Welcome to December. I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and relatively safe Black Friday. My condolences to those that had to work in retail on that horrible day. I did make one quick shopping trip in the afternoon and a visit to the grocery store, but everything was mostly calmed by that time. Anyway, it’s been a long weekend so let’s get straight to news:
Some ambitious gamer has hacked in to the data files for the recent Beach Bum DLC pack on Grand Theft Auto V / Online. Some audio files were discovered that may hint toward upcoming content for the game, including casino gambling, pink slip racing, selling drugs, and indoor motocross. It’s also possible that these files are remnants of cut content, but let’s look at it with hope shall we?
Gears of War is currently free on XBox Live with Games With Gold. It will remain free until December 15th when Shoot Many Robots takes over. December is the last month for the promotion according to the original announcement. However, Microsoft has since indicated they plan to continue the subscription bonus and may even extend it to XBox One games.
Sony’s own version of the free games, PS Plus’s Instant Game Collection, also received an update today with GRID 2 on PS3. Borderlands 2 and Dyad are also coming free for PS3 this month. For Vita, you can look forward to Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and Urban Trial Freestyle. No new PS4 games were announced for the month. One of my favorite IGCs to date, bit.trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, is on last chance.
Sony Pictures has recently claimed the domain names thelastofus-movie.com and .net. It’s not a stretch to say they are at least considering a film version of Naughty Dog’s darkly apocalyptic story. Video game movies don’t have a great reputation, but this is definitely one franchise with a lot of potential to make the leap.
Season two of Telltale’s The Walking Dead (subtitled All That Remains) has been confirmed to start in December. A recently tweeted screen shot also seems to confirm that Omid will be returning to Clementine’s life in this next chapter. The game is not currently scheduled for PS4 and XB1 but versions will likely come to those consoles in the future. Telltale is also only one chapter into The Wolf Among Us, which should get its second installment soon. Can we handle the wait for two episodic masterpieces at once?
The Gaikai streaming service from PlayStation is scheduled to hit North American PS4s in 2014. Europe will be waiting until 2015. According to Sony’s Andrew House
We’re on track to have a commercial service up and running in the US first within 2014. That remains the plan and we’re very much on track to reach that.
But what’s important is to understand the full scope of what we’re trying to achieve and why we felt the Gaikai acquisition was important. Our goal is to be able to have a new form of game distribution streamed from the server side, initially to PS4 consoles then gradually moving that out to Vita.
But eventually, the endgame is to have this available on a multitude of network-connected devices, essentially delivering a console-quality gaming experience on devices which are not innately capable of doing that.”
We need to prove out the technology, which we feel is good at its core, but we place – as I think is quite right – a real emphasis on delivering a quality experience for consumers. And that will be dependent to a degree on what the strength of broadband connection is going to be, and what our server deployment and infrastructure looks like.
The mention of Vita may seem like a throwaway line, but don’t ignore it. Let’s not forget the PS Vita TV. It was recently released in Japan to moderate success, becoming one of the first devices to push the streaming media concept to that market. There are no announcements to bring that box to the US yet, but it western markets are beign explored and will liekly be handled differentlyl. A cheap to purchase Vita TV ($99 MSRP) with a DualShock 3 and Gaikai streaming could be an extremely cheap and effective way to bring the PlayStation brand to families who don’t traditionally purchase gaming consoles.
That’s all for this week’s early edition. Come back Friday for all the news from throughout the week. Stay warm, friends.