Blog Post: Mythical Pokémon Arceus Available Now Via Download Code

Blog Post: Mythical Pokémon Arceus Available Now Via Download Code

The Pokémon 20th anniversary celebration continues. A new month means a new mythical creature to download.[Excerpt]

All you need is a code and a participating United States Gamestop location (Disclosure: Gamestop is Game Informer’s parent company). This month, you can grab Arceus, which is available from August 1 through August 24.

Once you have your code in hand, load up your copy of Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby, or Alpha Sapphire. Head over to the Mystery Gift menu and redeem your code.

For those playing The Pokémon Trading Card Game, a new Arceus-themed Mythical Pokémon Collection pack is available today. It includes an Arceus pin, two Generations boosters, and a promo card.

http://ift.tt/2aN7xB2

Blog Post: Meet Game Informer's New Associate Editor

Blog Post: Meet Game Informer's New Associate Editor

In 2004, I was sitting in my middle school's Tech and Living class. Instead of learning to make eggs with milk (which I haven't ever done since), I sat down and read an entire issue of Game Informer front-to-back (Issue 140, for the curious). I remember looking at the people who worked for the magazine I'd been reading for years on the staff page and thinking, "I bet they have the coolest job." If I had magically appeared from the future to tell my younger self he'd be working there as an associate editor before Half-Life 3 came out, I don't think he would've believed me - both about the job and that Half-Life 3 would never come out.[Excerpt]

I've been writing about video games for about eight years now, starting with blogs on places like Bitmob (now GamesBeat) and 1UP (rest in peace!). I'd take longer lunches at school to give a piece I planned to have up by tomorrow morning another read, do research, or play a game for review. After three years of blogging, I finally got my first paid freelance work for the now defunct magazine GamePro, where I played a game before it was out for the first time (which was an issue with NBA Jam: On Fire Edition's online mode). After GamePro shuttered I freelanced for a number of other game outlets, including Unwinnable, Paste, Vice, Playboy, and Zam.

I'm also in the small minority of people who can say they've made more money from Dota 2 than they've spent on it. Over the years, I've written about the way the game's matchmaking system puts its players on edge, how balance changes can affect people who have their favorite characters nerfed, the incredible matches and team plotlines the game's eSports is responsible for, and what it's like to play a game where you can be harassed at any second for no reason at all.

I've also gotten to write about all the other gaming niches I've fallen in love with: fighting games, which I've followed on and off for most of my life, and weird indie games, which play with the ideas more traditional games won't touch until years later. In general, I'm a fan of anything that doesn't compromise and just goes for it, whether it's an intricate web of systems or a gripping narrative. Early contenders for my game of the year are Anatomy, Street Fighter V, and Overwatch.

Doing something I loved for a living was a life goal of mine, and I'm incredibly lucky to have that. Even as far back as a year ago, I remember thinking I'd need a backup plan in case writing about video games became untenable. Even now, I know how rare positions like the one I have here at Game Informer are, and how rough working freelance can be these days; my heart goes out to all the other freelancers out there, both veteran and aspiring.I can already tell I'm going to like working here. The team has been a pleasure to work with (just yesterday, we all got caught up in a rare Porygon sighting at the office). If you want to follow my work here or read my ramblings on Twitter, you should follow me there. And if you want to see what I'm into and talk about that stuff, take a look at my profile page. I can't wait to talk about games and the stories they can they can tell with you all!

http://ift.tt/2aslLS8

Blog Post: Track Creator Added To GTA Online's Cunning Stunts Mode

Blog Post: Track Creator Added To GTA Online's Cunning Stunts Mode

Rockstar announced today it's added a "Stunt Race Creator" to GTA Online, giving players the ability to create their own over-the-top race tracks, like the ones seen in its recent Cunning Stunts update.[Excerpt]

The update gives players over 250 props to litter across their tracks such as over sized soccer balls, flaming rings, and speed boosts. The entire state of San Andreas is available to create tracks in.

Also added to the game is a new adversary mode, called "Entourage." In it, players are tasked with transporting an armored truck to an extraction point as a rival team of Assassins tries to stop them. 

For more on Grand Theft Auto, check out the time the Hotel Figueroa mistakenly used a shot of Grand Theft Auto V's fictional city of Los Santos as a shot of Los Angeles. Or read our review.

http://ift.tt/2asfPZI

Blog Post: A Serviceable, Stylish Rogue-like

Blog Post: A Serviceable, Stylish Rogue-like

Brutal is fixated on capturing the dark allure of an earlier time in gaming history, when maps were represented as numbers and symbols on screens instead of well-drawn diagrams – when heroes didn’t wield guns but wands, axes, or swords instead. Much of this time travel is attractive and welcome, a plunge into goofy nostalgia that lets you build and imbue weapons with magic powers capable of setting monsters aflame or transfiguring them into measly cockroaches to be squashed beneath your boot. In these moments of pure power fantasy Brutal works best, letting you rise from nothing into a powerful warrior or mage capable of clearing rooms of enemies. Unfortunately, Brutal’s attempts to capture the past often bleed into slavish devotion, hamstringing a would-be great game with cheap deaths and tediousness.

Every game of Brutal begins the same. You select a generic fantasy class (Warrior, Ranger, Amazon, Mage), all of which have the special abilities and weapon expertise you’d expect them to have, and then enter the first floor of a huge, procedurally-generated dungeon. The goal is the same for every floor: find the exit. Lots of doors require keys for you to unlock, which often means finding chests or killing special enemies to get them.

You earn experience by both killing monsters and smashing the environment around you into pieces; leveling up gives you access to new skills, like enchanting weapons with magic or giving your weapon of choice a special attack. Dungeons get harder as you go, filling up with trickier enemies like a nymph who will temporarily steal away your weapon if you try and kill her with anything other than bare fists, and expanding the number of rooms you have to traverse in search of keys and treasure.

Brutal’s structure and rhythm, as well as enjoyable squishy combat, more often than not results in a fun time. However, a number of issues can easily deflate the amount of fun you’re having. As part of its homage to Rogue and other ASCII titles, the game features permadeath. This in itself is not a problem until you discover just how easy it is to perish in later stages. For example, plummeting off a broken bridge will end your game, and that’s a problem because the camera angles in the hallways where these bridges are located are often so awkward that it’s hard to tell how you need to jump. You can spend a whole hour working through half of Brutal’s 26 dungeons only to die and lose everything because a bad camera screwed you over. This infuriating experience is lessened slightly because you can use treasures you uncover during your dungeon crawling to buy lives from altars that might give you another chance if you screw up a jump. However, it’s still frustrating to lose one of those lives that could have been useful in a tense battle thanks to something that’s out of your control.

Brutal’s enchantment and weapon collecting systems are neat at first, forcing you to start each game with only your bare fists and search floors for ASCII letters to create weapons like broadswords, pikes, and axes as you go. The drop rate for letters are generous so you’re never too worried about having to rely solely on your fists and shield for too long. Once you’ve assembled enough letters you can build a weapon, and later on you can enchant it with fire, poison, or another kind of magic.

The crafting system is superficial but pretty much all of Brutal is that way. Its most interesting qualities are gimmicks – the ASCII visuals, the procedural generation, a shield that you can throw like Captain America because why not? That doesn’t stop these things from being enjoyable and the meaty combat and the reliable but occasionally unpredictable structure of each game session are enough to prop up this rogue-like even after the sheen on those gimmicks has faded. However, it’s hard not feeling like Brutal could have had a more impressive showing given the size of its bag of tricks.

http://ift.tt/2aPIR81

Blog Post: Announcing The Destiny: Rise of Iron Magazine Cover Art Contest

Blog Post: Announcing The Destiny: Rise of Iron Magazine Cover Art Contest

We’ve been blown away in recent years by the support and enthusiasm of the Destiny community as we continue our ongoing coverage of the Destiny franchise. As we roll out our look at Bungie’s next installment, we wanted to find ways to involve the community in exciting ways.

Our new art contest is a small way to thank you for following along with our coverage. [Excerpt]

We’re giving artists a chance to see their creations featured as a Game Informer magazine cover.  Three winning entries, selected by Bungie developers, will be featured exclusively in an online feature here on gameinformer.com. Winning cover art will be prepared with the Game Informer logo treatment, just like we do for each of our magazine covers. 

In addition to acclaim from your fellow guardians, the three winners will receive a framed, poster-sized version of their Game Informer cover, complete with signatures from the Bungie development team behind Rise of Iron. In cooperation with Activision and Bungie, winners also receive a collection of awesome Bungie merchandise, along with a digital copy of Destiny: Rise of Iron on your preferred system. 

While we will feature contest winners on GI.com upon the contest’s completion, we encourage you to share your entries with the Destiny community throughout the month, in whatever way you desire. And while only one prize package will go out to each winning entry, there’s no rule that your art project needs to be the work of a single individual; feel free to to work together. Have fun, and send us the best Rise of Iron-themed art you can dream up.

Winning cover artists will be revealed on September 2nd.

Submission Guidelines

1. Your art piece should relate to Destiny as a franchise, or focus specifically on features, characters, or ideas presented or inspired by Rise of Iron. Judging will be based on relevance to Destiny: Rise of Iron as well as overall artistic merit. 

2. Send your single image attachment via email to ReaderArt@gameinformer.com. All submissions must be received by August 29 at 12:01am Central Time. Entries received after that date and time will not be considered.

3. Your email subject line must read as follows, or it will not be considered: Destiny Cover Art Contest

4. Email body text should include the name of the artist or artists who participated in the creation of your entry as you would like to see those names printed online if you win. Your email body text should also include your shipping address and preferred gaming platform for playing Destiny.  

5. Your attached image should not exceed 10 MB in size, and should be formatted in the jpg file format. The dimensions for your art piece should be 3810px x 5000px. 

6. Only one attached image will be considered per email.

7. Contest is open to legal residents of the United States and/or Canada.

7. If any aspect of your artwork is discovered to be copied from another artist’s work, your entry will be disqualified. 

 

For all our Destiny: Rise of Iron coverage throughout this month, click on the banner below. 

http://ift.tt/2apGhFi

Blog Post: September Cover Revealed – Destiny: Rise Of Iron

Blog Post: September Cover Revealed – Destiny: Rise Of Iron

Since its launch in September 2014, Destiny has defied even ambitious estimates regarding its potential reach, blossoming to tens of millions of registered users. Players have embraced the distant future setting, which sees a beleaguered humanity struggling against innumerable alien threats across a solar system that witnessed Earth’s golden age pass long ago. With its upcoming September release, Bungie is shifting focus, exploring the history of legendary heroes who sealed away a deadly threat, and allowing players to join that same order of warriors as the threat reemerges. We traveled to Bungie’s studio to get the full scoop on Rise of Iron, the expansion that launches Destiny’s third and final year before a sequel. We played it, interviewed its creators, and dug deep into everything from the latest PvP game modes to the new raid, and even learned about where Bungie is heading in the months after Rise of Iron launches. [Excerpt]

Last year, The Taken King expansion represented a dramatic retrofit of Destiny’s game systems and progression. With many of those core systems now firmly set, Rise of Iron puts the focus squarely on new content to discover, and our time with the game reveals Bungie’s fixation on player choice, allowing everyone to enjoy the game in the way they most prefer, all while still making meaningful progress. Guardians can look forward to a vast array of new weapons and armor sets, a new arena play space called the Archon’s Forge, new ways to enjoy Crucible PvP play, and only a few days after launch, the blistering cooperative challenge of Destiny’s latest raid: Wrath of the Machine. Bungie also pulls the curtain back on the reinvention of the artifact item slot, which now serves to provide a game-changing ability to be combined with your subclass and gear selections. Check back later this afternoon, as we'll have a lot of additional info to share as soon as the new digital issue launches to subscribers. 

Our cover story features dozens of new screenshots and as much info as we could squeeze into 16 pages. We also have tons of additional interviews and gameplay footage that wouldn’t fit, and we’ll be rolling out that info as we prepare it throughout the next month, including an in-depth conversation with Destiny’s story writers, a closer look at one of the new exotic weapons, and comprehensive video coverage of new PvP features and modes. 

And in thanks to the enthusiastic Destiny community for following our coverage, we’re also proud to announce our first-ever GI cover art contest, in which you have a chance to see your artistic creation featured as Game Informer magazine cover art. Winners receive a Bungie-signed and framed poster version for your wall, a copy of Rise of Iron, and other goodies, along with the acclaim of your fellow Destiny fans. Winning entries will be featured here on the GI website early in September. Check out the complete details by clicking right here.

As you dream up your own cover ideas, take a moment to enjoy the actual cover for this month’s issue, which teases some of the stark and imposing sights awaiting Guardians in the new expansion. 

CLICK ON THE COVER TO SEE THE ENTIRE SPREAD, FRONT AND BACK

To learn more about our forthcoming online coverage of Destiny: Rise of Iron, and to get a brief glimpse of some of the action, check out our coverage trailer below. 

[View:5067094864001]

In addition to our blowout coverage of Bungie’s latest release, the September issue takes a look at the wild phenomenon of Pokémon Go, examines race and poverty through the eyes of the game We Are Chicago, and visits with the team remaking System Shock from the ground up. We’ve got previews of Battlefield 1, Halo Wars 2, and Yooka-Laylee, as well as reviews for summer releases like Abzû and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We also take a fascinating look back at the strange experiment that was the Philips CD-I Nintendo games, as told by the man who made them. 

Can’t wait to get the full story on Rise of Iron? You don’t have long to wait. Print subscribers should see their issues arriving in the next week, but if you subscribe digitally, the issue launches later today (available on PC/Mac, iPad,  Android, and Google Play). You can also get the latest issue through third-party apps on Nook, Kindle, and Zinio starting tomorrow. To switch your print subscription to digital, click here, or to create a new subscription to the digital edition, click here.

For all our Destiny: Rise of Iron coverage throughout the month, click on the banner below and bookmark the dedicated hub. We’ll be adding new features every few days. 

http://ift.tt/2aiOEAG

File: This Is The Police Screens

File: This Is The Police Screens
Here's a look at This is the Police.
http://ift.tt/2axcIjR

Blog Post: Ape Escape 2 Now Available As PS2-On-PS4 Game

Blog Post: Ape Escape 2 Now Available As PS2-On-PS4 Game

There are some games that exist to put smiles on faces. The Ape Escape franchise firmly fits in that category.[Excerpt]

Your job is to travel through time and capture wily monkeys in your time net. It sounds absurd, but sneaking up on the patrolling and frustratingly clever apes is a darn good time.

Ape Escape 2, the series’ first of two entries on PlayStation 2, is now available on PS4. For the first week, you can pick up at a 25 percent discount. It’s $7.49 through August 9.

 

Our Take
Way back in 2014, I named Ape Escape as one of six reboots I wanted to see happen in 2015. I may have been sorely disappointed (by every single one), but at least this gives me a good way to introduce my kids to Specter and his evil apes.

http://ift.tt/2aKyp3n

File: This Is The Police Screens

File: This Is The Police Screens
Here's a look at This is the Police.
http://ift.tt/2aKymV6

File: This Is The Police Screens

File: This Is The Police Screens
Here's a look at This is the Police.
http://ift.tt/2axcgSz

File: This Is The Police Screens

File: This Is The Police Screens
Here's a look at This is the Police.
http://ift.tt/2aKyqnL