Dote Night: The Petting Zoo Of Disaster

Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be complaining about her Dota 2 petting zoo!

I am staring at a hang screen in Dota 2. I think I just tried to compile a map but I can’t be completely sure because programming words have always been a bit of a mystery to me.

Being sick and jetlagged I took the obvious decision that this would be a good time to build a petting zoo as a custom game mode using Dota 2 Reborn’s toolkit. So far I seem to have made a horrible map in the Hammer editor where the trees look goofy and the textures are unsubtle and there’s an army of butterflies completely by accident that I can’t get rid of. The totally separate INTENTIONAL army of butterflies is in a totally different location but I got cross with rotating them individually so they’re currently in grid formation and now they look weird and menacing and, crucially, unable to fly. I think they might all be dead.

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Stardock’s Sorcerer King Launches On July 16th

Stardock’s turn-based strategy game Sorcerer King [official site] has been hanging around in Early Access for a while now. But now it is taking the next step. It’s growing up. It’s graduating. It’s getting a mortgage and losing its childlike innocence in favor of grown-up cynicism. It’s finally doing that thing all the big games are doing: it’s getting a release date. (July 16th, in case you were wondering.)

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War Thunder Gets Chilly New Update

World War II multiplayer plane-o-tank battler War Thunder [official site], which sadly bears no relation to Tropic Thunder, has received a big new update. Titled Cold Steel, it brings a veritable armament of changes and improvements, 20 new vehicles, and everything in between. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty, come watch the pretty trailer first.

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Ultra Street Fighter IV’s Long Road To Becoming The World’s Greatest Fighting Game

A month or so ago there was a Capcom weekend on Steam, where some of the publisher’s finest cuts were free to play for a few days. Out of curiosity as to whether my old 360 arcade stick would work with it I downloaded Ultra Street Fighter IV [official site]. I have a long history with Street Fighter IV and thought I knew what to expect – but the World Warriors blew me away again, and that once-dusty stick is now part of the furniture. Here’s why.

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C.ARA: Cara Ellison’s Book Embed With Games

Former RPS contributor (unfortunately we had to fire her for excessive soup consumption during working hours) Cara Ellison is about to release her first book, Embed With Games. An ebook, specifically, but it’s got a cover and a pricetag and everything, and it contains some of her most heartfelt games writing as well as no small amount of travel journalism.
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Chris Crawford’s Unslain Dragon Of Interactive Storytelling

Chris Crawford is a contradiction: mythologized for his bold vision for the future of games; criticised and dismissed for his lifelong failure to accomplish that bold vision. His numerous critics see him as out of touch and over the hill. A washout. An unrepentant failure. Someone who should give it up and walk away. But he can’t bring himself to do that. He has a dream, and he hasn’t finished laying the groundwork for someone else to carry that dream forward. Crawford is driven by a singular vision — by an idea that he’s pursued doggedly since he left the games industry over 20 years ago. And even now, as I speak to him about Siboot [official site], his latest attempt to spruik his dream of character-driven interactive storytelling, he remains tormented by a dragon he knows he will never slay.

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Now You Can Too Be A Cruel And Clumsy God

Thanks to a childhood mired in Sid Meier’s simulations, I’ve developed a soft spot for god games. In a world buffeted by unpredictability, it’s so very nice to be in charge of helpless little lives, lives that could be brutally ended on a passing whim. This fascination with flippant sadism may be the reason why I’m rather excited about the release of Clumsy God [official site], which puts you in charge of an omnipotent hand capable of – literally – showing the world the finger. Look, you can check out the release trailer if you don’t believe me.

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