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It’s odd when a studio simultaneously acknowledges and ignores one of its franchises. When that happens, players can’t be blamed if they become confused and anxious about the fate of their favorite games. That’s sort of where Splinter Cell is at right now. At the last Ubisoft Forward, players learned that Sam Fisher, the protagonist of Splinter Cell, would make an appearance in another Tom Clancy title, Rainbow Six Siege. Considering it’s been seven years since the last Splinter Cell game, his re-appearance is welcome and baffling all at once....

The UK technology retailer Box announced it will be using ballots to determine which customers have a shot at purchasing new Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. Customers can register on the company’s website to win the chance for a new Xbox Series X later this December. The company said it would be receiving its second and third shipments of new Xbox Series X and Series S consoles starting December 7 and December 14....

Alongside Uncharted 3, was Naughty Dog released the Fortune Hunters’ Club DLC Season’s pass to mixed reactions. With that announcement in October, they provided information on how DLC was going to be rolled out and now, in the second month of 2012, Naughty Dog is announcing another release of DLC content to their users. Continuing the trend of providing users with game content to keep interest levels high, Naughty Dog is hard at work providing their Uncharted 3 client base with a constant stream of DLC updates....

Sony’s PlayStation Experience 2015 has an emotional moment, showcasing the reunion of the Drake brothers in a dialogue-laden new Uncharted 4 cutscene. When fans of the Uncharted series think of the finer points of the adventure series, serious discussions and introspective moments are generally low on the list. With the series renowned for its action focus, fast gameplay, and quick-quipping main character, emotional attachment is not quite a player’s priority. Nonetheless, Sony’s PSX 2015 opened with a new cutscene from Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and one that certainly tried to pull at the heartstrings....

Last week, Firefly and Castle actor Nathan Fillion posted a curious message on his Instagram page. The actor seemed to be hinting towards some sort of Uncharted-related announcement and fans begin to speculate. Was Fillion somehow involved in the next game in the hugely popular PS4 franchise? Or is he connected to the in-development Uncharted movie? Fillion’s teaser has now come to fruition, as an Uncharted short film has now been released online, starring the actor as Nathan Drake himself....

The Valkyria Chronicles series is unique among role-playing games, but one aspect they make sure to carry over into this nail-biting fantasy war setting is the strong characterization any RPG worth its salt will place front and center in the experience. A massive amount of this character building is done in Squad Stories. These are short optional missions the player can take on after meeting a short list of requirements...

The currently ongoing closed beta period for Riot Game’s flagship first-person shooter VALORANT began on April 7th of this year. While its beta was originally intended to last only for a short period of time, a combination of factors has led Riot to extending it to up until the game’s full release. While one cause was likely its meteoric popularity (and in conjunction with that, the difficulty for some of those wanting to try it had obtaining an access code) another contributing factor is adding in extra time to patch elements of the game that players are finding to impact competitive integrity....

Sometimes studios and publishers try to take advantage of the community’s naivety by deceiving people into believing their product is not how it really is. Take the incident last year in which the UK banned mobile ads for misleading information with regard to the likes of such games as Homescapes. Now it appears an independent developer has occurred some corporate wrath and been kicked off Steam by Valve for a similar practice....

A Call of Duty: Warzone player discovered that the hut he was hiding in had a one-way invincible window, so they decided the only answer was to use an RPG. It did not go well. Warzone is great, but there are glitches. Infinity Ward is working on fixing these issues, but some of them are so specific that they can be hard to spot until something like this happens. Reddit user Lord_GodFlow made the unfortunate discovery of a single hut in Verdansk that features one-way glass....

One of the largest community complaints in Call of Duty: Warzone is the blatant use of hacks in various matches. While Activision has imposed several new patches and report features in an effort to stem the hacking problem, videos of hacks being used continue to surface among the Warzone community. This has been a problem since the game first launched and continues to be an issues for the game’s community. Losing a battle royale-style match to a cheater’s inhuman accuracy can create a frustrating experience that many regular players condemn....

Warzone’s weapons have received a significant balance update via the game’s latest patch in an attempt to increase the game’s time-to-kill. Weapons in games like Warzone and Fortnite are changed and tweaked all the time. Whether that be a nerf, a buff, or the item being vaulted from the game entirely. However, Season 4 Reloaded, which begins today, will usher in what Raven Software has labeled “the biggest balance update in the history of Warzone”....

Like most people, earlier this year actor and filmmaker John Krasinski decided to pursue a small passion project of his by starting his own YouTube channel called Some Good News, a simple news show shot from Krasinki’s own home for the sole purpose of sharing good news and good news only towards the beginning of the pandemic. His most recent episode features a fun, holiday-themed appearance from none other than Dwayne Johnson....

This Westworld review contains spoilers. Westworld Season 4 Episode 5 From its first season, Westworld has been a show concerned primarily with outliers. Dolores Abernathy on her quest for vengeance against humanity is an outlier. Maeve Millay on her quest for self-discovery is an outlier. The whole purpose of Rehoboam was to hunt down and remove outliers from the world, because they’re dangerous to the survival of the human race. And now, even with humanity under the control of the Hosts and the Hosts prowling the streets of New York City like minor deities, there are still flaws in the system....

Microsoft’s streaming service Mixer unexpectedly shut down this morning as the tech conglomerate announced a partnership with Facebook Gaming, but that is apparently not the only video game-related news Facebook decided to make public today. In an Oculus Blog post by Facebook AR/VR content vice president Mike Verdu, it was announced that the company has acquired The Order: 1886 developer Ready At Dawn to create “groundbreaking content in VR.” Ready At Dawn’s 2015 third-person action-adventure title The Order: 1886 was considered a disappointment upon release, yet the studio has gone on to create other titles including Lone Echo, Echo Arena, and Echo Combat for Oculus since 2017....

This review of The Orville: New Horizons contains spoilers. The Orville: New Horizons Season 3 Episode 4 Good science-fiction should challenge us. It should contain subtext that can teach, subvert, and even make us uncomfortable by shining a light on aspects of our world we don’t want to look at. Whether it is the golden standard of this layered writing style such as The Outer Limits, the legendary The Twilight Zone, or recent forays into the genre like Black Mirror, these tiny vignettes of fiction are loaded with political subtext and important morals....

The Sims 4 is an ever expanding game, with DLC adding more and more to the franchise. There are 3 different types of DLC, expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs. The cheapest are the stuff packs, which can often come on sale for as little as $5. Stuff packs won’t add too much to your actual game play, except in rare circumstances, but they will add new furniture, décor, clothing and hairstyles....

It’s been a while since anything Dragon Age-related has released, but the fandom surrounding the franchise is still going strong. There’s a number of ways devotees have shown appreciation for the BioWare RPG series, from writing fanfiction to tattooing frenemy Solas on their arm. It’s often creative how fans have expressed their admiration, such as one who recreated Skyhold within Sims 4 with remarkable detail. For those unfamiliar, Skyhold was the headquarters of the Inquisition, the group that was the center of Dragon Age: Inquisition....

In 2019, James Cameron regained the rights to the Terminator franchise and set about retconning the three sequels that were made without his involvement. Titled Dark Fate, the Tim Miller-helmed movie brought back Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, but its script fell into a lot of the same pitfalls as the previous failed attempts to follow up Terminator 2: Judgment Day. When even Cameron himself couldn’t make a new Terminator sequel that justified its existence, it was clear as day that the series should’ve ended with T2’s perfect conclusion....

The Walking Dead’s second spinoff, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, promised…well, a world beyond the usual TWD storytelling possibilities. In that regard, the AMC series about four precocious youths 10 years into the zombie post-apocalypse mostly delivered. Season 1 of the show, which premiered last October after a COVID delay, picked up in Nebraska at the Campus Colony of Omaha before heading out on a cross-country adventure. In the process, the show formally introduced the Civic Republic, and its military arm (the CRM) that seems set to become a major antagonist for The Walking Dead franchise for years to come....

As the saying goes, heroes are only as good as their villains - and Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt certainly has more than his fair share of antagonistic forces to face. The world of the Continent is a harsh one, full of monsters, betrayal, and underhandedness of all kinds - and from all sources, even those you might least expect. From mad kings to murderous witch hunters, manipulative sages to treacherous spymasters, there is no shortage of cruelty and callousness that Geralt must overcome....