Papers, Please modded into Civilization V. All hail the Glorious Leader
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Civilisation V has been lacking in ex-communist bloc autocracies. Till now. Canny modder Snakeeater337 has brought the state of Arstotzka into Sid Meier's world of cultural development and a nuclear weapon-toting Gandhi.
His mod adds a a new map, units, buildings, and racial traits.
NaissanceE trailer shows corridors heavy with foreboding
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We first looked at NaissanceE back in May. It was an impressive looking thing then but now, seven months later, it’s something else. It’s clay-coloured walls and simple harsh lights create an unsettling environment.
It may not have the blood of Dead Space or the creatures of Amnesia but NaissanceE’s lonely architecture is horrible, like something out of House of Leaves.
Natural Selection 2 update lets you fund eSports teams through emblem purchases
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The latest update to Natural Selection 2 has added team emblems to the Steam Store and Organised Play to the lobby system. There are four emblems on offer, representing each of the four teams taking part in the first NS2 World Championship. 50% of the money made from each emblem sale goes straight to the team it represents.
There are a lot of other changes in the new update, too.
Dear Esther Unity port the result of “a huge bill” for using the Source Engine
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Rob Briscoe, the artist who overhauled the Dear Esther mod into one of the most visually stunning games ever released, is working on a Unity port. There are a number of reasons why, according to Briscoe, but a key one was that developer thechineseroom “received a huge bill regarding the licensing of middleware that had been, unbeknownst to us, included with the Source Engine but not covered in the original License deal.”
Switching to Unity meant they’d “be able to keep everything in-house, at low cost, with no more licensing or communication barriers, no more support woes and no more scouring for experienced Source Engine developers to help us.” Especially as, with Source, they’d “need to pay for a separate license for each platform released.” It was a big hit financially, which put us at a loss in terms of the mac and Linux ports.
Kickstarter hacked. Users advised to change passwords
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The Kickstarter team have emailed all their users to say that “hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data.” They claim that no credit card details were accessed by the hackers but some personal details such as usernames, email addresses, and encrypted passwords were.
It’s highly recommended you change your password, particularly if you use the same password and username combination elsewhere.
The Old City brings story to the fore in its exploration of the nature of knowledge
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The Old City has tickled my interest. It’s not just that its abandoned industrial sector setting is eye catching, nor that it’s following in the steps of Dear Esther - a game I love - by having you simply walk through the environment to the sound of the world and a narrator, but, instead, I think it’s because the team are being so brazen with their driving philosophy.
The Old City is about epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
Project Zomboid multiplayer goes live. It’s still very much in alpha
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“We're finally biting the bullet and throwing the PZ multiplayer onto a separate branch on Steam,” write The Indie Stone. It has bugs but they thought “better would be to cast the net wide, and put in some debug dumping code that pops the misbehaving chunk in a folder, and get more people playing to see if we can get more information to help us nail it.”
So you can now try and survive a zombie apocalypse with friends.
Randy Pitchford: “We are not working on Borderlands 3”
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Gearbox have too much on their plate to start work on Borderlands 3. Speaking to Polygon, the studio’s CEO, Randy Pitchford, said “We are not working on Borderlands 3. We have more to do in the franchise, but no there isn't a Borderlands 3.”
Instead, the studio are working on bringing out an HD release of Homeworld, a new Brothers in Arms game, and Furious Four.
Interstellar Marines update is sympathetic with British floods, adds new extreme weather map
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The developers of Interstellar Marines are reaching out to the British flood victims in the only way they know how, by creating an extreme weather map for their shooter. Astrodome is described as a “playground” but it will, in time, be developed into a training ground, and then a full multiplayer map.
I already feel the pain of the floodwaters subsiding
Subnautica terrain test lets you play with the game’s procedural generation tools
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Unknown Worlds Entertainment reckon they’ve hit on a new genre with Subnautica. As far as we know it’s a machine made up of RPG mechanics, creation tools, submarines, and weird fish. While the game is still a ways from alpha, UWE are already letting you try out somet of the game’s tools for free.
You can install the terrain generation tool for free and give it a spin.
“DooM the mercenaries” mod is almost complete, gets new gameplay footage
Our reader ‘Cristian Fabian Munoz Isla’ has shared with us some new details for his amazing mod for Doom that brings Resident Evil’s characters to it and changes the game’s camera perspective from first to third person. According to Cristian, this mod is 99.5% complete, so hopefully we’ll be getting it next month. In addition, Cristian released a new video for it, showcasing the – almost – final build in its full glory. Enjoy! Continue reading
Better? Maybe? – You Can Now Report Abusive Steam Tags
By Nathan Grayson on February 15th, 2014 at 2:00 pm.
Oh, Valve. I’d like it so very much if we lived in the world you seem to wishfully inhabit. Power to the people! It’s a wonderfully idealistic goal, but there’s just one problem with it: the Internet mutates far too many people into hideous trolls, and they use their powers to make the world a viler, more putrid place. I’m not as against democratization of game development/sales as, say, John, but I do think there need to be serious checks in place to prevent rampant misuse and willful idiocy. It is, then, good to see Valve sort of moving in that direction with Steam Tags. Doubtless, Steam needs to beef up discoverability for its increasingly labyrinthine library, but easily abused tags initially turned the feature into a giant joke. Valve’s solution? A community driven report function, naturally.
Amnesia Fortnight: Four Pitches Advance To Prototype Stage
By Graham Smith on February 14th, 2014 at 8:00 pm.
Amnesia Fortnight moves pretty fast. One week ago Double Fine’s yearly-except-when-busy publicly voted game prototype jam started with 31 pitch videos. Now backers have had time to vote, that list has been whittled down to the four games that are going to be developed into a prototype. The winners? Steed, Mnemonic, Dear Leader and Adventure Time creator Pendleton “the person I would most like to meet” Ward’s Little Pink Best Buds.
I’ve embedded the video pitches for each of the selected games below.
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