Matt ClariusGuillermo del Toro, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, Charlie Day, and giant robots?
Yup
Pacific Rim is about skyscraper-sized robots and monsters fighting to the death in the Pacific Ocean. But there are people in the movie too — after all, the monsters, or Kaiju, are looking to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. In a new featurette released today, director Guillermo del Toro and actors Idris Ebala, Charlie Hunnam, and Charlie Day explain how civilization is pushed to the point of building massive mechs to take on the Kaiju threatening the planet.
Matt ClariusGood news, friends! That cat game no one knows anything about is getting a thing!
Team Meat will bring the first playable build of its randomly generated cat-centric title, Mew-Genics, to PAX Prime, the developer announced via its website.
In addition to the game, Team Meat will also have an official 28-page Mew-Genics comic filled with "funformation." No other details about the game or the comic were provided.
Mew-Genics was announced in October of last year. Team Meat describes it as "a cross between Pokemon and The Sims with a sprinkling of Animal Crossing and a dash of Tamagotchi." The game is expected to launch for Steam, iOS, Android and possibly more.
PAX Prime will take place in Seattle, Wash., from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2. Polygon will be reporting live from the event.
Matt ClariusHotline Miami 2 just made my morning
Top-down murder-sim Hotline Miami left behind a legacy of synth-fueled tracks, stylish gore and addictive gameplay, and Dennaton Games is well aware of the expectations is has to live up to, creator Dennis Wedin said during an E3 demo and interview.
The follow-up to 2012's ultra-violent title, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is molded around just that: expectations. It's the expectations of fans on what the game should or should not be, Wedin said. Or, the expectations and motivations and dreams that in-game characters have about their part in the game. According to Wedin, many of the characters for Hotline Miami 2 were already well underway during the creation of the first game. Dennaton Games began work on another franchise, but felt...
Matt ClariusThose bastards know exactly what buzz words to use to make me to open my wallet
A bit more than a year ago, Double Fine Productions put Kickstarter on the map for game developers around the world. It was never the studio's intention to. It had launched a campaign to raise funds for an adventure game — a game it knew publishers wouldn't want, but fans might — and asked for $400,000, a modest amount by game development standards.
Within 24 hours, the studio established a Kickstarter record, raising more than $1 million in its first day and becoming (at the time) the most funded video game in Kickstarter history. The Kickstarter campaign for Double Fine Adventure — now officially named Broken Age — closed at $3,336,371.
With Broken Age due to release soon, the studio is going back for more. Developer Brad...
Matt ClariusThis looks neat. Should be fun to try after its done. I'm not excited about Crusader Kings eating another 80 hours though.
The official Game of Thrones video games were largely terrible. Lucky for us, then, that the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings II is better than any official game could ever have been. Even luckier for us, that mod is about to get a whole lot better.
    
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Matt ClariusExcited! Technical issues aside (more or less expected for this kind of Eastern European game), this sounds like all I wanted from a Metro sequel.
In Metro 2033 (released in 2010), this eagerness was a liability leading to frustrating, obtuse scenarios about as often as it led to fresh, perfectly-paced levels. With Metro: Last Light, developer 4A Games has found a more successful (and more impressive) balance between what it wants and what it can actually achieve.
Metro: Last Light is an achingly ambitious game, which shows in the length and breadth of its journey — and as with Metro 2033, this is reflected in its technical problems as well. 4A doesn't seem to know when to quit piling more on its plate — but while the end result isn't always graceful, it's absolutely memorable.
Matt ClariusSquee! Can't wait to play this!
It's hard to say what Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is.
Let's get this out of the way first. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is not downloadable content for last year's Far Cry 3 — it's available as a standalone product that doesn't require the original game. It's not a sequel in any way. But it's still got that "Far Cry 3" part in the title. In the greater scheme of consumer messaging and marketing, it's difficult to say what this crazy neon thing is supposed to be.
That aside, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon isn't totally inscrutable. With the loose, island-based open-world framework of its namesake, Ubisoft Montreal's bizarre experiment uses an amalgam of first-person shooting, stealth, and action-adventure as a lens to view '80s action movies and the...
Matt ClariusAttn John
Matt ClariusBrilliant commentary. This looks incredible.
Ubisoft has shared another chunk of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon gameplay, this time narrated by the game's creative director Dean Evans. This gives a sense of Blood Dragon's willful stupidity, and shows off a trick that wasn't present in Far Cry 3: The ability to call in a massive land-dragon to fight your enemies. Nifty.
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Matt ClariusI'm sad that Monaco doesn't balance well solo :(
I'll have to play it with John next time I'm down there or something.
Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine captures the thrill of pulling off the perfect heist.
The game takes everything exciting about heist movies — the colorful roster of cons, the scheming and tense near misses with armed guards — and distills that into a tight, top-down stealth-action game.
Monaco also highlights the frustration of watching your best-laid plans go straight to hell. The game’s multiplayer mode brilliantly hits both the highs and lows inherent to a high-stakes, high-risk scenario. But just as a proper heist can't be pulled off by a lone wolf, Monaco's single-player offering proves more frustrating than the loot is worth.
Matt Clarius:(
Netflix to the rescue?
Futurama is no stranger to being cancelled, and it unfortunately looks like the axe has fallen yet again — Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Comedy Central has declined to renew the show, making the seventh season the last go for the Planet Express crew (note: link contains season seven spoilers). While the show has a loyal and devoted fanbase, it also has had more ups and downs than most programs experience since its debut on Fox way back in 1999. Futurama was the victim of erratic scheduling until the plug was finally pulled (for the first time) in 2003.
Comedy Central led the show's first revival in 2007 after reruns of the Fox episodes on Adult Swim proved popular — four straight-to-DVD movies were released, and each was...
Matt ClariusPatton Oswalt <3
This preview of this weeks episode of NBC’s Parks and Recreation comedy series has comedian/geek icon Patton Oswalt delivering an epic filibuster that outlines impossibly great ideas for the recently announced Episode VII of Star Wars. This was all improvised, too. It’s freakin’ great. J.J. Abrams, call this man.
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Matt ClariusKickstarted this. Looks neat.
Helplessness is a key to good horror, and there are few times when you're more helpless than as a child. Among the Sleep, an upcoming game that just launched a Kickstarter campaign, aims to exploit that fact by putting you in the role of a two-year-old. You'll stumble through a dark house in search of your parents, seeing the world from a first-person perspective — and one that's much lower to the ground. You'll also have to deal with the added terrors created by a child's overactive imagination.
"There are at least two times in everyone's lives when we have been authentically scared: and that's while we are dreaming and when we were children," explains Adrian Tingstad Husby, from development studio Krillbite. "Among the Sleep...
Matt ClariusMalpractice Simulator is getting a real release!
Surgeon Simulator 2013, an expanded version of Bossa Studios's hilarious physics-based surgical game jam project, will launch on Steam tomorrow, the developer revealed this morning.
The title tasks you with using a single hand and a number of dangerous tools to perform increasingly complex surgical operations on an unfortunate patient. The original title featured a single operation in which the player must perform a heart transplant — the expanded version features a lot more organs to accidentally dismantle, including a brain surgery level which definitely, definitely shouldn't be completed by breaking a beaker over your patient's skull.
Check out the trailer above for a sneak peek at the title, which will cost $9.99 in the U.S.,...
Matt ClariusI read the headline and got excited. Then I saw the trailer and despair set in. I'm glad the original developer is leading this but I'm cautious about the direction they're taking.
Flashback — known as Flashback: Quest for Identity in the United States, a sci-fi platformer originally released in 1992 — is being remade by developer Paul Cuisset and published by Ubisoft later this year, the publisher announced at its Digital Days event in San Francisco.
Cuisset designed the original Flashback more than 20 years ago, and his new studio, VectorCell, is now working on the remake.
In an interview with Polygon, Ubisoft's Guillaume Da Costa Vieira said VectorCell approached the publisher asking to do a remake of the original because many fans had been asking about it. With the Ubisoft team being fans of the original game, Da Costa Vieira said they jumped at the opportunity.
"We wanted to stay true to the roots and...
Matt ClariusThis sounds fun. Hopefully some chumps donate so I can buy it when it comes out.
Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins gave effusive praise to PopCap Games' Bookworm Adventures in a December 2006 post titled "Hookworm Adventures," describing the role-playing/puzzle game as "linguaphile crack." Ryan Henson Creighton, the one-man team behind Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure co-developer Untold Entertainment, told Polygon in a recent phone interview that based on Holkins' glowing review, he bought Bookworm Adventures "sight unseen" and was somewhat underwhelmed.
The review put an idea in Creighton's head that the game didn't live up to. But the idea stuck with him.
"I thought, 'Man, I really want to play that game that [Holkins] described,'" said Creighton. "And that game that he described is Spellirium."
This week, Untold...
Matt ClariusFrom the creator of Soda Drinker Pro comes this acid trip!
Soda Drinker Pro creator Will Brierly recently revealed that the soda-drinking simulator has an experimental game hidden inside it called Vivian Clark, and he launched a Kickstarter campaign for the latter title yesterday.
Vivian Clark is "a game about changing perspective," says Brierly in the Kickstarter pitch video. "You start as a raindrop, and whatever you land on, you become."
In one example Brierly gives, the raindrop lands on a bird, and then the bird flies into an electrical outlet, and then the electricity lights a house on fire, and then the smoke ascends and you become another raindrop. The actions you take can affect the world, too: You can be flying a plane and bombing random houses, but later in the game you might become...
Matt ClariusDay = Made
One of these actors has signed up to be in this film. Guess which one. 20th Century Fox
Cinephiles, rejoice: director Roland Emmerich has announced details on his long-anticipated sequel to 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Sequels, actually: according to Entertainment Weekly, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin have penned two full scripts for the follow-up, which will be set twenty years after the events in the first movie and will again feature the return of Independence Day's IT-challenged squid-headed monster antagonists.
"The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back," Emmerich explained to EW. The invading tentacular horde from the first movie managed to send out a distress signal before being implausibly hacked by Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook and... actually, you know what? I'd probably better just stop using words like "implausibly" right now, because otherwise this article is never going to get written.
Twenty years after the first movie, Earth is a changed place: glowy-blue organic alien technology from the vast ships implausibly knocked out of the sky by plucky human resistance fighters...damn it, there I go again. Um, alien tech has been incorporated into the everyday lives of the people of Earth, but not without difficulty: the technology can be scavenged and used, but not recreated from scratch. "We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane," explained Emmerich. Emphasis added by me, because in a fascinating twist, Emmerich has created a future where portable electronics actually represent a legitimate threat to commercial aviation.
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Matt ClariusI was going to pick some up but I couldn't drag myself to the store
Matt ClariusLooks neat
Side-scrolling indie action game Apotheon is looking a lot better since last we saw it. We saw it at PAX East in Boston this past weekend, where it appeared to be shaping up as promising mix of Metroid and... Mount & Blade?
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Matt ClariusExciting!
This uncommented PAX East gameplay footage of Supergiant Games' latest title Transistor features the protagonist Red in action, the funky audio design and the turn-based strategy combat.
As outlined in Polygon's Transistor preview, Red was a superstar who had her voice stolen after a confrontation with five assassins. She then finds companionship in a possessed sword called the Transistor — which she found embedded in the soul's cadaver.
The 15-minute long gameplay shows Red dispatching robots spawned by the city-wide AI, referred to as the Process, who is after the Transistor. As touched upon in Polygon's PAX hands-on, the gameplay illustrates Transistor's sideways evolution into turn-based strategy combat.
The player then pauses...
Matt ClariusJohn may have been lukewarm on the original, but I have a boner for bleak, Eastern European shooters. Can someone check this out for me at PAX?
All this instability could have had a strong negative impact on Metro: Last Light. But according to Deep Silver's brand and PR manager, Jeremy Greiner — who was brought over from THQ — the game is better off now than it was before.
"The wheels started to fall off in December [2012] and we didn't know what was going to happen with THQ," Greiner tells Polygon. "Ultimately, THQ was auctioned off piecemeal and, thankfully, Deep Silver bought the game."
Greiner says Metro 2033 was hugely successful in Germany, which is where Deep Silver and Koch Media are based. The game was well-received in Europe, but Greiner says THQ "dropped the ball" with the way it handled the game in North America.
"I don't think the company really understood...
