Author: Sam Machkovech

Lookit that imp fly!

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Everything about Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 seems designed to get in the way of the thing it gets right: giant, instantly accessible team battling on the Internet. If you're looking for an enjoyable evolution of the Team Fortress formula, complete with diverse, complementary character classes and 22-minute battles across staggeringly large maps, this one's pretty danged good—and easily the most kid-friendly team-battling game of its kind.

But boy, do EA and Popcap seem to have it in for players in search of that content. GW2 does a lousy job inviting players into its universe, because it wallops them over the head with a sloppily curated single-player campaign, a confusing meta-structure, and a ridiculous focus on grinding for content unlocks. In short, everything good about the original 2014 game has gotten better, and everything bad about it has gotten worse.

Rambo-styled cobs of corn

GW2's core concept remains the same as the original—meaning the series barely resembles the popular, accessible tower-defense game it's named after. Instead of hovering over a garden and placing amped-up plants to defend against a variety of silly, undead fighters, you now take direct control of a single creature on either side of the conflict and engage in one of a few types of online, third-person-shooter battling. Each character comes with its own primary, unlimited-ammo weapon and three recharge-to-use, class-specific powers, ranging from rocket launchers to acrobatic maneuvers, bombs, healing powers, and more.

Join the fight—for less. (And, well, get quite a bit less.) (credit: Activision)

If you've ever dreamt of a world in which you could buy a Call of Duty game without any of the campaign nonsense—no "press B to pay respects," no forced airport massacres—Activision has finally heard your prayers. Somewhat.

On Tuesday, the company snuck a special multiplayer-only variant of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 onto Steam's Windows store at the reduced price of $15. The Multiplayer Starter Pack has quite a few restrictions, the most peculiar of which is a limited-time-only sale window. Think of it like Activision's take on those old clamshell Disney VHS releases—meaning, on February 29, the MSP goes back into the vault, limited only to those who already bought it.

As expected, this reduced-price variant has axed the game's entire campaign mode, but it also removes the game's popular, multiplayer-friendly Zombies mode. MSP buyers can access public ranked multiplayer battles "with a level cap of 55," along with the "arena" ranking variant, the parkour-tastic "freerun" mode, the "cryptokey" exchange system for new online-combat loot, and weapon editing options in the "paintshop" and "gunsmith" menus.

Gotta catch 'em all in post-war Boston. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

We knew Fallout 4 DLC was coming, as evidenced by Bethesda launching a paid "season pass" voucher alongside the giant game in November, but we had no idea exactly what to expect in terms of add-ons. A Tuesday update on the developer's blog confirmed the game's first wave of 2016 paid content—and promises of so much that the price of a season pass will soon go up.

In a first for a major Bethesda game, Fallout 4 will also allow its PC players to access its DLC content early and for free, provided they become approved beta testers. Bethesda doesn't mean a limited-time free access, where you get into a beta and then lose the content and your progress in it; the developer says that approved DLC beta testers will get to keep all content for free and retain both progress and achievements as the DLC content is patched and approved ahead of retail launch. You'll want to sign up quickly at bethesda.net.

As of right now, three bunches of DLC have been announced, with only one having a description that sounds like a major plot-driven release. "Far Harbor" will launch in May at a $25/£20 price point, and it will ask players to hit the seas in search of a Valentine Detective Agency case on a new island. The other DLC, March's "Automatron" and April's "Wasteland Workshop," will focus largely on companion-related upgrades—dealing with robots and trappable pets, respectively—for the price of $10/£8 and $5/£4.

The words don't lie! Unless they do. A GameStop statement seems to counter this specific slide about PlayStation VR shown off by Sony's Shu Yoshida in March 2015. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Since its formal announcement nearly two years ago, Sony's unreleased virtual reality system has become more defined in the form of improved hardware, more game announcements, and a "final" product name. One older detail about PlayStation VR has remained unchanged since a major March 2015 event, however: a vague launch window of "the first half of 2016."

That time frame may have changed by way of an official comment from gaming retailer GameStop. A Monday morning segment on the Fox Business Channel included a guest spot from GameStop CEO Paul Raines, who spoke about the broad state of the gaming industry. During the discussion, he claimed that his chain's retail shops would begin selling PlayStation VR hardware "this fall."

Even if Raines' statement checks out, that's not to say the system has officially been delayed. PlayStation VR could launch elsewhere beforehand—perhaps through an online-only presale, much like Oculus did to allocate its "first shipments" of headsets on March 28. Still, unless Sony announces a hard release window soon, it's not clear how the company will manage to meet that "first half" window at this point in 2016.

M. Bison laughs at your puny GTX 750 Ti. (credit: Capcom)

Ars' review of Street Fighter V, which launches on PlayStation 4 consoles and Windows PCs this Tuesday, was based entirely on our impressions of the console version of the game. We're certainly curious how the game will run on various PC processors, video cards, and installed drivers, and we imagine forums will light up as fans try installing the game on all matter of machine.

In the meantime, the motherboard mavens at Eurogamer's Digital Foundry column have confirmed at least one apparently consistent issue with the PC version: gameplay that is locked to the framerate.

The above video, which hasn't yet been met with an accompanying Eurogamer article, shows exactly what happens when PC gamers try to run SFV's single-player modes with the "paltry" GTX 750 Ti, which retails for a little over $100 and includes 2GB of VRAM. Instead of running the game at normal clock speed, an underpowered computer—or an adequate one pushed too far settings-wise—will display all frames of animation, no matter how long it takes your computer to render them. Thus, if your PC would normally run the game at a locked 30 frames a second, SFV's current build will instead force the game to run at half speed, and if you're not quite up to the full 60 frames-per-second standard, slowdown will appear whenever your system needs more than 16.6 milliseconds to draw any frames.

Capcom

This white fireball is full of hurt.

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With each new Street Fighter game comes an intense amount of scrutiny from fighting-game fans who are eager to see how new characters and mechanics have shaken up world's most popular quarter-circle-motion fisticuffs series. That scrutiny only intensifies in the case of a big, fat number bump. This isn't just the "Super Ultra Turbo Chibi-Sumo Edition," this here's one louder, isn't it?

Street Fighter V will certainly have fans talking, what with its new "V-Trigger" system and other noticeable tweaks throughout its roster of old favorites, peculiar returners, and weird new brawlers. But for the first time in a new-number Street Fighter game, people will almost certainly talk more about what's missing.

Capcom has advertised this as the first, last, and only retail edition for Street Fighter V—meaning, the game will supposedly live on as a constantly updated service, complete with free balance patches, free mode updates, and not-quite-free content purchase options. What Capcom hasn't advertised is the fact that the game, as it's launching on Tuesday, is already in desperate need of those updates.

Yuh-oh—are we in for Yet Another Formulaic Comic Superhero Movie? On paper, Deadpool might seem that way. Its origin story sets up the launch of a brooding hero and a distressed damsel. Its cast is made up mostly of archetypes, including comic relief, stern ally, and bitter villain. Heck, its time-frozen, Matrix-styled intro, in which a climactic action scene is frozen so that cameras can spin all around it, has been done a bazillion times.

Luckily for us, this is Deadpool we're talking about. Marvel's latest comic-to-film conversion wastes no time in forcefully asserting itself as a very different kind of superhero flick.

Fourth-wall break!

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The film's first moment of weirdness arrives only seconds into the runtime, when that opening sequence starts flashing unusual text crawls. Instead of the usual production company credit, we're told this is "some douchebag's film" directed by "an overpaid tool" whose stars include "a moody teen," "a British villain," and "god's perfect idiot"—in this case, Ryan Reynolds, whose real-life face briefly floats between dead and dying bodies on the cover of People magazine.

(credit: Bungie)

Following rumors that the official sequel to Destiny would not arrive in time for its previously announced September 2016 window, Activision made the news formal as part of its Q4 fiscal report on Thursday.

The news of Destiny 2's "2017" release window—with no month or quarter mentioned—also came with the announcement of a previously unmentioned "large new expansion," which Activision "expects" to launch this year. No name or release window was included with that news. That may very well be bad news for Destiny's "25+ million registered users" that Activision bragged about in its statement, who the company says have logged "nearly 3 billion hours" inside of the game—and who are avidly complaining about a wave of underwhelming limited-time "events" in the game, particularly this week's Valentine's themed snoozer.

Activision announced good sales news for Call of Duty: Black Ops III, which it dubbed "the number one console game globally for the calendar year." The company claims to have released "four of the top ten games on next-generation consoles life-to-date," including CODBLOPS3 in the top position. In absolutely shocking and world-shaking news, Activision said gamers could expect another Call of Duty game by the end of 2016—to be designed by Infinity Ward.

Earlier this week, Internet Archive software collector and historian Jason Scott answered our phone call to talk about one of his latest efforts: the Malware Museum, which offered online passersby a glimpse at how nearly 80 classic viruses worked once they infected an MS-DOS computer. We enjoyed picking his brain about the collection and told him so, at which point he stopped us from hanging up the phone.

"I have one more drop for you," Scott said. "On Thursday, we're going to put up a bunch of Windows 3.1 software. What we did for MS-DOS, we're doing for Windows 3.1."

We were immediately intrigued, remembering exactly what Scott and his slew of Archive.org volunteers did for MS-DOS and other computing and gaming platforms. Thanks to that team's efforts, thousands of seemingly lost pieces of software had found new life, all brought back to life with free downloads and a mighty fine web-browser emulation solution. From beloved classics like Oregon Trail to cult hits like Karateka, the collection's thousands of titles seemed to have it all.

Enlarge / Another Oculus bundled product: four months of Unity Pro. (credit: Oculus)

The creators of the Unity game engine kicked off a virtual reality focused event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and it began with a wave of freebie announcements—perhaps most notably, the news that all Oculus Rift buyers will get four months of free, unfettered access to Unity Pro.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was on hand at the Vision Summit 2016 to confirm the news, pointing back to Oculus' original decision to offer shorter free trials to the VR headset maker's dev kit products. "For virtual reality, we knew a lot of the best ideas and applications weren't going to come from people that you could predict," Luckey told the Vision Summit crowd. "It was gonna come from people who would create things you wouldn't expect."

This news follows prior bundled-software announcements, including a copy of Eve: Valkyrie for every headset pre-order and a copy of the cute platformer Lucky's Tale with all headsets, which may help the slightest bit with the $600 headset's sticker shock.