This week, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds added a new map, Hades added a new god and a rod, and Disco Elysium added an extra-hard difficulty mode. Read on for more of the week’s PC gaming patches in The Weekly Updates Update.
Japanese animator and illustrator Taro Oono (official site) may also be one of the most prolific game developers you’ve never heard of. But despite launching dozens of tiny interactive vignettes convened with domestic life, family antics and gorillas, you won’t find his catalogue on Steam, Epic or even indie-centric Itch.io. For a little under a year, Oono has been posting his collection of short, hand-drawn microgames directly through his Twitter.
After all – they’re only gifs.
Ark: Genesis, the monstrous next expansion for Ark: Survival Evolved, has been delayed. Again. Well, half of it, at least. While the first bit of Ark’s massive two-part expansion was set to embark last December, its release was later pushed back to January. This week, Studio Wildcard regret to inform us that we’ll need to hold on a little longer before building a bungalow on a sea turtle, with Genesis now scheduled to arrive on February 25th.
I know a game is good when I write down a to-do list with pen and paper. Games are great for goal-setting, but they’re also great for goofing around and goalless, meaningful mindlessness. This is why I’m a big fan of roguelite games, which feel like endless loops of manageable tasks. Weirdly, the endlessness of them never really feels onerous. Instead of feeling frustrated with my failures, I view them as opportunities to try again. This is common rhetoric in games — they allow us to fail, iterate, and try again — but I rarely experience this feeling so acutely outside of roguelites, city sims, and resource management games. Rogulites comfort me in times of tumult! Worker placement soothes me! For the love of god, someone give me a farming sim to sink hours into!
Here are some games to get swept up in. May you find comfort.
A deadly new disease is spreading its way across China and East Asia. With over 840 confirmed cases of the pneumonia-like Coronavirus confirmed this month, concerned players are looking for ways to cope with the threat of infection. Increasingly, they’re turning to Plague Inc: Evolved. Ndemic Creations’ outbreak management sim saw Steam player counts skyrocket in the last few days. Keen to avoid an outbreak of disinformation, Ndemic have warned against using their global sickness sim as a basis for real-world disease control.
Happy Burns Night, gang! If poetry isn’t really your bag, hey, Tam o’ Shanter is about something we can all relate to: getting chased by witches on our way home from the pub.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
As reported by PennLive, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit has affirmed the district court’s decision that a Pennsylvania man was not discriminated against by being “muted” in an online game.
Following up last year’s Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition release, Xbox Game Studios are planning a beta period for the Age Of Empires III: Definitive Edition for registered Insiders. If you took part in Age 2’s beta sessions, the developers say they are structuring Age 3’s beta a bit differently. Sessions will be shorter and more focused, with multiplayer beta times beginning in February.
As GDC‘s yearly survey of developers says in their report “unionisation and labor practices remain hot topics in the game industry.” The last several years have seen many reports of game developers being overworked that thing we call crunch to finish the biggest games each year. If not stories of crunch, it’s reports of major layoffs instead. No surprise then that talk of unionising continues to grow.
Post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland Remastered – which just looks a Wasteland remake let’s be honest – has bagged itself a release date, so you’ll be able to get your hands on it on February 15th. InXile Entertainment s remaster was announced back in June 2018, and it’s essentially a big old re-do of everything from the original 1988 game, with all-new audio and graphics.