Developer Naughty Dog continues its video game creation winning streak with the recently released Uncharted 4: A Thief's End for the Sony PlayStation 4, but early on in Nathan Drake's latest adventure he crosses paths with a piece of the developer's history.  Spoilers for Chapter 4 follow!

Major Hollywood movies based on video games seldom turn out well, but I have hope for the upcoming Assassin's Creed film based on the Ubisoft game of the same name. Featuring new characters but based on franchise lore, the Creed film sends its modern day protagonist back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition. I certainly wasn't expecting that. The first trailer for the film gives us a look at all kinds of classic Creed elements such as the Animus, lots of climbing & parkour, hooded robes, and the iconic leap of faith. I'm optimistically excited! Assassin's Creed opens in theaters in December 2016. I really hope there's a scene where the Assassin kills a civilian and desynchronizes from the simulation as a result. "Assassins did not kill civilians," the Animus attendant would say. "Try it again."

Failing to definitively conquer the video game console publishing market, Disney Interactive is exiting the business and taking its Toys To Life game platform Disney Infinity with it.  The game will shut down in June following the release of the final two character packs (based on Alice Through The Looking Glass and Finding Dory) and the studio behind it all, Avalanche Software (not to be confused with Avalanche Studios, the Just Cause folks), is now out of business.  It's a grim day for Infinity fans as despite performing what any other company would consider to be successful in this business, it's not enough for Disney.  USgamer has the report.

Disney Infinity probably made a good deal of money, but for Disney, the licensed Star Wars Battlefront represented the future moving forward. Pachter estimated that Disney Infinity made $200 million in revenue last year, while Star Wars Battlefront earned $660 million. The $200 million estimate put Disney Infinity ahead of Lego Dimensions and Skylanders, but Disney is a huge company and its perspective on 'successful' is vastly different.

By licensing the Star Wars brand to Electronic Arts, Disney doesn't have to have developers on hand to make titles. It reaps the rewards and the risks are all Electronic Arts. At some point, management looked that the gulf between Infinity and Battlefront and wondered why it was publishing games in-house. You can probably expect to see more licensing of Disney properties, but most of that will probably lean on the mobile side.

If you're still interested in the Infinity figures, watch for clearance sales at your favorite retailer over the summer.  It's disappointing to see Disney exit the business, but now that the company is switching gears back to a licensing model, perhaps we'll see some creative ideas based on Disney properties from other companies.  Yes, there will always be a place for Star Wars games, but where are the Arkham Asylum-like Avengers game, Darkwing Duck Remastered, and of course my biggest, most wanted pipe dream of them all...

Now that Disney is licensing its properties, can I just suggest... @telltalegames Presents Agent Carter.

— Matthew Green (@PressTheButtons) May 10, 2016

It's a shame that being merely successful at a business like this isn't enough for Disney which has an "engulf and devour" mindset in the video game industry as it engages in a repeated cycle of buying established studios, pushing them to deliver, closing them when they fail to quickly produce top selling sensations right out of the gate, and then withdrawing from the business altogether before trying again a few years later.  I don't understand why anyone would spend so much time and money to build a platform that is successful by standard metrics and then throw it away just became it makes only some money and not all money.

Aliens are among us!  Specifically, aliens in video games.  On this episode of Power Button, Blake Grundman and I take you through Zen Studio's Aliens vs Pinball pack which leads into a discussion of our favorite video game aliens.  From the denizens of SR388 to Lavos to Halo's Flood and beyond, we're going past the stars and beyond the moon.  You cannot comprehend the true form of this show, but try it out anyway.  Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton.

Before Duke Nukem became an everlasting punchline with the often delayed and eventually disappointing Duke Nukem Forever, he was a franchise favorite thanks to the popular Duke Nukem 3D. The sci-fi shooter turned heads on the PC and was ported to a variety of platforms of the day including the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, so it was only natural that the Nintendo 64 should see its own version. The problem, of course, is that Nintendo's censorship and acceptable content policies of the day did not allow for much of Duke's crude humor, gory violence, and sexual content. If games like Doom and Quake could be safely adapted for the N64, surely Duke 3D could make the transition with its overall spirit intact, right? GamesTM chronicles how Duke Nukem 3D transformed into Duke Nukem 64.

The biggest alteration of all came with the approach the game made with its female characters, though. Known as “babes”, these young, good-looking women were victims of the game’s alien invasion and they appeared in various guises from breast-bearing strippers to those who were cocooned, trapped or festooned on posters. Controversially the babes trapped in the alien pods could be killed in Duke Nukem 3D but in the N64 version, they could be rescued instead and it became a fundamental part of the game.

“Just killing innocents like that was too much,” says Mills. “I may be wrong but I think it was my idea to have the rescues in and have it as a stat at the end of the game so there was something to search for in each level. It was another thing to do in the game and something for the completest. We’d hide the women in strange places so they were an extra thing to find.” At the same time, out went nudity along with bad language, drug references and anything religious (there was no chapel in the N64 version). It left a void, though, and while a lot of removed material was replaced with a pop culture reference, extra violence was used to bridge the gaps. “This wasn’t a conscious effort, it just happened,” explains Finney.

While I wasn't a fan of gore when I was a kid, I was amazed at what Duke Nukem 3D had accomplished and played through the shareware version many times on my PC.  When I saw the game had made the leap to the N64, friends and I rented it time and again to play through the full campaign and enjoy some splitscreen multiplayer.  Duke 3D would end up ported to many other platforms over the years spanning from the Sega Genesis to the iPhone, but it's the old Nintendo 64 version that I fondly remember when I recall my high school gaming days of first person shooters with friends.  We didn't care that Duke 64 didn't include any background music due to cartridge storage limitations or that the strip club level had been replaced with a fast food restaurant called Duke Burger (as horny teens we missed the strip club, but as seasoned gamers we preferred the burger joint).  We had fun!  Really, what else can one ask for from a video game?

Capcom's famous Street Fighter II has been through a number of upgrades and spawned several sequels and spin-offs, and while the original arcade release has long been eclipsed by revisions containing words in the title like "Turbo" and "Super", the story behind that first iteration is exceptionally interesting.  Shmuplations has a translated interview with director/designer Akira Nishitani from 1991 in which he lays out all kinds of information about ambitious material that the team had created, but was forced to cut from the final release.  Here's a little of that, and I encourage you to read the entire interview to see it all:

There we were, one month to go before the final deadline. When you’ve come this far, time limits what you can do. With a calm and collected judgment (actually, it was really all my own selfishness) I had to decide what would be cut due to time constraints. Here is a list of some of the plans we had that got abandoned (man, I really wanted to do these!)

• Add weak points depending on whether you hit someone in the head, body, or leg. If you hit someone there, they’d take more damage.
• Add other special weak points outside of those listed above (you can see remnants of those in Blanka’s Rolling Attack, or Vega's Flying Barcelona)
• The computer would change its tactics depending on who it was fighting against (it does do this a little bit, but we wanted to do something more detailed, like the AI knowing how close to stand to each individual opponent, etc)
• Players would take more damage than normal when dizzied.

There's also mention of the original backstory for the game (though it doesn't compare to what the actual saga actually became), and what's especially amusing is that a typo crept into the game's subtitle and nobody noticed it until the very end of development.  If Nishitani hadn't been able to work some last minute graphic layering magic, we'd all have been playing Street Fighter II: The World Warrier [sic].  While I like the later Street Fighter sequels, there's something about that original arcade release that feels most pure before all of the high-level combos, complicated super moves, and other such things that make the game popular with pros were added.  I can do a Hadouken into a Shoryuken without fail, but some of the extended moves from Street Fighter V are way beyond me.