Helldivers is the rare game that knows exactly what it wants to do, and does it with complete confidence and authority. So much more than just another twin-stick shooter, it presents us with incredibly varied mission sandboxes and tactical options, then respects our intelligence enough to let us figure it all out on our own or with three friends. The result is some of the most white-knuckle co-op action I’ve ever experienced. From the opening cinematic, Helldivers wears its Starship Troopers influences on its sleeve. The tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top way in which it sets up the ongoing war between the aliens and our homeworld, Super Earth, is a clear nod to director Paul Verhoeven’s film, and it lends the action a delicious sense of both humor and danger. It’s mostly superficial in that the themes of radical Nationalism are never really explored, but the jingoistic one-liners your space marine spouts out are chuckle-worthy all the same, effectively drawing me into Helldivers’ persistent online war despite knowing my people probably started it for all the wrong reasons.
This questionable galactic war is fought on three fronts against the tech-heavy Illuminate, the gun-toting Cyborgs, and the Tyranid-esque bugs known simply as…bugs. Each faction brings a diverse set of units to bear, requiring you to either adapt your tactics, or die a horrible death. Cyborgs tote a lot of small caliber firearms, making heavy body armor a great choice to shrug off volleys that might have otherwise put you on the ground. Don't forget to bring something to punch through armor too, or you'll spend the better part of your mission running from mixed groups of tanks and hulking mechanized super-soldiers. On the other end of the spectrum, failing to pack some extra ammo for your shotgun against the bugs is usually a fatal mistake, since they love to get up close and personal. Every online match of Helldivers feeds into this three-pronged war, with each front’s greatest contributors being cleverly immortalized with an ever-present leaderboard. As you and your fellow heroes retake planets by waging successful missions, the war will eventually spill over to the alien homeworld, or to your own if not enough people are fighting the good fight.
Either situation leads to a timed special event where all players are called on to make one final push, or a desperate last stand. It's a smart system that gives each mission a greater sense of purpose, not to mention an urgency to log on every day to do your part. The real magic though, happens when you start unlocking more of Helldivers’ large arsenal of perks, weapons, upgrades, and equipment calldowns called stratagems. After over 25 hours, I still haven’t gotten everything, and from disposable anti-tank weapons, to gun-covered troop-carriers, every piece of gear feels meaningful, since each ends up being particularly useful for certain objectives or against particular foes. Capture or defend objectives call for sentry turrets, where snow-covered maps might tempt you to bring an exo-suit or a jump-pack to make traversal easier. You can only bring so much though, and adapting your loadout based on what your objectives are and what your teammates are bringing is where Helldivers exhibits much of its depth.
No matter what you bring to the fight though, Helldivers’ meaty sound effects convey the action convincingly, despite its so-so visuals. Whether you’re squeezing the last few rounds out of a heavy machine gun, or obliterating a screen full of enemies with a thundering artillery strike, everything sounds powerful and threatening. Many of these delightful bits of kit are designed to facilitate cooperative play. The recoilless rifle, for instance, comes with a separate supply pack with extra ammo. You could carry it yourself, but the reload time between shots will make it pretty impractical to use. Have a buddy carry the supply pack though, and they can walk up to you and toss in another shell in the blink of an eye. Touches like this make a full party of four feel like a cohesive fighting unit where every member is more powerful than they would be alone. Helldivers’ drop-in co-op makes forming a party easy from the couch, online, or a mix of both, which is fortunate, because while going solo can be rewarding in its own right, you can only get so far on your own.
The fact that virtually everything is deadly, be it friend or foe, makes every mission tense. Drop pods bringing a fresh supply of ammo might unceremoniously turn a teammate to goo, or a poorly placed airstrike might do more harm than good. There's just so much nitty gritty to get into, from going prone to let teammates safely fire past you, to using 90-degree angle shots to maximize armor penetration against enemy vehicles, and the cost of learning is almost always paid in blood - be it yours or a teammate's. But when you and your team fire on all cylinders to turn back the intense waves of enemies coming your way long enough to dramatically hop in a dropship and make a narrow escape, the sense of accomplishment is positively euphoric. It isn’t the prettiest game you can play on PS4, PS3 or Vita, but Helldivers is one of the most exhilarating, and you’ll get all three versions for the price of one. It pits you against seemingly impossible odds, arms you with a powerful, diverse toolset, and empowers you and a group of people to put the pieces together - and they all fit together beautifully.
Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. Follow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.Danny Benedettelli is a Lego genius – he wrote the book on how to create cool things with Lego Mindstorms (literally) – and has also created an exoskeleton to remotely control the robots he builds. The suit is what he’s sporting in the video above and it is just so cool. He calls the sensor-packed suit ‘Waldo’ and it allows him to make the robot move when he does via a Bluetooth connection. Ever been to a tech festival? TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017. Now that’s a good DIY project for the weekend… ➤ Danny’s Lab [via Boing Boing | Read next: Lego Dimensions offers up a powerful ‘Portal’ hit Amazon releases its own exclusive album full of indie artistsThe ‘80s were the golden age of the action figure, but not all '80s toylines were gold. For every He-Man or Transformers, there are a dozen series that will never return — either because they’ve been forgotten, or they've been outclassed, or just because they sucked in the first place.
Here are 15 toylines whose relaunch is forever aborted. The idea of animal warriors is a pretty solid one, as far as boys action figure lines go — it worked for TMNT, after all, as well as about a quarter of the Masters of the Universe toys — but surely someone at Playmates had some reservations about limiting a toyline to sheep and pigs. First of all, pigs and sheep are not high up on the list of animals kids find most fascinating. Second of all, if you’re choosing barnyard animals, why limit it to sheep and pigs? Shockingly, kids had little desire to buy General Hamfat Lardo, Corporal Hy Onahog, or even the Pork-a-pult.Despite containing space barbarians, demons and dragons, BlackStar was an obvious He-Man rip-off from day one, but whereas He-Man had a terrifying amount of creativity, Blackstar replaced all that with tiny, dwarf-like creatures called Throbbits, making the whole series about saving these little bastards. Even if someone wanted to bring BlackStar back, I doubt Mos Def’s band Black Star, Blackstar Amps, or “Black Star” fragrance owner Avril Lavigne would be amused.
And I sincerely doubt any parent nowadays would ever buy their child something called a “throbbit,” at least not without getting put on a potential sex offender list. Mattel’s Computer Warriors sounds like an idea that was a bit ahead of its time — a crazy military computer accidentally creates four evil viruses with artificial intelligence, so it then makes four good AIs to track them down. And then the evil viruses learn how to pull a reverse Tron and come into the real world, and the good AIs follow suit, hoping to capture the bad guys on their CD-roms. Sounds like the perfect ‘90s toyline, right? Well, that was part of the problem —Computer Warriors was released in 1989, just before the PC revolution encompassed pretty much everybody. But the bigger problem is that the actual toys transformed into things you’d find on an office desk. These Computer Warriors doubled as a clock, a pencil sharpener and even a small soccer trophy. Even kids of the ‘80s weren’t so desperate that they needed to play with office supplies.
People make fun of the GoBots for being Transformers rip-offs, but no one remembers the Convertors, who were GoBots without their winning personality. Hilariously, the Convertors were actually Bandai’s attempt to cash in on Transformers, and Bandai had the Japanese connection to license a lot of the same toy molds as Hasbro did, meaning the Convertors included a lot of Transformers, just in different colors — as well as some other anime toys that nerds nowadays would kill for. I’m pretty sure Hasbro has these rights locked down now.Back in 1982, the Mego Corporation was still trying to recover from the legendarily horrible decision to pass on the Star Wars toy license. After making countless failed Star Wars rip-offs, they decided to tip-off Hasbro’s G.I. Joe series with Eagle Force. The Eagle Force consisted of colorful and unique soldiers with goofy codenames who fought the evil R.I.O.T. — about the only difference they had from G.I. Joe is that they stood only 2 ¾-inches, a full inch shorter than their Hasbro counterparts.
If anyone tried to bring these guys back, they’d be forced to call them Chocking Hazard: The Toy Series. Kids love anthropomorphized animals (minus farm animals) who fight each other, right? So why wouldn’t they love anthropomorphized food? I don’t know the answer to this, but there’s clearly a reason, as Mattel’s 1989 Food Fighter series — of living foodstuffs in military garb with assorted weapons — was spoiled on arrival. It probably didn’t help that the toys were less action figures and more squeaky toys more suited for a dog’s chew-toy, but whatever. Honestly, a sentient stack of pancakes wielding submachine guns probably deserved better.7) Golden Girl and the Guardian of the GemstonesOne of the very few She-Ra rip-offs of the ‘80s, Golden Girl and the Guardian of the Gemstones is actually kind of awesome — arguably better than its source material. Unlike She-Ra and her pals, most of whom had nets and butterfly wings and pretty dresses, Golden Girls’ girls all had shields and swords and were ready to kick some ass.
While She-Ra dolls' accessories were dresses and horses, Golden Girl was rocking awesome chariots and a castle to fight in front of. Also, while She-Ra’s foe Hordak was relegated to the Masters of the Universe toyline to keep girls’ fragile minds from seeing toys that didn’t have hair they could brush, GGatGotG had a whole group of equally armed evil warrioresses to battle. Frankly, Golden Girl needs a comeback ASAP, but I’m pretty sure the name “Golden Girl” would cause waaay too much confusion amongst parents (and potential disappointment). The Infaceables seemed pretty awesome when they were released in 1984, because each figure had a regular face that changed into a monstrous face through a cunning use of rubber and an internal vacuum created by extended the figure’s torso. But I would love to see what would happen if you tried to give one of these guys to an 8-year-old nowadays. “What does it do? You pull it like this… and then the face changes? What else does it do?
No, changing back does not count as a different feature. Look, where is my Nintendo DS?” There is one reason and one reason along that Manglor will never be remade, and that’s because it was made out of bullshit. The whole draw of the toyline, according to its makers, was that kids could literally tear the Manglors apart, limb from limb, and then re-attach all the parts without problem. This was not true in any fashion. Ironically, if Manglors had actually been made out of bull feces they’d have been more likely to live up to their promise.Part of the My Little Pony cartoon n’ toy empire from Hasbro, Moondreamers were small children with big heads and bigger hair — basically, imagine if Toddlers n’ Tiaras had a doll line, and you have the Moondreamers. You’d think that this might actually be a pretty good idea to re-release, but there are three problems: The first is that the plot of Moondreamers is that Crystal Starr and her friends are giving magic crystals to sleeping kids so they can have good dreams, and fighting the evil Queen Scowlene, who wants to give kids nightmares — I can’t imagine that a toyline about grown women whose sole occupation is breaking into the bedrooms of sleeping children would get
The second problem is that like most ‘80s girls toylines, all the characters have stripper names. But the real problem is this: The Queen Scowlene doll is the most terrifying thing I have ever fucking seen. Talk about nightmares — I can’t imagine any child sleeping ever again after they received this horror. It seems impossible now, but at some point the Police Academy movies — which started as a Meatballs-esque comedy-T&A vehicle for Steve Guttenerg — became such family-friendly entertainment that someone made a Police Academy cartoon, and then someone else made a Police Academy toyline based on that cartoon. Despite the best efforts of master thespian Steve Guttenberg, the franchise is somehow forgotten (seriously, who the Scary Movie guys haven’t rebooted it yet is beyond me) and the cartoon/toys even moreso. This is 100% okay with me.Despite its hardcore military theme, the fact of the matter is that Ring Raiders were small jets that sat on rings that — gasp!
— boys would wear! Given the small but vocal portion of the U.S. population nowadays that freaks the fuck out anytime a boy or girl wanders down the wrong toy aisle, I don’t see any toy company asking for that particular brand of trouble by bringing Ring Raiders back. Here’s how insane the Transformers craze got in the ‘80s: toy company executives — people who could presumably have conversations with people and both feed and dress themselves — decided to make figures that transformed into rocks. Kids didn’t play with rocks in the 1880s. And this wasn’t one company, it was multiple companies! Mattel did it right and only added a few figures to its Masters of the Universe line, but Tonka went all in, and made a whole rock-based GoBots spin-off. It did slightly better than if Tonka had packaged and sold regular rocks, which is to say it sucked. And I imagine it would be even less popular today.The sole gimmick of the Sky Commanders was they all had ziplines they could ride down.