Don’t you just love it when big sites and companies make little slip-ups?

Earlier an ad campaign for Overwatch went up on IGN before being taken down again quickly. The reason? It contained the release date for the game, as well as mention of a beta that would be starting a few weeks earlier. Whoops.

Spotted by Reddit user DeadpooltheGreat, they managed to capture some screencaps before IGN took down the adverts:

Since the news was already out, Blizzard have since come out to confirm that the release date is indeed May 24th, and there will be a beta weekend for pre-orderers starting from May 3rd before the rest of the beta period from the 5th to the 9th will be a totally open, free for all beta before the game is taken offline again for the final few tweaks. The open beta will be on both PC and consoles and will feature everything that we’ve been shown – all 21 heroes, all the maps, full progression system. Also if you pre-ordered you’ll get an extra key to give to a friend to give them access to the first two days that are otherwise closed off.

There’s even been some videos put out to give all the information out:

Again, don’t you just love it when little slip-ups like this happen? Somehow it makes big reveals like this even better.

After declaring that they were going to tackle the issue of rage-quitters in Street Fighter V last week, Capcom asked for the community’s help in identifying people who were doing it through submitting video evidence for them to look at. Now it seems that they’ve gotten enough evidence because they’ve posted about how they plan to punish people caught at it.

The punishments will be handed out to those people who have a high win ratio, but also a high disconnection rate (around 80-90%) – hopefully missing out those people who genuinely are having connection issues to their games. As for the nature of the punishments, Capcom will be docking League Points from those they deem guilty of this, which has a negative effect on online rankings – a punishment that’s already been handed out to around 30 players. Those who log in to find that they’ve been hit with this can consider this “a warning” say Capcom.

Speaking on the issue Capcom wrote: “Ever since last week, we’ve received a ton of videos both here on Unity and our social channels which we’ve been able to cross reference with our data and put together a clear picture as to which players are abusing the system. Though we were pretty confident that players in our system who had high disconnect rates were indeed those who were attempting to avoid a loss at all costs, we didn’t want to start dishing out any punishments without clear proof. We’ve been working hard with the SFV server team to put together a process to pinpoint users who are clearly abusing the system and we’re happy to announce that we can now do this without any proof of video.”

While Capcom will now be carefully monitoring accounts with high disconnect rates, they do say they’re wanting to find a more permanent solution for the rage-quitting problem though. They’ll be keeping the community up to date on their progress towards this goal.

Seems some big news for Hearthstone is due to be announced in just under a week’s time.

Blizzard have announced that there will be a big announcement related to the game coming on March 11th, just before the start of the Americas Winter Championship. It’ll be coming to the Hearthstone Twitch channel on the say, around 10am PST.

“Something inside the Tavern stirs…  what could it be? Don’t worry – you won’t be alone! Our very own Lead Designer Ben Brode and Senior Producer Yong Woo will kick off the weekend of the Americas Winter Championship with an announcement about what’s coming next for Hearthstone,” says the Battle.net post.

It’s not the first time Blizzard will have announced something new for the game just before a tournament, and if patterns hold true it’s likely that we’re about to get the announcement of a new single-player adventure expansion or maybe the next set of cards – along with some previews of upcoming new cards and new Keyword effects. With the new Standard coming into effect they do need to bolster it with some new cards after all.

As for the tournament itself, it’ll be taking place over three weekends in March with winners up for a chance to make it to this year’s Hearthstone World Championship at Blizzcon.

Cute, addictive and relatively challenging on the higher difficulties before you buy any upgrades, Tiny Troopers took a little getting used to for me but after investing an hour into it or so, I found playing it to be a pretty rewarding experience and well worth my time. It is obvious the game was originally made for the android market, but it works quite well as a simple arcade game played just to kill some spare time.

Loading the game up for the first time, my initial impression was that it was going to be quite low budget and simple ( not necessarily in a bad way ) with pretty basic controls. The controls, I found out, were simple enough – but were something I did not expect in the fact that the game uses the analogue sticks for basic firing, rather than the trigger buttons. After failing the tutorial first time round like an absolute noob ( I have had very little experience with games like this! ), I finally got the hang of the controls and dived into the Soldier campaign.

There are two campaigns, Soldier and Spec Ops and each level has 5 difficulty settings. I spent most of my time flying through each level on the third difficulty level and this seemed challenging and engaging enough for me – however once you upgrade your armour and basic troop level I’d recommend cranking up the difficulty to keep it engaging, as you soon become invincible otherwise. Each level has a different objective which ranges from destroying enemy buildings, saving civilians by eliminating all enemy troopers ( friendly fire to be avoided ) or securing locations. The interesting thing I found about the game was that you can control more than one character at once ( depending on the level ) – again this took some getting used to, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty when I lost any of them. You do have the option to spend medals to revive fallen troops at the end of the level if you do lose any that are a decent rank allowing you to use them in the next level. Defeating enemies ( and getting a high combo ) as well as finding collectibles gives you in game currency called Command Points which you can then use to upgrade your weapons, armour and basic troop load outs, as well as purchase special characters with bonus special weapons. During a level you are also able to use your hard earned Command Points to buy special weapons ( such as grenades ) and health packs which are then air dropped to you instantly ( I couldn’t help but think of Worms at this point )

As well as the two main campaigns, there is also a zombie survival mode very reminiscent of the original Nazi Zombies from Call of Duty World at War. I found this to be the best part of the entire game, as the first zombie level I tried was so similar to Der Riese from World at War I couldn’t help but feel this must have been intentional. As you progress through the waves of zombies, you get extra weapons and unlock new areas which eventually allow you to assemble a full team of four troopers. Addictive and fun, the zombie mode is great.

All in all, I’d definitely recommend giving the game a go if you’re up for something simple and fun, but I feel it’s best to be enjoyed in small bursts so as to keep it from getting boring and repetitive. For its £7.99 price tag, you can’t really complain and it’s an easy 1000G for those of you who are achievement hunters too.

Good clean fun, but not ground breaking!
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This week, Microsoft has touted a new initiative that they’ve said will unify platforms, making it easier to for developers to release games on both PC and Xbox One. But at least one major developer isn’t thrilled with Microsoft’s plans.

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian this morning, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney absolutely railed against Microsoft, calling upon other developers to fight against the corporation for “moving against the entire PC industry.” Specifically, Sweeney criticized Microsoft’s new Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to build games and apps that can run across all of Microsoft’s hardware including Windows 10, Xbox One, and any Windows-branded tablets and phones.

The problem, Sweeney wrote, is that with UWP, Microsoft has created a closed ecosystem where developers must use the Windows Store and go through Microsoft’s certification processes to release games on that platform. Sweeney said he sees this as contrary to the spirit of PC development—a huge blow for Microsoft, as Epic is one of the biggest companies in the space. Epic is best known not just for their developer toolset, the Unreal Engine, but for creating the popular Xbox franchise Gears of War, which Microsoft purchased in 2014.

“They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers,” Sweeney wrote.

Microsoft disagrees with this assessment. Windows vice president Kevin Gallo told The Guardian in a response to Sweeney’s op-ed that Microsoft is not, in fact, building a closed platform. “The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store,” he said. “We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.”

Sweeney had criticized Microsoft for making it difficult and confusing to install UWP-developed apps outside of the Windows Store, pointing out that any user who wants to do so would have to dig through a series of convoluted menus and options. “It’s true that if you dig far enough into Microsoft’s settings-burying UI, you can find a way to install these apps by enabling ‘side-loading,’” Sweeney wrote. “But in turning this off by default, Microsoft is unfairly disadvantaging the competition. Bigger-picture, this is a feature Microsoft can revoke at any time using Windows 10’s forced-update process.”

The whole op-ed is brutal and worth reading, encouraging developers and customers to fight against Microsoft’s new initiative.

“As the founder of a major Windows game developer and technology supplier, this is an op-ed I hoped I would never feel compelled to write,” Sweeney wrote. “But Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991. We wouldn’t let Microsoft close down the PC platform overnight without a fight, and therefore we won’t sit silently by while Microsoft embarks on a series of sneaky manoeuvre aimed at achieving this over a period of several years.”

Of course, all of Epic Games otehr games, the new Unreal Tournament, Paragon, etc are ONLY available through Epic’s own launcher, which also make you wonder if this is a case of pot and kettle…

What do you think?