Celebrate the impending doom wrought by the zombie apocalypse with friends, seems to be the message I’m getting from How To Survive 2 [official site]. Oh, and Louisiana looks nice. How To Survive 2 has shuffled its way onto Steam Early Access in search of brains, online multiplayer, and a new camp system for the action-RPG. Focus your cross hairs on the launch trailer below.
Go To Bed: Survive The Night [official site] is the gamification of all those childhood nights you spent cowering under the covers completely convinced the monsters under your bed were real. They’re not real. They’re not real. They’re…ah, sorry, old habits die hard. It looks simple, but there’s a lot more to it than first meets the eye.
How’s your Goth Christmas so far, everyone? Me, I’m blasting The Sisters of Mercy and chucking back red wine – and writing this, I suppose – before wandering through trees in the fog at the Botanic Garden’s lights. If you want a spooky weekend indoors, though, here are a few of the Halloween happenings which caught my kohl-smeared eye. I’ve no intention of covering everything, but this stuff looks fun:
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I’ve gushed before about Quarantine, an open-world murdertaxi game where you drove odd passengers around a prison city, stacked up on weapons to take down fellow road-users, flung golfish into lakes, and brought down a megacorp. But have you played its 1995 sequel, Quarantine II: Road Warrior? This was the game to teach my naive younger self that sequels to games you adore won’t necessarily be good.
Objects In Space [Metrocide developers Flat Earth Games. They’ve just revealed the game’s first footage trailer that labels it a “stealth space trading game where you’ll navigate your ship as though it were a submarine, instead of fly it like it were a plane.” In practice, this means far less outlandish physics in the skies and more considered, meticulous strategy in the engine room.
What’s more, Flat Earth reckon you can build your own ship consoles to work with the game, if that’s what you’re into.
HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEN. From showing your demons the middle finger to backflipping your way past pumpkins and vampire bats, we have lots of skin-crawling, Halloween-themed free games for you this week. But also some normal games so that you do not become too frightened. I know how sensitive you are.
I have spent a lot of time looking at the trophy you get for winning at the League of Legends World Championships [official site]. It’s called the Summoner’s Cup (Summoners being Riot’s term for people who play League of Legends) and it’s this incredibly heavy blue, silver and gold affair. I wanted to find out a bit more about it in advance of today’s finals so I got in touch with the silversmiths at Thomas Lyte who created it as well as doing some poking about of my own. Let’s take a closer look!
The League of Legends World Championship [official site finals take place later today. It’s a South Korean bust-up which will see either SK Telecom T1 or the KOO Tigers walk away with $1m, an enormous piece of silverware, and the title “Best in the world”. I’ll be popping along to the arena to watch, interview people, and explain my theories about the relevance of Were-bears to Riot’s merchandising strategy a bit later but before I do, here’s the story so far:
Ｈａｐｐｙ Ｇｏｔｈ Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ， ｅｖｅｒｙｏｎｅ！
Ｗｈａｔ ａ ｄａｙ ｔｏ ｓｉｎｇ Ｇｏｔｈ Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ ｃａｒｏｌｓ，
Wｅａｒ Ｇｏｔｈ Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ ｊｕｍｐｅｒｓ，
Aｎｄ ｅａｔ ｔｒａｄｉｔｉｏｎａｌ Ｇｏｔｈ Ｃｈｒｉｓｔｍａｓ ｆｅａｓｔｓ．
Ｈｏ ｈｏ ｈｉｓｓｓｓｓｓｓ！
Ｉｆ ｙｏｕ ｄａｒｅ， ｂｒｉｅｆ ｍｏｒｔａｌ， ｐｅｅｐ ａｂｏｖｅ ｔｈｅ ｃｏｖｅｒｓ ｔｈｉｓ ｗｅｅｋｅｎｄ， ｗｈａｔ ｓｈａｌｌ ｙｏｕ ｄｏ？
Ｗｈａｔ ｓｈａｌｌ ｙｏｕ ｐｌａｙ？
Ｈｅｒｅ＇ｓ ｗｈａｔ ｗｅ ｄａｒｅ ｐｌａｙ：
This is article 5 of 6, adapted from my Psychogeography of Games series for London’s Videobrains. If you enjoy this, please consider backing me on Patreon, where there’ll be a zine of these texts coming out in the New Year, plus an exciting new project announced soon(ish).
In the months running up to the walk, Ed has sent me the occasional email, each time with new ideas for route near where he lives (and grew up) in Cumbria. The night before, we spread an OS map out on the table and he points out wild swimming spots, walks he went on with his parents, places not explored yet. Jack, a black and white cat, sits on top and bats at Ed’s finger each time he places it down. In the end we decide on Borrow Beck, in Borrowdale. The walk doesn’t look far on the map.
Long before always-online games and mass multiplayer became the norm, MMOs were seedbeds of sociologically fascinating interactions among players. The base game was always a digital sandbox; empty cities, towns, and fields built from the ground up around the assumption that the players would fill them with requisite life. In the process, elegant spider webs of informal community became the norm, a glittering metagame linking the digital assets of the formal game itself.
But until Nina Freeman’s recently released Cibele (pronounced SIB-ul), we haven’t really had a ludic love letter to this shared reality of many MMO gamers. The game tells a semi-autobiographical story of its creator, Nina, about a months-long romance she carried on when she was 19 through an online game, fictionalised here as Valtameri, which seems like a WoW/FFXIII hybrid.
I quit. For the next three or so months, I have better things to do than write about video games: I shall be playing the one and only game, the game of games, the game’s game, The Binding of Issac: Rebirth [official site]. The roguelikelike shooter’s expansion ‘Afterbirth’ has just come out on Steam, adding a new character, hundreds of new items, enemies, bosses, areas, room layouts, and so on. Oh, plus a whole new mode, and something no day of my life will be complete without: daily runs.
I imagine this is both part of Steam’s gradual drive to become an all-things-digital storefront and reflective of the fact that it’s happy to take 30% of any game anyone wants to sell via it, thus encouraging more people to make games is in its interest, but it’s definitely an odd one.
The latest addition to its digital racks are software tutorial videos; you can pay for instruction in the likes of Blender, zBrush or 3D Studio Max. Conceptually not a terrible idea, but fairly expensive given guides can be found for free and your YouTubes and what not.
