Welcome to Wednesday! Brenda is off for the next three weeks, so I’m your substitute! Al Rosenberg, friendly neighborhood Games Section Editor and stand-in newscaster extraordinaire. There’s a lot going on in the world of gaming, so let’s take a look.
Jihad Al-Mofadda, a Saudi Arabian Playstation gamer, was banned by Sony for using his name as his gamer tag.
Hey, @PlayStation. Do everybody a favor & don’t ban people because someone didn’t understand Arabs have names. https://t.co/f0zyvexskw
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) June 27, 2016
We’re big Mass Effect fans here at WWAC. In fact we have a secret staff channel devoted to talking about only Bioware. So, it is absolutely thrilling news that four Titan Books novels will be published to tell the story between the known ME universe and the upcoming Andromeda story. Even better is the fact that the first novel will be written by multiple Hugo winner NK Jemisin, you can pick it up in August of this year.
Old Spice, known for their whistly tune and less-fragrantly-offensive-than-Axe body products (“improve your mansmells” their website says), worked with development team MediaMonks to bring you the Facebook-connected free flash game Youland. The game pulls your face from your social media profile, sucks your friends in as fellow avatars, and sends you on one of three adventures. This closely follows their Dream Runner mobile venture that lets you win prizes that mimic the shape of your run.
Undaunted by the flop of Ratchet & Clank, it seems the Sonic team may be headed for the big screen. Game director Takashi Iizuka has also reportedly announced a new Sonic the Hedgehog game in our futures.
Shovel Knight, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, is set to release two more free campaigns. The developers have already set the standard pretty high for updating indie games after release, and fans are looking forward to even more play time.
You can sign up for the Gwent beta from The Witcher development team. The standalone card game was announced at E3 this year.
Teeny Titans, a kind of Pokemon-like game from Cartoon Network and GrumpyFace Studios, is available now for your Apple products. Teeny Titans, Go!
“Ninja Division Publishing™, LLC and Seven Seas Entertainment™, LLC are proud to announce the formation of a new joint venture game company, Shinobi 7. Combining Ninja Division’s expertise in superior quality game design with Seven Seas’ know-how in license acquisition and curation, Shinobi 7 will focus on producing tabletop games that are based on hit anime, manga, and pop culture brands.” Their first game, Space Dandy, based on the Adult Swim show by the same name, will be released this fall.
Due to some changes in the way the Oculus Rift developers are protecting their games, you can now play Rift-exclusive games on devices that are not the Rift.
The world of Zelda, and I don’t just mean Hyrule, is always an active one. The series producer Eiji Aonuma has suggested that a multiplayer Zelda franchise entry may be in the works, and Shigeru Miyamoto has clarified that there will be no female-led main games because Link will always be the hero. (Unless there’s a female Link in another Hyrulian time? A girl can dream.)
Well, folks, see you next week. Happy gaming!
