Since it’s release, GTA V has been having update after update released by their developer Rockstar to keep the game fresh and the people playing. It’s working because even after years of release, GTA Online is still pretty popular, and now Rockstar are adding the biggest update to date.

Following on from Executives and Other Criminals, the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony expansion will allow you to become the CEO of your own criminal business. Not bad.

Things it will come with include the possibility of a skyscraper headquarters for your high-flying criminal entrepeneur as well as warehouses to store loot and even sell it from. Of course, you’ll still need to deal with other criminals attempting to bust up your operations and sometimes even the LSPD will come calling – but these encounters bring the chances of rarer and unique items that carry the highest profit so there’s reward in the risk.

There will also be new vehicles added as well as many other features typical of a GTA update, when the expansion releases June 7th.

Welcome to another indie game review for the Sanitarium.FM. This time I’ve been playing a mobile port by the same people who ported Tap Heroes, VaragtP – Loot Hero DX. The game is available on Steam for £1.99 in the UK and $2.99 in the US. If you want its original soundtrack as well then you can get it for £2.79 or $3.99.

The game was released around the same time in July of last year, and basically sees you using a similar mechanic as Tap Heroes – progress through levels by beating enemies building up experience and gold to purchase upgrades before you take on a big final boss at the end of each level. It uses similar 2D pixel graphics as well and does have a minor story in it – the land you are in has been attacked by an evil red dragon and their magical powers have awoken evil creatures across the land – so this land is badly in need of a hero.

Game consists mostly of charging across levels with your lance by holding down your mouse button in the direction you wish to charge, either to the right to progress through the level or to the left to backtrack if you wish to grind out experience or gold a bit. If you let go of the mouse you do stop, and periodically along the way you will pass ‘inn’-like buildings that heal your health to full as well as offering four abilities for upgrade for ever increasing amounts of gold and loot – Attack, Critical, Defence and Speed.

The upgrades are pretty simple to understand – Attack will raise the amount of damage you do per hit of your lance, Critical increases your critical hit chance, Defence makes you tougher to knock down and Speed increases how fast you run across the level. To pay for these upgrades you must collect loot which is dropped by enemies in the form of coins, gold and diamonds; there are also other drops – a healing potion that restores you to full health again and a potion that briefly gives you invincibility and allows you to plow through lines of opponents.

So, how is it as a game? Okay but not great.

Sure, charging across the screen with only a lance between yourself and death is more fun than just repeatedly clicking on enemies or waiting for the game to dispatch your opponent for you, and upon a Critical Hit an enemy will go flying backwards off the screen which is a nice and quite funny little touch. The ability to backtrack is also nice, because being knocked down upon losing all your health will make you lose a portion of the loot you have gained – and the costs scale highly for upgrades. The game will encourage you to backtrack, and you should probably listen – you’ll need to do it at least in the beginning of the game.

However, once you have done the grind a little and made a few upgrades you probably won’t struggle with this game anymore – especially if you get lucky with your drops of both the health potion and invincibility potion. Each level is not that long really and there is a little variety in enemies with them getting progressively tougher as you charge forward until you run into the big final boss at the end. Add this to the fact that there’s only really 9 levels that keep looping around only slightly more difficult next time and you really don’t have a game with a lot of variety. Beating the dragon at the end of the 9th level does unlock a Miner to generate gold for you but at that point you really don’t need them. The loot also scales with the levels so you can generate massive amounts without ever having to rely on your miners.

Because of the lack of levels and the fact that you need only really do a little grinding, you can easily make a 9 level circuit in very little time. My first time around took me less than 30 minutes and because of how OP I was compared to the very minor difficulty hike for the lower levels the second time round, I didn’t have any trouble at all until I got to around the 7^th or 8^th level, by which time I’d built up a staggering amount of treasure to spend on upgrades so that I would no longer have that trouble.

I also had a lot of fun trying to capture it for my video review as well, with framerates bouncing between 10 and 60 FPS even at the slowest speed that the character moved. I included a little of that footage in the review just so you can see what I’m on about.

Loot Hero DX is okay. I prefer it to Tap Heroes immensely and I did have fun with this game for a bit. However, you can tell that it’s not meant for long play sessions, it’s meant to be picked up and played when you can snatch a few minutes of playtime and that sort of game is made for mobiles, which is where Loot Hero DX has been ported from. There’s just not enough content for a long-time session, although the fact that it is so cheap means that you probably won’t mind it too much. For that i have to give it 6/10.

If you’re looking for a nice juicy story today, boy have I got a good one for you.

Back in 2013, the board of directors voted out of the company Red 5 Studios ex-CEO and lead design on their MMO game Firefall, Mark Kern. Now Kern is appealing to the sci-fi MMO’s community to “let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be” – i.e. as he wants it to be.

Kern made the appeal through a post on Firefall’s subreddit, which has since been deleted, in which he said that he would buy the rights to the game, but only once it was a failure. He also claimed that the company had taken his vision for the game and ruined it, so he wanted to buy the rights and remake it in his ideal.

“I would only offer to buy Firefall if the IP fails and the game is shuttered or due for shuttering,” Kern wrote on Thursday. “Also, buying a failed IP is cheap. You get the code, the art assets, the tools, the name, the customer lists, the story and characters, etc, but nothing else.

“So why buy it at all? First, its my game. I created it, and I hate to see what they did to it and what they did to the vets. Second, I want to finish what I was not allowed to finish because the Executive Team thought “WoW with guns” would be better. But first, Firefall has to die. There can be no confusion that the version I want to make is DIFFERENT and not a continuation. For that, Firefall (current) must end. So don’t play it, don’t buy anything for the game. Just let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be.”

Understandably the community reacted with a bit of confusion and a lot of outrage, which resulted in the then deletion of the post. The most upvoted reply to the post was by another worker ‘gotkerned’ who basically called all that Kern was claiming “full of shit” and said that he must be “so delusional at this point that you really believe yourself.”

“There was no “Executive Team” making actual decisions. Nobody except Mark could make real decisions. Mark rarely showed up to work though, so lots of decisions were made in absentia, and many were countermanded when he decided to show up. The state of Firefall is the result.

 

The eSports focus? Mark. Founders Packs? Mark. Higher-tier frames? Mark. (He wanted to sell a new one monthly, so he could be like League.) Real-money, per-use paint jobs? Mark. Vehicles, Pets, and dozens of other random features that were irrelevant to the core gameplay? Mark. The completely fucked up UI? Mark. He thinks he’s a UI genius, and put himself directly in charge. Stage 5 and the clusterfuck that was the bus? All Mark. Cutting PvP? Mark again (and he told the forums before the devs).

 

The vaunted “story”? All bullshit. Was in constant flux. Major rewrites to support whatever feature was the flavor of the month.”

Of course the game and its developer have been having a lot of troubles recently with a soft-launch in China Nov 2015 also coming with a memo to staff members that payroll couldn’t afford to pay them over the holiday period. Then Feb saw investors The9 pull out of Firefall, leaving Red 5 to sell off shares for $76.5 million to a Cayman Islands holding corporation in March.

Still, in terms of ballsy moves this takes the cake. Too bad the post was deleted…

… But thank goodness for webcache. The post and replies can be read here if you’re interested.

Well, that didn’t take long. It seems that despite Blizzard making their policy on cheaters clear as being very harsh, forums for multiplayer game cheats are already beginning to list Overwatch maphacks for sale at $15 per month subscription.

The hacks take player data on positions as the game runs and then overlays rectangles over both enemy and ally positions so you can get more of an idea what’s around the corner. It works a bit like Widowmaker’s ultimate, or Hanzo’s Sonic Arrow, but that hasn’t stopped some people from messing around with creating these hacks anyway.

As mentioned above, Blizzard have made it perfectly clear that they will not tolerate anyone cheating in their new game. Given that the game has become so popular, Blizzard have said that anyone caught and proven to be cheating during matches will be permabanned immediately, no second chances. This stance is likely to deter people from cheating before they even think about doing it.

Already there’s been accusations being thrown around about people cheating, including some high-level players in pro teams being accused of such underhanded stunts. So far though as there’s been no concrete evidence of this, Blizzard have yet to ban any of the high-level players from the game.

A new patch has been rolled out for Insurgency and its WW2 conversion mod, Day of Infamy. Both patches come with significant changes and improvements to the base game, and also include new battlegrounds to play on.

The new map for Insurgency is Dry Canal, while Day of Infamy gets two new multiplayer maps and three fresh co-op maps added. Dry Canal was created by a community member by the name of Tribly and was a finalist in the game’s Gamebanana level design contest last year. The patch will add it to the regular rotation order.

The patch has also set up the foundations for the game’s upcoming competitive ranking system, to which New World Interactive thanks the players for their patience in waiting for.

“You can expect to see in-game progress in the near future, and if you want a preview of our competitive features, we will be creating a Competitive Testing group on Steam which will give you early access to features before they are introduced to everyone else. We will use this group to test the systems on a smaller base of users and solicit feedback.”

Also added are a few new animations for things such as reloading and facial animations for your training level guide. HTML MOTDs have also been disabled after player feedback complained about them being used for obnoxious and annoying adverts on clan servers.

You can find the full patch notes for Insurgency here, while the notes for Day of Infamy can be found here.