaged a lot of other basic stuff that led to their demise outside of that. Including paying too much money for the E.T. license in the first place. And rather than sucking, I’ve heard the game described as fun and very modern for the time- I heard that it was an early example of a new kind of video game I’ll call a “read the manual even one time” game.) Anyways, this whole phenomenon, however it happened, KILLED the home game industry in the U.S. and it was dead for years. In the interim, the E.T. cartridges got buried in the desert, and eventually Nintendo released their NES into a blank market that henceforth sustained the Genesis, Turbografx 16, SNES, Playstation, PS2, XBOX, etc. And the Atari Lynx? My emulator says that it’s a sweet system, did the culture still say otherwise? Was it Atari’s fault again?

The other thing that happened at PAX was that a single guy, who had made a very shmup-like game (it was an Arena Shmup, look it up), said off-hand that he’d try and make a real shmup (traditional definition) only if he wanted to, “End up living in the streets, penniless”.

Whoa! Is that true? Is there a shame on shmups? Is it a bad financial move to make a shmup? Why would anyone think that! Remember, I know a shmup ain’t no Assassin’s Creed, but the PAX zone I expected to see a shmup in was just one hundred screens in this order: 90% platformer with an art-style gimmick, gameplay mimic, and seriously 2D floating platforms, too- Atari style. Then, 8% just gimmick, like a non shmup/non platformer fun-gimmick. Then, 2% chase shmup, like Nokia’s SNAKE in shooting form. And then an extra .5% free roaming spaceships like asteroids (maybe Atari is finally back!). And last but not least, an extra .5% for the three arena shmups I saw. 101% homemade, creative, stupid, fun, lame homemade games, 0% “shmup”.

So, I posed my theory about “Which shmup killed “Shmups”” (like Atari) to the wonderful guys and girls over at shmups forum (which represents the shmup love in the English speaking world), and I also discussed the sitch with the people sitting around me at the coffee shop, and here’s some of what I got.

1. (From me- I’m not some kind of alien, so I’m presenting this as fact): Shmups are fun. They are physically fun. They turn on the fun when you press go and they don’t turn it off till you walk away from the machine. It is physically and emotionally fun to blow up the bad guys and dodge their bullets. I will credit feed through a shmup, having the most fun on the later levels when it’s the hardest and I’m blowing up the most frequently, and also dodging the most bullets and blowing up the most bad guys. I won’t settle down until I reach MAX BOREDOM of all that unbridled fun. If I ever reach that level of jaded-news, then I’ll just play my first quarter, as intended, for score (or distance), and the fun is BACK! And I mean ALL THE WAY BACK, and beyond. The myriad platformers don’t do that, certainly. MOST games don’t do that. Shmups ONLY do that!!! They’re so fun!!!

a. (the person next to me): Well, I don’t think they make games for fun, now. Lots of games are designed around abstract endorphin release addiction like with collecting swords or clearing a NOT funly designed dungeon, just to get it cleared out.

b. (person sitting on the other side): I don’t think they’re fun, I think they’re confusing. I can’t tell what’s going on and I feel out of control. Maybe people process things differently and you’d have to have a powerful visual processor (in your brain) to connect with what’s going on. Me, I like RPG’s, because I process things a little more abstractly in general (like as concept and language).

c. (from the shmups forum): “We’re all nerds, with stunted senses of empathy, so we don’t know isht about other people, but some of us will take the lead and try to make a guess as to why modern video-game-enthusiast-but-non-shmup-lovers may have a problem with shmups”. (Nerd to non-nerd translation leader): I think that your Atari-based shmup theory is ridiculous, and that shmups have just been slowly out-evolved by other games, and the gaming culture has also evolved away from shmups. Shmups could make a comeback if they had a social element, a story element, and an instant accessibility element built in on top of the regular shmup element (all three of those are the opposite of how shmups are, btw, except for the last- I think that shmups are the single MOST accessible kind of game!! A caveman would relate to a shmup. And on this note, the complexity of the finer details of many modern shmups is what is under attack, usually. Shmups can have a duality- the “scoring system”, or the way it’s designed to be played for maximum score, which can involve doing things in a certain order, memorizing certain shoot-down techniques, even dying on purpose at certain times, if you can possibly believe that, and lots of other crazy stuff, can be built into the experience to the degree that most people can’t even figure it out. But the whole thing is wrapped in such a crazily accessible package, i.e. shoot the bad guys and dodge their bullets, that I don’t see a problem). Anyways, people could make shmups and sell them if they’d just add that shite to them. Then people would learn to love them again. Oh yeah, they’d have to sell them for 3, 5, or 10$ though, like all other video games shy of Assassin’s Credence.

d. (from me): I think it was Ikaruga and Sina Mora. Those are the last two shmups that I’ve seen coming out on multiple systems, probably not making money (??? what do I know?), and probably sitting on the virtual shelf, on the T.V. screen, and not getting clicked on enough. And they’re both on the extreme fringe of traditional shmuppage, certainly on the edges of the “just absolutely and fundamentally fun” line that runs straight through the genre. If I wasn’t hardcore INTO shmups, both of those shmups would elicit the layman’s shmup responses from ME, like, “this is a little too visual for me”, and, “Maybe this isn’t just the right kind of fun for me”.

So… Ikaruga and Sina Mora may or may not be to blame. A culture that enjoys games, not for the physical fun of playing, but for other reasons might be to blame. Straight up, not cheap enough shmups might be to blame. People might just be different and like different things- I don’t think that would necessarily be to “blame”. And the real question remains: are shmups really extinct? It’s been two years.  One guy on the shmups forum said that new shmups are totally insignificant, and that there are so many old ones to play that I shouldn’t care about this.

My conclusion: “Bullet Hell” is such a stupid stupid term. “Bullet Heaven” would be appropriate.

 -Vourtron

The Utah Games Guild helped bring together a slew of local developers from Salt Lake City, to show off their games during SLCC 2014. Not only were these games a riot, but the developers themselves were excited, knowledgeable, and all around good people.We were on the scene interviewing each of them about their projects, You can catch the videos below!