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There’s few people who didn’t react in some way to the news of the death of comedian and actor Robin Williams. The man was a part of the childhood of many young adults, myself included, and he seemed almost immortal with his jokes and overall positive aura. Among the things he enjoyed was a good game of WoW and thanks to a petition supported by fans of the game and the entertainer, Williams’ legacy will get a chance to live on through this game.
Started shortly after the news, the text of the petition hosted on Change.org says that Williams could be “something of a troll in trade on good days or when anonymity allowed” and that he made many mentions in interviews of enjoying a game of Warcraft III and even built his own overclocked PC systems to game on. The petition was to see if Blizzard would agree to add an NPC somewhere in the game who would perform some of the more memorable and funny jokes that Williams made. Within less that 24 hours, over 10 thousand people signed and Blizzard said yes.
“While a single non-player character in a video game is only a small good thing to come out of a largely negative situation — many cannot help but feel that they’ve preserved a tiny spark of who Mr. Williams was: a gamer, and a character.” wrote petition organiser Jacob Holgate, thanking all those who supported the petition despite other players making negative comments about the idea.
Blizzard confirmed the tribute by a reply to a Tweet from Technical Game Designer, Chadd Nervigg asking if he’d seen the petition yet. They have promised to handle the creation of the NPC with the sensitivity and care needed to pay proper tribute to the comedian.
EA giving away free games? What madness could this possibly be?
Well it’s true, if you log on to Origin before the 2nd of September you can snag your free copy of Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger. This deal is part of EA’s new drive to promote t Origin. Usually Wing Commander 3 sells for $5, but EA is giving away full games for free for limited periods of time.
Wing Commander 3 was first released in 1994, but the series made recent news when a Kickstarter was launched to support an orchestral recording of tracks from WC3 and WC4. The beloved series was created by Chris Roberts, who you’ll probably know nowadays as the guy heading up Star Citizen.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years you will know about the storm of MOBAs like DOTA 2 and League of Legends that have taken the gaming world by the horns. Many of these MOBAs are slow and deliberate games based around something called ‘min-maxing’ where players kill artificial intelligence within the game to earn currency and to level up. MOBAs or massive online battle arenas are interesting games, as most are played from the top-down perspective and instead of aiming skills you select the skill you want to cast. Tome is one such game.
Tome is a new browser based MOBA which already sets it apart from the crowds and Tome tries to change things up even more by taking out a very important mechanic in most of these games which is last hitting. Last hitting is the ability to get the final hit on the AI (better known as creeps) to get the rewards, well Tome has taken that out and instead it shares all of the rewards for killing these creeps between team mates. This mechanic added to the way the characters play makes Tome perhaps the fastest MOBA I have ever played, instead of taking an hour matches take ten minutes, there are also a whole host of other mechanics in the game that we’ll leave for you to find for yourselves!
Tome continues to deliver in the art department as well, even on the lowest graphics settings the game performs well and looks good, it has a punchy and vivid art style with some very subtle undertones that make it pleasing to look at and satisfying to play, this combined with the sound assets which are heavy and often brutal make the presentation of this game easily rival that of bigger, non-browser based games which have their own engines and clients to play.
All in all Tome is a gorgeous game with solid mechanics, a fun character set and it has low demands on your system which makes this free to play game look very promising. Tome is presently in closed beta and is well worth a look. Developer Kixeye are onto a winner here.
Our very own Digmbot is also in the Tome beta, check out his video impressions below:
Kalypso Media showed off a new game at Gamescom this year with a teaser trailer for Grand Ages: Medieval.
This will be a follow-up to Grand Ages: Rome, released in 2009. Set in 1050 AD, the High Middle Ages, the game will be a real time city builder. Raise armies, build trade routes and perform research in a map of Europe spanning over 30 million square kilometers. The game is currently set to release for PC in 2015.
The SteamDB group have unearthed something fairly interesting in the coding for Steam’s latest big Beta update. Seems that Valve are already beginning to build in places for apps for game play things such as demos and DLC as well as other types of media such as music and TV.
Valve had already revealed the news of Steam Music earlier on, with a beta client for the new app being sent to testers in February. There has also been film released via Steam already, the Dota 2 documentary Free-To-Play as well as award-winning film Indie Game: The Movie although both are still stored into the game library at present.
This capability to fit apps into Steam’s architecture suggests that as well as trying to conquer the traditional part of the console market with their Steam Box console and Steam Controller (now delayed until 2015) Valve might be planning to offer a complete package of media to rival that of the Xbox’s upon the Steam Box’s launch.
