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Joystiq Weekly: Free upgrades for Destiny, Hatoful Boyfriend review, PAX Prime and more

Thomas Schulenberg
Weekend Editor
Updated ·8 min read
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Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet.

PAX Prime 2014 ended on Monday, but we're still recovering. Not from the marathon of appointments or swimming through an ocean of people – we've got those parts down pat. If you've ever heard of the PAX Pox though, just know that it's ... definitely a thing. It seemed every morning of this week brought news of another staff member falling to Prime's crowdsourced super virus.

Laptops still work on death beds, of course, so we kept churning out content from Prime while we tried to remember what clear airways and normal body temperatures feel like. You can dig through our featured content after the break worry-free though – we slathered it in hand sanitizer, so you shouldn't catch anything from going near it.

There's always the rest of this week's content that wasn't staged in a biological hazard, of course. We've got good news for Destiny fans planning on upgrading hardware at a later date, release dates for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and Mortal Kombat X, a review of pigeon-on-human dating simulator Hatoful Boyfriend and much more after the break!


News

  • You don't need the newest, shiniest console to be Destiny's most heroic Guardian, but if you eventually decide to upgrade, your adventure doesn't necessarily need to start over. Anyone with digital copies of Destiny on PS3 and Xbox 360 will be able to register for a matching download for Xbox One and PS4.

  • Saving Destiny's version of Earth is bound to be a timesink, but you can carry out heroic ventures without holding a TV hostage for hours. Bungie has optimized a control scheme to support Remote Play, meaning PS4 and Vita owners should be able to gather loot comfortably regardless of where they're playing.

  • You can tour The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth's basement renovations on November 4, as was revealed by a fittingly-odd and NSFW trailer this week. PS4, Vita and PC users are all invited to the remake's party, provided they can face the horrors awaiting poor Isaac.

  • Video game consoles are expensive, huh? Saving up for one can be frustrating when you forget to account for purchasing your first game as well, but if you buy a Xbox One today, you can take a game worth up to $60 home at no charge.

  • You don't have to keep your PS3 set up for Persona 5 if you're not really using it – a trailer offering a first look at the protagonist for Atlus' RPG reveals that P5 will fight its battles on PS4, too. Judging by Sony's Japanese press conference, P5 will also have plenty of company on the PS4, but that's a whole separate roundup.

  • With Mortal Kombat X dated for April 2015, we aren't far off from coating fighting arenas with obscene, totally-called-for amounts of gore once more. Things will get messy in NetherRealm Studios' brawler on PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

  • DuckTales: Remastered and Double Dragon Neon developer WayForward is working on a new Ninja Turtles game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Danger of the Ooze. The exploration-focused adventure will take place between seasons of the show currently running on Nickolodean and will let players switch between the four turtles on Xbox 360, PS3 and 3DS.

  • You know how things get pixelated when sims woohoo, presumably because somebody thought of the children? That's generally how pirates will view their life-away-from-life in The Sims 4, thanks to an anti-piracy move that acts as if everything in a player's view is vile, youth-corrupting filth.

  • Something as rough as Aliens: Colonial Marines doesn't just get released without a good story behind it, and court documents that have recently been made public give a sense of what was going on between publisher Sega and developer Gearbox during Colonial Marines' development. Hint: It involves Sega not being particularly content.


Reviews

  • Hatoful Boyfriend players might have initial hangups about bird-on-human dating – heck, we hope there's some sort of initial hesitation. During Senior Reporter Jess Conditt's review however, she learned that it's best to fall into the flock quickly, lest your cold feet lead to a colder overall state of deadness.

  • There's definitely a perceived divide in the Dark Souls community between the series' two outings, but while playing Dark Souls 2's Crown of the Old Iron King DLC, Reviews Content Director Richard Mitchell found remnants of what he loved in the first game. Aside from its unimaginative Iron Passage, Richard enjoyed Crown of the Old Iron King's locale and cast of enemies enough to reach its third boss by returning to Dark Souls 2, a game he had initially dropped due to boredom.


Featured Content

  • Double Fine's eclectic volume of work spans quite a few different attributes, but until Costume Quest 2, "sequel" had never been one of them. Contributing Editor Danny Cowan spoke with Double Fine founder Tim Schafer about what will be different with this year's tricks and treats, covering changes from minigames to CQ2's battle system.

  • Harmonix's rhythm-driven past can make its new sidescrolling bullet hell venture, A City Sleeps, feel a bit out of left field. After Danny dodged and blasted his way through a few levels however, he found traces of Harmonix's strengths in A City Sleeps' layered music, as well as total competency with a new genre.

  • Watching Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions' feature list roll in might have risen concerns over retaining Bizarre Creations' mastery of twin-stick arcade action, but Contributing Editor Mike Suszek felt right at home pouring bullets over 3D battlefields.

  • The Sonic series must be frustrating for everyone involved – developers choose between the series' traditional blurring speed or going in a new direction (unless they cram both into one game), and a splintered fanbase seems to mean Sonic's games can never achieve near-universal appeal. Weekend Editor Sam Prell's time with the blue blur's Sonic Boom showed some promise with the slower, 3D environments emphasizing exploration, but a shoddy targeting system and disorienting sprinting sections offer reason for concern.

  • Super Meat Boy was a mastery of blistering difficulty and varied level design, but how will all of that translate into the procedurally-generated Super Meat Boy Forever? Mike spent some time dodging saw blades and general bringers of death in Team Meat's PC and tablet runner, finding enough variation in Forever's building blocks to sustain that sense of ever-changing challenge found in the original.

  • Aside from The Behemoth's signature art style, there's not much in Game 4 that recalls the studio's previous efforts. Mike demoed the fast-paced, turn-based strategy game and spoke with Behemoth co-founder Dan Paladin about the new direction, as well as the team's unwillingness to just do a sequel.

  • Translating arcade pioneer Asteroids into an exploration-heavy, crafting-compatible survival game? That's certainly an ... idea, but it's particularly interesting coming from Atari CEO Fred Chesnais.

  • Upsilon Circuit is many things at once, catering both to seasoned dungeon crawlers and those that love watching a good show. Sam dissected the game's span of genres and mechanics, finding an interesting experience in its attempt to blend elements from Diablo 3, Twitch Plays Pokemon and 1 vs. 100.

  • It's already September, you know. You might see snow once a year, but if you can learn how to survive in a hazardous, arctic environment, why not give yourself the upper hand over out-of-nowhere climate changes? Danny preemptively learned how to predict blizzards and use spirits as physical platforms in Never Alone, a puzzle-platformer that helps raise awareness of the Inupait community.

  • Control freaks can always be the lone driving force behind their party in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but if they loosen up a little bit and team up with a few real-world people in its multiplayer component, the romp outside their comfort zone could lead to some great gear. Sam teamed up with fellow PAX Prime goers to raid a Templar-occupied castle, learning potion conservancy is key and that hacking and slashing is only a viable strategy for so long.

  • Sam's battles within Heroes of the Storm remind us once more that trying to lump every MOBA into one cohesive ball is never gonna work. With no item shop, farmable gold or individual level systems, Sam instead focused on Heroes of the Storm's aptitude with multiple maps and play styles unique to particular environments.

  • You can't just release a pigeon dating simulator and not expect us to talk about it. Editor-in-Chief Ludwig Kietzmann, News Content Director Alexander Sliwinski and Jess Conditt cover the bases of finding winged love in this week's Super Joystiq Podcast. There's also talk of slightly-less-weird dating in The Sims 4, and zero talk of dating gaming hardware such as the new 3DS and 3DS XL models ... For now.

[Image: Penny Arcade]