As is Dwarven tradition, the intersteller halflings at Deep Rock Galactic just won’t stop digging. Alien bugs or no, there’s gold down there – so grab a shovel and get in the hole. This week, developers Ghost Ship Games revealed their plans for the next few months of mining n’ shooting, bringing new biomes, classes, jobs and objectives to the beardiest blokes in deep space.
Sundays are for continuing to exist. Here’s the best writing about videogames from the past week.
For The Ringer, Ben Lindberg dove into the history of female videogame protagonists, touching on myriad forces that shaped (and still shape) developer decisions about representation. It’s a valuable, well-researched, and impressively thorough piece.
Let it not be said that Terraria failed to go out with a bang. Dropping today, Journey’s End is an exhaustive final update for Re-Logic’s venerable block-building sandbox. But beyond new items, biomes, bosses and golf, Journey’s End formalises mod support by releasing a fan-made kit as free DLC, putting Terraria’s future in the hands of the folks still playing it ten years on.
‘s coming in later than planned, but who can stay mad when your flight looks like this? Sitting at the crossroads between Luftrausers, Daemon X Machina and Top Gun, Vladimir Fedyushkin and Nicolai Danielsen’s slick dogfighting anime about turning mountain-sized mecha into scrapheaps with fighter jets hit the skies earlier this week on Steam and Itch.io.
As Apex Legends‘ resident doctor, Lifeline isn’t the worst character in the game. Far from it, she’s probably one of the better picks of the bunch. But while she’s not in a bad place, Respawn do feel she’s in a complicated one, and have suggested a “sidegrade” may be due to bring her in line with the rest of the battle royale’s colourful murderchums.
Time was, you could slap a JPEG on a handful of polygons and call that a Tony. But time affects us as much as graphics tech, and all those chipper young skaters in their 20-somethings back in 1999 are now well into in their forties and fifties. So when the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 scanned the cast’s faces to grab their likenesses, it’s not their fresh young faces coming out the other side. Instead, this year’s remastering is offering pixel-perfect renditions of a bunch of skater dads.
Half-Life and modding are basically synonymous. Whether it’s painstakingly remaking the original in Black Mesa or spawning entirely new multiplayer genres in Counter-Strike, Gordon Freeman’s misadventures are as much a platform for new works as they are solid shooters in their own rights. This weekend, Valve brought Half-Life: Alyx back into that lineage with Steam Workshop support and the beta release of HL:A’s editing tools.
Earlier this week, Alice O pointed out the work of Graham Dunning, an artist who creates improvised dance music in Half-Life by replacing the game’s audio with clips from 90s rave tracks and sample CDs. Now, Twitch isn’t known for being the greatest music-streaming platform about, so this weekend Dunning released Panopticon – a moody album of experimental noise arranged in Valve’s seminal 1998 shooter.
As the saying goes: lock down, jack in, and square off.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
The Comment Commanders have a mere minute left in which to convince me that they control the soggy end of the subterranean submarine base (My verdict, along with sundry stats, will appear in tomorrow’s epilogue – ETA midday). They choose to use that minute aggressively. While Crabmeat 2 ventilates the U-boat and 3rd Squad occupy the two-storey GOLD HQ, almost everyone else left standing is ordered to focus on the one landmark still in enemy hands – the gatehouse in the north-west.
(Colonel Croesus is an open-to-all game of Combat Mission: Fortress Italy in which Allied forces are orchestrated by commenters while German units are computer controlled. Each daily turn covers one minute of WeGo action. For a scenario outline and accounts of earlier turns, click here).> (more…)
