Video Game Reviews and More — 2014/05/11
Video Game Reviews and News for The Media Outsiders
No News Is Just No News
It’s been rather quiet month for videogame news and releases, and because of that I have been surprisingly quiet. “No news is good news,” is definitely not the case when you’re a journalist. But unlike some of my fellow travelers, I am uncomfortable with the idea that when there is no news that I should make news — as in “make it up.”
I won’t do that to you. I won’t do that to myself. Partially, that’s because I’m incredibly lazy. Making up things are hyping things which aren’t really interesting is way too much work for me which may just make me your most trusted source for videogame news. If so thank you. If not…
I’ll get back to you on what to do if not. Sometime.
Bundles?
Nah.
Well, the Humble Weekly Bundle is doing kind of a thing, I suppose, with Wizardry 6, 7, and 8 — but who wants a series that old and so inconsistent that doesn’t already have it? As historical artefacts, there’s some value, but not even I can really dig deep and recommend it. Of the rest, System Shock 2 is a verifiable classic, and that’s showing more age than leg. If you feel inclined, and you’re not running on a system as old as the game is, go ahead and pop for Deus Ex: Human Revolution on Steam, enjoy the more modern gameplay, and don’t feel like you got a little ripped.
Indie Royale, with or without stinky cheese? The best things about it are that it’s still under $5 and has one game yet unannounced. Is there anything of particular note coming from deep within the bowels of one of the most indie bundles consistently? The most interesting game also has the most complicated title, making it a real PitA to actually write about.
On the positive side, Continue?SomeBunchOfNumbers has an interesting concept. On the negative side … Well, there’s just not much “there” there. It’s one of those games that’s been tagged with being a “message game,” but frankly my message is, “Is this worth $5?” No, not really. Is the rest of the bundle? No, not really.
And the Indie Gala? They deserve kudos for putting together a bundle that’s all things up for Steam Greenlight, so that’s nice, solid promotion. But by the time TMO is aired this weekend, this bundle’ll be poof. IG likes to run multiple bundles over multiple weeks, though, keeping more stuff in the mix. Unfortunately, sometimes like when you pop by Target for one of their blow-out sales, the problem is that nothing they have for sale is anything you want. That’s more than a little annoying, but it’s been part and parcel of things for weeks.
I think the best we can do this week, at least in terms of pseudo-bundles, is Indie Game Stand, who absolutely adore their continuous 96-hour “Pay What You Want” sales for really, really indie, fresh, and often interesting stuff. And that is usually at least “good,” if not always “completely awesome.” This week — at least we get “interesting and intriguing” if not transcendently “good.”
Because right now we get Glitchspace.
I don’t even know how to describe my feelings about that. It’s a first-person game, that I know, and it involves wiring up some kind of interesting visual programming system to exploit code glitches in your puzzle-space, and that’s kind of awesome, and your gun shoots programs, and that’s where we just go off the rails into WTFville.
You can get it for $1. So, yeah, this may be the biggest indie bundle site deal of the week. Possibly a couple weeks.
Bigger Buys
There are, of course, bigger things afoot in the gaming world and it’s probably worth talking about them before the opportunity passes.
Killing Floor 2
The second biggest thing to hit this week? (I’ll get to the first here in a bit.)
Killing Floor 2 is a thing.
That might not mean a lot to you — unless you’re “one of us,” meaning one of the thousands upon thousands that played the original Killing Floor from the days of day one release to — hmm, a week or so ago was my last run. I should really do something about that.
A lot of people/not-really-people-because-reviewers-aren’t-really-people often referred to Killing Floor as Left4Dead’s semi-retarded younger brother, not being nearly as pretty, certainly not having as much focus on story, and really being sort of crass. To those people I would like to say that those are exactly the qualities that kept us coming back to KF, they after day, week after week, month after month, and now even year after year, while even though we think very fondly of L4D we simply don’t play it nearly as much.
KF was pick-up-and-run crafted arena combat with zombies and that was it — if you ignored the absolutely immense number of modders and mapmakers who set about expanding the scope of styles and environments of play in insane ways. You would also have to leave aside the fact that Tripwire Interactive really worked hand-in-hand with modders and mapmakers to get their creations into the hands of players, making it as much a product of the playing community as it was TI.
That makes a huge difference. To this day, one of our favorite maps is a faithful recreation of the first level of Doom. There’s just something charming about the whole thing.
Now, consider this quote about KF 2:
The zed manages two steps from the manhole before a stream of bullets blast it off its feet. More bullets tear into it in midair, splattering blood across the street and unburdening its gut of a generous helping of internal organs. Everyone in the dark conference room at Tripwire Interactive laughs or oohs as they watch the most complicated gore system in gaming—a gore system they’ve been building for Killing Floor 2 for the past two years—eviscerate the zed in a way they’ve never quite seen before.
I get the feeling that these guys know exactly what I want in my killing, on the floor or in the streets.
Factorio
This one kind of came out of nowhere, and is probably the third biggest thing to hit this week, if “this” week gets a little stretched.
I love production chains and automation. I love Engineering. That’s why I’ve been immensely aggressive about promoting Minecraft over the years. Such an incredible core system which inverts the usual power curve and allows you to establish yourself as relatively safe early on, letting you focus on expanding and exploring in ways that are immensely rewarding. A mod system that is enabled hundreds of people to create hundreds of essential changes to the game itself, adding entire technological trees, magical trees, fields of development, entirely new landscapes. The entire core of the Minecraft experience is engineering.
Likewise Space Engineers — it’s all there in the name. Even at this early stage of development, SE focuses on the experience of taking the tools that you have and seeing what insane things you can put together purely with the thought of your imagination, the power of your ability to conceive of engineering solutions, and every week they are releasing more tools which allow more people come up with more crazy things. SE is an engineer’s dream, and eventually I have no doubt that they will add more tools which are automatable components.
Which takes us to Factorio. I was a little leery given some of the early chatter I heard about the game. It seemed to be in my wheelhouse, it seemed to be something that I would be fascinated by but there really wasn’t enough talk about how the game actually played.
And then I saw the first episode of Sips’ gameplay that was just released a day or so ago.
And I saw their prospective feature list from their site:
These things are absolute minimum necessary for our multiplayer implementation. However there is more to be done after this, things like: starting the game (the lobby), mechanism for a player joining already existing game, hiding the latency for the player (most of the time the actions for different players will not collide so we can act as if common actions — like moving the player around — were confirmed immediately) and more (see our battleplan whiteboard in one of the previous friday facts). There is a lot of work ahead, but the good news is that we have finally fully dived into it. We will keep you updated about the progress☺
It’ll be multiplayer?
So that happened.
Homeworld Remastered Collector’s Edition
Some might remember that I wrote a pretty extensive article about the planned remaster and re-release of the Homeworld and Homeworld 2 games that made such a huge impact on my young gaming life. I was quite proud of it, but your milage may vary.
Gearbox announced today that the very limited number of Collector’s Editions were on sale via Amazon, but you better jump in fast.
Needless to say, I jumped the Hell in on it!
Hint: This is the big news for the week.
If you want the far expanded version of my gushing, go to my original Homeworld article and read that stuff, because — let’s be honest — it’s extra awesome.
13in tall Pride of Hiigara, folks! 13 inch! With USB-powered engine and hull lights! I guarantee, I’ll be using that on a space combat tabletop game table at some point.
I have a new project underway, 700 Horsepower! I’ll just quote from the G+ Community:
700 Horsepower is a hybrid game-setting, including Two Hour Wargames’ After the Horsemen setting and system, the new Machinas: Death Racing in the Wasteland system, while throwing in bits here and there from All Things Zombie and Weird War 2, if it just happens to come up. Throw in some GM-less play systems like Microscope, Kingdom, and Watch the World Die and something truly bizarre can emerge from the amalgam.
Saturday night was Watch the World Die, where we found out exactly how the world as we know and love it came to a chilling end. While giggling.
If you’re interested in my ongoing, more real-time updates on the day’s events, news and gaming, what You want is Operation BSU, where all the news fit to print.
And don’t be afraid to hunt us down on The Media Outsiders where you can pin us down on the entertainment of the day.
