The Forest is about the scavenging that comes with surviving in the woods, but it's also about avoiding a band of cannibals that would very much like to scavenge the meat from your bones. The open-world survival horror game finally has a Steam Early...
Before Papers, Please came along and dominated our hearts and our awards ceremonies with its grim tale of bureaucracy and poverty in a totalitarian state, we were reliant on Cart Life to make us feel empathy for our fellow men and women. The simulation of a life spent running a food cart won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2013 and caused Adam’s heart to grow two sizes.
But creator Richard Hofmeier has pulled the game from Steam. Why? Because he’s now offering it completely free along with its source code, so you can start to tinker with its innards.
At the time of writing, Hofmeier’s website is down due to the sudden spike in traffic that follows open sourcing your game. But when asked by fellow developers why going open source meant he was no longer selling the game, Hofmeier replied that he was “done supporting it / fixing bugs. Time to stop charging & open it up (despite fears of code nakedness).” Which is awfully generous.
If you already bought Cart Life on Steam, the game will remain a part of your Steam accounts. If you’ve never played it, now you’ve no excuse. Here are two out of context paragraphs from Adam’s WIT:
When I realised I could just take a bus to the store I felt like an idiot but I didn’t feel like the game had misled me. It seemed acceptable that Andrus didn’t quite know how to widen his own horizons yet, or wasn’t comfortable doing so. He’d relied on the proximity of the pub because it was safe. But then it became a habit. I’d stop for that morning beer every morning and make sure to have a couple more every evening.
Why was that? Because it broke up the monotony of work and because, sad and true, I was hoping that someone would spark up a conversation in that dark little room. A few words of kindness. The only ones I heard for the first couple of days were from the guy serving me and he was being paid to be friendly. It’s lonely out there and lonely people make strange decisions, even when debt and doom are heading toward the door.
AND IN THE GAME.
I really hope going open source leads to a whole world of Cart Life-inspired derivative works, expanding the boundaries of the original’s available characters and carts with new people, new roles, but perhaps also carrying the theme towards entirely new experiences. Let’s see what people can do.
I am a trusting person, which us why I often gather groups of stranger together and fall backwards into their arms. It’s something to do while my pies cool on my windowsill. But I also live in London, so today I’ve lost three pies and broken two vertebrae. Send help! It hasn’t damaged my trust, though, so I’m going to take Eurogamer at their word that they’re sure that Far Cry 4 is soon to be announced. I don’t think it’s any stretch to assume that it would be coming, but the setting promises mountains and elephants.
And – this just in – there’s a first, cryptic trailer for the next Assassin’s Creed game, subtitled ‘Unity’ and which appears to be set during the French Revolution.
According to Eurogamer and others, Far Cry 4 is set in the Himalayas. It will have rideable elephants, so anything else is secondary. I hope there’s a controllable trunk, and that you can use it to gather snowballs and fire them at Yetis. The rest is said to be based mostly on Far Cry 3, with outposts and an open-world to conquer. There’s more to be heard at this coming E3.
Kotaku is sure it has seen early shots of Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Hey, it’s a dude in a cloak running around a place, and that place is Paris and that dude is called ‘Arno’. Anything I could add would only be speculation, and I am not a high-paid analyst.
Except: all of a sudden there’s a video of the new AC, which Ubisoft unexpectedly put out today in response to the leaks.. Not a lot to it, but it comes with a confirmation from Ubisoft that a ‘next-gen’ Asscreed is indeed inbound:
Lufrausers sales outstripped the game's budget within days, making its two-and-a-half year development cycle a swiftly profitable one for developer Vlambeer.
Let's not forget, it's been a bit of a journey for Luftrausers: The arcade shooter was yet...
Playing as a black character in a video game, commonly viewed as a laudable choice promoting diversity, still can foster or strengthen racist attitudes, according to a recently published study.
White players act more aggressively after playing a video game with a black avatar or character, says the study, led by a researcher at Ohio State University.
The research also showed a stronger likelihood for white participants to openly express stronger negative attitudes toward African-Americans, and to show implicit attitudes linking them to weapons.
Bushman's study tested two groups. One comprised 126 white university students, 60 percent of them male, asked to play Saints Row 2; they were randomly assigned to play black or white avatars. They were also randomly assigned two missions from the game — either to break out of prison, or to find a church without harming anyone.
Afterward, the players were asked questions about their views of African-Americans. Those who played as a black character were more likely to agree with a statement saying African-Americans would be as well off as whites if they only tried harder. Further, those who played as black characters were more likely to associate pictures of African-Americans to negative words, such as "terrible," or "horrible."
The second study, comprising 141 white college students — 65 percent of which were female — asked participants to play either Fight Night Round 4 or WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2010. Again, they were assigned characters of either ethnicity at random. After playing, the subjects were asked to associate pictures of faces, white or black, with images either of weapons or harmless, everyday items. Again, those who played as black characters were more likely to associate African-Americans with weapons.
The study then used a longstanding test to measure aggression: the "hot sauce" test, in which participants are given the opportunity to force an unseen partner, who does not actually exist, to eat hot sauce after that partner revealed he or she strongly dislikes spicy food.
In the hot sauce test after the Fight Night/WWE test, those playing as a black avatar forced more than double the hot sauce — 115 percent — on their invisible partners than did those playing as white avatars.
"Usually, taking the perspective of a minority person is seen as a good thing, as a way to evoke empathy," said Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State. "But if white people are fed a media diet that shows blacks as violent, they don't have a realistic view of black people. It isn't good to put yourself in the shoes of a murderer, as you do in many of these violent games.
"The media have the power to perpetuate the stereotype that blacks are violent, and this is certainly seen in video games," Bushman said. "This violent stereotype may be more prevalent in video games than in any other form of media because being a black character in a video game is almost synonymous with being a violent character."
Allons-y! The TARDIS has landed on Steam, bringing with it the Doctor and his faithful companion, Amy Pond. BBC's Doctor Who: The Adventure Games are now available through Valve's digital distribution service for the Earthly sum of $19.99. These...
Apple's iTunes Radio could be just the start of Apple's streaming music plans. According to Billboard, the company is mulling an on-demand streaming service that would let people listen to particular tracks they wanted without buying them. Citing sources, Billboard adds that the company is considering the creation of an iTunes app for Android phones.
As it stands, Apple's iTunes Radio is a free, ad-supported service that lets people create stations based on songs, artists, or genres. Apple's also curated it with celebrity DJs, and around new album releases. Users can remove the ads if they pay for Apple's iTunes Match service, which costs $24.99 a year, though they still have to buy individual songs for full price through iTunes.
The words "combinatorial explosion" have probably never come up in a video game storytelling talk as many times as they did with BioShock creator Ken Levine's "Narrative Legos." At the 2014 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Levine outlined an ambitious — if vague — idea for endlessly replayable, systems-based stories that he compares to a player-driven episode of Game of Thrones. When a slide deck offhandedly lists "build a web of nearly infinite relationship states" as a prerequisite, you're in for something that's at least compelling listening.
The hallmark of Levine's BioShock series is carefully paced, twist-driven story lines, but that's something he seems finished with for now. That's partly because those plots require keeping secrets from the audience, a practice Levine sees as outdated in an age where games like Minecraft and DayZ make a name by selling alpha and beta access. Things like the climactic reveal of a character aren't endlessly repeatable. "Once those key story bits are revealed, that's kind of your special sauce," said Levine. "I think right now audiences want to be part of [development]. They want to play alphas. They want to be giving their feedback along the way."
"Once those key story bits are revealed, that's kind of your special sauce."
The thing he hopes to replace it with is significantly less clear. In the absolute simplest terms, it's about creating non-player characters who will react according to designated needs and desires, and whose responses will give rise to friendships, betrayals, and other interesting stories. Careful to avoid any hints that he's actually working on a new game, he spun out a high fantasy tale with characters with names like "Romeo," "Juliet," and "CliffyB." Each character is governed by a a handful of motivations that can be represented on a set of sliders: Juliet the Orc might hate elves, love the old gods, or want to marry you. If you build a shrine to the old gods, she'll like you a little more. If you help an elf, she'll like you a little less. Reaching a certain level of friendship or hatred could unlock some kind of reward or punishment from her, or it could trigger an event in the plot.
The goal is to generate zero-sum games that will create conflict. Some character desires might only be revealed over time, and they might contradict each other. Maybe Juliet the Orc hates elves but will make an exception for Romeo the Elf, and she'll only tell you this if you go on enough quests with her. Maybe someone else's motivation is to kill Romeo and woo Juliet instead. Whatever the system is, it's the kind of thing that can only be represented with a lot of arrows and bar graphs... and that results in explanations like "Frank cares about hating elves, but this is really how he feels about you in relation to hating elves."
It's also, however, the kind of thing that's hard to distinguish from existing interactive fiction and role-playing game systems. A game like Fallout will have multiple factions that offer different gameplay rewards, and helping one group will often alienate another. Levine's system seems theoretically more complicated under the hood, but it wouldn't be procedurally generated: Levine called it a way to organize individual scenes that could be written and acted. Discrete, variable character motivations and personality traits were a part of game designer Chris Crawford's (currently defunct) Storytron engine, and a similar idea is found in interactive fiction author Emily Short's (also currently defunct) Versu creation tool. If anything, Levine's idea is a successor to these efforts.
For now, narrative Legos are a back of the napkin thought experiment
Perhaps his most interesting contribution is a proposal that characters could have a randomizable list of traits to make them different on each playthrough. Oddly, this idea was hinted at in the unrealized plans for a Timothy Leary Neuromancer adaptation. But it's a bit early to be talking about what we'd see in a "narrative Lego" video game. For now, it's largely a back of the napkin idea put forward to spur conversation at GDC. Levine is open about the fact that he hasn't prototyped any of his ideas, though he says it could be easily done in a pen-and-paper role-playing game format, using a computer only to keep track of characters' reactions and interactions.
Levine's name made the news last month when his studio Irrational abruptly shut down, and all but about 15 members of its staff were laid off as Levine condensed the studio to work on a new project. He mentioned the change in passing, saying that he'd wanted "time to fail" at a new venture, and "time to fail for a long period when you don't have 150 people who are looking at you and saying 'Dude, what am I supposed to be doing today?'" According to reports of BioShock Infinite's tortured development process, the game went badly off track precisely because that time wasn't there: Levine and others iterated on chunks of design for years on end.
His "narrative Lego" technique doesn't seem like it will actually make less work for writers, since they'll still be creating huge numbers of scenes between characters who literally have multiple personalities. Audience members raised the question of a combinatorial explosion as situations and variables stacked up, and since it's a mostly theoretical idea, they could well be right. After seeing Levine work on one narrative thread for some time now, though, it's interesting to see the possibility of something new on the horizon — not just a new plot or a return to more complicated systems after the extremely straightforward shooter BioShock Infinite, but a switch to an entirely different school of storytelling.
In a bizarre bit of internet randomness, the blues-rock duo The Black Keys have gotten a little inventive in the run-up to their latest release. Titled Turn Blue, the new record was announced today on Mike Tyson's Twitter of all places. It's still unclear how Mike Tyson might be involved, but the move is certainly attention grabbing:
Attached to the tweet is a creepy inspirational video that seems to be recruiting for an offbeat '80s sex cult:
Turkey has reportedly blocked Google DNS inside its borders, eliminating a backdoor that briefly helped Turks stay connected to Twitter after the country banned access yesterday. Turkey's prime minister promised to "eradicate" the popular service with the help of a court order. "I don't care what the international community says," Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said at a campaign rally. "Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic." Twitter says it's looking into claims that the company failed to remove content deemed inflammatory by local courts, but has encouraged users to continue posting tweets via SMS in the meantime.
Typing in Google's DNS addresses (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) offered a reliable way to circumvent the ban and help Turks keep using the service. Some had even taken to spray-painting those addresses in visible outdoor locations, according to reports. Since Turkey has now shut down that pathway, according to the Hürriyet Daily News, Turkish internet users are continuing to share other DNS alternatives to maintain their link to Twitter.
Though Turkey's ban doesn't affect other social networking sites like Facebook, the country's government is still taking fierce criticism for the move. The White House issued an official statement yesterday, saying the US would "support the people of Turkey in their calls to restore full access to the blocked technologies." The State Department put out a separate statement, imploring Turkey to "unblock its citizens’ access to Twitter and ensure free access to all social media platforms." We've reached out to Google for a statement on the status of Google DNS in Turkey.
'Army-issued deodorant if the Army had a really good in-house design studio'
Et tu, Brut?
First sold as a line of cologne in 1964 by cosmetics manufacturer Fabergé with manly spokespeople like Joe Namath, Muhammmed Ali, Wilt Chamberlain, and Kelly Le Brock (who is not manly, but brought the manly out in men), Brut, owned by Helen of Troy Limited since 2003, has grown to include after shave and deodorant and become one of the more well-known grooming brands for men. Tasked with evolving "Brut's identity and packaging to push volume among current and lapsed consumers by reestablishing 'The Essence of Man' as a brand for me today", New York, NY-based Beardwood helped Brut introduce a new design in late 2013.
Sample of the old look.
Rooted in the past, Brut had to transition and reintroduce itself to consumers. We had to increase perceived performance and efficacy of the brand & introduce new fragrances to this 'single fragrance brand'.
Our logo evolution features a bold shield inspired by sports teams, that cues masculinity and is a modern evolution of where they were. The clean and chiseled fonts deliver efficacy and functional benefits, complemented by the brand's green equity color.
Provided text
Logo detail.Deodorant logo variants.
With strong competition from other men grooming brands like Old Spice and Axe plus the glut of big-brand products like Degree and Gillette, it's easy to see how Brut would fall behind, landing somewhere between the old-timey aesthetic of Old Spice and the more contemporary Axe but without any real distinctive trait. In my mind, Brut is from my parents' generation; none of my high school friends ever used it. So shedding its quasi Victorian logo is definitely a good move. (The options, I guess, were moving away from it or moving towards it full on and out-Old-Spice Old Spice.) The new logo goes for the outdoors, sports type with a chiseled type that looks bold and fresh but somehow seems out of place on a bottle of cologne.
A range of products in the new design.Hero shot!
I love me a good chisel logo, and this one is nicely crafted and perfectly deployed on the labels, but there is a bit of a disconnect between logo and product; it's almost like this is Army-issued deodorant if the Army had a really good in-house design studio. Perhaps it's simply the difficulty of separating the old image of Brut from this new iteration that is clearly meant to mark a line in the sand and establish Brut as something it hasn't been before. There is also the iconic elongated shape of the cologne to deal with, which looks out of place in 2014 and clashes wildly with the new logo and label shape so I think part of reinvigorating the brand will require a strong effort on the product design, one that fits better with this new gung-ho approach.
Official Map: Boston MBTA Government Center Station Closure Bypass
Submitted by Lawrence, who says:
As you’ve probably heard, the MBTA is about to close Government Center at the end of service tomorrow for a 2 year reconstruction. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the detour maps the T created and have put in stations. To me (a self-confessed transit geek), they seem adequate, but all of my friends find them very confusing. This leads to a broader question: how should transit agencies map and market necessary detours like this? What could be done to improve this? Thanks!
—-
Transit Maps says:
Lawrence, I think you’re being extremely generous when you say that this is an “adequate” map. For me, it takes a pretty simple concept and obfuscates it with so much confusing and unnecessary information that it becomes difficult to decipher.
The idea behind the map is to show riders alternative ways to change between the Green and Blue Lines while Government Center (the natural interchange between these lines) is closed for the next two years. The MBTA’s own project webpage says this, which actually sums things up pretty succinctly:
The recommended path of travel for Green Line customers desiring access to the Blue Line is to travel to Haymarket Station and transfer to the Orange Line toward Forest Hills (southbound). Customers should transfer at State Station for Blue Line connections.
The recommended path of travel for Blue Line customers desiring access to the Green Line is to travel to State and transfer to the Orange Line toward Oak Grove (northbound). Customers should then transfer at Haymarket for Green Line connections.
It’s not exactly convenient – requiring two connections instead of the previous one – but the concept is pretty easy to understand: transfer at Haymarket and State.
You can also walk pretty easily between Park Street and State to achieve a Blue/Green transfer (I’d suggest it would actually take far less time to do this than to transfer trains twice), but the MBTA isn’t doing you any favours if you do. Unless you have an unlimited weekly or monthly pass, you’ll have to pay again to re-enter the system, which doesn’t really seem very fair in the circumstances. An act of good faith from the MBTA might be to allow out-of-system transfers at Park Street and State for the duration of the project (within a reasonable time frame, of course).
So, now that we know what the map is trying to convey, let’s see how it does.
My first – and biggest – problem with the map is the seemingly random way that it depicts the subway lines: all the lines that leave the central map area are ghosted back, except the Blue Line. Why is it shown differently? Why are any of them ghosted back at all? Ghosting a route line back like that can imply that service on that line is suspended or otherwise not operating, which is not true for any of these lines.
It’s particularly confusing for the Blue Line between State and Bowdoin, because it makes it look like all Blue Line services terminate at State. In fact, trains will continue to run through Government Center (without stopping) to Bowdoin, which will operate full-time during this project, instead of its normal limited operating hours.
The other big problem: the repetition of the station “T” icons to show secondary entrances to stations. For someone unfamiliar with Boston (hello, tourists!) these could reasonably be confused for actual, separate stations (which don’t really exist).
The entrance to State station at the Old South Meeting House is the worst offender: the denoted walking path from Park Street leads directly to a labelled “T” marker that’s almost exactly halfway between Downtown Crossing and State – looks like a station to me! The only indication for the uninitiated that this is an entrance to State is that the ring around the “T” shares that station’s blue and orange colour-coding. To my mind, the walking path should continue all the way to State through the marker. And of course, replacing the entrance “T” markers with their own, unique icon would remove any chance for confusion. An icon should never represent two separate, unrelated things!
The arrows used to represent the possible alternate routes do a solid – if unspectacular – job, but they’re surrounded by so much visual confusion that it’s hard to trust what they’re saying. It’s actually kind of frightening that two paragraphs of text on the MBTA website can do a better job of explaining the bypass than this map can – a visual medium should really be able to explain this so much more clearly than a text-based or verbal solution ever could.
In conjunction with the project webpage, which is actually pretty comprehensive, this map is just about tolerable. But for someone coming across it in a station with no other knowledge of the project – it’s awfully hard work.
'a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have provided enormous amounts of hydroelectricity[2] and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by up to 200 metres (660 ft), opening up large new lands for settlement, for example in a now almost totally drained Adriatic Sea', plus beaucoup racism
On Thursday, we shared the news that Jem and the Holograms is getting a live-action, modern-day movie. The response among our readers was...cautious. To say the least.
Here's some fuel to add to your skeptical fire: Christy Marx, creator of the original series, won't be involved in production.
Finnish magician and mentalist Jose Ahonen typically performs his tricks and illusions for humans. For this trick, though, his audience is a series of dogs, and his trick is the same: show them a treat, then make the treat disappear.
The dogs’ confounded reactions are highly amusing…
This frame appears six minutes and 48 seconds into third episode of anime series “D-Frag!”. Main hero says: “Wow! This is how you make games?” The code looks like a legitimate C++, showing some Direct3D API calls.
"this has inspired me to want to pay horror in the Dark Ages", so obviously it has to be mythos, because no other horror exists
Having a 6 year old daughter, I have had the pleasure of re re re (ad infinatum) watching the Disney film Brave.
Ignoring the Disney cheesiness and the the myriad anachronisms, this has inspired me to want to pay horror in the Dark Ages. What with lost kingdoms, demon bears, witches hidden in the woods, ancient stone circles resonant with atmosphere and magic etc etc.
Back about 6 years ago, CDA struck me as a slightly rough around the edges, but inspired sourcebook, and one with massive potential. And it led me to start to plan a campaign for it. Given that the original fairy stories were pretty bleak and nasty, I toyed with a CDA campaign based around revised fairy stories - definitely "Grim Tales".
Maybe Rapunzel is locked in the tower for a reason, and that's not long hair she lets down?
Maybe Grandmother is possessed with a Werewolf spirit and Little Red Riding Hood has been sent to her as a sacrifice. Maybe the hunter on her trail is actually trying to save her?
Maybe the witches house is a sweet tasting tame Shoggoth, which when Hansel and Gretal eats it, eats them from the inside out - spawning and spreading?
Anyway, I lost my copy of CDA a few years back and plan to get a new copy to replace it, and get this campaign planned. But I heard through the grapevine that a revised version of it was planned.
Does anyone know anything about this, and when it is scheduled for release? I would hate to go buy the old one, if a revision will soon be available.
The Forest is about the scavenging that comes with surviving in the woods, but it's also about avoiding a band of cannibals that would very much like to scavenge the meat from your bones. The open-world survival horror game finally has a Steam Early...
Lufrausers sales outstripped the game's budget within days, making its two-and-a-half year development cycle a swiftly profitable one for developer Vlambeer.
Let's not forget, it's been a bit of a journey for Luftrausers: The arcade shooter was yet...
Allons-y! The TARDIS has landed on Steam, bringing with it the Doctor and his faithful companion, Amy Pond. BBC's Doctor Who: The Adventure Games are now available through Valve's digital distribution service for the Earthly sum of $19.99. These...
On Thursday, we shared the news that Jem and the Holograms is getting a live-action, modern-day movie. The response among our readers was...cautious. To say the least.
Here's some fuel to add to your skeptical fire: Christy Marx, creator of the original series, won't be involved in production.
