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I’m on a one-man mission to destroy your productivity. Yesterday I offered you Scrambled Maps, which is good for fifteen minutes of not working.
Today I offer Alphaguess, a once-a-day browser puzzle game in which you must guess a word. With every incorrect guess you make, the game tells you whether the correct answer comes before or after it alphabetically.
Avatar: The Last Airbender hasn’t had much luck when it comes to adaptations, whether to film or to video games. Now Paramount Game Studios and Saber Interactive are going to take a new swing at it. The pair have announced an action RPG set in the “Avatar Legends universe”, the broader world and timeline that The Last Airbender and Legend Of Korra take place within.
I’m usually a little suspicious of anything that winkingly describes itself as “very normal”. It’s got Mental Baz energy to me. You’ve met mental Baz, right? He’s mental, he is! Has half a lemonade shandy with lunch sometimes, and wears one of those t-shirts that look like a tuxedo. Absolute mentalist! Anyway, after reviewing Grunn last week it’s thankfully far more interesting and creative than poor old Baz, who’s honestly just a bit shy and actually really nice when you get past the facade. Grunn just released today, and my high level tempter is that it’s a little bit like Outer Wilds, just with all the touching wonder replaced by spooky whimsy. Here’s a trailer:
Ubisoft have released a big new Star Wars Outlaws patch which, amongst other things, tries to fix and improve the open world game’s stealth. I’ve seen, read, heard, intuited and telepathically detected a lot of complaints about Outlaws stealth, ranging from “it doesn’t look realistic when she punches out stormtroopers through their blaster-resistant hats” to “please remove the hide-and-seek entirely, I wishly merely to pew-pew”. Seems likely that the patch won’t lay all these grievances to rest, to say nothing of the other problems people have with Outlaws. But I’m always interested in how developers Find The Fun in stealth mechanics, given that they are very easily unfun.
I miss the height of Wordle mania not because of the game itself, which I still play on occasion, but because of the torrent of delightful, experimental browser-based puzzle games that followed in its wake. Worldle, Octordle, Moviedle, Waffle, Who Are Ya?, Cloudle and many, many more were a gold rush of bandwagon jumpers I was fully onboard with.
Scrambled Maps takes me back to those good old days. It bears little relation to Wordle, but it is a browser-based puzzle game that offers one new challenge each day, and it is just as delightful a distraction.
“Turn-based” games are, as we know, all derived from Turn, the strategy game about a dog digging for coins released for the BBC Micro in 1987. Prior to this, all actions in games simply took place simultaenously, as fast as the player or players could make them.
Fast forward to today and many games are now “turn-based”, from Tactics Ogre Reborn to Age Of Wonders 4 to chess. In celebration of their orderliness, Steam is currently running a turn-based RPG fest featuring discounts and demos for “turn-based games where you grow stronger with every battle”.
Yesterday, Valve dropped a Steam client beta update focused largely on Game Recording – the beta version’s recently added clip-capturing utility. It’s a pretty wide-spanning array of improvements, adding support for ultrawide monitor resolutions up to 32:9, the high-quality H.265 (HEVC) video codec – on Windows only for now, apologies to the Steam Deck – and the option to “record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.”
Out 17th October on Steam, Mask Quest is a platform game in which you hold and release a button to refill your character’s lungs while dodging police batons, bullets, gas grenades and drones. Neglect to do so, and you’ll pop your clogs. It’s the kind of mechanical tomfoolery you’d associate with Peter Molydeux, but in this case, it’s all the fine work of Stephen’s Sausage Roll developer increpare and Quadrant developer undef. The developers have somehow gotten 50 levels out of this meme-ish premise, and it looks like quite an elaborate hop-and-bopper with some less-cheerful political overtones. Here’s the trailer.
As I type these words, specialist wifeguy assessor Brendy is rambling through the fog of Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Knowing Brendy, he’ll be sauntering down Neely Street like a gentleman dandy from 1920s Oxford, throwing out his cuffs and elbows and winking merrily at all the shambling depression metaphors who are trying to chew his legs off. While we await his verdict, here’s another excerpt from a chat with Bloober earlier this summer, in which I pop the extremely imaginative question of what they’ll do after remaking Silent Hill 2. The answer, in brief, is more games with a manual third-person view that rely on ambience, suspense and the thrill of the unknown, rather than monsters going “boo!”
Edwin and I have a sort of running ‘joke’, in that whenever we’ve got him down to review something, the game gets delayed. Sometimes, it gets delayed multiple times. We’ve taken to calling it “The Curse”, such is its power to utterly obliterate video game development, by virtue of it being a phantom that floats into PC vents and fries motherboards. I think the curse has evolved then, as we hadn’t even discussed 11 bit’s upcoming third-person management adventure The Alters… but Edwin had played it at this year’s Geoffcom. And yes, it has been delayed.
