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3 CommentsHands-on with Shiny, the nonviolent platformer
The second-best thing about Shiny is what you don't do. But the best things about Shiny are all of the things you can see behind it.
Shiny is the product of Garage 227 Studios, a game maker based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is about as far away from the mainstream metropolises of development as you can imagine. And yet, the tiny team there is on the verge of releasing Shiny on Steam, thanks to community support from Steam Greenlight, and Xbox One, thanks to Microsoft's self-publishing for independent developers, ID@XBOX.
Garage 227 is a, well, shining example of the democratization of the enormous changes distribution and publishing that have emerged in the last few years. Gone are the days of teaming up with publishers and console platform owners granting tokens to publishers....
Cover Story
Issue
19
May 25, 2016
Designing Mirror’s Edge: The making of a franchise
Go behind the scenes with DICE on the creation of Mirror’s Edge and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
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115 CommentsNvidia's newest card, the GTX 1080, launches at the end of May
Nvidia revealed its newest cards last night, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, both of which overtake its current top-of-the-line product in performance, efficiency and especially price.
The GTX 1080 will be on shelves May 27 and costs $699. Nvidia's current best-in-class graphics card, the Titan X retails for about $1,000. It is less powerful and much less efficient than the GTX 1080, according to a graph shown during Nvidia's reveal event last night.
The GTX 1070 will buy Titan X-level performance for $449. It launches June 10. The prices are for boards directly from Nvidia and select partners. Other manufacturers will offer custom boards starting at $599 and $349, Nvidia said.
As a point of reference, the GTX 1080 is faster than two GTX 980 cards running together. Nvidia's live...
News
2 CommentsSteam updates review listings to better show how games change post-release
Steam is updating its user reviews to show player a video game's most recent reviews and review scores, in order to give a clearer picture of how people feel about the game at the current time.
The changes are in response to customer feedback, Steam said, and it better reflects the fact that games can change from their launch-day or even month experience thanks to post-release support, downloadable content and expansions, and title updates.
"That review score that appears at the top of a product page didn't always reflect the dynamic nature of the game," Valve wrote."We'd previously only been compiling an overall score using a simple calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive. This let us be really transparent in how the score was being calculated, but didn't...
News
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...
News
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...
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