We have been a bit inactive here at Drop Bear Gaming so far in 2013 due to a number of unforeseen things. Excessive work at our day jobs, illness, my laptop committing seppuku and the other distractions of life have meant we haven’t managed to get many posts up here. We are working to rectify this but to make up for not really covering anything this year I’ve decided to give a run down on what big news has been happening in the gaming world in no particular order.

– First and foremost the PS4 was announced! The next gen of consoles is well and truly on its way into our living rooms and if the things mentioned at the PS4 announcement all ring true it looks like the new PlayStation will be packing a punch. While most of the details will mostly be shared at E3 in June this year, Sony have definitely given us some tasty morsels. They gave us rough technical specs, trailers for new games, to the old promise of remote play with the Vita and mention of a redesign for the PSN so it sucks less. Yay! All of this without ever actually showing us what the new console will look like, although they did show off the DualShock 4 which will have a super handy Share button. Rumours abound that Microsoft will be unveiling the next Xbox sometime in April so stay tuned.

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– Ubisoft managed to enrage a whole lot of Wii U owners when they made an announcement about the Wii U exclusive title Rayman Legends. It’s no longer exclusive and will be coming out on the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well, oh but that’s not all. The game which was finished and ready to go on sale will be kept on warehouse shelves until the other versions are ready so they can all go on sale at once. Ouch. As a PS3 owner who loved Rayman Origins though I say yay again!

– A whole bunch of other games have been announced including but not limited to:

• • Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag will expand upon the excellent naval system from AC3 and will have gamers stepping into the shoes of Edward Kenway, grandfather of Connor. Hopefully he’s a more enjoyable character than Connor ended up being. It will be coming to Xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii U on October 31st. It will also be coming to the PS4, with an additional 60 minutes of gameplay exclusive to purchasers of the game for either of the PlayStation systems.

• A new Thief game is being made by Eidos Montreal, the same people who made Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While it is Thief 4, it will be going by the title of Thief to save us having to have another 4th game in a series. It will be coming to PC and next gen consoles in 2014.
• Pokemon X and Y were announced for the Nintendo 3DS which is great for all the pokemon fans out there, although it is moving in a slightly new direction. X and Y will do away with the top-down navigation of the game world opting instead for a third person 3D world.
• Saints Row 4 was announced and given a release date of August 23rd 2013. It was of course originally set to be DLC for the third but it was fleshed out to make a whole new game which is not a bad thing considering how amazing Saints Row The Third was. A pretty good option for the struggling publisher THQ, but it turned out to be too little too late to save them.

– THQ went bankrupt and was sold off in pieces to a number of different companies. All the in-house developers THQ owned including Vigil and Volition were picked up, as well as all the game IPs they owned. All that is, except for Darksiders which gives me a sad face. Those games were massively underrated and it’s a shame that we won’t get to see another one made. I think there is still a warehouse somewhere full of uDraw units somewhere as well, so if anyone out there needs to balance a wonky table you should look into that.

– Skyrim DLC finally arrived on the PSN Store. Not sure if anyone was still holding out for that all this time but if they were, good for them.

– The PS Vita got a price cut in Japan, but not anywhere else in the world. Disappointing. Although I already own one, it’d be nice if I wasn’t the only one.

– PAX Australia tickets are pretty much all sold out! If you were hoping to get to Melbourne for it then you should probably hurry up as only Friday passes are available and they are very nearly all gone. It’s going to be huge so I would definitely suggest it.

– Australia has finally got our R18+ rating for video games and the first one was ironically put on the game that will sell the least anyway. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus on the Vita. Now I’m not saying it’s not a good game but I just mentioned that no one owns a Vita. Anyway God Of War Ascension got an R rating as well and I’m sure there will be plenty more so yay for progressive policy changes!

– DC Comics nerds rejoice! More characters have been announced for Injustice: Gods Among Us, as well as the Blackest Night DLC which will give zombie skins to your favourite DC heroes and villains. The game is set for release April 17th and will include such excellent DC characters as Black Adam, Lex Luthor, Doomsday (so you can re-enact the death of Superman), Bane, Green Lantern, and many more including the almighty Aquaman! Fear his sea-controlling power! Cannot wait.

– The last thing I think worth mentioning is of course the atrocious launch two weeks ago of the new SimCity. While the game has sold in excess of 1.1 million copies since launch it hasn’t been all peaches and cream for EA and Maxis. Due to the always-online requirement of the new city-building game in conjunction with the fact that it has been 10 years since the last one EA learned the hard way that if you want to make an online-only game you need to actually have servers for it. Unfortunately they didn’t have enough so when hundreds of thousands of people tried to play it for the first time they overloaded the system rendering the game unplayable for a few days. Eventually EA and Maxis managed to fix the situation but not before the internet ripped them a new one. Lesson learned? We shall see, but they gave owners of the game a free game on Origin to say thanks for buying a broken game which should make everyone forgive and forget right?

Anyway that’s it for this epic rundown of news, here’s hoping life lets us be a bit more regular with posts from here on out! We will be recording episode 42 of our podcast tomorrow night so be sure to listen to that to hear more about some of these topics as well as a bunch of other stuff! I’ll leave you with the new Bioshock Infinite TV ad which was released earlier this week. The game is out next week!