I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khlo Take Miami? Take me, I m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they re even disowned. On a few occasions, they ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.

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The dramatically named Korean developer Pearl Abyss has three new games whirring away on their development PCs. The developers of Black Desert Online are working on three new MMOs: one shooter from the creator of Counter-Strike, one child-friendly jaunt, and one fantasy game. The three games have a proper reveal planned for on November 14, during Pearl Abyss Connect at G-STAR 2019. For now, we know they’re called PLAN 8, Crimson Desert, and DokeV, alongside a handful of other details.

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Were Plato alive today, he’d declare a sixth platonic solid: de_dust2, representing the sixth element of devotion. This sacred configuration of geometry escaped its confinement in Counter-Strike and for eighteen years the map has lived in the hearts of men, re-emerging in dreams, in other games with level editors, and in mashed potato sculptures carved at the dinner table. But in the far future, the last remaining copy of de_dust2 is maintained inside Dustnet, a multiplayer sandbox building self-aware deathmatch museum… thing? It’s out now, I’ve played a bit, I adore it, and I’m excited to figure out exactly what it is.

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The beta for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive s shiny new UI, Panorama, is now available to players who fancy a preview. Valve is touting it as the most substantial change to the look and feel of CS:GO since the game was released in 2012. Every part of the UI has been updated, so it might take a bit of time to get used to.

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Having spent around eight months in Early Access and then three in a mysterious state called Phase 2 , Flight Sim World, Dovetail Games’ modernised-but-feature-trimmed-and-unfinished version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, is officially dead. On Monday, out of the blue, DTG announced that work on the project has come to an end. Apparently, there simply weren’t enough customers to justify continuing. As the team assembled by the British train sim tycoons seemed to possess sufficient passion, will and, initially at least, resources to make FSW a success, it’s hardly surprising that some in the flight sim community are blaming the failure of the endeavour on poor project management and the manner in which Dovetail dealt with Flight Simulator’s vital ecosystem of third-party add-on devs. (more…)

Though Half-Life [official site] is almost nineteen years old and its sanctioned fan remake Black Mesa is nearing completion, Valve have launched a wee patch for their pretty okay or whatever vintage FPS. The patch fixes a few crashes and exploits, and hit other Half-Life engine games too, such as classic Counter-Strike. Given how much of modern PC games history connects to Half-Life and its mod scene, I’m glad Valve are still tinkering a little. Earlier this year, they finally got Half-Life an uncensored release in Germany too. … [visit site to read more]

Infamy! Infamy! They ve all got it infamy! is one of the best jokes of all time. It is also what I screamed as I was repeatedly gunned down in World War II shooter Day of Infamy [official site] while playing the early access version.

Fans of murdering me from afar with a scoped rifle will rejoice that the game has just now busted out into a proper release, fully baked and ready to storm some beaches. You can see what kind of terrible conflict you can create in the trailer below. … [visit site to read more]

I’ve been a member of many games communities over the years – clans, guilds, forums – but the one I remember most fondly was a server.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Remember that time Valve made a cover version of another developer’s game?

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Every Monday, Brendan heads to the frontlines of early access and writes about his heroic battles there. This week, he repeatedly fires upon his own team in multiplayer shooter Day of Infamy.>

In an age of Overwatches and hyper-CoDs it s easy to forget that every first-person shooter was once set inside a single trench of World War II. Returning to this battlefield might seem like a terrible idea to some who ve served their time in the hellish artillery bombardments of yesteryear. But I never played Day of Defeat, the Half-Life mod upon which this new WWII outing is based. So fumbling with grenades in the mud and snow of the Western front is something I was happy to do. I even tried my hand at commanding the other men. Which obviously resulted in everyone being disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces.

… [visit site to read more]