Starbound is a game that’s been coming for a long time, so when it finally became available in Beta form last Wednesday loads of people (who had pre-ordered) were immediately in-game testing and reporting back all the bugs of the early Beta. Although I’d only known about the game since August, when I saw it played at the Insomnia 49 event, I too was eagerly joining the crowds as we began out journey into this game…

First things first, Starbound has been called ‘Terraria in space’ and that’s actually a pretty accurate description, as the mechanics of the game are similar and it is also a singleplayer/multiplayer game. The game sees your character, chosen from six different species and customised to your liking, having fled your homeworld and coming to a stop above a planet in your now fuelless spacecraft. You beam down and begin to mine for and craft resources to allow yourself to survive and eventually refuel your ship so you can go to other places in your solar system and eventually other systems and even galaxies. Each planet/moon’s creatures are also customly generated with random body parts and colour palates and most will try to attack you. Fortunately among the items you are given for starting (stored in your ship’s locker) you will get a sword of some kind so you can at least fight back. The other main item you get is a matter manipulator which can do pretty much all mining and tree chopping you need done, but at a much slower speed than if you were using a tool made for that purpose. Your character has a decently sized inventory and a hotbar with 10 slots plus a bonus two L and R slots in the middle for your most important and often-used tools, and survival depends on keeping a ‘body temperature’ bar and a hunger meter topped up to avoid death.

Having played Terraria many times before I must say that I find Starbound’s crafting system somewhat easier, because if you know what you want to make you can search for the item and discover exactly what you need to build the item. This does however depend on if you’re highlighting the relevant item to craft it, if it needs such an item (e.g. iron anvil, crafting table etc.). Interaction with most items and NPCs is done this way, highlighting the item or NPC in question and then using the E button to interact with it/them. Z will switch between whatever two items you have placed into the L and R (I’d recommend the matter manipulator and whatever weapon you prefer using) and X will switch from number inventory items to the LR slot items and back again quickly. Shift will also allow for more precise mining, switching from the 2×2/3×3 block your mining tool does by default to a single block wide each way.

Right now the game is, as mentioned at the beginning, in an early Beta to all pre-orderers. This means that developer Chucklefish are releasing new patches often and already there’s been one ‘wipe’ update, the latest one: Annoyed Koala which has been called ‘the first balance patch’. With this new patch a lot of bugs have already been fixed, including reprogrammed monster AI to make them ‘smarter’ and stop them getting stuck so often, a total overhaul of the levelling system, the beginnings of ‘creature capture’ (you have three pet slots on your character screen and these I look forward to filling one day), a new galaxy sector, added plenty of new items, among them a Grappling Hook (which makes me very happy as it was such a useful item in Terraria) and plenty more.

Starbound is available for PC, Mac and Linux and the full version of the game will be coming in 2014.

Starbound is available right now to buy as a pre-order from Chucklefish’s site:

http://www.playstarboundgame.com

During Minecon this year one if the biggest announcements to emerge was the news of a partnership between Mojang and Twitch, which would result in a forthcoming update that would bring integration with the popular game streaming site to the blocky sandbox game. A few days ago the snapshot update with this very feature was released.

Linking to your Twitch account is done through the settings menu for your account on the Mojang website. From the snapshot it appears that you are able to mess with the streaming settings in-game before you start streaming. Recording stops and starts with the press of a single key (default bound to F6 but you can bind the on/off switch to a key of your choice) and a little red circular light appears in the top-right hand corner to let you know that your stream is live and people will be able to see you. The twitch chat also appears in the Minecraft textbox so you can see what your viewers are talking about and talk back to them (sound integration also works as I and my handful of test viewers found out).

Obviously, being a snapshot there are still a few bugs to iron out. For example there are a few frame rate issues (although as you’re streaming some of that is to be expected) and when you pull up your Esc menu all the in-game audio completely stops, mobs and in-game music, and then resumes where it’d stopped when you click out of the menu. Since none of this is game-breaking though this doesn’t stop me looking forward to the full proper release of this new Minecraft update.

Hearthstone is currently quite a big thing in the gaming community. Even though the game has been in closed Beta for a few months now and some of the hype has died down (especially with all the news about Heroes of the Storm and the new WoW expansion emerging recently), it’s fair to say that a lot of people are still checking their e-mails regularly hoping they’ll be one of the lucky ones to get a key before the game enters its Open Beta stage sometime in December. I should know, I was one of those people. Until Tuesday evening at least…

One of the first things I’ll say is that from the get-go, this game impressed me. Having seen many game play videos on Youtube while waiting for the key I expected the game to have some stutter or lag on my little laptop, which is the only machine I have available for PC gaming. Yet, despite having had this laptop for 2-3 years now, Hearthstone loaded up quickly and runs incredibly smoothly, much better than I was expecting.

As for the game itself, it is basically a card game based off the popular World of Warcraft series. There are a set of different ‘heroes’ that you can choose to play as and each hero has special cards that only they can use (for example Gul’dan the Warlock can summon all kinds of Demon minions) and a special ‘hero power’ that they can use which can do everything to striking any character with a single point of damage to sacrificing your own heroes life points to draw an extra card.

Hearthstone starts you off with a set of ‘tutorial battles’ that introduce you to the game’s core mechanics and how to do things such as summon minions, play spells and more besides. After these battles you are into the main game but still need to play and unlock all the other heroes (you start with the Mage alone) which you can do through the Play (facing real opponents you are randomly matched against) or Practice (AI opponents) options. Unlocking all the heroes allows you to access the Arena mode which I consider one of the best parts of this game. Arena gives you the option of three heroes to play as and then will present you with three random cards 30 times to help you build a deck with which to play an Arena round with. Trouble is, as those cards are random you can’t be sure what you’ll get. It’s a fantastic way of getting players used to cards they don’t already own or use and also to make them improvise with whatever they get.

The way a battle plays out is usually very interesting too. The amount of cards you can play in a turn completely depends on your ‘mana-count’ which increases by 1 crystal per turn (if you don’t use a card to increase or decrease this) to a maximum of 10, which means as the battle goes along the minions and spells get more and more powerful and/or more cards can be played in a single turn. It gives the game a sense of escalation and makes you ask ‘Should I take the chance on trying to rush down my opponent before he gets the 10 mana crystals or wait until I’ve got more crystals myself and use more powerful creatures?’

Yet this game isn’t all drama. The creatures on the board slam down onto the board with battle cries, but some of them are actually rather funny (‘Join or die! … Or both’) and there are a few different ‘stages’ for the card game with little interactive bits placed around for you to click upon to make actions happen. You also have the option of making your hero say six different phrases or if your opponent is spamming theirs, right click to ‘Squelch’ them.

It took me a while to get a key for this game, and it’s about a month before the Open Beta is due to arrive and let in everyone interested in this game. But given all that it has to offer, I don’t regret having waited for my early access at all. Hearthstone is for the PC, the Open Beta is coming in December and coming soon for the iPhone and Android.

We’ve known that Blizzard has been working on its own MOBA for a while, though the name has changed several times between each discussion. Originally announced as Blizzard DOTA – causing much of a stir with players of the Warcraft 3 mod of the same name – it was later given the code-name “Blizzard All-Stars“. Now it’s officially known as Heroes Of The Storm.

Now, before we go on, let me take some time to criticise Blizzard’s naming policy. It’s quite obvious to me people will start abbreviating the new name for Blizzard’s new MOBA; however, HOTS is already used to refer to another Blizzard game, the Starcraft II expansion fully titled “StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm” – and sometimes, by extension, StarCraft II itself. So should we call the new game “Heroes” for short? But then, what about Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft? It starts to feel like Blizzard don’t want people to call their games anything OTHER than their full, long titles…

Anyway, Heroes Of The Storm will feature characters from all three of Blizzard’s main franchises – characters so far revealed have been Starcraft‘s Kerrigan and Jim Ranyor; Illidan and The Lich King from the Warcraft series; and the titular Diablo of the games of the same name – in team-on-team battles to destroy an opposing base while protecting your own. But if that sounds too much like your standard MOBA game (if actually there IS such a thing as a “standard” MOBA since the term has been applied to a number of completely different games), it’s Blizzard’s attempts to switch up the genre that make this one stand out.

For a start, unlike most similar games, you will not be buying items and accruing currency to get more over the course of the game. Instead, gold chests will periodically spawn on the map to collect or steal (depending on which side of the map you’re on), which can then be used to purchase powerful map-specific upgrades. Items themselves have been replaced by unlockable character-specific skill choices, allowing you to customise the skills offered by your characters beyond the typical four initial choices and keeping you always in the thick of the action. As for those map-specific upgrades, one map sees a character able to transform into a powerful dragon; while another sees a ghostly pirate fire cannons at your enemy’s base to deal huge damage.

Blizzard’s main goal with Heroes Of The Storm is seemingly to speed up the time taken to play full MOBA matches, but still keep all the action. The previously mentioned maps shown off so far are small in comparison to genre tradition; and with mounts available to increase the speed at which players can move, crossing the map is likely to be a very quick process even in the most demanding battles. Slowing players down however are the use of gates, which must be destroyed before certain parts of a map can be accessed; bringing a new level of crowd control beyond towers and lanes. Forts will be nearby, too, to enable health and mana regeneration.

Heroes Of The Storm will be free-to-play with microtransactions, but it’s not clear if that means purchasing heroes to play as or just skins and mounts.

You can sign up to the Heroes Of The Storm beta now, or do so through your Battle.net account page.

Blizzard developers suggest that the original Warcraft games are coming to modern operating systems.

During the World of Warcraft Ask Anything panel, a question was asked about the original Warcraft games (meaning Warcraft I, Warcraft II, and the expansions). The BlizzCon goer asked if, because of the setting and theme of Warlords of Draenor, would we be seeing a port of the original Warcraft games to modern machines (I presume she meant modern operating systems). The devs gave an intriguing response by saying that they have a group at Blizzard working on something that may be able to do “something like that.”

Now, this is interesting and unexpected. Most players of World of Warcraft probably haven’t even played Warcraft III, much less Warcraft I and II. By releasing the games on modern operating systems, that would definitely introduce an expansive audience to the Warcraft universe’s roots. This is especially poignant when considering that it was just announced that the Warcraft movie would focus on Lothar and Durotan. Not only would they be bringing their newer players into the loop, but they would be introducing general movie goers to the back story, as well.

But, what did the developers mean by saying “something like that?” That seems to suggest that the games might be coming to us in a nontraditional way. What first comes to my mind is a system similar to the Starcraft II arcade. That would be pretty interesting and a cool addition to World of Warcraft. I would definitely play it even if it was within WoW.

So, what do you think? Do you think they’ll port the games to modern operating systems or not? What form do you think they could be distributed? What do you think the developers meant with their answer? Have you played the original Warcraft games? Would you play them again? Let us know in the comments section below!