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Don't like what Santa gave you? Destroy it
'Tis the season to, you know, get a lot of gifts you don't necessarily want. We at Engadget know how it goes, and we also know how badly you'd like to burn, break and bash those bunk presents. So we did the dirty work for you -- literally. If you like watching gadgets get mercilessly destroyed while being serenaded by an angelic choir, then consider this our very special holiday gift to you. (Special thanks to our friends at TechShop San Francisco!)
Throw the couch, there's a Fly In The House
A new trailer for Fly In The House shows just why lone developer Mykhail Konokh calls it an "exploration and destruction" game that parodies Fullbright Company's own exploration game, Gone Home. In Fly In The House, you become obsessed with a nagging, buzzing insect's presence and take up arms against the nuisance. Much like Coffee Stain Studio's Goat Simulator, Konokh's game rewards players with points and ranks when they toss any item in the house they find at the fly, trashing the place they call home. While not officially on Steam Greenlight yet, Fly In The House's concept page notes that players will also "search hidden objects" and "reveal the mysteries" of the main character across varying game modes. Check out the trailer after the break. [Image: Mykhail Konokh]
Carmageddon shifts to Steam Early Access on March 27
Carmageddon: Reincarnation will arrive on Steam's Early Access service on March 27, Stainless Games announced. The UK developer also offered a pre-alpha trailer for the vehicular destruction game, which focuses on damage tech for the reboot. Carmageddon: Reincarnation is the result of a successful Kickstarter project in June 2012 during which the indie developer earned $625,143. The developer earned a total of $3.5 million in funding for the game as of March 2013 thanks to the investment of Bullfrog co-founder Les Edgar, bringing the game to Xbox One and PS4 in addition to PC, Mac and Linux. Since the developer first unveiled its plans for an alpha-level launch on Steam in September, it stressed that all of its Kickstarter and PayPal backers who pledged at least $15 for a copy of the game will also get every piece of Stainless Games' DLC "for the rest of time." [Image: Stainless Games]
Watch Lion's Arch fall in Guild Wars 2
Lion's Arch is a center for both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. It has endured through countless trials. And now it's nothing more than ash and wreckage. Whether you've had a chance to experience the latest patch to Guild Wars 2 or have yet to sift through the damage, you can watch it fall in the latest trailer out of the ArenaNet community team. Admittedly, the trailer doesn't go into full detail showing the lengthy siege that took place, but you can fill in some of those details yourself. And it's quite a sizable chunk of destruction, razing familiar features across the city and reducing the game's iconic location to little more than rubble. Click on past the break to see the devastation unfold before your eyes. [Source: ArenaNet press release]
EVE Online graph shows connection between production and destruction
According to CCP, EVE Online is a constant feedback loop of production and destruction, each feeding off of each other in enormous amounts. The studio posted a colorful infograph that shows how much of each side was done in the game last year and under what level of system security. The devs explain the key difference between the two sides: "Most wars take place in the outermost regions of space (red on the scale), far beyond the safety of the high security regions of the Empires (light blue on the scale). The most favorable conditions for production are a mix of close proximity to major market hubs and the safety provided by the high security regions surrounding them. This visualization tells this story, showing the total produced- and destroyed-value of end products (ships and modules), where production mainly takes place in higher-security space (yellow to blue) and the majority of destruction takes place in low- or null-security space (orange to red)."
Blood Pact: What makes a 'lock a 'lock?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses class identity. One of our editors, Adam Holisky, forgot what class he was playing last week, and it made me a little sad. It's great that he wanted to be a warlock again, but we are not hunters. We're not mages either, despite how convinced Matt Rossi is by shared armor. We're not shadow priests, we have demons not totems, and having purple wings is the only similarity between a demo 'lock and a night elf moonkin. I'm not out to make Adam eat his hat, but warlocks certainly distinguish themselves from other classes, I think.
Next Car Game's Kickstarter in the ditch, early access program offers playable tech sneak peek
Bugbear Inc. has canceled its Kickstarter campaign for Next Car Game, but financial obstacles aren't enough to keep the project off the road of game development. The canceled campaign's most recent update notes the studio is "hell-bent to keep on developing the game with our supporters" through the pre-order program hosted on the game's site. If you can get behind the concept, Bugbear is offering a "playable technology sneak peek" to anyone that places a pre-order for Next Car Game. This sneak peek lets players run one of 24 cars through a "playground" Bugbear has been using to test Next Car Game's vehicle and environmental damage mechanics. That's not meant to replace the full game, of course, which the Kickstarter update states will include "a number of race tracks and derby arenas." This testing ground of sorts is offered in exchange for a $25 pre-order, which will eventually grant backers a Steam token for the finished version of Next Car Game. The game's site notes that the final version will "cost more than pre-ordering," so if you're the type to smash up pretty cars for some kind of sick game, it might be beneficial to you to commit now rather than later.
Infinite Crisis takes a deep look at blowing up cars
Superheroes don't fight clean. When a battle happens, you don't expect just a couple of guys punching each other, you expect people being thrown through buildings and cars being flung around like nothing. You expect destruction across the whole landscape, in other words. The developers working on Infinite Crisis understand that and know full well that part of the superhero equation is making sure that you get to have a major impact on the environment, and that's the subject of the newest behind-the-scenes video for the game. Both the destructible environments and the catastrophic event system seen in the game are meant to help players feel the impact of actions and of changing strategies. The battlefield isn't the same at the end as it is when you start. Walls get smashed, meteors fall and block off passages, and players adapt to new options and new circumstances. Take a closer look at what these systems mean in the video embedded just past the break. [Source: Turbine Entertainment press release]
Send Me To Heaven gamifies wanton smartphone recklessness (video)
Like to tempt fate? Then you might want to check out Send Me To Heaven, the Android app that uses your phone's accelerometers to track how high it travels when thrown upward. Assuming you don't fumble your handset on its return trip, its distance will join that of other daredevils on the game's leaderboards. That's all there is to it. Really. According to Kotaku, Apple pulled the game from iTunes because it encourages "behavior that could result in damage to the user's device." We've reached out to developer Carrot Pop for comment on Apple's actions and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, do you feel lucky? Update: Carrot Pop's Petr Svarovsky emailed us back saying that Apple initially rejected the app a year ago, and that at the time he "thought people would be careful not to break their expensive iPhones."
Infinite Crisis shows off what's going on behind the scenes
On one level, Infinite Crisis feels like an obvious premise. Take a setting that already gives players plenty of reasons to beat one another up as iconic heroes and villains, give those players plenty of iconic heroes and villains, enjoy the show. But according to the new behind-the-scenes video, the game took a fair bit more effort than that. It's partly a result of game technology finally matching up with what players need and want in this sort of game. The video features commentary by both DC Comics creators and Turbine Entertainment staff members. One of the big elements of the game is that environments are not static things, that they can be interacted with and damaged during play, and that helps contribute to the feel of a game of superheroes rather than just another MOBA. If you want a closer look, check out the full video embedded just past the break. [Source: Turbine Entertainment press release]
Halfbrick wants to watch it all burn with Colossatron: Massive World Threat
The makers of Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja want you to destroy the planet. From the halls of the first annual PAX Australia comes Colossatron: Massive World Threat. Sure, the game's whole mass-destruction-via-aliens concept sounds a lot like Rampage, but as the announcement trailer shows, it's oh so much more. Players take control of a modular robotic snake, using all manner of upgradeable weapons and abilities to wreak wanton top-down chaos on an unsuspecting populace. The goal? Causing as much property damage as possible. Think of it as a modern take on Godzilla with a campy anime slant and you're mostly there. The Queensland, Australia developer's latest will be playable at its booth for the duration of the show. Can't make it to the expo? Skip past the break for the debut video.
Ship destroyed in EVE Online worth approximately $8,000
It's really hard to get your hands on a Revenant Supercarrier in EVE Online. Darn near impossible, in fact. The ship is worth around 300 billion ISK, coming out to about $8,000 in real currency. The ship is so potent that up until last night, there were thought to be no more than three in the entire game. As of last night, there were two. One of the Revenants was destroyed in a battle between Habitual Euthanasia and Black Legion. Habitual Euthanasia apparently responded to a call for help, fielding the carrier against Black Legion, leading to its destruction. Speculation about whether this was a trap to destroy something valuable or simply a lucky break for the opposing side is being flung around with no conclusive answers. The video recording the destruction is embedded after the cut, although it's zoomed out enough that you cannot enjoy a slow-motion replay of one of the rarest ships in EVE Online going up in flames like a cheap firecracker.
Blood Pact: Flow like a shaman, sting like a hunter
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants to look into a popular counterargument to the nerfing of Kil'jaeden's Cunning. Or not, as I'll argue we warlocks have our own style of play. The damage dealing game isn't just about turning a mob down to 0 points at the end of the night, but about using the mob's health bar to vault over cooldown or resource barriers. Turning a warlock into a sitting duck in PvE requires either getting rid of all the mob health bars or getting rid of the warlock, which is usually accomplished by movement or threat of certain death. This struggle against being useless is what makes choices in a damage dealer's arsenal meaningful.
Blood Pact: Inner demons in our talent selection
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks it's too difficult to convey moving while casting in a static screenshot, so, instead, have the Scholomance potion guy in front of a Demonic Gateway. We covered Karazhan's pets, mounts, and fun last week, so this week, we'll cover Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in the continuing quest to colle-- No. Sorry. If you really thought I was going to skip this past week's bombshell of warlock PTR patch notes for collecting pets from retro raids, I will scold you later for having no faith in me. Let's talk level 90 talent problems.
Blood Pact: Combat log kung fu for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is finishing out the World of Logs posts while she hunts for BC-era battle pets. Have you ever tried to read the combat log? Maybe you're on the PTR testing a spell change or you want to know how often a new trinket procs, so you open the combat log chat window and start reading. You get twenty-something lines down before you realize something horrifying -- that's only one second of combat. Your jaw slowly falls to the floor and you reach up to pull your hair out as you contemplate reading a combat log for an entire raid fight -- that can sometimes last more than six hundred seconds and includes far more actors than just you and the training dummy. Luckily for us, when events are printed in a specified format without too much variety, computers can read and process --or parse -- these lines magnitudes faster than we humans can. World of Logs has graphs and charts to help us understand our performance, but it also includes what is basically Google for your combat log. Just like there are tips to speed up and pinpoint your browser searches, there are tricks you can use to query events better in the World of Logs expression editor.
Blood Pact: World of Logging warlocks, part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wonders how many logs would a warlock log if a warlock could log logs? Occasionally I get a request to look through someone's raid log on World of Logs for warlock improvement. Sometimes it's for a guild applicant and sometimes it's for another tweeter. A thing I've thought about doing for a long time is a World of Logs 101 on warlocks -- both for warlock players and for non-warlock raid leaders. I'm starting with the bare basics: how to tell warlocks apart on a World of Logs parse and exploring the DPS rankings. (It's actually not that difficult anymore!)
Blood Pact: To summon or not to summon, that's the question
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill scraps another attempt at Kanrethad to discuss being a pet class instead. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous pet bugs in encounter design like jumping down into Nefarian's pit in Blackwing Descent so your pet then did nothing but stand in the middle, or to take up Doomguards against a despawning abyssal phase 3 in Throne of the Four Winds -- and by opposing end them: to die, to sacrifice. To sacrifice, perchance to DPS; Aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death, what meter-topping dreams of 5.0 may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil (no, not that one!), must give our developers pause. My terrible warlock Shakespeare adaptation aside, we've had the ponderings about how tied to pets warlocks should or shouldn't be. As I continue to throw myself at Kanrethad's own demonic stampede, I've had some thoughts about the subject.
Blow up all the things in the new Marvel Heroes trailer
Have you ever found yourself playing a game and thought that while it's fun, it would be much better if you could just destroy everything around you with controlled explosions? If so, you may be Michael Bay, but regardless of your secret identity, you can enjoy the latest Marvel Heroes trailer, in which that is exactly what happens. This trailer is not about fine details of gameplay; it's about superhuman beings wreaking destruction all over the place. While the trailer clocks in at only about a minute, it certainly finds many things to make explode, including cars, streets, and in one particularly baffling instance, a portable toilet. (The Thing has powers that we weren't aware of, such as turning a toilet into an explosive device.) But don't take our distinctly non-poetic word for it; jump on past the break to watch the trailer and revel in the destruction yourself. Complete with classic and appropriate music.
The end comes to Final Fantasy XIV
As of 1:00 a.m. EST today, the Final Fantasy XIV servers started the game's final event before the relaunch. At 3:00 a.m. EST, they shut down. Immediately following the shutdown, the last trailer for the game's current version was posted, showing the outcome of the final battle against the forces of the Garlean Empire by the unified Grand Companies of Eorzea. And if you've been following the game's story in any fashion, you'll probably want to see how it all ends. It's worth noting that the cutscene is both fairly long and lacking in context -- if you don't know the most recent lore of the game, you're not going to catch everything that's going on. But if you've been watching the final defense of the Eorzean city-states from inside the game or on the sidelines, you deserve a front-row seat for the last clash of armies. And even though you know how it ends, it's still going to pack a punch. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Carmageddon earns Reincarnation as a Kickstarter project
Carmageddon: Reincarnation, initially announced as a downloadable multiplatform game last year, now depends on Kickstarter for completion. Patrick Buckland and Neil Barnden, CEO and Executive Director of Stainless Games, tell an all-too-common horror story from creatives stuck in a bad business deal. After doing work-for-hire projects with their new company in the mid '90s, they finally released a passion project, called Carmageddon, which featured goofy and gory, over-the-top vehicular carnage, and still claims a place in the heart of older PC gamers everywhere. In order to get published, they sold rights for the title to SCI, which co-published the game with Interplay. The title was followed up with a sequel in 1998 (it was called Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now, back when games could be called things like that), but when the sequel didn't do as well, the worst happened: Buckland and Barnden lost their own creation. They've spent years since then trying to get the rights back.%Gallery-154880%
