Snow! How exciting. Amounts may vary across the country but hell, I’m still delighted with yesterday’s centimetre. I’m keeping an eye on several webcams around the countryside to see if a big dump lands nearby, then I’ll be out the door for a nice long hike stumbling up hills then sliding back down on my botty.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
All things piratical are in vogue, as are FTL-likes, making Abandon Ship a game easy to get excited for. Developers Fireblade Software released a big update today for the early access game of oceanic adventuring against the odds, adding three new extra-murdery regions to explore. There’s volcanic death-gas to navigate, ferocious blizzards ready to knock crew from the deck and (of course) an entire ghost-stricken archipelago. So, not a gentle weekend cruise, but there’s some fancy plunder to be earned, and a bunch of new features. See the update trailer below.
Orwellian snoop ’em up Beholder is an uncomfortable game to play, and I feel this official live-action short from Kinodom Films captures some of its uneasy tension. Produced by the same crew that gave us the live-action Papers, Please film, this one goes the near-silent route, steadily escalating music aside. As in the game, a landlord turned snoop spies on his tenants, and tries to decide whether he should use his knowledge to win favour with the government, extort money through blackmail or help his own family directly. Give it a watch, as we’ve handily embedded it below.
Crying Suns feels a bit like playing FTL in the universe from Lexx – weird, uncomfortable, unquestionably a bit evil and confusingly exciting. Space here is a mean place full of freaks and lunatics, and you’re an expendable cloned captain sent to find out just how it got so bad. Developers Alt Shift released a demo to accompany the Kickstarter funding their rogue-ish game of grimdark space adventure – today they’ve delivered a streamlined and heavily reworked version highlighting the work they’ve done in the past seven months. You can grab the demo on Steam here.
Wargroove is out now, and clearly an Advance Wars game with the serial numbers filed off and replaced with Chucklefish branding. I am entirely fine with this, and you shouldn’t count that as criticism in the slightest. Clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’s accessible-but-tough strategy series, Wargroove has a few ideas of its own, and lots of maps, missions and little soldiers to boss around. It also has a playable commander who is a literal dog that just barks and chases its tail adorably, inspiring its men to fight with the strength of gods. Check out the launch trailer below.
The hot new way to create high-resolution texture pack to fancy up old games is ‘deep learning’, feeding the original textures into a computer so algorithms can draw more-detailed versions of what they imagine the images look like. It has… varied results. I’m a hoary purist who still plays Quake pixellated without texture filtering so I’m not mad keen on these hallucinated manglings, but I do like the technique as an act of creation rather than replication. Which leads me to coo over Everest Pipkin’s Mushy, a new free tileset for isometric games generated by machine learning with the intention of creating a glitched-out look that’s just not right.
Nvidia’s BFGDs (or Big Format Gaming Displays, to you and me) are no longer going to be called BFGDs. Instead, as of January 2019, these massive 65in gaming displays are now part of Nvidia’s wider G-Sync Ultimate family, which also includes their significantly smaller (but just as pricey) G-Sync HDR monitors such as the 27in Acer Predator X27 and Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ.
Why the name change? To make things easier to understand, according to Nvidia, although between you and me I rather liked the idea of it being the BFG of all gaming displays. And one of them will be here super soon, too: HP’s newly-christened Omen X Emperium. If you’ve been eyeing up this jumbo gaming display, here’s everything we know so far about Nvidia’s BFGD G-Sync Ultimate displays, including their price (I’ll warn you now, it ain’t pretty), specs and release date.
