Truth be told, I have never played a Castlevania game. Just haven’t gotten round to one of ’em yet! Symphony of the Night is probably more my speed over the original games, but I do see their importance too of course. However, what I have played, at least a little bit of, is a game that is very derivative of OG platformer except for the fact you can see the entire, 8-bit level at once: Schattenjäger.
Back in October, three weeks out from its release date, Yacht Club Games’ first completely new game since the original Shovel Knight, Mina the Hollower, was indefinitely delayed. It still doesn’t have a release date, and now in a new report and interview with the studio, it’s sounding like the success of Mina is a “make-or-break” moment for Yacht Club Games.
Bloody waiters. Asking you what you’d like to eat after you waltz into the restaurant at which they’re employed. The absolute cheek of it. Why can’t they just ingest my money and spit a vaguely edible chocolate bar out of their belly button? This is the central philosophy which serves as the “touchstone” of BioShock creator Ken Levine’s Judas and its protagonist, Judas.
Yep, there’s another dev blog out for the BioShocky FPS in which you’ll run around a colony ship and gradually force someone to dislike you so much they go full villain.
The Soulslike is dead. The age of the Souplike has begun. It’s been going for decades, in fact. Indie developer Kite Line has just published Soup Rooms – a sequel of sorts to dong yarhalla’s videogame concept album from 2007, in which you visit small square rooms with feverdream aesthetics and a peculiar entity in the middle.
What was I doing back in 2007? Alas, I was not playing Soup. There’s a high probability that I cooked soup in 2007, but it wouldn’t have been very interesting soup. It would not have featured any spirit wolves, whiny fallen clouds, consumptive Casio men, “boinglers”, or Willem Dafoes.
To successfully deliver presents to every child on Earth within a single Christmas eve, Santa Claus would need to travel in the region of half the speed of light – enough to vaporise the flesh and disintegrate the sleighs of mere mortals. He’d therefore appreciate the sheer go-fastness of the roguelite running game that’s blasting out of door #3.
The $55 billion leveraged buyout which will see Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner become the new owners of EA will reportedly lead to the Saudi Public Investment Fund owning a whopping 93.4 percent of the game publishers. That’s assuming the deal goes through as planned.
Arc Raiders developers Embark have shed a bit of light on how their looter-shooter changed after shifting away from the free-to-play business model. Apparently, it made Arc “drastically easier” to design, in the sense that the Swedish studio felt less pressure to turn players into whales.
One of the first “moving pictures” ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of “chronophotographs” of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge’s work thanks to Jordan Peele’s film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner’s Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.
Muybridge – who, incidentally, murdered his wife’s lover, which doesn’t seem wholly irrelevant here – captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge’s breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex – and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.
‘If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools’ is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia’s cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software’s excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia’s Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.