Dota 2 s International 2016 is almost halfway done, and good grief, what a digital sportstorm it s been so far. Champions have been slain, underdogs have dominated, and panels have turned into hand puppets for completely unstated reasons. Here s everything you need to know (besides a puppet explanation) ahead of today’s upper bracket semi-finals.
Obviously HERE BE SPOILERS:
The competitive games being featured as part of the eGames competition over in Rio from 15-16 August has been announced. Remember the eGames? They were announced a little while ago as an esports tournament that would run alongside the Olympics in Rio but wouldn’t actually be part of the Olympics. So a kind of Olympics-ish-by-proximity affair which seemed to be experimenting with the idea of a tournament run on the basis of representing your country and gaining medals and national glory instead of, say, a multimillion dollar prize.
When the event was announced they hadn’t actually got the list of games to be featured but today’s announcement explains that it will be Hi-Rez’s gods-brawler Smite and then Super Smash Bros on Wii U. They’re also showcase matches so… it doesn’t really feel like they’re saying anything is at stake?
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
A bit of a dirty word in some quarters of the roleplaying community, given that it marks the beginning of once-revered series’ ongoing drift into all violence all the time, and directly led to Fallout’s controversial divergence from its former cRPG path. Good god, Oblivion was exciting at the time, though. Probably the most excited I’ve ever been a RPG ahead of playing it. … [visit site to read more]
For The International 2016 I watched a game of Dota 2 [official site] entirely from the Roshan pit in virtual reality.
Dota 2’s VR hub is all about offering viewers new ways in which to spectate matches, new ways to present information, and new vantage points from which to observe professional players’ comings and goings. You can sit in a darkened area watching a massive VR screen if you want, but you can also teleport yourself into the actual map and shrink yourself to life-size proportions as you follow pro-players about.
Well, I wanted to see what it was like to be Roshan, or at least Roshan’s lodger never moving outside the pit that the huge monster inhabits on the map and entirely dependent on distant sounds to make sense of what’s actually going on. Oh, and also seeing what a team attempting to fight Roshan looks like close-up, when suddenly a violent house-party of spells and punching breaks out and Roshan has to uh go away for a while to recover.
Here’s what happened:
I’ve said before that I want more games that place you into the interesting shoes of people with interesting jobs, just as Papers, Please dropped you into the role of a customs officer. 911 Operator intrigues, then; it’s a game where you play the person on the end of the phone when you ring the emergency services. From crimes in progress, to terrible injuries, to cats being stuck up in trees, you have to say the right things on the phone, dispatch the right services in time, and you can play on a street map of any real city in the world.
The game’s been on Kickstarter for long enough to already reach double its small goal, and there’s a video below.
Dead Rising is coming to the PC for the first time, remastered alongside Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off The Record as part of the series’ ten year anniversary celebrations. All three will be released on September 13th and there’s a Steam page to prove it.
Spying the words “deep sea submarine adventure” in my inbox and opening that press release instead of anything marked “urgent” which I’d sent to myself in the middle of the night is how I found out about Diluvion [official site], an undersea exploration and combat adventure inspired by the work of Jules Verne. We wrote about it a couple of years ago but a) I missed that and b) it’s a lot closer to release so it’s worth seeing what’s being said now.
There doesn’t seem to be a playable build contained in the email so let’s just have a look at the words and trailer:
I watched some livestreams of No Man’s Sky yesterday and it looked like all my worst fears, as players on a muddy brown planet shot rocks with lasers to collect fuel, flew a few hundred meters in their ship, ran out of fuel again, shot more rocks with lasers…
I hold out hope. I’m OK with periods of boredom and graft between moments of beauty and discovery. The launch trailer suggests there’s plenty of excitement to be had, too.
Why did the knight stop using the internet? Because he was sick of chainmail. Wee medieval joke to get you warmed up there. Melee: Battlegrounds is a 13th Century multiplayer warfare romp being developed by the folks that brought you the cRPG mod for Mount & Blade: Warband. Or at least, it was . Following a failed Kickstarter, the game fled into the forests of the Unknown. But now it has rallied under the funding of Northern Ireland Screen and has returned to the field of battle with a new name Of Kings And Men [official site]. There are also some fresh details, including plans to create a persistent online world in which you can explore the countryside and be battered to death with a mace. Oh, and it s coming to Early Access this month.
Here s something for all you degenerate Facebook voyeurs out there. Orwell [official site] is a privacy-invading sim in which you play a member of the surveillance state tasked with combing through messages and private files of suspects . As an ordinary user of The Nation s new terrorist-tracking system, you have to choose what information to give to the spooks and what to withhold. Although something tells me> these suspects are not as criminally inclined as the eerie operating system will have you believe. Take a look for yourself in the trailer below. Maybe open a private tab.