GameSpot

Killer Instinct gets a bonus fighter, Omen

Killer Instinct announced the fifth fighter joining the game during Season 2, Omen, Herald of Gargos.

Omen will be a bonus character, meaning he's not one of the eight characters you'd normally get with the season. At the moment, he's only available to those who bought the Season 2 pack, and Microsoft said it has no plans to sell him individually.

"His moveset has some familiar normals from Jago, some new ones, and his specials are either all-new or ones that only the boss version of Shadow Jago used," Microsoft Studios Creative Director Adam Isgreen said on the game's official forums.

Paying Your way ahead: Are premium in-game boosts fair or foul?

As video game consoles have become increasingly online-centric, the games industry has experimented with different ways of making money from the opportunities this has presented. One such example: offering paid boosts that provide players with in-game money or immediate access to unlockables (be it cars, guns, or whatever else).

Several developers have been implementing these boosts in their games over the past few years. For example, Battlefield 4 has "Battlepacks" for purchase that give you several items and sometimes temporary experience boosts, and even World of Warcraft allows you to pay for your character to automatically level up to 90. Grid Autosport is one of the latest games to offer such a boost, releasing a "Boost Pack" DLC for $3 that makes you earn experience and in-game cash more quickly. This sparked a discussion online about why these kinds of things are offered, resulting in an astonishingly honest explanation from developer Codemasters' community manager: "It sells."

Why you should play P.T.

There was a time once, when I'd have to wring out a year's worth of entertainment from the single game I'd get gifted during the holidays. I'd internalize its minutiae, commit every inch to memory...and maybe that'd take me to March. That left nine more months to meticulously probe the walls of every level like a Jurassic Park velociraptor looking for a weak point in its cage. When you only get one game a year, every play-through is a deep dive.

P.T. is that in microcosm. It brooks no other playstyles. Your unidentified character awakens in a room, that room leads to a hallway, and that hallway leads to... the same hallway, ad infinitum. The two of you grow quite acquainted. You learn all its creaks and its corners; by now, I could probably navigate my way to its bathroom in the dark as though it were my own apartment. Though my bathroom doesn't come with the bloodstains and spectres.