What a 48hrs it’s been. Gamers have been given reason to cheer and cry. Such weight that can only be decompressed with hours of performing Mortal Kombat X fatalities.
Wait that ain’t it… oh well let’s talk about some of the major news video games has recently bombarded us with.
On Sunday, Treyarch showed off the first full trailer for the next installment of the Call of Duty franchise. Call of Duty: Black Ops III comes to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC this November.
Now the series has become a yearly expectation, not unlike a new Madden Football game or MLB The Show. Hell, the game has even aided in giving birth to pro gaming leagues where Mountain Dew fueled players compete for bragging rights and copious amounts of cash. So what can a new installment bring that we haven’t seen before? Bigger combat arenas allowed the game to boast a 4-player co-op campaign. For the first time in the franchise’s history, the campaign’s protagonist is fully customizable. In addition to upgrading abilities, changing your character’s appearance and tweaking weapons, players can pick the gender of their Call of Duty hero. Black Ops also brings back Zombie survival mode, where players obliterate wave after wave of the undead. This time the mode comes with a full character progression system similar to multiplayer.
Being the third CoD game by Treyarch, the group is leaving nothing out. Come November we’ll see wall running, underwater combat, unlimited sprinting, the ability to customize your solider as a heroic female in the campaign, and swimming. Yes according to the developer certain battle arenas will have areas where players can have their solider swim while still controlling weapons and combat. Though we haven’t seen much of how this development will affect the game, it sure does sound like a thing they threw in after the art directors pool party. The one thing the game really needs is a new Jim Lee drawn cover.
![modern-warfare-2-ghost-1-jim-lee-variant-call-of-duty-dc-wildstorm-comic-book-9353-p[ekm]290x448[ekm]](http://www.comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/modern-warfare-2-ghost-1-jim-lee-variant-call-of-duty-dc-wildstorm-comic-book-9353-pekm290x448ekm.jpg)
Cause this weird “I gotta go to the bathroom but I don’t want to put my guns down” box ain’t cutting it.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III is set to release on November 6, 2015. Preordering through Gamestop will get you access to the upcoming beta.
Disney Infinity 2.0 finally released their mobile app on Android today. The guesstimated five of us that don’t have iPhones can now:
Create your own worlds and games starring over 60 of your favorite Marvel and Disney characters! Marvel Super Heroes come to Disney Infinity: Toy Box 2.0, with some of your favorite characters including the Avengers, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Also explore some of your favorite Disney and Disney/Pixar characters from Frozen (Elsa & Anna), Big Hero 6 (Hiro & Baymax), Brave (Merida), Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters Inc, and more!
For anyone that hasn’t picked up any Disney Infinity console and PC version… yes the cost goes beyond what you’ll initially pay after the starter set. This is just the new trend in gaming. These miniature versions of Mickey Mouse, Venom, Jack Sparrow, and Baymax we all have to buy are the new form of downloadable content for games. Though they have the distinction of having desk/shelf potential for collectors, it can still add up to serious coin, which is why it’s a nice feature that you can use web code cards from your physical Disney Infinity Figures to unlock characters in the mobile game. Such a novelty is essentially making the content transferable through all the platforms that gives it a value other games could learn from.
Now if we could just get those Legos and Amibos to talk to each other.
Plus look at the meme potential!
As we talked a little about yesterday, Batman: Arkham Knight or as I call it “That thing I’m not going to work the week of June 23rd for,” dropped a new trailer that included the long awaited story playability of Nightwing, Robin, and Catwoman (I don’t count Arkham City cause you had to download her). The feature looks to be similar to what Grand Theft Auto 5 did with switching between three main characters at the push of a button at any time.
Here it is again in all it’s glory:
Two-Face, Oracle, Azrael, and the bat-plane also appear in the trailer. In addition to all this, pre-ordering the game get’s you a playable Harley Quinn in the game’s challenge maps and if you do it through GameStop then the Red Hood (Jason Todd) will also be yours. The game’s “Mature” rating doesn’t shine through in the trailer but you can see a level of despair that hasn’t been hit in the series yet, and that’s saying a lot because Arkham City wasn’t exactly sunshine and roses.
Fortunately we won’t have to wait too much longer as the game is locked into releasing worldwide June 23, 2015 on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
In the meantime, have you figured out who “Johnny Charisma” is yet?
Before we start the rundown of what gaming comics will be in stores this week, we should take a moment of “silence” for Silent Hills. Last year the world was told to play the creepy ass downloadable game P.T. In it, you’re put in the shoes of a man trapped in the hallways of a house where some supernatural depressing Scooby Doo ghost shit is going down. The erie vibrance and mind bending nature of the situation made the game a brief but intense ride. Then at the end players find out that this is just a “Playable Teaser” for a game called Silent Hills. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re then told the game is being developed by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and master film director Guillermo Del Torro. Then as if that isn’t enough we’re told Daryl Dixon himself, Norman Reedus, is going to model and voice the main character.
Yesterday, Konami confirmed our worst fears and officially canceled Silent Hills.
For fans of the Silent Hill series; the teaser was like being defibrillated back to life. A franchise whose better days were behind them, only showing mere glimpses of awesome in comics being published by IDW, was going to make a comeback. For a brief moment two storytelling giants that specialize in the bizarre were going to give fans the game they knew this series could be and P.T was the proof.
What went wrong? While we may never know the real answer to that, at least until someone makes the documentary about all this ten years from now; the writing had been on the wall for quite sometime. Rumors surrounding Kojima leaving Konami after Metal Gear Solid 5 turned into plausible scenarios. Though he doesn’t look it, Hideo Kojima is like 50 something years old (Somewhere there’s an attic with a painting of an old Hideo Kojima screaming cause this guy doesn’t age). If he feels it’s time to move on and tell a new story then he’s earned that right. Most feel that he’ll put his passion for Hollywood to use. Then, Konami itself is starting to show signs of restructuring to focus on other ventures like gambling; they even pulled themselves from the New York Stock Exchange. Though, if you look at their numbers, it was apparent very little trading happened in the US for them. Both parites will undoutebly be okay as their names and properties alone could keep them afloat for years.
There’s the matter of Guillermo Del Torro. He was the first one to come out and say that he was no longer working on Silent Hills. The news was just the latest in a string of incomplete projects the filmmaker has in his portfolio; Justice League Dark and Haunted Mansion (announced at SDCC 2010 but only now finding its star) come to mind . It looks like Pacific Rim 2 will be done before either of those movies gets to theaters. In the end the tragic news of Silent Hills doesn’t fall on Del Torro, he’s a gamer and a storyteller who wanted to create art with a man he sees as a legend. When it became apparent that the legend was leaving the table, he decided not to do the project.
Kojima will be okay, Del Torro will be okay, Konami will be okay; the only real casualties here are all of us because we’ll never know what could have been.
Gaming Comics 4/29:
Injustice: Year Three Annual #1 (W) Ray Fawkes, Brian Buccellato (A) Sergio Fernandez Davila & Various (CA) Neil Googe