Dec 16, 2019
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)
We’ve made it to day 15 of the RPS Advent Calendar, which can only mean one thing: time to do a bumslide right through that door and see what’s behind it.
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Parkasuarus was already an unbearably cute park simulation about raising dinosaurs, what with being able to put hats on them and all. It’s at least 30% cuter now that you can get baby dinos by breeding two that you already love instead of just picking an egg up from ye olde dino baby store. The latest update to Parkasuarus’ Early Access build lets you combine your dinos and adds a number of new maps to its campaign as well.
The world of Frostpunk is a hellscape where the cold will kill your entire city despite all those tough choices you made to allow cannibalism or put children to work in coal mines. Brendan Caldwell called it one of the harshest winters in games which is, if anything, an understatement. There had to have been something before the Game Of Thrones style winter that never ends. 11 bit Studios are going back to when it all began in the upcoming DLC for Frostpunk called The Last Autumn scheduled for January.
According to Hello Games, players spend a lot of time designing their bases in No Man’s Sky these days. They say a frequent player request was for the ability to add sounds or music to their planetary homes. Apparently one of the coders at Hello Games was quite into the idea and integrated a system for programatically generating music. Players can leave the algorithmic music as is or use the new ByteBeat device to edit it themselves. Now you can invite your friends over for a dance party set to spacey chip tunes and create an in-game light show to accompany it.
It’s that time of year again. A new Star Wars movie is coming, which means that Disney have partnered with countless other brands to make sure there are stormtroopers and lightsabers and blasters in your face every day. One of their latest partnerships is with Fortnite, where Geoff Keighley, director J.J. Abrams, and Ben Schwartz (as a stormtrooper) got together in-game on Saturday to show off a new Rise of Skywalker trailer for players. It was only a ten or so minute event but the short movie clip was followed by lightsabers and blasters popping up on the Fortnite island for players to wield for the next week.
I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khlo Take Miami? Take me, I m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they re even disowned. On a few occasions, they ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.
With another patch for Teamfight Tactics comes more changes to the TFT traits. The latest update had a large amount of updates to various origins and classes, as well as a major retooling of the Shadow origin because of the recently added champion. We’ve updated all of the TFT origins and classes to reflect the 9.24 patch.
I feel like I’m having a sort of ARPG existential crisis.
With Diablo III continuing to be so popular, the same game finding a new audience and fresh buzz seven years on with its Switch release last year, I wondered if Torchlight II could do the same. A wondering that probably reveals a damning lot, since Torchlight II was actually re-released for Switch, PS4 and XB1 in September this year, and I didn’t even notice. At the time of its release, I confidently declared TL2 to be the better game, and yet one seems like it’s still the dominant title in the field, and the other like a retro feature idea despite having most recently been released three months ago.
And my conclusion? Having replayed both a bunch in the last month, I still prefer Torchlight over Diablo! But, um, well, I’m not sure how much I actually like either.
“Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman,” Russian playwright Pavel Chekhov said in his manifesto. “Give him two and he’s God.” The same is usually true in video games, except in Receiver. There, giving me even one gun turns me into a fumbling idiot, unable to shoot because I forgot the the safety off, accidentally dropping precious bullets when trying to reload… I hope and pray I am not given two guns in Receiver 2. Over the weekend, Wolfire Games announced a sequel to their fantastically fiddly first-person shooter where it’s vital to master the mechanical procedures of firearms.
The most recent changes to the TFT tiers and stats have added some new champions and modified a lot of stats for every champion tier. Whether or not these changes will be sufficient to stop the tide of . Below is the TFT 9.24 tier list with all the up-to-date stats.