I love Starbound. It’s a nice chill game that lets you just get on with playing the game but also has a set of missions you can do if you choose to do that. If you’ve never played it, think Terraria but less complicated and with more species you can be. I like to play as the bird-like Avian race myself.

The game spent quite a while in development and Early Access before it released last year, but developer Chucklefish continues to improve the game and the next patch they’re going to be adding will add new locations for you to explore in between the planets you can hop between. This includes derelict space crafts, merchant ships and more.

To aid you in this (because as you might be able to guess some of these places are pretty hostile to life!) the game will be having giant mech suits added to allow you to engage in extra-vehicular activity, which means you can explore abandoned space stations and derelicts all you want. You’ll be able to customise these suits, adding weapons, painting them in custom paint jobs and much more. Updating it and keeping it repaired will be crucial to continue to plumb the depths of ever harder and more dangerous space wreckage.

To make travelling between planets, planetoids and locations between orbits, the navigational interface is getting an update too. Now you’ll be able to zoom all the way out to see what is orbiting around the star you’re currently in the system of, and the map is active which means you can see where everything is in their orbital paths – including your own craft. You can even watch other crafts moving around so you can intercept a merchant at where they’re going to be next. No word on whether this means we’ll get space pirates though – it’d be a logical next step I imagine.

Chucklefish haven’t given a date of release for this update yet, but keep your eyes on the Starbound website for up to date information.

BattleForge was a combination of card game and RTS that was launched back in 2009, and had its servers shut down back in 2013. Now in a post on the BattleForge Reborn forum, community manager MrXLink has made the announcement that EA has apparently permitted a fan revival of the game called Skylords Reborn to be a thing. According to the post, EA has officially sanctioned this revival with the help of a company called Ardent Peak; and the revival will bring the game back up to the same standard it was at before the server shutdown with potential new content in the future.

Originally developed by EA Phenomic, BattleForge was a freemium game where players could build armies not with resources but by collecting and trading cards with other players. Cards were divided into frost, shadow, fire and nature, with players having to use special BattleForge points to get more cards – which in traditional freemium fashion meant microtransactions and quite a few of them. This was back when they were only just beginning to take root in games, so people didn’t quite hate microtransactions as much as we now do.

This new version though is stripping out all of the microtransactions and upping the amount of BattleForge points you can get through regular play of the game – the Skylords Reborn team promise that the game will never “Pay2Win or Pay2Play”. The team have also have a new server run by Ardent Peak, and have apparently been given permission to alter the original BattleForge client mostly to remove all references to EA. However, the post does also state that while they can “alter the server in such a way to release additional content”, they will not be allowed to “release any paid DLC or paid updates for the game.” For now the aim of the team is to simply restore the game, although it does make you wonder how they will continue to fund both server upkeep and any further updates afterwards – apparently the team are allowed to “commercialise the game to the extent that we are allowed to gain money for the project” but we’ve no idea what that means other than to take donations from the community. We’ll see in time I guess.

It certainly sounds interesting, but it is worth noting that the post is not from an official EA source and EA themselves haven’t made any statements on their own sites or social medias. Maybe wait for that before you jump into the game; it’d be a shame to make any progress only to have EA come in and shut it all down again.

I like stories. I love to evaluate the way they’re built, characters and especially those narratives that play with the typically accepted patterns and turn them on their head. It’s been done quite a bit, but I never get tired of flipping a story on its head and experiencing it from the other side.

So Nefarious, which is a modern take on the 2D platformer genre that has you play as the villain? Yeah, it got my interest immediately. The main character is villain Crow, who indulges in the time-honoured tradition of kidnapping the princess of his area, Princess Mayapple, as well as building doomsday devices and so on, so forth. Pitted against him is hero Mack, a Megaman-esque type who is in a relationship with Mayapple and is her ‘hero’. Only throughout the first level, which takes place in the city location the three are based in, you get hints in the dialogue that honestly the kidnapping thing has happened so often that Mayapple and Crow understand each other a bit better than Mayapple and Mack do right now. It’s wonderful to see the three play out their roles while still being believably the role they fit into.

The gameplay itself takes place over several different locations as Crow sets out beyond his usual boundaries to kidnap many princesses for an ultimate weapon. Enemies will be encountered and can be dispatched with punches or with grenades which have a timer of a few seconds unless they hit an enemy. Grenades can also be used to hit buttons and can also sometimes be found fixed into place to act as a jump booster for higher up platforms. Defeated enemies usually drop grenade refills, also they can also drop heart canisters if you have taken on some damage. Crow starts with 3 hearts and enemies can take a half or full heart on hit, while most enemies early on take only one punch or grenade. Different princesses grabbed also give Crow certain abilities, such as the Insektia princess letting Crow jump higher or further than before; and abilities can be upgraded in between location levels by spending accumulated currency that you pick up while in the location levels. Death will also leave behind a chunk of the current amount of money you are currently carrying too, and you can grab it again as you go past by touching, punching or blowing up the container left behind.

I really enjoyed this game, as I adored the characters, the use of tropes and the chance to take part in ‘reverse boss battles’ (you get to be the boss against heroes!) as well as the regular boss encounter type battles. My gripes with this game extend to one thing though – who thought it was a good idea to tie the punch to the right-mouse button and grenades to the left? Most games will tie a punch to the left and grenades to the right, so my muscle memory really played havoc with me (fortunately you cannot blow yourself up with your own grenades). We have a suspicion that this might be a game that plays better with the aid of a controller.

If you love 2D platformers, give this one a go. It’s not that expensive and it’s a lot of fun, with interesting characters and awesome music.

7.5/10

Quite a few video games have had movies made, and honestly it’s universely accepted that a movie made of a video game often turns out… bad. There’s been some exceptions, but mostly they’ve been more ‘okay’ then good. However, studios continue to license out their games for movie adaptations – mostly recently Take-Two.

Take-Two have licensed out some of their IPs for movie-making, but which ones haven’t been confirmed anywhere yet – Take-Two aren’t telling. Certainly though they’ve had a hand in a number of interesting franchises that would be good on a big screen, such as Bioshock, Max Payne, Red Dead, XCOM and more.

Speaking about the licensing to MCV, CEO Strauss Zelnick said “We have licensed a couple of titles for motion picture production and we don’t have much more to say about that yet.” He also said that while he’s open-minded about TV and film, Take-Two will not be investing any money into film adaptations of their franchises because of the past patterns of video game films not doing so well. Instead they will be opting for licensing agreements that give them creative control, making sure the end product aligns with their vision of the universe – and hopefully the one the fans remember to save a film going wildly off track from canon. It’s certainly one of the more obvious ways you can turn fans of the game off the film.

Now we just wait to see which one of Take-Two’s franchises pops up first in the cinema.

Despite a recently released statement about how they had surpassed their revenue targets, Activision Publishing have laid off around 5% of their workforce this week, saying that they are aiming to “realign resources” to “support [their] upcoming slate”. Reports indicate that the staff in question were employed in Beenox, Activision’s corporate office, Infinity Ward and others. Blizzard were unaffected by the layoffs however.

In a statement Activision said “Activision Publishing [are] realigning our resources to support our upcoming slate and adapt to the accelerating transition to digital, including opportunities for digital add-on content.”

So money is being freed up for new games, and it seems a focus on DLC and other digital content. This came to light during Activision’s Q4 2016 call, in which the CEO of Activision Eric Hirshberg said that the sales of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare had been “disappointing” – but really we knew that already.

The call did reveal one other interesting fact though; Activision only has two games planned for this year seemingly – Destiny 2 and a new Call of Duty that will return to its roots and leave behind the futuristic stuff for something more historical. This does seem to suggest that their mention in the statement about digital add-on content may become the company’s focus at least for this year. Beyond that, we’ll have to see how things pan out.