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Today sees the release of a game featuring a character who might be familiar to long time Capcom fans, but who hasn’t actually been front and centre of a game for a long time. That’s right, Strider is back in a new game!
Strider is, for those who don’t know, a Capcom character who first appeared back in the late 80s in his first game on arcade systems. It was celebrated back then for its play-style, definitive music and was notable for its use of multi-lingual voice acting during the cut-scenes (Japanese, English, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish) and was one of Capcom’s hits before Street Fighter II brought the company’s name to everyone’s attention. The main character was a young member of a group called the ‘Striders’, a ninja-like group within the world and you as the player were tasked with travelling through the side-scrolling world to eventually kill the ‘Grandmaster’, the rule of the dystopian future world Strider was set in. The game also saw home releases for many platforms such as the Mega Drive and Commodore 64, some which omitted the ending or replaced it entirely.
The game went on to have two sequels, Strider 2 and Strider Returns, which was a Western-only release that had no involvement from Capcom. The sequel Strider 2 introduced new mechanics into the game and had releases on arcade machines as well as the Playstation 1 in 2000.
Other than these games, the character of Strider has made many cameos in other Capcom games down the years.
The new game aims to combine the best aspects of the original game and the sequel as well as improving upon them using the technology of today. Hopefully gamers who fondly remember Strider will not be disappointed by this new adventure.
Strider releases for the Playstation 3 and 4 today and for Xbox 360, Xbox One and many PC digital distributors (including Steam and Green Man Gaming – pre-order for the free 20 track soundtrack and concept art!) tomorrow, February 19th.
Last week in gaming saw the release of new user-added tagging to games on Steam. The idea was to allow players to apply tags to games to further refine categories and maybe allow people to find games similar to ones they might already own and be enjoying, a way to give the players more control on how they sorted games available and allow them to choose what tags they followed. What followed was some of what was intended but as is the way of humanity, the new tagging system quickly became a free-for-all. The exploiting of the system ranged from people using the tags to spoil endings of story-driven games, to people using the tags to insult the game or developers to even offensive and abusive tagging on games such as Gone Home from players who opposed themes presented within the game.
Now in a bid to attempt to combat abuse of the new system and prevent strict moderation internally Valve has added a way for other users to flag tags they don’t find helpful, bringing them to the attention of Valve who will remove the tag if it meets one of four criteria: spoilery, offensive/abusive, not appropriate for the game or simply unhelpful. Tags will also now need to be applied by a greater number of people before they will show up as popular tags to the wider Steam audience.
The Steam Dev team says that they are working to improve the feature and to keep feedback coming as to how the new safeguards are working, but also Valve has shown no interest in removing tags that might keep someone from purchasing a game if enough players find it a bad game; which can only be a good thing.
What do you think? Will this new set of safeguards be enough to make Steam user-tags useful and reliable at last?
Those of us paying attention to the snapshots Mojang have been releasing in the run up to the release of Minecraft 1.8 might have long since noticed a pattern to the additions to the game, an awful lot of it is centring around making building maps of different types easier to automate. Most of this seems to be because the way blocks are rendered among other things are being subtly fiddled with ‘behind-the-scenes’ in the run up to the implementation of the plugin API that Dinnerbone has been promising for a while, meaning a lack of ‘survival’ changes to the game.
Snapshot 14w07a is no different, although it does bring new iron trapdoors to the survival aspect of the game. Otherwise the majority of changes in this ‘smaller snapshot’ (Mojang’s words) centre once again around adding new ways to customise and set-up maps and mini-games for map-makers to use.
The two major map-making additions in my opinion are the ability to now display team objectives that can only be seen by the team it is for (filtered out by ‘team colour’) and the ability to at last switch off nameplates above a player’s head, using the teams function. That last one especially will have a major effect on Survival Game type maps equal almost to how Spectator Mode did back in snapshot 14w05a.
Other notable command additions have to do with the /scoreboard command added in the last patch, with some new subcommands /scoreboard operation and /scoreboard test, operation used for math-based functions such as totalling up all the kills from one team into one single score and test used to make sure that scores are falling between set parameters (e.g. not under 0 and not over 100).
Needless to say, 1.8 looks like it’s going to be a very good update for all map-makers in the Minecraft community.
Back in December EA told everyone that they were not going to work on any future projects or release any expansions or additional content for Battlefield 4 until they had sorted out the problems that continued to plague the game at that point.
Yesterday though they announced the upcoming release of a Battlefield 4 DLC, Naval Strike, coming at the end of March, hot on the heels of the Second Assault map pack being release on February 18th. As you can probably guess from the name, Naval Strike will add a lot of water-based craft and weaponry as battles are taken to the sea and will also add four new maps to the game: Lost Island, Nansha Strike, Wave Breaker, and Operation Mortar.
The problem seems to be that the reports of game crashes and players being randomly kicked from servers or even the entire game haven’t stopped. There are still people saying that doing certain actions, such as getting into a vehicle with another player is meaning that their playing of a game is stopped right there until they can reboot the game and rejoin the server. Some are even still reporting that they have a problem launching the game at all.
Back in December DICE general manager Karl Troedsson said that they had the “entire team working to stabilise the game” and that the reason they were working on Battlefield 4 before expanding it or concentrating on future projects was because “it’s the right thing to do.” and to be fair certain prominent bugs have been nipped in the bud already.
Hopefully the game will be a little more shipshape when the boats finally set out to sea.
