Author: Kyle Orland

Since Amazon launched its free Lumberyard game engine yesterday, the world has been united in a single question: are we legally allowed to use the engine to operate life-saving infrastructure during the zombie apocalypse? After digging through Amazon's updated terms of service for the new engine, we can now confirm that the answer is a definitive "yes."

Don't believe us? Go to the Amazon Web Services TOS and scroll down to rule 57.10. There you'll see the following (emphasis added):

57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

As obvious jokes hidden in legal boilerplate go, Amazon's efforts fall a little short of the Divinity: Original Sin EULA, which gave out rewards to the first 100 people who bothered reading through the boring language. And the humorous clause diverts attention away from other, potentially more worrying clauses therein, like the engine's collection of "information about system and server resources, features used in the integrated development environment, frequency and duration of use, geographic and network locations, and error and information messages."

Things are looking mighty grim for long-lived gaming accessory maker Mad Catz this week, the company perhaps best known for making those cheap off-brand controllers you forced your younger sibling to use. Despite seeing significant sales from a publishing deal for Harmonix's Rock Band 4, Mad Catz announced that it is laying off 37 percent of its staff amid massive financial losses and a significant executive restructuring.

There were hints of trouble earlier in the week, when Mad Catz announced that longtime President and CEO Darren Richardson was resigning, alongside SVP of Business Affairs Whitney Peterson. Then the real bad news came down last night in the form of the company's quarterly earnings report: a $4.36 million loss for the last nine months of 2015, up from an $809,000 loss from a year before.

Mad Catz has been in dire financial straits since last summer, when the company notified investors that it was at risk of defaulting on its debt. At the time, Mad Catz executives said they were counting on a Rock Band 4 publishing deal to lead to "significant growth in sales and gross profit."

Last month when Oculus announced the surprising $599 price for its Rift virtual reality headset, the company also promised upcoming bundles that would include the Rift and a PC that has been certified as "Oculus Ready." Today, Oculus revealed details of the first branded PCs in that Oculus Ready line, which will be available for pre-order starting at $1,499 when bundled with a Rift headset.

At the low end of the line, the ASUS G11CD, Alienware X51 R3, and Dell XPS 8900 SE all barely squeak by with Oculus' minimum required specs for the Rift. Those low-end Oculus Ready towers all sport an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and Intel i5 processors and sell for $1,499 to $1,599 when bundled with a Rift.

At the high end of the line, the Oculus Ready Alienware Area 51 has an Nvidia GTX 980, 16GB of RAM, and an i7 processor for a whopping $2,549 MSRP (and that's before you purchase the Rift). Asus and Alienware also offer a few Oculus Ready options somewhere in the middle of the price/power continuum.

A major game piracy group says it will cease releasing any its DRM- and copy protection-stripping cracks for the next year, ostensibly to examine whether or not its efforts have any material effect on game sales. But there's little reason to expect this "experiment" to yield any useful results.

Torrentfreak reports that Chinese piracy collective 3DM has decided in an "internal meeting" not to crack any more single-player games as of the Chinese New Year, which was on February 8. Then, after a year spent away from the cracking scene, the group says it will "take a look at the situation... to see if genuine sales have grown."

That's an interesting idea, but it's hard to imagine 3DM's unilateral action having that much effect on legitimate game sales. After all, there are plenty of other active groups in the cracking "scene" that will try to fight to increase their own exposure by filling the hole left by 3DM. And even if every major cracking group collectively decided to take a break, some bored kids with debuggers and too much free time would no doubt step up to fill in the overwhelming demand for cracked games.

I'm not a big fan of getting lost... mainly because I do it so often. In the real world, if I'm not being actively guided by a GPS voice or a human navigator, I generally end up hopelessly off course. In games (especially first-person games), I usually need a detailed mini-map or a big, flashing arrow pointing me in precisely the direction I need to go. Otherwise, I tend to meander around the game world, trying in vain to remember which paths I've already tried and which landmarks I've already seen.

Yet I didn't really mind getting lost in Firewatch. In fact, by the time I made it to the game's somewhat abrupt end, I found myself wishing I'd had more opportunities to get lost in its detailed, well-built wilderness.

Getting lost is incredibly easy in Firewatch's intimate sliver of national forest. Instead of a mini-map or a bright flashing arrow, protagonist Henry gets a compass and a less-than-detailed paper map that he has to physically hold in front of him to even see where he is (you can turn off the flashing red dot that pinpoints your location on the map if you want to really test your navigation abilities).

The good news is that XCOM 2 actually does support the use of a handheld gamepad for today's launch, despite early promises to the contrary. The bad news is that the support is limited to Valve's decidedly non-standard Steam Controller for the time being.

Backing up a bit, Firaxis announced back in June that the PC-exclusive XCOM 2 would not bring along its predecessor's surprisingly competent support for standard console controllers (which was a necessity for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game). At the time, Creative Director Jake Solomon told IGN that the team tweaked XCOM 2's on-screen user interface to be mouse-and-keyboard friendly. Though there were vague nods toward supporting gamepads "in the future," such support was not supposed to be ready at launch.

Then, last night, Firaxis took to the XCOM 2 Steam page to explain that the game was getting launch-day controller support... as long as you have a Steam Controller. The "early access" native integration for the Steam Controller, being developed in conjunction with Valve, reportedly lets players:

The last time we checked in on the sales battle between the big name video game consoles, Microsoft had seen its annual sales increase, but not fast enough to catch up to the still-surging PS4. The same trend was apparent in 2015's all-important holiday quarter, which saw Sony continuing to extend its sales lead over the competition.

In recent earnings reports for the fourth calendar quarter last year (October through December), Sony announced shipments of 8.4 million PS4 units to retailers (Fig. 1), a record for the system and a 2 million unit improvement from the 2014 holiday quarter (more on the difference between shipments and "sell-through" below). Nintendo, however, announced 1.87 million shipments of Wii U hardware. That marks the system's second straight year of slight decreases in holiday performance, which came despite the availability of well-regarded 2015 releases like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker.

Remember a little over a year ago when Nintendo announced it was taking some of its focus off of making video games and consoles to develop a "Quality of Life" sensor that monitors your sleep? That was weird, right? Apparently, Nintendo has come to this conclusion too, and the company has officially put the effort on hold.

"In regards to the Quality of Life [device], which was not mentioned in any of today’s questions, we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product,” Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said during an investors Q&A session (translated by Wired). "We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016."

The remarks echo similar comments Kimishima made to the Japanese newspaper Asahi (as translated by Kotaku), where he said the sleep-tracker is "not yet at the level of a Nintendo product. If we can release it, we’ll release it. If we can’t, then we’ll examine things further."

The wait for "spring 2016" just got a little more specific and easier to bear, as Bethesda Softworks has announced its Doom reboot will be released on PS4, Xbox One, and Windows on May 13. Players will be able to buy the game for $60 or invest in a $120 collectors edition that includes a 12-inch Revenant demon statue and a metal case. Players who decide to put their money down early will get a "Demon Multiplayer Pack" as a preorder bonus, a package that includes a number of cosmetic upgrades and six "Hack Modules" that can be used for a one-time boost in multiplayer.

Today's announcement comes alongside a new campaign trailer, shown above, which... actually doesn't tell us that much about the game's campaign. Instead, the jumpcut-filled trailer is packed with lots of extremely gory shooting action and almost no indication that the game has an actual plotline to speak of. Which is kind of how it should be when it comes to Doom.

The game originally known as Doom 4 was first announced way back in 2008, and largely unseen by the public during its long and reportedly troubled development. The game was eventually renamed to just Doom and first shown off in its new form at Quakecon 2014.

Nearly a year after promising to "completely stop talking to the press," famed game designer Peter Molyneux is... talking to the press. Specifically, he's breaking his silence in a wide-ranging and reflective interview with Eurogamer to promote Godus Wars, a new real-time strategy twist on the faltering god game.

To be fair, a year is a long time for a serial over-promiser like Molyneux to keep publicly quiet about what he's working on. The direct cause of the long silence, as Molyneux himself admits directly to Eurogamer, was a February 2015 Rock Paper Shotgun interview that led off with the blunt question "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?"

"It was one of the most bruising moments of my life," Molyneux told Eurogamer. "My world changed after that interview. ... That was the point where I said, this is just not going to work. To be called a pathological liar, which he said at the start... it's just not going to work, because how do you ever gain people's trust and belief after a journalist says that?"