Mark Johnson is the developer of Ultima Ratio Regum, an ANSI 4X roguelike in which the use of procedural generation extends beyond the creation of landscapes and dungeons to also dynamically create cultures, practices, social norms, rituals, beliefs, concepts, and myths. This is the first in a four part series examining what generating this kind of social detail can bring to games.>
This month’s Street Fighter V [official site] will launch on Tuesday, July 26th, Capcom have announced. The biggest addition is Juri joining the playable lineup, returning from Super Street Fighter IV. She’s already appeared in SFV through its Story Mode, released last month, but now everyone will get to kick faces as the Taekwondo expert (cheeky modders have enabled her earlier, mind). Here, this trailer shows some of her moves:
Fancy a little weekend getaway? Get off Teletext and turn to Jalopy [official site], the roadtrip simulator formerly known as Hac. The latest update on Jalopy’s journey through Early Access has added a whole new country, Hungary. The full journey across Europe is still a good few countries short but you can also now keep yourself busy by repainting your dinky little car and raiding scrapyards for spare parts.
Evolve [official site] went free-to-play earlier this month, breathing new life into Turtle Rock Studios’ 4 vs. 1 monster hunter. Riding that renewed wave of enthusiasm, Turtle Rock has added a new version of the hunter Griffin ripped straight from an ’80s scifi flick Electro Griffin.
I don’t think I could name a more beautiful game. I don’t use ‘beauty’ in the straightforward sense of Kentucky Route Zero [official site]’s appearance, although its bold geometric shapes and flat-wash colour absolutely qualifies, as does its wonderful architecture – Americana infused with magic realism. There is the soundtrack and the sounds too, ambience and steel guitar and the lonely sound of engines – gentle sonic beauty, but again that is on the surface.
In fact there is beauty woven through the core of KRZ: its love of images, its love of words, its love of the American landscape, and perhaps most of all in its preoccupation with the warmer side of the human mind. Whether that be conviviality and the coming together of sympathetic souls, or pulling solace from solitude and from the road. This has been a theme, of sorts, throughout KRZ’s first three acts, but the fourth arguably pushes it more to the fore, consciously slowing down and allowing its expanding cast to idle, to find themselves in idyllic rather than unsettling locales. This could be a good life, if they wanted it.
The war with the Windows 10 icon in the corner of everyone’s screen took a turn for the worse this week, when it began an apocalyptic countdown timer, administering one last threat to all remaining dissenters: join us now or be forever exiled to whatever version of Windows you were using before. With the resistance lacking any kind of coherent command structure, the icon seems to be upping its rhetoric. As we all know, the icon has been with us since before we can remember. We have always been at war with the icon.
Over the weekend I was playing Firewatch [official site]. I actually played it twice because I wanted to spend time in those environments and with those colour palettes. As I spent more and more time in the game it occurred to me that the game’s relationship with insects is an interesting one.
No Man’s Sky [official site] is a big game set in a massive universe. As release approaches, we’re learning about all of the things we can do in that universe, and they’re all of the things we’ve been doing in big space games since Elite arrived in 1984. Exploring, fighting and trading. The latter is covered in the video below, which shows the actual swapsies interface. That’s new to me, as is the actual footage of hunting and gathering.
No matter where you re from or what you re into, it s always nice to pick up something resembling a bargain every now and then. That s where I come in. Over at Jelly Deals, I ve been rounding up the best prices, deals and offers on games and hardware as they arrive each day. I check for UK and US deals, so I ve got both sides of the pond covered as best I can. I also write a lot of puns, as the name of the site may have already suggested. The worse the pun, the better, really.
So, with any luck, I ll be here each week to give you a round-up of what s available out there on the big wild west of the internet. Whether it s a cheap game deal, a discount on some PC hardware or something that s just really worth knowing about. Let s take a look at what s been available this week.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
No, Richard & Alice [official site] is not some fan fiction about the time Richard Cobbett and Alice O’Connor fought spacecrime together, although now damn I wish it were. It is in fact a small, very lovely, very sad little adventure game.