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Most Recent: PS3
FIFA 18 will be available on September 29 with Cristiano Ronaldo on the cover
EA Sports has announced that FIFA 18 will be released across the globe on September 29. The publisher also confirmed that Cristiano Ronaldo, the award-winning forward for Real Madrid and Portugal’s National Team, will serve as the game’s global cover athlete.
Ronaldo also lent his “footballing” expertise to FIFA 18’s development team with a motion capture session that will inform “important gameplay elements” in the game:
To deliver innovation in FIFA 18, Cristiano Ronaldo’s data was recently recorded during a training session at a mobile EA Capture studio in Madrid. Data capture of Ronaldo’s acceleration, run cadence, skills, and shooting technique were all recorded to bring veracity to his likeness and personality in FIFA 18. His data also informed important gameplay elements including fluidity, player responsiveness, and explosiveness.
The first trailer for FIFA 18 has been embedded above, and EA Sports has promised to reveal more details about Ronaldo’s contributions to the game during their E3 Press Conference, which is scheduled to take place this Saturday, June 10 at 3:00 PM (Eastern Time). A livestream of the presentation will be available to watch on EA.com.
FIFA fans will also be able to purchase a special Ronaldo Edition of FIFA 18 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The Ronaldo Edition will grant access to FIFA 18 three days early, and come bundled with bonus content for FIFA Ultimate Team including 20 Jumbo Premium Gold Packs, eight Special Edition Kits, and a Cristiano Ronaldo Loan Player for five matches.
FIFA 18 is in development at EA Vancouver and EA Romania, and will be available on September 29 for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
Kyrie Irving will be the cover athlete of NBA 2K18’s Standard Edition
e very interesting. To add a little more spice to the proceedings, 2K Games announced today that Cleveland’s Kyrie Irving will be the cover athlete for the Standard Edition of NBA 2K18. Shaquille O’Neal was previously announced as the cover athlete for the game’s Legend Edition.
“It is well known that I’m an avid player of this series and I am honored to be the cover athlete of NBA 2K18,” said Irving. “It’s surreal to be featured on the cover and I can’t wait to dominate on the virtual court with all of my fans this Fall.”
“It’s obvious that Kyrie isn’t disappearing from the spotlight anytime soon, so we’re thrilled to have him as our cover athlete, alongside Shaq for the NBA 2K18 Legend Edition,” said Alfie Brody, the Vice President of Marketing for NBA 2K. “He’s a more-than-worthy recipient of this honor, and joins so many other greats who were cover athletes before him.”
The NBA 2K18 Standard Edition will come packed with a variety of in-game content including 5,000 Virtual Currency, 10 Weekly MyTeam Packs, a Kyrie Outfit Pack, and more. Players who pre-order the game will also receive the game four days early thanks to 2K’s “Early Tip-Off Access” program.
NBA 2K18 will be released for the PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on September 19.
The Video Game Canon: Street Fighter II
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at Hollywood’s influence on Street Fighter II (and it’s influence on Hollywood). Here’s a teaser…
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior wasn’t the first fighting game ever released, but it single-handedly helped shape the genre for decades to come.
Capcom’s masterpiece rose to prominence by replacing the small and stiff characters of previous fighting games (including its predecessor, 1987’s Street Fighter) with highly detailed characters that seemed to fly around the screen. Instead of generic fighters clad in traditional karategi uniforms, Street Fighter II starred a diverse group of characters with fantastical “special moves.” And young fans lined up around the block to do battle with “World Warriors” like E. Honda, a sumo wrestler with a lightning-quick Hundred Hand Slap; Zangief, a Russian giant who fought bears; Blanka, a green-skinned prince who controlled electricity; and Dhalsim, a yoga master who breathed fire.
Rather than rest on their laurels, Capcom refined Street Fighter II’s controls and added more characters to the select screen through the release of four subsequent revisions. This parade of improvements (and Street Fighter II’s eventual release on home consoles) helped ensure the game’s status as the biggest fighting game of the early 90s arcade renaissance. By the late 90s, a loosely-connected group of enthusiasts for Street Fighter II began building a “Fighting Game Community” online, which eventually grew to include organized tournaments (like the annual Evo gathering) and a dedicated fandom that could rival any professional sport.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, PS3, Retro, Switch, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Xbox 360
Tagged Street Fighter II
Take-Two has shipped more than 80 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online is more popular than ever
Grand Theft Auto V continues to steamroll the competition. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick lead off yesterday’s quarterly financial report by announcing that the publisher has shipped more than 80 million copies of the game since its release in 2013.
Even though that’s an absolutely astonishing number, Grand Theft Auto V still trails Wii Sports and Minecraft on the list of best-selling games of all time.
Grand Theft Auto V’s continued sales success is mostly due to the way its sprawling single-player story draws in new players every month. But the game’s multiplayer component, “Grand Theft Auto Online,” has actually never been more popular. According to Zelnick, Take-Two made more money through microtransactions in “Grand Theft Auto Online” during their last fiscal year (April 1, 2016 – March 31, 2017) than ever before. Not bad for a game that’s almost four years old.
New content for “Grand Theft Auto Online” is released on a nearly weekly basis, and Zelnick confirmed that Rockstar Games is currently hard at work on even more updates to the game mode:
On “GTA Online,” we have said that plenty more content is coming. More announcements will be made by Rockstar Games. The title is absolutely being supported by the label.
With Red Dead Redemption 2‘s recent delay, this strategy will surely sell more copies of Grand Theft Auto V (and keep “Grand Theft Auto Online” players happy) for a long time.
Spider-Man’s Tom Holland will star as a young Nathan Drake in the Uncharted movie
Brace yourself… the Uncharted film adaptation is undergoing yet another writer switch.
Joe Carnahan turned in a completed draft of an Uncharted film adaptation back in January, and filming was expected to begin this Summer with Shawn LevyAc in the director’s chair. While Levy is staying with the production, Carnahan’s script has been tossed out in favor of a “Young Nathan Drake” story that’ll feature Spider-Man: Homecoming‘s Tom Holland as a teenage version of the adventurer.
According to Deadline, Sony Pictures is currently searching for a new writer to pen the screenplay. The report also claims that Tom Rothman, the Chairman of Sony Pictures, instigated the change after viewing an early cut of Holland’s performance in Spider-Man: Homecoming and finding inspiration in a similar “Young Nathan Drake” level that Naughty Dog included in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.
Nathan Drake’s video game career came to an end last Spring with the release of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, but Naughty Dog plans to continue the series with a standalone spinoff, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, for the PS4 on August 22.
Posted in Etcetera, News, PS3, PS4
Tagged Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
The Switch continues to soar as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the best-selling game in April 2017
Nintendo continues to dominate the retail charts with another strong showing in April for their Switch console. According to The NPD Group, Nintendo added another 280,000 Switch consoles to its tally last month, and the newly-launched Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold more than 459,000 copies (in just two days) to take the top spot on the list of best-selling games. The company’s success also seems to be great for the industry as a whole, as the industry generated $636 million in sales in April 2017, a 10% increase over the year before.
The other big news in April is that Persona 5 pushed the franchise and gave the RPG the #2 spot on the best-seller list, just below Mario Kart 8.
“Persona 5 experienced the strongest debut month for any title in Persona franchise history, with packaged dollar sales five times that of the previous best-selling debut, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4,” NPD Analyst Mat Piscatella told GamesIndustry.biz.
Additional new releases were thin on the ground in last month’s Top 20, but Lego Undercover‘s re-release on the PC and current-generation consoles helped it secure a spot (#13). And as expected, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild continued to sell well, landing in the #3 position for the month. But the big retail winners in April all came from the backlist, including Grand Theft Auto V (#6), Overwatch (#9), Call of Duty: Black Ops II (#10), and Minecraft (#20).
The NPD Group’s complete list of best-selling games for April 2017 can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Wii U, Xbox 360
Tagged Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, For Honor, Grand Theft Auto V, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix, Lego City Undercover, Lego Worlds, Mario Kart 8, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Minecraft, MLB The Show 17, NBA 2K17, Nier: Automata, NPD, Overwatch, Persona 5, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege
LocoRoco Remastered, Strafe, NBA Playgrounds, more added to PS Store
It’s another throwback day for the PlayStation Store as several classic games receive re-releases on new platforms and long-forgotten genres get another chance with the gaming public.
First up is LocoRoco Remastered, a PS4 re-release of a quirky puzzle platformer originally released for the PSP. Players will need to tilt LocoRoco’s world of “blowing flowers, lively creatures, and pastel scenery” to fight back against a group of evil outer space creatures.
Also available to download this week is Strafe, a retro-styled first person shooter for the PS4 that includes procedurally-generated levels and tons of gore. And speaking of retro style, Saber Interactive has brought back the arcade antics of the NBA Jam franchise in NBA Playgrounds, which also launched yesterday for the PS4.
Fans of the Harvest Moon series will be pleased to learn that Yasuhiro Wada is back with another life simulation, Birthdays the Beginning. It’s launching on the PS4 alongside Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland, which was originally released for the PS2 in 2001. Resident Evil: Code Veronica X was also added to the PS2-On-PS4 section of the PlayStation Store yesterday.
You can learn more about all of these games (and a few other new releases) after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, PS3, PS4, Vita
Tagged LocoRoco, NBA Playgrounds, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Strafe
NBA 2K18 Legend Edition will feature Shaquille O’Neal
Shaquille O’Neal will crash NBA 2K’s “Legend Edition” fraternity this Fall, joining previous honorees Michael Jordan (NBA 2K16) and Kobe Bryant (NBA 2K17). Scottie Pippen continues to wonder when it’ll be his time to shine.
“Shaq” was a larger-than-life player for the Orlando Magic and Los Angeles Lakers, but O’Neal’s post-basketball life has seen him transform into an even bigger pitchman and NBA commentator. Naturally, 2K Games is creating a Legend Edition and a Gold Legend Edition for NBA 2K18 that befits his stature.
Set to launch on September 15, the Legend Edition ($99.99) will include a limited-edition poster, five Panini trading cards, exclusive stickers, and a variety of in-game content. The Gold Legend Edition ($149.99) will add five more trading cards, a lenticular poster, and more in-game content.
2K Games will release the Legend Edition and the Gold Legend Edition for the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The Legend Edition will be available at a wide array of retailers, but fans will need to visit their local GameStop if they’re interested in purchasing the Gold Legend Edition.
“I want to thank NBA 2K for their continuous support of my basketball and broadcast career,” O’Neal said. “I’m excited to be on the cover of the NBA 2K18 Legend Edition and I hope my fans have a blast playing it up big man style and re-creating my most legendary in-game moments!”
The Standard Edition of NBA 2K18 will be available for the PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on September 19. A closer look at the contents from the Legend Edition and the Gold Legend Edition can be seen after the break. (more…)