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BioShock gets an HD remake, sort of
When it launched almost seven years ago, BioShock was quite the looker thanks to its stylized aesthetic and the custom version of Unreal Engine 2 under its hood. The game has held up pretty well in terms of visuals (all that water!), but it's certainly starting to show its age. Don't get us wrong, we love the original. It's just that we wouldn't turn down a new version of the game running with all the bells and whistles that Epic's next-gen development tools offer, either. Well, as Kotaku has spotted, an enterprising indie dev has kindly done something along those lines.
BioShock Infinite Burial at Sea DLC stars Elizabeth, dressed to impress
BioShock Infinite's Burial at Sea DLC is a noir nostalgia trip to Rapture, the city in the ocean featured in BioShock 1 and 2, and Elizabeth's outfit gets an update befitting the new theme. Irrational provides an image of Elizabeth in five angles, ostensibly so cosplayers can start planning their sewing equipment accordingly. Get a (much) closer look here. There's no word on if we'll get a sneak peek of Booker's new threads, too. Burial at Sea is in two episodes, both set in Rapture two years before it falls to ruin. The first episode stars Infinite protagonist Booker Dewitt, and the second stars Elizabeth. Players will get new plasmids and vigors, new weapons, dimensional tears, Big Daddies and skylines – and, of course, a new perspective on Rapture. Episodes one and two are $15 each, with a release date on its way.
Spiritual Guidance: Priests and the 5.2 patch note preview
WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore is a discipline priest by reputation, but still enjoys melting faces as shadow and bugging her raid to click the Lightwell as holy. Looks like there are some big changes in store for priests on the patch 5.2 PTR. Blizzard released a PTR patch note preview late last week and I'm honestly a bit baffled by some of the changes. Keep in mind, I am not often baffled. The biggest change is that Power Word: Solace is being redesigned. The talent will now replace Holy Fire in the player's spellbook, but interact with other priest spells and abilities just as Holy Fire does. The new version of Power Word: Solace will be instant cast, cost no mana, and restore 1% of your maximum mana on cast. Surprisingly, the patch note preview makes no mention of redesigning Shadow Word: Insanity, the shadow portion of the talent. Now it's no shock that Blizzard decided to redesign this talent. A quick glance at WoW Popular will tell you that almost no priests are taking it (in fact, it looks like more of us are taking Dominate Mind than Power Word: Solace). Shadow priests certainly aren't taking the talent, and most healers will tell you it returns too little mana per cast to be worth it.
Spiritual Guidance: Lightwell, Lightspring, and the latest on priest healing in Mists
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Well, we got it. I never thought I'd see the day, but we finally got the Trial of the Crusader Lightwell that shoots heals at allied players instead of requiring them to click. Holy priests will gain access to the new Lightwell, called Lightspring, using a glyph of the same name. Before you get too excited, however, I should mention that there is a catch. Apparently, automatic Lightwells don't heal for nearly as much as a manual ones do, so depending on the fight and your raid members' ability to use the Lightwell in the first place, you may choose to skip the Glyph of Lightspring now and again. Good ol' Derevka has already written up a thorough first look at Lightspring in which he points out many of the spell's limitations. In the post, he points out that Lightspring only heals targets at less than 50% of their health, and it has a 5-second cooldown between heals to prevent it from being used as a raid cooldown. To read the rest of Derevka's write-up and see his comparisons on the numerical output of the two spells, head over to Tales of a Priest.
Spiritual Guidance: Shadowfiends retire, more priest talent news from Mists beta
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Do you want to know the greatest and most amazing new thing priests are getting in Mists of Pandaria? It's a squid. Well, it could be an octopus, but I think it's a squid. It's called a Mindbender, and it's our new level 45 talent. The Mindbender is a flying, shadowy squid that serves as an improved version of (read: replacement for) our old pal, Shadowfiend. Our new squid friend does double the damage of Shadowfiend and thus returns twice as much mana. I can only assume the reason he can do this is because he latches onto the heads of our enemies and sucks out their brains, sort of like a Mind Flayer, the squid-faced monsters from Dungeons and Dragons with telekinetic powers. Mindbender, Mind Flayer ... That's right, Blizzard, I'm on to you. Anyway, I imagine Squiddy will become the prime choice for healing priests in MoP because 1.) mana is mana, and 2.) the other level 45 talents are a bit lackluster. That will unfortunately mean leaving Shadowfiend at home, which is awfully sad, but I've painted up a scenario in my head where Shadowfiend tells me, "Look, Dawn, we've been raiding together for a few years now, and it's about time that I caught up on all the prime time television I've missed. There's Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and I've still only seen one episode of Game of Thrones. I need a break." "OK, Shadowfiend," I say to it, "you can stay home this expansion." "Thanks, dollface," it responds with Don Draper-esque charm and winks an eye at me I never knew it had.
Spiritual Guidance: New priest talents in the Mists of Pandaria beta
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Let's get the bad news out of the way first: We've already lost Path of the Devout on beta. The good news is that in its place, we now have Feathers From Heaven, a talent that allows priests to lay out a little track of speed-boosting feathers. Think of them as those little speed arrows in Mario Kart, only they're feathers, and you can put them wherever you please. The individual feathers have no expiration that I can tell, so you can lay them out in advance on one end of the room for special tactics in your raid encounters or PvP, if it suits your fancy. The ability has no mana cost at the moment. Instead, it is limited by charges: one feather per charge, and you can have three charges at a time. You can place one feather right after the other, but it takes 10 seconds to restore one charge. This allows you to spam three of them on the ground in succession if you like (something you can't do with Body and Soul) or spread them out gradually ahead of you in your path. They can be used by any friendly target, not just party members, so be mindful of people's stealing them if you're using them while leveling to snatch up quest items. Oh yeah, and the feathers can be used on top of water with Levitate. So, you're excited about Mists of Pandaria now, right?
No Gods or Kings, only Blocks: BioShock's Rapture made out of Legos
And here we thought our AT-ATs and 55 Central Park (you know, the Ghostbusters' building) Lego diddies were neat ideas -- not even close. Turns out Lego sculptor Imagine Rigney has the game on lock, evidenced by this amazing recreation of Rapture, which can be seen in full past the break.
Spiritual Guidance: Let's talk about mana, baby
While Mr. Van Allen is getting his waistcoat pressed, Dawn Moore presents her weekly book club Spiritual Guidance, a healing guide for priests. Here you can expect some optimism, some cynicism and absolutely no Regency period clothing. So, supposedly mana is going to be an issue for healers in Cataclysm. It's the word on the street, ya know? Everyone is talking about how we're not going to be able to spam this or that, and that we'll need to make better decisions with our spell selection. "Triage" is this year's vocabulary word. That old, busted spam style of healing is out, and the new "do damage, get mana" mechanic is supposed to be the new hotness. Of course, we priests are bound to be the superstars* of the next expansion; it's all pretty exciting, don't you think? Well, maybe not everyone feels that way, but that's why we have cake and counseling. Dawn motions to the door behind her. So, in the short time I've written for WoW.com, I've noticed that the mana question is one that continually comes up. Is mana a problem? Is it not a problem? It seems like there isn't a single satisfactory answer I can give to everyone, but knowing mana might be a hurdle in the future for all of us, I figured now would be a good time to look back and ahead. So, let's talk about mana.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest gems for raid roles
Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance takes a step into the light to reflect on the subtleties of healing for discipline and holy priests. Your guide, Dawn Moore, enjoys bubble wrap, bubble milk tea, Bubble Bobble, watermelon bubble gum, water bubbles in space, and dolphins blowing bubble rings. She is lukewarm toward bubble spamming. I have a 6140 gear score. Don't get excited though; I just said that to rile some of you up. I loathe the concept of the gear score addon, and I actually had to look it up just to know what mine was. The real reason I bring up my gear score is to give you, my fair readers, an idea of what kind of gear I typically work with as a player. If you have no idea what that number translates to, it is full 264 item level gear with a few 277 level items sprinkled in. So for the most part I have a fantastic set of gear. If I walk into a PUG 5-man, most players will glance me over and immediately feel at ease about their fate for the next 15 to 20 minutes. This is ironic though, because despite the quality of my gear being well above average, I am currently rocking a gear set far worse for healing heroic dungeons than I was 3 tiers ago. Why, pray tell, is that? Because my guild and I have spent the last three weeks working on the heroic Lich King encounter and I've been slowly optimizing my gear for the past month in preparation for this one, single fight. How's my mana regeneration? Pathetic: I get all of my mana return not from trinkets, flasks or mustache-twirling meta gems, but from carefully timed Power Word: Shields and the Rapture trick. What about haste? Awful: my GCD isn't even close to 1 second if I cast two spells back to back. My sole purpose in the Lich King fight is to cast one spell, on as many people as possible, for about 10 minutes straight. As such, all my gear, gems, enchants, and glyphs are selected to work in this fight alone, even if it cripples me in every other aspect of the game. And it is quite crippling. I used to love spoiling myself with haste. I loved the 1 second GCD; but now, because of my gear, I find myself having to smash my buttons frantically and repeatedly in the easiest of 5-man dungeons, because my inner sense of timing is all thrown off to what I'm accustomed to. I have trouble healing Halls of Reflection! (If you could hear me, there was a cry of shame in that last sentence.) So, what are we going to talk about today? Gems. That was obvious before now, right?
Irrational revisits scrapped BioShock, System Shock 2 features
Irrational Games' new community-oriented website continues to impress us with its candid peeks at the inner workings of the studio and interesting developments that may have eluded the public eye. In an update posted today, Shawn Elliott examines five features that were cut from Irrational's beloved pair of 'Shocks. "In one fell 30-second swoop, we could have prevented about 80 percent of the complaints, or at least redirected them toward Xerxes and the Many, and away from the development team," says designer Dorian Hart on the infamous ire directed at System Shock 2's degrading weaponry. And how would said swoop combat arguments about the unrealistic, accelerated rate of weapon malfunction? An in-game audio log "would have explained that as part of their takeover, the Many had released a special corrosive gas into the Von Braun that damaged weapons but was harmless to organic creatures." If that seems maddeningly simple, consider "Nav-Bot," a mechanical fellow intended to guide lost players through BioShock's city of Rapture. Designers had several concerns -- what happens if the helpful bot gets stuck in a scrap with enemies? -- but the player's familiarity with a plain ol' map dealt the death blow. "In the end, someone (maybe Jon Chey at Irrational Games Australia) made the executive decision that we needed to suck up the extra work and make a map," notes technical director Chris Kline. "Thus died Nav-Bot." May he rust in peace.
Spiritual Guidance: Disciplined raid healing
Every Sunday Spiritual Guidance offers Holy and Discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. I decided to take a break from gems this week to discuss a style of priest healing that is becoming popular among raiders: discipline raid healing. Though the concepts behind it are extremely simple to understand and execute, this style of play seems to have slipped under the radar of many players despite its amazing potential. Tag along with me after the jump and I'll fill you in on the basics and benefits of disc raid healing. Holy priests, I'm talking to you, too.
Rumor: Bioshock 2 Achievements emerge from the abyss
If your wait to return to Rapture has been too much to bear, then you may be interested in some of the Achievements for Bioshock 2 over at Xbox360Achievements -- you know, just to help ease the passing of time. None of them spoil the game (you hack stuff again!) and, unsurprisingly, they mimic a lot of the Achievements in the first game. But, with the inclusion of multiplayer this time around, a few of the 'cheevos are obviously geared toward that. [Via Hot Blooded Gaming]
GTTV features BioShock 2 this week; reveals who's running Rapture
Ever since Andrew Ryan decided to go out for that pack of smokes (our mom says he's coming back; just you wait!), there's been nobody to tend to the leaky pipes and roving packs of splicers in Rapture. Well, according to GameTrailers TV's Geoff Keighley, someone's finally decided to step in and assume the leadership role for BioShock 2, and we'll find out who on Thursday's episode.In another tweet, Keighley promised plenty of "new single player info and footage" and even teased that the episode will also reveal new characters -- something we already knew was planned for the sequel. You can catch the special BioShock 2 episode this Thursday night, October 22 at 12:30 a.m. ET on Spike.
Rumor: Square-Enix to debut unannounced MMO at E3?
While we've known of a new Square-Enix MMO that has been in the works for some time now, we've recently received information that Square might be showing off this unannounced title during a special press conference on Wednesday at E3.The conference doesn't have specific details as to what's going to be presented, but fellow press site Gameplayer has made the claim that it will be this unannounced project, codenamed Rapture. Rapture will be a PC and PS3 only title, with Sony announcing the game during their own press conference, scheduled for Tuesday.Currently only Gameplayer has announced these details, putting this story firmly in the category of rumor. However, Massively.com's Shawn Schuster, Elizabeth Harper, and Krystalle Voecks will be on site to follow up on the story and deliver the latest announcements as they occur during our coverage of E3. If this is a taste of what Square-Enix has to offer us, then it's going to be one heck of a week next week!
Spiritual Guidance: Shield questions answered
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. Today, Matticus looks at a few question on shields. More specifically, why Holy Priests should not shield tanks if Disc Priests are present. One of the core spells in any Priestly arsenal is the use of Power Word: Shield. The primary purpose of it? To save lives and prevent players in your party or your raid from taking damage. I've seen a few questions and grumblings crop up regarding the use of it on a few blogs and I wanted to weigh in.
2K Marin says Rapture is key to BioShock, promises more characters
We weren't positive we wanted the first return to Rapture in BioShock 2, but it apparently wasn't a tough decision to keep the series underwater. In an interview with OXM, 2K Marin creative director Jordan Thomas said, "We feel that Rapture is so core to BioShock it has to feature in some form. It's one of the characters we don't want to let go."OK, fair enough. But Thomas went on to undermine our confidence, saying, "With BioShock 2 we're actually going to make sure that you have some strong and unforgettable encounters with unspliced characters that you can develop genuine empathy for, who will not be trying to hide their face from the camera."You know the problem with BioShock? ... Too isolated. We can't wait to meet Loony Lou, Rapture's top comedian. "What's that, Lou? You know the secret combination to get into Laugh-a-porium's cafeteria? But you want to come along and be my hilarious sidekick? Deal."[Via CVG]
WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Holy and Disc Priest changes
A lot of changes are being introduced for both types of healing Priests in the upcoming 3.1 patch. Some of them are expected and others are unexpected! As always, check out the full PTR notes (which are most likely incomplete). The promised changes to increase Holy's PvP ability don't seem to be here yet. I rubbed my eyes when I saw it because this wasn't the Holy tree I remembered. As an overall grade, I'd say there are some serious buffs being doled out for healing Priests. Our Area of Effect heals have been ramped up! Some notable highlights? Rapture has some new additions to it (It grants energy, rage, mana, or runic power to the target when it is removed). Prayer of Healing is no longer restricted to the Priests current party. Renew get's some extra nice bonuses in the form of an instant-application aspect and an overall spellpower bonus. Keep reading! Disc and Holy changes are after the break!
Spiritual Guidance: Secondary stats and what to stack
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Some requests were made recently to help newer Priests figure out what secondary stats are important and what to aim for. Matticus shall help! I know when I started playing World of Warcraft, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to secondary stats. To be fair, stats like Hit didn't exist back in the day. This post is meant for newer Priests who aren't quite sure what these secondary stats do or what they mean. Just to be clear, primary stats are base attributes like stamina and intellect. Secondary stats are things like haste and critical strike rating.
Spiritual Guidance: 3.0.8 for Priests
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Today Matticus looks at the upcoming 3.08 patch. I thought we'd be getting the 3.0.8 patch last week. I guess I need a new magic 8 ball. Hopefully it will come out this week instead. In any case, here's several of the big changes you can expect along with a list of bug fixes. Mind you, most of these aren't game or class breaking type changes. At least, not to me. You may feel otherwise.
Verizon gets official with Motorola VU204, Rapture, and Samsung Sway
As expected, Motorola's VU204 and VU30 flips have teamed up with Samsung's Sway slider for announcement on Verizon today, bringing an interesting range of new hardware from the low to the upper midrange. Unfortunately, this is a case where "interesting" isn't necessarily a good thing; for example, we find it "interesting" that the Sway (pictured right) runs a cool 70 bucks on contract after rebate yet doesn't feature EV-DO, a feature we'd assume was now standard in a handset of this price. At any rate, it's got a 2-megapixel cam and a media player with microSD expansion, so we'll cut it some slack. On the Moto side, the VU204's an ultra-basic piece that "meets everyday, on-the-go needs" (that's code for "ultra-basic," by the way) with a VGA cam and Bluetooth; it runs just $29.99 on activation. The Rapture VU30 (pictured left) does a 2-megapixel camera, touch-sensitive external display, and EV-DO, running a stiffer $129.99 on contract. The Sway and VU30 are available now, while the VU204 follows on come October 14.Read - Samsung SwayRead - Motorola Rapture VU30
