Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
Welcome to your weekly update on things happening within the Kickstarter Gaming campaigns currently running.
As always, we start with a recap on previously covered campaigns. It’s a short recap this week, as last week we basically refreshed our list. Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game has made its target with plenty more time to go in its campaign, and Pixel Princess Blitz has a lot of funding with plenty of time to finish up and reach its own goal. Best of luck to the campaign runners for that one.
First up we have a 2D sandbox game that tries to take the best and make it better.
Built with concepts and ideas borrowed from other games of this genre, Project Life is an attempt to combine the best elements of the survival sandbox game and make it amazing. There will be some degree of ‘realism’ in that creatures in the world will have some sort of AI to dictate actions, relationships with other creatures in the world as well as time passing to allow them to age. The graphics maybe aren’t the best, but such things can be updated if the game gets funded if the developer plans to.
Project Life has 28 days to go to make its full £2,000 target, of which it still has to make any.
Next up we have a game that’s already in pre-Alpha.
Legrand Legacy is set in a world that is in the grip of a war between two kingdoms that makes life chaotic. You play as a young slave named Finn who wakes up without any memory of how he got to where he is, yet quickly discovers that he is in possession of strange and mysterious powers. You must now fight to prevent the ‘Second Coming’ and try to restore balance to a war-torn world, as something much darker waits in the wings for the stage to be set…
Legrand Legacy has a £40,000 goal and has 24 days to go. It has made £27,609 so far.
The Pedestrian takes you into the world of ‘signs’, as you try to connect road signs, restroom signs and more to make your way across the world as well as solving puzzles contained within them too to continue to advance. It’s a creative idea, and we’re seeing a lot of indies take us into worlds inside ‘mundane’ objects more and more now a days. The Pedestrian already has a playable demo available too, so you can try before you pledge!
The Pedestrian has made $10,083 of its $21,000 goal, and has 23 more days to go.
Finally, we round off with a game about pitching bad ideas.
Pitch Deck is a card game that combines weird ideas with real companies, and challenges people to make up pitches for ideas. It basically takes the mick out of terrible startup ideas, and that was what the makers themed it around, working for a year to get it ‘perfect’. There’s even a $5,000 tier for companies to get their own company included in the game.
Pitch Deck has a $20,000 target and 23 days to go. It has made that goal already – so this is not a failed startup at all!
For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘smurfing’ refers to the act of using a low level character or account that is below that of your main accounts, to ensure that your opponents are of a level of skill significantly below your own. There’s some debate on whether people using accounts that are only a bit lower also counts, but the generally accepted definition means that it’s not a well-accepted practice among the main competitive gaming communities that exist. It strikes as very unsporting behaviour.
So no big surprise that an Overwatch pro player has come under fire for streaming himself not only doing it, but laughing about it while he was doing it, as well as commenting on their ineptitude compared to him. He even typed ‘I fak you’ into the chat to rub it in for his poor overwhelmed opponents.
The account used the alias IDDQ6, alleged to be a Swedish player known as IDDQD, and thus many outraged viewers have taken to the Overwatch forum to demand some sort of karmic payback for this show of sheer douchebagginess. The stream also went up on Youtube, and a number of the comments follow a similar line – making it very clear that the community does not think that the smurfing was in any way funny or entertaining.
Among suggestions for punishment, there has been a call from a few for ‘IDDQD’ to be permanently banned on all his accounts, with one of the top comments simply saying “Blizzard, wake up, he’s smurf streaming and you’re not banning him”
While I’m not sure a permaban is the right punishment, it’s up to Blizzard if they want to drop any sort of hammer to discourage this sort of gameplay for the future.
Opinions on games can differ a lot between people, even those who get on quite well. Both the station manager Digm and I had the same game to review recently. While Digm didn’t really enjoy it much, I got on much better with it.
Hive Jump is an indie sci-fi shooter title developed and published by studio Graphite Lab. It’s on both PC/Mac/Linux and also the Wii U, and I was reviewing the PC version of the game. The game sets you in the role of an army of space soldiers, blasting your way through a hive of alien insects of all different shapes, sizes and abilities. How many soldiers? As many as you want, infinite respawned soldiers with randomly generated names… that is as long as you keep your backpack intact. Once it’s gone – no more respawn and the next death is game over.
The hive levels are randomly generated upon each play, and enemies will keep coming as long as their spawning nests are still undestroyed. Getting rid of them is advised to stop yourself getting overrun. Like any good game of this ilk, you get to upgrade your weaponry and even unlock new ones the more you play. To pay for these upgrades, you collect alien ‘goo’ that comes from killing the insectoid enemies, bursting spawner nests and also the weird alien pustules scattered around the walls and floor. You can also sometimes find ‘resupply’ crates that will contain either more explosives, a ton of ‘goo’ or on less common occasions goo and an upgrade.
The game comes with challenge, campaign and arcade modes, and each run will end with some sort of boss fight or varying difficulties depending on how good you are with your jump timing and the boost jet you have. There’s no fall damage which is nice, frankly in such a hostile environment everything else is trying to hurt you so it’s good to not have that additional damage to just make things more difficult. The game can also be played with 1-4 players in both local and online co-op, although I’ve not managed to try out multiplayer co-op yet. I hope to soon though. The game also has some customisation options, with both your soldier’s appearance and weapon set-up being available for tweaking before a playthrough and your weapon set-up being able to be tweaked in between each level of the hive.
I really enjoyed this game, it was fast-paced, exciting, challenging and there was enough going on with it that I didn’t feel it was too repetitive. The only complaint I might have is that after I unlocked the weapon set-up I wanted, I didn’t feel the need to purchase any more unlocks, but if I play more I might experiment more with different weaponry and set-ups. My soldier will always be purple though.
If you want to see my video review of it, click here:
A study from 2012 that suggested that violent video games, especially those involving a lot of gunplay, could improve a player’s marksmanship skills and even led to them being more likely to then use guns in real life has been retracted by its publisher Communications Research. The posted notice on this retraction states that a committee at Ohio University recommended the retraction of the study after they were “alerted to irregularities in some variables of the data”.
Published 4-5 years ago, the study ‘Boom Headshot’ written by Brad Bushman makes the claims that people who regularly play shooting games extensively become better at gun shooting in real life, as well as more prone to violent acts. The implications of this are pretty obvious, it’s only what a lot of mainstream media outlets have trotted out over the years – video games are the cause of several big shootings and should be banned. However, Dr. Patrick Markey contributed the other side of the argument to the same study, disputing the video games make murderers of gamers and was part of the reason why the study came under investigation in the first place, along with fellow researched Malte Elson.
Speaking on its retraction Bushman is quoted as saying “A Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State University recommended retracting this article after being alerted to irregularities in some variables of the data set by Drs. Markey and Elson in January 2015. Unfortunately, the values of the questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable. In 2016, Drs. Markey and Elson sent their report to Dr. Gibbs, one of the editors of Communication Research, who decided that a retraction was warranted. A replication of the study by Dr. Bushman is in review” but also called the move to retract the study as a ‘smear campaign’.
If you want to read more on this, check out the page on the retraction over on the Retraction Watch website.
