Pixelkin

The Plants vs. Zombies franchise has exponentially expanded its audience and game types over the years. In 2014, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare ushered in an entirely new and refreshing take on the quirky universe. Now Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 has done everything a sequel should do. It stays true to its gameplay while adding in enough new content to make the game feel like the next step up.

The final major player in the virtual reality market has finally announced its release date and price. PlayStation VR will be launching in October and will cost $399, though if you don’t already own a PlayStation 4 camera, you’ll need to lay down an extra $60 for the headset to work.

The launch announcement was made by Andrew House, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, made the announcement via video, which you can see above, and a post on the official PlayStation blog.

When you’ve been married for 12 years, there are few things you can do besides murdering your partner in their sleep (gotcha!) that will surprise them. Which is why it was so satisfying to say to my husband, after he told me that I would hate Wondershot, that, in fact, I liked it quite a bit. Because I am still a delicate mystery, an onion with many layers, and will you please bring me a roll of paper towels because we ran out of toilet paper and I forgot to go to the store.

See? Mystery.

This month, Pixelkin asked me to review Wondershot, a game which, I learned, is a big deal in the indie gaming world, having won the Game To Play award at Indie Games Play 2015. The reviews I read said that it was a great “couch co-op” game. I don’t know what this means, because to me a “couch co-op” sounds like a rental plan for hobos. I do like couches, though, and I liked that this game was supposed to be great for families to play together. So I let my kids have at it, and then one afternoon I sat down with my 8-year-old son, who took me through it.

Ubisoft announced today a new game they’re making for a number of VR platforms. Werewolves Within is designed to recreate the experience of playing a board game with friends by using VR.

The game is being developed by Red Storm Entertainment in collaboration with Ubisoft Barcelona. Werewolves Within has players tracking down werewolves that have been terrorizing the residents of a small medieval town. The game is specifically a multiplayer game with support for five to eight players. Specific roles with different abilities are assigned to each player. These roles change every round so no one player has an unfair advantage. Werewolves Within can be played with just friends or others through matchmaking features.

Conventional wisdom may still say video games are a bad thing, but the evidence is slowly piling up: moderate video gaming is associated with emotional and intellectual intelligence. A new study in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology says video game use is associated with better academic functioning and sociability in grade-schoolers. Lee Banville, in an article in Games and Learning, interpreted the study for us non-medical types.

According to Banville, the study, called “Is time spent playing video games associated with mental health, cognitive and social skills in young children?” found that “kids who played video games five or more hours a week did better in school and suffered no emotional or mental health problems.” The study came out of Columbia University and included data on kids aged 6 to 11 from six European Union countries.

Players have been waiting for the next expansion to the popular card game Hearthstone. First announced at the beginning of February, the expansion will bring some big changes to the game including a new game mode. Now we’ve got some more details on the expansion, which is titled Whispers of the Old Gods.

The story behind the expansion is that all of that noisy Hearthstone playing in the tavern has awoken some pretty nasty characters. But the story isn’t really important in the game at all. What is important are some of the details that have just been revealed. Whispers of the Old Gods will bring with it 134 new cards including four new legendary cards.

If you’re a game designer, visual novelist, or filmmaker interested in interactive storytelling and diversity, this may be the opportunity for you. Games for Change and Interlude, makers of the Treehouse authoring platform, are teaming up to sponsor an interactive storytelling competition called The Challenge of Diversity. Competitors will create an interactive video series to discuss “the opportunities, difficulties, and complexities of living in the most diverse country on Earth.”

Entries will consist of a 3-minute pilot and the treatment for two additional episodes. The winning submission will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. The winners will get $10,000 toward the production of episodes two and three of their series.

With the huge success of Hearthstone, it’s only natural that other game developers will try to copy its massive appeal. That’s exactly what the developers at PopCap are doing with their own beloved franchise in the form of Plants vs. Zombies Heroes.

Nicole, Linda, Courtney, and Stephen talk about news and more news, especially all the big news from Nintendo. Then, as always, we talk about what we’re playing.

The new Korean MMORPG Black Desert takes the kinetic action-based combat of Assassin’s Creed, the open world freedom of Skyrim, and a community of thousands of players, and combines these elements in what many are calling the first in a generation of new MMOs. It’s tough to foretell how far this MMO will go, but it has sparked plenty of well-deserved interest.

Many of the innovations in Black Desert are refinements of familiar features in the MMO genre. It’s a high fantasy setting with established quest chains to help you learn the game and escort you through the world. As players venture from town to town, they have tasks to go out and smash a certain number of some local monster. The tasks range from the familiar— fending off encroaching imps—to the somewhat bizarre, like attacking bees.

Fire Emblem may not be as recognizable as Final Fantasy or Pokemon. But it is one of the most prolific franchises in gaming. Fire Emblem Fates combines the series’ trademark chess-like battles with building up relationships between your soldiers. The tale of family, love, and war remains captivating throughout each tactical battle.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out 10 years ago for Nintendo GameCube and Wii. Now it’s been rereleased with HD graphics for the Wii U. The new version is mostly the same as the original, but with a few key updates.

When you hear the name Professor Jellyrobot, you’ll probably think of a…robot of some sort? Well, honestly I’m not sure what you would think, but I’m pretty sure you won’t come up with the right guess. You see, Professor Jellyrobot is a wolf. More specifically, he is my daughter’s wolf and her main avatar in Animal Jam. She loves him and the game. And I love watching her play. That’s why it’s unfortunate that a recent update to the game makes me love it less.

Lots and Lots of Animals Animal Jam, for the uninitiated, is a free-to-play multiplayer online role-playing game for kids that was developed with coordination from National Geographic Kids. Everything is all about animals in this game. It contains little factoids about animals in pretty much every load screen, and the game also features videos from National Geographic. Don’t let the multiplayer part scare you. Like most other online games for kids, your child doesn’t have to interact with anyone else to play. And you can customize settings to something you feel comfortable with.

I wish I were in Sweden this weekend to see this: the rollout of a test version of a VR viewer in McDonald’s restaurants. That’s right, for about $4, Swedes will be able to purchase a VR viewer. It’ll be as easy as 1, 2, 3 for parents to fold up the red cardboard viewer, insert their smartphone, and hand the virtual reality viewer to their toddlers to try out.

AdWeek reports that the VR viewers, called Happy Goggles, will be available for a limited time. The opportunity coincides with a traditional Swedish ski holiday, and kids will be able to use the Happy Goggles to play a skiing-themed game.

A few months ago, my 8-year-old daughter was having problems with the kids on her bus. They were making fun of her because she was crying. Why she was crying isn’t really important, but this wasn’t the first time this had happened. We talked about it afterward. I tried to explain to her that most 8-year-olds don’t cry a lot unless something really bad or sad happens to them. She said she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.

“I told them I have autism, Daddy. But that didn’t help.”

My daughter was diagnosed with high-functioning autism six years ago. You’d be unlikely to know she’s autistic when meeting her for the first time. She doesn’t present many of the stereotypical behaviors that go along with how people understand autism. She’s friendly, bubbly, and social, almost to a fault. It’s only when something happens to cause a “meltdown,” which usually manifests as a loud burst of tears, that she presents as anything other than neurotypical. But she’s different than the other kids, and that brings with it a number of strengths and weaknesses that are unique to her as a girl with autism.

Earlier this month we got some of the details on the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront DLC package: it’s called the Outer Rim and one of the places you’ll be able to do battle is Jabba the Hutt’s palace. However, there wasn’t any information on whether we would be seeing the crime boss of Tatooine himself. Now we know. He’s coming as part of a free update to the game.

According to an official trailer (which you can see above) there will be a new gameplay element called Hutt Contracts. Details on the new gameplay weren’t given, but you can see Jabba very clearly, holding a hologram of various weapons. This means it’s probably a safe bet that we’ll see some new weapons too.