I’m pretty good at navigating new cities using a map, where McDonalds and Starbucks act as landmarks on my journey. It’s a lot more difficult when that McDonalds is instead a lonely tree, and the Starbucks is a big rock, as Virtual-O will show you.
You could throw a hell of a lotta buzzwords at Gun Rounds. It is, at once, an indie roguelike (roguelite) bullet-hell deck builder with permadeath mechanics and tactical blah blah blah. You get the picture. But in play, Blabberf’s turn-based shooter brings all those disparate terms together with wonderfully tight gun puzzles, a potent mixture that easily squares up against its genre contemporaries.
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! As the clouds of the past week’s hard work part, developers, hobbyists and curious beginners gather in kind to share their personal projects and would-be masterpieces on the social media site you love to hate. This week: Blasting to the beat, neon-tinted parkour, low-res goblins and a nice trip to the coast.
Checking out a new coffee shop is intimidating enough as-is. Wondering whether the wifi’s good enough for work, checking the prices on the croissants, trying to figure out how “chatty” the baristas are. The last thing I need is one of Doom Eternal‘s cretins judging me for my choice of milk alternative. Until May 14th, Eternal’s Coffee and Camo Series lets you grind out a fresh batch of free cosmetics – one that, unfortunately includes this absolute roaster.
Last weekend, World Of Warcraft private server Elysium planted a single, awful seed. Server organisers coated one in-game item with a highly infectious virus. Within 24 hours of first infection, it had spread to over 7,000 players. This was Pandemic in Azeroth, an attempt from one fan project to deliver actionable real-world advice on surviving the Covid-19 pandemic to World Of Warcraft’s fantasy denizens.
Sundays are for continuing to continue continuing staying at home. Here’s the best writing about videogames from the past week.
For her blog, Emilie M. Reed took apart Western assumptions about visual novels. It’s a cracking piece, examining the central tenets of the genre in the context of people’s uncharitable interpretations. It’s also a review of Hashihime Of The Old Book Town.
Like the sort of macabre bragging right that has you somewhat proud of your hometown’s staggering crime rates, we’ve sure got a few cheaters over here on PC. At least, that seems to increasingly be the view of the folks stuck playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare with us over crossplay. Now, it seems some would rather brave the long queue times of running and gunning on their own platform that risk facing off against PC’s home-grown hackers.
Cosmo D’s Tales From Off-Peak City Volume 1 might as well be a dream. None of the lines make sense, voices are disembodied and audible only as music, with a general sense of being neither somewhere nor elsewhere. The pizza toppings look gross. But even if the developer’s world seems pieced together from half-forgotten memories, it’s all quite real and – as a new trailer this week attests – available to buy come May 17th.
After dabbling in curated Bitsy exhibitions, Pittsburgh indie collective LIKELIKE have brought a new show to their low-res gallery. The Online Museum of Multiplayer Art opened its doors last night, a collection of social experiments and collaborative folk rituals. If the last exhibition captured the feeling of discovering hidden gems on a convention floor, this week’s gallery encourages you to finally strike up a conversation with your fellow visitors.
Did this whole “being stuck inside” thing get you reinstalling World Of Warcraft again? No? Well, I’m proud of you. If you did fall back into the MMO (or never left), however, the next few months should be smooth sailing indeed. Blizzard this week announced that the Winds of Wisdom double-XP buff has been extended, and will now run until the pre-release update for WoW’s next expansion, Shadowlands.