Welcome to your weekly Kickstarter round-up.

Starting off as always with a review of games I’ve covered in the past, Home Free has 6 days to go until campaign end and has reached its next stretch goal; adding cats to the cities for your low-poly puppies to interact with although it won’t be possible to play as a cat. As expected Aberford didn’t reach its funding target in time, and pretty much all of the projects from the Round-Up of Oct 9th have more than half of their totals to make up in just under two weeks.

Of last week’s selection only GOAT ARMY is close to target, having less than €300 to make up in 29 days.

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Crematory Bot

First up is a little mobile game with a simple task: set alight and burn corpses of monsters and fallen heroes to gain loot for your master. Also you play as quite a cute but angry looking little fire-spitting robot and that’s just cool.

Crematory Bot tasks you with charring the corpses being produced by a war without letting a single one past, collecting loot pick-ups as well as upgrading The Bot through collecting enough scrap pick-ups then using them to generate a randomly selected upgrade for The Bot. Each corpse will have some different attributes and you’ll even get to face ‘boss-level’ corpses. Makes a difference to play a game where your ‘enemies’ are technically already dead!

Crematory Bot has made nothing of its goal yet, but it has a target of only $300 to make in 27 days.

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Super Axe Boy

This game’s page describes it as “a love letter to platform games”. As someone who grew up with a number of good platformers, that’s appealing.

Super Axe Boy will feature a combination of 2D and 3D levels, sometimes switching between the two perspectives in the same level. The creator is advertising that the game could be available for many platforms both computer and console but the console versions are only going to be made if their stretch goals are met in time. It’ll feature pop culture references and some leaning on the forth wall and has a silly story that sees our hero and his sidekick Bebop as the sole people not abducted by beaver-like aliens for the purposes of slave labour/meat products.

Super Axe Boy has a target of €25,000 of which €5,297 has already been raised with a further 26 days to go.

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Dusty Raging Fist

I admit it, this one caught my eye because the hero is an anthropomorphic kick-ass rabbit. Who doesn’t like battle bunnies?

Dusty Raging Fist is a beat’em up action game with 3 player co-op play, both locally and online and is actually the sequel to a 2014 Steam game; Dusty Revenge. It follows the heroic lapine Dusty and his allies as they fight their way through levels, using their hands and feet to fight as well as picking up elemental power pick-ups to use against foes as well. The three have been sent on a quest to acquire elemental powers from the world’s Guardians to fight an evil that resides in the dark Catacombs.

Dusty Raging Fist has 27 days to go and has made $3,988AUD of its $60,000AUD target so far.

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Fanthoms

Wrapping it up with a tabletop board game with miniatures this week, one that includes a group of players working against one ‘game master’ player. Those are always fun.

Fanthoms is described on its Kickstarter as “a cooperative adventure game, with miniatures, in which a group of players fight against hordes of undersea monsters controlled by a game master”. It features either a campaign to help players grow their characters and acquire skills to help them deal with the undersea terrors and hull breaches or a number of stand-alone scenarios that have been included in the game for game masters who are a little less sure of crafting their own. Each game comes with five character miniatures, several monster miniatures, a series of weapon cards and a foldable game board, although you can only receive this core game if you back at $60 or higher.

Fathoms has 26 days to go to make a $35,603 goal (I know, it’s not a nice rounded number for once) and has made $5,022 so far.

Overwatch has been keenly watched since Blizzard announced it to the public.

Now dates have been announced for the beta and despite originally thinking otherwise, it seems that the closed beta for the game will be deployed at the same time for both the Americas and Europe while Asian players unfortunately will need to wait a little longer to gain access.

“We were able to complete setup and testing of our beta servers for Europe sooner than anticipated. As a result, we’re happy to report that we will be launching the Overwatch Closed Beta in both the Americas and Europe gameplay regions on October 27.” Blizzard blogged about the beta.

To better stress-test the servers, Blizzard will be gradually inviting more and more players to let the servers slowly fill up to give them enough information to see when problems with connections begin to occur. Asian servers are still undergoing set up and will be opened to players at a later date.

Anyone interested in joining in with closed Beta should go to the Overwatch site and sign up/ Then wait and keep your fingers crossed that you get chosen.

Whatever happened to the damn good guy? I liked the damn good guy, the damn good guy was a…Damn. Good. Guy.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by “the damn good guy”. What I mean is pieces of entertainment that aren’t huge, massive, world changing, innovative behemoths that somehow seem to fail living up to the expectations of the creator. The damn good guy refers to pieces of media that are just enjoyable because they’re well put together, well written and don’t try to cast a net so wide and cast that they can’t possibly hope to be considered a success.

Example, Tomb Raider 2013. That was a good game, really good in fact. Solid gameplay/mechanics, great voice acting, very good atmosphere and was a nice long length. Square Enix however deemed the game a failure despite it selling a whopping 3.4 million units worldwide. Seriously Square? How big were your expectations of the game that you needed to re-release it for Playstation 4 and Xbox One just to beef up the sales? How much was the budget for this endeavour?

According to an article from Eurogamer.net the budget for Tomb Raider was $60 Million…HO-LY FUCK!!

I think we can all agree that’s pretty tall order to fill, a really tall order to fill. And there’s my point, set the bar too high and the chances of you hauling your arse over it decreases, don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed Tom Raider, but to have it deemed a failure due to unreasonable expectations just seems rude (for the lack of a better word), I’m no game designer but even I can see effort when it’s right in front of me.

Square sadly seemed to act like EA is constantly acting with their Battlefield franchise which ends up with a game that makes a huge amount of money and sells an insane amount of copies but is deems a failure anyway. Instead EA just end up aping Call of Duty in order to try and win over their audience, which they seem to keep failing at. These developers can clearly dominate in their fields of work but they’re tunnel-visioning so hard that they forget that they’ve still made a metric fuckton anyway. There’s nothing wrong with 2nd place is what I’m saying and there’s also nothing wrong with not releasing a game every fucking year, yeah I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed, I love you but slow the hell down, you make tons of money with what you have maybe you should take the time to enjoy it? You know make some use of that company yacht you undoubtedly have, maybe take it for a sail and unwind?

See, this is why I love the damn good guy. The damn good guy gets their budget and knows exactly what to do with it, the damn good guy thought process I imagine would be something akin to this:

“Ok, I’ve been given $25,000,000 to make a piece of entertainment”

“My piece of entertainment will be about this”

“I will spend the money accordingly in all the necessary areas in order to make this piece of entertainment as appealing to its target audience as possible”

“The product has been released, sales figures are strong and we’ve made the budget back plus a little extra, even the reviews are positive I’m going to spend some time with my kids as I’ve been coming home late recently” 

The damn good guy thought process probably does not resemble,

“OHDEARGOD, WE’VE BEEN GIVEN $70,000,000 TO MAKE A PIECE OF ENTERTAINMENT, WE MUST BE BETTER THEN EVERYONE ELSE IN ORDER TO BECOME ANY KIND OF SUCCESS”

“But sir we’re making a ton of money anyway…”

“DAMMIT HENDERSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT THIS MYTHICAL MONEY NONSENSE, WE MUST BEAT THE COMPETITION OR BE BRANDED AS FAILURES AND BE CAST OUT FOR ALL ETERNITY BY THE HUMAN RACE”

“Sir we’ve been getting ratings up in the 90% range…”

“WE NEED TO TRY AGAIN AT BEATING THEM, WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES”

At this point Henderson has defected to a Studio that isn’t staffed by impatient tunnel-visioning weirdos who scream a lot.

This is why we need to support the damn good guy, the damn good guy takes their time, evaluates their options and sets themselves a reasonable goal and when all is said and done, the result is damn good. The result is

• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
• Solomon Kane
• Dishonoured
• Darkman
• Hellboy
• Dredd
• The A-Team (2010)
• The Grey,

Do you see what I’m driving at? Not to say that giant bits of game changing innovation are a bad thing, they can just get out of hand fast and end up bloated, fat and always hungry for more.

Bottom line, support the Damn Good Guy. Because he’s a damn good guy.

Windows 10 might have been provided free of charge to all who already had a licenced copy of Windows 7 or 8.1, but it seems that Microsoft might be looking at other ways to make money from the new OS.

The build 10565 of Windows 10 shows that Microsoft is beginning to experiment with placing advertisements for apps in the operation system. It’s somewhat discreet right now, being placed in the Start menu (even if in a prominent place under your most used apps list) and providing an option to turn it off but there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. To be fair, there’s also no guarantee that they won’t remove the adverts after a while either.

Given that Windows 10 tracks your data and interests as well, it’s probably likely that the suggestions will be somewhat related to what you already use. Although given past uses of ‘suggested’ content we’d be interested in… it could also just be a queue of things that we really are not interested in.

It remains to be seen whether or not this feature will stay in this form or if it will be expanded upon in some way. At least for now you can turn it off if you want to, but if you can stand it keep it on. After all, all companies need to make money somehow and one little ad won’t be too bad.

AMD have announced that their Q3 2015 period saw a $197 million net loss, and an operating loss of $158 million. The comparison of revenue loss between this time last year and now doesn’t look so good on paper either, it was $1.43 million at this point in 2014 while right now it’s $1.06 billion.

While this is the fourth straight quarterly loss for AMD, they do point out that the quarterly revenue has increased 13% between Q2 and Q3. There’s also a good reason for the figures being so low as well.

Recently the company lowered the prices of their older model GPUs to make room for all the new R5, R7 and R9 cards, which resulted in a write-down of around $65 million inventory. Thankfully the new cards are selling well enough that the graphics segment of the pie to be up 12% quarter-on-quarter.

Talking on the latest figures, Dr. Lisa Su (AMD president and chief executive) had this to say:

“AMD delivered double-digit percentage sequential revenue growth in both of our segments in the third quarter. We continue to take targeted actions to improve long-term financial performance, build great products and simplify our business model. The formation of a joint venture of our back-end manufacturing assets is a significant step towards achieving these goals and strengthening our balance sheet.”