Audiosurf 2 [official site], the game which allows you to ‘ride’ your music on a neon futuristic racetrack, has left Steam Early Access today. It brings an updated Audiosurf experience, with new official game modes and skins alongside the 500+ already available on Steam Workshop. Not only that, but according to the developer the “UI is good now”, which is always a plus.
You’ll play a blind girl called Cassie who must use echolocation to explore a haunted mansion in Perception, a first-person horror game just launched on Kickstarter by former Irrational members. It looks to be a refreshing take on the scary house trope, with noise ‘illuminating’ areas so that you can ‘see’. Cassie’s ability to detect her surroundings are not dissimilar to those of Marvel’s Daredevil, except it’s unlikely that she will be flipping out and beating people with sticks. Probably.
There s something about Magicka s sense of humour that makes the series instantly likeable. The first game and all of its DLC was daft and fun and refused to take itself seriously. It helped that it was a cracking good game, as well. Judging from the Magicka 2 [official site] launch trailer, the sequel looks to follow the same vein. Only 96 seconds long and I definitely caught myself mid-chuckle at least twice. Bodes well.
When Xenoshyft Onslaught spits you out because that’s what this game does you’re left scratching your head and wondering what on earth you can possibly do to win at this game. You’re also full of questions. You’re confused about the way certain cards work. Some of the rules in the rulebook are so unclear that you’ve just had to make a call about what the designers actually meant. Okay, so I think that this Quill Monster thing attacks your first guy then does an additional one damage to the first three guys in front of it. I think. I think.> It niggles you. You’ve just been battered hard and you’re not sure if you were battered exactly right.>
And yet. And yet>. There’s something about this game that just gets its teeth and claws deep into you.
Any time Arc System Works announce something about Guilty Gear on PC, I hope it’s them bringing the gorgeous (and ridiculously-named) Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- our way. Xrd sent the fighting game series from gorgeous hand-animated sprites to gorgeous hand-animated 3D, looking a squillion times better than Street Fighter IV. Seriously, watch this GDC talk about its style.
Anyway, no: it’s not that. Arc are still a few years behind on PC, though today they’re another step closer to caught-up with the PC release of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R [official site].
The last lesson developers Might & Delight had to teach about babies is that they’re weak and foolish so leave them to die and live your life free from fretting. Or maybe you came away from Shelter with a different message, I don’t know. Maybe their next lesson is that I’m a monster.
Announced today, Child of Cooper [official site] is told from the perspective of a child. They describe it as “a visual narrative that challenges aspects of normative video game storytelling”, which means it’ll be a bit weird. Let’s have a look.
Continuing a (mostly) in-character diary of my adventures in The Witcher 3 [official site]. Probably contains spoilers. N.B. critical opinion & technical complaints are happening elsewhere on the site.>
I’m going on a bear hunt.I’m going to catch a big one.What a beautiful day!I’m not scared.
I’m also wearing nothing but my underpants. … [visit site to read more]
Savage Road, the title of the new Mad Max [official site] story trailer, is strangely similar to the name of that Mad Max movie that released recently. You might not have heard of it, it had kind of a subdued launch and response seems to have been a bit muted so far. Mad Max is so hot right now> and Avalanche Studios knows this, as they’ve managed to make it just as fun as any of the Fury Road trailers, complete with guns and explosions and cars and arid wasteland as far as the eye can see. Which pretty much sums up the entire Mad Max experience. In a good way, I mean.
Sorry for the delay on concluding this – one person got behind, then we had a domino effect where everyone else was off-schedule, then we got distracted by a bumblebee and… Here it is, though: the final part of the Cities: Skyline succession game I’ve been playing with Jonathan Shipley and Dan Corns, in which we pass our savefile onto the next person whenever our shared city levels up. In this last part: so much death, and yet not enough.> … [visit site to read more]
2K Games are going to announce a new game soon. You can tell because the publishers are tweeting links to a faux-hacked website covered with concept art of sci-fi cityscapes. That and we can pretty much guarantee every publisher will be announcing a new game soon. E3 is only weeks away, after all. This 2K game will possibly be called Advent, but also possibly not.
And that’s about as much as we know about it. The website is an in-universe advert for some kind of utopian futurecity that promises a “brighter future together”. Hacked-in warnings about missing citizens suggest that might be too good to be true. So, a science-fiction thriller then.