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KIBORG: Arena feels like a throwback in several ways that I quite enjoy. It’s a free prologue to the upcoming cyberpunk puncher KIBORG. The titular arena is a large room in which you, a large man, bash a large amount of enemies. You have to punch a gong between waves to trigger the next, and this struck me as a nice pre-emptive nudge that every problem you face in Kiborg can be solved by rapidly moving your fist towards offending objects, which turned out not to be too far off the mark.
Valve have made no secret of their plans to make SteamOS – the Linux-based operating system that powers the Steam Deck – available to other games-playing devices, including rival handhelds. After a recent beta update mentioned adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s inputs, The Verge confirmed with Valve that SteamOS support for non-Steam Deck portables is still very much in the works. The Deck’s long-promised dual booting capability, on the other hand, sounds further down the to-do list.
It’s been looking grim for Super Earth recently. I mean, not really. Multiplayer shooty Helldivers 2 is still sitting around 35,000 concurrent players, which is perfectly respectable, if only around 10% of its peak back in April. Still, a clutch of disgruntled ‘divers have recently found a novel way to protest an increasingly unpopular series of nerfs: laying down their guns and letting the bots take the damn planet.
“If Super Earth wanted to remain safe, they would stop nerfing our guns,” reads one comment on the subreddit, in response to a post titled “Let the bots advance. Let the Super Earth burn.” It seems to have picked up some steam inside the actual game, too. As of earlier this week, there’s only around a thousand players actively trying to stop the bots advancing perilously close to the home planet, via Gamesradar.
Whether this is all massively overblown for the sake of a dramatic yarn or not, Arrowhead themselves have taken note of player concerns over nerfs. Yesterday, game director Mikael Eriksson unveiled a plan for the next 60 days, directly addressing player feedback over the controversial ‘Escalation of Freedom’ update.
Finding and sharing Free Stuff is one of the time-honoured duties of the video game journalist or SEO-monger. Back when I was OXM’s online editor, “free Xbox games” was one of our golden Google pillars, the other two being “Minecraft Xbox 360 update” and “Skyrim something something”. Well, uncle Valve has just rudely torpedoed that ancient investigative initiative by adding a Trending Free tab to the Steam frontpage, encompassing prologues, demos, free-to-play games and that most treasured of jewels, a full free game with no monetisation elements, such as Grimhook.
Do not cry for us pitiful electronic scribblers, crowded on our melting internet icebergs. Play free games instead! Thanks to that new tab, I’ve just discovered a demo for neato wide-format tower defender Frontline Crisis. Hah, that’ll keep the awareness of steady livelihood erosion at bay.
Aside from being a game where you run around a shopping mall murdering the living dead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 is a clownish satire of sleazy tabloid photojournalism. It expresses this by way of its scoring system, where you earn “Prestige points” for snapping pictures that fit one of five categories: “Brutal” scenes of characters being slain; moments of “Horror”, such as the spectacle of an approaching horde; comical “Outtakes”, like characters caught in bizarre poses; moments of “Drama”, such as people reacting to discoveries; and “Erotic” photos of women alive or undead, which range from snaps of exposed underwear to close-ups of cleavage.
The Erotica tag has, however, been chopped from the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, in what Capcom gingerly suggest isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”, but expressive of the view that earning points from such photos is not “an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive”.
The Steam Deck’s competitors, whether they’re the old guard Ayaneo family, the luxe Asus ROG Ally X, or the shapeshifting Lenovo Legion Go, usually share the same attack line: they can play more of your games. The Deck’s compatibility issues aren’t nearly as issue-some as they were at launch, but between its Linux-based SteamOS and its relatively mild processing power, but it is true that beefier Windows handhelds will more likely cater to your entire cross-launcher library.
Unless, that is, you get something else to run them for you. Streaming games on the Steam Deck has emerged as a nifty workaround for the portable PC’s lingering compatibility woes, making even officially unsupported games playable. Usually with much better performance, too, as the actual rendering work is done remotely – what you see on the Deck’s screen is basically a video feed of that remote device’s display output, with your control input beamed the other way via a low-latency connection. And because you’re not using SteamOS or the internal hardware to actually run the game, it’s not bound by their limits.
As long-time readers will know, I’m a piteous mark for weird little game guys. I’m currently trying to puzzle out what the titular Mother Machine in The Curious Expedition studio Maschinen-Mensch’s upcoming co-op platformer refers to. But, if it’s a reference to forming a parental bond with what the game has saw-me-comingishly named “chaos gremlins”, I’m way ahead of you.
Ah, the press release speaketh! Probably should have read some more before I began exclaiming “Chaos Gremlins!” over and over. Have an announcement trailer.
Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014’s Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone – a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station’s worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!
Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016’s Don’t Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus – the seventh and avowedly “back to basics” Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature’s dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien’s Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly’s work, he’s filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.
Everyone loved Half-Life yet no one in 1998 was brave enough to say: “Okay, but what if this was an early access crafting survival game voiced by a bunch of New Zealanders?” Those 90s cowards. Abiotic Factor is the courageous game that has been correcting this historic oversight. It’s fun, and the fun just got funnerer. The “Crush Depth” update, released yesterday, adds a heap of new areas to the game’s messed-up scientific facility, including a dangerous Security Sector and a vast reservoir zone called the Hydroplant. On top of that there are new weapons, tools, workbenches, drivable vehicles, fishing rods, and quite a bit more. It’s all shown off in the trailer below.
Valve’s third-person hero shooter Deadlock hasn’t been officially revealed yet, but thousands of you unscrupulous devils have been playing it thanks to stolen development builds. Speculation abounds that these “leaks”, coupled with Valve’s obstinate silence about it, are a calculated publisher psi-op. Are they deliberately letting people play the game early so as to temper the marketing rollout in some way? Perhaps handle any early player criticism under cover of non-announcement? It seems unlikely, but as other writers have pointed out, this is Valve, unaccountable elder god of PC gaming. I guess we should be thankful it isn’t another Half-Life tease.
