Comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis has confirmed that Uncanny X-Men #600 has been delayed until October.

Originally scheduled for release this month, Bendis took to Tumblr to explain that that the issue has been "bumped until after Secret Wars for editorial and commercial reasons. Not my call. This was Marvel. But they have their reasons."

He went on to write, "It will not effect the story or the impact of the story. In fact it may have more impact on how things shake out after my run. But I promise you, it could easily ship this month as it was supposed to. It has been written. Pages are already in as many of the collaborators have said so on Twitter."

Continue reading…

Oculus VR does not intend to stop the adult entertainment industry from using its Rift virtual reality headset as a platform for virtual erotica, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said during a panel at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference on Monday.

“The Rift is an open platform. We don’t control what software can run on it,” Luckey said in response to question about intentions to block X-rated content or apps, according to Variety.  “And that’s a big deal.”

The Facebook-owned company plans to begin shipping the consumer version of the Oculus Rift in Q1 2016, with pre-orders opening later this year. The consumer model is based on the Crescent Bay prototype and builds upon its "presence, immersion, and comfort," hopefully alleviating the effects of nausea-inducing  Simulator Sickness.

Continue reading…

We’ve known for several years that Mad Max creator and director George Miller intends for Mad Max: Fury Road to be the first instalment of a new trilogy, but Miller has now revealed the title he has in mind for the first follow-up to Fury Road: Mad Max: The Wasteland.

Discussing the potential future of the Mad Max series on The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, Miller echoed his 2011 comments regarding future Mad Max screenplays and confirmed that a script for a second film exists and work is underway on the third.

Continue reading…

A fresh batch of purported Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice concept art has popped up online, showcasing the film's two main heroes duking it out.

In the first image, courtesy of Heroic Hollywood, we see Batman deliver a solid blow to the face of the Man of Steel.

The other piece of art provides a glimpse at what happens when the tide has turned, and Superman has the upper hand of the Caped Crusader.

Continue reading…

Download Tech Fetish (right-click to save)

This week, the Tech Fetish crew discusses the tech they're most looking forward to in the near future, the latest announcements about Windows 10, and how they'd prefer A.I. be programmed when it comes to emotions.

Hop to the 07:15 mark to get right to the tech talk!

Continue reading…

It’s nearly impossible to escape the superhero craze that’s taken over Hollywood. With movies slated until 2020, and more television shows on the air than ever, it’s clear we’ll be in drenched in hero lore for many years to come.

As wonderful as this superhero renaissance has been, we still have a long way to go when it comes to the representation of our female heroes.

Things have gotten better. Just a few years ago we wouldn’t have heard as much of an outcry for Black Widow merchandise, and we’ve finally moved past the hurdle of just greenlighting a Wonder Woman movie. But despite that progress, we still receive trailers like the recent reveal of Supergirl, CBS’s new show about the struggles of Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin, who also escaped to Earth during the fall of Kypton.

Continue reading…

Hello! Welcome to our latest Game of Thrones show. This week, Roth Cornet is joined by Joshua Yehl to discuss the events of Game of Thrones, Season 5, Episode 6, Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.

We open up with our thoughts on the episode and an initial response to that final, controversial scene. We talk about the episode as a whole, though. Including: Arya's evolution and whether or not the Dorne storyline is paying off.

Download Game of Thrones: 'Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken' - Dragons on the Wall HERE!

Continue reading…

At several different points during Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, you encounter spots where B.J. Blazkowicz can fall asleep, prompting dream sequences that stick the modern, polygon-constructed B.J. into various levels of Wolfenstein 3D, complete with low-resolution graphics and flat sprites. Functionally, it plays almost identically to the original, but vestigial bits from the modern day, like vertical aiming, stand out, especially if you clearly remember experiencing Wolfenstein 3D for the first time. Also, the game's use of sprites gives it a similar feel to a shooting gallery where you get to walk around and explore. It's a stark reminder of how far the series--and games in general--have come. The same can be said of The Old Blood as a whole, and although it stumbles attempting to reconcile old and new thematically, its varied encounters deliver the primitive thrill of clearing a room in a hail of bullets and blood.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Wolfenstein: The New Order did the same thing by juxtaposing B.J., an old-school shooter protagonist out of time, with modern first-person shooter design sensibilities. The Old Blood is a lot less subtle about it, though by necessity. Set before B.J. gets his head injury and goes into the coma that leads to his involvement in The New Order, The Old Blood reunites him with the setting that made him famous: Castle Wolfenstein itself. The first part of the game involves infiltrating the castle in order to find the location of the Nazi headquarters. B.J. is more in his element in the World War II setting, and though there's still advanced technology, it's more in line with what you'd expect from pulp Nazi superscience for the era--much like Wolfenstein 3D's level of technology, in fact. The game practically hits you over the head with parallels to the past: the attack dogs, the giant robot you face right at the beginning of the third chapter, the secret areas you find.

And yet we still see the same thoughtful modern design implemented in last year's The New Order interlaced with the callbacks to days past. Firing guns feels both effortless and flexible, with each weapon boasting distinct modes for different situations (such as the assault rifle's automatic and semi-automatic modes), as well as dual-wielding options. Instead of just setting you loose in a sprawling level as you shoot at flat enemies, The Old Blood ebbs and flows as it constantly changes up each encounter's focus, creating an excellent sense of pacing. Action-packed shooting sequences couched in open, cover-laden levels alternate with more freeform stealth sections that don't object to you taking a more direct approach. There are even portions where you're encouraged to run rather than fight. Tying the level design together is some seriously great enemy AI, who intelligently flank you and take cover, yet are not so smart that you can't use cover to outmaneuver them. Everything about the way The Old Blood plays exemplifies the diversity of modern FPS design, and the game does so in a way that's on point and fun.

The Old Blood also illustrates where we're going in games and what we're leaving behind. Yes, you still have to fight past dogs, but they also happen to be wearing dog-sized body armor that you can harvest, and instead of coming at you at a crawl, they realistically rocket towards you and tackle you as they try to shred your meat to bits. Yes, you still fight a giant armored super soldier in the third chapter, but when you do defeat it, more troops come pouring out and you're forced to weave in and out of the foyer you just fought in, giving the level new dimensions. And those secret areas? You no longer have to press up against every wall in a level, mashing the confirm button hoping to reveal a sliding wall. Instead, there really are secret areas that can be found through normal exploration. It's amazing to see how design has become both more simplified and more complicated over the years.

We also see shades of a somewhat self-aware industry attempting to look at the past through a different lens. B.J.'s local contact, Kessler, is a stark contrast to the burly protagonist. Ever-defiant in the face of a Nazi-ruled future, Kessler and his late love fight for a Germany that rises up against the hateful regime, with his weapon of choice being leaflets rather than guns. He's also acutely sympathetic towards human life: in one memorable exchange he implores B.J. to avoid killing as many people as he can, which B.J. then willfully misinterprets to mean that he should kill as many Nazis as he can, a sentiment he emphasizes every chance he gets. We also see more fleshed-out versions of enemy combatants, albeit only through memos and a scene where you walk through a bar crowded with Nazi soldiers. We get glimpses of soldiers who still display care and affection for their families at home, even as they become upset because their lovers are dismayed at how the war has changed them, feel fear at the many occult studies and phenomenon they're being focused on, and buy into all the propaganda that litters this world. Even Helga Von Schabbs, the antagonist of the game, is granted some character development in her lifelong fascination with adventure and her potentially royal lineage.

Even so, B.J. still sees them as the same flat characters as he sees in his dreams, good for only one thing: killing. The game's mechanics almost never encourage you to leave any Nazis alive. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the end, this is a blunt, muscular, bare-chested romp through levels full of deadly moving targets, even during its subtle moments. As a dumb action game, The Old Blood has the chops. But it fumbles when it attempts to introduce gray areas into the game. Whether it's Kessler's empathy or the supplementary notes you find, The Old Blood seems to have something to say about the evolution of games, but never arrives at a solid point. The sledgehammer that is B.J.'s philosophy always wins out, stranding the gray areas in a game that clearly won't give them the time of day.

Then again, maybe games haven't changed as much as we like to think. The second half of The New Blood changes up enemy types by replacing fully functional Nazis, the default enemy type of the old era, with zombies, the go-to foe of the modern one. It's initially a nice change of pace from the terse shooting arenas that came before, but it's hard not to think of them as a downgrade, turning a mechanically-smart dumb action game into a brain dead one. Don't get me wrong: mowing down zombies with a sawed-off shotgun is a classic scenario, but the waves and waves of corpses pouring at you can't help but feel disappointing after you've experienced the smart design of part one.

Clearly MachineGames has big ambitions and understands the nuance that can be evoked in the medium. And The Old Blood certainly displays intelligent action FPS design that's fun and effortless to play. Just don't expect the deep examination the game hints at to go anywhere. Here, the gloriously dumb (yet smartly designed) reigns. Progress can wait. Long live The Old Blood.

It's difficult to wrap your head around how large the universe is. It's one thing to say that the distance from the here to the moon is ten times the circumference of the Earth, but that figure is incomprehensible. It's hard enough to wrap our tiny minds around the notion that our planet, our home, is finite, much less the preposterous distances between the stars. Galactic Civilizations III understands and fluently wields those disparate perspectives--the mundane and human as well as the astronomical--to craft a game that manages to bring the tiniest shuttlecraft, the mightiest quasar, and all the distant mysteries that lie between into a single coherent vision.

As you might suspect from the name, Galactic Civilizations is a game that, while inspired by Sid Meier's seminal masterpiece, Civilization, opts for the cosmos as its stage. Matching the stellar scope is the potential to have up to 128 additional players. That alone should give any fan of the strategy game genre pause. For most games of its type, such massive games would bog themselves down in micromanagement, construction, and empire maintenance. But Galactic Civilization III's greatest strength is its ability to manage its momentum. Play starts quickly, with everyone having enough resources at the outset to begin crafting a basic strategy. There's no waiting around for your first few workers here; instead, you can buy up some colony ships, kick-start your military, or roll out some research labs to start cranking out PhDs.

After that initial burn, it's a couple dozen more turns before you have quite so many decisions to make. You can use that down time to secure what you have and develop your territory, design some custom ships, or fine-tune your government to suit your most pressing goals. After a bit, you have another burst brought on by a new technology allowing your ships greater range from their home planet or a new pile of credits to be spent on supercharging development.

Galactic Civilizations follows this pattern of punctuated equilibrium until the end of the game--regardless of which specific strategy or victory condition you're seeking. It helps guide and reinforce the infamous "one more turn"-style play that 4X games are known for, as well, as you never know when that next burst will hit. You could find some special resource that, if tapped, could unlock a new prototype hyperdrive. That, in turn, can get your colonists to the next star system over, where a new planet and new resources lie waiting. As soon as you've mastered what you own and what you know, you'll face a fresh batch of challenges.

The burst-secure-develop-burst loop also solves one of the genre’s longest-running problems--militaristic powers. As with any proper 4X game, Galactic Civilizations has a variety of win conditions. You can be elected the leader of the galaxy, you can ascend to a new plane of existence, or you can steam-roll your opponents with the biggest, baddest ships around. The caveat here is that it's rare that you'll encounter someone whose war machines completely outclass your own. Expansion requires a great deal of investment in engineering and supply chains. Supporting dreadnoughts far from any habitable planets requires chains of star bases or advanced life support systems--both of which can take resources away from a massive military campaign. Military victories are still possible, but blocking off large chunks of the map to the people with the most advanced technology or those that can daisy-chain supply lines keeps anyone's fun from ending prematurely or without proper warning.

In creating this cycle, Galactic Civilizations encourages careful, directed thinking. You always want to be in control of your next boon, ready to capitalize on the next step out, no matter where that leads. Thought and investment are rewarded. When you colonize a new planet, the order and placement of the buildings and projects you undertake will determine their effectiveness. Placing factories adjacent to a refinery will boost both their output. Tourism centers next to ports will yield dividends. It's not about doing everything you can but about efficient use of the space you have. The production of new ships and star bases is also decoupled from planetary improvements. Instead, you can assign several planets to support a shipyard. Any manufacturing output dedicated to military development will go to building new weapons. Colony ships and troop transports for invasions will pull population from contributing planets as well. This too emphasizes the cyclic pace. Hooking a few planets up to a dry dock won't net you much until they've been built up with appropriate factories, academies, and the like. But in a few short turns, you'll have a mega factory that can turn out battlecruisers with ease, and then you're ready for your next expansion.

If it sounds like I'm placing a lot of emphasis on that loop, it's because Galactic Civilizations forces you to view it through that narrow lens. This is strange, indeed, in no small part because it is a game about the bigness of galactic warfare, about the farthest reaches of the stars, and yet it comes down to a long series of manageable steps. When you're first starting a round, space, as it does here in the world, is incomprehensibly vast. Instead of letting your first few explorers wander to the ends of the map, you're given a small starting area. This, the game says, is as far as you can go. When you've conquered or at least explored that sector, you're trusted with more. These steps helped me develop relationships, memories even, with each new area. I remembered which regions I saw after I developed my first prototype warp drives or when I built a deep space station so I could see what was on the other side of a black hole. It's odd, but it's sentimental.

Toward the end of my first game, I remember the map all the way out, astonished by how far my people had come. It was a special feeling, one I've since come to cherish, because I've realized that it's one that no other game has given me. Not even Civilization brought me this close to the progress of my empire without letting me get lost in the grandeur of it all.

I have to attribute that, at least in part, to the fact that Galactic Civilizations not only lets you craft your own alien species and their technology but incentivizes you to do so. No matter what race you pick or which one you create, you'll have a few basic ships to choose from. Each is there to fill a specific role, but you won't get anything particularly special there. However, if you want to take the schematics for the latest and greatest antimatter missile launcher and use them for an otherwise vulnerable cargo ship, you can do that. You can also make a mega-carrier holding dozens of assault drones that can sweep through any defense around. These creations will usually cost a little more than the usual fare, but the degree of control you have over them is worth the time and the money, especially when paired with a well-crafted strategy playing to the strengths of a custom-made race. It ties micro- and macromanagement together in a way that pushes you to win with your own creations and your own ideas.

That's also where Galactic Civilizations begins to break down. Much as Elder Scrolls games are expected to have a lot of bugs because they are so open, Galactic Civilizations has a lot of rough edges. I played a final build of the game, and there were still some missing textures, odd graphical glitches, poorly edited music, and one missing technology description. They were all cosmetic, but they were common enough to be distracting.

The bigger problems come from how unrefined some of the ancillary features are. One of the biggest additions is the ideology system. As you make choices about how the shape of your civilization progresses, you'll build up points in Benevolence, Pragmatism, or Malevolence. This is intended to be a morality system, but in practice, its effects are loose and intangible. Picking a new step on one of the three trees will usually grant you a one-time bonus, but they aren't substantial, and they don't represent play style. In my second game, I was ruthless and declared war on everyone, but I was able to maintain a façade of altruism by picking certain dialogue options. As a method of embodying the kind of civilization you want to be, the Ideology system doesn't work.

Taken as a whole, Galactic Civilization's failings are minor. For most games, a few major pieces that don’t quite fit together would be a death knell. Galactic Civilizations keeps its focus right where it needs to--on excellent fundamentals. Progressive pacing makes the enormity of space amenable and paradoxically personal, while the sheer number and variety of tools and options at your disposal allow you to succeed and win if you can out-think everyone else.

In Last Word’s prim and proper world, words speak louder than actions, and combat is fueled by discourse, shifting the momentum of a conversation. This might sound dull in theory, but in practice, the numerous tactics and systems at play lead to an enjoyably varied, if initially confounding system. Combining tact, power, and a healthy dose of subtlety leaves your discussion partner susceptible to your every whim--providing little more than a deflated ellipsis in response to your last word. Despite its elementary presentation, Last Word stands out as a witty, novel venture carried by clever writing and a creative form of combat.

To buy into Last Word’s concept, you need to suspend your disbelief and accept the bizarre power of the spoken word within this otherwise realistic society. The courtly, cultured characters have the gift of gab, constantly spouting long-winded tales of their family names and the distinguished natures of their storied houses. Their words carry unique weight, though, as whoever speaks the last word and “wins” an argument leaves his or her counterpart powerless. You’ll often see NPCs at a door endlessly trading polite “after yous” or “I insists” in fear of letting someone else finish the conversation.

This strange societal wrinkle produces plenty of silly moments, but when it comes to actually engaging in longer conversations, the “Discourse” mechanism is anything but simplistic. Think of it as a basic RPG battle, but instead of swinging a blade or blasting enemies with a fireball, you leverage disruptive, submissive, and aggressive forms of banter to push the conversation in your favor. You often open with a disruptive phrase in order to fill up your power meter, followed by something more submissive that spends power to gain tact. Aggressive phrases, which consume stored tact, effect the most change in the conversation bar, so you need to parlay your power into tact before the opportunity to really push the dialogue arises.

More and more systems are stacked atop this foundation. A character’s composure changes from collected, to irritated, and eventually to uncivilized, based on a sort of rock-paper-scissors system. Certain actions serve as counters to others, and if you continue to correctly rebut your foil’s last assertion, their composure cracks and eventually shatters. This adds a bit more venom to your aggressive moves, lowering your opponent’s defense and more quickly swaying the conversation meter in your favor. Purchased skills and attributes continue to add bite to your bark, but it takes practice to sharpen your conversational steel and become a true threat.

Even with a tutorial that helps you navigate through the dense schemes, Last Word’s Discourse feature is far too opaque early on. All the different tones and meters take time and effort to both understand and intelligently utilize, so you have to bang your head against the systems and fail a few times before the flow of conversations becomes clear. After you learn the ropes, this unique take on turn-based action begins to shine, and the fair-yet-steep difficulty curve gives you ample opportunity to test your tongue.

Outside of the conversational duels, the regular discussions you have with the cast are brainy and nimble. Last Word never falls too in love with its aristocratic tone, staying on the right side of "tongue-in-cheek" through its intentional pretentiousness. There’s a deep well of text to draw from, too, since the other major mechanism at play surrounds gossiping with your peers about specific hot-button topics. Leveling up these topics by talking to the right person at the right time opens up new narrative avenues, and if you manage to examine each corner of your environment and learn everything you can from its guests, a few interesting wrinkles are added to the last few story sequences. For a game trapped in windowed mode and focused on a single location, Last Word is rich in subsidiary content.

On the surface, the characters appear as little more than colored silhouettes, their different hues based on each house of origin. But once you enter a conversation, hand-drawn caricatures appear, sporting expressions and audible squawks that pair well with their personalities. Each member of the small cast has a name as fanciful as their persona--from Whitty Gawship to Professor Chet Chatters. It’s a peculiar world with far too much one-upmanship for anyone to want to live in, but for a four-hour visit, it’s a treat.

It isn’t exactly easy to pick up, but the layered Discourse system in Last Word is worth the few verbal jabs and hooks needed in order to master it. The turn-based structure succeeds at supplying a fun alternative to the cavalcade of fantasy RPGs on the market, and while it can be easy to roll your eyes at all the patterned bow ties and discussions of fine wines, the posh tenor never tips so far that it becomes pretentious. Last Word shows that you don’t need a towering sword or a 15-minute summoning sequence to create an exciting battle system--sometimes it just takes a sharp script and an even sharper tongue.