In 2009, Konami announced a third-person military action shooter based on the Iraq War – specifically, the infamous Second Battle of Fallujah that featured house-to-house fighting against insurgents that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. Atomic Games was going to be the developer, but highly vocal criticism of the concept caused the project to be quietly shelved by Konami and Atomic shuttered in 2011 after releasing Breach. Surprisingly, Six Days in Fallujah is making a comeback. There’s a new trailer and Steam page for it already.
Six Days is now being published by Victura and developed by Highwire Games. Victura CEO Peter Tamte was the head of Atomic Games back when the game was first announced in 2009, so this is a personal project for him. Highwire Games was founded by Jaime Griesemer, a former designer for the Halo games. The studio boasts the talent of Marty O’Donnell, the former composer and audio director for the Halo franchise.
This time around, the developers hope to stave off the pre-launch criticism by presenting a more nuanced take on the incident. Six Days is being made with input from not only some of the American and British military soldiers that fought in the battle, it will also include input from some civilian survivors.
Project Cars 3 doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. It’s a serious game, obsessed with cars and tracks and uninterested in silly party games. That’s the next door down. You can’t miss it. It says Wreckfest on the door. Wreckfest is Project Cars’ younger funnier brother that everyone loves.
But sometimes Project Cars 3 tries to tell a joke. It’s not very good at it. It messes up the punchline. Its timing is off. But it’s trying. Here’s how the joke goes:
Steam is finally officially available in China. Technically, Steam hasn’t really been approved for use in China, although you’d never know it from looking at the player counts and sales numbers. It’s existed in a murky limbo where the Chinese government has turned a bit of a blind eye to all the citizens using a VPN and the international version of the Valve store to play PC games. At least until now. Valve, in a government-approved partnership with Perfect World, has launched Steam China. It’s just like Steam if you squint really hard.
It’s got the right look and it sells game like Steam, but Steam China has only 50 or so games on it at launch. (Thankfully, all vetted and licensed by the government approval boards.) The biggest difference is all the community features have been swept away in a gloriously cleansing wave of patriotic duty. No pesky chat or forums to negatively impact your view of the games (or the government) and no community guides to cheat your way past content. User reviews for games are available, but I’d wager there’s some monitoring going on there.
Steam community features have never been usable in China despite the widespread use of VPN to access it. Now, there won’t even be the temptation!
The last couple of daily rivals events have been forgettable. Generically overpowered cars on generic racetracks. But the current weekly challenge has shaken up my game a bit. It’s been educational. I’ve advanced my knowledge of cars and how to do car talk. And my collection has grown. Let me show you.
Like most colonies, Australia was built from its coasts inward. If you go inland from Sydney, you can’t get very far without bumping into the Blue Mountains. But just beyond the Blue Mountains, settlers discovered an expanse of arable land called Bathurst Plains, watered by Australia’s largest river system. To open the way from Sydney, a hundred-mile road was built through the mountains, ending at the newly founded town of Bathurst in 1815. It was Australia’s first inland colony.
Today, 37,000 people live in Bathurst. South of the town is a 400-foot rise called Mount Panorama, because you can stand on it and get a nice view of the town. The town spray painted the words MOUNT PANORAMA on the slope, in bright white capital letters. Not quite as showy as erecting giant wooden letters over Hollywood, but the sensibility is the same. Five times a year, the streets in the southern part of Bathurst are closed off for racing through town, up the slope of Mount Panorama, and back down into town. This is where I went for today’s rivals event in Project Cars 3. And this is where I discovered one of my new favorite things in racing.
Are Rivals events like New York Times crossword puzzles? Is Saturday the day for sadistic challenges? Why else would I be driving Project Cars 3’s most powerful car in the rain? Why else would I be hydroplaning in a car so absurdly overpowered that it doesn’t even have a name? Why else would I have done what I did to finish this challenge? Why else would I sink to these depths of shame and loathing?
Sunless Skies is a great game. Some are saying it’s literally the greatest game of 2019. Developer Failbetter Games has been working on an update, called the Sovereign Edition, which includes an overhaul of character progression, a reworking of some of the endgame areas, and a not inconsiderable amount of new content. The update was announced on October 19, 2019 and scheduled for an August or September 2020 release alongside the console port of the game.
After the announcement, there was no word until September 16, 2020, when Failbetter conceded that console ports are “more complex than they expected” so they didn’t have a release date anymore. Then on December 2nd, they said the Sovereign Edition had been submitted for certification (since it was also going to coincide with the console release). This tends to take a couple of weeks, tops.
Unless something goes wrong. Which we can infer from Failbetter’s silence for another two months. Today, Failbetter conceded the Sovereign Edition is “still seeing some challenging performance problems” and they still don’t have a release date to announce.
It might surprise you to know this, but I’m no car expert. Everything I know about cars I Googled and then forgot ten minutes later. When I go to the mechanic, I make a great show of nodding sagely while he explains in detail why he’ll be charging $742.18 to my credit card. He might as well be speaking Klingon.
However, I do know physics, common sense, and today’s rivals event in Project Cars 3. I also know the ongoing weekly rivals event that will be in effect for two more interminable days. From these things, I have some advice to offer the supposed experts who make fancy cars. Because right now, they’re Doing It Wrong. So I’m going to tell them how to make their fancy cars work better.
Activision Blizzard revealed that Call of Duty has generated an eye-watering 27 billion dollars across the franchise since its start in 2003. There were over 100 million monthly active users on average throughout 2020, and the latest chapter, Black Ops Cold War, which launched in November, effectively doubled the average user’s time spent in-game when compared to Modern Warfare. CEO Bobby Kotick also announced in the 2020 results investor call that you all seem to love the Call of Duty in-game microtransactions and season pass malarkey. In-game sales grew 50% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2020.
While no specifics dollar amount was attached to Call of Duty’s in-game purchases, the whole of Activision Blizzard made 4.85 billion dollars from microtransactions in 2020. Overall, it was the best year for the company in its 30-year history.
Today’s daily event was a lap around Donington Park, which is a real-world track in Leicestershire, England. The track is named after a nearby castle, which I probably climbed around on while playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. The car is called a Caterham. I’ll have more to say about it shortly. There will be cussing. My best lap time, after using all 20 available attempts, was 1 minute and 38.589 seconds. As of this writing, that puts me in the silver ranking at 132nd place.
Following are ten reasons I’m not in 131st or better place.
This isn’t really a review of Raiders of Scythia because there’s a pandemic going. That means I’m pretty much limited to solitaire gaming until vaccines are rolled out widely enough to cover “people who really want to get back to playing boardgames with their friends”. That’s a lower priority than, say, front-line health care workers, teachers, and grocery store employees. But it’s a higher priority than hermits, firewatchers, and seamen doing multi-year tours of duty on nuclear submarines. So, fingers crossed. Until then, there are a ton of games I can’t review, much less play.
But this is a short analysis of why I think Raiders of Scythia is so good, including why it’s better than worker placement games in general, and why it’s better than its predecessor, Raiders of the North Sea, in specific. I’ll spend about fifteen minutes explaining why I like it so much, and then run through a solitaire game so you can see how it plays. Also, there will be some Bible talk.
One of the multiplayer modes in Project Cars 3 is called Rivals. It consists of month-long seasons. Each month, there is a single event which you can drive as often as you like to improve your standing. There are also rotating weekly events and daily events, each with a limited number of attempts. When each event closes, you win points based on how you placed on the leaderboard. Those points accumulate over the course of the season. At the end of the season, everybody’s ranked and wins experience points based on how well they did. And, of course, you’re earning experience points along the way just by driving the events. However you choose to play, you’re always making progress in Project Cars 3. If you drive, you advance.
But what if I let Project Cars 3 have a turn at the wheel?
Google has shut down its internal Stadia game studios. According to Stadia VP, Phil Harrison, the company will shift all resources away from developing games and concentrate on providing a streaming platform where others can publish their games. Harrison cited the expense and time needed to create first-party games as a barrier.
“Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially.”
The business shake-up also means Jade Raymond, originally hired on to oversee Stadia’s game studios, is leaving to “pursue other opportunities” outside of Google. Raymond came from Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise and EA’s Motive Studios and had originally been hired in 2019 to head Stadia Games and Entertainment, but Google’s studio produced no games during its short run.
At the same time, Amazon’s foray into creating games doesn’t seem to be going much better. Bloomberg dove into the recent failures at Amazon Game Studios and came away with some insights of the bungled effort. $500 million a year has given Amazon a catastrophic misfire in Crucible, a copycat free-to-play hero shooter game that almost immediately shut down after launching.
“One of the things that we hear most often from people who try Crucible is that it feels unique.”
Its MMO, New World, changed from a survival and crafting focus with a colonizers-versus-natives theme to something a lot less racially charged, but its issues continued. After feedback from playtesting last year, the launch was pushed from August 2020 to Spring 2021.
Game development is hard. When a company like Google cites Cyberpunk 2077 as the highwater mark of its platform, you know you’ve hit trouble.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A haunted older cop on the verge of retirement teams up with a hot-tempered young detective to hunt down a creepy celebrity playing a serial killer who likes a bit of a flourish in his crime scenes. In The Little Things, Rami Malek as Brad Pitt is as fascinating as ever, Jared Leto as Kevin Spacey is unintentionally hilarious, and Denzel is Denzel. John Lee Hancock’s last movie, The Highwaymen, told its story from a unique angle, using a couple of seasoned actors doing their thing, in a period piece with a lot of keenly observed detail and some gratifying gun porn. So what happened here? Hancock’s ham-handed script and even more ham-handed direction — you couldn’t edit a car chase any worse than this movie’s excuse for a car chase — make it hard to just enjoy the cast. It’s quite the turgid movie that doesn’t come alive until Jared Leto is onscreen, but that’s just because he’s so darn unusual. But, hey, at least something interesting is finally happening. I call it the Crispin Glover Effect.
The Little Things is such an aimless mish-mash of cop vs serial killer tropes that it only keeps you guessing because it’s unclear what it’s even trying to do. Is this a buddy cop movie? Is it a horror movie? Is it a homicide procedural? Is it a mystery? A thriller? A parody of James Patterson? Something that Morgan Freeman passed on? How about none of the above by virtue of all of the above? When the Obligatory Shocking Final Twist thuds into place with all the grace of a body rolled into a shallow grave, it turns out you were watching something else entirely. The Little Things is ultimately a story about how the police sometimes have to cover their asses because, well, they’re the police and we should really cut them some slack if they can’t be bothered to follow rules and stuff. Hey, John Lee Hancock, try reading the room. Or alternatively, try paying closer attention to what made David Fincher’s masterpiece tick. Because this Seven is barely a Two.
