Friends. Your free time is about to be… taken.
By The Taken King. Which comes out this week. Who here is planning on getting back into Destiny? Who never left?
Albino Lullaby (PC)
What is it? A horror game that doesn’t depend on gore or jump scares.
Should you care? There’s a fair amount of hype surrounding this one. People are excited. It looks like proper horror.
Destiny: The Taken King (360/PS3/Xbox One/PS4)
What is it? It’s The Taken King.
Should you care? Good luck friends. Your free time is about to be… taken.
Forza Motorsport 6 (Xbox One)
What is it? It’s another Forza. These seem to come quick and fast these days.
Should you care? This is a big one though, particularly if you’re into V8 Supercars. Forza is always great anyway.
NHL 16 (Xbox One/PS4)
What is it? It’s Ice Hockey. In video game form.
Should you care? If you are a fan of Ice Hockey you should probably care.
Pixel Galaxy (PC)
What is it? It’s a non-shooting top down shooter.
Should you care? That concept alone intrigues me. I’m down for this.
Shmup Love Boom (PC)
What is it? A shoot-em-up with interactive novel influences. AW YEAH.
Should you care? Why haven’t these two disparate genres locked horns before? THIS IS GENIUS.
Skyshine’s BEDLAM (PC)
What is it? A strategic, rogue-like with turn-based RPG mechanics. Looks pretty.
Should you care? I haven’t been keeping up to date with this, but it looks interesting. Particularly if you’re a fan of every genre in PC gaming history being squashed together in one video game.
Superstatic (PC)
What is it? Looks like a Hotline Miami rip-off basically.
Should you care? I would skip this one if I were you. Or play Hotline Miami.
TY the Tasmanian Tiger 4 (PC)
What is it? Remember Ty The Tasmanian Tiger? Well, he’s back.
Should you care? It’s kinda like the Rayman games on mobile, which were awesome. It’s not quite on that level, but it’s fun.
What are you picking up this week? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below~
Comments
66 responses to “This Week In Games: The Taken King Is Here And You Are About To Be Taken”
Destiny!!!!! Goodbye life
Also out this week:
Flame Over (PS4)
NHL Legacy Edition (PS3/XBox360)
Pro Evo Soccer 2016 (PS4/PS3/XBOne/XBox360)
Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows DLC
Konami has said they are still waiting on the Classification Bureau for Suikoden III so we haven’t been forgotten in amidst the excitement over the MGSV release.
@markserrels
Regarding Forza, Microsoft have two studios constantly working on Forza titles. Forza Horizon being more of an arcade and open world racer. Forza Motorsport is their more hardcore simulation/circuit racer. Both studios release a game every 2 years, ala Call of Duty style release schedule.
Every week, I scroll down through the list, then jump to your comment to see the rest. Thank you, Prolix.
Yes, I am one of zero people I know who loves NHL games….
Well I might like them but I haven’t played a ice hockey game since Blades of steel
Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey FTW
That was the best, sports sims nowadays are far too complex for me, Waybe Gretzky on the N64 was just perfect.
FWIW I think that’s why Rocket League took off – because it captures the spirit of when sports games were simpler and for everyone
Make that two, I enjoy them but rarely find anyone in the same hemisphere who wants to play them as well.
I love them, just no time to play them 🙁
I guess nothing for me this week. Except maybe for Shovel Knight.
Forza 6 and The Taken King – must resist while Masters is still incomplete…
What’s a masters?
Tennis
My Masters degree! The most time consuming and expensive game I’m playing
Whats it do?
Takes a whole bunch of time and money, with only the promise of potential fun. A bit like Destiny.
Fun doing what?
I hear that has expensive Amibo-like DLC called ‘Text books’!
Ahh! But thats where your wrong, for I have seen Taken and plan to call Liam Neeson the first chance I get before I get sold to Xur as an exotic commodity
i was still playing destiny, but took a break when rocket league came to town… id love to get back into it but $70-80 for dlc is an absolute joke…
If you have the current two expansions I think it’s $40 on PSN? The $79 (price at JB) for what you get on the taken king blu ray is for the base game, expansions and the taken king.
nope… 69.99 is the price for the taken king expansion on au psn… US psn it $40
Damn, you’re right. As someone who’s interested in TKK and only has Vanilla Destiny, guess the best option is to buy the disc from JB. Shame to move from an install of vanilla on the HDD to a disc, but I would need to buy a season pass plus TKK – $110 to keep it installed! Ridiculous
its an absolute joke, it really is…
Am not getting it until the price drops. As you said, its an absolute insult. Especially when the US gets it for almost half the price
i think the choice u will have to make is wether you buy it or not… DLC RARELY ever drops in price, unless your waiting on the Legendary Disc Edition to drop i suppose.
It can do on Xbox if it goes on the Deals with Gold 🙂 that’ll be the only way i’ll buy it though, I’m not paying more for a DLC then I did for the full game! lol
To be fair the exchange rate of AUD to USD is actually pretty sucky at the moment. So yeah it’s still overpriced, but not really double the price. I mean currently $40USD converts to $56AUD according to xe.com currency converter.
I was eexaggerating for effect 😛 We’re still paying quite a bit more, but yeah, not quite double, thats why i said ‘almost double’ 😉 haha
Yeah, I think $70 is correct, PSN doesn’t seem to have a price up atm though.
It tells me I need the Destiny Expansion Pass to see the price of TKK. Pretty ridiculous
you may as well buy the legendary edition and save yourself the downloads at that rate. 40 for expansion pass, and 70 for TK is 110. its what legendary edition goes for. may as well buy that and sell ur standard destiny disc for 15-20 and recoup some of the cost.
‘The Taken Wallet’ joke has been done to death, but hey, if the shoe fits!
I consider this less DLC and More Destiny 2, and you keep your character. But $70 for a game I feel burned me and never lived up to it’s promises. I’ll be waiting till it’s closer to $40.
Once again I love playing the game, but the original with 2 expansions was pretty fricking short.
i get what your saying, and i would have justified that if the content fit the scope of a retail game;
but a new patrol zone, a few new story missions, multiplayer maps and strikes hardly qualifies as anything more than a standard expansion. the reality of it is, you get much more content out of the expansion pass at $40 ( the dark below and house of wolves), then you do buying the taken king at $70… how do you justify that?
not only that, but if you want the extra emotes and stuff, you have to pay an additional $20 for it where collectors edition players get that for free.
its a big F U to those that have supported Destiny since the beginning, and bought all the dlc content separately.
Oh is Bedlam out already. Backed it when it was on kickstarter and haven’t looked at it since.
Oh? Did they not spam Kickstarter backer updates every three days like some projects I’ve backed? Or did you sensibly go looking for an opt-out button on that guff?
(Also god damn Bedlam looks like my jam.)
Kickstarter folder that I generally bulk delete. I think I saw something about them having a release date, or an announcement saying they were going to announce a release date or something. Didn’t realise it was so soon.
When it was kickstarted I was at a stage of not backing any games as I had too many unreleased out there. But the combination was just too good to pass up.
I preordered Destiny TTK on my PS4 but got a payment error with some BS error message “The credit card information is not valid. Please check your entries carefully” despite having used my CC dozens of times on there. Tried adding a different card and Paypal and still doesn’t work (same error message!). Googling the error message shows the problem having existed for about 4 YEARS. FFS Sony get your act together. Had to beg a friend in Aus to buy me a prepaid card (I’m overseas), hopefully that will let me top up the account in time for the preorder to go through…
I’m sure this is probably pointless advice but still, just in case – have you checked the expiry on your CC? I had the same problem until I realised that was the issue.
I’ve had this problem as well on my ps4 , I ended up logging in through my laptop and updating CC info and that worked.
Yeah just got the same error, Sony are truly one of the world’s great clusterfucktard organisations…
I love how much mileage Mark’s getting out of the Destiny expansion’s name.
I wonder how long it’s “taken” him to come up with all these puns?
I think it has been Mark’s Destiny to be the King of all puns for a long time.
He’s gotten more mileage out of the name than I got out of the base game.
Oooooh, Bungie best hold that under some cold running water because that’s how you treat burrrrrrrrrns
I’ll wait for reviews before spending $60 on a handful of new bounties and weapon skins. I’m sure their ‘focus on story’ will be a paragraph or two from a new vendor and nothing more.
Prove me wrong Bungie.
Easy there Mr Cynicism
I think Bungie’s earned that cynicism.
They’ve told us that they’ve improved their narrative before, remember the hype about The Dark Below and its ‘new approach to storytelling’?
So far they have yet to show me any signs that they actually understand what makes a story compelling, such as character development and growth or even character interaction. They seem to have the most feeble grasp imaginable on concepts such as raised stakes, loss, or sacrifice.
Destiny’s entire story so far is an AI nattering at you, doing all the heavy lifting of exposition in white-noise monologues at you while your bland, personality-devoid character mutely exercises its only interaction with the world – putting bullets in the skulls or guts of aliens and robots.
‘Characters’ make some cameos to pretend like there’s some kind of story going on, but essentially the only stakes are remote, the only loss is what you stumble upon after the fact, and your contribution is summarily dismissed as unimpressive and unnecessary in a world full of guardians who would’ve done the job if you hadn’t.
Bungie’s response so far to, “Where’s the damn story?” has been to take the complaint literally and post big, obvious sign-posts with “THE STORY IS HERE:” at the meagre scraps they think are worth calling a narrative. An insult to the intelligence of anyone familiar with storytelling, as if the problem was that we just didn’t ‘get’ it, as opposed to the fact that they’ve shown and told us nothing interesting to invest us in our oft-promised ‘legend’.
They’ve had three swings and misses at delivering anything meaningful.
If anyone ISN’T cynical about Bungie’s ability to deliver a stirring narrative by this point, I’d say they’re experiencing some kind of chemical imbalance, stockholm syndrome, or other confirmation bias.
They have this massive story in the grimorie which just doesn’t translate into the game, I’m not confident they are about to improve it any…
Well, it’s not really a massive story as much as it’s a massive collection of little stories – vignettes. They don’t especially form much of a cohesive story. Lore tidbits, mostly. There’s some overarching ones, like The Last Word, or Kabr… but certainly nothing you’re able to get involved with, apart from possibly one day maybe meeting some of the figures from those stories. But in general, those back-stories are done and separate and never involve your guardian.
It really shouldn’t be that hard. FPS game shave been telling stories better than Destiny for decades. It’s pretty basic. Have multiple characters, have them interact with each other, replace monologues with dialogues, let exposition occur via witnessed events rather than monologue/dialogue, let there actually be some stakes – something at risk – and allow challenges, triumphs, losses bring about noticable changes in the characters.
That really is it. That’s all you need to do to dramatically improve ANY story. You could draw the details of what happens to who, where, out of a fucking hat. It’d still be better than what we’ve got.
Double post? Bleh.
Edit: To salvage the post, let’s make it useful. Hey, if you haven’t done the ‘quests’ to replay the story again, I highly recommend that if you do… whenever you hear the Ghost talking at you, just try to figure out how that monologue could’ve been improved by having part of the heavy-lifting taken away and having your character ask questions for the ghost to answer, or take over some of the dry observations.
Imagine how much better that would’ve been and how much more it would’ve involved you.
It breaks up the monotony of just one voice, it injects variety of tone and cadence, it allows for some personality to grow in your character and for the interaction between ghost and guardian to be a symbiotic relationship instead of the one-way exchange we endure so far.
Destiny would be better if Bender was your Ghost.
Why did I get Taken king – I like destiny, but I’d love if it was on PC.
I’m getting Forza and TTK this week.
I think I’m at a stage in my life where I’m ready to renew my hate/disappointment/resentment about Destiny.
The only thing the Taken King is doing for Destiny is taking your cash. Seriously though I’m not getting it for $70 I would if it were $20 but that’s still pushing it. Their promises of story has always been unfulfilled.
Quiet week for me this week it seems.
Been enjoying the new updates to Destiny and looking forward to the drop of The Taken King tomorrow! As it stands now I’m liking the changes to Destiny so far (although hearing NolanBot instead of DinkleBot is a bit weird, not better or worse just different *shrug*) and they do seem to be making the gameplay a lot more streamlined and enjoyable. As someone who has rather limited time to play any games, since I’m working and studying game design LoL, I’m certainly liking that levelling up items and your character seem to not take a billion years anymore. I mean it was always cool when you found a new exotic, but it’s much cooler that I don’t have to invest weeks of playtime just to get them to a level where their cool abilities work now 😛
So yeah, I’m hoping TTK is pretty freaking massive. Either way, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it with the few hours I can spare here or there, ahah.
So they make it easier to level up so your goal is to collect loot…which really has no depth apart from feeding some gambling addiction…
Welcome to the world of games, where this system is almost always used in one form or another 😛
Of course when it comes to Destiny, it means I can actually play the bits I want to and slowly level up, rather than having leveling up require me to do some bullshit hard mode that I don’t really enjoy playing with my limited gaming time. So yeah, I’m pretty happy they’ve modified their systems to allow the players a bit more choice of what they find fun.
Far out at $70 they should rename this “Destiny: The Taken to court by Marty O’Donnell now paying the legal fees” special edition
Can’t believe you missed PES 16 @serrels
Felt a little bit dirty putting down the $69AU for The Taken King. A bit pricey for digital dlc.
I was totally over Destiny for the last few months but have enjoyed getting back into it since the patch dropped. Suppose the dollar per gaming hour ratio is pretty strong with this one. If I get 100 hours out of it then I cannot complain.
I will be back on TTK but I so want Forza 6 as well.
Just really got into Euro Truck Simulator 2 on my Mac recently (console gamer) so if they could somehow cross Forza and Euro Tru……………………..*light bulb moment*
YES!!! Euro Truck Simulator 2 but delivering Xbox One Forza 6 games bulk to game stores!!!