Blizzard have announced they're making a survival game set in an "all-new universe." There's not much information on it bar two pieces of concept art, but they're looking for artists, designers and engineers to join its development team.
Now that Strange Horticulture is out, I would like to make a formal request to all game developers who may be reading this.
Please make a game that is basically Strange Horticulture, but about a weird book shop. Possibly a book shop with a small coffee shop attached. I'm not going to be too strict about it, you know, I'm not a monster. It could, for example, be a library. Or maybe there isn't another business attached, or the business attached to it is a bakery instead of a coffee shop. This isn't just my personal hobby horse, either. I'm pretty sure loads of people would like that game. And please, for the love of God, tell me if the Mystery Book Shop Game already exists. I'd be disappointed if it does, because nobody has yet brought it to my attention.
There were a lot of games I played last year that could have been on our Best Games You Missed list at the end of 2021. I ended up going with Studio Pixel Punk's Unsighted in the end, but it was very nearly OPUS: Echo Of Starsong, a stunning visual novel adventure game from Taiwanese studio Sigono Inc. I'd seen a few other games journalists raving about it when it came out on Steam last September, and hey, over 3000 overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews can't be wrong either, so I took the plunge, and golly, it sure is something special.
Codemasters’ Grid series continues its resurgence after 2019’s decent-but-slightly-neutered reboot. This time, it’s going right back to Codemasters' TOCA Race Driver roots and adding in a full-fat story mode, complete with real actors. No Scotty, mind, but we suppose they have to save something for the sequel. It’s this story mode we’ve been given early access to, so let’s jump in.
Andorra Telecom, the only Internet service provider in the tiny European principality, has suffered a series of cyber attacks disrupting Internet access nationwide—and supposedly it's all over a Minecraft tournament. The Twitch Rivals tournament SquidCraft Games over the weekend included a number of players in Andorra, several of whom dropped out after their connections exploded. Trying to blast a whole country offline to ruin a Minecraft tournament sounds like the setup for a bad YA metaverse novel but may be a terrible vision of our future.
Sheesh, what a week. Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for $69 billion is so weird that it's easy to lose your head and forget to say "Nice." Alice Bee has considered some of the implications while I'm also groaning hard about nostalgic navel-gazing reviving old Activision series. But it was nice to close out the week with news that Raven QA are unionising. Sheesh! Settle down, Actiblizz. Tell me gang, what are you playing this weekend?
What a ridiculous week. Activision Blizzard came in on Monday dragging a trail of lawsuits and scandal with allegations of widespread discrimination and harassment, on Tuesday were being bought by Microsoft for $69 billion (£50 billion), and now on Friday they've grown a union. 34 quality assurance testers at the Activision Blizzard studio Raven Software, who currently maintain Call Of Duty: Warzone, are forming a union named the Game Workers Alliance. They're seeking better working conditions in the wake of Raven QA layoffs.
I’ve always entertained the idea of an apocalypse. I mean, zombies are definitely scary, but it’d be a cool fantasy to play out. Over the years, I’ve even formed my own little plan. Loot some local houses and then set up a base in the fire station on my street. They’ve got electric gates and metal fences to guard the perimeter, a renewable power source thanks to a wind turbine on the roof, and a really handy watchtower. I thought 11 years of The Walking Dead would’ve prepared me fairly well and I fancied my chances. So, I made myself in Project Zomboid. It turns out, everything I learned from The Walking Dead was useless.
Pupperazzi is a game about taking pictures of dogs. They are, as is traditional, very cute dogs. You go around several areas that increase in complexity and dog saturation, completing photo challenges and unlocking more and more complex areas. An extreme sports dog wants a picture of a dog riding a scooter. The old sea-dog at the beach would like a photo of any dog, as long as the lighthouse is in the background. In return for this you get golden bones as a form of currency to buy different kinds of film, or weird lenses, to kick your photography into the next gear.
It's cute. It's a really nice playground that facilitates the player's own creativity. You can pet dogs to make them happy, or find toys to make them do different things: turn on a radio and any furry pals nearby bust out some truly astonishing moves; throw a stick to initiate a huge game of fetch. You post your photos to a kind of dog-centric Instagram for likes and comments (possibly from dogs; possibly from humans). The colourful, chunky art, combined with deliberately stiff animation where nobody can move their joints, really reminds me of Playmobil toys. Despite this carefree, playful tone, I also find it unaccountably sinister.
If I ever achieve immortality, there might be time to sit down and work out exactly why some building games grab me and some don't. I fear I am too often left with a page of notes that are just variations on the word "vibes".
Perhaps some taxonomy would help. Moons Of Ardan is a space colony building game that's mostly about balancing production rates by placing buildings. Less dryly, you're making a new home for mildly cute little space people on semi-cartoony worlds, where nothing ever really goes wrong and... the vibes. It's the vibes, you see.