Now Playing: The Broken Banner Age Edition
The Banner Saga is out this week – thank you, Kickstarter. Broken Age: Act I is out now for backers, too – hey thanks, Kickstarter. And the creator of Final Fantasy Tactics just launched a $600,000 Kickstarter for his next game – hey thanks again, Kickstarter!
What are you playing this weekend?
Russell Archey, Staff Writer, @NeoScyther
I've actually been doing the impossible and making progress on my Steam backlog. Lately I've been going back and forth between Cave Story+ and Final Fantasy VII. One of my New Year's resolutions is to actually finish a Final Fantasy game, and I've started FF VII about three times now, so I think it's finally time I finish it up. As for Cave Story+, I'm a sucker for platformers and CS+ is pretty fun ... though I already messed up getting the best ending, but in my defense I didn't know the game had multiple endings until reading GameFAQs after the fact.
Sean Cahill, Staff Writer, @GN_Punk
I'll be rotating between FIFA 14, Madden 25, and Need for Speed Rivals on the Xbox One this weekend as I recover from CES. Just to give everyone a bit of an idea with graphical changes: FIFA 14 is light years better graphically on XBO than the 360, Madden 25 not so much, and NFS Rivals is absolutely gorgeous.
Nathan Carter, Staff Writer, @natedoggcata
A few weeks ago I bought an MSI Twin Frozr GeForce 660 and a 400W power supply. After paying $230 along with getting Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Splinter Cell Blacklist free, I am now part of the PC Master Race, even though I absolutely hate that term. I am now playing games at max settings and at 1920 x 1800 resolution and it all looks amazing. I also bought Skyrim for PC and have been downloading mods like a mad man, so this weekend I will be heading back into Skyrim for another adventure. I've played a little bit of Skyrim for the PC and I am just amazed at how amazing it looks and how smooth the frame rate is. I must have sunk hundreds of hours into Skyrim on consoles and I cannot wait to do so again on the PC.
Sean Colleli, Staff Writer, @scolleli
After the announcement of Alien: Isolation, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the franchise again and I'm on an Alien kick. I've been playing Aliens vs. Predator (the greatest being the PC version from 2000), installing a few of the mods and custom levels. I'm restarting Aliens: Infestation, the legitimately excellent DS game that WayForward released as a handheld companion to Aliens: Colonial Marines ... nearly two years before the chronically delayed Colonial Marines came out. Yeah. I'm also hunting around online for a way to run Alien: Trilogy under Windows 7; it's a decent mid-'90s Doom clone but a good and nostalgic game in its own right. And speaking of Doom, I can always fall back on Justin Fisher's Aliens: Total Conversion, one of the greatest, most comprehensive Doom mods ever made and possibly the first really good Aliens game. At the rate I'm going this could lead to a full-blown Aliens retrospective article.
Travis Huinker, Staff Writer, @travishuinker
This weekend I'll be playing through Broken Age: Act I, which I've been eagerly anticipating since backing its Kickstarter project two years ago. As well, I plan to finally set some time aside for the various projects I've purchased through the Steam Early Access program, including Starbound, DayZ, Rust, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid, and Space Engineers. I'll be satisfied if I can play just one for those for an extended period of time.
Charles Husemann, Editor-in-Chief, @chusemann
With the Broken Age beta finally available to backers, I'll be digging into the game to see if it was worth the wait. I'm still a bit burned out by the scoping issues of the project – and the recent kerfuffle this week didn't make things any better. Hopefully a great game will smooth over all of the noise. I'll also be logging some time with Battlefield 4 and maybe dive into Don't Starve.
Randy Kalista, Staff Writer, @RandyKalista
Found out that the length of my banner (cough) in The Banner Saga was directly proportional to my caravan's total population. Let's just say that my banner shrunk embarrassingly by the end of my Nordic exodus. It's, it's not always like that. It's just cold outside. Also, "Leave Her, Johnny" and other Assassin's Creed IV sea shanties run endlessly through my head, so I look forward to the crew of the Jackdaw piping me back on board this weekend.
Matt Mirkovich, Staff Writer, @Stillmywords
In the new year I'm always going back and playing over stuff I missed. Right now it's Papers, Please, which is incredibly entertaining, though the perfectionist in me screams internally whenever I get a citation. I'm also making the final trek toward level 50 in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Only 500,000 experience points to go (really it's not that much, I'm just tired of doing leves to get there). I've also got the Muramasa Rebirth: Fishy Tales of the Nekomata DLC, which I'll be throwing down a short review on soon.
