The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) will induct Nintendo composer and sound director Koji Kondo into its Hall of Fame at the 27th DICE Awards.
12.01.2024 - 09:17 / gameinformer.com
The Finals offers rare novelty in the competitive multiplayer genre, encouraging creative strategies impossible in other titles because of its immense environmental destruction, physics-based hazards, and armory of whimsical gadgets. This first-person shooter occurs amid a digital game show where varying counts of three-person teams fight over money caches in an objective-focused format. The Finals is unpredictable in the best way: gameshow events like meteor showers or orbital lasers remap previously memorized paths, map variants like moving platforms or suspended structures can obfuscate objectives, and your team’s best-laid defensive plans are often interrupted as explosives obliterate the buildings around you.
Developer Embark Studios showcases its mastery of Unreal Engine with gorgeously lit, fully destructible level designs that are incredibly fun to maneuver. Monaco, Las Vegas, Seoul, and Skyway Stadium – the four maps present at release – require distinct strategies and feature randomized elements that make every match impressively dynamic. You might load a map and find it under construction or unrecognizable, such as when sandstorms cover Vegas with enormous dunes.
The game features three unique classes: Heavy, Medium, and Light. Heavies can equip a rocket-propelled grenade, flamethrower, energy shield, a massive sledgehammer, or a glue gun that allows the user to create makeshift walls and cover. Mediums most closely resemble a support role, featuring the option to equip a healing beam, automated turret, zipline systems, jump pads, and defibrillators for quick revives. Lastly, the Light class specializes in grappling hook traversal and multiple invisibility gadgets. Each role is satisfying to explore, offering numerous possibilities for emergent play. Witnessing brilliant synergies like propelling the Cashout – an ATM-like objective – toward the opposite side of the arena by using the Heavy’s rocket to bounce the object atop a Medium’s well-placed jump pad leaves me energized and curious. Ultimately, team collaboration is crucial in finding success in The Finals since the skill ceiling becomes much higher with these potent equipment combinations.
It’s incredibly satisfying to interrupt an enemy team’s attempt at stealing the objective (an ATM-like device) by blowing the floor from beneath them with an RPG or C4 pack and ambushing them as they unexpectedly fall to a lower level. On the flip side, you can avoid a perilous fall with a well-timed goo grenade, creating a makeshift floor or bridge where one didn’t exist before. The reactive, high-stakes strategies the physics system facilitates remind me of the breakneck decisions that define the best fighting games.
Ignoring current
The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) will induct Nintendo composer and sound director Koji Kondo into its Hall of Fame at the 27th DICE Awards.
Koji Kondo, the Nintendo composer and sound director best known for his work on The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. series, will be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ (AIAS) Hall of Fame during the 27th D.I.C.E. Awards.
A Final Fantasy 14 live-action TV series is now confirmed to be «dead» due to the «size and scale needed to do it right».
Final Fantasy 14 recently added a new furnishing item that hearkens back to the iconic square grapes from Endwalker’s original release. The Labyrinthos Grape Lamppost outdoor furnishing, added in Patch 6.55, lets Final Fantasy 14 players immortalize the meme outside their homes and Island Sanctuary forever.
Embark Studios’ latest update for free-to-play competitive shooter THE FINALS is now live. It introduces Solo Bank It, the first limited-time mode which sees 12 players in a free-for-all fight to earn 40,000 cash and deposit it before the others.
Destructive game-show shooter The Finals has received its biggest update yet. Patch 1.5 arrives with a litany of bug fixes, balance changes and more, along with the introduction of a brand new mode - the game’s first time-limited variant, as well as its first mode for solo players.
Official Xbox news website Xbox Wire has deleted a post that claimed the open beta for Final Fantasy 14 had gone live on Xbox.
“We Take a Zebra to Vegas,” the sixth episode of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, is one that fans of the book series have been waiting for. Percy (Walker Scobell), Annabeth (Leah Jeffries), and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) make their way to Las Vegas and enter the infamous Lotus Hotel and Casino — where the fans have been hoping a specific favorite character might make an appearance, due to what they already know about this location from Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels.
With the 2024 Toyko Fan Fest in the books, Final Fantasy 14 released Patch 6.55, Growing Light Part 2, which brought the story of the Endwalker expansion and several side quests to a close. In addition to the stories, Final Fantasy 14 made some changes specific to the PvP mode called Shatter and some Jobs were nerfed in Frontline mode.
Just as we expected, AI was the running theme throughout CES 2024. In this episode, Devindra and Producer Ben Ellman chat with co-host Cherlynn Low, who’s on the ground in Las Vegas with the Engadget team. We dive into AI coming to almost every product category, new standalone AI hardware, and a surprising amount of “shush” tech. In geekier news, we dive into Micron’s new RAM format for laptops, which has the potential to reshape the notebook industry, and discuss why we all may want a rolling house robot like Samsung’s Ballie. And on a sad note, we chat about the wave of tech layoffs from Google, Amazon and others.
Hello and happy new year! Once again, team Engadget has set up shop in Las Vegas for CES, living out of suitcases so that we can scour the massive show floor and occasionally injure ourselves in the process. For CES 2024, we expected to see AI everywhere, and we were not disappointed.
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