Usually, I try to open up the week with some sort of big, bad-ass story, or maybe a lengthy, witty post featuring a half-naked Princess Peach. But frankly, I got nothin’ like that today. Its post E3, and the gaming industry has blown its collective load all over our metaphorical backs, and we have to give it a few minutes before its ready for round 2.
In the meantime, though, more details about some already known stories slipped out over the weekend, and you might have missed them while you were busy chasing the ladies, or kicking the puppies, or doing whatever it is you do on the weekend.
This weekend, we had another character reveal for Batman: Arkham City, we had a security breach at Sega, and we had Crytek dispel some rumors. Click the jump for more.
Robin Confirmed in Batman: Arkham City–
We’ve known this was coming for a while. Robin was reported to be in Arkham City a while back, but the news was quickly pulled down and then ignored as hard as possible by the sites that had accidentally broken the story. Obvious embargo much? Of course, despite Warner Bros. objecting to the Robin speculation, he was still listed on IMDB as a character with assigned voice credit.
Sidenote: IMDB, stop listing video games on your site. They aren’t movies. You’re a movie database. Fork over the money, and make an all-encompassing video game database. Call it VGDB. You can give us royalties for the idea later, thanks.
Anyway, WB finally came out this weekend and confirmed that Robin was in the game. I mean, we already knew because some guys from WB were talking about it at E3 and I like to eavesdrop, but that’s beside the point. The Robin in the game will be Tim Drake, for all you continuity hounds out there, the one who didn’t get beat to death with a crowbar. He will be a DLC pack included as a reward for those who pre-ordered the game, and will be usable in the game’s challenge levels. Could we see Dick Grayson as Nightwing in the future?
SEGA Done Got Hacked-
Sega has become the latest victim of the recent outbreak of cyber douchebaggery. Following up on last April’s Sony hack, the net’s seemingly endless army of incorrigible 733t h4xxor5 have now turned their attention to Sega.
Sega, being much more gentle and polite about their shortcomings than Sony, confirmed on day 1, Thursday, that they had been hacked, but gave no further comment. On Sunday, they finally gave a press statement, confirming the extent of the damage. 1.3 Million accounts of Sega Pass online members around the world were compromised. Happily, while the usernames, passwords, and email addresses of the customers were copied, all credit card information remained secure. Still, if you have one of those accounts, you need to think about changing your password before you start getting used for Spam attacks or something.
I feel pretty bad about this happening to Sega, personally. I mean, Sony is a pretty big corporate monster, you can see why someone might get a self-righteous chub attacking them. But Sega? Sega has always been the underdog, the #2 competitor on their best day, and since the failure of the Dreamcast, that image has been solidified. Sega is like part of the family for many gamers, like that one uncle you have that’s kinda poor and always dressed kinda shabbily, and maybe he heard once that you liked hedgehogs, so now he’s always giving you hedgehog-themed birthday presents even though they’re not really what you want… but, you know, he’s a really nice guy, so you let it slide.
Crytek: “There is No News, Stop Making Shit Up.”–
Okay, I’m paraphrasing. But today’s news is a decided lack of news, at least when it comes to Crytek. Before E3, rumors were abound that Microsoft already had a tech-demo ready for their next console, and that maybe they would announce it in order to steal the thunder from the Wii-U on the show floor. In fact, the fanboy community was so enamored with this idea, that many became convinced that EA had a copy of the demo and was already at work programming games for the thing. News sites (and some days, I feel I use the term loosely) reported, and then later had to retract this notion, as EA came out saying, ‘We ain’t got shit.’ (again, paraphrasing)
Well, after E3 came and went without a single 720, 1440, or even XXXbox announcement, the speculators of the world had to turn their focus elsewhere. The rumor then became that Crytek, developers of the Timesplitters series, had a working mock-up and was helping Microsoft test the hardward and develop test software for it. Ultimately, Crytek offered a statement to MSNBC to dispel the rumors.
“Relating to the recent rumours, Crytek do not have any next generation hardware from Microsoft, nor do we know when Microsoft may announce future hardware or what that hardware will entail.
Crytek are working at pushing the boundaries of what current technology can bring, including our focus on DX11 which will be released shortly as an update for Crysis 2, and we believe this work, added to our estimations of what the new hardware will provide, set up CryENGINE as a next generation engine for all consoles.”
With no working hardware demos at either Crytek or EA, unless they’re being particularly sneaky about it, we may not see anything involving new systems from Sony or Microsoft until 2014.
The original rumor seems to have come from VideoGamer.com, who claim to have had a “High-ranking source” that had to remain anonymous. Hmm, that’s the same kind of source for the EA rumor before it. Must work in their offices out in MadeupBSinordertogethitsville.
Oh, and it seems I’m out of time to sit and write. Too bad, because I was going to tell you all about the schematics to the PS4, and the awesome gameplay of its first exclusive game, a gritty reboot to the Ducktales franchise. Seriously, I have a “Very high-ranking, reliable” source. No, I can’t tell you who it is, don’t be ridiculous. Just trust me. Maybe next time.
