Mortal Kombat and LEGO Games Hit GOG With Discounts

Good Old Games is celebrating adding Warner Bros. to its list of partners by offering discounts on a variety of Mortal Kombat and LEGO titles.

GOG is adding six new classic titles, five of which will be discounted for the first week they're available. The full list of titles are:

  • Mortal Kombat 1-3 Bundle
  • LEGO Batman (-50%)
  • LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 (-60%)
  • LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7 (-60%)
  • F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon - The Complete Trilogy (-50%)
  • Bastion (-60%)

"We are very happy to see another of the gaming's juggernauts venture into the DRM-free waters with us." says Oleg Klapovsky, GOG.com's VP of Business Development and Operations. "Together with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, we are planning on more exciting releases, so stay tuned."

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Arrow’s Felicity Smoak (Finally) Gets an Action Figure

We have your first look at six toys from DC Collectibles that will be available in October 2015 -- action figures for Arrow’s Arsenal, Felicity, and Diggle and The Flash’s Captain Cold, and prop replicas of The Flash’s Reverse-Flash ring and Constantine’s Helmet of Doctor Fate.

Click through our slideshow gallery to take a look.

“2015 is going to be another groundbreaking year for DC Collectibles,” Geoff Johns, chief creative officer of DC Entertainment, told IGN over email. “#DCTV has exploded and so we’re following suit with figures and props."

The action figures will be $24.95 a piece. Reverse Flash’s ring will go for $34.95. And Doctor Fate’s helmet, complete with pyramid stand, will retail for $499.95 -- power of Nabu not included.

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Windwalkers Game Revealed on Kickstarter

Forge Animation has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the creation of a Windwalkers video game.

The campaign began on February 4 and will end on March 4. Windwalkers will be a PC RPG combining action, adventure, and survival gameplay.

According to the game's description, players will take on the role of a Windwalker, intent on finding the source of all winds. "The universe of Windwalkers is a dynamic world shaped by the wind, where tornadoes, erosion, and storms are not calamities, but a part of everyday life. The world is in constant movement and change, which both helps and hinders the player. Following the wind is the only path to reaching the ultimate goal - but while the wind is the player’s guide through this world, it is also the very thing that could destroy them."

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Total War: Attila Review

In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933. He falls into conversation there about regional history, alluding to Attila and his Horde by exclaiming, "And suddenly, at last something happens. Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!" The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust. Paddy claims that there's no fun in watching civilizations "float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew." Clearly, he would see the Huns as a a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Finally, something to upend the dreary peace!

Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D. The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught--straight into Roman territory. To the east, the comparatively recumbent Sassanians lie within striking distance of Constantinopolis. A litany of small but active tribes occupy the interstitial spaces, cannibalizing each other and nipping impishly at the heels of the larger factions. All eyes are drawn to the eastern steppes, however, when Attila enters the world stage, providing a not-so-subtle cue to start getting your affairs in order.

In the beginning, there was "interface." And it was just OK.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila's cutscenes and campaign descriptions regularly invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But Death himself can be slow coming, depending on your chosen faction--Attila still has to grow up before the gears of the Hunnic war machine really start to turn, so it can be some time before he makes his presence known to those in the far corners of the map. In the meantime, Famine proves to be a more immediate concern, as does Disease, both of which need to be mitigated through the construction of relevant buildings in one's home cities. A waterworks system, for example, confers sanitation +2, public order +1, while a sheep pen does as much for statistics like food surplus and wealth.

War, for his part, is an old hand by now. The series' battle engine is set in its ways; save a few new wrinkles in the siege system or the way fire spreads, it's mostly content to demonstrate mastery of those skills it already possessed. As opposed to the turn-by-turn politicizing, battles take place in real time, across fields or along castle ramparts, between collected armies that are, if not a one-to-one representation of the thousands of soldiers present, close enough in abstraction to dissuade you from counting. Your units engage the enemy's automatically when the two collide, leaving you to concern yourself with formations.

If that sounds simplistic, it's because you haven't seen how many formations there are to choose from--to say nothing of the stances and abilities that can be toggled on each individual unit, or the passive qualities like morale or fatigue that themselves hinge on dozens of other factors. If there were any doubts, let it be known that Total War: Attila retains the series' depth of strategic offerings. But for the uninitiated and leery, it's entirely possible to play par golf on normal difficulty armed only with an understanding of the series' now-familiar unit rock-paper-scissors. Swords beat spears, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat swords. And generally speaking, everyone hates having arrows lobbed at their heads. Once armies clash, you never concern yourself with any individual soldier. Instead, you command armies as the Sorcerer's Apprentice commanded waves and lighting, pointing out what you want done and watching a wave of spearmen break off in that direction like a tributary branching from a roaring river.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila regularly analogizes the Horde to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Most of the quirks of Total War's artificial intelligence have been ironed out by now: it properly diverts forces to prevent dead runs at the main capture point of its bases, and those old instances of units spinning aimlessly have yet to rear their heads. But Attila is not without its idiosyncrasies. Battles can occur at sea, but naval skirmishes remain a mess of sails and hulls, a paltry imitation of their counterparts on land. Back on terra firma, units occasionally show their displeasure with your commands by sprinting headlong in the wrong direction, particularly when you try to send them up a siege ladder. Then there's the curious case of the Vandal general at Ad Decimum, who will refuse to break his tidy formation to chase off a single unit of horse archers sent out to pester him.

You don't need a field manual to beat an enemy like that, but for what it's worth, Total War: Attila's tutorial prologue is comprehensive, and a good precursor to the Grand Campaign. It has its limitations, though--perhaps inevitable when you've got an interface that's as complex as Photoshop and half as intuitive. Information like, say, the cost of unit upkeep, is lost among the icons and numbers that are tucked into each of the screen's corners.

The camera can be swung in for a close up of the balancing act between scale and fidelity.

Speaking of too much information: every member of your chosen faction's royal family has a set of qualities that affect his or her statistics, and let's just note that “flaccid” is one of them and continue on. There are wives that affect stats, companions who affect stats, even random little trinkets like necklaces and scrolls that affect stats. Imagine, if the scales of rebellion truly tipped on some statesman getting a particularly shiny bracelet! Absent that hyperspecificity, the returning familial power system is welcome. Family members and statesmen accrue influence, which can be leveraged into political actions. Influence needs to be wielded to avoid losing control of your faction, so running low can mean ceding a percentage of your control every time the game springs a political event on you, like a power play from a rival or an inopportune marriage. Neglect your influence, and each time it'll be another -2% control, -2% control...death by thrown shade.

That granularity flows into all of Total War: Attila's historical representations--here, it's not Istanbul, it's Constantinopolis. This a game that's got its Latin roots in mind when it suggests that you might need to "decimate" your troops to deal with failing integrity. It certainly seems to put a tax on the in-game encyclopedia, which regularly fails to load properly (though it should be noted that the review copy's encyclopedia is online-only). The whole game regularly seems to struggle under the weight of its own persnickety attention to detail, stuttering when the map is panned even when graphical settings are tuned down. It's uncanny to watch the seabirds that float above the game world's coasts sputter out and stall whenever you click "end turn."

Each of those turns represents quite a bit of data: each one a season, each season a time to specify constructions or appointments, or expend a unit's action points towards movement, raids, or out-and-out battle. Scale translates well on the world map, generally speaking: forests allow concealment, and distinctive masses like the great Arabian Desert represent near-impassable natural barriers. Total War does stoop to representing armies on the world map with single avatars, a rare moment of generalization.

Cities now reflect damage done to them during a siege on the world map.

It's a beautiful map, really. Its deciduous trees have a lovely, fungal sort of grunginess to them, like anything viewed through an electron microscope (though they do turn a bit fractal when viewed from directly overhead). Sand looks like it was cascaded over real rock and dirt. Select a settlement, and it’s illuminated by god rays. Waves sound along the coast, sometimes pierced by a shout from a unit that's been set to raid a nearby trade route. This never fails to sound like a bunch of people pranked their fellow soldier with the old “let's tell Maximus that we're all going to yell “HRUAGGGH” at the count of three then totally not do anything” gag.

Raiding isn't considered an act of war, strangely enough. So you can sue for peace with a neighbor, then promptly start pillaging your way across their country. They're unable to retaliate lest they suffer the betrayal penalty for all other factions. There are a few other tics of note here, too. Sometimes messages need to be clicked twice to confirm them. The "show/hide deceased" toggle in the family tree menu doesn't appear to work. More egregiously, if you assign a statesman to a provincial governing slot, the decision appears to immediately and irrevocably transport him across the thousands of miles to his destination--try to recall him, and you'll be told that he needs to travel back. It's the one time when I wish the game would ask me to click twice to confirm.

On the world map, the opponent empire AI seems cautious by nature, rarely pressing an offensive. Enemies are not sleepwalking, though--if they catch you trying to send an ambush force deep into their empire they'll crush it with overpowering force. Other than that, though, they seem mostly content to maintain their border wherever it lies at the time. Newly introduced puppet states hold up their end of the bargain, though: on more than one occasion they've chased separatist fighters away from my besieged cities, and they regularly seem to harry enemy forces. They're a little too eager to use the new ability to raze cities, though, so it’s probably best to step in before they go and annihilate a city you'd been eying.

Naval battles are an unmanageable mess of sails.

Unless you're playing as the Huns, that is. Then you'll probably want to do the razing yourself. They're fast, dangerous with bows, and packing a fear-inducing bonus against Christian factions. They--and the Vandals and Goths--eschew stationary living for slightly different pick-up-and-go versions of the same structures the other factions build. Don't expect to be the dominant force right out of the gate, however: the nomads and migrating tribes of Total War: Attila face the steepest initial difficulty. You might begin not with a city to rest in, but only with your nomadic units themselves, playing mouse to other factions' cats until you come to terms with the wandering life and learn to make a home wherever the heart and Horde are. These factions are fun to play as, highly mobile and free from some of the fussier portions of the game's political realm, carrying their culture in their saddlebags, driving the "civilized" world before them like a flock of sheep.

As the Huns, you upend the status quo, even if Total War: Attila itself doesn't represent a major disruption. Austere writing, along with campaigns that come to a close rather quickly compared to many games of this ilk, come as a surprise given battles of such enormous scale, and given systems that allow you to poke and prod at so many fine details. At least the production values fulfill the promise of historical grandiosity, including a militant musical score that brilliantly anchors the game's atmosphere. "Everything starts changing place at full speed!" it calls out. "Chaos!" it cries, echoing the mighty Huns as they raze the landscape. Attila is more of the same and a little bit extra, then, not as convincingly realized as the best Total Wars, but strong enough to keep you clicking until the inevitable patches and expansions trickle in.

Total War: Attila Review

In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933. He falls into conversation there about regional history, alluding to Attila and his Horde by exclaiming, "And suddenly, at last something happens. Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!" The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust. Paddy claims that there's no fun in watching civilizations "float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew." Clearly, he would see the Huns as a a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Finally, something to upend the dreary peace!

Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D. The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught--straight into Roman territory. To the east, the comparatively recumbent Sassanians lie within striking distance of Constantinopolis. A litany of small but active tribes occupy the interstitial spaces, cannibalizing each other and nipping impishly at the heels of the larger factions. All eyes are drawn to the eastern steppes, however, when Attila enters the world stage, providing a not-so-subtle cue to start getting your affairs in order.

In the beginning, there was "interface." And it was just OK.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila's cutscenes and campaign descriptions regularly invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But Death himself can be slow coming, depending on your chosen faction--Attila still has to grow up before the gears of the Hunnic war machine really start to turn, so it can be some time before he makes his presence known to those in the far corners of the map. In the meantime, Famine proves to be a more immediate concern, as does Disease, both of which need to be mitigated through the construction of relevant buildings in one's home cities. A waterworks system, for example, confers sanitation +2, public order +1, while a sheep pen does as much for statistics like food surplus and wealth.

War, for his part, is an old hand by now. The series' battle engine is set in its ways; save a few new wrinkles in the siege system or the way fire spreads, it's mostly content to demonstrate mastery of those skills it already possessed. As opposed to the turn-by-turn politicizing, battles take place in real time, across fields or along castle ramparts, between collected armies that are, if not a one-to-one representation of the thousands of soldiers present, close enough in abstraction to dissuade you from counting. Your units engage the enemy's automatically when the two collide, leaving you to concern yourself with formations.

If that sounds simplistic, it's because you haven't seen how many formations there are to choose from--to say nothing of the stances and abilities that can be toggled on each individual unit, or the passive qualities like morale or fatigue that themselves hinge on dozens of other factors. If there were any doubts, let it be known that Total War: Attila retains the series' depth of strategic offerings. But for the uninitiated and leery, it's entirely possible to play par golf on normal difficulty armed only with an understanding of the series' now-familiar unit rock-paper-scissors. Swords beat spears, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat swords. And generally speaking, everyone hates having arrows lobbed at their heads. Once armies clash, you never concern yourself with any individual soldier. Instead, you command armies as the Sorcerer's Apprentice commanded waves and lighting, pointing out what you want done and watching a wave of spearmen break off in that direction like a tributary branching from a roaring river.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila regularly analogizes the Horde to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Most of the quirks of Total War's artificial intelligence have been ironed out by now: it properly diverts forces to prevent dead runs at the main capture point of its bases, and those old instances of units spinning aimlessly have yet to rear their heads. But Attila is not without its idiosyncrasies. Battles can occur at sea, but naval skirmishes remain a mess of sails and hulls, a paltry imitation of their counterparts on land. Back on terra firma, units occasionally show their displeasure with your commands by sprinting headlong in the wrong direction, particularly when you try to send them up a siege ladder. Then there's the curious case of the Vandal general at Ad Decimum, who will refuse to break his tidy formation to chase off a single unit of horse archers sent out to pester him.

You don't need a field manual to beat an enemy like that, but for what it's worth, Total War: Attila's tutorial prologue is comprehensive, and a good precursor to the Grand Campaign. It has its limitations, though--perhaps inevitable when you've got an interface that's as complex as Photoshop and half as intuitive. Information like, say, the cost of unit upkeep, is lost among the icons and numbers that are tucked into each of the screen's corners.

The camera can be swung in for a close up of the balancing act between scale and fidelity.

Speaking of too much information: every member of your chosen faction's royal family has a set of qualities that affect his or her statistics, and let's just note that “flaccid” is one of them and continue on. There are wives that affect stats, companions who affect stats, even random little trinkets like necklaces and scrolls that affect stats. Imagine, if the scales of rebellion truly tipped on some statesman getting a particularly shiny bracelet! Absent that hyperspecificity, the returning familial power system is welcome. Family members and statesmen accrue influence, which can be leveraged into political actions. Influence needs to be wielded to avoid losing control of your faction, so running low can mean ceding a percentage of your control every time the game springs a political event on you, like a power play from a rival or an inopportune marriage. Neglect your influence, and each time it'll be another -2% control, -2% control...death by thrown shade.

That granularity flows into all of Total War: Attila's historical representations--here, it's not Istanbul, it's Constantinopolis. This a game that's got its Latin roots in mind when it suggests that you might need to "decimate" your troops to deal with failing integrity. It certainly seems to put a tax on the in-game encyclopedia, which regularly fails to load properly (though it should be noted that the review copy's encyclopedia is online-only). The whole game regularly seems to struggle under the weight of its own persnickety attention to detail, stuttering when the map is panned even when graphical settings are tuned down. It's uncanny to watch the seabirds that float above the game world's coasts sputter out and stall whenever you click "end turn."

Each of those turns represents quite a bit of data: each one a season, each season a time to specify constructions or appointments, or expend a unit's action points towards movement, raids, or out-and-out battle. Scale translates well on the world map, generally speaking: forests allow concealment, and distinctive masses like the great Arabian Desert represent near-impassable natural barriers. Total War does stoop to representing armies on the world map with single avatars, a rare moment of generalization.

Cities now reflect damage done to them during a siege on the world map.

It's a beautiful map, really. Its deciduous trees have a lovely, fungal sort of grunginess to them, like anything viewed through an electron microscope (though they do turn a bit fractal when viewed from directly overhead). Sand looks like it was cascaded over real rock and dirt. Select a settlement, and it’s illuminated by god rays. Waves sound along the coast, sometimes pierced by a shout from a unit that's been set to raid a nearby trade route. This never fails to sound like a bunch of people pranked their fellow soldier with the old “let's tell Maximus that we're all going to yell “HRUAGGGH” at the count of three then totally not do anything” gag.

Raiding isn't considered an act of war, strangely enough. So you can sue for peace with a neighbor, then promptly start pillaging your way across their country. They're unable to retaliate lest they suffer the betrayal penalty for all other factions. There are a few other tics of note here, too. Sometimes messages need to be clicked twice to confirm them. The "show/hide deceased" toggle in the family tree menu doesn't appear to work. More egregiously, if you assign a statesman to a provincial governing slot, the decision appears to immediately and irrevocably transport him across the thousands of miles to his destination--try to recall him, and you'll be told that he needs to travel back. It's the one time when I wish the game would ask me to click twice to confirm.

On the world map, the opponent empire AI seems cautious by nature, rarely pressing an offensive. Enemies are not sleepwalking, though--if they catch you trying to send an ambush force deep into their empire they'll crush it with overpowering force. Other than that, though, they seem mostly content to maintain their border wherever it lies at the time. Newly introduced puppet states hold up their end of the bargain, though: on more than one occasion they've chased separatist fighters away from my besieged cities, and they regularly seem to harry enemy forces. They're a little too eager to use the new ability to raze cities, though, so it’s probably best to step in before they go and annihilate a city you'd been eying.

Naval battles are an unmanageable mess of sails.

Unless you're playing as the Huns, that is. Then you'll probably want to do the razing yourself. They're fast, dangerous with bows, and packing a fear-inducing bonus against Christian factions. They--and the Vandals and Goths--eschew stationary living for slightly different pick-up-and-go versions of the same structures the other factions build. Don't expect to be the dominant force right out of the gate, however: the nomads and migrating tribes of Total War: Attila face the steepest initial difficulty. You might begin not with a city to rest in, but only with your nomadic units themselves, playing mouse to other factions' cats until you come to terms with the wandering life and learn to make a home wherever the heart and Horde are. These factions are fun to play as, highly mobile and free from some of the fussier portions of the game's political realm, carrying their culture in their saddlebags, driving the "civilized" world before them like a flock of sheep.

As the Huns, you upend the status quo, even if Total War: Attila itself doesn't represent a major disruption. Austere writing, along with campaigns that come to a close rather quickly compared to many games of this ilk, come as a surprise given battles of such enormous scale, and given systems that allow you to poke and prod at so many fine details. At least the production values fulfill the promise of historical grandiosity, including a militant musical score that brilliantly anchors the game's atmosphere. "Everything starts changing place at full speed!" it calls out. "Chaos!" it cries, echoing the mighty Huns as they raze the landscape. Attila is more of the same and a little bit extra, then, not as convincingly realized as the best Total Wars, but strong enough to keep you clicking until the inevitable patches and expansions trickle in.

Dying Light is Getting a Devastating Hard Mode

Dying Light is getting a new hard mode via a free content update.

There’s no fixed release date as of yet, but Techland expects the mode to ship around the start of March or some time sooner.

New features coming with the mode include a ramped-up night-time difficulty, where the infected will become much more vicious. This heightens the need for stealth and complete silence, and supplies will be more limited. That’s as well as “plenty of other additions,” we’re told.

”A few gamers have already finished Dying Light and are asking for more. So we’re going to give our community a new challenge that will put everything they learnt in the game to the test. Hard Mode is exactly that,” says producer Tymon Smektała.

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Mass Effect 4 to Have an Online Component

The next game in the Mass Effect series will have an online component, according to a new job listing.

Senior development director Chris Wynn tweeted out earlier today: "Things are getting real now and I need an excellent Producer to come shape online for the next Mass Effect."

It's not clear what shape this online component will take, whether it'll be some form of multiplayer or perhaps connected features. Seeing how well Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was received, however, it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility we'll see something similar. Regardless, it's good to hear development is ramping up.

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Comic Book Reviews for February 11, 2015

It was another big week for new comic book releases (as if there's any other kind these days). DC delivered a stellar new Harley Quinn special, a bevy of digital-first series like Mortal Kombat X and Injustice: Year Three, and the long-awaited Secret Six #2. Marvel launched their second ongoing Star Wars comic, capped off the Spider-Verse saga, and continued the Black Vortex crossover in Guardians of the Galaxy #24. And Dark Horse capped off their long Fire and Stone crossover to surprisingly great results.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of great indie books from various publishers, including Rachel Rising, Southern Bastards, Rai, Adventure Time: Marceline - Gone Adrift. Our Review Crew tackled these and many other new releases.

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SPECTRE: First Look at The Next James Bond Movie

Sony Pictures has released the first official photo of Daniel Craig as James Bond, agent 007, in SPECTRE. The photo was taken on the Austrian set of the 24th Bond film.

SPECTRE is the fourth Bond movie to film in Austria following The Spy Who Loved Me, The Living Daylights, and Quantum of Solace.

The studio also launched a new vlog chronicling SPECTRE's production. You can watch it below.

The behind-the-scenes video includes chats with Lea Seydoux (Madeleine Swann), Dave Bautista (Mr. Hinx), production designer Dennis Gassner, production manager Martin Joy, and associate producer Gregg Wilson. You also see a bit of 007 in action.

First look at Daniel Craig as James Bond in SPECTRE. First look at Daniel Craig as James Bond in SPECTRE.

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More Classic Characters Teased for Mortal Kombat X

NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Games may have teased at least two classic characters for Mortal Kombat X in a Brazilian video released on Monday.

According to a translation of the YouTube video provided by IGN Brazil, Cassie Cage has quotes referencing Sonya Blade and Jax. Pitty, a popular Brazilian rock star providing the voice for Cassie in Portuguese, can be heard saying “Stay away from my mother,” which is a direct reference to Sonya. Cassie is the daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade.

In the video, Cassie Cage also says “Are you ok, Uncle Jax? Your joints are cracking,” presumably speaking to the cybernetically-enhanced metal-armed soldier. Neither Jax nor Sonya Blade are shown in the video.

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