New game announcement by Interceptor, the studio which made Rise of the Triad (2013) and after that bought up the remains of 3D Realms, since they are big Apogee/3DR fans. They were originally working on a Duke Nukem game, but now Gearbox and Interceptor are in court over who exactly owns Duke (and Gearbox could well win, we'll see), but either way, Interceptor had to work on something in the meantime...
And this game, kind of a Duke spinoff, is what exists instead. The basic gameplay is the same as the Duke game they were working on -- it's an isometric action game with some RPG elements. Only now you play as the female character Bombshell instead of Duke. Bombshell, in prior form, was originally created as a Duke Nukem Forever character, and she was going to be Duke's AI companion pretty much. However, at some point probably later in development she was cut (perhaps a a part of the "cut everything not done so we can ship SOMETHING effort as 3DR went down), so she's not in the DNF that was released. She is in one of the old ('98 or '01) DNF trailers, though... or rather, another character with the same name is. Bombshell the game is its own thing, and really only shares a character name with the DNF character. The new Bombshell is entirely redesigned; she now has dark hair and a cyborg arm, for instance. I see a lot of criticism for the intro trailer and skepticism about the game, but I think the screenshots look quite good and the interview (watch the interview video on the site) was pretty good and definitely made me want to try this! I don't know if it'll be good or not, but I am an Apogee fan for sure and the idea of an Apogee/3DR-inspired action-RPG like this is a good one. So yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the game. It could be good, we'll see. :)
No, not like this... this is not okay! Sponsored tabs... what a horrible idea for users. And whether or not Mozilla goes through with this, I'm sure we'll see it eventually. I can't see Google passing on another moneymaking opportunity!
I've never been particularly interested in online shooters, or, for some years now, online games much at all, but for a few years in the late '90s and early '00s, I did like a few online FPS games. I never loved them, as the games get old quickly -- they're so repetitive, and just didn't hold my interest anywhere near like what online RTS games did -- but still, I did enjoy some Jedi Knight 1, Unreal Tournament, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force online once in a while. And I've always thought of UT as probably the best arena shooter series; I didn't play all that much of UT3, but what I have played of it I like (story aside, that was stupid). And the original UT is of course a classic.
So yeah, this interests me for sure! Game development only just started, so there's nothing to look at for it yet of course, but I hope it turns out well. I like that it's going to be free, I don't love FPSes enough to actually buy them often, but free UT? Yeah, I'll play at least a little of this for sure. Apparently Teamfortress 2 has been successful with a similar free-but-with-pay-mod store system, so they're basing it on that I guess. I never really played TF2 though, so I wouldn't know myself. They're also looking for a lot of feedback for fans about the direction the game should go in.
For anyone who hasn't heard, the issue is that Tomodachi Collection, a 3DS game releasing soon (watch the quite amusing Nintendo Direct!), doesn't allow for gay relationships or marriages -- it's heterosexual only. Naturally, while this wasn't too controversial in Japan where gay rights aren't nearly as far along, it's caused quite a problem here, even though the game isn't out yet. Here's a good summary of why this is an important issue:
This doesn't surprise me at all, of course. Nintendo has always been a conservative company, with backwards views on gender roles present in many of their games. I wouldn't have expected anything else on the issue of gay rights from them, unfortunately. I just hope that they change in the future, because greater equality is the future. They do seem to have been trying for the past year or so to have more female characters in some of their games; hopefully this is next.
Oh, for another issue that came up a while back, Animal Crossing (the newest one, for 3DS) was criticized for not having any darker skin colors available; it's light-skin only, unless a character gets tanned from the sun or something.
Seriously, Nintendo? Why? It was pretty bad for you last year that you didn't have one, and... they're doing the same thing again. Yeah, the Nintendo Directs are good, but they aren't a serious replacement for an E3 conference, and Nintendo needs the attention these days, with how badly the Wii U is doing.
Seriously, can't we just end the Cuba embargo already... it's beyond ridiculous. Yeah, they're an oppressive Communist regime, but it's not like we're not supporting far worse governments; there is no other nation the US treats anything remotely like what it does to Cuba. Maybe Castro will have to die before finally something can happen, but it should. Maybe it'll even help open up Cuba some, too.
Either that or we should be consistent and treat China just like we do Cuba. I can't see that getting anywhere.
![[Image: bombshell_may_02.jpg]](http://alloutofgum.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/static/img/bombshell_may_02.jpg)
![[Image: bombshell_may_01.jpg]](http://alloutofgum.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/static/img/bombshell_may_01.jpg)
