Up first: Zero Theorem, Waco, Raw, and Thelma. Then we talk about our favorite audition scenes besides the one that should be everyone’s favorite.
Next week: Ready Player One
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Do you remember Steam Machines? The high-concept idea first floated by Valve in 2012 was built around an affordable semi-standardized computer running a Linux-based ValveOS which would give customers an easier entry into PC gaming. It was also meant to be a sort of bulwark against what some in the industry saw as over-aggressive attempts by Microsoft to turn Windows into a walled software garden cutting Steam out of the future.
Steam Machines launched in 2015 as offerings from various hardware manufacturers. Along with the Steam Controller amd the Steam Link, some pundits saw a potential Valve end-run around Microsoft. Alas, it was not to be. Muddled messaging, controversial pricing, and a campaign that never overcame the inertia of the market hobbled the effort before it ever really began.
Valve has quietly taken the Steam Machines page from the front of the store client, and they’ve removed the listing under the hardware dropdown. Although you can get to the page via a direct link, potential buyers without may never find it on their own. A Steam death sentence for sure.
The kicker is that the catalog alteration may have occurred on March 20th. It took the fansite, Gaming on Linux to notice the change a week later! A sad indicator of just how few people cared.
Techland continues Dying Light’s year of free add-on content with the fourth and fifth installments. Drop 4 is a Prison Heist game mode set in a new penitentiary location. Players must break into Harran prison and get in the armory in solo or co-op modes while fending off hordes of undead. Drop 5 is the addition of a new wandering mini-boss named Sgt. Deathrow to Harran’s Old Town area.
Additionally, Dying Light is celebrating the holiday by having an in-game Easter egg hunt. Players have until April 3rd to find at least 25 eggs hidden around the zombie-infested land to snag a sweet chicken outfit and a special weapon.
Dying Light’s pivot from a one-off product to the games-as-a-service model has been fascinating to watch. Midway through the developer’s 12-month support plan, players have gotten free weapons, characters, cosmetics, new game modes, and a steady drip-feed of community events. Pretty good for a game that came out in January 2015!
The North American turkey. Staple of Thanksgiving dinner tables and renaissance fairs. In Far Cry 5, they are murderous foes capable of pecking and gobbling an adult human or mountain lion to death in seconds. They are the merciless ninjas of Montana. Beware! Beware the mighty turkey!
If Outlast 2’s frantic scramble through backwoods mutant village horror was just too much for you, there’s a new mode that may tune the game to your liking. The Story Mode update adjusts the game so enemy numbers are decreased and there’s more time for exploration. One of the criticisms of Outlast 2 was that it was paced like a non-stop chase, negating any attempt to appreciate the creeping dread of the plot. Developer Red Barrels cautions that players can still die, there’s just more room to breathe along the way. The studio says the update reinserts content that was cut to get an M rating for the game’s launch as well.
In related news, the game is launching on the Nintendo Switch today. Even Mario fans get to enjoy the hillbilly killer zealots!
Terry Gilliam’s pre-apocalyptic time travel sci-fi is the winner of this year’s Make Us Watch Whatever You Want Fund Raiser! So how did that turn out?
Next week: our favorite auditions
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Czech boardgame developer Vlaada Chvatil’s Through the Ages is a nearly unplayable masterpiece recreating the sweep of history with a handful of elegantly interlocked systems. It’s hard to learn, even harder to learn to play well, and even harder than that to actually get through a game. Playing Through the Ages competently requires failing Through the Ages several times over, wasting your and your friends’ time when you all could have been playing something you already knew and enjoyed.
For some reason, the boardgame’s publisher figured they’d make an iOS port of Through the Ages. As if. They didn’t have any experience doing videogame ports of boardgames, much less boardgames as sweeping, unmanageable, and esoteric as Through the Ages. It was bound to be a disaster. Instead, in one of last year’s biggest surprises, it was a triumph. It turned Chvatil’s unplayable masterpiece not only into a playable masterpiece, but an accessible masterpiece with a clever and funny tutorial, a built-from-the-ground-up interface that makes information intuitively available, as competent an AI as you want, a set of engaging challenges that will help you flex various ways to play, and smooth multiplayer support for real-time or asynchronous games with friends, enemies, or just strangers. It is the best boardgame port I have ever played.
Today it’s available for the PC with thorough cross-platform support to play with iOS players. It even synchronizes your progress with any challenges you’ve beaten on your iPad. Through the Ages is available on Steam for $16.
The indie game scene on Steam, once filled with rags to riches stories, has become a place for dreams to die. Mike Rose of No More Robots, told attendees at the 2018 Game Developers Conference that their wide-eyed optimism for success on Steam was an error. According to his data, the average game on Valve’s PC gaming service makes about $30,000 in sales in its first year. Sales decline from then on. For small studios with more than one person working a ton of hours to bring their indie vision to life, this is sobering news.
“A lot of people are coming to me saying things like ‘our game’s a bit like Limbo, and Limbo sold millions of copies.’ Oh god, that’s not how it works.”
The problem, of course, is an over-saturated platform. In 2017, over 6,000 games launched on Steam, and thus far 2018 is looking to double that figure. Rose’s advice for indie developers? Have a plan to sell on other platforms, and make your product stand out from the overcrowded space. Even then, Rose cautions indies to prepare for less-than-stellar sales.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
This is what I say out loud. I’ll mutter things from time to time. But this I say. Out loud enough that the cat mewls because he thinks I’m talking to him.
Yes, I tell him.
The best peak moments are in games that also have the lowest bleak moments. Kingdom Death: Monster is nothing if not bleak. It will test your willingness to subject yourself to the ruthless whims of the random number gods. You will roll Blood Geysers, Exploding Heads, leprosy, and two 1’s when you only need one of them to be a 3 or higher, so your population drops because a woman just died in childbirth. It exists to kill you so that you’ll be elated during moments when it doesn’t.
Digital Extremes removed a microtransaction from Warframe based primarily on one player’s behavior. Studio manager Sheldon Carter explained in a Noclip interview that the team disabled an “insanely profitable” in-game option to change the fur pattern and color of an animal companion when they realized it enabled gambling. For a little less than a dollar, players could push a button that randomly mixed the appearance of a pet kubrow, a sort of alien dog. The team observed one player that spent over $137 almost immediately in an effort to get his perfect cosmetic mix, which brought the team to an uncomfortable realization.
“Oh my dear God, what have we done? We’ve created a slot machine.”
It took the team a couple of days, but they rolled back the change and disabled the cosmetic mixing button. According to Carter, the behavior was not desired because they’d rather have players support the free-to-play game with transparent and non-predatory purchases.
More Deep Space Nine content is coming to Star Trek Online. Already present in the long-running MMO as a location hub with a few quests, the Victory is Life expansion will add more Gamma Quadrant content including the ability for players to become Jem’Hadar. René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman, and Nana Visitor will provide voicework for the characters they played on the show. Real DS9 fans want to know if Mark Allen Shepherd will reprise his MVP role as Morn.
Victory is Life for Star Trek Online launches in June.
It takes an hour and five minutes to cook a frozen Marie Callender chicken pot pie. One of the curious properties of Space Tyrant, a sci-fi micro-grand strategy game, is how it reduces that time to about 20 minutes. Because there’s no way I put that chicken pot pie in the oven, sat down to play Space Tyrant, and have been at it for an hour and five minutes. That’s just not how time works.
The hat god looked upon A Hat in Time and rightly decided that the delightful puzzle platformer from Gears for Breakfast needed more hats. And lo, there are now more hats! There’s more of everything thanks to the addition of official mod support. All those user-made levels won’t go to waste either. Playing mods and completing mod levels, will grant Rift Tokens which can be used to purchase new hat flairs, remixes, and more! The cutest platformer in the universe just got an extra oomph of cuteness. It’s almost twee overload.
Don’t take my word for how cute the game was already. Check out the review of A Hat in Time here.
That’s Electronic Arts’ SEED (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division) showing off their tech demo for Project Pica Pica, a game built with real-time ray-tracing technology. Ray-tracing has been around for decades, but mostly as a way to render light on surfaces for static images or in motion only via very powerful and expensive systems. We probably won’t see consumer games built with this tech for a bit, but it’s an interesting look at the ever-evolving world of computer graphics.
Thumper begins as an artsy look at the life of high school kids with all their social media and first loves and difficulties in school and casual drug use and absent parents. Leads Eliza Taylor and Daniel Webber positively glow as a young couple, ablaze with bright blue eyes and radiant smiles. But Taylor doesn’t quite fit. She’s got too much presence to play a high school student in a movie about the travails of vacuous youth. Beneath the self-assured sexuality of a young Kathleen Turner, there’s something maternal about her, something with the wholesome midwestern quality of a zaftig Reese Witherspoon. She has gravity beyond her years, or at least beyond the years of the character she’s playing. She’s as out of place as a 22 Jump Street character. Thumper knows just what to do with this disconnect.
Writer/director Ross Jordan has a background in MTV docudrama, which presumably informed this movie’s starting point. But Thumper doesn’t stay where it begins. By the time it has strayed into conventional territory, dragging a trail of cliches behind it, it has at least come in from a new direction. The cast can handle the familiar beats, with Pablo Schreiber charging ahead. When Taylor’s character asks him if he’s a shepherd, he demurs to deliver a small speech about the disaffected lower class, tinged with just the right amount of racism to sound real. But Schreiber is a shepherd here. Without his presence, Thumper probably wouldn’t work, and Jordan’s cliches would sink instead of skipping across the surface. Schreiber is an actor in the middle of a fascinating career, spanning crime thrillers and arthouse comedies, action schlock and serious drama, TV and movies. Come to Thumper for its attractive blonde leads, freshly imported from Australia (it’s a real hoot to listen to Taylor and Webber in interviews, accents in full bloom). Stay for the Schreiber.
