1551 posts tagged with gaming.
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Physical Dice vs. Digital Dice
"We took it to the streets and asked both hardcore and novice tabletop gamers." Meanwhile, on another forum... A loosely related blending of physical and digital. Some feel that It's The Apps That Are Wrong. A D&D-focused list of dice apps. There's also Elmenreich's "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games" [SLPDF]. Previously [more inside]
Ikea Tycoon
IKEA wants to pay real people to work in its new store inside Roblox game. IKEA has put a new spin on remote working, seeking 10 real-life staff to work in its Roblox virtual store that opens on June 24 and becoming the first brand to offer paid work on the gaming platform. “The Co-Worker Game” will give people “a chance to immerse themselves in the working world” of the store.
Randomness or the Perception of Randomness?
"All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his [sic] games? After careful consideration, I don’t think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct." A neat previously featuring random maps.
This is not a post about lying in fiction or games
Some say that lying non-player characters can motivate player characters, at the cost of paranoia. Some say that characters in crime fiction may be justified in their dishonesty. Marvel comic books are full of liars. Psychology experts have advice for you about how to spot liars. Some recent research has addressed factors associated with designing video games with falsehoods.
A relevant previous Ask. [more inside]
The ultimate goal of all this micro-design and shuffling about malarkey
"Procedural narrative is the design strategy, emergent narrative is the goal, the player’s experience." Game design previously.
Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?
Is Super Mario Marker beaten yet? Back in 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, which allowed users to create their own Mario levels and upload them for others to play. Over 8 million levels were created for the game. On March 31, 2021 Nintendo "discontinued" the game, which meant no new levels could be uploaded. Then the second shoe dropped: Nintendo announced the Wii U servers would be turned off forever on April 8, 2024, effectively removing all of these user levels from existence. Upon hearing this news, the Super Mario Maker community began to rally around a single goal: clear every single level uploaded to the servers before the shutdown date. [more inside]
Are we the product of some cosmic coincidence?
Rooster Teeth is shutting down. Warner Bros. Discovery is ending the Austin-based media enterprise after 21 years.
So you like to place workers
"Some of the most heated debates on online forums involve definitions. What is a Euro game? What is a medium-heavy game? What constitutes “too much luck.” The definition of worker placement is no exception."
How to Design a Tabletop Game
The folks over at Stonemaier Games have a nice, lengthy set of pages and links about how to design a tabletop game. Game design previously.
It's not even very good!
AI is already better than you. "You cannot shame this technology into disuse any more. That only works if quality is something the people with money care about. The problem with the continuing erosion of the games industry, the dehumanisation of game workers and the brutal treatment of outsourced work, is that many roles in the games industry are already treated as if they were automated. You are appealing to the better nature of money men who do not have one."
Hex Marks the Spot
"As is true throughout the history of innovation, whenever there is a problem, it usually turns out that multiple people arrive at similar inventive solutions. That was the case with the development of the hex as a basic unit of division in board games." Hex maps also have been noted to have problems. The internet is, of course, full of lists of favorite hex and counter wargames. (While a counter may be gorgeous, and may be found in your kitchen, it is not a kitchen counter, which can be dangerous.) Hexcrawls have been part of Dungeons & Dragons for a long time, though they have spread to other RPGs over time, though some people prefer pointcrawls to hexcrawls. It should be noted that hexes had ludic uses[SLPDF] prior to the modern era of board wargames and RPGs.
A directory of healthy mobile games
and the dark patterns you should try to avoid. From their description: A game review website devoted to helping you find mobile games that aren't riddled with in-app purchases, and don't use psychological tricks to manipulate you into becoming an addicted gamer. Learn about the dark patterns that game designers use to waste your precious time and money. [more inside]
Gamedev Willie
By the time works resumed passing into the public domain in the US in 2019, countless people had grown up believing nothing would ever do so again. Techdirt invented a unique solution: an annual game jam in which all entries must include material from at least on newly public-domain work. The sixth has just begun - Gaming Like It's 1928! (Itch page. Pages for previous jams including submissions: 1927, 1926, 1925, 1924, 1923. Previously on Techdirt (including winner announcements and spotlights), Metafilter. Recent MeFi post on newly PD works.) [more inside]
A Blind Crusader Can be King
After around a year and a half of work, this mod for Crusader Kings 3 has hit version 1.0. It converts the game's very graphical UI into plain text, and is thus screen reader accessible, thanks to OCR software. [more inside]
Connecting people through the power of language
Chants of Sennaar [Launch Trailer] “Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.” [via: Polygon]
Escape from Dogtown.
Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 Phantom Liberty Is the Game It Should’ve Always Been [Siliconera] “Though examples of other titles having a redemption from its initial launch exist, such as No Man’s Sky, I never had the motivation to give these games a second chance. But this changed with the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC, as CD Projekt RED finally made good on the promises the RPG made when it was originally released in 2020. Even for those who don’t purchase the Phantom Liberty DLC, you’re in for a treat, as the base game feels much more exciting than ever before with the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update. [...] Everything from the action sequences to the terrific performances to even the storytelling, this is what I hoped Cyberpunk 2077 would have been from the start. I enjoyed my time with the DLC, and the 2.0 update changes so much that I actually plan to finally beat the base game and see the new ending now. If, like me, you’ve been on the fence about this game or were disappointed in the RPG in the past, I recommend giving Cyberpunk 2077 a second chance.” [Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty | Update 2.0 Overview] [Phantom Liberty - Official Cinematic Trailer] [more inside]
Leaked documents from the FTC vs. Microsoft case spilled a lot of beans
It's been a terrible morning for Team Xbox, as a major leak related to the FTC investigation of the Activision Blizzard deal has revealed all kinds of information that Microsoft surely never intended anyone to see. And seriously, this is huge! We now know that Microsoft has been planning an Xbox Series X refresh (potentially arriving in late 2024), and an entire release schedule from Bethesda dated July 2020 (new Bethesda games including DOOM, Dishonored, Fallout & Oblivion) has also been doing the rounds. There's more coming out of this as well, such as a new Xbox controller that appears to be launching alongside the new Xbox Series X revision, and even the revelation that Phil Spencer was interested in acquiring Nintendo back in 2020! The leak also revealed Microsoft's plans to release a new next-generation console in 2028. Via:[Pure Xbox][Polygon][Eurogamer][The Verge]
Master of puppets.
Lies of P carves a singular space out of the Soulsborne genre [Polygon] “Lies of P is the latest addition in the ever-growing lineup of Soulsborne-inspired games. On paper, it definitely dresses the part. It’s a hack-and-slash game with obtuse mechanics; challenging areas delimited by sweet, sweet checkpoints; and dramatic entrances for each and every boss encounter. The standout element is its narrative, which sets the tale of renowned lying apologist Pinocchio against the Belle Époque era.” [Gameplay Trailer][Story Trailer][1 Hour of Midgame Gameplay] [more inside]
Farming, fishing, friendship... faeries?!
Fae Farm is the cozy game I’ve been waiting for since Animal Crossing: New Horizons [CNN] “Fae Farm places you in the sprawling land of Azoria, where you can harvest crops, catch critters, reel in fish, raise animals, defeat monsters, show off fashionable looks, craft items and decorate to your heart’s content, not to mention befriend villagers and even date and marry one. The game takes a lot of cues from cozy games that came before it, including Wylde Flowers, Littlewood, Stardew Valley and, of course, Animal Crossing: New Horizons — but its magical world and abilities, plus its unique art style and convenient game mechanics, make it stand apart from some of the competition and may even set a new standard for cozy games in general.” [more inside]
TAG TEAM WITH DESTINY
WrestleQuest [Launch Trailer] “WrestleQuest fuses turn-based gameplay of traditional fantasy RPGs like Final Fantasy or Earthbound, with the fantastical world of pro wrestling. In WrestleQuest, players explore a fantasy realm dotted with gyms, arenas, and even shrines to the legends of yesteryear. Combat takes place in the ring (usually) and follows a familiar turn-based cadence, with wrestling moves and action points nimbly taking the place of spells and mana. Land a particularly devastating move from the top rope, and a guy’s plastic arm might pop off. No worries, he just sticks it back on. [...] The characters — 12 of them playable, 400 of them NPCs, and about 30 of those real-life, old-school heroes from the past 40 years — are all action-figure representations. Some aren’t even wrestlers. The world in which the main protagonist “Muchacho Man” lives is a fantasy realm of toys, the kind a middle-schooler would spread out on the bedroom floor and mash up in glorious crossover, non-canonical throwdowns.” [via: Polygon | Game Review]
Ground control to Major Todd
Starfield | Overwhelming Scope [Game Informer] “Even in the increasingly crowded marketplace of big, expansive games, Starfield stands out. Leveraging the gameplay Bethesda popularized with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, Starfield expands the breadth of exploration to a galaxy of solar systems, planets, and ships. It populates those environments with a rich palette of activities and missions that tap into the outer space fantasy. It’s a staggering span of content to wrap one’s head around. At times, that scope threatens to impair the focus and pacing, and moment-to-moment gameplay is not always a strong suit. But players can expect to uncover hundreds of hours of experimentation in a richly imagined sci-fi playground, and that thrill is worth experiencing.” [more inside]
a cyberfunk love-letter to Jet Set Radio
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Better Red than dead [Shack News] “Set in a funky, futuristic New Amsterdam, the world of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is ruled by crews of graffiti artists-slash-DJs-slash-superheroes(?). The constant power struggle is a bid to become “All City,” the top of the top. You start as Faux, someone seemingly crucial to the current rankings. But before you can escape a mysterious holding cell and figure out what’s up, another crew leader lops your head off with weaponized vinyl. You wake up with a new (robot) head, a new name (Red) and a new crew, and set off to get your head back and become All City on the way. [...] If you’re an old school Segahead, there are definitely a few holes in your heart in need of filling. Jet Set Radio, which hasn’t seen a new game since the Xbox, is one of the biggest. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has appeared like a beacon of hope to fill that void, and it does so while bringing new stuff to the table. This game is like a long-lost Dreamcast game in so many different ways, and most of them are good. Clearly, the developers at Team Reptile understand the concept of love.” [Launch Trailer][Gameplay Trailer]
feed the fire.
Armored Core 6 brings mecha to the masses [Polygon] “The rebooted Armored Core is not a sprawling adventure game à la Elden Ring or Bloodborne, nor does my experience with those games make me a capable mech pilot. Instead, Armored Core 6 is a reconsideration of a classic game series infused with a decade of studio growth, expertise in combat and level design, and the heightened expectations of FromSoftware fans. Armored Core 6 is a faster, more refined Armored Core experience that streamlines the mecha franchise in clever ways. [...] It’s noisy, chaotic, and starkly beautiful, all this clanging metal, ricochets, and explosions. It’s unlike many of the FromSoftware games you may have played over the past decade, to its benefit.” [Launch Trailer][Overview Trailer] [more inside]
more cyberpunk than cyberpunk
After Cyberpunk 2077's rocky launch, it's time to bring back Deus Ex [PC Gamer] “Currently published by Square Enix, the Deus Ex series has been on hiatus since 2016, after the (mostly good) Mankind Divided failed to match sales expectations. But the huge attention and commercial success Cyberpunk has garnered, combined with its equally significant problems, has opened up a window for the series to return. This would really be things coming full circle. Deus Ex essentially served as the template for Cyberpunk 2077's core, boasting the same blend of fighting, sneaking and hacking. It also shares plenty of themes, like body modification and corporate conspiracies. For all intents and purposes, Deus Ex is a cyberpunk game. [...] Deus Ex's superiority is particularly evident when it comes to the RPG side of things. Putting aside the bugs and the technical issues, Cyberpunk's biggest problem is that its RPG systems are either poorly implemented or simply don't work at all.” [more inside]
“I'm having a good time despite being really terrible at it.”
It's okay to be bad at games [EX | Substack]
“The thing that I eventually came to realize is that it's all about people's expectations. Everything when you're talking about difficulty in games has to be framed in terms of, how do people expect this run to go? And how did it actually go? And are the points of difficulty in the places where I expected them to be? A game is marked out as hard if you expected to be able to do things and you couldn't do them. And it is marked out as easy if the things you expect it to be able to do you could do even if there's a lot of repetition.”A Q&A with Bennett Foddy, the high priest of videogame difficulty.
Let’s Get Really Nostalgic About The Early Days Of PlayStation
At a GameStop store on Launch Day of PS2 in 2000 [YouTube] ““There was a sense that video games were toys. And Sony is not a toy company.” That’s how a new mini-oral history about PlayStation revolutionizing console gaming begins over at IGN. The words belong to former head of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, and they ring true for anyone who grew up with an NES or SNES. The Nintendo consoles built for angular cartridges could take a beating like children’s building blocks, and the games often revolved around colorful worlds full of knights, dragons, and magic mushrooms. In the ‘90s, PlayStation felt like something entirely different. [...] In addition to the pitch of bringing arcade-level graphics into the home, there was the idea of a video game console that could channel the same feeling of cool imbued in the Sony Walkman and your older sibling’s collection of grunge and hip-hop CDs.” [via: Kotaku]
How Lara Croft lived and died in Derby.
20 years on, the Tomb Raider story told by the people who were there [Eurogamer] “There are conflicting reports about the origins of Tomb Raider, but everyone agrees that it was Toby Gard who created the Lara Croft character and came up with the idea for a third-person adventure game in which the player explored tombs. Legend has it that Frances Gard, Toby's younger sister, was the inspiration for Lara Croft. The devil is in the detail - some remember seeing prototypes that included an Indiana Jones-style male character, and that Core's bosses were terrified it would spark a lawsuit. Others insist Gard had envisioned a female character from the very beginning, although at first she was called Laura Cruz. Whatever the truth, Gard was the driving force behind Tomb Raider, even if others played a crucial role in bringing his vision to life. Jeremy Heath-Smith is clear in his mind how Tomb Raider came to be. "Tomb Raider came out of my trip to the States," he says, "where Ken Kutaragi showed me the PlayStation. "I got back on a plane, flew home, and called an off-site meeting of the company.” [The history of Tomb Raider][YouTube] [more inside]
This game makes me feel very seen.
Tourist To Your Own Culture By Veerender Singh Jubbal [Gamespot] “Venba is a game that has been on my radar since its announcement trailer was released in 2020. It comes from a mainly South Asian development team, with its aesthetics, character designs, and sound design drawing its inspiration from the culture to tell a story about a South Asian family trying to reclaim and archive their own underrepresented culture after immigrating to Canada. It is an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented. Venba is about trying to figure out your own identity (or sometimes lack thereof) in an all-new environment. This new environment is not kind or accommodating to people who are not considered white, and if you are underrepresented from a culture of color you are swayed and forced to assimilate, leaving what made you unique behind to survive this new place.” [Game Trailer][YouTube] [more inside]
Thanks, Anita
high melodrama, ultra-violence, and slapstick comedy
How To Get Into the Ever-Growing Yakuza Series [Game Informer] It's never been a better time to be a Yakuza fan – if only due to the sheer amount of Yakuza games there are. Across the mainline series, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has released 15+ Yakuza games since 2005. But with that kind of output, it can be a little confusing to know where to start and in what order you should play the games (spoiler: not in release order or chronological order!). [Yakuza (franchise) wiki] [more inside]
My neck, my back… my wrists and fingers
An obsessive gamer’s guide to chronic pain peripherals [Polygon] “I now live by a common chronic pain axiom called “spoon theory.” Every day, I have a number of “spoons” at my disposal — a measurement of my energy, where each spoon signifies the ability to do one task. Sometimes I wake up with few spoons to spare. Sometimes I overspend my spoons and must live for weeks in recovery, with no spoons at all.” Playing video games used to replenish every spoon in my drawer — it was a restorative, passive hobby like reading or doing a puzzle. But all of these activities have something in common: They involve sitting, crouching, and craning my body for hours at a time. After my back injury, I realized I had to rebuild my idea of rest, and that I needed to factor ergonomics into nearly every aspect of playing games, especially because I have a tendency to get sucked in. [...] Nowadays, I think seriously about the tools I use, and the positions I sit in (or pretzel my body into) when I become obsessed with a game. I’ve assembled some of my favorite “hacks” for gaming with chronic pain. Because chronic pain is an individual experience, your mileage may vary. But these tools and tricks have helped me enjoy playing games in the most pain-free way possible since my injuries.”
toxicity persists and worsens in highly competitive games
Despite Advancements, Games Still Aren't Doing Enough To Stop Toxic Voice Chat by Alyssa Mercante [Kotaku] “I started regularly playing competitive online games in 2007, with the launch of Halo 3. Back then, participating in in-game voice chat was harrowing for a 17-year-old girl whose voice betrayed her gender and her youth. I was subjected to such frequent and horrific hostility (rape threats, misogynist remarks, sexually inappropriate comments, you name it) that I eventually started screaming back, a behavior my parents still bring up today. And yet, voice chat is essential in competitive online games, especially modern ones like Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, and Overwatch. All of these popular games require extensive amounts of teamwork to succeed, which is bolstered by being able to chat with your teammates. But in-game voice chat remains a scary, toxic place—especially for women. [...] I spoke to several women about their voice chat experiences, as well as reps from some of today’s biggest online games, to get a better understanding of the current landscape.”
Gamers can have drip
Video Game Fashion Week 2023 [Polygon]: We’re digging into all sorts of angles on how games and fashion converge, from the evolution of Link’s hairstyles to the ruthless nature of Style Savvy to game-themed makeup tutorials and what it’s like to live a week as Mario. If you want to learn, reminisce, or simply appreciate the lengths people go to style your favorite characters, you’ll find plenty to love here. [more inside]
“A true witcher should never abandon poultry in distress.”
The Witcher 3 hits even harder in a post-Cyberpunk 2077 world [Polygon] “Oddly enough, the prevailing thought that dogged me as I played The Witcher 3 again was actually about another game. I was thinking about Cyberpunk 2077, which I played earlier this year, and how little it played off the successes of The Witcher 3. A strength of Geralt’s adventure is how little of it really has to do with him. He’s in some important rooms, and he meets movers and shakers, but warriors live and die without him. Dynasties fall. Monsters kill the weak. The mechanisms of life happen, and he doesn’t have to be there to see it all unfold — that’s what makes his tale so compelling. He’s a hero when he’s around, and he’ll move or shake as necessary, but his world is not one driven by a protagonist. It is a humble fantasy, or at least presents itself as one, and by contrast, Cyberpunk 2077 was so self-centered on the part of the player that it seemed like people didn’t exist if they weren’t within my field of view. In that game, history happened so that protagonist V could be there to inherit it. Geralt is almost anonymous by comparison. The next-gen upgrade is going to make that available for more people, and I’m excited for that. But it did leave me with a melancholy feeling about where we’ve been and, given the future of The Witcher franchise, where a post-Cyberpunk Witcher game might go.” [more inside]
“To permanently become part of the beauty of the Zone”
“The Zone itself undulates between three possible descriptive modes - sublime, spooky and grotesque - and becomes controlled by players after they perish inside. Only one player will make it to The Center, and everyone else who has perished collaboratively decides their final fate, whether that’s evisceration by a plant werewolf or a slow dissolution by way of radiation.” (via) The Zone is a storytelling RPG inspired by horror works like Annihilation, Stalker, Uzumaki, and the SCP Foundation. It’s “play to lose” — players know from the start that their character will almost certainly die, which frees them up to take big risks that fuel exciting stories. [more inside]
All hail our megacorp overlords!
Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard [The Verge] A California judge is allowing Microsoft to close its acquisition of Activision Blizzard after five days of grueling testimony. Microsoft still faces an ongoing antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has listened to arguments from both the FTC and Microsoft and decided to deny the regulator’s request for a preliminary injunction. [Explainer Video][YouTube] [more inside]
Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape
An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time [Kotaku] “The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) partnered with the Software Preservation Network, an organization intent on advancing software preservation through collective action, to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games. “Classic” in this case has been defined as all games released before 2010, which the VGHF noted is the “year when digital game distribution started to take off.” In the study, the two groups found that 87 percent of these classic games are not in release and considered critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.” You can read the full 50-page study on the open repository Zenodo. [more inside]
“I'm the strongest woman in the world!”
The Kickass Legacy of Chun-Li, the First Playable Woman in 'Street Fighter' [Vice Games] “In the midst of this digital world designed, developed, and dominated by men, Chun-Li defied expectations about women in games entirely. She wore an athletic modified qipao, combat boots, spiked cuffs around each wrist, and had massive, impressively toned muscles. Plus, she was one of the best competitive Street Fighter characters; her speed, agility, and match-ending Super Combos proved a devastating mix for her opponents, and ensured top-tier dominance throughout the series. [...] Chun-Li immediately shot to popularity as the franchise’s first playable female character. And by giving her the same depth of backstory and combat ability as every other player, Street Fighter set the bar for female characterization. From her skillful strikes and powerful air throws to her infamous Spinning Bird Kick, Chun-Li’s offensive capabilities proved she was a woman who could finally fight on an equal playing field with her male counterparts.” [more inside]
An archive of video game history digitized from physical media
We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History [YouTube] Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history. The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. The above video explains the how and what and why of it all. You can subscribe to the archive via the @NoclipArchive YouTube channel or archive.org. Highlights from the archive include: Microsoft E3 2009 Press Conference, A young Hideo Kojima interviewed about the American Metal Gear Solid 4 reveal trailer, Infinity Ward Studio Tour During Development of COD:4 Modern Warfare, Exploring Nintendo of America's Employee-Only Museum, Tony Hawk Half Pipe Demo - Games Convention 2007. [via: Destructoid]
what's old is new again
The Best Reviewed Games of 2023 (So Far) [IGN] The snowball of games delayed out of 2021 and 2022 has settled in 2023, coalescing into the most exciting games lineup of the decade so far. 2023, arguably, marks the proper start of the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation with Unreal Engine 5 support building and an increasing number of developers dropping support for last-gen hardware. Each of the three console manufacturers has at least one blockbuster release scheduled this year — Starfield for Xbox, Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo — complemented by a generation-best third-party lineup that includes Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Hades 2, and Mortal Kombat 1. Five Six months through 2023 and already the year has lived up to its lofty expectations.
Claw & Order, Jersey Shore edition
In New Jersey, cheating at boardwalk games is considered especially heinous. On the Jersey Shore, the dedicated detectives who investigate this malicious mischief are members of an elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission. These are their stories. (archive.today link) [more inside]
Have you ever wanted to walk up to the clouds?
Only Up! [Game Trailer] If you’re a gamer in any capacity, your cup likely runneth over with great games to play right now. There are hits like Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, to name a few. But many people, from big influencers to humble players, are choosing to spend their time on an unlikely candidate: Only Up! Only Up! is similar to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a surreal platformer that put the player in the role of a shirtless man crouched in a cauldron, using his mighty sledgehammer to climb a magnificent and surreal peak. Only Up!, which was developed by SC-KR games, is a 3D platformer with a similar premise. The player has to climb past giant disembodied feet, Shiba Inu balloons, and massive networks of oil tankers and scaffolding. The game took off in China and was eventually streamed by Ludwig Ahgren, which led to it exploding in popularity on Twitch and TikTok. [via: Polygon]
Everyone loves Elephant Mario and it’s (mostly) wholesome
Wednesday’s Nintendo Direct was jam-packed with pleasant surprises, from a Super Mario RPG remake to the return of Detective Pikachu. Another standout announcement was a new Mario game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which looks like a fun and trippy take on the usual 2D platformer formula. The trailer showed Mario and the gang going on adventures, and at the end of the trailer, Nintendo gave us a sneak peek at a new, goofy-looking fruit that turns Mario into an elephant. Elephant Mario is still recognizably Mario. He’s bipedal, bright-eyed, and keeps his usual mustache, cap, and overalls. (His shoes, however, are gone; presumably, they don’t fit his new elephant feet.) [...] Nintendo didn’t reveal any details about Hollow Knight: Silksong, Metroid Prime 4, or post-release content for Tears of the Kingdom. [via: Polygon]
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Welcome to Hyrule Engineering Club
Tears of the Kingdom site will help you make those wild builds you're seeing Meet the inventors making Hyrule’s most complicated contraptions. [more inside]
a beautiful retro nostalgia trip
Capcom's 40th Anniversary Site Is An Incredible Digital Museum With Playable Retro Games [Capcom Town] “Capcom has launched a beautiful 40th-anniversary website which celebrates the company's history, as well as shares artwork and design docs, and acts as a hub for some of the developer's biggest titles. [...] The town is segmented into areas for certain franchises — Street Fighter has a dojo in the top right corner, for instance, while Monster Hunter occupies the space in front of the giant arcade machine. If you're an eagle-eyed fan, then you'll spot some other small references to Capcom characters throughout. [...] You can pop into the C.M.D Museum to look at artwork from many of Capcom's best titles — there is some never-before-seen concept art for some games, high-resolution artwork of characters we've never had access to, and design docs for the original Mega Man, Ace Attorney, and Street Fighter II. An archivist's dream, basically. Also, remember the arcade we mentioned above? Well, there are a handful of playable retro games over there — these include Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man X, Street Fighter II, and Final Fight, and you can play them in English or Japanese. You can also read through the game's instruction manuals and have a look at the cartridges for those titles.” [via: Nintendo Life]
No Man's Skyrim
Starfield Gets The Gameplay And Story Reveal You've Been Waiting For [Kotaku] [Starfield Direct] [Starfield Story Trailer] “While we’ll have to wait until September 6th to take to the stars, explore its 1,000 worlds, and listen to its 250,000 lines of dialogue, we now have a much better sense of what you’ll actually do in the game. And during today’s Xbox showcase, Bethesda pulled the curtain back even further, giving us our best glimpse yet of what’s likely going to be one of the biggest games of 2023.” [more inside]
“Try feet, but...?”
The Many Feet of The Lands Between: A collection of the many feet you'll encounter on your journey through the Lands Between. [Steam Community][SFW] “Elden Ring is full of hard bosses, esoteric secrets, and weird exploits, but the current top guide on the game’s Steam page isn’t about any of that. It’s about feet. The fleshy pads come in all different shapes and sizes, and Elden Ring, like the Souls games before it, is full of them. So of course someone decided to document each pair, and now Steam users can’t get enough of them. “The Many Feet of The Lands Between,” reads the title of the current most popular guide. The collection, curated by Steam user Mister B, has over 70 entries, from Fia’s long narrow tootsies to the Mad Pumpkin Head’s gnarly arches. There are zero descriptions; it’s all just names and images, and it keeps getting updated with new content. The guide has a perfect five out of five stars and over 500 ratings.” [via: Kotaku]
Spatial Facial
Apple Vision Pro: I Tried the New Mixed-Reality Headset [ungated] - "At the end of the demo, I took off the headset and felt two things: 1) Wow. Very cool. 2) Did I just do drugs?" [more inside]
Riot Threatens To Cancel Entire Esports Season Over LCSPA Strike
Earlier this week League of Legends players voted “overwhelmingly” to strike [twitter link: @NALCSPA] over plans to make rule changes that would cut the North American Challenger’s League—which only launched last year—from 16 teams to seven. The LCS Players Association, the body representing the region’s professional players, say the plans will see an estimated 70 people—players, coaches, etc—lose their jobs. Riot, meanwhile, say the cuts were necessary to ensure the North American leagues remain “sustainable [and] economically viable”. Tensions escalated a day later when news emerged that pro teams had been actively looking “to field scab players” [twitter link: @NALCSPA], a move that the LCSPA rightly say would “put all players’ futures at risk”, as “crossing the line undermines player negotiating power”. The LCSPA met with Riot earlier today, and not long after, Riot published a long statement on their site addressing the walkout. You don’t have to read far to see that the company has decided to play hardball. [via: Kotaku]
The future is being made now
"Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible. It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.
Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things that grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. "
Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things that grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. "