Indiescovery is the new sibling in the RPS podcast family and will sit snuggly next to Ultimate Audio Bang, and The Electronic Wireless Show, but our focus is strictly on the wonderful world of indie games. It’s best to think of the podcast as an extension of our Indiescovery tag on the site - although we’ve got the Indiescovery Podcast tag just for the pod, if you ever want to check all the episodes....
Little Inferno was a game about burning things. You’d unlock new items, you’d throw them in your fireplace to set them alight, and you’d try to incinerate them alongside other items to discover combos. It was more of a toy than a game, and it was wrapped in a beat-you-over-the-head satire of capitalism and video game monetisation. I didn’t like it very much and neither did Jim in our Little Inferno review....
“In the dead of night a fierce storm rages across North Wales,” say Headware Games. “Miles from any town, Chris Selwood seeks refuge in a remote roadside café. Shortly thereafter Chris experiences a horrific sight as he finds the café waitress pinned to the ceiling by something with fierce glowing eyes, he passes out waking up to the dusty old abandoned remains of the café.” That is indeed part of how Chasing Static starts....
Meta, formerly called Facebook, began to require Meta Quest users, formerly called Oculus Quest users, to have a Facebook account in order to use their headset back in 2020. People weren’t happy about that, both because they didn’t want a Facebook account or because the process of merging an old Oculus account with a Facebook account was laborious and broken. In that regard, it’s good that the requirement is going away....
In the launch trailer, we hear gruff Sam talk us through his plans to escape back to the US, and also watch him shoot lots of dudes and get attacked by many gruesome creatures. “Traverse the remains of Vladivostok’s tsunami ravaged harbours, ruined industrial buildings and crumbling residential districts in a huge, ‘sandbox survival’ level,” the blurb says. Sam’s Story will cost you £15/€18/$18 on the Epic Games Store. It is also sold on Steam, though right now that’s only useful if you pre-ordered Exodus there before Deep Silver pulled it to become an Epic exclusive....
Microsoft say they’ve revamped 20 cities in Italy and Malta using “digital elevation modeling, aerial and satellite imagery, and triangulated irregular network (TIN) modeling”. They’ve also worked on zhuzhing the coastline (that’s the official, technical term, you know), which is a pretty major attraction of Italy and Malta. The update incorporates an airbus-load of new points of interest too, from the Pantheon to Saint Mark’s Basilica and Vatican City. Wave to the Pope everyone....
The biggest mods are some way off, however. Modding a game that’s in early access is a bit like trying to ice a cake before its baked, and Bannerlord’s fans don’t even have a spatula – by which, of course, I mean official modding tools – to work with. Without these tools, not due until the game’s full release, there’s no easy way to access Bannerlord’s internal scripting language and make changes....
Garangolm fight walkthrough Garangolm uses its massive fists to pound players and tear boulders from the ground to use as projectiles, dealing damage in large areas in front of it. You need to be in front of Garangolm to hit its weakspots, but unfortunately, that’s the most dangerous place to be. With one particularly dangerous attack, Garangolm shoves both fists into the earth before flipping up a huge chunk of ground, dealing damage in a large directly in front of Garangolm and creating a huge boulder projectile that hits further out....
The demo consists of the opening portion of the game. It’s been available for the Nintendo Switch for a couple of weeks now and from what I’ve seen you can enjoy at least a couple of hours of the game: a few dungeons to raid, monsties to battle, and weapons to upgrade. The limitations include only one save slot, no multiplayer, and a level max of 11. You can play after reaching level 11, you just won’t accrue any XP....
Since we’re defining niches, you can’t convince me to not call Moonglow Bay fishcore. It’s got the little seaside house, the pet, the Instagram-ready book-and-an-armchair scenes, but it’s also about sailing out on your little tug to catch different kinds of fish. And you can’t convince me that boat doesn’t smell of fish guts. There’s a new trailer below, which brings the news that we can all imagine those fish guts come October 7th....
Nebuchadnezzar is not a rubbish olive. It’s very pleasant, and certainly reasonable value for 16 quid. But it comes so close to delivering the city building holy grail - a proper successor to the old Impressions city builders at last - that the shortfall is agonising. It would be easier to deal with if it was just an unimaginative reskin of Pharaoh or Caesar III. But no; Nebs fixes some of the most annoying fundamental systems in those classics, with astonishing elegance, and does new things besides....
The new hires will join former Overwatch executive producer Chacko Sonny, team lead at the newly formed Netflix Games Studio. Who knows if they’ll make anything good, but at least it’ll probably come free with your ‘flix. The job postings reveal a few more details (cheers, Mobilegamer.biz). The ad for live service director confirms it’ll be a live service game with regular updates and whatnot, which Netflix say they’re keen to explore “without the barrier of ads or in-app purchases”....
Heart Machine’s Alx Preston describes it as a little like rollerskating. You shoop-shoop across a landscape, build speed via collectables, and chain movements together with jumps and grapples that allow you to traverse enormous environemnts. When you come face to face with an enemy, the combat flows seamlessly from your sprinting, with beasties in the trailer above dispatched in just a couple of quick hits. What the trailer doesn’t show, and what I wish it did, is what happens when you miss one of those jumps and fall 600 feet to the ground....
If your chatmates are lucky, you’ve already seen and been using these. If not, hey, this is a helpful reminder. So here’s “Barnacules” demonstrating Nvidia’s new RTX Voice the other day: Come on, that fan’s not even on and no way he’s actually banging that hammer, you can see he’s just flapping it around without tou- oh. Oh! That IS good. Then he escalated: I’m dead impressed. It processes all that noise and manages to filter out (almost) everything but the voice....
As we approach the end of the PC gaming calendar for 2020, here’s a reminder of all those new PC games coming out over the next couple of months. Retooled and updated with all the latest PC game release dates for October, November and December, here are all the confirmed new PC games for the rest of the year as they currently stand. Ordered by month, I’ve rounded up all of this year’s new PC games into one handy list so you know exactly when you’ll be able to play the biggest and best PC games....
Part of me that feels like this is a good idea. Having a way of quickly and easily getting rid of them is great. However, I’ve heard one too many stories about AI learning to be racist, so I do wonder if it’s the best sort of tech to put in video games. Last week, Modulate revealed a new AI-powered moderation tool called ToxMod. It uses machine learning models to understand what players are saying, and how they’re saying it to recognise if someone is being nasty in voice chat....
NieR Replicant was released only in Japan for the PS3 in 2010. We did get a version of Nier here, the slightly different game known in Japan as NieR Gestalt, which had a dad as the protagonist instead of a young brother. Their story continued thousands of years later in NieR: Automata. Visually, Replicant has received a new lick of paint, the soundtrack has been re-recorded, and the most substantial additions are the a new story episode and new dungeons....
The base-building app supports both importing and exporting, so you can fiddle with your existing No Man’s Sky bases as well as knocking together some creative new ones. My favourite example that Banks gives is a humongous Christmas tree, complete with lights, right slap bang in the middle of a hillside base. I don’t tend to get into the spirit this early usually, but seeing that did make me remember to get on with the festive shopping....
No Minion Spell Mage deck list and strategy Here’s the No Minion Spell Mage deck we’ll be using for the Darkmoon Faire expansion. It’s not changed a huge amount with the new spells, but we’ll keep you updated with any changes! Select and copy the long ID string below, then create a deck in Hearthstone to export this deck into your game. Deck Import ID: AAECAf0EAr/gA5PhAw7BuAOMuQOBvwPgzAPHzgPNzgOU0QP30QPr3gPQ7APR7AP8ngT9ngT+ngQA General strategy No Minion Spell Mage is a value-oriented deck at heart....
