At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to Sid Meier's Pirates! reveal themselves to be a masquerade--yet it still finds more time for the yawns, for good measure.

Windward presents itself as a "chart your own adventure" high-seas simulator promising great ocean expanses, complex economic trading, diplomatic engagement, and high-octane sea battles for whoever wishes to find their inner Magellan or Admiral Horatio Nelson. You sail your ship (and the small fleet you gather at the beginning of the game) around procedurally generated seas trading goods, hunting pirates, laying siege to cities, and building diplomatic relationships with towns and opposing alliances. But every mode features the depth of a freshman-level philosophy course, and if you want to engage in any of the non-combat options the game offers, you must deal with rote, padding-fueled combat for extended stretches.

For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out. The best way (honestly, it's the only reliable way) to gain money in Windward is through trading. You enter a town (through a bland menu) and either buy goods the residents have too much of or sell them goods they are short on. That's it. It never becomes more complicated than that. The aggravating, time-consuming portion of the system is that for the first few hours of the game, you’re stuck with ships with a two-slot cargo hold, which means you can only sell two trade goods at a time. So you're forced to waste time sailing around these large-ish maps unloading your cargo rather than taking care of a significant amount of business at once.

To further that aggravation, the questing/diplomacy systems--which feed into experience you get to make your ship better (read: survivable)--also take up space in your cargo hold. So, if you're ferrying passengers for a quest, you can only carry one trade good. That creates an interesting incentive to make sure you're maximizing your time, but it mostly creates an incentive to never quest (and therefore rarely engage in direct relationship-building services) because it never pays half as well as the more rote side of trading.

For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out.

But, wait! Exploration! I love exploration! I will spend hours just walking around The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and not fighting anyone (if I can help it), or questing, or doing anything because I just want to take in the gorgeously realized environments. I will happily get lost in a part of Brooklyn I have never visited before because I will be overcome by the stunning Victorian houses, the trees that seem to be more than just streetside window dressing, and the innumerable churches that are genuine architectural wonders. Exploration in Windward never achieves a fraction of that pleasure, because exploration is fun and intoxicating only when you're presented with a space worth exploring. Gone Home is literally a walk through your house, but every nook and cranny of the Greenbriar abode offers a glimpse into the lives of that family. Eidolon drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.

Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of "will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.

That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they’ll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn’t give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don’t engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.

The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.

Color Guardians is a beautiful headache. The idea is simple enough: you're a colorful mascot, running mostly from left to right and dodging back and forth along three lanes to avoid upcoming hazards while you collect glowing orbs to boost your score. The experience could have been delightful, but instead wavers between monotonous and infuriating.

As the game begins, most of the color is sucked out of a magical world and replaced with darkness. You, a red guardian, and your two friends--blue and yellow--are the only ones who possess the ability to restore the vibrant hues that otherwise will be gone forever. The setup is reminiscent of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse or de Blob, only this game is populated by generic characters you've never seen before and probably won't care much about now.

If making everything right only required you to gather the orbs strewn about the three lanes, Color Guardians wouldn't offer much to challenge you, even with the addition of the environmental hazards. However, as a guardian you possess the ability to change between the three primary tones, and must utilize that gift in order to make real headway. If you pass over orbs while appropriately colored, you gain rewards. You do better still if you press one of three buttons as you find yourself in position. This is a neat idea on paper but tedious in practice. Imagine if your score in an old Sonic or Mario game were dependent on your willingness to press a button each time you passed over a ring or coin.

Earning the best possible ranking in a stage is difficult, since you must manage a nearly perfect run to do it. A two-star rank is essentially the default. If you mess up badly enough that you're in line for a lesser accolade, you seldom survive the effort, at least during the first half of the game. After that, it sometimes seems the only way you ever reach a goal is by the skin of your teeth. Fortunately, you can resume as often as you like from a checkpoint, once you pass one. The downside is that these are in rather short supply as the game wears on, and thus you have to retread a lot of hostile ground.

Early on, the challenge isn't severe, but that changes with the introduction of new mechanics. You eventually find oversized parasols that you collect automatically as you pass over them, and these carry you into the air for a while, after which you can either descend slowly or discard them to initiate a quick dive. Elsewhere, your path is blocked by color-coded barriers that recede only when you approach them with the proper hue applied. There are mushrooms and giant fans that allow you to quickly gain elevation, but your color must match theirs, or they're useless.

None of that may sound especially taxing, but it comes together in some truly exasperating ways. The developer did a commendable job of taking full advantage of each new gameplay wrinkle. Less admirably, it produced a lot of seemingly simple scenarios where you must do the opposite of what feels natural or face the consequences. Because of the particular button layout, it's easy to associate each color with a particular lane, but any color can require your interaction at any time, often in a rapid-fire sequence and with all manner of distractions. This dynamic is of course exploited frequently. Likewise, the game eventually trains you to switch hues so that you can gather trinkets and spring triumphantly from color-coded mushrooms. You then tackle a level that forces you to do precisely the opposite, lest you launch into inky spirits flying overhead. In the third world and elsewhere thereafter, you ride in mine carts that only switch lanes if you press a button corresponding to the desired lane. Such areas force your brain to adjust yet again, especially when segments of track are interrupted by ledges for a brief time. The net effect of the game's design is that you spend your time racing through one level after another, failing frequently until you memorize every danger that lies between one checkpoint and the next. Each stumble is punishment for your lack of a crystal ball that might allow you to divine what obstacle comes next. Successes don't feel like proof of skill; they merely attest to your ability to memorize another sequence.

The irksome platforming is exacerbated by a number of related issues. You frequently find yourself floating over wide gaps, forced to land briefly on small islands and launch from pads. Sometimes, you must drop your parasol and quickly switch colors and spring into the air again before changing to another lane. Then, as you tumble into an abyss, you realize that you actually needed to switch two lanes at once, which wasn't immediately apparent. An on-screen indicator lets you know where you will land, but it's mostly only useful to explain your mysterious death so that you can do things differently the next time around. Another problem is that sometimes the game hangs for a split-second without warning, which murders your timing, or indicators pop up as you pass score thresholds and ruin your concentration.

Whatever its other issues are, Color Guardians at least nails its presentation. Its visual design in particular is quite appealing. Regions start out draped in shadow, but everything comes to vibrant life as paint washes over it. There's lots of activity most of the time, as well, from floating spirits to mischievous goblins and dancing light and shadows. The music and sound effects set the stage nicely, being both mystical and energetic in just the right proportion.

If you find yourself enjoying the game despite its excessively punishing design, or perhaps even because of it, there's good news: the five worlds possess around ten stages apiece, along with boss encounters (though each of these offers increasingly challenging variations on a theme, rather than wholly distinct confrontations). When you defeat the recurring baddie at the end of an area, you can backtrack and search for hidden sprites and unlock additional stages, or just revisit your familiar stomping grounds in search of better scores. Leaderboards let you know how you rank compared to other players, which should be a nice incentive once the game has been in the wild long enough.

Color Guardians features a concept that's still new enough to feel fresh, and makes the most of it. All too often, though, the stages are designed in such a way that you're tricked into failing, and any technical issues stand out more than they might elsewhere because precise timing and concentration are so vital to success. You can always rebound after failure, but sometimes it's difficult to muster the energy to do so when part of you knows there's bound to be another trick of some sort waiting just a few screens away. It's all very pretty, sure. It's just not worth it.

We love playing David to countless video game Goliaths. Bosses are, more often than not, larger than the game heroes who defeat them. In Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains, you're never short of giants to vanquish as you reenact scenes from the anime and manga from which the game was adapted. If there are thrills to be found, they come from swinging through a map using the maneuver gear. Using this mobility against the titans can provide a rush as you amass your first dozen kills, but don't expect this excitement to last. Humanity in Chains is a surprisingly soulless affair, a reminder that sometimes it takes a game packed with titans to make us appreciate refined adventures with fewer behemoths.

Much of the best anime is set in worlds you wish you could visit, such as the early 1980s interpretation of metropolitan Japan in Urusei Yatsura, or the sprawling vision of Earth in Dragon Ball. As good as the original material is, its setting is an utterly miserable world. One hundred years of peace have just been shattered by the return of remorseless giants who only want to eat humans. What are you to do but try to defend yourself, especially if you're a revenge-hungry teen who watched helplessly as your mom became a snack? The titans' perpetually maniacal faces only add insult to one's presumable fate to become a decapitated morsel. For once, we have an anime in which teenage whining, scolding, and anxiety-driven introspection is justified, even if all this motivational talk, pointless or otherwise, comprises one-third of the anime's content.

Humanity in Chains spares you these moments of angst while framing story missions with many of the show's most memorable scenes. If this game is partly designed to attract Attack on Titan virgins to watch the show, these brief videos are its most effective selling tools. The game is punctuated by the two opening themes and credits. If anything convinces you that you're about to experience the playable version of a well-received anime, it is the rehashing of a catchy and memorable title sequence. I haven't watched Attack on Titan since it appeared on Netflix over a year ago, so reacquainting myself with the resoundingly Germanic choral chanting was exciting, if only for a few minutes. The only thing missing is a Netflix streaming voucher to watch the show on the 3DS.

Attack on Titan inadvertently poses a question that could have been asked decades ago: What if Spider-Man had a penchant for bladed melee weapons and his arms were freed from web-slinging? Add the mutant-hunting sentinels and you essentially have the gameplay premise for Humanity in Chains. Much like Spider-Man, you don't question how your gear manages to find an attachment point every time; you just run with it because there are more pressing matters, like a city filled with invading titans. You spend most of your time swinging from point to point because moving on foot is impractical and, more importantly, is the easiest way to get yourself killed.

The point of all this maneuverability is to position yourself to attack the titans' napes, their main weak spot. Thanks to a lock-on function, this is a peculiarly simple task, provided you make an effort to avoid approaching titans from the front. Once you've initiated the attack, the only challenge lies in lining up a timing ring within a larger ring; pulling that off results in a hit. This challenge, unfortunately, makes up the bulk of your goals in Humanity in Chains, so it's normal to feel bored after about an hour of play. Aside from an optional spin attack and the ability to hinder a titan's mobility, there's no depth or nuance to combat. You're either aiming to deal a lethal blow to the titan or you're making a brief retreat in order to regroup. We've come to expect third-person adventures chocked full of objectives in a given sortie, which can take anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes to complete. There are missions in Humanity in Chains that take 30 seconds to clear. And when you're not killing titans, your tasks are more menial jobs, like performing CPR on fallen comrades or collecting food. The art department didn't even design the food; you just have to find gleaming blue dots on the ground.

Not wanting to stick solely to the anime's script, developer Spike Chunsoft added world mode, a feature that lets you grow and customize your own squad of titan killers and team up in multiplayer. It's a well-intentioned mode that is meant to add replay value and an RPG-inspired sense of character ownership by starting you off with baseline stats. The world mode menu screen overlooks a base with multiple facilities, giving you the impression that there are a lot of activities there with which to eat up an afternoon. It is true that you can upgrade squadmates' abilities and craft weapons in world mode, but incentives to apply these enhancements in the field are sorely lacking. Not only are you stuck with the same types of titan takedown missions found in story mode, but now you're greatly underpowered. The chances of getting grabbed by a titan are much greater, as is the unlikelihood of freeing yourself from its grasp. Learning the ropes and learning from defeat would be engaging if not for that fact that world mode doesn't unlock until you've beaten seven story missions. By then, you've been spoiled by controlling top-tier titan-killer talent, ruining any motivation to start over again as an entry-level grunt. It's a case of foreplay deferred after a game has already spoiled its best moves.

Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is further proof that the seemingly obvious genre for an anime-to-game adaptation isn't always the best one. Take the Ghost In The Shell games as another example. As enjoyable as it was to play as Motoko Kusanagi in third-person adventure Stand Alone Complex, it was an even better experience playing as the Tachikoma spider-tank in the original PlayStation game. The disappointment of poor mission variety in Humanity in Chains is compounded by the brevity of each assignment. And while world mode had the potential to show the franchise's appeal beyond the main story, its team customization allure is severely hobbled by the same shallow combat in story mode.

Between the can't-look-away morbidity of being eaten and watching the ensemble cast persevere, there's no denying the draw of Attack on Titan and the potential for a superb game adaptation. Humanity in Chains just isn't that game. Given the squads of soldiers, the seemingly limitless influx of titans, and one's mobility options, there is surely hope for an excellent game set in this universe in the far-flung future.

A good 4X strategy game is a bit like a slow-burning fire--something to be stoked every now and again with a click of the mouse and watched through half-lidded eyes into the late hours. When that contented sort of complacency sets in, I'm more easily coaxed into "just one more turn." These empire-building games make it easier still because they tend to defer the consequences of poor moves. Mistakes amount to small hang-ups in the otherwise effortless forward momentum of upgrades and technological developments, lost in the spaces between ascending data points on one of the genre's ubiquitous end-of-game line graphs. It's only when I come out of my daze a few scaled eras later that I often find myself long surpassed by opposing empires, the graphs telling a story of steady mediocrity since, oh, sometime in the Middle Ages when production took a brief turn towards the slightly sub-optimal.

The thing is, 4X games don't have much patience for an also-ran. They're "games" in the same way that the game of thrones is a game: you win or you die, and the middle ground is really just another burial tract. And if the same goes for the crowded, largely homogenous genre they belong to, where does that leave an entry like StarDrive 2? For the most part, the game seems to be a proper execution of its developer's vision; it's worked its way up its chosen tech trees, so to speak, arriving as a sci-fi empire builder in the grand tradition. And yet, when it's time to take stock, StarDrive 2 finds itself firmly in the middle.

But 4X games always begin full of promise, at least. StarDrive 2 offers the selection of a space-faring race--always a good time, unless you pick Human--and, if you want, a complete overhauling of its prepackaged traits. The system, like many others in the game, is cribbed directly from Master of Orion, but it remains rousing and balanced. "Peerless Starfighters" might sound like a must-have bonus, but can you stomach the "Repulsive" or "Corrupt" negative trait you'll have to equip to zero out the ledgers? And then there are the races themselves: an eclectic bunch that includes Cthulhu-likes, an ursine shogunate, and a narcissistic collection of pods that speak through the hijacked brains of alien owls.

As if to further signal that you're not supposed to take the ensuing intragalactic war too seriously, there's a color commentary robot that periodically interjects to introduce the competing races in a segment called--wait for it--"racial profiling." And as if to signal that this is a terrible idea for a feature, there's also an option to turn it off. But whether you listen to the introductions or not, it behooves you to immediately start spreading out across the star map from whatever randomized homeworld you've been deposited on. Exploratory fleets can be sent across the universe with a click, revealing new planets of varying hospitality to colonize. The best ones go quick--opposing empires in StarDrive 2 gobble up territory, and they're not shy about claim jumping either.

These enemies can be held off for a time via diplomacy. Technological advancements are divided into mutually exclusive sets of three and are often differentiated by whether they provide an immediate benefit or one that scales better over a longer period of time. Researching one cordons off the other two, so the best way to snag them is through trade. That, in turn, plays out via a now-overly familiar interface, wherein resources and policies are given a unifying currency and exchanged between two empires at something resembling a fair rate. There's also a limiting "tolerance" meter that hints at a xenophobic civilian population weighing the deal behind the scenes. Combined with a capricious AI and the utilitarian feel of the diplomacy system at large, the meter mostly just contributes to StarDrive 2's gravitational pull towards war.

If the end justifies the means--and the end involves every race that isn't you being purged from the galaxy--nothing is ever really beyond the pale, is it? The enslavement and bombardment of civilian populations, consequently, are perfectly tenable according to StarDrive 2's rules of engagement (albeit partially lampshaded by the cartoonish aliens and abstractions of the game's model). The infrastructure of a colonized planet is indicated with a list of the buildings it's added, and its farming, manufacturing, and scientific output are represented. As an example, these outputs are represented for the Kulrathi Shogunate by bears holding pitchforks, pickaxes, and beakers, respectively.

To protect them, you kit out a starfleet or two. Here, StarDrive really feels like it's found its wheelhouse. All ships have a single frame housing a few different pre-existing equipment packages, but they're used more effectively when you customize their payloads yourself. The ship editor uses a lo-fi but intuitive version of EVE Online's similar interface, where armor plating, power generation, weapons, and cockpits all take up a certain amount of tiles on a planar overlay atop the ship's frame. A bigger missile launcher is surely more effective, but it'll take up valuable tiles that you might need to use for thrusters or point defenses.

If any system isn't being adequately accounted for, you find out quickly when StarDrive 2's ship-to-ship combat plays itself out. When two fleets collide on the star map, they're set down across from each other on a new screen, where they trade maneuvers and lasers semi-autonomously. A pleasant feedback loop plays so you can see how the battles resolve themselves, note deficiencies in your lineup, and run back to the hangar to draw up a suitable counter to the tech your enemy is fielding.

It isn't all quite as tidy as opposing empires trading volleys across their borders. StarDrive 2 introduces a refreshing amount of entropy to the system via third-party raids, discoverable anomalies, derelict ships, and mission pop-ups that can throw a wrench into your previous priorities. But these instances frequently mean that you need to engage in ground combat, a half-baked, grid-based affair that sees two squads march up to each other and wail away until one drops.

You can give ground units tools and abilities, too, but they don't fundamentally alter the static nature of the combat--if you need to wait 20 turns for an ability to recharge and the enemy hasn't spotted you, you might as well press "next turn" 20 times until it refreshes. This is silly, because StarDrive 2 has no pressing need to render ground combat. There's enough of a draw in the larger scale, ship-based combat and exploration as well as the thrill loot-seeker get from discovering a planet with a unique resource and scrambling to claim it first.

But even though these systems achieve competency, they've been done before (and done better) in many other games. So any praise leveled at StarDrive 2 inevitably ends up faint when it's taken alongside other entries in the sci-fi 4X genre. Is that a flaw of a navel-gazing piece of genre fare or of our own tendency to internalize lessons from an empire builder--that there can only be one winner and that existing for the sake of existing isn't enough?

NASA scientists have found evidence through laboratory experiments that the dark material partially dusting the surface of Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa, may be sea salt from a subsurface ocean.

Sea salt on Europa's surface suggests that its ocean is interacting with its seafloor, which, according to NASA, is a positive indication towards finding out whether the moon could support life.

“We have many questions about Europa, the most important and most difficult to answer being is there life? Research like this is important because it focuses on questions we can definitively answer, like whether or not Europa is inhabitable,” said Curt Niebur, Outer Planets Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Once we have those answers, we can tackle the bigger question about life in the ocean beneath Europa’s ice shell.”

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Warning: Spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Agents of SHIELD follow.

The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2 finale didn't hold back. The synopsis for "S.O.S." mentioned sacrifices, and both the Inhumans and SHIELD suffered losses and/or injuries. In case you need a refresher after the action-packed two hours: Cal embraced his Mr. Hyde comic book personality, Raina was killed, Coulson lost an arm, Ward became even angrier, Terrigen Mist was released into the general population, and oh yeah, the Kree stone captured Jemma. The Inhumans and SHIELD are aligned for the moment, and that means a world of new possibilities are ahead. We spoke with executive producer Jeffrey Bell about Skye's new Inhuman team, what Ward has up his sleeve, Coulson's missing hand, and more.

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Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is heading to the Nintendo 3DS in Japan on August 27 for 5,980 yen (roughly US$50), Square Enix announced today.

According to a translation by Gematsu, the upcoming re-release to Nintendo's handheld will feature StreetPass support, voiceovers, soundtrack by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and new party members with a female thief named Garda and Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road‘s Morrie. The incentives from various Japanese retailers include:

• Square Enix eStore – “Candy Cane” (weapon for Yangus) – A mysterious spear that will absolutely cause damage and is even effective on metallic monsters.

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Marvel is reportedly courting Ava DuVernay to direct one of its Phase 3 movies.

According to The Wrap, which broke the news, multiple sources have suggested that the director will helm Black Panther, due to open July 2018.

via Wikipedia.

DuVernay is best known for last year's historical drama Selma, which debuted to great critical acclaim. Her previous work includes the independent features I Will Follow (2012) and Middle of Nowhere (2012). The latter nabbed her the Best Director award at 2012's Sundance Film Festival.

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Update: As our readers have pointed out, the guy Lesnar is fighting in the piece of concept art has Frank Mir's stomach and arm tattoos.

Make of all this what you will.

Original story is below.

Professional wrestler and all-around Big Fightin' Dude Brock Lesnar has popped up in Assassin's Creed Syndicate.

As pointed out by Kotaku, a piece of concept art appearing in Syndicate's reveal stream  (pause at 44.54) shows off a bald guy in a fighting arena sporting Lesnar's exact back tattoo. Check it out below.

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Welcome back to IGN's Game of Thrones show! This week, Roth Cornet (I think I just wrote about myself in the third person there, which is weird. Anyway!) is joined by Game of Thrones experts Sam Claiborn and Steve Butts to dive into Game of Thrones, Season 5, episode 5, "Kill the Boy".

Download Game of Thrones: "Kill the Boy" - Dragons on the Wall Here!

After our we give our initial responses to the episode, we delve into the nitty gritty of what's happening on Game of Thrones this season; including Jon and his controversial decision, Dany and her "How to Feed a Dragon" lesson in terror, what the heck is going on with Sansa, and Tyrion goes to Volantis!

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