I guess it’s cheating a little to say that Battletoads is a new release this week—but it is, alongside 29 Rare games in the absurdly nifty Rare Replay collection. Are you dipping into some nostalgia this week, or getting through the summer lull in some other way? Come tell us about it in this week’s Tuesday Game Room!
What have you been playing this week?
I’m continuing to dig into the Master Chief Collection now that I have an Xbox One (and also learning I have another opinion to add to my list of hilariously unpopular tastes—I’m not a fan of Halo 2 in the slightest), and enjoying the hell out of it while I sort of rediscover my interest in Halo.
I did not play Halo 4 all that much, despite not necessarily hating it as much as your average Halo fan does (told you, unpopular tastes everywhere!), but a combination of that, a bit of fatigue, and moving away from the Xbox platform to spend more time on PC and on Playstation, lead me to thinking that while I’d always appreciate Halo as a franchise and its influence on me, my time of loving the series actively had sadly passed. Fortunately, that isn’t the case, and I’m finding myself relearning how much fun I have with it all over again.
New Releases!
Rare Replay, out on Xbox One, is undoubtedly the most notable release of the week, on a week with not much else to its name. The PS4 gets a trio of titles in Galak-Z: The Dimensional, Trans-Galactic Tournament, and Submerged. Meanwhile, Beyond Eyes comes to Xbox One digitally. Told you it was a light week!
And now, the News
Once again it’s time for a few select picks from the last week of Gaming news, via Eurogamer:
- Halo Wars 2 is a real video game, oh god - ALL UNITS. Halo Wars 2 was always the sort of joke announcement you’d say whenever Microsoft were teasing something Halo-y—the weird console RTS original was decent enough but never really caught on—so when Microsoft capped off their otherwise mixed bag of a Gamescom press conference today with the reveal that yes, Halo Wars 2 is real, coming to PC and Xbox One, and made by a collaboration between Halo custodians 343 industries and Total War developer Creative Assembly. What a world we live in.
- Peter Dinklage is being written out of Destiny - What a day for news! Destiny’s upcoming expansion pack The Taken King is the feature of this month’s issue of Game Informer, along with a whole host of news about the expansion is an announcement that the Ghost, the game’s little robotic guide who narrates your adventures through what is very generously called Destiny’s story, is getting a new voice. Dinklage, a big get for Bungie, delivered a truly souless experience with his voice work, one that was less Tyrion Lannister and more a very bored, very emotionless husk. It was weirdly endearing, so I’m kind of sad that he’s being replaced by Nathan Drake himself, Nolan North. Not just for Taken King either—Bungie are retroactively going back and scrubbing Dinklage’s voice work from the game, replacing it with North’s dulcet tones. RIP, Dinklebot. May the great Moon Wizard in the sky guide you to your final rest.
- Idiot Twitch streamer fakes getting swatted, wonders why Twitch bans him - If you’re not familiar with the disgusting act of swatting—a trolling act where people anonymously contact the police and feed them the address of a twitch streamer, claiming that a violent, usually armed crime is in progress there for the sole purpose of getting an armed response unit to interrupt (and arrest) said streamer while they’re on air—count yourself lucky. It’s an alarmingly growing internet prank in the age of Twitch streaming, and one that can lead to some fatal mistakes that puts streamers and their families in danger. So when popular streamer Trick2G staged a fake swatting as part of his livestream for celebrating getting 800,000 followers, people, including Twitch, were understandably annoyed at him making light of swatting. Twitch promptly banned Trick2G for an undisclosed period of time, and presumably he’ll never do something as silly as that again.
We’ll be back this time next Tuesday for more gaming discussion, but for now, sound off in the comments with the games you’ve been playing, and what you’re looking forward to this week - and don’t forget to join the unofficial io9 community group on Steam!
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