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26 CommentsMighty No. 9 finally launches on June 21, creator says
Mighty No. 9 has a new launch date: June 21.
The "spiritual successor" to Mega Man has "gone gold," creator Keiji Inafune said, putting Mighty No. 9 on course to launch for Mac, Linux, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on that date in North America and Asia. It will launch worldwide on those platforms on June 24. Deep Silver is publishing the game on consoles.
The versions for Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita will follow at a later date, Inafune said.
Inafune acknowledged it has been nearly three years since the project was initially and enthusiastically crowdfunded by thousands of Mega Man fans and apologized for the repeated delays to Mighty No. 9's launch.
"This is a project where everyone's passions were combined in order to create something very...
News
7 CommentsNew mod from Long War developer released for XCOM 2
Long War Studios, best known for creating the Long War mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within, has created a new mod for XCOM 2. This is in addition to the three mods the studio made available for the game at launch.
Called Toolbox, the new mod is available on Steam Workshop for free today. It allows players to configure camera rotation within missions, create random stats for new soldiers, edit damage values, tweak the game UI and turn on a modifier where injuries can affect a soldier's stats. The original Long War mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown made the game more challenging as well as adding units, weapons and customization options. It was popular among players of the turn-based PC game, in which humans seek to defend their planet from alien invasion.
For the February launch of X...
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May 2, 2016
Their future is Epic: The evolution of a gaming giant
Find out how one of the industry’s biggest developers is changing its approach.
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23 CommentsHyper Light Drifter gets co-op mode in beta
Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine just added a beta version of a local co-op mode to the game, a surprise addition of a feature that the studio cut many moons ago.
"This was a mode we had cut months before we shipped due to time constraints, but have since gone back to because it's a lot of fun and felt worthwhile to take the time to complete," said Alex Preston, the game's creator, in a post on Steam today.
The beta of co-op mode is available now; players can enable it by right-clicking on the game in their Steam library, then hitting Properties and going to the Betas tab. In the game, you turn on co-op mode from the pause menu. Co-op requires at least one player to use a controller, and it's not possible to earn achievements while playing in co-op.
Heart Machine will run...
News
16 CommentsRuiner is a neon-bright swords and guns game that will brook no blunders
Kuba Stylinski is pretty good at Ruiner.
He can twitch-zip his way between enemies using the right mouse click dash, taking down the bad guys with his swords. He pops up the shield at just the right time and sprays gunfire as he slides around the screen, avoiding incoming fire.
Where most people can't beat the Ruiner demo at PAX East, and those who can take an hour or so, Stylinski can usually demolish the final boss and wrap up the demo in 12 minutes flat.
I watch another PAX-goer play the game; he gives up after a few minutes and several deaths.
"That game sucks," he mutters to his friends as he walks off. "I'm doing everything right and I keep dying."
Ruiner, a neon-bright, unforgivably difficult isometric action game set in a Bangkok-inspired future city, doesn't suck, but it...
Video
10 CommentsCyberpunk shooter Ruiner looks like a stylish blend of Akira and Hotline Miami
Publisher Devolver Digital and Polish studio Reikon released an announcement trailer today for a new top-down shooter called Ruiner that's dripping with anime cyberpunk style. Think Katsuhiro Otomo's seminal manga Akira paired with the action of games like Hyper Light Drifter and Hotline Miami.
Devolver calls Ruiner a "brutal action shooter" set in the year 2091. The game's protagonist, "a wired sociopath," is on the hunt for his missing brother and will be guided by the voice of a "hacker friend." Players will have access to cybernetic augmentations, like a quick dash and an energy shield, as they battle street scum, corporate security and cyborg heavies.
Reikon, the indie studio developing the game, is made up of former The Witcher, Dying Light, This War of Mine and Shadow Warrior...
News
19 CommentsMeet the gambling kingpin funding Eve Online's biggest war
His name is Joe, and he lives in Georgia. But in the world of Eve Online he's known as Lenny Kravitz2 — yes, like the musician — and right now he's personally bankrolling what may be the biggest interstellar war in gaming history.
Not long ago we reported on the conflict that has come to be known in the Eve community as World War Bee. Thousands of players have banded together to storm the gates of the most powerful player-led faction. Known as The Imperium to some, the CFC to others and the Goonswarm to most everyone else, that group has a long history in the world of Eve Online. It's led by one man — Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco — and his reign, such as it is, has been long.
Too long, Joe says, and it's time to roll it back.
But the planning for this war, and the fighting — which...
News
6 CommentsOne of the best board games ever made is now live on Steam
Long before Pandemic: Legacy rocketed up the charts at Board Game Geek, there was another "best" board game of all time, and now it's playable on Steam.
Twilight Struggle, the complex strategic wargame chronicling the entire Cold War, went live for Linux, Mac and Windows PC yesterday thanks to a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. An iOS and Android version is still in the works.
Co-designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews and first released in 2005, Twilight Struggle pits two players against one another as either the United States or the former Soviet Union. Beginning after World War II, play proceeds up until the late 1980s as a series of political and economic events unfolds through a card-driven game engine. The game has won many international awards, including the coveted...
News
84 CommentsRust update randomly, permanently assigns players a new gender
Last week online multiplayer survival game Rust published a rework of the in-game character models, adding a female form for the first time. However, designer Garry Newman (known also for Garry's Mod) is not giving players a choice in their physical appearance. As such, genitalia have been randomly — and permanently — assigned to all players.
To those paying attention to the game's development this should come as no surprise. Newman has mentioned his desire for this kind of randomization in the past. It adds to the growing list of player model attributes, including race and penis size, that are immutably locked to a player's Steam ID.
"We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people," Newman wrote on his blog. "We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t...
News
2 CommentsTickets for Dota 2's The International 2016 go on sale next week
Tickets for The International 2016, the world championship of Dota 2, will go on sale Thursday, April 7, Valve has announced. Tickets will range from $75 to $100.
The event returns to KeyArena in Seattle for a third consecutive year and will be held Monday, Aug. 8 to Saturday, Aug. 13. Tickets are being offered in two groupings, a midweek package at $75 that allows access to events held Aug. 8 to Aug. 11, which includes the opening ceremony and an all-star event. The Finals ticket, at $100, grants a seat for the last two days of the event.
Attendees will also collect unique in-game items for Dota 2 by attending. To be eligible, the attendance badge must be linked to a Steam account, and the bearer must be in the arena at the time of First Blood in each Dota 2 match, when the loot will...
News
8 CommentsCourt rules Valve broke Australian consumer law
Eighteen months of legal wrangling with Australia's consumer protection authorities have ended with Valve being found in violation of the law there for not having a refund policy.
The lawsuit was brought in 2014 by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, before Valve established the refund policy now in place. An Australian federal court ruled that Valve made misleading statements to consumers in its terms and conditions, all of which pertained to the right Australian citizens have to demand a refund if they are sold a faulty or defective product.
Valve had disputed that it was officially doing business in Australia or that whatever was being sold through Steam could be considered "goods" under Australian law. A judge ruled that Valve was in fact doing business in...
News
2 CommentsPerception is a sound-based game of hide-and-seek
In Perception, sound is both your lifeline and your downfall.
Perception is a Kickstarter-funded, first-person horror game from The Deep End Games, a studio made up of developers who worked on BioShock and Dead Space. The game follows a blind woman named Cassie as she explores a house with a confusing relationship to time and space; throughout the game's story, Cassie will find herself in different time periods and places.
Cassie may be blind, but she possess the the unique talent of echolocation, which allows her to "see" the environment around her. Sounds throughout the world provide a shaky blue light to walk by. Cassie taps, and the area around her lights up.
Using that power comes with a cost. Early in my demo of Perception, I sent out a frenzy of clicks. I was playing with the...
Deals
2 CommentsUbisoft Steam sale cuts prices on Far Cry, Assassin's Creed and more this weekend
Valve is running a massive Ubisoft sale on Steam this weekend, offering discounts on dozens of games and add-ons from the French publisher.
Games on sale include recent hits like South Park: The Stick of Truth to new releases like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. Discounts are also available on items like DLC season passes. Here's a sample of the deals:
Rainbow Six Siege - $40.19 (33 percent off)
Far Cry Primal - $47.99 (20 percent off)
Assassin's Creed Syndicate - $29.99 (50 percent off)
South Park: The Stick of Truth - $7.49 (75 percent off)
Child of Light - $3.74 (75 percent off)
Far Cry 3 - $4.99 (75 percent off)
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway - $4.99 (50 percent off)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - $4.99 (50 percent off)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -...
News
4 CommentsPayday 2 celebrates SteamOS launch with free play campaign
Overkill Software has ported Payday 2 to SteamOS — and to celebrate, all Steam users can try out the game for free through the end of the month, the company announced on the game's community page.
Current owners of Payday 2, like other Steam games available across multiple platforms, will now be able to play the game on Steam Machines at no additional cost. For those who have yet to test out Payday 2, however, the company is offering several promotions for those who have yet to pick up the game. From now until March 31, the game will be free-to-play; those who want to pick up the full game after their trial run can then purchase it at a discount. Along with the game itself, available content for Payday 2 — and its predecessor, Payday: The Heist — is 75 percent off for the rest of...
News
69 CommentsEmulation isn't a dirty word, and one man thinks it can save gaming's history
Frank Cifaldi, head of restoration at developer Digital Eclipse, took to the stage at this week's Game Developers Conference for an hour-long talk about game preservation. Emulation — a software process by which programmers are able to make one computer pretend to be an entirely different kind of computer — is the best solution for keeping games in print, Cifaldi said.
But the clock is ticking. Games are being lost right now, and something needs to be done about it if the video game industry is to avoid the same fate as the film industry.
"According to the Film Foundation, over half the films made before 1950 are gone," Cifaldi said. "I don’t mean that you can’t buy these on DVD. I mean they’re gone. They don’t exist anymore." For films produced before 1920, Cifaldi said, that number...
Report
22 CommentsKarl Marx and the historical determinism of video games
History is the chaos of human events, formed into narrative upon a sloppy potter's wheel. This is what makes it so compelling.
The myths and certainties tilt between facts of things that actually happened and interpretations, re-orderings, designed to serve us in the here and now. Bombs were dropped on London in the early 1940s. Fact. The Brits thumbed their noses at the outrage. Story.
"History is full of really bad decisions. It's a process."
Video game designers must take this ill-formed mess and render it into highly predictable systems that always do what the player expects them to do. The only way this can realistically be accomplished is by pretending that certain facts are malleable, and that certain stories are immutable.
On Thursday at Game Developers Conference, Chris...
News
7 CommentsValve experiments with more paid user-generated content in Dota 2
After an aborted attempt to introduce paid mods last year with Bethesda's Skyrim, Valve is once again dipping its toe into the water of paid user-generated content with custom games in free-to-play behemoth Dota 2.
Valve revamped the way custom games work with Dota 2 when the game's Reborn client launched last summer, allowing creators to more easily share and surface their custom gametypes. Valve also added prominent promotion for popular variants, leading to something of a resurgence of interest. And today, the developer announced that specifically chosen makers of custom games will be allowed to sell premium Custom Game Passes, adding a monetization model for mod makers to Steam once again.
In an FAQ, Valve clarified some key points for the initiative. First, Custom Game Passes...
News
13 CommentsShadwen is an unapologetic stealth mashup that shouldn't be so cool
The first game that gobsmacked me as an adult was Metal Gear Solid, because it turned the basic idea of video games — confront and kill every enemy — on its head.
It's a rare occurrence, that tectonic shift in worldview. Still, every once in a great while, a game comes along that forces you to rethink assumptions that had been obvious moments ago. Metal Gear Solid was that game for me.
Shadwen, developer Frozenbyte's upcoming action stealth title, is not that kind of game. In fact, based on what we saw at GDC 2016, it might be the opposite of that kind of game.
But here's the thing: That's no problem at all. Shadwen's discordant mix of borrowed mechanics hails from some of the best and most innovative games in recent memory. Despite my hunch that this should work about as well as...
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