As the poet wrote, April is the gamer's month. (That was it, wasn't it?) And as this month begins, and the darkness of April Fool's Day passes, WIRED's videogame roundup, Replay, has some news to go over. Buckle up.
Prince Harry, whose primary claims to fame are being born to a royal family and having a stellar wedding, had some strong words about juggernaut videogame Fortnite during a recent visit to a British YMCA. Per a story in The Hollywood Reporter, he called the game, about shooting enemies while building questionably designed towers out of found trees, "more addictive than drugs and alcohol," saying that not only should parents not allow their kids to play it, but that it should not be allowed in the United Kingdom at all.
I guess this means we won't be seeing the expected royal baby streaming with Ninja any time soon.
Turns out, Bioware's latest and not-at-all-most-loved game, Anthem, had a rather tough birth. According to a massive barn burner of a story by Kotaku's Jason Schreier, the game began as a project named Dylan, which morphed and shrank and struggled through years of development complications until it became the game we have now. It's a story of crunch, messy internal studio politics, and an Electronic Arts engine that not many folk seem to like.
EA, for its part, responded to the article with a statement that can best be summarized as "no snitches," while Bioware has responded internally with some rough gestures toward change in its studio practices. As with every ugly thing going on in the industry right now, we'll, uh, have to see how that goes.
Following the lead of other social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat has announced that it will release a line of games on the app, allowing players to participate in simple competitive phone contests with their friends directly in the chat bar. Ah, mobile games: the last bastion of a chat app desperate to hold onto relevance.
But, games, though! Titles include Bitmoji Party, a mini-game collection starring those advanced emoji comic characters that people really loved last year, and Zombie Rescue Squad, which will see you and your friend rescue survivors from a zombie-infested hellscape. Oh, and there's a very small battle royale game from Zynga called Tiny Royale, which is just adorable.
Yeah, I know, revengeance is not actually a word. But it is awesome, which exemplifies the entire approach of Metal Gear Rising, a title that takes the most over-the-top elements of the Metal Gear series and dials them up to about 23, turning the whole thing into a wild hack-and-slash paradise. This game is wildly, stupidly fun, and it stars robot ninja superheroes. If that's not appealing to you, then we probably wouldn't get along.
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