My favourite bits of Life Is Strange are the sitting around bits. You know, when Max decides she wants to rest her legs and plops down on the ground next to a convenient tree to lean against and thinks about how weird everything is now that she’s got time travel powers. Wonderfully, they’re back in Life Is Strange 2 and – even better! – they’re still very good.
With Assassin’s Creed Odyssey just around the corner, I find myself thinking back to last year’s entry in the series, Origins. It was packed full of side quests and collectables and set pieces – in short, everything we’ve come to expect from a Ubisoft open world adventure. But one moment in my playthrough still stands out to me. It was almost entirely unscripted, driven by my own exploration, and – because this is an Assassin’s Creed game we’re talking about – involves a dead body.
Spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Origins and Revelations below the cut.
If you were to hear that a digital collectable card game like Hearthstone is going to bring something out in a paper format, you would probably expect a run of physical cards. But that’s not what Blizzard has gone for – instead, they’re producing a pop-up book, very simply called ‘The Hearthstone Pop-up Book.’
Park management sim The Eldritch Zookeeper looks totally normal if you ask me. You keep a zoo full of very ordinary animals and invite people to come and see them, just like any other zoo. Okay, sure, you’ve been cursed by a skeleton in a sharp suit, but who among us hasn’t? Just take a look at these extremely typical mind-possessing llama friends:
A new Minecraft spin-off game will delve into the blockworld as a dungeon-crawler in 2019, developers Mojang announced this weekend during their MineCon fan event. Minecraft: Dungeons is its name, and whacking monsters is its game. Inspired by “classic dungeon crawler games”, they say, it’ll send up to four players to whack and stab and thwipp and zap through Minecrafty levels and monsters, grabbing whatever loot’s not nailed down. Have a peek in the announcement trailer below.
Sundays are for realising that telling the internet what you’re up to every Sunday is boring, so making stuff up instead. I’m tobogganing down Mt. Everest with Jennifer Aniston, while reading the best writing about video games from the past week.
On Kotaku, Cameron Kunzelman spoke to a YouTuber who’s using Cities: Skylines to illustrate the politics that govern infrastructure. Some of the talk about water management is inevitably dry, but I like that Justin Roczniak’s original stab at presenting a historically accurate account of city building quickly turned into rampant leftist propaganda. Turns out they’re basically the same thing. (more…)
Search engine and all around web giant Google famously love to put hidden features in their products, and a few days ago a new easter egg was discovered: a full text adventure game hidden away in the dev console. The game sees you playing as a “big blue G” and searching for your friends, the other colourful letters that make up the Google logo.
The Overwatch League’s inaugural season victors, the London Spitfire, might have played all of their main season matches at Blizzard’s arena in Burbank, California, but they still courted a local following, including adopting the quintessentially English ‘It’s coming home’ messaging before winning the finals. Now, the unspecified ‘it’ will be ‘them,’ as they’ll be visiting London for two weeks this October.
Valve have responded to some raised eyebrows regarding a recently revealed card for their upcoming game Artifact by changing its name. What was once called ‘Crack The Whip’ will now become ‘Coordinated Assault’ to avoid connotations of slavery and racism when considered alongside the card’s text, which begins “modify a black hero.”
To be clear, ‘black’ cards do not refer to race, but are a gameplay classification alongside blue, green, and red. Nonetheless, Valve clearly agrees that it carried unfortunate implications and have adjusted it accordingly.
Early access top-down shooter Geneshift is, to quote their own marketing materials, “hopping on the [Battle Royale] bandwagon” today, and you’ll be able to play the new mode for free. It’s got some twists that set it apart from your Fortnites and Plunkbats, too, like each round lasting only two minutes. You can get a feel for the action in the trailer below:
For those who want that taste of academia without the elitism, I recommend the Queerness in Games Conference.
Apparently something named ‘EGX‘ was going around last weekend, judging by some of the groaning from the gang as I asked what they were up to this weekend. Must be one of those nine-day flu things? But here we are, in autumn somehow, when I feel summer barely had time to get started. Summer can’t end if we don’t let it. Leave your jacket at home, bare your arms, and for goodness’ sake swim in the sea – autumn will begin if you don’t.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
Scum may be detailed enough to let you urinate or even defecate on your foes, but that requires you to be up close. A raised middle finger? Well, that’s your new ranged option for offensive offending. In today’s early access update, prisoners attempting to survive the zombie and robot-infested hell that is Gamepires’s Scum have a few new options. These include hiding in caves, making rude gestures at people, crafting improvised firearms and (if they push you just that bit too far) skinning your foes and wearing them on your face. Lovely. Check out the patch notes here.
Atop the lofty corridors of the ivory tower there’s an even higher, loftier tower with a sign out front that says, “Critical Theory.” I cannot pretend that academia has ever tried to make itself accessible, despite its cries to the “widening participation” otherwise. The humanities, especially, gets a bad rap for its pages and pages of philosophy books and politics and symbolisms and god, what if the curtains were just BLUE.