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Before the EA Star Wars Battlefront that released recently was a project, there were rumours that a sequel to the last two Battlefront games made by Free Radical was in the works. LucasArts denied that it existed when the DICE version was given the go ahead, but some fans decided that if the supposed game would never see light of day through EA’s hands, they’d do it themselves.
The fan-project tilted “Galaxy in Turmoil” has been in development at Russian outfit Frontwire Studios, and has been freely billed as the remake of the Battlefront III that never was. They plan to offer the game for free, but there’s still some tricky hot water the studio could get themselves into with Disney over the fan-game. However, in an odd turn of events Valve have already agreed to distribute the game on their digital Steam store.
“It is with great pleasure that as of today I am able to officially announce that Frontwire Studios has officially signed a distribution deal with Steam/Valve for the game Galaxy in Turmoil,” revealed Frontwire president Tony Romanelli. “By Steam agreeing to ship Galaxy in Turmoil we are not only adding more validation and awareness to the project by opening up the game to a whole new audience, we’re also cementing Frontwire Studios’ reputation as an up and coming developer with the opportunity to now publish our games on Steam in the future. This will help us ultimately achieve our goal of making the games that you, the community want.”
While admitting he had “mild concerns” over Disney moving to halt the project, he seems pleased that Valve has decided as they have saying that it means that Valve “clearly lacks the same concern.” He has encouraged others to take a chance on the project by taking a leaf from Valve’s book.
“Take a deep breath and just take a chance on our project. In the end, it’ll pay off for everyone involved. Especially the community.”
It remains to be seen of course if Galaxy in Turmoil will make it to the Steam Store, as the threat of Disney forcing the project’s halt is still a very real possibility at this stage.
Steam Spy is a site of statistics. Using the publicly viewable stats provided by Steam, it’s often used as a judge by many of how well roughly games are doing. It tracks the number of owners of a game, when the owners bought the game and so on. However it’s not perfect.
Because of this, publisher company Paradox Interactive have asked Steam Spy to remove the data on their games from the site. The owner of the site, Sergey Galyonkin, has complied saying that Paradox has a right to ask for the data to come down, even if he doesn’t think it’s any danger to the company.
For their part, Paradox’s reasons for these actions were explained on Twitter through the account of one Shams Jorjani, a business guy for the company.
It’s a fair judgement and Jorjani went on to say that he has seen many business plans from devs that were based on inaccurate information gained from Steam Spy, saying that the assumption made is “Owners x full price = tons of money – please give us $$$” on their part. Galyonkin responded with a tweet asking if that data should really be removed just because some people didn’t know how to read it properly.
Either way, while Paradox won’t be the first to ask for the removal of their games’ data, they are the first major publisher to ask to have it taken down. It’s unclear if others might try as well if they’ve things to hide, but less data makes a resource like Steam Spy a lot less useful.
Dead Island 2’s had quite the journey already through development, and it’s still not even close to release. Originally announced a few years ago, it was in the hands of Yager Development for a while. That was until publishers of the game Deep Silver announced that there’d been a split between the two companies citing that “respective visions of the project fell out of alignment”. Earlier this year we were told that Sumo Digital were now looking after the game, but with its history you can see why yesterday’s disappearance of the game’s Steam Listing caused more than a few people to question if the game was still in development.
No worries though, Deep Silver has assured fans that this does not mean a game cancellation. When asked about the disappearance Deep Silver said “Dead Island 2 is in development with Sumo Digital. Once we have new details to share, we will do so.” It doesn’t tell us a lot, but it does seem that the game is not dead.
The vanishing Steam listing was first noticed by NeoGAF yesterday and alongside the speculation of cancellation some people theorised that the listing was only down while Deep Silver and Sumo revised it to reflect the new direction Sumo Digital will be taking the game. Not that we know much about that new direction yet.
With E3 coming up, maybe we’ll see the new details of the game there.
I remember when I was a young boy. At this age, that is a distinct achievement but back then we didn’t have computer games to keep us occupied. At the centre of every boys collection was the toy car. Usually made by Matchbox, Hot Wheels or Corgi, these stalwarts of an 80’s childhood are still popular, even today. In 1986, however, the toy car market was rocked by the introduction of Micro Machines, toy cars so small that they were about the size of a pencil sharpener. This turned toy car collecting in to a hobby you could keep in your pocket and so popular was the Micro Machines phenomenon that a computer game was bound to follow. Sure enough, in 1991, Codemasters released the first Micro Machines game as a top down racer. It sold well enough to spawn three sequels and two spin offs, although the last of these games was in 2007.
This has paved the way for the team at Playrise Digital to release their take on the mini-combat-racer genre with Table Top Racing: World Tour (TTR:WT). At the time of writing, this game is available for free to anyone who has a Playstation Plus account and with a 15% discount on Steam. In fact, there aren’t many platforms this game isn’t on. It has even made its way on to most tablets.
On first playing, you might be surprised at why anyone would like this game. The cars seem slow and difficult to handle and the pickups not particularly visually attractive or even enticing, being blue question marks sitting in little bubbles. There is no handbrake turning, there is no jump, although you can fit tyres to help you drift. Like a real car, however, what’s really important is what’s under the hood. As you progress through the levels you can purchase upgrades for your vehicle. They’re not expensive and with the amount of times you play to get 1st position in all of the tracks, most things will be easily available to you fairly quickly. Upgrading your car is only part of the fun, however. The skills you need to start achieving in this game are much the same as you would in a traditional racer. You have to know what your best lines are if you want to make the best times. Usually, this isn’t as important in combat-racers like this, the pickups and attacks being a larger part of the action. Here the pickups could easily be an afterthought to what is a fairly good racing game that doesn’t bother with the hard numbers, like a proper simulator would.
That said, the pickups are still fun. There are several available from rockets to targeted rockets. There is the ever popular oil slick, the bomb and a really nice frost ray that turns your opponents in to blocks of ice. To that end, however, none of these items are particularly special, although the ice was my favourite as it could take out more than one player at a time.
The AI in the game works well with the surroundings. There were times, when I was in the pack, I really felt like I was racing hard against another player, and the cars will try to push you in to obstacles, or off the edge of tables, in order to get past you. The largest selling point for this game is, however, the multiplayer. Gamers can set up tracks the way they want and include the specific options they want in the game before others are invited in (joining through the simple multiplayer menu). You can see exactly how many people are already waiting to start a match, so finding people to play with is pretty straight forward. Once in, you’ll be able to compete with people of different skill levels, really helping you to up your game. Don’t have a car of the right class? Don’t worry because one will be provided for you.
Multiplayer is actually really fun and it makes the game a little more dynamic. This is where I learned about some of the shortcuts and some good tactics for knocking other players off the table or in to obstacles. It really does add something to the game although one of the ‘hosts’ of a game seemed to be suffering from lag, which made playing difficult for everyone.
Of course, the big thing about this game is the setting. There aren’t many locations yet (a total of five) but these are broken down in to 20 tracks, each with challenging jumps, passageways and shortcuts for you to find. One of these locations is a Yo! Sushi restaurant and I must admit to having a few pangs of excitement as we rushed around the semi-familiar setting. It’s actually a really nice touch from something that could otherwise have been a bit of a corporate grab and something missing from the Micro Machines games that I played. Let’s not fool ourselves, the biggest sell for this game is that the cars are very small in a big and familiar world. The Yo! Sushi location really cements this in to your consciousness. I do wonder how international audiences would take to this, however, as the company is a distinctly British one. Generally, you won’t be disappointed with the locations here and it is clear that a lot of thought has gone in to them.
Of course, this leads us in to talking about the graphics. I rather liked them even though they are a little bit plastic in their look and some of the animation could be a little smoother. What they have done, however, is really fill the environment with well created elements that are reminiscent of an attic with toys in, a yacht, a junk yard or a garage. What can I say, it works.
I really liked this game and it is one that I think I will return to from time to time. It’s an easy game to pick up and put down, something simple to give you a break from the vast fantasy lands or sprawling battle arenas of other titles. You find the fun with TTR:WT because it’s a good racer without being a simulator. As such, it’s much more accessible than something like Gran Turismo but without the quirkiness of Mario Cart. A micro-combat-racer for a more discerning gamer. This won’t give you the pangs of excitement that the old Micro Machines might have done or the true to life racing experience from F1 Simulator, but it can get your adrenaline pumping. I’d really recommend getting the game and giving it a go. Even at its full RRP, it’s not that expensive and will give you hours of enjoyment. Overall, the game is well worth three and a half corgi miniatures out of five.
Dead Island 2 has not had a smooth ride since it was shown off with this trailer back at E3 2014 with this trailer:
The troubles seemed to start in April 2015 when it was announced that the game would be delayed into 2016 for reasons unknown to the public. Delays like this aren’t too unusual though so no one really panicked too much. At least, until the publisher Deep Silver announced that they were parting ways with Yager Development, the studio that had been working on Dead Island 2. At the time they assured fans that they were still committed to working on the game and after a while, during which Techland expressed some interest in taking up the reins, it emerged that the game had been given over to Sumo Digital to work on earlier this year. So, it seemed that Dead Island 2 was still a live project.
Except now something odd has happened to the game’s listing on Steam, as noticed earlier by NeoGAF. Where once there was a listing there is now nothing, and on SteamDB it is only referred to as “Unknown App 268150”. This has of course fuelled speculation about what has happened and immediately people have assumed the worst – this can only mean that the game has been cancelled outright.
But wait, others have suggested that this is instead Deep Silver and Sumo Digital removing the old page in preparation for a ‘re-reveal’ of the game. After all, the old listing was based on the game that Yager had been making and their split did have “conflicting visions” listed as a reason for the parting so maybe Sumo’s ideas are shaping a new page that will be added onto Steam’s listings soon. SteamDB does also note that UnknownApp could mean that the listing is just no longer viewable by the public, so it could just be down while they re-do it.
Obviously, if there is any development on this story we’ll let you know but it is interesting…
Hopefully if they are doing a re-reveal the next trailer won’t be quite as blatant with the ‘turning’ of the character in the trailer… I still shudder thinking of it.
