Following the introduction of new characters Sticks and Lyrics, Sega have announced that addition of a heap more ally characters into the Sonic Boom universe, in a range of different positions.

The characters will appear in both the games of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric for Wii U, and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal for 3DS in a non-playable form. They’ll also make appearances in the accompanying Sonic Boom television series set to debut on Cartoon Network when the games release.

The new characters include a “happy go lucky farmer,” Old Tucker and Hayward, who assists Old Tucker on the farm. There’s also a pair of sailing hippo brothers called Salty and Pepper with a broken relationship, Hokey and Pokey, an old married couple, Chef Woody, a beaver cook, Q-N-C/Quincy who acts as a guide in the games to our heroes and many more personalities to flesh out the Sonic Boom world.

I consider Sonic Boom to be a separate canon to the one we’ve followed since 1991, so introducing characters to help flesh it out seems logical to me. Only I do wonder if Sega have introduced too many at once this time. Without more information we can’t be sure whether these new characters will act as quest-givers and background, or if they’ll play a bigger role in the story.

Sega blog post: [x]

Riot has begun testing a new banning system for League of Legends to try and curb the toxicity within the games massive community. They are looking to use a new system that utilizes both human reviews of complaints as well as “machine learning” in an effort to catch offenders and punish them, under this new system those seen to be ‘smack talking’ could receive extensive bans ranging from two weeks for minor offenders to permanent bans for repeat or chronic offenders.

This time though Riot are planning to be transparent with people appealing against their bans and much harsher, even going as far as releasing chat log transcripts as evidence. Riot they had this to say

“Some players have also asked why we’ve taken such an aggressive stance when we’ve been focused on reform; well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.”

Seems like a cruel but fair system to us, what do you think?

The next installment in Bioware’s popular Dragon Age RPG series has been delayed. The game was originally set to drop in October one of the busiest months of the year. It has now been delayed to late November, the developers wrote this statement on their blog:

“I’m writing to let you know that Dragon Age: Inquisition has a new release date of November 18, 2014 in North America (November 21st in EU). We appreciate the enormous support we’ve received from all of you to get to this point, and while this extra few weeks may not seem like a lot, I know the game you’ll play will be all the better for it.

Since we began working on Dragon Age: Inquisition almost four years ago, our goal was to create the best Dragon Age experience ever. It was that goal that motivated many of our decisions: moving to Frostbite, bringing race choice and customization back, improving tactical camera, building a team of characters whose relationships evolve based on your actions, and most importantly, crafting an epic, nation-spanning story that both draws upon past games and takes you to many new places in the realm of Thedas.

I’m privileged to be a part of a team that has been working very hard to surpass every measure they’ve set for themselves. That has meant completing huge amounts of game content, fixing bugs both big and small, and improving the overall experience. This last bit of time is about polishing the experience we want you to see. Ensuring that our open spaces are as engaging as possible. Strengthening the emotional impact of the Hero’s choices. And ensuring the experience you get is the best it can be in the platform you choose to play on.”

* Dragon Age is slated for release on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Are you ready to jump back into the world of Dragon Age? Let us know in the comments below.

The Crew is now in Beta, and I’ve been playing around with it a fair bit. Ubisoft and Ivory Tower’s new open world racing game has a lot of interesting ideas. But how well does it actually play? Well dear reader, thats why this article exists! So read on for my thoughts on The Crew closed beta for PC!

The Crew starts out with an action packed chase sequence that has you driving a truck offroad in a bid to elude pursuing police. Once you lose them, you enter a race in the nearby city of Detroit. Then…your brother shows up and asks you to accompany him to a gang meeting? Then he gets shot? And you end up in jail until an FBI agent offers to let you out in return for helping her take down a corrupt agent and your brother’s murderer? If this sounds like a rejected plot for a Fast & Furious movie, then you didn’t go ahead and check your brain at the door before jumping into The Crew.  Stellar storytelling is clearly NOT a top priority here, and I found it was better to just tune out the nattering of your NPC friend Zoe whenever she popped up in the corner of the screen.

Once you drive yourself through the Death Star sized plot hole that is the story, things thankfully start to get better. Immediately you are given the cash to buy one of four starter cars before hitting the open road. Then..Zoe shows up again. This will become a common theme, but it seemed that every time I was settling in and enjoying The Crew,  Zoe would pop up to nag me about something. Once you get your first few races out of the way, you are allowed to pretty much do whatever you want. This is where the game really starts to get interesting for me.

The entirety of the United States makes up the map in The Crew. Obviously, its not a 1:1 recreation and I find the selection of cities such as Detroit, New York, etc to be a bit wearing on the eyes. Things get better when you venture west , but I still saw far to much of grey city streets with grey buildings and grey skies. Eschewing the missions Zoe constantly tried to foist off on me, I decided to take a drive from Detroit to New York. The game let me do that without throwing any invisible walls in my way, much to my (pleasant) surprise. Even more pleasantly, as I cruised the highways at ludicrous speeds, slamming into tour buses full of unsuspecting victims and incurring no discernible penalty aside from the few seconds it required me to accelerate back to top speed, I came across challenges. One had me launching my car off of a ramp towards a landing zone. The further I jumped, the more points. Another had me slaloming in and out of gates littered along the highway. They provided nice diversions and gave me hope that driving in the game would be overall entertaining.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the case. While I am aware that the game is in Beta, I found no such distractions when I chose to venture westward from Detroit to Salt Lake City. Instead, I was greeted by a bland expanse of open road, populated by overly chatty players whom I could not seem to turn off in my voice comms…and not single challenge to be seen.

Fortunately, the game is decent looking. Some people will argue that it looks great. And it probably does on console. Unfortunately, much like the recent Watch_ Dogs,  the game is merely competent on PC. Textures are of mixed quality, the frame rate is locked to 30 FPS and the damage modeling on the cars is so awful I actually stopped and searched the options menu for a way to turn it off. Mud and snow effects stick to the bottom of your screen, and while they are a nice touch at first, they quickly become distracting. The in car view is nicely detailed, but utterly impractical for long term driving.  It is noteworthy that I was unable to find any of the offroad races, and I will update this article once I do.

You might be thinking to yourself that I seem to have very mixed impressions of The Crew so far. Truthfully, I do. Once I did a little judicious tweaking and unlocked the games 30 FPS artificial cap, it went a long way towards solving the niggling control issues I had. That being said, the lack of things to do and the somewhat lifeless feel of the open world have me concerned going forwards. Is the game fun to play? You bet it is. The customization, sense of speed (even at 30 FPS) and overall presentation (aside from Zoe. SHUT UP ZOE!) are slick, polished and well implemented. I look forward to what Ivory Tower will do with their new IP. Unfortunately, unless something drastic changes, I won’t be seeing to much of it as I can’t justify paying full retail price for The Crew if the final game doesn’t improve by leaps and bounds over this beta.

Check out my video impressions below:

The Crew, the new open world racing game from Ivory Tower and Ubisoft has been getting a lot of attention recently. Unfortunately, some of that has been rather negative because the game is locked at 30 FPS  on PS4, XBox One and…PC. While some people might say that 30 FPS vs 60 FPS isn’t that big of a deal, others will disagree. Particularly in racing games, lower framerates introduce input lag, leading to that floaty disconnected feeling you might have experienced before in other games. Fortunately, the engine isn’t hard locked at 30FPS. Follow these simple steps and enjoy your new 60 FPS version of  The Crew (PLEASE NOTE: The Crew is in Beta and this fix may not work for everyone. If you experience instability, simply reverse the steps to restore your previous framerate.)