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Halo 5: Guardians , E3 beta trailerAnd that's why I fell in love at an early age with hockey, the only sport whose players could survive a pub brawl with the cast of Warcraft III. True, playing hockey meant that all the bigger, sexually insecure kids would call you a girl, but what it loses in strutting virility hockey wins back by arming everybody on the pitch with a vicious wooden maul.And have you seen our goalkeepers? They're worse than Klingons. In my experience, at least, the job of a hockey goalie is to turn into Blanka from Street Fighter at the earliest opportunity, usually while screaming at defenders to stop fucking about and smash some ankles. So, Blanka doing an impression of General Patton, then.
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The trailer for Halo: The Master Chief CollectionRecognizing that eSports is on the up and up, developers like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare studio Sledgehammer now consult with pro-gamers when adding to well-travelled multiplayer modes. Symptoms of this range from more robust support for player clans, to new abilities aimed at tactical loopholes in previous games that were seized upon by the sporting elect.This has led to some interesting tensions within multiplayer communities. Most of us cannon fodderites are, I think, glad that the eSports scene exists—it's nice to know that somebody can shoot a guy out of a cockpit in free-fall conditions—but the last thing we want is to be lumped in with those supernaturally slick bastards during a throwaway round of Battlefield 4. As a recent Guardian piece notes, it's a particular problem for emerging titles that can't muster the numbers or mode separation to keep people like Fatal1ty (overall earnings: £289,453.27, or around $450,000) away from the average Joes and Josephines.Still, if we can't beat them and we don't want to join them, we can at least marvel at their antics. Pro gaming is well on its way to becoming a mainstream spectator's sport, a festival of skill that players of all levels can savor and drink themselves stupid moaning about of a Saturday lunchtime. The biggest contributing factor is probably the warp-speed increase in online video consumption, via Twitch and YouTube. New video game consoles like PS4 and Xbox One are built from the ground up to accommodate this lust for gameplay on-tap, at least when they work as advertised.
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