firehose

By Samit Sarkar on May 12, 2013 at 7:49a

Double Fine wants to acquire the distribution rights for Costume Quest and Stacking, not just for business reasons, but more importantly, because the company has an "emotional attachment" to the games, studio head Tim Schafer told Polygon this weekend.

THQ published Costume Quest (2010) and Stacking (2011), and retained the distribution rights to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade versions of the titles. In a brief interview after giving the closing keynote at the inaugural Twofivesix conference, Schafer confirmed that Double Fine attempted to pick up the rights from the now-bankrupt publisher; the studio told Polygon in February that it was "optimistic" about doing so.

However, the rights went to Nordic Games last month when the company acquired almost all of the THQ intellectual property that was up for bidding in the defunct publisher's second bankruptcy auction — including the Darksiders and Red Faction franchises — for $4.9 million. That means that Nordic currently receives distribution-related royalties from sales of Stacking and Costume Quest. But the money isn't even Schafer's main concern.

"It's not, like, a lot of money; it's mostly for us to just tidy up things," said Schafer. "And also an emotional attachment — more of a mission of Double Fine to own everything that we make. It's, like, this loose end that kind of bothers me that we'd like to tie up."

Schafer noted that Double Fine owns the IP for both games, so the studio can move forward with future projects involving them if it so chooses. He declined comment when asked if Double Fine is currently in discussions with Nordic Games for the rights, but lamented that his studio's personal ties to the games leave it at a relative disadvantage in any negotiations that it might be undertaking.

"It's frustrating when something's really valuable to you for emotional reasons, and not that valuable to anyone else," he explained. "Because they can still say, 'Well, how much do you want it for?' and it's, like, 'Aw, you know this isn't valuable to you.' It's valuable to me, but not for business reasons, in a sense."

By Porpentine on May 12th, 2013 at 2:00 pm.

Princess + bomb = cake. Wasteland baseball brutality. Endangered hypertext preserve.

Princess Chardonnay in Bomb Kingdom by Ishisoft

A princess, some cake, and some bombs. Of course, you need the bombs to get the cake. That’s how life works!

Chew on some hard facts, buddy: life is a series of floating brick platforms and you gotta push the bombs to get the cake or you starve to death, because there’s no other food, except maybe grass, but princesses know better than to eat grass. That’s why we bomb the shit out of everything.

Princess Chardonnay doesn’t introduce new elements, it just figures out increasingly clever ways to use the bombs. They can destroy stuff, knock stuff around, blast you into the air, that’s all it needs. And it’s cute as fuck.

Conversations with my Mother by Merritt Kopas

Conversations is a letter from Merritt’s mom. Or rather, it’s a letter possibility space.

It’s about misgendering, or maybe not, because you decide, clicking words to cycle through “daughter”, “son”, “child”, that kind of thing. Love. Denial. Fear.

It doesn’t force you into any one role, it doesn’t turn the player into an instrument for a message. It’s more complicated than that.

Most playthroughs lead to tweets from Merritt’s Twitter, grounding each ending in real world bursts of emotion, ephemeral lines frozen like snapshots.

Lethal League by Reptile

So you hit the ball. It starts bouncing off the wall. It gets faster each time it bounces. Oh, and it kills you on contact. So it’s like playing tennis against the garage door except you can die.

Challenge Mode is about getting as many bounces as you can without killing yourself.

Versus mode adds a computer player or another human and you try to kill each other with the ball.

The sound is sexy, big SLAMS and CRASHES. I left the game running just to hear the music.

Fragments of Him by Mata Haggis, Tino van der Kraan, Elwin Verploegen, Henriette Sande

A man’s partner dies and he starts deleting his memories, throwing away his things so he won’t have to dwell on the pain.

Click the ducks. Gone. Click the pillow. Gone.

Maybe there’s a little too much clicking, I think it could have communicated itself by the removal of big objects without me hunting for little books and such. Robert Yang has another take though: “I thought so too, at first, but then I thought, “how can a candle or a fence post remind you of someone?” and then I was okay with how, uh, compulsive obsessive it is.””

And by the end I was moved, no mistake.

Undercolor Agents by farmergnome

Arena shooter where the level is filling up with colors and you have to destroy color generators to save the world, by which I mean get rid of all color, which is kind of grim, but maybe these colors had it coming. These are the angry cube-shaped colors that kill people after all.

Seems best with multiple players, as each agent is good against a certain color and you can shoot to free fellow agents Left 4 Dead-style.

ROM CHECK FAIL by Farbs

Not exactly new but we finally got around to posting it on the site, so here it is!

Carefully place a dozen arcade classics in a large mixing bowl.

ROM CHECK FAIL rapidly cycles three variables: the environment, the enemies, and the player. So maybe you start as Mario fighting Pacman ghosts in Breakout but every few seconds everything crackles and mutates and you have to instantly adapt to your new body and environment. Hectic brilliance.

The Parasite by Jimi Ahlgren

Platformer where you have to eat the ground or starve. This being a platformer, you come into conflict with your appetites real quick.

On top of this, you have a stamina meter, which limits your ability to chomp ground. So you’re balancing stamina, and chomping, and chomping the right pieces of dirt, and not dying of hunger, and trying to reach the exit.

TIPS

-You can double jump

-You can dig into wall sides mid-air.

-Hunger carries over to the next level.

Mondrianism by Jezzamon

A cross between a Mondrian painting and a piano.

Each color can move diagonal, horizontal, or vertical. You want to merge colors with other colors.

I was clicking around to move at first but then I realized you can just hold the mouse button down and kind of roll around, which feels a lot nicer.

Movement generates music–slow, halting tones of trial and error turning into rippling melodies of discovery.

Minimal 2 Player Game by NiallM

Just a simple game of Pong.

OR IS IT

Some of the most fun I’ve had with a two player game for a while.

Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner by bananafishtoday

A conversation with your wagon buddy as you ride across the post-apocalyptic countryside, and maybe it gets kind of serious.

The cool thing is that Breakfast is all dialogue. No scenery, just two lines, you and your partner, painting a world through words alone.

Like Conversations With My Mother (both were made independent of each other), you tweak words then push the scene forward by clicking a symbol. One link, many possibilities–ranging from breakfast to how you spend the rest of your life.

Mandala by arrogant.gamer

Mandala isn’t here anymore. Just the idea of it.

It was an old Japanese house.

the game is about the effect of tourism on the beautiful place of the world. Mandala is a curious, tiny world that begs to be explored… but the more people enjoy and explore it, the more damage they do.

Electronic media is pretty fucking immortal by default. Once it gets out there, it’s linked, reblogged, excerpted, mirrored, cached, entombed in the Wayback Machine. If you’re an American, your tweets are buried in the Library of Congress. After a certain point, you couldn’t delete yourself if you tried.

Traditional media has all these preservation needs–storing manuscripts out of sunlight, installing paintings in carefully curated spaces. Entropy in games, on the other hand, is an act of deliberation by the creator.

A game that fades like sidewalk chalk.

By Jeremy Laird on May 12th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Remember our gaming rig give away in January? It took a little while to pull all the pieces together and get the kits out to our winners. But it was quite a haul – a package including our favourite CPU, motherboard and graphics card combo – and well worth the wait. The lucky so and soes who won have had their booty for a few months now, so we thought we’d drop in and find out what life is like in the pixel-pumping fast lane…

Just to recap – and to give credit where its due from our immensely generous benefactors – the two prize kits contained the following unbeatable gaming goodness:

Intel Core i5-3570K CPU
Asus P8Z77-V PRO Thunderbolt motherboard
PNY Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 graphics

Don’t cry for David
All of which adds up to what remains the sweet spot for gaming grunt. So what of our winners? First, may we introduce David Agustín Dominguez, he of sunny Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. As our overseas winner, we had to leap a few logistical hurdles, negotiate some customs red tape. But eventually, it all arrived.

David’s previous rig was actually far from shabby. Core i5-3450, Asus H61 and Radeon HD 6770 have the makings of a nicely configured mid-range machine. Would the new clobber give his games tangibly more graphical gumption? Over to David:

“The new rig is a lot faster in the graphics department. The new CPU is also faster, too, and I can overclock it now as the new mobo and CPU allow that.

This is David’s serious face

“I’ve tested Crysis 1, Warhead and Crysis 2 and now I can play all of them at 60fps with maximum detail. The new Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and Metro 2033 also run like heaven. I tried Tomb Raider and Metro with my old card and couldn’t keep a steady frame rate unless I turned off AA and DX11 effects.

“I never finished Crysis 2 but now I’m on my way thanks to the new rig. Basically, I can now turn everything up in every game, something that I couldn’t even dream about before.”

Back in Blighty…
A happy customer, I think you’ll agree. And what of our UK winner? We’re kind souls, so we won’t mention names (we know who you are and where you live!), but we haven’t been able to get in touch with our UK winner, save to confirm he got the kit.

Did it go on eBay? Is he simply too busy playing Quake III at 1,700 frames per second? We may never know (but we’d still like to hear – it’s not too late to get in touch!).

Anyway, there you have it. Read RPS and all your games will look awesome. Or something like that. There’s nothing confirmed yet, but as things went pretty smoothly I’ve been giving some thought to another prizetastic give away. So keep your scanners peeled. Last time around it all happened very quickly…

Members of the singing duo Simon & Garfunkel.

By Megan Farokhmanesh on May 12, 2013 at 11:00a

All profits made by Diablo 3 players who exploited the gold-multiplying bug will be donated to charity, production director John Hight announced via Battle.net.

Hight addressed the recent bug, unleashed after the game's 1.0.8 patch went live, that allowed players to duplicate gold from stacks of 1 million to 10 million through the real-money Auction House. Hight wrote that the team will ensure that all "legitimate transactions" will proceed as usual, and that players who did not take advantage of the bug will be allowed to keep their items, gold and money from sales.

"We'll also be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players — including all of their sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee — to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals," Hight wrote.

According to Hight, only a small number of players had the funds to take advantage of the bug, and "only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain." Anyone found exploiting the bug has been banned or had their account rolled back, effectively deleting their progress since the 1.0.8 update.

Diablo 3's Auction Houses were brought back online late Friday night. The team will continue to remove duplicated gold from the game's economy rather than doing a complete rollback, which would bring the servers down and delete all player progress. According to Hight, more than 85 percent of the duplicate gold has already been removed.

Thanks for the tip, John.

By Michael McWhertor on May 09, 2013 at 10:44p

Valve added support for the Oculus Rift VR headset to its landmark first-person shooter Half-Life 2 in the latest update to the game that also added support for SteamPipe, Steam's new content distribution system.

Joe Ludwig, the Valve programmer who lead development of Oculus Rift support for Team Fortress 2, announced the feature on the Oculus developer forums. The virtual reality option for Half-Life 2 is included in the game's opt-in beta version, and Ludwig says it should ship "to everybody in a few weeks."

"This port is a bit more raw than TF2 was when it shipped," Ludwig explained, "so we would appreciate hearing about any bugs you find. Just like in TF2 this mode is experimental, so we really want to hear what you think."

Ludwig reports a few known issues, including problems with the zoomed-in UI and that the HUD is "dim and hard to read."

Valve introduced support for the Oculus Rift VR headset to Team Fortress 2 in March. Ludwig said at GDC that the developer is still experimenting with implementing the headset into its games, development that comes with challenges related to UI, motion sickness and position of elements like targeting reticules. Support for other Valve titles, like Portal and Left 4 Dead, has also been tested.

• Source
• Oculus Developer Forums