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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And yes, it is that time again to not only give thanks for your friends and family, but also for video games! Today marks the official start of the Steam Autumn Sale.
The autumn sale will run from November 21 through November 26.
Now is your chance to take advantage and finally save some money buying video games. Discounts for you PC gamers may run up from anywhere between 25% to a whopping 75%.
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Today's Steam deals include Prototype 2 for $20, the Hong Kong, action-thriller sandbox of Sleeping Dogs for 24.99 and Max Payne 3 for a very clean 14.99, which, people, I do have to say is one of the best deals for one of the best games to have been released in 2012!
Visit the Steam often and obsessively as flash deals occur every few hours and there are always new games discounts every single day.
For more turkey and pumpkin pie surprises, stay tuned for Subculture!
Following Skyrim's Dawnguard and Hearthfire DLC, The Elder Scrolls lore expands as players will soon be graced by Dragonborn, which is set to come out early December.
Don't be an N'wah!
Through this new expansion, players can travel to Solstheim, an ice-cold island near the now-volcanic laden Dunmer homeland of Morrowind, where they will discover the mystery and danger behind the original Dragonborn's lust for power.
The Elder Scrolls website states players will "Encounter new towns, dungeons, and quests as [they] traverse the ash wastes and glacial lands. . . . [Their] fate, and the fate of Solstheim, hangs in the balance as [they] face off agasint [their] deadliest enemy . . ."
Along with these new goodies, you can look forward to exploring a new Daedric realm, fighting new enemies, and discovering new thu'ums and armors.
You lookin' at me?
Though little detail exists of this new system, the Dragonborn DLC looks to have...DRAGON MOUNTS!
Yup. It looks as if players will soon be able to ride a dragon. So, with any luck, you can throw away that horse-powered horse and exchange it for a brand new shiny dragon.
Check out the trailer below at Bethesda's Dragonborn DLC.
For more news and views, stay tuned for Subculture!
Fricitonal Games on Wednesday released a new trailer for the upcoming horror game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Unlike the stifling, stone castle corridors of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it looks from the trailer that fans of the original game can look forward to creeping through the dark, foreboding halls, streets, and lonely basement refineries of a Victorian-era London. (check out the scary for yourself in the trailer below)
The Machine for Pigsofficial website sets the year in 1899, sixty years after the first game. Players will take on the unfortunate role of "industrialist Oswald Mandus," who "has returned from a disastrous expedition from Mexico, which has ended in tragedy. Wrecked by fever, haunted by dreams of a dark machine, he recovers consciousness in his own bed, with no idea of how much time has passed since his last memory. As he struggles to his feet, somewhere beneath him, an engine splutters, coughs, roars into life..."
Looks like a fun time.
In a PC Gamer interview with The Chinese Room, the company in charge of developing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, David Pinchbeck said, "It's fairly true to the spirit of the original game. There's a definite case of 'don't fix what isn't broken.' We're not going to be arming the player up at all - you're still going to to be hiding for most of it and running and peaking and not wanting to open doors and things like that."
The atmosphere definitely mirrors The Dark Descent. Just discovering this game, I am already both excited and scared for its release. I have not yet seen what exactly stalks Oswald Mandus through these horrific, ill-lit halls, so my anticipation of seeing these other-worldly monsters is through the roof.
This new title in the Amnesia franchise is not a direct sequel, but rather another tale in the same universe.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is set to release in early 2013. In the meantime, The Chinese Room developers want your fear! Yes, they want recorded screams, shrieks and whimpers of your terror and anguish. The recorded files, in formats of Wavs, Oggs, and MP3s, may be sent to piggies@thechineseroom.co.uk
For more information, visit www.aamfp.com.
Stick around, folks, and, as always, stay tuned for Subculture!
Bulletstorm is crass, brawny and raw. Revenge, of course, is rehashed to drive the plot and character dynamics are nothing new. Save from a few key features, Bulletstorm is far from innovative. But, that's not the point of this article.
This dissection and analysis is not a review, but rather a discussion of how and why Bulletsorm is so much fucking fun.
It's a murdering party!
Bulletstorm's simplicity offers the breath of fresh air the video game culture needs. While series such as Metal Gear, The Elder Scrolls or Mass effect offer amazingly fun, immersive and vast worlds to explore, games such as these often harbor convoluted and hardcore elements. Bulletsorm is one of the more recent games to challenge that avant-garde direction of video game companies with its back-to-basic attitude.
I'll admit it: this game may be classified in the genre of brainless-shooters. Epic Games gracefully embraces this idea. However, in doing so Bulletstorm, in regards to its shooting mechanics at least, avoids feeling dumbed-down and shallow.
In fact, Bulletstorm offers a palate of gore for those that are experimental. In Minecraft, players gather and stack dozens of different environmental-blocks to achieve whatever they wish to build. Similarly in Bulletstorm, players use their environment, and of course their guns, as tools for dealing fountains of death in different ways. These are called skillshots.
Time to paint the town red
Need to put down a group of baddies? Activate the Sniper's secondary firing-mode and it shoots an explosive round into an enemy, which the player can then maneuver, with said enemy still attached to the bullet, into the rest of the group of bad guys and "Boom!" Instant ground beef! Or, assuming these baddies are indoors, use the Energy Leash's thumper ability to sweep all the bad guys off their feet and gravity-slam them to their chunky, rainy red demise on the low-ceiling.
This crimson-colored, lego-blocks style of murder bolsters the adventures within Bulletstorm. Each new gun expands the arsenal of carnage and discovering new ways to annihilate all your foes only adds to the bloody fun.
Like its action, this game's dialogue and characters are very base. The colloquialism divinely adheres from words such as "fuck," "shit" and "dick." Just check out the video below and see for yourself!
Awesome, right?
While many may find Grayson Hunt and his band of merry pirates immature, the language of Bulletstorm falls back to the concept of rawness. The brutality of skillshots and its shades of violence are meant to reverberate the basic shooter. The vulgarity of this title, on the same lines, reflects contemporary societal standards of vocabulary.
In an era past post-modernism, there are fewer and fewer original niches narratives can exploit. Simply put: audiences everywhere think they have already seen and heard everything. So, what is the consequence of including a shit-storm's worth of f-bombs and dick jokes? The answer is simply comedy.
These jokes, like the violence, communicate through fundamentally basic human aspects. Comedy revolving around sex and bowel-movements can even be traced as far back to Aristophanes and the ancient Greeks.
"Son of a dick"
The reason such comedy persists today is because of its universality. Everyone farts, burps, takes dumps and urinates. And because the complexity of language allows it, these everyday, hilarious functions are labeled and survive through base language.
This universality also equalizes all classes of people. Stripped of possessions, hierarchies and ideals, humankind is homogeneous. And through this basic ideal, Bulletstorm, at its core, reflects that essence of similarities.
Its simplicity mixed with its base-language and kill-creativity brings hours of entertainment. Nonetheless, it follows a basic system of call and response: you fire a gun and the enemies skulls shatter upon impact.
Again, the cadence of language and the cacophony of battle stirs up the basest pleasures in a medium that sometimes attempts to complicate the concept of fun.
Bulletstorm's facet of minimalism reflects older games such as Super Mario Brothers and even Pong. While it is far more technologically advanced than the latter titles, its entertainment-value feeds off the same nuances that make simplicity so good. This title didn't make promises to be something that it wasn't. Bulletstorm is simply a shooter basked in blood and fun.
Now is your chance to take advantage and finally save some money buying video games. Discounts for you PC gamers may run up from anywhere between 25% to a whopping 75%.
