The New Curiosity Shop: Itch.io Interview
By Adam Smith on April 23rd, 2014 at 1:00 pm.
I visit some strange places during my daily trawls across the vastness of the internet. The search for obscure and eclectic games demands a willingness to look beyond the convenience store of Steam and the archive of Good Old Games, and in recent months I’ve found myself visiting itch.io on a regular basis. I didn’t intend to visit on such a regular basis but interesting games increasingly linked to the site as a download portal. In a reversal of the common high street trend, itch.io is a rapidly expanding independent store, with plenty of freebies alongside the paid goods.
Designed as an open platform, it aims to give developers control over the sale or distribution of their games. I contacted creator Leaf Corcoran to learn more.
2K plan Steamworks support for Borderlands, Civs III and IV post-Gamespy shutdown
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Nobody will weep for Gamespy, when it’s gone. But it’s been one of the necessary monsters holding up the foundations of PC gaming - and when it finally slips sideways into the abyss come May 31, a host of old online games are at risk of toppling in with it.
2K are the latest to invest in some new pillars to support “several legacy titles”.
Mojang's Minecraft 1.8 world generator heralds "the return of floating islands"
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What’s your favourite depth base size? No? How about your preferred biome scale offset? So, the 16 sliders in Minecraft’s new terrain generator will be beyond most of our kens. But push them to their extremes and they’ll reliably produce some inspirationally strange landscapes. Watch Mojang silently play with the parameters below.
Hazard Ops closed beta sign-up begins ahead of third-person pulverising in May
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Hazard Ops is the Chinese-made shooter we first wrote about, ooo, yesterday. For better or worse, it frees third-person cover-darting from the part-time pacifistic handwringing of Spec Ops and Uncharted and pits players against humanoid targets which unequivocally deserve it: zombies, robots, Egyptian zombies, demons, zombie dogs, etc.
And it has news! There’s a closed beta happening shortly, and we’ve a PCGN exclusive new trailer here ready to tell you all about it - through the medium of guns.
Red Orchestra 2 will be free forever on Steam - so long as you click the button today
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Life with Uncle Joe at your back wasn’t easy, and Red Orchestra 2 isn’t prepared to pretend it was. Death through blood loss, realistic bullet drop and spin, and an all-but-absent HUD all conspire to send players running back to the Californian comforts of CoD.
Consequently, you have to ease would-be comrades in gently. And that’s exactly what the next few days of Steam are all about.
The 11 best Football Manager 2014 players
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People play Football Manager for lots of different reasons. Some of us do it to discover new talents, others to create the next great revolutionary tactic, but everyone can do with a few good bargain players now and then, which is why we’ve compiled this ‘dream team’ of FM 14 bargains.
These players represent 11 of the game’s best buys arranged in a modern 4-5-1 formation. With this list in hand you’ll be able to plug any gaps in your struggling team for peanuts (well okay a few million) and acquire some young talents that you can build a dynasty with.
We also sent a copy to David Moyes, but for some reason he doesn’t seem to be answering his emails.
Goat Simulator 1.1 improves on perfection with front-leg balancing and parkour. There's video
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In this age of perpetually-updated PC games, there’s a worry: that games can be spliced beyond recognition in a bid for perfection, losing their identity somewhere along a path strewn with patches.
It’s with appropriate solemnity and a dash of relief, then, that we can inform you that Goat Simulator’s 1.1 update does nothing to dilute the game’s peculiar brand of surrealist slapstick.
Lethal League is a fighting game about launching a ball into your opponent's face
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Lethal League is a faux-16-bit fighting game in which, ideally, you’ll never touch another soul. It’s a Nidhogg that subscribes to the Hollywood notion that all teen problems can be solved over a totally awesome sports match.
It looks totally awesome. Dude: check it out.
Riot name League of Legends' "first true tank support" champ: Braum, Heart of the Freljord
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The frozen peaks of the Freljord have for centuries punished the weak, sez LoL lore. But that’s fine! Weakness is no good in the lanes. Instead, the cruel land has produced a gaggle of pleasantly OP nordlings, of which Braum is the most playable.
He enters Riot’s metagame with the “hopes and adoration of the Freljord’s people” behind him - and far better, a dependable melee support specialism.
Stab a shark, build a house, just an average day in FarSky
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I can’t imagine it’s easy being a little fish. You swim in your own filth, you’re always damp, if bigger fish aren’t trying to eat you then people are, even though you taste pretty horrible most of the time. Fish must now suffer yet another indignity: being stabbed in the face by a lost submariner.
In FarSky, you’re the villainous submariner, stabbing all the fish and using their kingdom to build your own underwater home. But you’ve crashed your sub and you’re stuck there, so it’s not totally your fault. Unless you were drink driving diving.
Warlords of Draenor is changing a whole mess of things and throwing in dynamic PvP gear
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Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft’s time travelling expansion, is currently boiling away in alpha, so Blizzard has some knowledge bombs to drop to get you up to speed on the big changes.
In the latest episode of WoW Source, Lead Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Class Designer Kris Zierhut and Senior Game Designer Brian Holinka go over PvP changes, like fiddling around with CC abilities, making armour from PvE increase in level and become PvP gear when struck by another player and the PvP island of Ashran.
A hack between friends: Watch Dogs flaunts its multiplayer shenanigans
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Watch Dogs’ multiplayer is somewhere between Dark Souls’ phantom invasions and Assassin’s Creed’s “the enemy could be anywhere” approach.
Ubisoft’s released a video breaking down the three multiplayer modes, with invasions, mobile play and team-based shenanigans. All taking place in the same space as the single-player campaign.
1C dips into King's Bounty once more and pulls out Dark Side
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King’s Bounty: The Legend was pretty damn good. So the expansion, Armoured Princess was a welcome one, even if it was more of the same. Then came Crossworlds, then Warriors of the North and then a free-to-play version. Expansions, spin-offs, and nothing that really took the series anywhere new.
The next King’s Bounty is, once again, an expansion of the standalone variety. This time players are commanding the naughty dark side, hence King’s Bounty: Dark Side, and there’ll be more unit recruiting, wandering around going on fantastical quests and beating up folk in hex-based brawls.
Star Wars: The Old Republic's Galactic Stronghold expansion delayed until August
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Star Wars: The Old Republic’s housing expansion has been delayed. As anyone who has ever watched Grand Designs can tell you, it always takes longer than you think it will to build a house. And BioWare is building a few.
“We have been listening to what you, our players, were hoping to see from the Galactic Strongholds expansion,” said senior producer Bruce Maclean. “When playing early builds of Galactic Strongholds it became that clear that our June Early Access date was simply not enough. For this to truly feel like an expansion, it needs to include the full set of features, including those originally coming later in the year.“
Star Trek Online Season 9 gets a dose of Vulcan logic
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Cryptic’s four year old Star Trek MMO, Star Trek Online certainly has no dearth of content. In the last year or so it’s expanded greatly, with the addition of a separate Romulan campaign and a more fleshed out Klingon faction.
With Season 9 going live today, the galaxy has just got a bit bigger. The Undine (Species 8472) are threatening the galaxy, and captains will have to hop in their ships and report to Tuvok, with Tim Russ reprising his Vulcan role, at the Jenolan Dyson sphere to plan a coordinated effort against the shapeshifting bastards.
Oculus VR and Facebook deal approved by government money men
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The US Federal Trade Commission has approved the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook. While it was announced last month - to what can only really be called a shit-storm - Facebook and Oculus VR were merely revealing their intention to make the deal. The acquisition was still to happen.
And since the announcement there’s been a lot going on, with a hiring spree at Oculus, developers condemning and commending it, and Palmer Luckey trying to do a bunch of damage control.
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