Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
Real-time strategy games seem to be a dying artform, which is a shame given that Eugen System’s RUSE provided a perfect roadmap for where they might want to go.
Techland, the Polish studio behind high-action first-person shooters including Dead Island, Call of Juarez, and Dying Light, have announced they’re making a farming simulator. Pure Farming 17: The Simulator [official site] will be a serious farm ‘em up, no zombies or nothing as far as I know. Though I do believe that techno-organic monster teased in the announcement trailer, as shown up top, may be the final boss.
“Pinch and a punch for the first of the month”, we used to say in the EU meatculture days. Now we all drift in the post-Brexit cybercloud, we get a pinch, a punch, and a price hike on cybergoggles for the first of the month. I can’t keep pace with modern life.
The price of HTC Vive cybergoggles today goes up up by 70, “due to recent currency valuation changes”. You know, how our currency’s done a falling-over since the referendum over leaving the EU. Good times. Proper japes.
As many hours as I’ve spent playing them over the years, MMORPGs always fill me with a touch of sadness for what they could have been. I’m thinking of the original optimistic dreams of people like Richard Garriott, talking of his world where players accidentally killing too many sheep would draw the wrath of a nearby, now hungry dragon, back in that innocent time before it was accepted that players would not only kill the sheep, but the dragon, and any other living creature within murder range. There’s many reasons why the modern theme park style ended up being dominant, but as stories from games like Eve regularly demonstrate, we definitely lost a lot in that philosophical and pragmatic shift towards PvE content and fixed interactions.
At least we’ve still got world events. I love world events.
Infographic puzzle-platformer Metrico+ [official site] is nearing its release date (I am excited about this because stats nerd x sucker for a lovely art style = I am this game’s target audience) and THUS! we have a trailer to gawp at/assess. It features a bunch of the new worlds which have been added since the original Metrico’s Vita release.
OBSERVE:
Epic Manager [official site], now in Early Access, is a game about managing a party of adventurers in a fantasy world. There are several games of this sort now, the Football Managers to the typical RPG FIFA, but Epic Manager takes an unusual approach. Rather than operating like the majestic Majesty, which simulated a kingdom and had you manage its heroes indirectly, this game jumps straight into the competitive leagues of a sports game. You’re not just hiring and managing adventurers, you’re trying to recruit and direct the best questers in the whole world.
There’s a really interesting post over on Gamasutra about proportion and scale when making game characters. I feel like that still sound a bit dry given I’m trying to tell you how interesting it is, but essentially it takes a look at how different head sizes and body proportions make you see game characters differently as well as affecting tone and mood.
Lazarus is the famous story of the man who was raised from the dead (read more here). It is also what my dad used to call me when I crawled out of bed at 1pm on the weekends. But now it has a new meaning: a free top-down shmup where hundreds of players duke it out in a huge persistent world, only to implode and restart every week.
Have you ever dreamed of a game where you scour the darkest, seediest corners of an over-populated, neon-saturated cyberpunk metropolis? Was that game a virtual board game with lots of deck building and dice rolling? Well, the good news is it might not be a dream after all. Spanish team Quantum Goose are working on a cyberpunk virtual tabletop game called Quantum Quest [official site] and it’s on Steam Concept now.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
I suspect> but I don’t know> that Relic’s stompy-squishy-shooty Only War third-person action game Space Marine is one that has aged rather well over the years. I base this on two things: one, occasional enthusiastic chatter on Twitter. Two: a regular, strong urge to revisit it.