Today’s Fortbyte challenge in Fortnite requires jolly cooperation. I will frown upon you if you don’t let others grab the Fortbyte too, so you have been warned. These challenges unlock every day or so, requiring some specific conditions to unlock. There are a hundred in total and I will be going over all of them. Wish me luck.
Rockstar Games are helping Starbreeze’s dire financial situation a little by buying their majority stake in Dhruva Interactive, an Indian art asset outsourcing company who have provided bits for games including Prey, Mortal Kombat 11, and Alien: Isolation. Rocktar are paying $7.9 million ( 6m) for Starbreeze’s 91.82% of Dhruva shares, which the Swedish crew bought in 2017. Dhruva will become part of Rockstar India and work on Rockstar’s games. Lord knows Rockstar have an insatiable need for art to flesh out their open worlds.
Space survival craft ’em ups can be pretty grim places, what with the lack of oxygen and constant threat of being eaten alive by the resident fauna and all that, but for some developers there’s nowhere more hostile than the mothership from which they all originate. Throw a dart on Steam, says Joe Tirado, head communications honcho for Astroneer, and you could probably hit a bunch of other things [like ours]”. It’s partly why Astroneer adopted such a bright and bubbly exterior during its run in early access, he adds. Originally, however, it was going to be a very different game indeed.
Rage comics may be so over by now but Id Software remain committed to their FPS adaptation of the Internet meme, this morning releasing Rage 2. Their open-world drive-o-shooter imagines a world where everyone raged so much that human civilisation collapsed, turning into a Mad Max-ian wasteland where people drive angry and murder angrier. For the sequel Id have collaborated with Avalanche Studios, the mob behind Just Cause and Mad Max, and given it an injection of rude ‘tude plus sci-fi superpowers to cause big daft murdermesses. The future…!
Sniper Elite V2 is the one where you can shoot Hitler in the testicles, right? I mean shooting people in the testicles is par for the (gruesome, slow-mo, finely rendered) course in Sniper Elite games, but this was the one with the Hitler hunting DLC. Except… it turns out every game since has included a different spin on Reich castration. Feels like flogging a dead Nazi at this point.
Speaking of: Sniper Elite V2 Remastered is out today. I remember the original being quite good, especially in co-op.
Dramatic irony: the videogame. That s basically what you ve got in Astrologaster. It s a choose-your-own-tragicomedy set in Elizabethan England, where you play an astrologist and doctor of physik called Simon Forman, who gives his patients counsel as well as tinctures. Both his advice and potions are of questionable quality. It s a story reminiscent of Blackadder, dripping with sarcasm, theatrical and funny. At times it doubles up as an exam in both Tudor history and star signs. And it s sometimes a bit smug in its oh-so-literary references and knowledge. But that s okay, because it makes plenty of poo jokes as well. I liked it a lot.
Everything has conditioned us to expect that when we play as a superhero in a game, we’re going to be thwarting some villain’s plan, or preventing some great evil from occurring. But in SpeedRunners, you never actually get to that point. Instead, you’re racing against other superheroes (all with remarkably similar powers…) in a desperate attempt to reach the scene of the crime first.
There must be something in that icy water that makes the Elder Scrolls mod scene so volatile. Skyrim Together, a project to convert The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim into an online co-op adventure, was raking in a staggering $25,000 a month on Patreon up until allegations of code-theft from the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) torpedoed it. The good news is that it’s still in development, but you might be waiting a while. Yesterday on Reddit, the developers confirmed that the project is still alive despite the “entire codebase” being “scrapped”, later clarified as just being in the middle of a major restructuring.
I am famously not a fan of children in video games, because I think they mostly dead-eyed haunted dolls that are used as cheap, empty receptacles for player empathy. I don t even like Clementine in The Walking Dead. Yes, I am a monster, etc.
I tell you this so you understand how cute Hugo in A Plague Tale: Innocence must be for me to love him. He is a little stampy only-just-not-a-toddler bundle of wonder. I want to pick him up and pinch his little cheeks.
Life and game development are full of cruel struggles, but dogs make everything better. Kato will sadly never be a finished game, but developers Cliffside (students from the Institution Of Game Design at Uppsala University) have released a prototype version for us to enjoy. Players control Kato, a dog, bringing happiness to a cliff-side village recently beset by tragedy. You do this by barking, digging stuff up, helping folks with chores, plus some literal fetch quests – be a good dog, really. Take a look at the trailer for the game below, or download the free prototype here on Itch.