Auto Added by WPeMatico
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! This week, it’s writer on Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Hindsight, Life is Strange Season 2 and more, Emma Kidwell! Cheers Emma! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Back in June, Edwin covered One Million Checkboxes, a website with one million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with any change visible to all other visitors of the site. It became an obsession for some in the two weeks the website was online, as players fought to fill all the boxes, or undo the work of their peers.
The fight was far more complicated than it seemed, as the developer recently explained, with some players finding ways to encode hidden messages in the checkboxes.
Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game has been delayed into early 2025. The cosy life sim set in the home of the hobbits had initially been aiming for a late 2024 release, but developers Weta Workshop Game Studio announced they need more time.
In V Rising, you’re a fledgling vampire on a mission to become absolute bossferatu of a Gothic open world. You get a Diablo-ish combat system, the ability to shapeshift into a spider, and a whole castle to prance around in, crooning at the moon. I like this premise almost as much as I dislike the fact that V Rising is also a survival game, in which you must fell trees and master a crafting system like a common turnip farmer.
What do we hope for when our interest in a game is almost perfectly balanced by our disinterest? We hope that the developers will treat us to a free-to-play weekend, in which our perhaps-unfounded reservations might be strategically offset by the endorphin rush of not having paid any goddamn money. This, V Rising creators Stunlock have now done. The game is free to download and play on Steam from right now until Monday, 16th September at 5pm UK or 10am PST.
After PowerWash Simulator’s jet to success, it was inevitable, really. Whitethorn Games and North Star Video Games have only come out with a rival: Spray Paint Simulator. In it, you get out your spray painter and “shshshshshs” different colours of paint onto various surfaces. For whatever reason, the universe this takes place in doesn’t seem to value brushes or those rolly mops. “No”, it says, kicking your brush into the sun. “Spray or nay”.
I could have described the multiplayer racing game Faaast Penguin a lot of ways. It is Fall Guys meets Snowboard Kids. It is Diddy Kong Racing but all the courses are water slides. It’s Cool Runnings but there are 40 penguins instead of four Jamaicans. Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch. But basically, yes, this brightly coloured free-to-play knockout racer feels like that one Super Mario 64 level where you race the big penguin down a slide, only this time there are a ton of other players trying to beat you to the secret shortcut. It’s coming out next week.
Haha. Hoho. Yes. Hehe. Yes. This rules. This rules so hard. Portal To The Cosmobeat is a rhythm dance battler where you copy the moves of your opponents by controlling each of your limbs, and your head, with a separate key. If you look down at your keyboard right now, you’ll notice your W, A, D, Z and X form a five pointed star – with the W key a bit off, granted. That’s you, that is. You hold down the limbs you want to wiggle, then control them with your mouse. It’s simple, silly, and very fun. Here’s a tray-tray:
Annapurna Interactive – the publisher behind games such as Cocoon, Stray, and Neon White – have seen their entire staff resign after an internal dispute this month, via Bloomberg.
The resignations came in the wake of a dispute between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and Annapurna studio head Megan Ellison. As Bloomberg report, negotiations were taking place to “spin off the video-game division as an independent entity.” After failing to reach an agreement, Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, resulting in the resignation of Gary and “other executives.” Further resignations followed, with a reported two dozen other staff leaving the company.
There’s no greater tool in video games than a grappling hook. 2022’s Grapple Dog knew that, making it the core ability of its platforming. The ability returns in sequel Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines, out today, although there’s now a second character to play as for those fools who favour shooting over hooking.
There seem to be an infinite number of video game showcase streams these days, each one promising to be full of exciting indie games. Whatever my feelings about the entertainment value of these streams, I can’t deny I watch all of them, or that they introduce me to games I might have otherwise missed.
Next on the calendar is the Convegence games showcase on September 26th, which is a new event that – hey, what a twist – promises to feature exciting indie games. It does have some recognisable publishers onboard, including Secret Mode, Thunderful, and Kepler, among others.
