My diaried adventures within The Forest began with my foolhardy attempt to build a log cabin. It was hubris. So following a remarkably similar plane crash into a remarkably similar – but slightly different – woodland, I’ve attempted a more modest life of brutal fights, daring cave escapes, and most of all, sharkrolling.>
My diaried adventures within The Forest began with my foolhardy attempt to build a log cabin. It was hubris. So following a remarkably similar plane crash into a remarkably similar – but slightly different – woodland, I’ve attempted a more modest life of brutal fights, daring cave escapes, and most of all, sharkrolling.>
I first saw Containment Protocol at Rezzed this year when the large banner showcasing its simplistic, beautiful art style immediately caught my eye. It’s difficult to describe in ordinary genre terms, but it’s close to a survival/exploration game. You remotely control a quad copter exploring an abandoned scientific facility, only able to see via its lidar scanning the surroundings. It’s atmospheric to the max–sounds echoing in empty corridors, clinical beeping coming from the automated defenses of the facility. You can explore too, as solo dev Byron Atkinson-Jones has dropped a new in-browser demo on its site (the build he’ll show at EGX, in fact).
It’s blackberry time here in Upper Bumhope. Brimming punnets of fragrant fruit clutter kitchens and courtyards. Almost everyone you meet has indigo fingertips and scarred forearms. Finding villagers willing to gather simulation and wargame news at this time of the year isn’t easy but thanks to Gleaner, Gusto, and Ghast (FP’s trio of duraluminum-and-balsa reconithopters) I do, just about, have a column for you today. On the other side of yonder html hedge, slim paragraphs on To End All Wars, First World War Campaigns: East Prussia ’14, DCS World, Unity of Command, and Combat Helo. … [visit site to read more]
A new trailer for Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments demonstrates the manner in which a conversation with the great detective plays out. It’s impossible to lie to him, essentially – tell him that you’re feeling good about yourself for the first time in six months, and he’ll spot some lint nestling in the fabric of your cuff and use it as an excuse to deconstruct your frame of mind, pummelling you with the blunt edge of facts until good feelings are slumped, bloody by your side. I loved the depiction of Holmes in the previous Frogwares game, which also featured the most perfectly rendered dog dick I’ve ever seen. The trailer shows an interrogation, which involves spotting details and clues rather than interpreting a series of looping gurns and sneers.
Listening to a thundering heavy metal soundtrack while blasting enemies straight from the 16-bit demoscene is, almost surprisingly, exactly as awesome as it sounds. Level 2 – Virus Master, on the other hand, is not as awesome as it sounds. It’s way better.
Titans are fairly central to Titanfall. They’re right there in the name–that’s what the game calls it when your honking great mechs plummet from orbit to the battlefield. I actually preferred the plain old manshooting though, darting about, double-jumping, and wall-running as a regular supersoldier with a jetpack. Well gosh golly, the next Titanfall update will introduce a new mode with simple 8v8 manfights, no Titans and no AI battlefield buddies.
Which makes me wonder: if we can remove the Titans from Titanfall, what titular elements can we remove from other games and still have something interesting?
In the deepest, darkest basement of Harmonix HQ, Alex Rigopulos is trying to make a rhythm game out of a Cherry Bakewell. He’s added coloured buttons to it, he’s patting it to a mamba beat, he’s jabbing the glac cherry and making an airhorn noise with his mouth. They’ll try to turn anything and everything into a rhythm game, that lot. Making air guitar into Guitar Hero went pretty dang well, though trying to rhythmise FPSs with Chroma has been trickier. They won’t give up.
Harmonix are now having a crack at shoot ‘em ups, they announced yesterday, in A City Sleeps.
Breach And Clear: DEADline is another zombie game but it’s [edit: possibly not] a tactical turn-based zombie game so I’m willing to give it a chance. If you put a turn-based game about OXO in front of me, it’d probably occupy me for at least a couple of hours. As already mentioned, this is a beefed up version of an iOS release and a new developer diary sheds light on the design philosophy of the development teams.
“One of the phrases that we are using here internally and is basically written on the wall everywhere we go is ‘what does it feel like when hope dies?’”
So says Gun Media creative director Wes Keltner. I really hope he doesn’t have reason to visit many public places with his permanent marker pen.
Oh, you silly GPUs. Remember the days when by your names should we know ye? No longer. Increasingly, both AMD and Nvidia appear to be engaged in a game of one-upmanship when it comes to baffling branding. Enter, therefore, the new AMD Radeon R9 285. The nomenclature suggests it should sit above the existing R9 280, but in fact it’s cheaper, less complex and most likely a bit slower. Why not Radeon R9 275? I have no idea. Still, it looks like a promising new option in terms of bang for your buck. Meanwhile, the complete package for next-gen SSD performance is finally coming together as a major new controller chipset with support for NVMe is announced. Yes, NVMe! Oh and on a related note, it now looks like you might want to skip Intel’s upcoming Broadwell architecture / CPU family / platform / whatever and jump straight to Skylake. Details after the break.