Board games provide a fantastic opportunity to escape to another world and work together with your friends to overcome a tricky shared challenge. But they’re also good opportunities to scheme and plot for hours, waiting for the perfect moment to betray your friends and family, stabbing them in the back and snatching up victory along the way. Whether you’re just looking for a little more confrontation in your life or just need some fun party games to keep a larger group of players engaged, secret identity games are always a hit.
Below are our picks for 6 of the best secret identity board games available. So join us in the shadows for a night of backstabbing your friends.
The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection does a lot to celebrate 30 years of the series’ focus on one-on-one fighting action. While Capcom has released other fighting game collections in the past, such as Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Street Fighter Alpha Anthology, the 30th Anniversary Collection is by far the most robust compilation package ever released for the series. We recently had the chance to check out the upcoming collection ahead of its May release to all of its offerings. In addition to getting hands-on with the Nintendo Switch-exclusive Tournament Mode, we dived a bit further into the collection, and got to see just what makes this particular package so special.
The clear focus in the collection is highlighting the many major milestones of the 2D era. Featuring 12 of Street Fighter’s greatest hits, the package includes the original Street Fighter, Street Fighter Alpha 1-3, Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II: Turbo, all three versions of Street Fighter III (SFIII, 2nd Impact, and 3rd Strike), and much more. As direct ports of the arcade releases, each game retains much of what hardcore fans can expect from the original games as they were in their traditional arcade cabinets.
Speaking of which, the collection also features a selection of filters and options for how you wish to view each game. Along with the old-fashioned normal mode, you can switch over to arcade and TV filters that show CRT-style scanlines and television tube-like curvature to each game, giving a more retro feel. A significant feature added to several of the games is the inclusion of online play for SFII Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super Turbo, Alpha 3, and Street Fighter III 3rd Strike. With ranked matching and casual play supporting up to four players, you’ll be able to dive into online matches against other hardcore SF fans. Unfortunately, only these select titles are online-enabled. According to the developers, they focused on offering online play for the most popular entries in the series, instead of having empty online lobbies for the least active games in the package.
The 30th Anniversary collection will also come to the Nintendo Switch–which will have a console-exclusive mode. Called the Tournament Mode, up to 8 players (across four different Switch consoles connected locally) will be able to compete against one another in Super Street Fighter II Tournament Edition as they fight their way up the ladder. During our session, we started off by picking one character and competed against the opposing player. After one round, the match finish screen instructs each player to move over to a new spot on the connected Switch units, bringing their chosen fighter and current progress with them. It sort of felt like a game of musical chairs, except with quick matches of Street Fighter. Though it felt a bit gimmicky, it’s a neat feature for the Switch, and it could be a neat diversion when you have some friends around and some time to kill.
Along with the suite of games, the Anniversary Collection also comes with a special Museum Mode detailing the history and lore of the Street Fighter series. With a viewable Street Fighter Timeline, you can examine entries for each Street Fighter game along with factoids about their respective ports and the resulting impact for the franchise. Moreover, the timeline also details proposed side-games, such as how Street Fighter ’89 eventually became Final Fight, along with some developer notes and art about each major milestone in the series. The bonus mode also features detailed information about each member of the roster, along with an incredibly detailed sprite viewer where you can inspect each character’s individual animations for various moves across multiple games. Seeing the difference in detail between Chun-li’s Hurricane Kick from the original Street Fighter II to 3rd Strike shows how much the series has improved over the years, giving some added respect for the craft that went into each title.
It was fun going through each game and checking out what they had to offer in today’s age. Each entry is represented well, even featuring detailed facts about their development along with a showing of each game’s arcade specific attract mode during your pre-game selection. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection looks to be the most ambitious compilation the series has seen yet, and a surprisingly educational one as well. The series has been through a lot over the years, and seeing the essential games on display in all their glory offers some neat perspective on how much the series has held up over time, and how it still remains one of the most respected franchises out there.
Microsoft has officially confirmed its plans for E3 2018. Rather than have its usual presence inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, where E3 takes place, Microsoft is moving the bulk of its efforts across the street to the nearby Microsoft Theater in LA Live. The company says this will make for the company’s “biggest E3 showing ever.”
First up at the Microsoft Theater will be Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which is scheduled to take place on Sunday, June 10, at 1 PM PT. Following that, it will host Xbox FanFest events, hands-on demos for E3 attendees, and more. “Not only does the Microsoft Theater allow us to centralize our Xbox presence at E3, but its size enables us to include even more fans and partners in the Xbox E3 2018 Briefing than ever before,” said corporate VP Mike Nichols in an Xbox Wire post.
The announcement makes it clear that the move was made in collaboration with the ESA, no doubt to avoid spurring discussions about E3’s demise. Microsoft also points out that it won’t be absent entirely from the official E3 show floor, as it will have a booth for its streaming service, Mixer.
“These changes–expanding our presence, multiple venues, taking over the Microsoft Theater–give us the opportunity to bring together a variety of Xbox experiences into one primary location and, most importantly, let fans in on what we’re up to in 2018 and beyond in a fresh new way,” Nichols said.
At this point, we have little idea of what to expect from Microsoft’s E3 showing. Whereas last year we knew that Xbox One X (then Project Scorpio) would be a major highlight, this year’s show remains more of a mystery. Xbox boss Phil Spencer said in January that there would be some “positive changes” at E3 for Microsoft, which may have been a reference to the just-announced move. One possibility is the announcement of Halo 6, which has been discussed but not formally revealed. Microsoft is also said to be working on a PlayStation Now-like game-streaming service.
One thing that the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection strives to be is as arcade-perfect as possible. That means that all 12 games in the collection, from Street Fighter 1 all the way to Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, are as close to their actual arcade counterparts as they can possibly be. You can even enable Street Fighter 3: Second Impact’s widescreen mode, which was the only CPS-3 arcade cabinet to have native widescreen.
But there’s one mode in Super Street Fighter 2’s arcade cabinet that is simply not possible to realistically emulate on a PS4 or Xbox One, though it is possible on the Switch.
Whether you watch it on the big screen or from the comfort of your living room couch, Annihilation is easily the first must-see film of 2018. This mind-bending sci-fi movie stars Natalie Portman as a member of an expedition exploring a strange, hyper-evolved realm called “The Shimmer.” And in the grand tradition of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar, Annihilation goes to some pretty strange places before the end. (Read our Annihilation review.)
While Annihilation is based on Jeff VanderMeer’s book of the same name, writer/director Alex Garland pushes the story in very different directions. Now, with the film hitting Netflix internationally, we decided to take a look at just how much the source material was altered. Here are six key differences between the novel and film versions of Annihilation.
The Pokemon trading card game is getting a new expansion. Pokemon Sun and Moon – Forbidden Light has been announced for a May 4 release.
“Building on the story of Sun & Moon—Ultra Prism, this latest expansion showcases the mysterious power of Necrozma, who has absorbed a Legendary Pokémon and taken on a luminous new form as Ultra Necrozma-GX,” the official press release reads. “Drawn to this new light, other Pokémon, including Lucario-GX, Greninja-GX, Zygarde-GX, Yveltal-GX, Volcanion Prism Star and Arceus Prism Star, must decide whether to welcome it or resist it.”
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It’s been several years since the world was traumatized by Game of Thrones killing off its presumed main character before the end of its first season, and now Sean Bean has finally revealed what Ned Stark was saying before his untimely end.
Over the years a number of the fan theories about Ned’s final words have emerged. Some speculate he was communicating with his son Bran, while others thought he might have been delivering the fan-favorite phrase “Valar Morghulis.” But it seems what he was saying was nothing more than a small prayer.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Bean set the record straight: “I just thought, ‘What would you do if this were really gonna happen?’ You probably would pray. You probably would murmur some words and you’d keep it quiet. You’d keep it to yourself.”
