Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly round-up of the best new but under-reported games released on Steam over the past seven days.
This week: SF startup simulation, nihilistic Tetris, toilet humour and fantasy RPG Tinder. (more…)
How difficult can organising a music festival be? Oh, right. Well! If you’ve got the moxie despite being woefully underqualified, you can now step up and organise concerts with the latest “mini-expansion” for city-builder Cities: Skylines [official site]. It lets players build festival grounds, host bands, and hopefully not end up with a musical mega-hell. It’s not a deep business simulation but might be a bit of fun to brighten up your city. (more…)
Something about putting the words ‘Quake’ and ‘early access’ into the same sentence makes me dizzy. We’re in another world these days, but back in the day Quakes were games that arrived so fully-formed, so absolute and monumental, that the idea of being able to buy an unfinished one makes the damn fool old man who sits at the back of my head wave his walking stick around furiously.
But there it is: id Software’s multiplayer-only shooter Quake Champions [official site] is strafing into the rough’n’readier part of Steam in just five days.
Toss another podcast episode upon the fire, stranger. The cold is closing in but the Electronic Wireless Show will keep us warm. Pip, Alice and Adam gather round the podfire this week to talk about the lies (Adam tells) at Gamescom, the icy reception to The Long Dark‘s story mode, the cleansing rain of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and the deadly climates of No Man’s Sky.
We then turn to you, listeners, to discuss your favourite in-game weather. And somewhere in the middle there’s also a long discussion about karaoke, for some reason. (more…)
As someone who knows what twitter is, I have seen many brands invite people to manipulate images or add their own text to things imagining that the internet will adhere to the company s #brand #values and not e.g. draw genitals all over the place or make jokes at the brand’s expense and then the brand discovers that you maybe need to hope and pray that the adage about all publicity being good holds true.
That’s why I’m interested in this XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site] Propaganda Center promo tool, because Firaxis seem to have hit upon a way of obviously asking the internet to do their marketing for them but without accidentally building in the capacity for making themselves the laughing stock in all of this or immediately losing all goodwill they may have accumulated. (more…)
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>
The lesser loved of Popcap’s moreish games, lacking the bombast of Peggle, character of Plants vs. Zombies or the pure relaxation of Bejeweled. Still, I love Zuma, a game about a frog spitting balls at a big line of balls. (more…)
Lawbreakers [official site], as I wrote yesterday, is an excellent zero-gravity FPS that you should probably play if you like fast-paced action. It’s also a very balanced game, with no one class able to dominate. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t the odd tweak to be made, and developers Boss Key Productions have released the game’s first post-launch patch with welcome nerfs to some classes.
The Harrier’s Convergence ability is their first target. It’s a giant, powerful laser beam that she shoots from her chest and kills you before you have time to react. So, its base damage has now been bumped down from 500 DPS to 400 DPS to “make it easier for coordinated teams to take advantage of Harrier’s vulnerability” (she can’t move very much when she fires it). I approve.
When Great Warlord Queek Headtaker fell in battle, it wasn t a particularly heroic end. Nor was it especially brave; he was fleeing from the battlefield when an enraged dinosaur trampled him. But the Skaven, Total War: Warhammer 2 s [official site] long-teased and recently revealed fourth race, don t have much use for bravery or heroism. They re sneaky, untrustworthy rodents, and for 30 turns of the campaign, I led them to several unchivalrous victories and one devastating defeat.
Frantic food ’em up Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! [official site] will not be served to us this month after all. The sequel to 2013’s surprisingly super restaurant management and cooking game was on the menu for August 24th but is now pushed back to September 13th. It needs a little more time on the gamegrill, see. I’d rather eat late than suffer digital salmonella poisoning, especially when the meal looks so appetising. (more…)
The makers of free-to-play hit Warframe have unveiled their next game, The Amazing Eternals [official site]. Announced in May under the name Keystone, The Amazing Eternals is a first-person ‘hero’ shooter with a splash of deck-building thrown in for cards giving power-ups and abilities. Yup, it’s a bit like Overwatch meets Paladins, or Titanfall, or Battlefront, or… you know, it’s smooshing together several concepts in the air tonight. Oh lord. And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord. Can you feel it coming in the air tonight? Oh lord. Oh lord. (more…)