Day 1 and 2 of the Hearthstone World Championship group stages have gone past already, half of the matches being played before Blizzcon to cut down the 16 player field down to just 8 to allow them to play in the big finals at Blizzcon itself next weekend. These two days were dedicated to setting up the matches that would not only decide matches for the next two days – it also served to knock out 4 of the players at the end of the second day.

The four regions; North America, Europe, China and Asia Pacific have each fielded some of their best players for matches that were streamed over Blizzard’s PlayHearthstone Twitch channel live. Divided into their four teams of four, going into the tournament while Europe were the favourites both the Asia Pacific and China teams proved hard to beat, with many of their players putting up difficult fights against their opponents and three of the four Asia Pacific players making it through their first matches.

The first day saw a lot more of one particular player per pair dominating their game of 3, with the very first match-up being a 3-0 sweep in favour of Thijs verses opponent NoTomorrow; while the second day saw matches going on a lot longer with many 3-2 matches especially during the four elimination matches which resulted in the losers having their tournament runs end at that point. The second day also saw a nail-biting final match between Neirea and Purple coming down to the very last turn and saw Purple’s Rogue deck pull out an amazing one-turn kill that amounted to more than 20 damage done to Neirea’s face, winning Purple the match.

Deck-wise despite the worry that Paladin Warrior decks would die out with the change to Warsong Commander, two of the Warrior decks used Paladin tactics to great effect. Also out there were decks for the lesser used classes: Shaman decks, Rogue decks and even a Priest deck from European player Thijs.  The most popular class by far was Druid with twelve of the sixteen fielding a Druid deck, and Paladin was also pretty popular with the Mysterious Challenger/Secrets Paladin deck being the favoured type of that deck. Another common deck types being used was the standard Freeze Mage set up containing cards like Frost Nova, Doomsayer and Alexstrasza which were commonly seen. Among all types of deck it was also common to see Piloted Shredders and Dr. Booms being played.

In the end the second day saw the end of the road for four players – NoTomorrow and LoveCX from China, Nias from North America and Neirea from Europe. This means that after two days only the Asia Pacific team had all players still in the competition to make it to Blizzcon.

There are of course two more days worth of matches to go, which will decide exactly which eight of the remaining twelve will be going to the final matches at Blizzcon next weekend. Day three will sort out four who will guarantee their place on the Blizzcon stage, and then the remaining spaces will be decided on the forth and final day on October 31st.

If you missed any of the matches so far, catch up at Blizzard’s Hearthstone Youtube with the posted VoDs so far.

Older media is very much in vogue right now. A lot of things are being revived, reworked or otherwise rebooted in some way, with varying levels of success and popularity. This situation is somewhat unique though – a game developed for the NES that was never released until its makers re-discovered it in their attic.

The 90s saw a lot of platformers made, one being the Dizzy series from the Oliver Twins which was quite popular. One such game was an NES game called Wonderland Dizzy, which due to a collapsing relationship with publisher Codemasters never made it to release and ended up in Philip Oliver’s attic.

Fast-forward 22 years and Philip Oliver found himself looking for some Dizzy props for an event, and ended up re-discovering the Dizzy game that never made it to shelves. With some reworking the Oliver Twins have managed to release the game now as a free browser game.

The filebox that contained the code did not contain the finished game, but did contain all the source code and graphics and with the help of Andrew Joseph, owner of Dizzy fan side Yolkfolk.com, and Lukasz Kur, a fan from Poland a new finished game was produced. Kur managed to put together a playable ROM image of the game with tweaks to get rid of some bugs, add extra language options and a ‘Fun Mode’ with infinite lives.

Around the time Wonderland Dizzy was made, the Oliver Twins made a lot of games for various different platforms that existed at the time. As well their publisher at the time Codemasters was not prepared to publish the game which led to a split between the companies that saw Wonderland Dizzy’s finished file lost and forgotten about until now.

Fortunately the two groups are still on good enough terms now that Codemasters has allowed the twins to release this forgotten game for free to play.

If you enjoy Dizzy back in the 90s, you can give Wonderland Dizzy a shot here.

Cobalt has been on the gaming news feeds now and then since it was announced as Mojang’s little side-scrolling project back in 2013. It surfaced as a more fully-formed idea that was being published by Mojang and developed by Oxeye Studios.

Now however Mojang have announced on their blog that the game will not be releasing at the end of this month as was originally planned, but has instead been delayed until February of next year. The reason? The current build they have is much buggier than they’re happy with releasing.

“We want every part of Cobalt – the campaign, challenges, and local and online multiplayer to live up to your expectations, no matter which platform you play it on. That’s going to require a bit more development time.

In honesty, we don’t need four months to fix the outstanding issues, but releasing a game on console is an especially complicated business. There are release windows, and certification things, and all kinds of boxes that need to be ticked before games can be released into the wild.”

There’s no new exact date for the release, but I will always support a studio delaying a game’s release because they want to patch out as many bugs as possible. Buggy and broken games are not fun and even if a delay will disappoint some, it is usually a very responsible step on the part of a game developer/publisher to do so for this reason.

Mojang Blog “Cobalt delayed until February 2016 :(“: [x]

This past weekend, I was privileged to play an interesting new indie title named Mushroom 11.

When I watched the trailer of the game, I was instantly interested in the unique mechanic in controlling your ‘character.’ Of course the design of the character you control is absolutely worth mentioning. You play as an amorphic green blob, with no name that I was able to discern. I had no issue with the lack of description or simplicity of the character model, in fact, I applaud it. Mushroom 11’s tutorial instantly begins to show you how to control your blob, and the game becomes completely about the game’s mechanics.

The mechanics of the game appear shockingly simple, you essentially use the 2 mouse buttons to delete parts of your blob to move it. Except when you delete blocks, the blob replaces these blocks randomly out of different sides of itself where the level allows. The mouse gives you 2 types of control: a large sweeping deletion type, and a fine tuned deletion tool. The large sweeping tool, bound to the left mouse button, allows for rapid movement and easy size reduction. The fine tune deletion tool makes it much easier to delete smaller portions of your blob which becomes essential for some of the tougher puzzles as the levels progress.

During the hour I spent playing this game, I easily encompassed the tutorial and enough levels to start to need several tries to clear an area. I was even able to conquer 2 boss fights. It is definitely fair to say the game has a steep learning curve. Rather than being frustrated while playing, and failing several times, I started to see the brilliance in the game. It is the first game where I found myself not having direct control on my character and it’s movement through the game. We are allowed only indirect control, and it’s an absolutely fresh and fantastic idea for a game mechanic. I find myself more and more interested to see how the game will show me to stretch, bend, curve, and express the flexibility of my little blob through the future levels. With the modest price tag, this game is an absolute steal for hours of mind-bending gameplay.

A Solid 9/10

The only reason it’s not a 10 is because I really like a story and it has none. But Otherwise, this is an amazing game!

The new Star Wars Battlefront game seems to have been quite popular in its beta stage if the numbers released are any indication of its popularity.

The number of people who played the beta during its run was around 9.5 million across all the three platforms that had a version active, with a combined playtime of 1.6 billion minutes. That’s a lot of blaster fire and thermal detonators sailing around a battlefield of players.

Playable ‘hero’ characters Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have each been spawned just under 6 million times, while 783,392 walkers were taken down. The most popular Star Cards from those that were available during the beta (and that wasn’t a lot) were the Cycler Rifle, the Thermal Detonator and the Jump Pack, in that order.

While popular, the beta did have its problems with an inbalance of power between the sides that led EA to admit that it was too easy for the Empire side to win and some rebalancing would need to be done to fix it. Mind you, that’s one purpose of a beta – to identify these things before release (although it was kind of obvious).

Digm tried out the beta and while fun he didn’t feel like the game offered much in the way of uniqueness. What about you? Did you get to play and what did you think?

Leave a comment below!