Everything tagged with 'games'

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A new APWOT day is a good day.

A black cat sitting next to the latest issue of APWOT.
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Rolled credits on Alan Wake 2. I flipped from not really liking the game - I maintain the combat is Bad and there’s too much of it - to really getting invested in the story by the end. The DLC whips too, it transpires. Might even play Final Draft.

A screenshot from Alan Wake 2
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Happy Dragon Age day! If any of you spoil Veilguard for me before I can get to it (gotta finish 2 and Inquisition replays first…) then the Dread Wolf will eat you, thanks

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Anyone using Moonlight/Sunshine for game streaming and have any tips about getting smoother performance out of it?

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Got a real hankering to play Elden Ring yesterday because the freezers at little Sainsburys were humming exactly the same note as the drone on Altus Plateau.

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We did it! Total time was right around six hours. I hardly ever get to play dungeons or raids totally blind so this was just wonderful.

A screenshot from Destiny 2 showing us playing cowbells next to The Anomaly.
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Dungeoning with my pals.

A screenshot from Destiny 2 showing two guardians in a spooky corridor.
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Playing Metaphor: ReFantazio which has some of the most stunning UI work I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile I can’t get the text boxes to reflow properly in my own game engine.

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Got my layout being actually flexible now with preferred dimensions, expand, and fill. Alignment next. Loosely basing it on GTK because I like using GTK!

A screenshot of Growl showing coloured rectangles in a variety of dimensions.
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Starting to get the flexible layout stuff implemented in Growl, my pet game engine. Very early days yet!

A screenshot of Growl showing lots of coloured rectangles in a flexible layout.
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Went on a little autumnal walk (to Argos)

A copy of the new Zelda game
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Chuckling at this from the new Steam update.

Q. Why is LinkedIn on the list of social media links? A. We are also confused by the presence of LinkedIn in this list of links we found on game store pages. But the data don't lie: developers are already referencing LinkedIn from their written descriptions, so we've included it as an option.
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It’s a lovely fresh crisp day here so here are four games with Impeccable Autumn Vibes. What are yours?

Forza Horizon 4 Moonlighter Dark Souls II Alan Wake
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700 quid and they don’t even give you the stand, good grief lads

The PS5 Pro pricing slide.
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Astro Bot is so so good.

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Finally got around to reconfiguring the debug UI in Growl, rendering the game scene into an Imgui window - starting to look like a real engine now.

A screenshot of Growl showing its fancy new debug UI.
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We are so back

A Wii U playing Wind Waker.
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Rolled credits on 1000xRESIST. Need to go away and have a proper think about it but safe to say it’s the best game I’ve played this year.

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Just got myself unstuck from a tricky Lua-C interop thing that I’d been going round in circles on for weeks now. Pleased!

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Flock is just so lovely

A screenshot of Flock. A screenshot of Flock. A screenshot of Flock.
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Off on an excursion today

A 3DS running Phoenix Wright, with the view out a train window behind it.
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This post brought to you by my rediscovering that the 3DS is simply my favourite bit of gaming hardware ever created.

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Become increasingly clear to me that bells-and-whistles graphics do not matter - that much is obvious to everyone - but also, as a Computer Toucher, that the really exciting thing is talented teams pushing underpowered hardware to the absolute limit.

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Managed to go the whole way to and through one of the UK’s largest airports yesterday and not a single StreetPass hit. What have we become as a society?

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Having a great time getting back into Elden Ring.

A photo of Elden Ring being streamed to a 3DS via Moonlight.
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Wrapped up Final Shape and, goddamn, they really stuck the landing.

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Destiny is so back (shots from opening mission only!)

A screenshot from Destiny 2. A screenshot from Destiny 2. A screenshot from Destiny 2. A screenshot from Destiny 2.
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Starting to get a feel for AC6 now I think. Moved to a lightweight build after this fight and it already feels so much better.

A screenshot from Armored Core VI
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This game is hard and I am bad at it

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Armored Phwoar

A screenshot from Armored Core VI A screenshot from Armored Core VI
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Not sure how I only just clocked that the gap between Game Boy and Game Boy Color was nine years, that’s wild

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It’s sensational, having such a good time with it

A screenshot of Animal Well
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It only took me four years but I did it!

A screenshot of the end screen of Hades
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Animal Well is 33MB, holy shit

A screenshot of the Steam UI showing that Animal Well is 33MB on disk.
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Bloodborne is a cosy game, I will not elaborate

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Having a fantastic time with Dragon’s Dogma 2, to my relief

A screenshot from Dragon's Dogma 2 A screenshot from Dragon's Dogma 2
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Had a lovely time with Botany Manor. Short and sweet.

A screenshot from Botany Manor A screenshot from Botany Manor
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I introduced Lucy to Tunic and now it’s 2am and she won’t come to bed

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Hell yeah new Pope

Mars after Midnight running on my Play date
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God damn, they already got the garbage fake mobile games doing bug killers

A screenshot from an Instagram ad showing a (probably fake) mobile game where some bugs are getting killed by a truck thing
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Very pleased to discover several games recently ported to the Epic store are using eos4j!

A screenshot of the Showcase section on the GitHub page for eos4j. There is box art for now four games - Feud, Age of Conquest IV, Retro Commander and Demise of Nations.
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The challenge with putting an action sequence set to a musical number in your game is that the action has to be really good in order for me to justify listening to the same song for double-digit minutes. Control earns this. Alan Wake 2, sadly, does not.

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Might ship a game tomorrow

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Rolled credits on Yakuza 0. What a wonderful, brilliant, stupid, incredible game

A screenshot from Yakuza 0 A screenshot from Yakuza 0
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game pretty

A screenshot from Nightingale A screenshot from Nightingale
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The last game I touched professionally - excited to finally play it

A screenshot of the Steam UI downloading Nightingale
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Just submitted the final build of Feud 2.0 for review to the stores. It’s real, it’s happening, we’re doing it

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cool guys don’t look at explosions (except us)

A screenshot from Helldivers 2
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A bit buggy but I now have Lua scripting inside Growl’s debug UI!

A screenshot of Growl's debug UI. There's some Lua code in a text editor, and some nice cats.
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Rolled credits on Witcher 3 after playing off-and-on for about eight years. Just outstanding, sad it’s over.

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First Warlord’s Ruin clear!

A screenshot from Destiny 2
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Not sure yet if we’ll get any kind of boost from visibility on Steam when we leave Early Access but here’s hoping.

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I just realised that Feud has crossed the 70,000 players mark! Very pleased

A screenshot that says 'Players: 70236 total players'
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Working out who to contact for press stuff in games now seems so much harder than it did five years ago. How does this work? Who do I talk to? Aaaahhh

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Actually just not finishing the demo to not spoil myself for launch

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The inventory screen is inspired

A screenshot of Pacific Drive's inventory UI
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Really very impressed by the Pacific Drive demo

a screenshot from Pacific Drive
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A screenshot from Quinns Quest. The text reads 'through toil richard praises god'
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Any games press types On Here who would like to try out a prerelease build of Feud 2.0? Get in touch if so!

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Quite a nice day of Feud polishing and bug fixing. Still got a couple of localisations to review and import but other than that I’m feeling good about the release on the 23rd!

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Trying to explain mastodon to this guy

A screenshot from Persona 3. The text reads “that’s enough about mammoths. I don’t see the big deal. They’re just huge elephants”.
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Also the little tribute to Super Mario Sunshine in the cassette levels made me cackle

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Celeste 64 is just wonderful. They could have so easily made it into a throwaway gag but it’s a tough-as-nails retro 3D platformer with typically beautiful music.

A screenshot of Celeste 64, showing the character standing on a high tower.
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Not sure if I always get the Best Dressed commendation at the end of a Destiny match because I’m the best dressed, or because I’m actually quite shit at the game

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Trying to see how far I can get with NieR Reincarnation before it gets pulled offline.

A sceeenshot of NieR
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Jusant is just stunning

A screenshot of the video game Jusant
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Ultra Sun was the last good Pokémon game. My mind will not be changed.

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eos4j v1.2.0 has been released! This new version adds support for the Ecom interface in Epic Online Services. It also fixes a bug with conversion from timestamps to Java Date objects.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j/releases/tag/1.2.0

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· The games of 2023

As many have written, 2023 was a great year for the games themselves and a pretty dire year for the industry and the people working in it. Let’s hope things improve in 2024.

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Just saw the Wide Ocean Big Jacket devs have a new game out - instant buy for me.

https://beforethegreenmoon.com/

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Well, there’s still a fair amount of work to do - bugs to fix, translations to review - but as of today Feud is feature-complete for graduating from Early Access. It’s nearly eight years since we started working on it - longer than my professional game development career lasted!

A screenshot of Feud's commit graph from GitHub.
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Just played a tiny prototype of what might well become the next Bearwaves game and I am very energised.

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Sounds like my computer might actually be able to run Alan Wake 2, which is a relief.

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Rolled credits on Signalis last night and haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so it’s good this excellent video essay from Sam Greer exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUnVUXAn-fQ

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eos4j v1.1.0 has been released! This new version features support for the Leaderboards interface in Epic Online Services.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j/releases/tag/1.1.0

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Been playing Chants of Sennaar and it’s really something special.

A screenshot of Chants of Sennaar. A screenshot of Chants of Sennaar.
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Had my first report on eos4j this weekend from someone actually using it in their game! Very exciting.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j

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I worked at Improbable in 2019, when Unity tried to change their TOS to screw us over. They ended up backtracking and put their TOS on GitHub, saying they would not change TOS retroactively.

It appears to be gone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/

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lol, lmao

Google search trend for Godot, showing a big spike.
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· Turns out immersive theatre isn’t video games

I went to see Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City the other night. In the bar on the way in, I confidently said to my partner, “immersive theatre is video games”.

It isn’t.

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Since launching on the Epic store a couple of months ago, Feud has had something like 28,000 new players. That feels significant!

A graph showing monthly sales for Feud on the Epic Store.
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Alright, I caved. I have a Steam Deck. I also have £45 of store credit to get nice games for it; recommendations please!

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I will admit it irks me slightly that my application for a Switch developer license was declined when the eShop is full of shit like this.

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-eshop-aaa-digital-clock-release-1850205218

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Rolled credits (well, you know what I mean) on Lightfall. I actually quite enjoyed the action movie vibe of the campaign as a whole but every complaint about the narrative is valid; it feels like we’re back to the bad old days.

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· The games of 2022

I had a really great year in 2022. I also played fewer games in 2022 than maybe any year previous. I don’t necessarily want to think about what that might mean, thank you very much.

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· The games of 2021

I’m genuinely impressed that 2021 managed to be a generally worse year than 2020, for a variety of fun reasons. It had some high highs but also some very low lows. It was a year in which I mostly quit social media (a positive change!), which means I was out of The Games Discourse for the last third. Do I miss it? Like hell.

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· The games I played in 2020

2020 has been hot garbage. It has had very few redeeming factors and I am not appreciative of it at all. 

Some great games, though.

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· The best days of my life

I finally got around to picking up Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC. This was a very big step for me. Let me explain.

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· one-fifty: Virginia (2016)

Virginia is one of the best films I’ve played this year.

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· one-fifty: What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)

In my early teens, after experiencing my first death in the family, I developed an odd fascination with the preservation of spaces.

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· one-fifty: a new writing project

I love games. I love playing games, I love reading about games, but I’ve realised that what I love most is talking about games, as anyone who’s spent time around me can attest.

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· Joel's Top 5 (2016)

What a great year, eh? OK, so 2016’s been fairly appalling, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some great films, games, albums and a bunch of other stuff. Here are my top Things this year, from as many genres of Thing as I can be bothered.

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· Pokémon Go

This isn’t really going to be a game review. Taken purely as a game, and ignoring its wider impact, Pokémon Go is not very good. It crashed frequently before a recent update, there’s nothing to do outside populated areas, the drain on battery and mobile data is high, and it’s incredibly hard for new players coming in to the game a few weeks late to catch up.

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· It's time to stop pre-ordering

It’s been a little while since I was really excited for the release of a game. The last time was probably Halo 4’s release this time three years ago (for the record, it was disappointing), and the last time I pre-ordered a game was, I think, Mass Effect 3, six months earlier.

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· Pixels Are Evil

The game development landscape has changed significantly over the last few years (understatement of the century, but whatever). One of the most significant of these changes , especially for game developers - though it’s one that often goes unnoticed - is the rise of screen resolution and aspect ratio fragmentation.

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· Review: FIFA 15

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m not really a huge fan of the beautiful game. I am, however, quite into gaming, and so thought that it was only fair this latest upgrade get a review. I’ll look at a few different sections. Without further ado…

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· Uplift: A Postmortem

Before I begin, I should point out: Uplift isn’t dead. The Kickstarter for Uplift is dead. Sensationalist title, I know. Let’s pretend I’ve been learning how to be a journalist. Because having a blog definitely makes me a journalist, right? Ahem.

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· Review: FEZ (PC)

Polytron’s XBLA hit (and personal favourite of Mojang’s Notch) has finally made in onto PC in the last couple of weeks. I downloaded the game yesterday and finished it this morning, after a small delay - I saw the sunrise creeping at my window and decided I’d better get some sleep. FEZ is absolutely fantastic.

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