Blue Isle Studios’ indie action-adventure game Valley begins with the player slowly hoofing it through a verdant wilderness. Just as it begins to fee like another walking simulator, they find the L.E.A.F. exoskeleton, and movement becomes a joy.
Mixing their love for old school adventure games like King’s Quest with everybody’s love affair with Netflix’s supernatural horror series, the folks at Infamous Quests cooked up a small playable slice of what needs to be a much bigger game.
Who would have thought that Roger Corman’s unreleased Fantastic Four would leave a greater impression on the pop culture landscape than the three big-budget, major studio releases? It’s arguably more successful, too.
Only the truest The Next Generation fans likely know that Isolinear Chips are the 24th century’s equivalent of the USB flash drives we carry around today. On the show, they utilize futuristic optical storage techniques
which haven’t been invented yet, so these non-functional replicas will best serve as drink coasters—as well as being a truly impressive signifier of your Trek fandom.
Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen “countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.
In their lawsuit filed against MaxMind, the IP mapping firm, the Arnolds allege:
The following events appeared to originate at the residence and brought trespassers and/or law enforcement to the plaintiffs’ home at all hours of the night and day: stolen cars, fraud related to tax returns and bitcoin, stolen credit cards, suicide calls, private investigators, stolen social media accounts, fund raising events, and numerous other events.
James Arnold has even been “reported as holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films.”
I do really want to play this game. And apparently the soundtrack is done by 65daysofstatic. That's fucking awesome.
Blast off: It's time for No Man's Sky! (credit: Hello Games)
In crowded expo halls and at private demo sessions, No Man's Sky has impressed and intrigued with promises of a massive, gorgeous, and diverse galaxy of space exploration—and one that, developer Hello Games insists, no two people will play the same way, since the game's 18 quadrillion planets are built using a web of criss-crossing math formulas. But now, brief demos give way to the real, final game—so how much does No Man's Sky live up to its hype?
Ars Technica was fortunate enough to land a single day's advance play of the game before its Tuesday launch on PS4 in North America (it's released in the UK a day later, on August 10), which isn't enough to constitute a full review. I mean, I still have, er, 17,999,999,999,999,999,992 planets left in my completist run of the game. But after a 12-hour marathon on the eve of its retail launch, I'm getting a sense of the game's potential, its limits, and whether I see myself continuing this epic quest to the center of a mysterious galaxy.
Ars' full review is forthcoming, but for now, let me kick off my marathon impressions with an atypical proposition: that No Man's Sky is the rare game that is better when spoiled.
It'd be cool to see this in a resolution higher than 640x480. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)
Are you one of the thousands of diehard real-time strategy gamers who has yet to abandon the 1998 version of StarCraft? Would you rather not deal with the sequel's altered soldiers and upgrade trees, yet also pine for a version of the original that runs at a higher resolution than 640x480 pixels?
The game's creators at Blizzard Software might have a treat in store for you: a remastered version of the original StarCraft. According to Korean news outlet iNews24—spotted by Kotaku on Friday—multiple sources are confident that Blizzard plans to announce StarCraft HD in September. The announcement would be followed by a deeper reveal at BlizzCon's November event in Anaheim.
The Korean report hints at "improved graphics resolution and user interface," but it doesn't confirm whether fans should expect redrawn 2D assets or a complete 3D overhaul of the game's Terran, Protoss, and Zerg races. The report doesn't mention whether or not the remaster will include single-player content, and it doesn't mention whether the multiplayer mode will hinge on the Brood War expansion pack (though, based on that version's dominance in international competitive play, we assume it will).
This is the SFW version of the spin-off's card selection.
Board game smash hit Codenames has earned countless accolades and awards since its 2015 launch due to its ease of play, surprising depth, and family friendliness. The game revolves around giant packs of words, which means a simple "add some more words" offshoot or expansion was inevitable, but the game's first official follow-up wastes no time erasing the phrase "family friendly" from the recommendation list.
Codenames: Deep Undercover began appearing at Target shops in late July, and this week it finally officially launched at more Targets (and will, for now, remain an exclusive at the US big-box chain) for $20. The 200-card set only differs from the core game in one key aspect: dirty words. Players split into two teams, and they're each led by a "spymaster" who must help his or her teammates figure out which face-up words on a table belong to their team—and must do so with one-word clues, which makes the clue-giving process pretty tricky.
But while the original game's word list mostly consisted of neutral words and proper nouns, C:DU takes the blue route, consisting mostly of sexual words (squirt, vibrator), slurs (bitch, slut), and double entendres (clam, pickle). The game also comes with Codenames' first official set of blank cards, on which players can write their own vulgar or gross words of choice, along with more stylized versions of its "bystander" cards.
Quake looks cool. I bet it will be fun to play like 25% of the time. Infuriating the other 75%. And then never played again after a couple months.
But Prey looks fucking awesome. Got some Dead Space shit going on.
Quake Champions gameplay reveal trailer.
This year's E3 gaming conference began with one of the industry's current heavy hitters, Bethesda, announcing two new games in a blatant "more smoke than fire" kind of way. Deep down, we knew why Quake Champions and the Prey reboot got such content-thin reveals back in June: because Bethesda had to save something for its giant, weekend-long QuakeCon festival.
That event kicked off in Grapevine, Texas, on Thursday with gameplay reveals for both games, though Quake Champions' 75-second video was more revealing. The upcoming Quake-branded online shooter from id Software was shown in what looks like a fully functional pre-alpha state. Champions' combat was shown from an apparent first-person, mid-combat perspective, along with a few floating-camera shots of at least three arenas that look like modern upgrades of the castle, sewer, and factory settings from its forebear, 1999's Quake III Arena.
Anarki is back!
The verticality is strong in this one, as the QC sequence's combatants take advantage of booster-jump pads and their own rocket jumps to bounce around large, well-decorated arenas. While some details—particularly a giant, chained eyeball—are rendered well and smothered in cool lighting effects, other parts of the reveal look less polished than id's other recent, major shooter, the Doom reboot from earlier this year. This seems intentional, as id has advertised support for 120 Hz monitors for the sake of twitchy, high-speed gameplay—and QC's reveal looks mighty fast, packed to the brim with running, bunny-hopping, and precise railgun kills. (Clearly, the squad working on QC wants to evoke your fondest Q3A memories, what with a combatant who looks a lot like the hoverboard-riding character Anarki from the game of old!)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.
If you don’t pay attention to the world of modern board games, you’ve almost certainly never heard of Scythe. If you’re a diehard cardboard fan, though, it’s all you’ve been hearing about for months.
Not so much a second map as it is just the first section of Nepal being reached from the second section. Still cool to see people testing the boundaries of maps though. Like how we could skip entire sections of Halo 2 and 3 by getting on top of the maps.
Ever gaze into the hoary peaks of Overwatch’s Nepal map and wonder what’s out there? What lies beyond the map space’s endless combat purgatory, Blizzard’s tiny death island? A couple Overwatch players managed to break free. Here’s what they found.
Were you, for whatever reason, still waiting to get into Game of Thrones but have suddenly decided to jump in? Well, then, Samuel L. Jackson’s got a summary of pretty much everything you need to know about the series up to the most recent season, including the story, the characters, and the motherfucking dragons.
It actually happened. The Kickstarter not only resurrected the show, but there was o much support (and cash!) for the beloved puppets-makin’-fun-of-cheesy-movies that Netflix has acquired the new series. But that may not be all.
Is there a patent on the formula that helped generate this beautiful scene?
With No Man's Sky's highly anticipated release just weeks away, a Dutch company is objecting to the game's alleged use of a patented "superformula" to generate landscapes and terrain.
Let’s begin with some much-deserved kudos: Fan-o-rama, this fan-made Futurama flick, is just mind-boggling in its accuracy. The newly released trailer does its level best to capture the unusual characters, locations, and pastel palette of Matt Groening’s beloved show. Even the show’s character designs have been brought to life... and that’s the problem.
Sure, in real life, Lucy Lawless and Bruce Campbell have already teamed up in the new Ash Vs. Evil Dead TV show. But now their heroic counterparts are uniting in the pages of comic books, for a new series spinning out of their current ongoings at Dynamite Entertainment. Expect lots of glorious undead killing!
Comes with everything you see here. (credit: Adam Poots Games)
You'll never encounter a more brutal game than the pen-and-paper monstrosity that is Kingdom Death: Monster. Let's rattle off every one of its negatives:
Its print run is incredibly limited, meaning you can currently only buy the game from eBay resellers. Their insane price hikes make the game's retail ask of $400 seem quaint.
The box is crammed to the brim with enough content to terrify anybody. There's a 223-page book, a series of elaborate play boards, a gazillion minis, and hundreds of cards split into dozens of decks.
Every summer, a jury of board game critics from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria announces its pick for Game of the Year, or "Spiel des Jahres" (SdJ). The board game world has its fair share of award ceremonies, but none is quite as prestigious or important as the SdJ. The award assures wide promotion and a healthy sales bump both in Germany and abroad; previous winners have included such undisputed classics as Catan and Qwirkle. Most of the games nominated for the 2016 prize were initially released in 2015; to be considered for the award, they needed to have been released in the German market within the past 12 months.
This past weekend, we took an exhaustive, 8,000-word look at all the nominees across two categories, and we waited patiently to hear who would come out on top. The winners were announced today.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main "Spiel des Jahres" award went to the word-association party game Codenames. Released near the end of last year, Codenames has taken the board game world by storm; Board Game Geek users have quickly voted the title the best party game of all time (for good reason, too). We've never introduced the game to anyone—from kids to gamers to grandparents—who didn't instantly fall in love with it.
Stranger Things—an eight-part Netflix series that debuts July 15—is set in the 1980s and is heavily influenced by Stephen King and Steven Spielberg works of the era
, including E.T., Firestarter, It, Stand By Me, and Poltergeist. Heavily, heavily influenced. Is that a bad thing? Certainly not when it’s this much fun to watch.
One thing you’ll learn from the newest installment of DC’s weird, junk-food specialty project: Harland Sanders is like a Kentucky Fried Christ who died and came back to life to spread the gospel of finger-lickin’ poultry parts. The letter column says so.
There is not nearly enough merchandise based on Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ truly incredible scifi comic Saga out there. But, good news: now there is some, and it’s amazing. Bad news: it’s exclusive to San Diego Comic Con, so it’ll be god damn nightmarish to acquire.
Poor snake. This slithery Stimson’s Python somehow managed to shed its skin completely within itself. The tail, oddly enough, finished shedding inside the mouth of the snake, forming a perfect circle that unfortunately trapped the snake inside of its old skin. According to the Alice Springs Reptile Centre in Australia, the non-venomous snake was just going around and around inside its own skin for over three hours before it was able to find a way out.
Early this morning, one truck carrying bread collided with another truck carrying deli meat on a New Jersey highway. Jersey residents are finally getting the lunch they deserve.
Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. "As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.
Worth your 2 minutes. I didn't even realize that some of them were shot for shot references.
It’s really fun to see the genius eye of Stanley Kubrick get translated into the world of The Simpsons. Instead of the psychopaths in A Clockwork Orange, we get Homer, Moe, and crew. Instead of the stillness of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see the goofiness of Homer eating in zero gravity. Instead of the eeriness of The Shining, we get Homer... again.
Playing ping-pong has always been a two-person experience—until now. Trainerbot is a new household robot that is almost guaranteed to be your toughest ping-pong opponent. Brothers Alex and Harrison Chen developed Trainerbot after years of playing ping-pong with each other. While away at college, Harrison developed the first Trainerbot prototype out of a garbage can so he could practice in secret while away from his brother. A dozen or so prototypes later, the newest version of Trainerbot is going up on Kickstarter today.
