Oh, I do hate self-aware trailer voice overs. Bomber Crew was a charming surprise though, so I’m quietly optimistic about this sequel. It has you zooming across the galaxy to defend humankind, which sounds exciting, but the real appeal is in the ways you can customise your crew and ship. I’m not talking about upgrading weapons, but the ability to give your ship a silly name and name everyone onboard after your real friends....
But even when that happened, it didn’t really reflect much about them as characters (other than some rather unfortunate replication of stereotypes, I suppose, where the wholesome Alistair couldn’t be romanced by a male player character, but the amoral, promiscuous elf Zevran could serve as “the gay option”). And the fact of any given character being said “gay” option was something that you knew going into the game. Both in and out of character, they were completely out of the closet....
In SaGa Frontier you play as one of seven characters off on quests in The Regions, a science-fastasy setting. The remaster adds another character to that roster, Fuse (not to be confused with this guy). For this new version, the developers say “several cutscenes that were cut have been added to Asellus’s scenario” and “alongside upgraded high-resolution graphics, the UI has been updated and improved.” There’s also a double-speed mode now, to make things fly by a little quicker....
The singleplayer portion of the multi-pronged Star Citizen package, Squadron 42 was pitched as a Wing Commander styled campaign with a heavyweight cast including Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman. Cloud Imperium initially envisioned it coming out in 2016 - but here we are, four years of release date pushbacks later, with no sign of a launch anytime soon. Earlier this year, Cloud Imperium posted an update assuring backers that the team was looking at better ways to keep them update....
Via IGN, Valve’s Scott Dalton shows how the Deck’s ability to track the console’s physical position means he can swish the screen with ease. Left 4 Dead looks particularly good like this, tracking the movement and tilt of the Steam Deck precisely. Dalton himself uses it while playing Witcher 3, to look around while travelling in-game. I think tying gyro to a device with a screen might be the best way to get people to accept it more on the PC....
You can check your own Steam Replay by heading here and signing in with your Steam credentials. All the stats are then offered on a single page, with options to share individual charts or the entire page. It’s nicely formatted and there’s some interesting data in the mix. Of the 41 games I played in 2022, for example, 55% were games released this year. That’s compared to an average of 17% for the broader Steam database....
Who said a post-apocalypse needed to be all rusted steel and guzzoline, anyway? Key to Last Oasis are walkers - massive wooden land-barges, using spindly wind-powered legs to spindle their way across the landscape. They’re explicitly inspired by Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s wonderfully alien Strandbeests, if his unpowered kinetic sculptures could carry a crew of post-apocalyptic scavengers across a massive open world. See, there’s been a nasty post-apocalypse that’s left most of the Earth uninhabitable, save for a shifting temperate band that spans the globe....
DotEmu today announced they’re publishing this new side-scrolling thwackfest, with development duties falling to Tribute Games. Tribute have previously made games including Mercenary Kings and the fine Flinthook. As is the way, up to four Turtles (in co-op) will be kicking their way from New York City to Dimension X. I feel someone tries to make a new Turtles beat ’em up every few years but most fail to capture that nostalgia and vanish fast enough that I, uh, don’t even remember their names....
The rats in Tails Of Iron are cute. Little 2D inhabitants of a feudal rat kingdom, where they get milk from insects that look like cows, and royal succession is determined in trial by combat - which you, Prince Redgi, win, and shortly thereafter become King Redgi when your dad is murdered by frogs right in front of you. Let the amphibian bodies hit the floor. Time to kick this RPG into a side-on soulslike experience....
The offer is available when you use code PRICEWINS before 11:59pm at May 7th (this Friday) on items from selected sellers. That list of retailers includes the likes of Currys PC World, The Game Collection, Boss Deals, Laptops Outlet Direct, ShopTo and RPS Clothing (no relation). The code works on products that cost £15 or up, and maxes out at £60 off, so around £300 is the sweet spot for maximising the savings....
I’m always astounded what a good gif can do to stop me in my browsing tracks. Watching the pixelated tiles of TaniNani’s level swap to bring the two little blob creatures together nearly mesmerized me. The way the tiles break apart, swap, and then bunch back up together is snappy and satisfying. On each level there is a crystal and multiple little blob creatures rolling along their respective tiles. You’ll swap two tiles at a time to change the path of the blobs so that they can pick up the gem and then reunite with one another....
“We are happy to announce that Tencent will be taking the System Shock franchise forward,” OtherSide said in yesterday’s statement. “As a smaller indie studio, it had been challenging for us to carry the project on our own. We believe Tencent’s deep capabilities and expertise as a leading game company will bring the franchise to new heights.” Which doesn’t really explain who is now making System Shock 3. Ah, we’ll hear more in time....
Kill It With Fire actually came out a couple of weeks ago, but it’s one of a bunch of games that publisher tinyBuild brought to showcase at PAX X EGX, and I decided to push my personal limits by playing it. I was surprised to find my time with Kill It With Fire quite liberating, albeit worryingly so. I wasn’t afraid of the spiders at all. Instead I’d become a virtual eradicator of the eight legged kind....
All On Board! promises officially licensed board games along with the ability to make your own, and share them for free. They’ve already partnered with some real-life tabletop names such as Ludus Magnus’ Black Rose Wars, Themeborne’s Escape The Dark Castle and Pegasus Spiele’s Istanbul. You’ll be able to modify games, mucking about with the pieces and boards, and players only need one copy for them all to play. The weird floating head avatars look surprisingly okay, even if the Metaverse chills me to the code....
The Division drops you in a frigid New York City after it’s been ravaged by a pandemic and essential services have come crashing down. A titular group of special agents are activated to save society with the power of, ah, guns? You can shoot your way back to civilization in an open world New York alongside a some co-op pals as well. In RPS’s The Division review, Brendan Caldwell worried that although it was a looker, The Division may wear out its welcome....
Also we talk about holes quite a lot. Links First up we chat about Donut County (not country), a game that sounds amazing as an idea and is pretty great in execution - but not doing quite as much as I hoped it would when I heard about it. Matthew reckons Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney sounds amazing when you describe it (a lawyer, but, like, fun!) Daniel Mullins’ games like The Hex either sound good or sound bad, but either way next time he should make a game that has no twist in it whatsoever....
There’s an eight second video announcing it, beacuse why not: “If you’ve shopped online before, the cart works exactly as you’d expect,” says the announcement post. You can hit an “Add to cart” button on game pages that, uh, adds it to your cart, and repeat the process until you’ve got all the items you want and are ready to checkout. At the point of checking out, you can enter a creator code if you want 5% of your purchase amount to go towards a particular creator....
In a statement released this evening, the FTC say their panel voted 3-1 in favour of filing the complaint against the acquisition. “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition in the statement. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets....
Because we operate so much behind the scenes, it’s easy to miss some of the amazing stuff that the team did in guidestown this year. It ain’t easy, writing a walkthrough or how-to that’s useful for the reader while simultaneously appeasing those nebulous and mercurial SEO gods. But 2022 has been a stonkingly good year for guides, and I’d love to take a little bit of time to shine a light on some of the things we’re most proud of having achieved this year - and to toast what will hopefully be another smashing year for guides in 2023!...
The Madvent Calendar opens its first door with Rip, a short, first-person hall-wanderer from developer Pastasfuture. We’ll open more doors as the days go on, but here’s a peek at some of the entries you can expect to gobble up over the next few weeks. As per advent calendar law, each “door” in Haunted PS1’s Madvent Calendar will open every day for the next 24 days. That means, at time of writing, all we have to play is the aforementioned Rip - a lovely, lonely home-wandering exploration game that lets you use uncomfortably photographic arms to tear apart curtains I’m 99% sure the PS1 wouldn’t be able to simulate....
