” data-medium-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Microsoft-buys-Activision-Blizzard-1280×717.jpg” data-large-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Microsoft-buys-Activision-Blizzard-1280×717.jpg” />Those of us who thought Microsoft was done with big money gaming purchases after its $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media last year were sorely mistaken, it seems. Today, Microsoft announced its intention to buy Activision Blizzard for a staggering $68.7 billion. With this acquisition, a lot of popular game franchises will come under the ownership of Microsoft, including Call … Continue reading
It took more than a decade, but Weird Al is finally about to get the documentary he has always deserved. You may recall back in 2010 Funny Or Die released a trailer for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The clip promised an unflinching look at Yankovic’s life with performances from actors like Aaron Paul, Olvia Wilde and Gary Cole. We’re not about to get that film (sadly), but Roku may just give us the next best thing.
The company announced today it’s backing production on WEIRD: The Weird Al Jankovic Story. Instead of Aaron Paul as Yankovic, we get Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe. Eric Appel, best known for his work on Silicon Valley and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, co-wrote the film’s script alongside Yankovic and is directing the project. If Appel’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he directed the 2010 trailer for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
“I am absolutely thrilled that Daniel Radcliffe will be portraying me in the film,” Yankovic said in a statement. “I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for.” WEIRD: The Weird Al Yankovic Story doesn’t have a release date yet, but production on the film is slated to start next month. Once it’s ready, it will be available to watch for free on The Roku Channel.
Dungeons & Dragons is bigger right now than than it’s ever been before, and its designers have spent nearly eight years building on its latest incarnation. A new introductory collection wants to tie all of those post Player’s Handbook design decisions together, and cut a path towards whatever’s next.
Microsoft set the stage for a battle against Chromebooks when it released Windows 11 SE late last year, and now the troops have arrived in the form of low-cost laptops designed for students.
Microsoft is acquiring gaming giant Activision Blizzard in a deal worth just shy of $69 billion—which the Xbox owner says will allow it to gain access to hundreds of millions of gamers and position it as “the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.”
Microsoft just made one of the largest-ever bids for a game studio. The company has announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard for $95 per share, valuing the all-cash deal at an enormous $68.7 billion. The deal would make the combined entity the “third-largest” game company by revenue, according to Microsoft, and would put titles like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush under the company’s wing. Microsoft plans to add Activision Blizzard games to Game Pass as part of the deal.
Mobile gaming is also a significant factor in the acquisition, Microsoft said. On top of folding King’s phone games into Microsoft’s business, the purchase promises to bring franchises like Halo and Warcraft to more devices.
The buyout is expected to close sometime in Microsoft’s fiscal 2023 (no later than June 2023) if regulators and Activision Blizzard shareholders greenlight the move. The boards of directors for both companies have already approved the deal.
While news of the purchase comes as Activision Blizzard is still embroiled in a misconduct scandal, you shouldn’t expect significant leadership changes. Bobby Kotick will remain Activision Blizzard’s CEO despite calls for his resignation, and will now report to Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer. In a company letter, Kotick described Microsoft’s move as a chance to “further strengthen” Activision Blizzard’s workplace culture and “set a new standard” for inclusiveness.
OlliOlli and its sequel, OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood, are notoriously difficult to master. These side-scrolling skateboarding games start out easily enough, but if you want to complete every challenge, get ready to play and replay some levels dozens of times over. It can be infuriating, but also extremely satisfying to pull off just the right combo of tricks and grinds needed for a big score.
I was worried that OlliOlli World, a new direction for the series that arrives on February 8th, was going to dispense with that level of challenge. After playing an extended preview of the game over the last week, I’m no longer concerned. Developer Roll7 has made a game that’s significantly more approachable than the original titles — but one that keeps the twitch-response gameplay and score-chasing highs intact for those who crave them.
For the uninitiated, OlliOlli World is a, 2.5D skateboarding platformer where your character simply has to make it from one end of the course to the other while pulling off as many tricks and combos as possible. That’s the same basic formula as the original games, but the scope of OlliOlli World is much greater. The game is split into five different areas, three of which were playable in my demo. The first one, Sunshine Valley, had close to 20 distinct levels, a handful of which were merely training levels meant to introduce the basics of skating, grinding and pulling off different tricks. But even if you don’t count those levels, there’s far more to explore in OlliOlli World than the two earlier games, each of which had 50 levels total.
There’s a host of ways to challenge yourself as you skate through these levels. For starters, you need to navigate grind rails, gaps, ramps and other obstacles to get to the end before you can progress. In a concession to the game’s history of bruising difficulty, though, levels now have checkpoints — so if you blow it 90 percent of the way through the level, you can try that last segment again. Of course, if you had a huge combo going that got interrupted, you’ll lose out on that opportunity for big points. But this at least makes it easier to learn levels and work on problem spots without having to tackle the entire course again.
But the levels are both extremely well designed and visually interesting, so I was eager to play and replay them until I mastered all the challenges and found as many secrets as I possibly could. The world is populated with colorful and fantastical creatures like walking bananas, smiling trees, giant bees holding signs for you to wall ride on, huge frogs (sometimes riding those giant bees) and, of course, the Skate Godz that you meet at the end of each world.
Roll7
See, your character is on a quest to become the new Skate Wizard, with the help of a goofy and delightful animated crew, including Chiffon, the one-eyed, pipe-smoking current Skate Wizard who’s ready to retire. To take their place, you’ll need to meet all of the Skate Godz that inhabit the five different zones you can play through. Each level has some banter with your crew as well as people you meet on your journeys, full of ridiculous puns and occasional advice on how to improve your scores or pull off new moves. You can skip it if you want, but it helped me get in the headspace of the gorgeous world of Radlandia.
It’s hard to sum up in words what makes the individual levels in OlliOlli World so compelling, but they mix serious challenge in with moments that let you really get into that elusive flow state, where you’re just pulling off tricks, riding rails and generally tearing through a course without thinking too much about what you’re doing. The music, sound effects, art style, level design and variety of moves you can pull off all contribute to this vibe — and even though the game looks entirely different from its predecessors, the end result is the same: skateboarding bliss.
My skills from the original OlliOlli games translated here, but there are plenty of new things to challenge long-time players. The game isn’t straight 2D anymore, which means there are multiple paths you can discover through many levels, something that seriously adds to replayability and challenge of these levels. Each level has multiple goals you’re presented with at the beginning, and meeting them all will almost certainly require multiple plays, especially as the game goes on and the tracks get more complex.
Indeed, by the time I got about halfway through the third world in the game, I was seriously struggling to check off all of a level’s goals. The good news is you can keep progressing without beating all three challenges, nor are you penalized for using checkpoints, but the game is so well designed that I wanted to keep going back and trying to best my earlier scores and nail those goals.
Roll7
There are plenty of new moves like grabs to pull off, and quarter-pipes let you change the direction your skater is going in. It sounds simple, but having your skater go right-to-left instead of the opposite really threw me for a loop, but I also audibly cheered the first time I skated into one of those quarter-pipes. They add a whole new dimension to the game that I wasn’t expecting.
It’s also worth mentioning some of the other ways Roll7 made this game more approachable than the earlier ones. Besides the aforementioned checkpoints, it’s a lot harder to wipe out now. Earlier games required you to press a button when landing, or else you’d lose all your momentum as well as the points you accumulated from a trick. Now, you can land without having to worry about that step — but pulling off so-called “perfect” landings increases your speed and score.
The main game is a deep experience, but Roll7 added new features for those who love to chase high scores. Every time you finish a level, you’ll see a rival player’s score that you’re then challenged to best. It’s subtle, just showing your rival’s high score beneath your best score — but these challenges taunted me into playing a few extra rounds to try and beat that challenge. OlliOlli World is smart enough to match you with players of your own skill level, so if your high score tops out at 100,000, you won’t be challenged to beat someone who got 1 million on a level; the rival scores are usually around 20 percent higher than your own best. It’s good encouragement to push yourself even harder through a level.
OlliOlli World also offers daily challenges through the Gnarvana League, which you unlock once you finish the game’s first area. Here, you join a league where you’re pitted against nine competitors who again skate at a similar skill level to you. The levels change every day, and you’re simply trying to put up the best score in your group. As you play, you can get promoted to other leagues, where the courses presumably will get trickier. I’ll readily admit that after putting up a score that put me on top of my group, I kept my eyes on the league throughout the day to see if I’d have to replay it and improve my score to keep that top spot.
Roll7
Finally, there’s a random level generator that you can use to challenge your friends or strangers to put up their best score. The Gnarvana Portal is extremely simple, letting you pick a level’s “style,” which is based on the five main worlds in the game. You can then choose one of four difficulty levels and set the course’s length. Once it’s generated, you can share that course via an eight-digit postcode. That code lets anyone else try your level, regardless of what platform they’re playing on, and you again compete to see who can put up the highest score. The fun thing is that anyone can try this, so you can give the postcode to a few close friends, or post it online and challenge anyone you want.
For the first time in an OlliOlli game, you can also customize your character to your heart’s content. There are a ton of clothing options, hairstyles, skateboard designs, skin color options and much more here, and you’ll unlock much more as you check off the different challenges each level offers. Unlike the first two games’ single, generic male skater design, you can make a character here that truly fits your personality.
There’s a ton of game here for $30, and the Roll7 team has at least two DLC expansions planned for later this year (both of which are included if you order the $45 Rad Edition). If you have even a passing interest in skateboarding or platformer games, OlliOlli World is absolutely worth your time. It’s deeper, brighter, bigger and more fun than the original games, and I expect it’ll be a hit with hardcore OlliOllli fanatics as well as a much bigger new audience experiencing the thrill of this meditative skating series for the first time.
OlliOlli World will be available on the Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC on February 8th.
Most of us have been using YouTube for years, and so you probably don’t think much about all of its various settings. But the Google-owned video platform has added so many features and tools in recent years that you’re probably missing some of its most useful capabilities—both on the website and the apps.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
