Oh my! Yesterday Twitter brought Growbot [official site] to my attention and it is SO PRETTY! It’s a 2D point and click adventure but the art is that strange, beautiful children’s book illustration style which I guess you might call whimsical (although that word feels like it often undermines the work involved in creating it so I’m reluctant to just bandy it about).
GOSSIP. TITTLE-TATTLE. RUMOUR.> The basest of base discussion, as your mum told the postman in the sauna the other day. At least, that’s what I hear. I also hear that maybe, just maybe, console online FPS-come-hamster-wheel Destiny [official site] might be incorporating PC into its sequel plans.
Goodbye youse.
It’s been six long years since Cardboard Children began here on the world’s best computer games website, and it’s time for the column to come to an end. Yes, I’ve packed my bags, and I’m standing by the RPS door, ready to leave. My hand is on the doorknob. But before I go, I’d like to point you towards some of my favourite pieces during the run, so we can all have a little nostalgia trip together.
War is dreadful. But also: exciting! We ve already had a look at Dice s next romp through War 1, by diving into the multiplayer beta of Battlefield 1 [official site] held earlier this month. But what of the story mode? This is normally where Battlefield games tend to stumble and fall on their own grenade. This new trailer showing off some of the campaign is here to convince you that it won t be like that this time. It features lots of sad men saying brave things and then killing everybody with a gun. Come and see.
Indie episodic adventure games rarely seem to get past their first edition. What chance has post-apocalyptic robotic tale, The Uncertain [official site]? Here’s wot I think:>
Multiplayer hacking sim Hackmud [official site] launched on Friday, catching us by surprise. We tasked our most elite hacker with entering its digital realms to crack the mainframe and report back. Sadly, Alice couldn t make it. So we sent Brendan instead, who quickly found himself in over his head, lost in a world of player-made malware, intrigue, deception and guilt.
I played Hackmud all weekend. Almost all my free time time for the past two days that wasn t spent eating, peeing, or sleeping my way through the necessities of meatspace, has been spent exploring the murky chat channels and malicious scripts of this game, which appeared, seemingly out of the ether, on Friday. To give you some background: it is an MMO hacking sim in which you must earn GC a digital currency by breaching NPCs or other players and stealing their money. The more money you have, the more upgrades you can buy, the better you can hack, and the more money you can get next time. Levelling up through tiers like this is the standard of MMOs. But I want to tell you that, despite some issues, this game is far from standard.
Motorcycles, aka the horses of the highway, will be seeing a lot more action in GTA Online [official site] following Rockstar s upcoming update. We already told you about what s expected in this addition the ability to start an 8-person motor club, new competitive and co-op modes, new bikes, weapons, clothes and tattoos but you didn t listen. You just twisted the throttle like a petulant John Connor and pretended not to hear us. Well, I m here to tell you that the update is happening on Octo – oh for heavens sake.
I SAID THE UPDATE IS HAPPENING ON OCTOBER 4.
Leaping across the backs of a convoy of trucks as they crash, flip, jack-knife, and explode sounds a right lark. That’s Clustertruck [official site], a timetrialling first-person platformer which launched today. Correction: that’s the early levels of Clustertruck. Then it’ll introduce static obstacles, then swinging hammers, lasers, plummeting… it gets messy. Look, I need to finish this news post before I’m allowed to clock off for the day and play Clustertruck myself, so let’s crack on with it, shall we?
Alec wasn’t entirely happy when we duct-taped him to a chair, bolted his Rift goggs to his skull and jacked him into a tour of Chernobyl and Pripyat with Chernobyl VR Project [official site]. He liked seeing inside that irradiated corner of Ukraine – known to Those Young People as the setting for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games – but technically it’s messy. It’s split between photogrammetry-scanned environments and plain old 360-degree video, see, coming out a bit disjointed. Well! Today brings the release of a Vive edition, along with an update adding more content and improving those videos.
Oh, virtual reality. So much promise, so many drawbacks. Stick your hand into the Tombola Of VR Woes and see what you grab. Headaches and nauseau? High system requirements? Too many cables? Screen door effect? Apparent low resolutions? Gimmicky games? Problematic prices? Your face in a box? I could go on, but I won’t because, er, that is most of them. Both Oculus Rift and the Vive offer a real jolly good time for initial forays into lifesize 3D wonderlands, but come up short when it comes to longer term usage, for reasons we’ve opined about at length here and here. But those constitute just the first consumer generation of hardware.
The tech will be refined over time (unless the market totally loses faith in the concept), but whether that is achieved by Oculus, Valve/HTC or someone else entirely is very much up for grabs still. In the interim, here’s Chinese outfit Pimax, who are selling what they label as the first 4K VR headset for PC, which works with SteamVR. It’s also $350 (or $300 without headphones), compared to the Rift’s $599 and Vive’s $799. Two questions, then. 1) Can it really solve the image quality problem? 2) Can it really do what it needs to at half the price of the big boys of VR? I’ve been testing the Pimax for the last few days, and here’s what I think.