Electronic Arts revealed earlier this year that it’s planning to add a college basketball game to its ever-expanding roster of sports franchises. Then 2K Games came out hours later and indicated it was doing the same. Now new reporting suggests both publishers have been at war behind the scenes trying to lock up the deals needed to make an NCAA basketball game a reality.
Sports Business Journal reports that while EA won a bidding round earlier this year with the Collegiate Licensing Company for the rights to the NCAA brand, 2K Games has moved forward with its own college basketball game by trying to negotiate brand partnerships with individual colleges like UCLA.
“UCLA Athletics and UCLA Trademarks & Licensing, an enterprise of the Associated Students UCLA, have announced a long-term collaboration with 2K which will see the UCLA Men’s and Women’s Basketball programs bring the rich legacy of Bruins basketball to a future project,” the school announced on Thursday.
EA is apparently very unhappy about this. According to Sports Business Journal, it wanted the rights to everything in NCAA divisional basketball on both men’s and women’s leagues, which would give it the sort of exclusivity stranglehold it long had with the NFL in its Madden series. And if EA doesn’t get its way, sources told Sports Business Journal the publisher might abandon the upcoming game altogether.
“The opportunity that’s excited us in college basketball is to deliver a full, standalone experience that captures everything that makes the sport so special,” EA Sports VP Sean O’Brien told SBJ in a statement. “The approach we’ve proposed is to create a game that includes all 350-plus NCAA Division I schools—both men’s and women’s teams included—with name, image and likeness compensation for all athletes, 32 conferences, the NCAA and all things that make ‘March Madness’ the most exciting month of sports and all the traditions and pageantry fans love.”
Basically, 2K Games, which was reportedly part of the NCAA bidding war but lost to EA, has decided to move ahead with a college basketball game regardless. While it abandoned its Hoops franchise over a decade ago, it’s been releasing NBA2K every year and could quickly spin off a new version of it for college teams or, as SBJ reports, possibly position it as an add-on or expansion for the existing franchise.
EA, which also abandoned its basketball franchise over a decade ago, will have to start from scratch. Recent reporting suggests a new game would be years away at best and possibly not arrive until 2028 or later. Unless it can get the NCAA and its member schools to pull the plug on 2K’s game, it’ll be coming in late. A big part of what helped EA Sports College Football explode in popularity last year was years of pent-up demand. Now both publishers are in a race to see who can cash in on the latest untapped market for annual sports games.
Gearbox’s Borderlandsgames are known for quite a few things, but the biggest among those is arguably its sense of humor. It was Borderlands 2 where the franchise’s sense of comedy really took shape, and the series has since been littered with humor largely in the vein of crass or internet humor. No surprise then that carries over to the live-action film, whose first clip is…well, it is what it is.
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Lionsgate came to IGN Fan Fest with a new clip for the film, which features series mascot Claptrap (as voiced by Jack Black) shitting out a lot of bullets. Thankfully it doesn’t go on too long, but it’s still a bit of weirdness that probably lands more if you groove with the games’ general sense of humor.(Which can be legit funny sometimes, even outside the more-regarded Tales from the Borderlands spinoff!) If not…well, that visual’s in your head now, so sorry about that.
Borderlands (2024) Exclusive Look – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black
On the bright side, the rest of the clip has decent-looking action featuring the Vault Hunters—Roland (Kevin Hart), Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteau), and Lilith (Cate Blanchett) going up against a group of raiders. This part is the most Borderlands-ass part of the entire clip, minus how no one’s using of their class skills to make this fight significantly shorter. If you need something in this movie to latch onto, it looks like Blanchett will be your lifeline. She looks to be doing an alright impression of a sci-fi gunslinger, something the movie seems to recognize since she gets to be the most involved in this fight.
The bigger issue here might be that the clip is too sterile for its own good. Borderlands games aren’t bloody to the degree of a Mortal Kombat or Gears of War, but their approach to violence is delightfully cartoonish because the guns are goofy as all hell. There needs to be more flavor here; one of these guys needs a gun that melts these raiders or electrocutes or lights them on fire. (Maybe a combination of all three, since the later games have guns with two element types?)
Borderlands comes to theaters on August 9, and hopefully between now and then, the movie looks more like the games in the way that matters: endearingly stupid violence and humor that feels like there was intent behind it.
The Epic Games Store is once again handing out a very good game for free. This time around it’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns, one of the best games of 2022 and one of my favorite superhero adventures out there.
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Marvel’s Midnight Suns, in case you missed it, is a turn-based tactical RPG that blends some light life-sim-like elements—like romance and dates—with fantastic tactical combat on par with XCOM and Fire Emblem. But, unlike those games, Midnight Suns lets you kick cars at classic Marvel villains like Venom and Sabretooth. And right now, you can kick cars at Venom for free via the Epic Games Store.
Marvel
Don’t get it twisted, though; Midnight Sunsis more than just fun gameplay and cool combat. The game also features a compelling narrative that plays out unlike anything seen in the MCU or most other superhero games. I mean, how many superhero movies or games let you spend time with Blade in a book club?
And don’t let its card-based action scare you away, as the game isn’t a deck builder or anything like that. It just uses cards to represent powers and moves you can use during each turn. However, game director Jake Solomon did express regret about using cards, suggesting that might have been the reason why the game didn’t sell as well as expected.
“I think cards were a major problem,” Solomon told VGC. “I think it was a good design solution, but I think I was naive about what people would think when they saw the mechanic was cards. Not everyone on my team was behind the idea, but they trusted me.”
Earlier today, players noticed that Spec Ops: The Linewas no longer available to purchase on Steam, leading many to fear that the acclaimed third-person shooter had been quietly delisted without warning. Sadly, 2K has since confirmed that is the case, and the publisher has also explained why it pulled the landmark shooter.
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Developed by Yager and released back in 2012, Spec Ops: The Linewas a reboot of the lesser-known Spec Ops franchise. Like those past games, The Line was a third-person military shooter. However, the 2012 reboot garnered critical acclaim at launch thanks to its narrative which depicted a solider in the deserts of Dubai slowly losing his grip on reality, offering a meta-critical take on the way some military shooters glorify the horrors of war. While it didn’t sell as many copies as 2K would have liked, the game has gone on to become a cult favorite among shooter fans. And now, it’s no longer on Steam.
On January 29, folks began to notice that Spec Ops: The Line had been removed from Steam and other storefronts, like Fanatical. People wondered if 2K had delisted the game, possibly due to expiring licensing rights on some music featured in it. And that seems to be the case, according to a 2K spokesperson.
“Spec Ops: The Line will no longer be available on online storefronts, as several partnership licenses related to the game are expiring,” explained 2K in a statement sent over to Kotaku. No specific licenses were named, but among the noteworthy music tracks included in the game are Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Rooster” by Alice in Chains.
The publisher assured players that owners of the game will still be able to download and replay Spec Ops: The Line “uninterrupted” but it will no longer be easy to buy a digital copy moving forward. Currently, the game is still for sale on GoG, but the above statement seems to indicate that will change soon.
“2K would like to thank our community of players who have supported the game, and we look forward to bringing you more offerings from our label throughout this year and beyond,” said 2K in its statement.
While there had been talks of a sequel for years, it seems 2K isn’t even willing to tease that and instead is just letting Spec Ops: The Line fade away like a mirage in the desert. It’s just one more game—on an ever-growing list—that will be harder to play as the years go by.
I was on board with Lego 2K Drive the moment I learned we were getting an open-world Lego racing game, complete with the ability to build your own vehicles. And having played nearly 12 hours so far, I’m still having a lot of fun with the game. But it’s impossible to ignore a nagging feeling that it really wants me to spend money in its in-game store.
Announced in March, Lego 2K Drive is the first game to come from a deal struck between 2K and Lego back in 2022. The two companies apparently decided to glue their names together and add “drive” to the end to create what might be the most boring video game title of 2023. Thankfully, the video game itself is much, much more fun than its drab title, which sounds less like a wacky open-world racer filled with cool power-ups and more like a bad sports game featuring a sport I’ve never heard of but which is nonetheless popular.
Bland name, but fun Lego racing
Get past the bland name and Lego 2K Drive comes right out of the gate firing on all cylinders with an exciting CG cutscene and a fairly short but fun tutorial. It makes a good first impression. And the moment the game gave me full control, I was in awe of what I saw. Lego 2K Drive is set in a brick-built world filled with side missions, mini-games, collectibles, and so, so many Lego vehicles. It’s very colorful and gorgeous. And massive! The open world of 2K Drive is split into a few different biomes, each with its own theme, characters, missions, and vehicles. Playing this game is like getting to play in the basement of the rich kid you knew in elementary school who had every Lego set. Lucky bastard. But now I, Zack, have all the bricks and cool sets to play with!
The basic setup behind the main story mode is that an evil racer hates you—for reasons the game jokingly doesn’t elaborate on—and you have to win the big trophy to prove yourself the better driver. To get a chance at that big win you’ll have to earn a bunch of flags by beating rivals, leveling up to unlock new races, rank up, and eventually gain access to the big final tournament. There’s not much to the actual story, but the writing is similar to the recent Lego movies, occasionally making me smile and rarely annoying. And I think kids will enjoy the zanier moments.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
But to win the big trophy and prove yourself to your evil rival, you’ll need to do more than race Lego-built cars around various tracks, as piloting boats and mastering off-road vehicles are on your agenda, too. And like the cars, all of these are brick-built. However, you don’t actively choose between each type of vehicle. Instead, as you race around, the game auto-swaps between either your car, boat, or off-road ride of choice. This streamlines what could have been an annoying part of 2K Drive, and also means that you can explore the entire Lego-filled world of Bricklandia as you please.
Driving real fast and reach a river? Keep driving and you’ll just turn into a boat! Take a sharp turn off a paved road and onto some dunes? Don’t worry, the game will swap your car out for a jeep without missing a beat. It takes the open-world driving of Forza Horizon and makes it even more arcadey and exciting as you can literally go anywhere at any time.
All the bricks and cool stuff in the world can’t save a racing game with bad driving physics or poor controls, and luckily, Lego 2K Drive avoids those pitfalls and is a blast to play. Once I mastered the drifting and jumping controls, I was masterfully swooping, swinging, and gliding around the world like a Lego pro. And on Xbox Series X performance was smooth as butter, making it easy to enjoy all the high-speed action.
Lego 2K Drive’s disappointing microtransactions
The moment bricks start to fall off this creation is when you start to dig around the menus, where you’ll encounter a store complete with a season pass. While the game does feature an amazing, in-depth, and easy-to-use vehicle builder—letting you make nearly anything you can imagine—it also features some disappointing microtransactions.
Technically, you can just drive around, have some fun, unlock some cars, build your own creations, and never really interact with the in-game store. But, if you don’t want to (or can’t) build something like an ambulance or a giant hamburger car, the store offers official Lego builds that you can buy and use in-game. However, all of these cars cost $10,000 Lego Bux. And after playing for 12 hours I’ve only reached around $8,000.
This is the part where 2K Games would, while twirling its mustache, likely say: Don’t worry, you can buy some Bux if you want to. This is true, sure, but it’s so out of place in this otherwise colorful romp of creativity and wackiness.
And the way the economy is balanced, it really feels like you’ll need to fork over some cash if you want to buy more than one of these pre-made cars without grinding for hours. It’s also sad that the in-game store contains Lego part packs for sale. These are cheaper than the cars (thankfully) and the builder in-game does come with a lot of parts available for free (and you earn more by completing missions), but the fact that some bricks and bits are locked behind a paywall—even one that you can bypass via grinding—is frustrating.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
The other big part of Lego 2K Drive is multiplayer, which I’ve only barely poked as there weren’t many other players online while I played the game before release. The online races play similarly to the single-player races, but with the added wrinkle that your opponents might have spent hours figuring out how to build the ideal, perfect race car. Or a giant dick. Or maybe they just spent some real cash and bought a car using Bux. Until the game is out in the wild, it will be hard to say how multiplayer will shake out, but I have some concerns.
It’s really a shame that such a lovely and fun open-world sandbox is tied to stuff like a season pass, premium currencies, and expensive in-game purchases. Perhaps 2K will tweak some levers to make it easier to earn and unlock new cars—which would be nice—but until then the specter of greed will always be there, nagging at me as I build, smash, and race.
