The world’s most beloved speedrunning marathon kicks off today (Jan. 7) at 11:30am ET on Twitch.
Games Done Quick (GDQ) is a speedrunning event that only happens twice per year. Thousands of viewers watch their favorite speedrunners destroy some of their beloved games and, in turn, donate millions of dollars to charity. The runners come from all corners of the globe, and it’s easily the world’s biggest speedrunning event.
This year, AGDQ will be benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation, an organization that helps to detect and prevent cancer before it spreads.
JHobz is kicking off the event this year with the popular speedgame Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy. The event will then continue for the next seven days without any stops as speedrunners attempt to complete 155 games as fast as possible.
Fans can also support AGDQ this year by buying merchandise from either Fangamer or TheYetee. A percentage of all sales will go towards the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Now that AGDQ is here, it’s time to rally the speedrunning community to help a great cause.
The Astronauts’ narrative adventure The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is heading to Xbox One with support for Xbox One X. It’ll feature 4K support to bolster the game in the graphical department for Xbox One X players, but it’ll also include a new mode to play through.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter follows a paranormal investigator who receives a letter from a 12-year-old boy named Ethan Carter, whose disappearance he ends up investigating, which spirals into something even darker and more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.
The new version of the game, which was originally released in 2014, will include Free Roam mode, which has been requested by fans looking for ways to explore further than what the game allows. This way you can take in all the sights of the world of Red Creek Valley without having to worry about progressing in the game or what the story will bring next. This way the previous limits imposed on players are removed to make things easier to experience.
The game is up for preorder right now on Xbox One, but it doesn’t launch fully until Jan. 19 with full 4K support. You can go ahead and play the game right now if you’re curious, however, as it’s available on both PC and PlayStation 4 right now.
Capcom held a livestream from Japan today with a new trailer and additional info about the upcoming Monster Hunter World divulged.
The game is currently scheduled for launch on Jan. 26, and it’s looking especially awesome. The new trailer shows off several of the Elder Dragons from the series, with some new additions and those included from earlier iterations of the series.
You can check out the flame king dragon Teostra with dangerous fires, steel dragon Kushala Daora with an entire body covered in metal plates, the rock-eating Dodogama, and several other dragons that can mess with your hunter if you’re not careful. All are extremely formidable opponents.
There’s also a final beta before release, which Monster Hunter fans on PlayStation 4 will be able to take part in from Jan. 19 to 22. It’ll feature a battle with Nergigante, an enormous and fearsome creature featured in the game’s marketing materials.
Capcom also discussed some additional details about Monster Hunter World’s post-launch content, confirming that there will indeed be major, free updates to the game as well as regular content injections. There’s a major title update planned for spring 2018, which will add the monster Deviljho as well.
If you’re looking to sink your teeth into life as a monster hunter, there isn’t much longer to wait. It looks like it’s certainly going to be worth holding tight for.
God of War’s upcoming reboot is poised to explore themes grounded in Norse mythology, but that doesn’t mean future games will be rooted there, according to director Cory Barlog. In a new interview with Game Informer, Barlog stated that the team may end up actually exploring both the Egyptian era and the Mayan era, “and so on and so forth.”
It seems as though the God of War games may become somewhat cyclical in that it will eventually explore additional eras, following its original Greek exploration for the entirety of six whole games. It’s interesting to ponder what a Mayan God of War game might look like, or an Egyptian version.
“What became apparent to me was that we were watching this franchise wane a bit,” Sony Santa Monica Head of Studio Shannon Studstill said in the interview. “It was getting old. The storyline with Kratos being the hardcore badass – I think people were starting to say, ‘What’s next?’ I felt like, in order to reinvent, we really needed to turn a lot of things around.”
It was possible that the game we’re seeing in the near future could just have easily have been given an Egyptian setting, though as it turns out with Assassin’s Creed Origins taking the same route, perhaps it’s a good thing that the project went another way.
Whatever route the series takes in the future, it’ll be interesting to see a new direction for Kratos, especially if it means he’ll be growing and evolving as a character.
Minecraft and Norse mythology may seem like two very different things, but the two are coming together with the new Norse Mythology Mash-Up Pack, a new DLC release that brings together some familiar pieces together with the blocky goodness of Minecraft.
The mash-up pack includes locations like Hel, the Great Hall, and Yggdrasil from throughout the annals of Norse mythology. You can even dress up as important figures from the stories themselves, like the very same ones you may remember reading about in one of your history classes (the parts you fell asleep during.)
For instance you can dress up as Thor and Odin, or even Heimdall and Sif. There are a few creatures up for grabs as well to complete the package. Enemies get several interesting skins as well, transforming familiar baddies into antagonists based in Norse mythology.
There are plenty of large, fanciful environments found in the expansion as well that really look as though they could transport you, even temporarily, to a faraway place and time. You can see it all in action in the official trailer, and you can download the DLC pack right now across all Minecraft platforms.
If you like reskinning Minecraft with lots of different looks, be on the lookout for a new Festive Mash-Up DLC pack, which is releasing later this week just in time for the holidays. It will transform your favorite world with candy canes, Santa hats, reindeer, and more!
Nearly six months ago, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two released. Jesse’s story carried on from the first season as he/she met new friends, went on exciting new adventures and came face to face with strong, fearless enemies. It was all about to come to a head in this final episode, so just how would Jesse and friends defeat the Admin once and for all?
How exactly do you defeat the Admin?
We left Jesse and friends at the end of the last episode as they’d managed to make their way back to Beacontown. After sneaking into the town through some tunnels, we then get a real look at what has happened to Beacontown and see what it had been turned into by the Admin posing as Jesse. Even in block form, the town still manages to look run down and almost abandoned, a shell of what it used to be like. This is reflected in the especially dullen look of this episode, with the darkened skies, colours and streets.
Once inside Beacontown, your aim is to get to the primary terminal to enter the word of passage. In order to get there, you are given a number of different choices along the way that may help or hinder you depending on what you pick. The game offers you lots of chances to make decisions that, whilst they may not affect the ultimate outcome of the episode, will determine how the other characters in the game react to you. This gives you the choice of whether you can trust old and new friends with what you decide to do.
Aside from these smaller choices scattered about the episode, you also have some big decisions to make when it gets to the end of the episode too. No matter what you’ve done earlier in the episode or the season, these choices stand alone and can be made however you see fit. The ultimate last decision you make will decide how the episode ends, and either choice rounds things off nicely while still leaving the story open for potentially more episodes, as the first season ended up having.
No-one ever said it was going to be easy
This episode is another that is quite short compared to other episodes in the season, but it still ends up being largely focused on conversation. For the rest of the time, you have the expected bit of wandering about, combined with a bit of crafting and also a little bit of puzzle solving. A puzzle towards the end of the episode might cause you a little bit of a problem as you aren’t really given much help, but this offers a nice change from the conversation filling the rest of the episode.
With this being the finale, you’d be expecting some kind of boss fight to occur and you’d be right. The boss fight does not disappoint for the large part, taking place across a number of different locations with the boss having a handful of different forms as well. It’s an impressive boss fight and while the game does tease you for a little while that there may not be any fight at all, it is an enjoyable one that only has one outcome.
Another thing that this episode does well is to tie up some of the loose ends from previous episodes. Old friends that have made appearances in other episodes reappear and allow their stories to tie up, and people that you may have lost or left behind along the way also have their stories finished off. This is a nice touch and the episode perfectly brings everything together, which makes it feel like the ideal finale it is aiming to be.
Finally, the six achievements of the episode will unlock with natural progression through the story, offering the expected 200 gamerscore upon completion.
Summary
“Episode 5 – Above and Beyond” is an appropriate end to another good Telltale season. The episode does a brilliant job of bringing everything together and tying up a number of loose ends across the season. The episode is scattered with important choices and either choice at the end offers closure for the gamer. Aside from the episode feeling a little short, there’s not a lot wrong here. It may not be non-stop action, or blow you completely away, but it is a solid end to an enjoyable season.
