I shouldn’t expect Aquanaut’s Holiday, but I can’t help myself. Drop me into a virtual ocean and I’m going to remember that game’s open-world wonder from a time before open-world was even a thing. It was 1995. It was a Playstation. And not a Playstation One, because there was no such thing. The Playstation 2, 3, and 4 didn’t exist yet. Just a Playstation. It was Japanese, which might explain why it didn’t feel the need to be an actual game. It was instead a virtual ocean released at a time when you couldn’t go online and Google search a forum to start a thread called “uh, what am i supposed to be doing in here anyway?” So I spent most of my time in Aquanaut’s Holiday wondering what was going to happen, if anything, and not particularly minding that nothing was happening because it was so weirdly hypnotic. Relaxing. Sometimes eerie. Years later I would discover you could build a reef to attract fish or something. I suppose that’s gameplay, but it’s nothing I ever figured out.
Paradox has been trying to tidy up some of the shortcomings of Stellaris with a series of patches named after science fiction writers. Asimov has been released and Clarke is under way. Given the work the design needs, I’m holding out for, I dunno, maybe Vonnegut? No earlier than Shatner, at any rate. But the ongoing patchwork won’t deter Paradox from selling DLC in the meantime. The first set of DLC is the Plantoids Species Pack for $8. It sounds like it might add some cool factions to a game whose factions aren’t cool, because they aren’t even factions (they’re randomly rolled sets of traits given nonsense names). So let’s take a look at what you get for your $8.
Fifteen new species portraits
New templates for plantoid civilian and military ships
New cityscape art
Oh. So, just plant artwork? Well what’s this that’s already in the base game?
Wait, those are fungoids. How could I confuse the two? Stellaris fans have already gotten the mushroom treatment.
Big Robot, the studio behind Sir, You Are Being Hunted, has announced The Signal From Tolva. It’s an open world first-person game centered on exploration and combat. Unlike Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the objective isn’t hiding from robots and the world isn’t procedurally generated. Big Robot’s previous game was strong on visuals and flavor, but the gameplay was hampered by repetitive scavenging and traversal, so here’s hoping that this next game makes the back and forth less of a pain. One of the more intriguing elements revealed in The Signal From Tolva is the faction gameplay that sounds a bit more meaty.
The game world is driven by AI activity that decides where our robots will go, and what they will decide to do. Bots will head out from bunkers to survey crash sites or attack neighbouring bunkers or guard locations. Territory control battles kick off dynamically, with patrolling AI squads skirmishing against each other and taking control of a series of brutalist locations across the planet’s craggy valleys. Battles erupt with or without the player’s intervention, and their consequences can change the course of play by clearing ambushes and capturing or losing vital bunkers that allow for respawning and re-equipping as you play.
The Signal From Tolva will launch in early 2017 on Windows PC and OSX.
Ark: Survival of the Fittest, the free-to-play competitive multiplayer spinoff of Ark: Survival Evolved, is being folded back into the main game. Studio Wildcard announced the change of plans on Monday, saying the project needed to be reintegrated into the production cycle of Ark: Survival Evolved. The developers also cited the growing support expense and technical expertise needed for a free-to-play title as other reasons for the move.
Ultimately, it’s clear this is not who we are, we like to make games, and to make the gameplay fun. We don’t know much about monetization, and quite frankly we aren’t interested in hiring an economics team to take over that process, it is much more in our and your best interest for Wildcard to solely focus on the development of a game.
Ark: Survival of the Fittest has struggled since its launch in March. Technical issues, poor balance, and shoddy gameplay have been common complaints about the spinoff. Players used to other popular free-to-play games have accused Studio Wildcard of neglecting the game in favor of their bigger project. Survival of the Fittest will continue to exist as a game mode within Ark: Survival Evolved, but it’s unclear what will happen to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the free-to-play game. According to the announcement, the console versions are being placed “on hold” while the developers figure out what to do.
Sometimes you pay a price when you write reviews for people who’ve already played a game. That price is people who look to reviews to decide what they’re going to play. Where will they spend their time or money? But if I’m going to critique Inside based on what I know after I’ve played it, and if the majority of Inside’s appeal is discovery, I can’t tell you much without compromising your experience with the game.
In other words, there will be spoilers.
But first, I have three things I want to tell people who haven’t played Inside.
After the jump, don’t worry, it’s safe to keep reading!Continue reading →
It’s only been a couple of months since Disney announced their intent to cease direct videogame creation outside of browser and mobile games, but they’ve already laid out the schedule for Disney Infinity’s slow death. In a post on the official page, The Walt Disney Company has detailed exactly how all your toy DLC purchases will become obsolete. Effective immediately, the PC Steam, Android, iOS, and Amazon versions of the Disney Infinity are disconnected from the in-game store. On September 30th, these versions will be shut out completely and all online features will be dead. Console versions of Disney Infinity will continue to operate as normal until March 3rd, 2017. On that final date, all the servers for the game will be turned off and it will only be playable as an offline experience.
The good news for collectors is that the figures are being sold off with steep discounts by many retailers. Get that Yondu figure while you can.
Ghostbusters from the team that made Bridesmaids? What could possibly go wrong? At the 1:08 mark, we don our hooded robes and begin the creepy ritual known as the weekly 3×3 to discuss cults in movies.
People seem pretty jazzed by the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic system, the inexpensive throwback hardware that’s coming in November, so reports of a similar system from Sega are just as exciting. Unfortunately, while the idea of Sega jumping back into making console hardware sounds awesome, it’s nothing but an illusion. The plug and play Mega Drive Classic Game Console that’s been floating around social media for the past couple of days is manufactured under license by Chinese firm AtGames and is a revamp of their Sega Genesis Classic Console that’s been around for years. (They also manufacture the Atari Flashback console.) While AtGames’ console recreations basically do what they advertise, reviews suggest somewhat sloppy performance thanks to some slapdash emulation. In short, if you want classic Sega games on real Sega hardware, check out the thrift stores.
There’s a bit of The Witness in Quadrilateral Cowboy. Just a tiny bit. The Witness is a game about teaching you how to play The Witness. Period. Full stop. Quadrilateral Cowboy is, at times, a game about teaching you how to play Quadrilateral Cowboy. Dot, dot, dot.
After the jump, I promise you won’t read the word “heuristics” because this isn’t that kind of review.Continue reading →
The Call of the Beastmen DLC for Total War: Warhammer launches on Thursday, but even if you don’t buy it, the half-animal servants of chaos will show up in your games as computer-controlled enemies. Creative Assembly has detailed the goodies that everyone will get as a free content update to the game regardless of DLC ownership and it includes Beastmen as an A.I. faction in the campaign, an Amber Wizard hero with mount, four new maps to use in multiplayer and skirmish battles, and a new unlockable lord.
The Amber Wizard is a new unit for the Empire that can use animalistic battlefield magic. He also rides a flying griffin mount. The new lord, Sarthorael the Everwatcher, Lord of Change and Greater Daemon of Tzeentch, can be unlocked by playing the grand campaign and fulfilling his achievement requirements.
Sony will not require players to have PlayStation Plus to play No Man’s Sky online. Game Informer reached out to Sony and the console-maker confirmed that despite requiring an active PlayStation Plus subscription to play most games online, they will not require it for No Man’s Sky. That’s a good thing because while the game has some shared universe gameplay like logging discoveries and tagging them with your name, the studio is treating the game as a single player experience. Thanks to the procedurally generated nature of the galaxy, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in the No Man’s Sky universe. Running into another player on accident should be a rare occurrence, but congratulations if you do! You just got free multiplayer!
No Man’s Sky will release on August 9th for the PlayStation 4 and August 12th for Windows PC.
You can tell how strongly some of us feel about this movie by the fact that we don’t get to the 3×3 until the 1:45 mark. Then we adjust our mics to do a 3×3 on microphone scenes.
Publisher 2K Games probably wants you to think of violent crime epics like The Godfather or Goodfellas when you watch this live-action trailer for Mafia III, but you’ll be forgiven if it just reminds you of a perfume commercial. At least until the murdering starts.
