Everybody gets old — the question is, how do you realize it? I realized I was old when I stopped being surprised by things that would have shocked me in my twenties. Russia ruled by a madman? No longer shocking. US soon to be ruled by a madman? No longer shocking. Game touted as Computer Squad Leader ends up being disappointing? Well…
After the jump, okay, I can still be surprised by some things. Continue reading →
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Offworld Trading Company, the economic real-time strategy game from Mohawk Games, is launching on April 28th. Not that it should matter to you because you’ve been playing the game since it hit beta status, right? Soren Johnson’s take on Martian stock manipulation and industrial sabotage has been delightfully playable for over a year, but now with a coat of polish and balance, we can expect even greater things. The addition of a story campaign and daily challenges sound like good reasons to get cracking on shorting stock and making buddy-buddy with business mercenaries.
Four big businesses are vying for all of the resources and control on Mars. Learn about what brought them there and how they intend to drive their competition into the ground and come out on top.
Offworld Trading Company is available on Steam for Windows PC.
Thanks to all the trash and trash business model clogging up my iPad, I’m so disenchanted with the iOS as a gaming platform that I can hardly recall a time when I used to see a cool little PC game and think “I wish that was on the iPad”. But occasionally, a vague memory of that sentiment burbles up. For example, Axes and Acres would be a perfect fit for dinking around on my iPad in the waiting room of the dentist’s office when I can’t play it on my PC (stay tuned for more on that videogame boardgame, which was just released today).
But then someone actually goes and ports his cool little PC game to the iOS. Now I have to remind myself what I did with my iPad. Is it in the garage with my copy of that Tony Hawk skateboarding game? Underneath all my copies of Game Informer in the attic? In the spot reserved for the Oculus Rift I can’t be arsed to get yet? Nope, there it is next to my Friends VHS tapes! Do I still even have a cord to charge it?
I’m prepping my iPad for actual gaming again for when Scott Brodie releases the just announced updated version of Hero Generations.
[Hero Generations] ReGen was created because of the overwhelming demand we’ve received for a phone and tablet version of Hero Generations. But this isn’t just a port. We’re also taking a lot of the ideas and feedback we’ve received from fans of the original game, and integrating them into one kick-ass, definitive remake of HG.
From the screenshots, Hero Generations might look like your garden variety rogue-like. It is no such thing. You don’t level up a character so much as you level up the maps. Your heroes develop cities and beat back monsters over the course of multiple generations. One of the improvements Brodie intends is a large connected map rather than interconnected separate screens. Great idea. Hopefully it will make it easier to wrap your head around how the game progresses. A tricky part of the learning curve is figuring out that your dynasty has to strike out beyond the first map and, hopefully, not die out.
Here’s Brodie’s stream of an early build, which opens with a demonstration of how to flee a battle: “I’m going to run away from this guy because he is huge and we are young.” The non-iOS version of Heroes Generation is available on Steam. Some dude over there wrote this review:
This is not your father’s roguelike. It’s your grandfather’s roguelike. And his father’s before his. And his father’s before his.
Such a clever concept, so refreshingly different from the usual dungeon crawls. It reminds me of a line from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: “For all the points on the compass, there is only one direction. And time is its only measure.”
Remember when Syd Mead and Ridley Scott told us the future would be a drizzly nighttime dystopia with flashes of neon? Remember how we all agreed for several decades that, yep, that’s what it’s gonna be like, all right? The bright color and quaint tilt-shift aesthetic of Tokyo 42 has other ideas.
Tokyo 42 will be released not soon enough.
Would you rather read a review of Gremlins Inc, have some guy explain it to you in exhaustive detail, or spectate two hours of raw gameplay between a lord of the underworld as played by Tom Chick and the manager of a city dump as played by Kelly Wand? If you picked that last one, enjoy the above video.
Ten years ago, Bethesda Softworks looked at the growing market in gamerpics (remember those?) and background themes in the Xbox Marketplace for the Xbox 360 console, and wondered if people would purchase something similar in a videogame. If people were willing to buy a virtual drawing of a funny face for their profile, why wouldn’t they buy a pony dress in their game? Thus, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s Horse Armor Pack DLC pack was born. A cosmetic bit of fluff for your in-game Oblivion steed, the content was originally sold for 200 Microsoft Points (remember those?) or $2.50. Although it became the poster-child of bad downloadable content, Bethesda pointed out that quite a lot of people bought it, even two years later.
To say the Horse Armor Pack was divisive would be an understatement. Some people felt very strongly that it was the death knell of gaming. They said it was a nickel-and-dime scam that piecemeal sold what should’ve been bundled in an expansion, or even given away for free as a mod. Others thought that it was no big deal. People would vote with their wallets and sanity would win out, tossing the “microtransaction” into the dustbin of history.
Horse Armor was neither as it turned out. It was the start of a revolution in the gaming industry. Far from killing gaming or going away quietly, it instead pointed the way forward. Whole companies and genres are built around this model of selling game content now. In fact, the argument over this experiment looks sort of quaint today. DLC is commonplace. One could even argue that the majority of gamers prefer to pay for their gaming experiences through DLC or microtransaction offers. After all, where would mobile gaming be without in-game purchases?
Hooray for Horse Armor! It changed gaming forever and gave us all a Godwin’s Law equivalent for DLC.
When making an action RPG, the most important task — important above all else! — is to get the moment-to-moment hack-and-slash right. It has to be gratifyingly chaotic, splashy but not too confusing. The camera can’t be zoomed out so far that you can’t appreciate your character and her gear, but neither can it be zoomed in so far that you can’t see monsters coming. It’s a difficult balancing act. No one does it better than Blizzard, which is hardly surprising given how much practice they’ve had.
If you can’t get this stuff right, there’s no reason to continue development. Just throw in the towel and make some free-to-play thing for the Apple Store about waiting for crops to grow. But if you get that stuff right, if you tune and tweak and cajole and code and flex videocards and wring every ounce of sweat from your animators and carefully calculate the line between too much and too little — if you do all that — then you’re half way there. Next comes the really hard part.
After the jump, the Iron way Continue reading →
https://youtu.be/HjASHR7F79Q
The trailer for Fallout 4’s next DLC features a bunch of cool stuff, but everything that matters is at the 1:10 mark. Mirelurks are scary, super mutants can be formidable, and deathclaws are intimidating, but kitties are where it’s at. Just like in real life, a cat in Fallout 4 can sleep through a firefight, scamper between melee combatants, and generally just not care about the lumbering half-ton of powered armor nearby. The guy in the video doesn’t know how close he came to dying when the cat jumped out.
The Wasteland Workshop DLC for Fallout 4 will launch on April 12th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It is part of the season pass, and will be available separately.
Unfortunately, you don’t get movies like The Witch very often. Which is why we spend so long talking about it. But we don’t sink into a discussion of sand until the 1:41 mark.
Be sure to check out listener sinnick’s movie posters here.
Next week: Zootopia
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That’s an in-game shot from RollerCoaster Tycoon World. My park guests could either be yawning at the game’s klunky performance on a decent PC, or they’re aghast that I’m playing this instead of a better game. It’s a mess. The game is in early access, so things could get better, but there’s a long way to go. As it stands now, it’s little more than a sparse sandbox park editor with a barely adequate tutorial mode coupled to art design that only barely looks as good as the full-featured RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 from 2004. The fact that the game is sorely unfinished didn’t stop the publisher, Atari, from boxing up a Steam code and tossing it up on retail shelves in some territories anyway.
Nvizzio Creations is the third studio that publisher Atari hired to take on the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise after Pipeworks Software and Area 52 Games were both removed from the project. Nvizzio at least seems to be excited to work on the project and they’ve acknowledged that they have some work to do. Hopefully, Atari recognizes that there is an audience willing to support these modestly budgeted, but well-made, sandbox sims.
Frontier Developments, the studio that made the previous RollerCoaster Tycoon games for Atari, is busy developing their own theme park sim, Coaster Planet.
While taking a break from feeding his chickens in Stardew Valley, Jason McMaster discovers another MOBA. Tom Chick saves the world from zombies again, this time as Lara Croft. Then he initiates the Tachyon Project nearly a year too late and maybe on the wrong platform.
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Eugen Systems’ real-time strategy game R.U.S.E. is no longer available for purchase digitally. The game has been de-listed from Steam and Ubisoft’s own storefront. While current owners can download and play the game, you won’t be able to buy the game unless you find a dusty retail copy somewhere. From Ubisoft’s explanation, it doesn’t sound like the situation will be fixed in the near future.
“Due to the expiration of licensing rights over certain military items within the game, R.U.S.E is no longer available for purchase.”
The game has actually been missing in action since December, but neither players nor the game’s developers knew why until now. While R.U.S.E. had issues, it’s an interesting look at what would eventually become Eugen’s Wargame series.
Microsoft says the company has heard the complaints about Universal Windows Platform Apps, and will take steps to course-correct. At the Build 2016 conference, Xbox honcho Phil Spencer, revealed that some of the issues people (including Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney) noted with Windows 10 Store PC games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition would be fixed. The specific points noted hinged on the fact that due to the nature of the way UWP works, user mods, overlays like Steam, disabling vertical sync, and using some graphics processor software, are all currently not possible. Spencer promised that Microsoft is working with engineer partners to enable these features into UWP that PC gamers have enjoyed for years previously.
During the same conference, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Store and Windows 10 Store would merge to present a consistent experience across all Microsoft platforms.
Formula One World Championship Limited, the rights and licensing arm of the Formula One auto-racing organization, has put the brakes on user-made mods for a number of F1 games. Pretend Race Cars notes that over 30 pages of mods have been removed from the sim racing community site RaceDepartment for the games Automobilista, F1 2013 and F1 2014. Even relatively minor mods like one that returned real-life Martini Racing logos and colors to the games have been removed. Since mods for the current officially licensed game F1 2015 from Codemasters remain untouched, the speculation is that Formula One is pushing the latest licensed product by forcing modders and the community to abandon older titles.
This is not the first time that Formula One has issued demands against sim modders working on older games. In 2014, the organization forced VirtualIR to remove mods for their licensed games.
UPDATE: Automobilista has been de-listed from Steam due to a copyright infringement complaint. The developer’s notice doesn’t confirm if the complaint is related to the F1 modding issue, but they note that until the legal issue is sorted out, they cannot discuss the specifics.
