Team Fortress 2 now lets players treat themselves to an early Halloween
You won’t miss Halloween in Team Fortress 2 when it comes - there’ll be an exceptional comic, and a funny blog post, and maybe one of those webpages that changes as you scroll through it.
But if you like, you can start early. Valve have pushed out a new TF2 update that unlocks the use of spells and cosmetic items usually reserved for the holiday.
Riot approve two third-party apps for League of Legends: Curse Voice and Razer Comms
We missed this last week, because we were distracted by the fog descending over League of Legends. But that particular mystery doesn’t seem to be dissipating anytime soon, so we should talk about the approval of two VOIP tools for one of the PC’s best free-to-play games - including one of the programs that first prompted Riot Games’ to clarify their third-party app policy in the Spring.
Fighting the inevitable in Stardock's Sorcerer King
Brad Wardell describes Sorcerer King simply: “You’re Gondor, and Sauron has the Ring. He got Frodo.”
It’s an interesting place to start a fantasy 4X: you’ve already lost the familiar contest for supremacy. Another faction triggered the endgame and relegated everyone else to an historical footnote. That ruler has become the Sorcerer King.
Meanwhile, you’re the last holdout, trying to mount a resistance with just one city against an empire. To borrow another phrase from Wardell, it’s The Alamo as a 4X strategy game.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive eSports team ALSEN accused of match fixing
Polish Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team ALSEN have been caught fixing their match against eliminacja at the ESL Pro Series Poland 9. Several ALSEN players placed bets on their opponents to win, and made more than $2,000 by losing the match.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor free DLC lets you dress all in black and laugh in the face of poison
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor just got a wee bit bigger thanks to a new free DLC from Warner Brothers. Think of it as the crumbs that were left in the development cake tin, should have been part of the cake but you're glad they weren’t thrown in the bin.
It adds a new costume and three new epic runes to play with.
It will never end: Assassin's Creed Chronicles will be a series
If there’s one rule that Ubisoft has, it’s that everything needs to be a series. This rule has been taken to new extremes with Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China. The side-scrolling spin off is a piece of standalone DLC, and Alex Amancio, Unity’s creative director, has confirmed that it’s just the first of a series.
That’s right - even DLC spin-offs have to become franchises. Thankfully, it does actually look rather interesting. That might not be the case five or ten games later, though.
Paranautical Activity developer steps down after threatening Gabe Newell
Death threats are a pretty terrible way to blow off some steam, especially during a time when people are being chased out of the industry by them. But with Code Avarice’s Mike Maulbeck, who threatened Gabe Newell after his game, Paranautical Activity, was mislabeled as Early Access on Steam, the inverse has happened.
Maulbeck’s outburst led to Paranautical Activity being removed from Steam, and in an apology written on the Code Avarice blog, the developer explains that he’s stepped down and will no longer have anything to do with either the game or the company.
Rodina is No Man's Sky on a budget
Rodina has been around for quite a while, squirreled away in Steam's Early Access folder, hoovering up incremental updates like a hungry piglet.
It's an open-world space explorer in which you fly around a procedurally generated solar system collecting gadgets that allow you to visit and explore planets with ever more hostile environments, seamlessly ascending from surface to orbit and beyond.
You can walk around inside your ship too, pressing buttons, using computers and putting out fires, and all without loading screens. It's like an extremely pared down No Man's Sky, except better, because you can play it right now.
Putting on the deerstalker and becoming Sherlock Holmes in Crimes and Punishments
When I admit my love for Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes adventure games, I make it sound like I’m confessing a secret vice. It’s a little silly. Yes, they’re a bit stiff, often obtuse, and occasionally quite odd, but they offer refreshing traditional consulting detective adventures in the face of the character’s constant reinvention.
There’s Sherlock reimagined as, well, Robert Downey Jr., as a recovering heroin addict in modern New York, and as a tall man-child, but I’ll take Jeremy Brett’s portrayal over those any day of the week, and that’s what the adventure games are like. But occasionally there’s Elder God cults and Jack the Ripper.
Holmes’ latest escapade, Crimes and Punishments, is probably the best of the lost. It’s trite marketing, but when Frogwares said that it would let you become Sherlock Holmes, it was a statement of intent that the developer has really tried to follow through on. And I blooming love it.
Epic's hosting an Unreal Engine game jam this weekend, so get tinkering
Out of all the jams, game jams are my favourite, next to strawberry jam, of course. But at least game jams don’t have those little seeds that get stuck between your teeth. Though you can get seedless jam. Okay, let’s call it a tie and get move on to more important and relevant things: an Unreal Engine 4 jam is kicking off this weekend, and the top three entries will get a free one month subscription. Since $20 isn’t a lot, it’s mostly for fun.
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