Last week’s best-sellers, today. Most of the recent mainstays are still hanging on in there, but it’s goodbye to Dead by Daylight (for now, at least). We do get two intriguing new entries, one glowering and one that is ALL THE FISH. Number one, meanwhile, is probably the number one you expected. That’s right: Limbo of the Lost is back-back-back!
No Man’s Sky is out today in some territories for PlayStation 4, but us PC bods have to wait till Friday. There’s probably contractual reasons for that, but Hello Games are apparently also “racing to get all the extra options and stuff” into the PC version. That’s from a Reddit AMA that developer Sean Murray did late last night, which has information about PC release times, FOV sliders and more.
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.
Either RTS games got faster or I got slower. Could be both. Either way, there was a point when war, whether interstellar or historical, became unmanageable for me. Exceptions existed, with Company of Heroes the most splendid of them, but the wider arena of real-time strategy esemed like a thing of my past for a while.
Sudden Strike 4 [official site] is a return to a slower, more thoughtful time.>
Sometimes I keep secrets from you. As a rule, when I spend any decent amount of time playing a game, I report back about my experiences. That’s rather my job. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I spend entire mornings with a game that I never write about, because I’m too embarrassed to admit it to you, and perhaps even more, to my colleagues. The net result being not only have I not got any work done, I’ve turned what could have counted as work into goofing off. TODAY I SHALL BE BOLD. I spent the morning playing Animated Puzzles [official site].
I made good on my promise last week and booted up Everest VR [official site] to see what the mountain-summitting experience really had to offer. I was especially curious after seeing so many negative reviews calling it out for being a very expensive tech demo with not much to do. I’m sorry to say that I actually concur with that assessment.
Tibia [official site] launched in 1997, but I’m not sure I’d even heard of the MMO before today. And I heard about it because of a door.
In the online MMO Tibia, there’s a door with a simple message: “You see a gate of expertise for level 999. Only the worthy may pass.” This week, a player named Kharsek passed through that door. It took him nine years to build up enough experience to hit level 999. But once he passed through the door, Kharsek disappeared, and took the secrets with him.
I write a lot about esports/professional gaming and, as such, I’ve witnessed a lot of discussion of the years of various tournament formats – their strengths, weaknesses and, obv, what the company should be doing instead according to that particular commenter at that particular moment in time.
So I thought I’d ask you, as people who might watch professional gaming or play in your own tournaments: Which tournament formats do you prefer and why?
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
So much time has passed that I’m not sure if my opinions about Lemmings 2 are contrary or against the grain. I didn’t like it, having loved the original, which was the perfect blend of challenging puzzles and comic characters, I found The Tribes’ larger skillset upset the sense of progression horribly.
I want to talk about the No Man’s Sky [official site] pre-official-launch-but-post-unofficial-launch patch notes. They contain what lead developer Sean Murray describes as spoilers so if you want to go in without knowing much and have an unsullied first exploration don’t read any further.