Rock Band Blitz Review

Music games are dead -- at least as we've known them since 2005. Plastic guitars sit on closet floors around the world, Rock of the Dead 2 is nowhere in sight, and even Activision was like, "OK, we'll stop shoving Guitar Hero down your throat." But Rock Band Blitz proves that not every game revolving around music needs to be banished to the Island of Misfit Toys. With fast, challenging gameplay, the $14.99 download's focus on high scores should get you and your friends list bopping to the music on your hard drive once again.

Rather than plug in all those unloved instruments, Rock Band Blitz takes the franchise's note highways and connects them to your controller. You use the shoulder buttons to cycle through the drum, guitar, bass, mic and keyboard highways, and then tap the D-pad and the A button to play the descending notes. (Rock Band Blitz actually supports a number of control options, so feel free to just use the joysticks or whatever to play.)

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And therein lies the rub: Rock Band Blitz is a pretty hardcore game if you want it to be.

The setup is a lot like PS2's Amplitude, PSP's Rock Band Unplugged and Rock Band 3 on the DS -- if you've never played a music game like this, you're missing out. Playing Rock Band Blitz is fun even if you're cursing yourself for missing a long note you had no business missing. The notes are coming no matter what, so you have to be quick on the trigger and willing to jump around to master every track. When you're on a roll, it's easy to feel like god's gift to gaming.

Even if you suck at rhythm games, you'll get your rock star moment as you can't fail out of Rock Band Blitz. No matter how terrible you're doing, the song keeps going. Your only concern is getting the highest score you can, so you're trying to nail the notes in order to score points and keep each highway's individual multiplier growing.

Multipliers are one of the big tweaks developer Harmonix has brought to the gameplay of Blitz. When you hit the prerequisite number of notes on a given track, you raise its multiplier. However you can only raise it by so many in a given section of a song. Cross a checkpoint, and the max multiplier will increase giving you a new ceiling to shoot for -- but your ceiling only increases as much as your lowest track multiplier.

If it sounds confusing in explanation, you just need to play a song to get the gist. If you have all your highways at 4x except for a 2x microphone track, you're only going to have a max of 5x for the next section of the song because 2x is only one away from the lowest multiplier.

This system is equal parts ZOMG excitement and the frustration of hindsight. I love jumping between my tracks and trying to get everyone to the temporary ceiling, but how many times did I ignore a vocal track for too long only to not have enough notes to get it whipped into shape before the checkpoint? (The answer is: a lot.) To truly succeed in Rock Band Blitz, you need an intimate knowledge of the songs so that you've concurred the minimal keyboard notes before a bass solo takes you to a checkpoint.

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Rock Band Blitz is doing for Elton John songs what Pac-Man Championship Edition DX did for pellets.

And therein lies the rub: Rock Band Blitz is a pretty hardcore game if you want it to be. Yes, there are pretty colors and poppy songs to entertain your roommate with, but when he goes to bed, you can sit there and nitpick your performance to death because the game is all about high scores. Before you even launch into a session, you're presented with a song's leaderboard so that you can see how your friends did. When you're playing the song, a meter on the side shows you how your friends were doing at the exact point you're at. When you're done, you can fire off Score War challenges to online buds.

Rock Band Blitz is doing for Elton John songs what Pac-Man Championship Edition DX did for pellets. No matter how good you're doing, there's some way to milk Rock Band Blitz songs for more points, and that's rather ingenious. The game isn't about making music, it's about making a place for yourself on the leaderboards.

Knowing that, allow power-ups to change everything. As you knock out songs, you're earning Blitz Cred and coins. Blitz Cred is the game's experience system, and as you hit milestones, you unlock power-ups such as double points for bass notes and bomb notes that clear off surrounding highways. Before launching into a jam session, you can equip three power-ups, but each time you use a power-up, it costs you coins.

You might see that I crushed Stephen and the Colberts' "Charlene (I'm Right Behind You)," but when you try it, you can't get close to my score. You'll need to tinker with power-ups to find the combo that gives you the edge. On the flip side, I might see you embarrass me at a beloved Weezer song, but seeing as I'm fresh out of coins, I need to go farm some by playing Boston's catalog. Rock Band Blitz is pretty great at keeping you playing and -- if you dig the formula -- loving every minute of it.

My problem is that I wish Rock Band Blitz called out to be played. You can link the game with your Facebook so that Score Wars are just a click away, but I'd rather a message to my console told me KingTut33 beat me at The Police's "Can't Stand Losing You." When I turn on my video game machine, I want updates about my video games -- not when I'm trying to figure out if those two people from high school are still married. From a single-player perspective, I always loved building a band in Rock Band Unplugged, and that's not in Blitz. That carrot on the end of the stick would've been nice, especially for players without Rock Band-lovin' friends.

I did notice some framerate issues when Rock band Blitz got super-colorful and jampacked with notes, but for the most part the game ran well.

I've mentioned a lot of different bands in this review, but it's important to point out that Rock Band Blitz only comes with 25 songs, and as it's a hodgepodge trying to have something for everyone, the list is all over the place, which I dig but I know some who don't. However, all Rock Band downloadable content is compatible with Rock Band Blitz. So if you're like me and religiously bought tracks for the few years when music games were the bee's knees, you've got a hard drive full of Rock Band Blitz goodies. And if you skipped the music game craze, the Rock Band store is bursting with tunes to make you happy. Plus, once you buy Blitz, the new 25 songs can then be played in Rock Band 3 with its plastic instruments and such.

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The World Ends With You Coming to iOS

Square Enix's quirky RPG The World Ends With You is apparently coming to iOS later this year.

We told you earlier this week that a countdown clock had appeared, teasing an imminent announcement about the franchise. Although there are still 2 days and 14 hours left until the big reveal is scheduled, it appears that Square Enix may have spoiled its own surprise a little early.

The eagle-eyed observers over at Andriasang noticed that the company's e-Shop recently added a listing for a new The World Ends With You soundtrack, which mentioned the title was due to release on iOS later this year. Whoops.

Although the offending text has since been removed, with the counter set to hit zero over the weekend we'll soon know for sure whether this is what we've been ticking towards. There's no guarantee that this is all the information to be released either; could the game finally be about to get the sequel we want and that has been teased?

We'll find out in a couple of days.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.

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Hoodwink Review

A dystopian world where gun-toting anthropomorphs, recycled human brains plunked down onto metal robot bodies, and hippy rebels all co-exist under the oppressive thumb of a trigger-happy pharmaceutical company sounds like a neat setting to dig into. It could be, really, except Hoodwink totally botches its inherent potential from the get-go. Almost every major step of the way in this insipid, barely hour-long point-and-click adventure feels like a lesson in how not to design a game.

Navigating Hoodwink's story might be a lot more enjoyable if it made some modicum of sense. Roguish protagonist Michael Bezzle (M. Bezzle)'s adventure kicks off with a night out on the town to pilfer the items he needs to propose to his girlfriend Francesca. Most of your time spent fiddling around with rote fetch quests in the dirty slums of Global-1 is dedicated to this seemingly mundane quest, yet sporadic encounters with a cat-detective and the comically oafish UniCorp troops hint at bigger matters afoot. Wisps of frayed plot threads pop-up along the way, but none of them really come together to explain or intrigue. This total lack of cohesiveness comes to a head at the awkwardly-placed cliffhanger ending that does precious little to inspire me to play a sequel in order to find out what the heck is going on, assuming one ever gets made.

It doesn't help that things get off to a rough start. The impact of the clever narrative slight-of-hand that unfolds in the opening scene introducing Michael is lost amidst some of the most unwieldy point-and-click controls I've encountered in a long time. Simply moving around to access specific areas of the screen and interacting with objects is a constant wrestling match. Changing the camera angle and transitioning between areas is triggered by clicking vague hotspots around the environment, rather than walking over to where you want to go. While this will sound familiar to adventure gaming vets, the way its implemented here just doesn't work that well.

After I accidentally walked past a crucial puzzle hotspot sitting on the back wall following a brief cinematic, it took me several minutes of cursing and frantic trial-and-error clicking to figure how to get back there. I knew what I needed to do. The game just wouldn't let get there without a fight. This particular issue is less prevalent in the open areas found further along in the trek, but most forms of movement and interaction throughout Hoodwink's brief jaunt are awkward and sluggish at best -- and that's when they're not glitching out.

In several instances, using a staircase caused the camera to get stuck on the wrong floor, forcing me to restart the game from scratch. Wonky pathfinding also occasionally made Michael walk in the opposite direction of where I intended him to go before looping around to his destination in a bizarre roundabout way. These funky moments stand out among the more general feelings of frustration that set in when trying to get around.

Hoodwink's poorly conceived puzzles are far from inventive, and most boil down to fetching objects and bringing them to the obvious spot where they're needed. Some puzzle solutions are absurdly disconnected from their objective, like one early-on that has you hunting down matches, smoking a cigar, and cranking a machine on the wall to reveal the item you're hunting for. Others are either too basic to begin with or are ruined by the erratic hint system, which alternately tells you exactly what you need to do next or spits out vague leads. There's a rare instance or two where interactive mini-games have you turning cranks or catching bugs, but these tasks are tackled within seconds and add very little to the experience. It's not terribly hard to figure out what to do simple because there's barely anything to interact with in the environments to begin with.

The lack of puzzle creativity carries over into the one-dimensional characters that they frequently hinge upon too. Playful stereotypes abound, from the flower child hippie spouting "stick it to The Man" rhetoric to the agitated Asian food vendor peddling rat burgers in bad English, but they're more hokey than humorous. Dialogue alternates between cheesy and obnoxious too, and while some of the voice work is well done, most of it is overdone. All of this is a shame, because the cel-shaded artwork is really quite good, and the setting itself is an interesting place to explore. Unfortunately, everything else is pretty weak.

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Undead Labs Announces State of Decay

Undead Labs has announced State of Decay, an open world zombie game that “develops in real-time, shaped by your actions.” According to the game’s official site, State of Decay is a third-person action game set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse.

“You choose where to make your stand, designing and fortifying your home base, performing daring raids for food and ammunition, and rescuing other playable survivors with unique talents,” Undead Labs explains. “The open, sandbox world develops in real-time, shaped by your actions, dynamically generating content based on your choices and the ever-increasing zombie threat.”

State of Decay was originally announced as Class3 back in 2011, described at the time as an "open world zombie-survival game" where choice is a major part of the gameplay. According to a blog post from Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain, the team began work on the game in summer 2010. “Two years have passed. It sometimes feels like forever, but the truth is that’s not a large amount of time in game development years,” Strain wrote. “For those of you who’ve stuck with us from the beginning -- when those two years seemed like forever -- today is for you.”

Despite beginning development as an Xbox Live exclusive, State of Decay is now in development for both Xbox Live and PC. A release date has not yet been announced.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

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The World Ends With You: Why We Need a Sequel

The World Ends With You is one of the biggest success stories from a handheld that has had many such stories to tell. It was a Square Enix-published RPG, developed by Jupiter (the makers of the Kingdom Hearts franchise), and it launched in North America in April 2008. It was praised by critics, earning positive reviews across the industry. And it sold well at release, though not record-setting numbers by any stretch.

It was what happened after that launch that really mattered, though. TWEWY began to build momentum. Those who bought it and played it loved it, and they told their friends. Then their friends tried it, loved it too, and they told more friends. The game's reputation grew, and grew some more, and the game achieved that rare and intangible accomplishment – cult classic status.

We realize, though, that not everyone is part of this in-crowd. That TWEWY's slow, under-the-radar growth to achieving its dedicated audience still may never have caught your attention. That you find yourself asking, "Just what is the big deal with The World Ends With You" after all? Well, we're here to help. Here's a refresher on what the game is, what makes it so great, and why we desperately need that recently rumored sequel.

The World of The World Ends With You

Square Enix was one of the most prolific third-party publishers for Nintendo's DS, bringing more than 30 different games to the handheld in North America over the course of the system's life cycle. By and large, though, those games were all sequels, ports or spin-offs of pre-existing brands – Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests and even a couple of Manas. So The World Ends With You stood out immediately thanks simply to the fact that it was a new IP. Made by the Kingdom Hearts people, sure, but not a spin-off of that series – TWEWY had its own new world.

That world, though, is one that our hero Neku Sakuraba has no interest in. As TWEWY opens we meet this young, anti-social kid, strolling through Tokyo's crowded Shibuya district and getting so fed up with all the people and noise and commotion around him that he screams for everyone to just "Shut up!"

And then they do. Everyone goes quiet. Everyone begins to totally ignore Neku, and extremely so – it's like they can't hear him or see him or sense him at all. Neku has unexpectedly gotten his wish, as he's flung into an alternate version of Shibuya where he's little more than a ghost.

Then a countdown appears on his hand, and a swarm of frogs assaults him.

Things get strange pretty quickly in The World Ends With You, and it should come as no surprise that another game from the Kingdom Hearts team would feature an odd, otherworldly and altogether hard-to-follow storyline. But to try to sum it up succinctly, Neku has been drawn unwillingly into the "Reaper's Game," a deadly week-long series of missions to fight against physical manifestations of the world's social distortions. That anti-social attitude he had in the game's opening moments? That was part of the problem, and now he's being forced to deal with the damage his negativity has done to the world around him. (Which, again, somehow translates to attacking amphibians.)

Neku isn't alone in this Reaper's Game, though, as there are other players that have been drawn in as well – each with their own reason for being there in the shadowy, alternate Shibuya and each with their own prize if they're somehow able to survive long enough to "win" the game. Neku, at first, is simply fighting for understanding – to figure out how he ended up in this place, and figure out the rules of this crazy game he's been thrown into. He ends up partnering with another player almost immediately just to help him get a sense of what's going on.

And that's when things really start getting weird.

The Gameplay of The World Ends With You

The gameplay design of The World Ends With You is focused on a two-character, double-screen simultaneous combat system. While Neku appears on the touch screen and you guide his movements and attacks with the stylus, his partners show up on the upper screen - fighting the same enemies, just not exactly with Neku. The two characters are somehow split into two overlapping, concurrent realities and foes have to be killed in both places for them to truly be defeated.

The DS system's upper screen, though, is not a touch screen – so the partner character who appears there has his or her actions directed by an entirely different method of input. You tap the D-Pad and face buttons to input commands for them in a new riff on the card-battling system first seen in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. And remember, at the same time, you're still also directing Neku with the stylus down below.

The two-screens-at-once battle system is wild, imaginative, complicated and even more difficult to master than it is to explain. But it proves to be incredibly compelling for those who learn its rhythms, and it remains the cornerstone of TWEWY's appeal – especially since now, years later, no other games have come along to mimic its method of madness.

Those battles end up just being one of TWEWY's crazy game design ideas, and each other element Jupiter tossed into this mix helps further define the game's personality. There are pins to collect. Little buttons, each embued with psychic powers and used to activate Neku's attacks in battle – you equip them and even level them up over time, while the physical actions they demand range from simple taps on the screens to wide slashes across enemy sprites. There are something like 300 different pins and attacks. Neku himself levels up after enough battling too – an RPG staple – but then you have the option of sacrificing Neku's gained levels to increase the probability of more pin drops from fallen foes. Another unprecedented idea.

Then there's the fashion scene. Pins aren't the only thing to wear, as in the clothing-conscious neighborhoods of Shibuya you're actually given further bonuses in battle for equipping your heroes in outfits that match the trending style of each location. And then there's the food – almost every RPG features standard things like HP-recovering potions or meat, but in TWEWY you buy things like hot dogs and essentially equip them into your heroes' stomachs. There, they digest over time and ultimately grant a permanent stat bonus after they've been fully absorbed into the body.

TWEWY even boasted the wireless tagging of "Mingle Mode," which was essentially Jupiter inventing StreetPass years before Nintendo built it into the 3DS.

Wrapping all of these wonderfully ridiculous design elements together is one of the best soundtracks ever crafted in gaming, and a visual style so bold that it's no wonder the game inspired a full manga adaptation shortly after its release in Japan. That release, by the way, was on July 26, 2007 – meaning The World Ends With You just celebrated its fifth anniversary a couple of weeks ago.

The Future of The World Ends With You

That milestone could be seen as significant on its own, but it's made much more interesting by the not-so-coincidental timing of a new Square Enix release in the same week this year. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance debuted in Europe, Australia and North America in late July, all within a week of that fifth anniversary date. And Kingdom Hearts 3D also happens to host the first reappearance of characters from The World Ends With You we've ever seen.

Half a decade has come and gone with no proper TWEWY sequel, but the makers of Kingdom Hearts continue to make Kingdom Hearts – and in this latest 3DS adventure, the series most well known for its crossovers with Disney films and characters instead sidelines Mickey Mouse and his friends for one chapter to give Neku Sakuraba a second chance to step into the spotlight. Sora teams up with Neku in Kingdom Hearts' recurring village locale, Traverse Town – while Riku, on his own adventure, meets up with Shiki Misaki, who was Neku's first partner character in TWEWY. Other major characters also reappear as Sora and Riku help the gang through a truncated version of TWEWY's plot, as Kingdom Hearts chapters often do with the Disney films they draw on for inspiration.Neku, Shiki and all the rest appearing in Kingdom Hearts 3D is a paradigm-shifting event for the KH franchise – they've become the first non-Disney, non-Final Fantasy characters to ever cross over into the series. Square Enix has plenty of other properties to draw on. You'd think a Dragon Quest hero would've made the cut by now, or even just the iconic Slime. But no, it's never happened – The World Ends With You is the first to get the honor, and you've got to think that it's all a nod to Square Enix's plans to publish a TWEWY sequel.

And, appropriately enough, a countdown has now appeared that looks like it will announce exactly that.

A new teaser site has just gone live this morning. The site contains nothing more than a countdown and a bit of music playing on a loop, but the countdown of one week, the font of the numbers, the music, the image of the Shibuya silhouette displayed in the background and even the URL itself all point unmistakably to The World Ends With You. If all goes to plan, in less than a week we hope to discover that Square Enix has finally made The World Ends With You 2 official.

So what does that mean, for all of you who still haven't experienced the original? Well, your time to play this incredible game before its series moves on without you is running out. I'll leave you with the advice of one of our IGN readers:

"always wanted to try the world ends with you" - MaverickHall2

"Stop trying and DO IT. Its worth whatever you have to pay to get it." - _AbBaNdOn

Lucas M. Thomas made the mistake of not picking up TWEWY the instant it came out in America back in 2008. Don't repeat his mistake. Play the game now. (And follow Lucas on Twitter.)

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Why eSports Are Like Dubstep and Pro Gaming Isn't For Gamers

There’s something in the air at the World Championship Series StarCraft II Oceania Finals at the Australian Technology Park. It is, in fact, the roof of the Australian Technology Park. Or was, rather. 100km/h winds had blown a section of it off the converted locomotive workshop earlier.

But there’s definitely a buzz down here, and it’s not just the iron sheets above us vibrating as they cling to the roof while the gale outside tries to peel them off like a stubborn nether-hair from a bar of soap. People seem excited. Excited about StarCraft II. They’re sitting in clusters fixated on the big screen while a man brings around platters of tiny chicken schnitzels on tiny pieces of toast. The crowd is small today, but it’s a Friday. The show isn’t open to the public until tomorrow, when we’re assured things will get a lot more boisterous. All 600 tickets for the event were snapped up inside of 11 minutes. Tomorrow the crowd of people cheering on a man in a small glass booth playing a video game against another man in a different glass booth will be a lot larger and louder.

Larger. Louder.

There’s very little about this experience that would seem real to your everyday everyman. It barely makes sense to me. I’m watching two people I don’t know battling against one another on a video game I’ve never played. The commentators aren’t called commentators, I can’t quite figure out why everyone is cheering and I don’t actually understand what anybody is talking about.

This must be how my wife feels when I play video games at home. Or perhaps a more potent example would be what my sister feels like when she watches cricket. She doesn’t understand the game and she doesn’t understand the rules.

Two of the expert StarCraft II shoutcasters brought in to provide commentary for the event, Nick ‘Tasteless’ Plott and Dan ‘Artosis’ Stemkoski, laugh when I confirm with them they don’t know anything about cricket.

“No, we don’t!” says Plott. “Basically our jobs are to try and make that as accessible as possible to a viewer like you, for instance. We’re just trying to translate, ‘Okay what’s this guy trying to do? What’s this guy’s dilemma? What’s the other guy’s advantage? We’re there to navigate the viewer through the experience so they can enjoy it.”

Thus far I’m still working on volume. When the commentators start shouting I figure something exciting is happening. Plott and Stemkoski are the commentators I’d know all about if I knew anything about StarCraft. The pair are currently based in South Korea.

“

[In South Korea] if I say I’m a StarCraft commentator that doesn’t require an explanation.

“Out there,” says Plott, “if I say I’m a StarCraft commentator that doesn’t require an explanation. If I say I’m a pro-gamer that doesn’t require an explanation. They did a poll a few years ago where they asked young Korean boys, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and the number one response was professional gamer.”

“We live in this world where it one of the most watched things on TV, completely culturally accepted. It’s not a taboo, it’s not weird and there’s an ecosystem there that supports it.”

Peter Neate is 31. He’s from Brisbane. For three years, however, Peter Neate lived in South Korea and everyone called him Legionnaire.

After qualifying for the first World Cyber Games main event in 2001 Neate found himself in South Korea.

“I went overseas to Seoul in Korea and I was the only Australian to win a match,” says Neate. “They set up a show match afterwards and I was the only one to win versus a Korean pro-gamer. They offered me [a chance] to stay, just out of the blue. I really did not expect it and I didn’t really understand just how big professional gaming was in Korea at the time, so I turned it down.”

“I did a bit of research after that; I started playing a lot more. The next year, WCG came around again, I qualified, I went to Korea, I extended my Visa out for the full three months and I just went around trying to play as much as I could. We got very fortunate, I was there with another Australian... we got picked up by a sponsor a couple of days before our Visas were to expire.

“We were sponsored for three months and we played non-stop. At the end of the three months there was a big tournament – 512 players I believe – in Korea and I went through to the top eight where I got noticed by one of the professional teams. I became friends with them and they asked me to join so I leaped at the opportunity. From that time on I spent three years playing professionally in Korea.”

Neate out of retirement for another crack.

Neate illustrates just how hardcore South Koreans are about eSports.

“Back then they had an event down in Busan, the second largest city in Korea,” he says. “They did a custom built stadium, on the beach; they brought the players in on rafts, up onto the beach.”

“There were 90,000 spectators. So if you think about that, it’s like an AFL Grand Final. That many people were turning up just to watch a computer game.

That’s Australian Rules football, for non-antipodeans.

“It’s amazing,” Neate continues. “It’s really hard for people who haven’t seen anything like it to understand how big it is. In Korea, it is considered a sport; it’s a real sport, it’s the fourth biggest sport in Korea after soccer, baseball and basketball I believe.”

Neate retired after three years, conceding many players stay in the scene for longer.

“It’s a full-time job over there, so a lot of Koreans stick with it for a lot longer,” he says. “For me it was long enough. I’d done everything I’d wanted, my brother was getting married and I’d never actually met his fiancé because I’d been over there for so long. I’d had a lot fun, I’d travelled around everywhere and I just felt it was time to move on and get back to normal life.”

Normal is probably not a term you’d apply to the life of fellow finalist Andrew Pender. Pender has a nickname for his nickname, but that’s not what makes his life so fascinating. No, it’s because Andrew ‘mOOnGLaDe’ Pender, or GLaDe, quit his job to play StarCraft II eight to 12 hours a day in the lead up to this tournament.

Pender’s first real-time strategy game was the original StarCraft.

“As that went on Brood War came out and I continued to play during high school and I stumbled across pro gaming on the Internet, and I thought that was an amazing thing at the time,” he says. “That was the thing I wanted to be as a kid. Pro-gaming; it sounded so amazing.”

Dream job(?)

“From there after StarCraft I jumped into WarCraft III as fast as I could and started competitive playing there in the hopes that one day I could be a pro gamer, but at the time it was only a hobby. For six years I was competitive playing WarCraft III and I managed to travel around the world for it and do rather well, nothing too amazing, and then StarCraft II was on the horizon so I quit WarCraft III, worked for a couple of years until StarCraft II came out and then pretty much put all my time into StarCraft II and tried my best to go pro gamer with it.

“Basically from there I started to do very well and I joined a pretty good team and I managed to travel around the world with a salary and make some money and some fame and do pretty well. For the last two years I’ve just been travelling around the world for StarCraft II.”

The prospect of being paid to play games might be a tempting one for many. It sounds like the perfect job for someone who loves games. However, one of the more interesting things is how few games pro gamers actually play.

“If you’re a pro gamer you’re probably only playing StarCraft,” says Plott.

Stemkoski agrees; he spends his free gaming time playing StarCraft too.

“Yeah, it’s definitely mostly StarCraft,” he says. “I find that I’m so involved in StarCraft, I enjoy it so much that I find if I have some free time I don’t necessarily want to pick up a PlayStation controller. I want to go and play some more StarCraft. There’s a reason why this is the biggest eSport; it’s because it’s the best game.”

Pender tends to avoid other games too.

“

I used to play many, many games before I became a professional gamer. Once you become a professional gamer it’s a lot harder to just jump on another game.

“I used to be a gamer, he says. “I used to play a lot more other games; I used to play many, many games before I became a professional gamer. Once you become a professional gamer it’s a lot harder to just jump on another game.”

“In the back of your mind you’re worried that it’s going to affect your StarCraft, or your mouse movements or whatever. But that’s not really the main reason I don’t play many other games. Currently I don’t have time for it, and when I do have time for it I kinda don’t want to be in front of the computer, more than anything. I like to do physical things. Anything but be on a computer.

“I do love exercising. I do a lot of boxing; not so much the getting hit in the head, but the training for it I really enjoy.”

There are other misconceptions about pro gaming.

Though probably not ones shared by these rabid fans.

“I think that the biggest misconception about pro gamers and especially about this industry as a whole is that it’s a bunch of geeks or nerds or something like that,” says Stemkoski. “We have such a diverse line-up of humans that play this game and complete professionally at it.”

“We had people that worked at McDonalds, we had people that were bodybuilders, we had people that play basketball, just every type of person. There are dog catchers that turned into professional video game players. This is not something like some of these other sports where, ‘Well, you have to be born this tall to do this’. No, anyone can do it.”

So where to now for eSport? Speaking to GamesIndustry International at Gamescom Riot Games co-founder Brandon Beck believes that the popularity of eSports could grow to the point where video games are actually played at the Olympics.

“We don't have our sights set on replacing soccer right now, but we definitely think that eSports has a place as a large, important, mainstream competitive activity,” he said. “I fundamentally believe that eSports will be an Olympic event in my lifetime.”

Plott and Stemkoski stop a few miles short of anything as monstrously optimistic as this, but both agree eSports are on the rise.

First, you win the StarCraft. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.

“It’s gonna take some more time,” says Stemkoski. “Some places are starting to catch up, like China and Germany, and to a lesser extent Sweden. These places are starting to get more and more there. You need to get the word out, you need a lot of tournaments, and the more that you have the more people will see it and the more it’ll be in the news.”

Plott picks up from Stemkoski.

“The way I would look at it is, are you familiar with dubstep?” he asks. “So like, dubstep started out in the UK and it’s actually been around for a long period of time now. Imagine the UK is to dubstep what South Korea is to eSports.”

“

Imagine the UK is to dubstep what South Korea is to eSports.

“They had the right club scene, they had the right attitude; progressive, electronic music was taking over there. Nowadays everybody knows what dubstep is right, but it just took time for it to catch on. If you imagine video games as music, I feel like eventually there’s just gonna be a point in time where this is kinda a genre of gaming that’s just gonna take over everywhere.

“I mean, two years ago this was so niche outside of South Korea it was mind-boggling how long it took me to explain to anybody how big my job was. Now I’ve ping-ponged all over the globe, we’re going to Germany right after this, and I would say I don’t know whether it’s going to be two years, five years or 10 years, it’s gonna be a genre of gaming. “

Looking at just how heavily the likes of Black Ops II are becoming geared towards the competitive player, I’m inclined to agree. It’s not going to matter if you or I are interested or not. Enough people are.

I leave to find the foul weather has knocked over a tree just outside the building. If a tree falls in the park and everyone is inside watching two men play StarCraft II, does it make a sound?

Apparently not.

While veteran Peter Neate’s tournament was ended early, Andrew Pender came in as runner-up in the Australian National championship and was the overall winner of the Oceania Finals the following day. He and his fellow finalist will advance to the StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Final at the Battle.net World Championship in Shanghai, China in November.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and other stuff on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.

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Website Teases The World Ends With You Announcement

A website has gone live that teases an impending announcement about The World Ends with You.

The game isn't explicitly name checked but everything about the site points towards 2008's acclaimed action RPG, from the font used for the countdown clock, to the music and the silhouetted cityscape of Shibuya. At the bottom of the page, it even says the character design by Tetsuya Nomura and Gen Kobayashi – the two artists who worked on the original title, as well as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy franchises.

At the time of writing the clock has 6 days and 14 hours remaining. So expect more information to be revealed at the beginning of next week.

The World Ends with You was released on Nintendo DS in Japan back in 2007 and was localised for Western markets in 2008, and was generally well-received by critics. IGN's review gave the game a 8.9.

Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's worst cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

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On the Brink of a New World of Warcraft

To prepare World of Warcraft players for the new content in Mists of Pandaria, patch 5.0.4 will be deployed before the expansion’s September 25 launch date and change around many major systems. This includes a dramatic overhaul of each class’ talent tree, condensing the current branching system into what Blizzard hopes is a better alternative, where every 15 levels you pick one of three talents to customize your class.

“Say I’m a fire Mage online today,” said Ion Hazzikostas, lead encounter designer. “I probably spent thirty-three points in the fire tree and twenty-eight or twenty-nine of those points are being spent on things like ‘oh, your fireball hits harder,’ ‘oh, you have pyroblast now.’ Those weren’t very interesting choices. Those weren’t really choices at all. They were just the things you were expected to spend. If you somehow managed to not take those, you were just hurting yourself. So we got rid of those, but we actually just gave them to you for free. So the player who logs in as a fire Mage is still going to be a fire Mage, is still going to have pyroblast. It’s not going to be a foreign, unsettling experience.”

The new talents are meant to let players make decisions without really hurting their combat efficiency. “I think they’re going to find some interesting choices that really let them set themselves apart and differentiate themselves from other players of the same class and spec in the game. If they want to be more mobile, if they want to be more defensive, if they want to have more offensive crowd control. They can customize themselves in a way that layers on top of what’s already in place.”

Changes to many of the classes, some of which are significant, will be rolled in with the patch as well to let players get familiar with the altered mechanics before Pandaria is released. “Some have really just had balance adjustments, got a couple new abilities, had some streamlining,” said Hazzikostas. “Others, such as the Warlock, have been more heavily overhauled. In all cases we take efforts to preserve a lot of the core that players expect and are used to with the classes.”

“I wonder about the Hunters and the removal of the ranged slot,” said John Lagrave, lead producer. “The bow is now the main hand. Whether the Hunters go, ‘what the hell, I need my polearm too.’ We’ll see.”

With so much changing, Blizzard also looked back at existing systems and in some cases made cuts in order to keep everything from spiraling into chaos. “We removed resistances from the game. There’s no elemental resists any more,” said Hazzikostas. “Years ago, you crafted resistance gear and that was part of the progression. You needed to get a full set of shadow resist gear before you could fight Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, but we haven’t made that type of gear in a while and it was just a buff that players cast. So we just assumed that you have Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild that gives you resist all. So you’re taking less damage from all these attacks, but you also have these five numbers on your character sheet that are adding to noise and really potentially confusing. So we took that out. That also means, though, if nothing else changes, you’re going to take about fifteen percent more damage from every elemental attack in the game, which means we go through and adjust those elemental attacks so we’re not making the game harder for players.”

“Suddenly you’re not just dead,” said Lagrave.

“That’s one of the great challenges of a game as expansive as World of Warcraft,” continued Hazzikostas. “It’s very difficult to just touch one thing without their being ripple effects that you have to take into account across the entire game.”

Also in the patch will be a Scenario, a new type of story-focused dungeon that doesn’t require the standard healer / tank / DPS group composition to complete.  Lagrave explained the Scenario will link the events in the existing world to the events of the soon to be added continent of Pandaria. “There’s a version for both the Horde and the Alliance, that starts the story of what has happened since the Destroyer’s end. After Deathwing’s fall, what does the world turn back to? Of course, the world turns back to hating each other. The Horde and the Alliance start fighting again.”

Then moving into Pandaria and beyond launch, Blizzard sees Scenarios as a better way to deliver focused stories. “As a vehicle it allows us to further along whatever plotline we want to go with,” said Lagrave. “We know that everyone will have a chance to see it because any three of us can queue up for a scenario and boom, we’re in. Three tanks can do it, three healers can do it, it doesn’t matter what your group composition is.”

“In many cases they occupy and expand upon a niche that previously might have been filled by some of our more involved outdoor quest experiences, events that were kind of multi-stage things,” said Hazzikostas. “Those can be very tricky to do in the open world where you have player interactions. In an instanced version of that, we can really set up a multi-stage quest event where this village is going to be attacked and you’re setting up defenses. We’ve done things like that in the open world before, we can give players a better experience when it’s an instanced version. Once we move away from the DPS, healer trinity as it’s called, players suddenly use all kinds of abilities they would never find an occasion to use in instances. You’re suddenly using CC [crowd control] all the time, because as a Rogue there isn’t someone to tank for you and something’s actually hitting you. So you stun it, you gouge it or you fear it. That gives the combat a very unique feel. We’re looking forward to expanding on the system in the future.”

Lagrave provided more detail. “The big challenge we had in outdoor events like that was, when those things go live you have fifty, a hundred people trying to do that event. So everybody’s trying to click on the NPC to get up the dialogue to get it started. It really is a cluster***. You don’t really have a sense of what’s going on because it’s more important for you to step through the process rather than enjoy the experience. Because if I don’t get going on this, all these people are going to stop me from progressing. [Scenarios] allow you, the player, to spend the time to go through the content at a reasonable pace and get what we’re trying to tell you.”

Blizzard has been making changes large and small over the course of the Mists of Pandaria closed beta testing period, which started up this past March. Blizzard found that the starting experience on the new continent of Pandaria, home to the Pandaren race and all the level 85 through 90 questing content, wasn’t quite up to the proper quality level. So during testing the beginning sections on Pandaria were closed off and Blizzard took one month to alter the experience to better reflect the growing animosity between Alliance and Horde. “Previously you just landed on the shore. Now you come in, depending on your faction, as part of a massive assault. Whether you’re in a gunship bombarding an Alliance encampment or you’re doing a strafing run in an Alliance gyrocopter on a Horde fleet, and you really get that feel of conflict between factions. You see one of the main themes of Pandaria is war, the consequences of war.”

Outside of the main questing content, Blizzard is adding plenty of extras into the game, such as a Pokemon-like pet battle system, which lets players create teams of pets and battle others. It’s a system build just for fun – battling with pets will not serve as a method of progression for your character – but even so, Blizzard has been balancing the gameplay to try and ensure it remains interesting for those excited to try it. “Our players are great about sitting there and hammering on a system and letting us know ‘this is broken’ or ‘this is way OP [overpowerd]. They love to tell us what’s OP,” said Lagrave.

“There was a cockroach that had an ability, I think it was called Apocalypse,” said Hazzikostas, “that basically killed everything after X turns. Everything that’s not a cockroach dies. And it’s like, ‘yeah ok, multi-target death touch is maybe not the most balanced ability,’ even if there’s a delay of a few turns. Sometimes, some our more creative ideas, that’s what play testing iteration is for.”

The cockroach Apocalypse ability has since been removed. “We have a ton of new pets in the game as well,” said Lagrave. “We want people to go out there and explore and  trap new pets and not just run after one thing.”

In case you’d rather take on something a little more grand in scale than a pet battle, Blizzard is also adding two outdoor world bosses to Pandaria. “They fill slightly different niches,” said Hazzikostas. “The Sha of Anger in Kun-Lai Summit is this massive, towering Sha. Whenever it’s up, you can see it from pretty much anywhere in the zone. It’s the size of a mountain.  That one actually respawns every two hours. It drops from a large random pool of raid loot and PvP loot, so it’s going to be attractive to all players regardless of play style, but it’s designed to be accessible because it respawns so frequently. You can only actually loot it once per week.”

“The other boss is Salyis’s Warband. It’s a band of saurok lizardmen that are riding on the back of a gigantic mushan. A mushan is a beast that’s unique to Pandaria, it’s kind of like a green lizard kodo. That is also pretty much the size of a small town. It has about a dozen lizardmen on its back and huge cannons that it uses to bombard villages in the Valley of the Four Winds. That respawns every three to five days. It has unique loot. We expect it to be very hotly contested. We look forward to seeing, particularly on PvP servers, how that’s going to play out.”

So what kind of group will you need to successfully take out the Warband? “It’s designed for a group somewhere around in the teens,” said Hazzikostas. But you’re going to want to bring more people because you want to kill it faster before someone else comes to gank you. You can have ten people fighting off the gankers while the rest of the people actually kill the boss. For the world bosses we’re also using our new loot system. That is personalized loot. Your chances of getting a reward for the target are independent of the number of people in the raid and class compositions. So if I’m a Paladin, it doesn’t matter if there are six other Paladins in this raid group with me. When I kill the boss, I get my own personal roll. If it’s a success, then I will get an item that’s usable by my spec. That means there isn’t an incentive to keep the boss to yourselves with the fewest number of people possible.”

Are you looking forward to pet battles and world bosses, or have you moved on from World of Warcraft?

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Defiance: Sticky Grenades and Alien Aides

Trion has shown off how you can quest and kill in the open world and take part in Defiance. For this particular round of previews, arena PvP combat was on display. Using your regular PvE character, you’ll be able to queue up for matches while running around in the overworld and then magically transport yourself into maps that can range from fights between small teams to bigger 32 player contests that allow for vehicle use.

Defiance’s weaponry includes the conventional and the strange. You can run around with shotguns and assault rifles, or switch to a grenade launcher that lobs up to five sticky explosives that can be detonated by reloading the gun. While this is great for setting traps around stages, the bombs also stick to players, which means it could be wise to time the detonation so it coincides with the moment the affected player runs into a group of his friends. Alternatively, if a player sees there’s a bomb stuck to his clothing, he could run at you, making it impossible to detonate the bomb without dealing damage to yourself as well.

By equipping a beam weapon you become a significant threat, as its damaging energy discharge rapidly drains the health of any enemy it touches. By using its alternate fire, you turn into a healer, and can serve your team most effectively by pairing up with others and scouring the map for enemies as part of a pack. The strangest weapon on display fired blobs of organic goo at enemies. The blobs stuck and grew on targets, and eventually burst, spilling Half-Life-like headcrab monsters onto the ground. These creatures then scurried around the map for a limited time and attacked any hostiles in range.

In addition to weapons, you’ll have special abilities like cloaking fields and speed bursts and decoys to help escape from and distract opponents. The map included in the demo had plenty of hiding spots and few wide open spaces, making it easy to escape around a corner and throw off a pursuing enemy by tossing out a decoy in the opposite direction. Near the map’s center was a raised platform that gave a view of most of the map; an excellent place for snipers to sit and pick off any down below. Getting up to the platform was risky, though, as it required you climb up an exposed ladder at a slow pace, making you an easy target for any in the area.

If you’d rather play on larger maps with vehicles, you’ll find many machines can accommodate multiple players at once. One could drive while another could operate a rocket turret, so it seems the flow of combat on each map could differ quite significantly. While on foot, the game played just like you’d expect a third-person shooter to, which perhaps didn’t really highlight what are Defiance’s most interesting aspects – the fact that it’s not only a third-person shooter, but also an MMO. Still, it’s yet another way to play, in case you’re looking for combat that’s a bit more structured than the chaos of the open world.

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Captain Marvel #2 Review

The second issue of Captain Marvel is a pretty dramatic shift from the previous issue. This is a straight up time travel story that throws Carol into a World War II setting. That might seem a bit strange, but Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy make it work. This issue doesn't quite have the same heart and heft that the series started out with, but it's still a great comic book with a tight script and some gorgeous artwork. Captain Marvel is quickly becoming the Marvel title to watch. Or read, I guess. You know what I mean.

The use of time travel is an interesting choice, and once you get about half way through the issue you realize why it works for this story. Carol says it herself, when she notes why time travel is taking her out of her comfort zone, "You can't blast it, punch it, outrun it or throw it into space." This is not business as usual for Carol Danvers. This is a story that looks to grow the character and make her a different kind of hero. The dialogue is great, but the inner monologue is even better. The time we get to spend in Carol's head is worth the cover price alone.

The change in setting really suits Dexter Soy's art. Every page in this issue looks good, but it looks even better once we shift back in time. Once a group of female commandos burst on to the scene, you'll be sold. It looks absolutely awesome and it's the kind of thing that is really enhanced by Soy's dark, washy art style. If you didn't think he was a good fit for Captain America fighting Absorbing Man, then you might want to give his work a second chance here. It looks stunning.

This is a dark book, not in tone, but rather in style. Soy's art is heavy on shadows here. Blackness seeps into every page, covering the world and characters. It's a credit to the artist that after only two issues, it's hard to imagine anyone else drawing this series. I'll admit, I had originally been expecting a light and bright comic with Captain Marvel, but what we get is better. It looks better with Soy at the helm and all you naysayers need to suck it up and give this comic a look. I'm calling it; Dexter Soy is going to be a superstar.

If Captain Marvel continues on this path, DeConnick and Soy will have created one awesome new title for Marvel. It's engaging, fun, beautiful and different. This is not your typical superhero book, and that's exactly what makes it so great. It's nice to see a different kind of monthly title from Marvel. I have never been a Carol Danvers fan, but as long as Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy are handling her adventures, I'll be picking up every issue. Marvel needs to take more chances like this, because -- in the case of Captain Marvel, at least -- it has totally paid off.

Benjamin is a writer and storyteller. He owns many leather-bound books and his office smells of rich mahogany. Follow Benjamin on Twitter, or find him on IGN.

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Pele Movie in the Works

With the World Cup hitting Brazil in 2014, Imagine Entertainment has plans to shoot a film about the most famous footballer of them all: Pele.

According to Variety, the studio has asked brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist to write the script, with a view to directing. The pair have previously worked on the documentary likes of Favela Rising and The Two Escobars.

The story will concentrate on Pele’s remarkable early years, with Imagine President of Production Kim Roth describing it as “A coming-of-age story that will trace Pele’s childhood until he won his first World Cup in Sweden at the age of 17.”

Language will be English with some Portuguese; the film shooting next year with a view to releasing before the summer 2014 tournament.

Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN and thinks that Pele is the second greatest footballer of all-time, coming just behind Crystal Palace's midfield dynamo of the mid-1990s, David Hopkin. His football Tweets can be found on both Twitter and MyIGN.

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Thor 2 Goes to Iceland

With production for Thor: The Dark World ramping up in England, new reports suggest that the Norse gods of old may be paying a visit to one of their homelands: Iceland.

According to the Latino Review (via Svarthofdi), Thor 2 helmer Alan Taylor is no stranger to the island country; the director spent some time filming there during his stint on HBO's Game of Thrones. When asked about filming there for the fantasy series, Taylor said, "We feel amazing to travel to a world that looks like those we are trying to create. It gives us all inspiration."

Thor: The Dark World stars Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston and Christopher Eccleston. The Marvel epic opens November 8, 2013.

Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love on Twitter and IGN.

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Christopher Eccleston Cast as Malekith in Thor 2

Former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston has been cast as the primary villain Thor: The Dark World.

Deadline claims the 28 Days Later and Shallow Grave actor will play Malekith the Accursed in the Marvel sequel. Eccleston is no stranger to comic book-oriented fare having played Destro in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and having a stint on the TV series Heroes.

Malekith the Accursed is the leader of the dark elves of Svartalfheim, who in the comics stole the Casket of Ancient Winters. (The casket can be seen in the first Thor movie.) Malekith also had a badass servant, Kurse, who ultimately turned on Malekith and killed him. The Malekith and Casket of Ancient Winters storyline was adapted for an episode of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Mads Mikkelsen was initially approached for the role, but had to bow out due to scheduling.

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