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One of the announcements coming out of PAX this year has been that of an upcoming Super Meat Boy game, due to release next year. It’s surprising for two reasons, the first being that no one saw it coming and the second? Well Team Meat have said that the new game will capture the feeling of the original but without the use of “multiple buttons”.
Quite what this means isn’t yet clear, but given that the game will release on Steam and also mobiles and tablets it seems to suggest that the game will support touch controls upon release and that’s a bit confusing given that Super Meat Boy was all about timing and precision and such things are a lot harder to do with touch control.
Otherwise the game will feature randomly generated levels over six chapters, twice as many bosses as the original game and an ‘endless’ mode, whatever that entails. There’s no concrete release date, but they aim to have it out “sometimes next year”.
Steam’s policy of refunding can be a bit of a nightmare at the best of times. Now the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) are planning to take Valve to court over the policy which they argue is in “breach of the Australian Consumer Law for businesses”. Pretty serious stuff.
The list of points that make up their case include the belief that Valve is seeking to modify guarantees and would not refund games that the customer hadn’t attempted to sort their differences out with the publisher or developer first (and weren’t Valve games themselves). Australian consumers have a right to a refund if a product does not work as advertised and that the “allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law”.
On their part Valve have stated that they’re working with the ACCC to resolve the matter while still continuing to bring their services to all gamers around the world who love gaming through their platform.
Oh no! You came to work 0.03 seconds late. Now all the good, safe jobs are taken. Now you, a lowly cleaning robot, is tasked to collect precious materials from various worlds in a sector that is about to go Kaboom! And if that isn’t enough, these planets are crawling with dangerous rogue robots that are out to destroy everything in their path. But not all is bad, you happen to convince some fleshy meatbags to do a lot of the hard labor for you. Just be careful not to let any harm come to them. The Boss’ wife thinks they are cute.
Freaking Meatbags is a real-time strategy game that combines base building, tower defense, work management, and some shooter-like action. Most levels in the game start out with you landing on a planet with a select few meatbags you chose to take with you from previous worlds. Given limited space on your ship you are only allowed to take a small number, the rest you just leave on a planet when you are done with it. Now it is your job to manage where the meatbags go and what they do. Most of the time you will have them just collecting materials, sometimes you have them explore secrets to find useful items, and other times you may just have them put into a machine which mixes their DNA to form another meatbag with their combined stats.
As they continue to work and work they gain experiences and increase stats which make them work harder and faster. Of course you can also alter them a bit to make them better if you think they are too lazy. One of the first things you can do is implant a brain slug to make them less likely to slack off and more likely to work harder. Another thing you can do is as you travel from planet to planet you sometimes come across other aliens. Some of them have laser eyes, some of them explode on contact, and some even have rocket launchers. Somehow you convince these aliens to help you and if you combine their DNA with your meatbags, you can create more useful meatbags that can work harder as well as protect the base and themselves. But remember you can only take a few of the meatbags with you to the next planet so choose wisely.
Now, while your meatbags get to work, you have to build up your base and your defenses. As the game progresses and you collect money you will be able to unlock some useful structures that you can build as you collect the resources for them. Some of these items are not available in the game as of yet but will be put in soon. These items include items that help your base run better like: jump pads to help the meatbags move faster, a mining drill, and barracks to hold more meatbags. There are also items which can be used to defend your base from the rogue robots like: turrets, rocket launchers, and metal barricades which all can be upgraded as you progress. You will need to be careful with how you use your resources, for when night comes, the waves of enemies come as well. You don’t want to be caught without some sort of defense or your base, you, or even your meatbags can be in trouble.
This is where the real time strategy comes into play. Sometimes there can be multiple places the rogue robots can come from. Once they show you where, you need to block off the area and place weapons to try to keep them back and destroy them before they reach your base. On some planets it is straight forward, but others give you limited space to build. Most structures cannot be built on water or certain terrains. Luckily as you progress you would hopefully create some meatbags that can help defend your base.
In between some of these normal levels of base defense and material collecting are levels where you are beamed down to a planet where there is no place to build a base. In these cases you are tasked with finding stray materials on your own as well as destroy all the rogue robots that seem to plague these planets. Luckily you are able to find some turret guns which follow you around that you can use to defend yourself. These guns are powerful but can’t fully protect you for if a robot comes to close to you it explodes and damages you a lot.
So far this game has been quite fun. It is a nice twist on the tower defense genre that also throws in some action in there as well. This game is still in Early Access Beta, so some features are not yet implemented. They seem to be thinking of adding another mode or two as well as new items and DNA mixes. All in all I can’t wait to see where this game goes in the near future and can’t wait to play more of it.
A few days ago creator of twin-stick shooter Zenzizenzic announced that his game was now to be published by Adult Swim Games, a name that comes with quite the positive reputation.
Zenzizenzic is the latest game from Dutch developer Ruud Koorevaar, following on from Super House of Dead Ninjas and Jazzpunk. The game recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the funds needed to finish the game’s development and get it onto Steam. There will also be a new gamemode called ‘Macro’ added to the finished game now, despite that stretch goal not having originally been reached.
We’ve been watching this game and it does look like it’s bound to be a good one. Are you looking forward to being able to play it?
PC ports are a bit of a double-edged blade. We want good games to come to our preferred platform, but at the same time porting over games from console to PC can sometimes leave us with what feels like a sub-standard experience, especially if time isn’t put into properly optimising the game for the new hardware or re-mapping the controls comfortably.
However, the port of Dead Rising 3 is set to be different. Among the things done to it to make it a good port, is to allow full control of the graphical options, mod support, the ability to remove the 30 FPS cap and much more alongside the usual tweaks and bug fixes. An interview with Gamespot had producer Jon Airhart tell all about the port.
“For PC, that meant we needed to go back and put extra work into optimizing the game for the full range of PC gaming hardware out on the market,” he said, adding that although 30 FPS will be the cap players with beefier computers will have the option to remove it and get higher framerates as a result. He also spoke about officially allowing mod support, “Dead Rising is the ultimate sandbox, and if modders decide to turn their creative talents to DR3 (which I hope they do) the sky is the limit, with combo vehicles, DR3 has blurred the lines between a vehicle and a weapon, so I expect to see an even wider variety of crazy creations.”
Dead Rising 3: Apocalypse Edition will come with all the DLC packs for the game, as well as being released on Steam and all the additional things such as trading cards that brings too. ~It will be released September 5th.
