Review Of The Year 2014: December

You shouldn’t really need a recap of December. Well, you might need some help remembering the festive period, perhaps due to a few too many bottles of alcohol that you received as gifts. I know I do, which doesn’t really bode well for this article, does it?

December, as per usual, was quite cold. We didn’t get that white Christmas that we desire but there were a few patches of snow here and there. In Scotland, it was mainly that rainy, horrible sleet which freezes over as soon as it touches the ground, making even the thought of going outside a task. I only slipped three times this year, I think that’s a new record.

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PSN and Xbox Live went down over Christmas, which made a lot of people sad as they couldn’t use their new gifts to their full potential. This was a bad move by so called “hackers” who overloaded the services by throwing a lot of traffic at them. I don’t know why driving vehicles into server rooms would bring online services down, but it worked.

There was an actual hack in another part of Sony – their movie division. This was allegedly from North Korea, and hundreds of terabytes of data was taken. This hack actually happened towards the end of November, but it was December where we saw the bulk of the leaks, including a forthcoming Mario Movie.

This hack led to the cancellation of the Seth Rogen and James Franco film The Interview, which saw the duo as television producer and host respectively who were working with the CIA to assassinate North Korea’s Glorious Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. However, after Obama said he wanted to watch the film and said it was a bad move, they released the movie on demand and in cinemas (in the US) over Christmas. Aww, how nice.

Earlier this month, we saw the first PlayStation Experience event – yet another thing that had us glued to our screens and keyboards to write up news, as well as the Game Awards, which was more like the Trailer Premiers as Geoff Keighley seemed to forget about the awards themselves, most of which were announced off-screen. Hey, while we’re here, why not check out our Game of the Year awards so far? There’s no new trailers in there but we actually spent a lot of time on them.

So we saw some of the new Legend of Zelda game at the awards, which looks phenomenal, but the PlayStation Experience had much more to give, including the first gameplay footage of Uncharted 4, which looks absolutely incredible. Ralph Baer, the father of video games, who pioneered home console technology with his Brown Box – the first game console – unfortunately passed away the day before these events. We really owe all of this to him.

In terms of game releases, December was as barren as usual, with the only AAA release being The Crew. We saw a new Telltale series in the form of Game of Thrones and Lara Croft & The Temple of Osiris also saw a late December release. Quite a quiet month then, as we said, but there was also the expansive Destiny Dark Below DLC which brought many people back to the game, embarking on the Raid as well as the story missions.

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This, of course, led us towards the festive period which we’ve just been celebrating. Hopefully you all managed to spend time with your families – and your new games – and the PSN/XBL downtime didn’t affect you too much.

We certainly had a great time, even though I had to spend some of it writing about December, and while it was a stressful time for the first half of the month, as we tried to get all of our festive features written up and organised, we like to think it paid off as we got some time off and you got quality reads like this.

2 Comments

  1. Got to say I wasn’t too fussed at all personally about the psn downtime. I was never going to play much playstation on Christmas day, it was a touch irritating on boxing day but forced me to play the cod single player campaign which I’m enjoying.
    Destiny dlc can sod off, too expensive, too little content and it’s divided the community like no other game I’ve ever known before. Shockingly bad decisions made by bungie!

  2. Downtime didnt affect me at all really but i felt bad for those people who got new consoles on christmas day and had it ruined by a bunch of asshats with nothing better to do. They wanted to turn people against Sony/MS but all they did was turn people against themselves.

    I really do hope they catch these fools and give them ridiculously long prison sentences to deter others from doing this again. I suppose public flogging is out of the question? Anyway, imagine all those poor, pissed off inmates who couldnt play on their personal consoles in their cells over the holidays. I imagine they’d like to have a word with these douchebags.

    Are the new Destiny ‘story’ missions any different to the main game or do you still just fight your way through endless rooms of enemies until you reach the end marker. Then fight hundreds of enemies whilst your floating ghost thingy scans a rock… Rinse and repeat?

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