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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I am ill, so no guest this week. To tide you over, here is a short excerpt from a story I started once about the redemptive power of forgiveness:
Industrial Annihilation is a mashup Planetary Annihilation (big robot armies do battle on a planet) with factory management such as Factorio (conveyor belts conveyor belts conveyor belts). When we last checked in with it back in January, it was funding via StartEngine with an ambitious eye towards a spring Early Access release.
Now it’s September and it’s just got done being successfully funded via Kickstarter, with a probably-still-ambitious eye towards an Early Access release before the end of 2024.
Shinji Mikami, founder of Tango Gameworks, thought the studio would be “safe as long as they continued to make Hi-Fi Rush games.” Mikami was asked about the studio’s closure by Microsoft earlier this year, and its revival under new owners Krafton at Gamescom last month.
After watching the announcement trailer for Whispers of the Eyeless, I have one request: please, do not have that voiceover in the full game. It is hammier than a hamster eating a ham sandwich in Hamburg during a performance of Hamlet. It starts with “The Whispers [of the Eyeless] call to me!!!” and does not improve from there. Beyond that, colour me fairly enthused.
I’ll admit it, I downloaded the free prologue for horror game Baby Blues Nightmares mostly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “utilize the unique abilities of a toddler”, encompassing “stealth gameplay”, “survival elements” and “upgradeable abilities”. It’s as though a toddler were actually an undersung class of special operator from a Tom Clancy shooter, rather than a wailing, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was a toddler once. Perhaps this is how he got started: escaping a smashed-up house full of roaming demon toys.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only widescreen. No ultrawide for the moment, sadly. As and when they add support for ultrawide monitors, perhaps they should call it “ultramarinewide”. Ha ha! Ha. Anyway, here’s what’s coming in the first round of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 patches.
Not too long ago, Arrowhead dropped a vague list of improvements coming to Helldivers 2, as they admitted “inconsistencies” in their “approach to game balance and direction”. They’ve now published another blog post that torches the vagueness of the previous post with the righteously democratic flames of specificity. Overhauls to enemies are on the way, less-loved guns will be more effective, reworks to armor penetration and health values are on the boil, and they’re taking inspiration from “player fantasies” for certain weapons and stratagems. All of these tweaks are set to go live on the 17th September, so not long to wait.
About 12 years ago, we drew our breath in pain to report that Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne’s new “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” action-RPG was no more. “It was too big for a single person to make,” Byrne wrote at the time. “This is the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I fell out of love with the idea, just that I can’t physically do it.” That was then and this, thankfully, is now. Byrne has tentatively returned to the project and begun sharing screens on social media.
Black & White was a god game that frustrated more often than it delighted, but which was nevertheless delivered with enough verve and ambition to be worth playing. It’s a crying shame that it’s not currently available to buy anywhere digitally, presumably because the rights are soaked in a gutter between EA (the original publisher) and Microsoft (who bought and closed developers Lionhead).
If you do still own a physical copy of Black & White however, you might be interested in Openblack. It’s a fan-led project to create a modern, open source engine for running Black & White, and its first build was just released yesterday.
Every week of late I seem to pop up here with another new arcade racer to talk about, and well, I wouldn’t want to break the streak. This week’s new hotness is Parking Garage Rally Circuit, which is about powersliding around multi-storey car parks and is designed to look like a lost Sega Saturn game. It now has a release date: September 20th.
