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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.
I know that you don’t need a reminder of how sometimes people on the Internet can be really horrible people, but sometimes it’s needed so we can all remember how not to behave online.
No Man’s Sky has been quite the awaited game since we first saw its announcement trailer. A game that promises procedurally generated planets, with space travel to allow you to skip between them? Hell yeah, a lot of people are understandably excited about it.
However, the team working on it at Hello Games has had a run of bad luck with one of the most notable past incidents being the flood on Christmas Eve 2013 that destroyed laptops, furniture and development kits along with quite a bit of work. At the time the studio said that it wouldn’t cause a problem with meeting their release target, but that was a few years ago and things change. Hello Games recently announced that they would need to delay No Man’s Sky a little bit and some people didn’t like that at all.
So they sent death threats to the people at Hello Games. For some inexplicable reason.
The founder of Hello Games dealt with it in a very classy way through, tweeting that Hello Games now resembled the house from Home Alone so he was safe now. But then he followed up by adding “Tell me when its safe to remove the marbles and oil from the stairs. It’s getting really cumbersome, and I need the toilet.”
Tell me when its safe to remove the marbles and oil from the stairs. It’s getting really cumbersome, and I need the toilet
Of course, making light of it is all well and good but really, death threats? Over a video game delay? Come on.
As I have written many times previously, delays in release can only help a game by allowing more time for bugs to be stamped out and the game polished and improved. Sure, they’re annoying if you really want a game but speaking as someone who understands impatience, you’re better off waiting.
Because really, no matter how many times you threaten to kill someone for delaying a game, it’s still going to release in August now.
One of the things that’s made Overwatch stand out is its Play of the Game clip at the end of a round; right now there’s an ongoing meme that inserts a totally random clip as the ‘play’ which I love personally. But it does make the comment that at times, the PoTG does need a little work. The play is often a long string of enemy kills in a row and if a Torbjorn player got the best kill string through his turret while dead… well, watching a dead body for a minute while those kills pop up onscreen isn’t exactly thrilling viewing.
Another complaint is that because of the way it seems to favour the long kill strings, the PoTG often goes to offensive characters as opposed to maybe a Support who did something cool and turned the match around for their team. Blizzard are listening however and are trying to improve the formula used to determine these plays.
Lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton explained this in a Gamespot interview saying: “From a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there. We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.
“We also have a lot of cool systems internally where we can play with the algorithm that determines Play of the Game and play the same game back again, and be like, “Okay if I tweak these numbers, what’s going to be the Play of the Game that gets picked this time?” So it might’ve been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden its Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”
In the interview he does say that some improvements have already been made, so that the algorithm takes into account the difficulty of shots made, using the speed of the player and the distance to calculate the ‘coolness’ of the shot. More changes are to come soon, so hopefully we’ll slowly begin to see a slide towards an equal showing of all characters for PoTG.
After all, I’ve seen some really cool ones from the lesser shown characters including one Lucio wall-running shot that managed to leave three enemy players down. That sort of play deserves more recognition really.
