Mighty Tactical Shooter is a turn-based shmup
Comment
The shoot-’em-up comes with an inbuilt defense mechanism against haughty dismissal that other twitch-based genres lack. Shooter, shmooter. Racer, shmacer. Shmup, um. You see? Can’t be done.
Mighty Tactical Shooter doesn’t need even that fallback, however, because it’s successfully recast the business of sidelong pew-pewing as a boe-nah-fie-dee intellectual pursuit.
Total War: Rome II patch 3 improves the business of conquest in 140 small ways
Comment
Our Fraser counted the ways he loved Rome II in his review, and on balance decided that they outweighed the ways he didn’t. And you know what? There are bound to be a few more things he likes in the 140 or so technical optimisations, balance tweaks and usability updates that reached the game today. Week by week, Creative Assembly’s latest is slowly becoming the game it ought to be.
One year of Steam Greenlight: the story so far
Comment
Just over a year ago, Valve set out to solve a problem. Deluged with new game submissions from a growing independent game development community, with lots of games that were impossible to pigeonhole, Valve’s traditional Steam approvals process wasn’t meeting the challenge.
Valve’s solution was innovative and community-oriented. They’d let Steam users decide what to publish on the Steam platform, making the selection process more democratic for an increasingly democratic development scene.
Greenlight has been trouble ever since, perhaps the most notably mixed result in Valve’s history. During its first year, Greenlight’s harshest critics were many of the same people it was meant to help. Its own creators seemed, at times, to be on the verge of renouncing it altogether.
To celebrate Greenlight’s first year, and perhaps to wipe its slate clean, Valve recently approved one hundred Greenlight games. It was a goodwill gesture that ameliorated Greenlight’s sluggish, at times grudging rate of approvals.
But is it enough? The mass-approval of Greenlight candidates may have solved problems for some of Greenlight’s most vocal critics, including some of the people who had suffered the most from Valve’s caprices. But it did not come attached to any clear reforms, and for indies who are still looking to bring their games to PC gaming’s biggest marketing platform, Greenlight may still be a crippling roadblock.
With Valve poised to vastly expand their role in gaming via SteamOS, it’s worth looking at how Valve have administered Greenlight throughout its young life. What did Greenlight do right and wrong in its first year, and what does it need to do to improve its standing in the future? This week, we’re examining Greenlight’s record, and examining whether it deserves another year’s worth of “Yes” votes.
Space Engineers’ video knows what its audience wants: big spaceships smashing into one another
Comment
Sure, a subsection of Space Engineers’ players will be interested in the effects of gravitational pull on large objects in deep space and the accurate representation of meteorites when distant from large planetary bodies but the majority are all about smashing spaceships into things and watching the debris fly.
Keen Software’s trailer speaks to that majority.
Terraria 1.2 update released and, girl, it’s a big one
Comment
Just to give you an idea of how big this Terraria update is there are over 1,000 new items, 100 new enemies, 4 new bosses, and 15 new pets.
Oh, and 4 new types of wood.
@TheVoxelman on twitter
