This is an oldie, but a goodie. I still can’t believe someone at Sega wasn’t having a laugh with the localization. “They’re really big bad dudes, you know. I think they drink a lot of booze at the bars or someplace.”
(Thanks, Gordo!)
I am the slayer of zombies, the knife in the dark, the caster of great magics, the slayer of Hdir. I am Sir Gans, the second of my name. I crouch on a ledge, feeling the cold stone beneath my feet, breathing the musty air of a castle centuries old. I see the Gray Knight shambling below me. His is all that stands between me and the castle exit to the forest beyond. I prepare to strike from above, my legs tensing for the leap onto the Gray Knight’s head. As I spring upon my quarry, a loud rumble emanates from my loins. The Gray Knight is split asunder by my falling strike, my flatulence the last sound on his ears.
After the jump, farting around in a dungeon. Continue reading →
Yesterday’s news that Microsoft will allow indie developers to self-publish on the Xbox One came as good news to gamers. Microsoft’s previous policies of not allowing self-publishing and charging to host game updates were major roadblocks for small studios. With both policies apparently being reversed, Microsoft looks to be trying recapture some of the magic from the early days of the Xbox 360 when it seemed to be a haven for indie developers.
Joystiq asked some developers for their reaction to the news and they expressed cautious optimism. Most seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude. Peter Bartholow, CEO of Lab Zero Games, said that he’d “need to see the final details to really know one way or another” while Rami Ismail of Vlambeer said that he would “have to wait until Gamescom to hear all the details” to make any decisions. Gaijin Games wanted to “do a little more research into the specifics” before committing to the platform.
Engadget spoke to Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano who was less positive about Microsoft’s indie game policy changes.
After my experience working with them to release on Xbox 360, I have no interest in even buying an Xbox One, let alone developing for it. The policy changes are great, but they don’t undo the experience I had. I’m not ready to forget what I went through. Working with Microsoft was the unhappiest point of my career. Policies are one thing, but developer relations are another.
Although Micorosft said they will have more details of the path to self-publishing at Gamescom in August, Marc Whitten did confirm to Kotaku that the system won’t be ready for the console’s launch, but hopes to have it set within the first year. The ability to change a retail Xbox One into a dev kit via an online update will also come later.
Meanwhile, Sony continues to woo indie developers. While a PS4 dev kit normally costs $2500, sources speaking to Polygon said that Sony is letting developers borrow them for up to a year for free. Additionally, Develop reports that Sony Europe will host a quarterly indie developer event at their London offices.
This week, Chris Hornbostel joins us for a discussion about going back to MMOs. What happens when you quit an MMO and then come back months or even years later? Which MMOs are best for this? Why is Secret World featured so prominently in the discussion? Will Tom ever shut up about Guild Wars 2? Is Dark Age of Camelot actually still around? How effectively can McMaster defend World of Warcraft from our scurrilous accusations? For games of the week, we consider whether Red Dead Redemption holds up, what’s gone terribly wrong in the first round of DLC for Metro: Last Light, and what sports game is actually an action RPG.
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There have been rumors for a few days now that Microsoft was going to announce a change to their indie game strategy for the Xbox One. The lack of a pathway to self-publishing had been a point of criticism with both gamers and developers because Sony made it a point to embrace indies on the PS4 during and after E3. GameInformer posted a report based on anonymous sources earlier, but Polygon got the official confirmation that Microsoft is going to offer a way for developers without publisher sponsorship to get their games on the Xbox One.
“Our vision is that every person can be a creator,” Marc Whitten, corporate vice president at Xbox said in a statement. “That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August.”
One of the points in the GameInformer article was that any Xbox One could be turned into a debug console via an online code update. The statement from Whitten would seem to support that rumor.
See that boardgame in the image above? Savor it. That’s as close as most of us will ever get to playing The Doom That Came to Atlantic City despite a successful crowd-funding campaign that closed in June of 2012. It was described by the creator on the Kickstarter page as a sort of reverse Monopoly in which players took the role of a Lovecraftian Elder God and tried to destroy Atlantic City instead of building it up.
People were excited by the tongue-in-cheek concept and by the art which mixed whimsy with horror. Wired wrote about it as did Tom on Quarter to Three. By the time the Kickstarter closed, the funding effort raised about four times more than the creator was asking for.
Unfortunately, it appears the game will never be a reality. The project lead, Erik Chevalier has admitted that the creation of the game as well as the establishment of a new company has gotten beyond his control and that the whole thing is being terminated. In an update to backers, Chevalier wrote that the failure of the game rests on his inexperience managing a project of this size.
From the beginning the intention was to launch a new board game company with the Kickstarted funds, with The Doom that Came to Atlantic City as only our first of hopefully many projects. Everyone involved agreed on this. Since then rifts have formed and every error compounded the growing frustration, causing only more issues. After paying to form the company, for the miniature statues, moving back to Portland, getting software licenses and hiring artists to do things like rule book design and art conforming the money was approaching a point of no return. We had to print at that point or never. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards for a variety of reasons.
As for the crowd-funded money, Chevalier said that he will try to return the pledges when he can secure employment and begin paying into a fund he will set up. He explained that he will try to pay back the people that pre-ordered the game through their webstore before returning money to Kickstarter backers.
The real world amber route is an overland trade route from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean, where Poles, Latvians, and various other eventual unwilling communists carted amber from its source to harbors that fed into a thriving world trade for buyers eager to find dinosaur DNA. I don’t know what else you would do with amber. I guess you could make a necklace or a brooch.
After the jump, beware the Lesovik! The what? Continue reading →
Gun Monkeys is a “procedurally-generated, physics-based, online deathmatch platform game” from Size Five Games. If that sounds confusing, you can check out the Steam page to see a video of it in action which will probably explain it better than mere words can. The game launched earlier this month, but head of Size Five Dan Marshall has learned that the sales of any online multiplayer game depends largely on the health of the community.
So, Gun Monkeys needs players in order to play it. You need other people milling around. At times, the servers are quite busy, you can quite happily play for hours. At other times, they’re dead, because everyone who owns a copy of Gun Monkeys is at work or at school or sleeping or playing Rogue Legacy. You have to sell HYPER-LOTS of copies in order for the servers to have anyone in them, triply so if you’re trying to get a game at 4am. This is a fact I now know that I didn’t really appreciate before.
In response to the low multiplayer population, Marshall is dropping the price of Gun Monkeys from $10 to $5.99, and every purchase will come with a gift copy of the game to give to someone else. He hopes this will solve the problem and get the multiplayer community going. Marshall also offered this advice to fellow indie developers:
Here’s the takeaway from this, for any indie dev considering adding multiplayer to a game: the number of games you have to sell in order to have people playing *constantly* is HUGE. Hugerer than you think, even. Even hugerer than your revised figure. It’s massive, and it might not happen.
Eidos Montreal founder and general manager, Stephane D’Astous has left the company. After a tweet announcing his departure, D’Astous explained to Develop that his decision was based on his perception of the leadership at his parent company Square Enix Europe.
“Since last year’s financial short-coming performance of Square Enix Europe, we (HQ London and GM Eidos-Montreal) have had growing and divergent opinions on what needed to be done to correct the situation.”
“The lack of leadership, lack of courage and the lack of communication were so evident, that I wasn’t able to conduct my job correctly. I realised that our differences were irreconcilable, and that the best decision was unfortunately to part ways.”
In an interview with Polygon, Stephane D’Astous went on the say that recent changes at Square Enix resulted in strategic planning counter to his thinking. Compounding that difficulty, he felt that SE’s inability to market Eidos Montreal’s games exacerbated the disappointing fiscal results.
Square Enix, D’Astous said, “has some things to learn about how to sell their games.”
“We are in a situation that we have great games that could have sold more,” he said. “They need to attack that very, very seriously. Last year was supposed to be a home-run season, but we didn’t hit a single home run; maybe a double or a triple, but they weren’t home runs.
Despite his feelings for the parent company and the recent reports of troubled development, D’Astous remains confident that the team working on Thief 4 will be able to deliver a game that will be successful and well-recieved.
StarCraft II is having a birthday on the 27th of July. It’s been three years since that first time some anonymous kid from another country rushed your Terran base with a thousand Zerg in multiplayer StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. To celebrate the occasion, Blizzard is rolling out some treats for players. Along with a 25% multiplayer experience boost for everyone, players with the Starter Edition will be getting a chance to try out something other than the Terran race.
Once again, we’ve unlocked all three races in the StarCraft II Starter Edition. That means that any player who hasn’t yet upgraded to the full edition of StarCraft II can check out what it’s like to play from the Protoss and Zerg perspective. Combine that with Spawning, and you’ve got a holiday on your hands!
Spawning refers to the recently announced ability for players using the Starter Edition to “spawn” full game content when they are playing online with Wings of Liberty owners, or for Wings of Liberty users to get Heart of the Swarm content when they match up with players using the latest expansion.
Spelunky will be getting a Daily Challenge mode exclusive to the Steam version. Developer Mossmouth announced that the Steam HD remaster of the 2D sidescrolling rogue-like will get a randomly generated Daily Challenge that will be the same for all players. This challenge will tie into the online leaderboards, so players will be able to post their scores for fame and bragging rights.
One chance… each day. For guts… for glory. No excuses! Since everyone plays the same adventure during the Daily, you’ll be able to know for certain who’s the top Spelunky player in your tribe – we’ve already been having a great time competing against one another behind the scenes!
To promote the Daily Challenge, specially chosen Spelunky players will be posting their runs to Youtube, so we can all see how it works starting on July 28th.
Spelunky got its start as a free game, then went to the XBox 360 as an Arcade game with HD graphics, and is now coming back to PC with the upgraded graphics and controller support as a Steam and GOG release. The new PC version of Spelunky launches on August 8th.
Ouya, the crowd-funded $99 Android console, had its retail launch on June 25th. It garnered mixed reviews from critics for its combination of neat concept, somewhat underpowered hardware, an interface much improved from the beta, and a selection of games that mostly mirror the kinds of things you’d find in the dregs of the Google Play store. Early adopters seem pleased by the mostly fulfilled promises of the Kickstarter. For its part, OUYA Inc. announced a $1 million fund for indie game development to help improve the catalog of titles.
Consoles live and die by the developer support, so how is the Ouya treating its launch partners? Gamasutra rounded up some game developers to ask them how well the Ouya has been for their bottom line. Like the critics’ hardware reviews, the partner opinions are mixed. Ryan Wiemeyer, developer of Organ Trail, expressed disappointment.
It’s sold about half of what my low-end predictions were. Last I checked we were at 501 purchases from 13,112 downloads. (a 3.8 percent attach rate.) This accounts for about 0.1 percent of our total Organ Trail sales to date (which is over 400,000.) So, I don’t even know if it was worth the man hours yet. Then again… Organ Trail was a pain to add controller support to and that was the bulk of the port.
While some developers agreed that sales were less impressive than hoped for, others were less negative. Matt Thorson, creator of TowerFall, told Edge that he was pleased with his sales so far.
“We’ve made about 2,000 sales so far at $15 each,” Thorson said. “So sales have been surprisingly high for a new game on a new console. The game has definitely proven itself on Ouya, I think there’s enough demand to warrant bringing it to PC.”
Developers praised the ease of communicating with the Ouya company, including its engineers, but many pointed out that title discoverability remains an issue in the console catalog menus. Between the cool reception by critics and the low software sales, the Ouya has quite the hill to climb to reach the peak of the industry.
In Apollo 18, a dreadfully dopey found-footage space horror movie, the big reveal is that moon rocks are actually space spiders. Which isn’t much of a surprise considering the movie’s failure to play out like a convincing astronaut procedural. Of course there are space spiders waiting at the end. But Europa Report is like Apollo 18 done right, or Apollo 13 done more fantastically. Think Sunshine, but with the hearty indie spirit you’d expect from a movie about a privately funded mission to one of Jupiter’s moons.
The space procedural stuff is top notch because it’s not afraid to be mundane. It helps that the international cast of actors doesn’t look like an international cast of actors so much as an international astronaut crew. You might recognize Sharlto Copley from Disrict 9, Michael Nyvquist from the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies, Anamaria Marinca from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and the other serial killer from the first season of Dexter. But not a one of them looks out of place. Okay, maybe the hot marine biologist is a bit much. But this is mostly a convincing cast working on a lovingly detailed set. What a grand collection of down-to-earth space hardware.
One of the problems with watching this sort of documentary style found-footage, complete with testimony of characters recalling what happened, is that you know which characters are going to be okay, and that furthermore the footage has to find its way back to Earth, where it will be edited and even marked to direct your attention to certain parts of the screen (unless the movie is Apollo 18, which is surprisingly unconcerned with the fact that it’s showing you footage that will blow up in space at the end of the movie). But I love how Europa Report — this is a report, after all — plays with the idea and even earns it.
My main concern watching Europa Report was that at some point it would go off the rails into space spider territory. No such thing happens. It’s too smart for anything other than a gratifying reveal that doesn’t betray the grounded movie you’ve been watching.
Europa Report is available for video on demand now and will have a limited theatrical release next month. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
The Enter the Dominatrix DLC that was originally supposed to be for Saints Row: The Third, will now be the first DLC for Saints Row IV. GameInformer reports that the DLC information was discussed at a panel held at the San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend. Enter the Dominatrix will ship 45 days after Saints Row IV launches.
The Enter the Dominatrix DLC has had a bumpy road to publication. It was originally going to be a standalone Saints Row: The Third title when it was announced in April 2012, but In June it was canceled. Much of the content of Enter the Dominatrix, such as superpowers and an alien invasion, were incorporated into the main plot of Saints Row IV, so it remains to be seen what the DLC will now add.
Next up in the live-action video game commercial theatre, it’s The Bureau: XCOM Declassified starring Meriadoc Brandybuck. This bit of advertising doesn’t contain any goofy costumes or cheesy special effects, but it has narration that definitely does not sound like Dominic Monaghan, so it has that going for it. There’s also some kind of social media voting tie-in, but who cares when you’re riveted to the screen while watching Charlie from Lost type?
