Check out our review of the MLB 14: The Show game.
Baseball season is just around the corner. Spring Training is about to get underway, and pitchers have already begun to report to camps. It won’t be long now until newspaper sports sections and websites are filled with statistics dedicated to tracking the minutia of America’s pastime.
Unfortunately for fans of the sport, they still have a few months before the new season begins. For gamers, though, there is always MLB 14: The Show to help fill the gap.
This year’s version releases later this spring on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and the PS Vita. Of the three, the PS4 version is the most intriguing, as it’s the new kid on the block. There are no next-gen exclusive features, but there are other reasons to be excited for the PS4 version – specifically, the graphics.
Check out the visuals above and you should be able to get a sense of where the next-gen processing power is being spent. The most obvious example may be the beards. On the PS3 version, beards are just texture maps plastered to faces. By comparison, in the next-gen version, each beard has up to 40,000 individual hairs. The crowds are also vastly improved, and there are several character models that move in different ways. It isn’t just blocks of repeating fans, it is a stadium filled with digital individuals – or at least enough character models to fool the average gamer.
The grass is also made up of blades of grass rather than just a green colored floor with some added textures. The lighting has also been overhauled, which is evident in the way light now hits a player’s skin and how it casts shadows. Check out the screenshots and then watch the PS3 trailer for comparison.
MLB 14: The Show, will launch on the PS3 and PS Vita on April 1, 2014, the day after Major League Baseball’s opening day. PS4 fans will have to wait a little longer though. The Next-gen version will debut sometime in May.
Update: This article has been updated with the game’s release dates.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.