I know that you don’t need a reminder of how sometimes people on the Internet can be really horrible people, but sometimes it’s needed so we can all remember how not to behave online.

No Man’s Sky has been quite the awaited game since we first saw its announcement trailer. A game that promises procedurally generated planets, with space travel to allow you to skip between them? Hell yeah, a lot of people are understandably excited about it.

However, the team working on it at Hello Games has had a run of bad luck with one of the most notable past incidents being the flood on Christmas Eve 2013 that destroyed laptops, furniture and development kits along with quite a bit of work. At the time the studio said that it wouldn’t cause a problem with meeting their release target, but that was a few years ago and things change. Hello Games recently announced that they would need to delay No Man’s Sky a little bit and some people didn’t like that at all.

So they sent death threats to the people at Hello Games. For some inexplicable reason.

The founder of Hello Games dealt with it in a very classy way through, tweeting that Hello Games now resembled the house from Home Alone so he was safe now. But then he followed up by adding “Tell me when its safe to remove the marbles and oil from the stairs. It’s getting really cumbersome, and I need the toilet.”

Tell me when its safe to remove the marbles and oil from the stairs. It’s getting really cumbersome, and I need the toilet

— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) May 28, 2016

Of course, making light of it is all well and good but really, death threats? Over a video game delay? Come on.

As I have written many times previously, delays in release can only help a game by allowing more time for bugs to be stamped out and the game polished and improved. Sure, they’re annoying if you really want a game but speaking as someone who understands impatience, you’re better off waiting.

Because really, no matter how many times you threaten to kill someone for delaying a game, it’s still going to release in August now.

One of the things that’s made Overwatch stand out is its Play of the Game clip at the end of a round; right now there’s an ongoing meme that inserts a totally random clip as the ‘play’ which I love personally. But it does make the comment that at times, the PoTG does need a little work. The play is often a long string of enemy kills in a row and if a Torbjorn player got the best kill string through his turret while dead… well, watching a dead body for a minute while those kills pop up onscreen isn’t exactly thrilling viewing.

Another complaint is that because of the way it seems to favour the long kill strings, the PoTG often goes to offensive characters as opposed to maybe a Support who did something cool and turned the match around for their team. Blizzard are listening however and are trying to improve the formula used to determine these plays.

Lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton explained this in a Gamespot interview saying: “From a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there. We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.

“We also have a lot of cool systems internally where we can play with the algorithm that determines Play of the Game and play the same game back again, and be like, “Okay if I tweak these numbers, what’s going to be the Play of the Game that gets picked this time?” So it might’ve been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden its Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”

In the interview he does say that some improvements have already been made, so that the algorithm takes into account the difficulty of shots made, using the speed of the player and the distance to calculate the ‘coolness’ of the shot. More changes are to come soon, so hopefully we’ll slowly begin to see a slide towards an equal showing of all characters for PoTG.

After all, I’ve seen some really cool ones from the lesser shown characters including one Lucio wall-running shot that managed to leave three enemy players down. That sort of play deserves more recognition really.

Since it’s release, GTA V has been having update after update released by their developer Rockstar to keep the game fresh and the people playing. It’s working because even after years of release, GTA Online is still pretty popular, and now Rockstar are adding the biggest update to date.

Following on from Executives and Other Criminals, the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony expansion will allow you to become the CEO of your own criminal business. Not bad.

Things it will come with include the possibility of a skyscraper headquarters for your high-flying criminal entrepeneur as well as warehouses to store loot and even sell it from. Of course, you’ll still need to deal with other criminals attempting to bust up your operations and sometimes even the LSPD will come calling – but these encounters bring the chances of rarer and unique items that carry the highest profit so there’s reward in the risk.

There will also be new vehicles added as well as many other features typical of a GTA update, when the expansion releases June 7th.

Welcome to another indie game review for the Sanitarium.FM. This time I’ve been playing a mobile port by the same people who ported Tap Heroes, VaragtP – Loot Hero DX. The game is available on Steam for £1.99 in the UK and $2.99 in the US. If you want its original soundtrack as well then you can get it for £2.79 or $3.99.

The game was released around the same time in July of last year, and basically sees you using a similar mechanic as Tap Heroes – progress through levels by beating enemies building up experience and gold to purchase upgrades before you take on a big final boss at the end of each level. It uses similar 2D pixel graphics as well and does have a minor story in it – the land you are in has been attacked by an evil red dragon and their magical powers have awoken evil creatures across the land – so this land is badly in need of a hero.

Game consists mostly of charging across levels with your lance by holding down your mouse button in the direction you wish to charge, either to the right to progress through the level or to the left to backtrack if you wish to grind out experience or gold a bit. If you let go of the mouse you do stop, and periodically along the way you will pass ‘inn’-like buildings that heal your health to full as well as offering four abilities for upgrade for ever increasing amounts of gold and loot – Attack, Critical, Defence and Speed.

The upgrades are pretty simple to understand – Attack will raise the amount of damage you do per hit of your lance, Critical increases your critical hit chance, Defence makes you tougher to knock down and Speed increases how fast you run across the level. To pay for these upgrades you must collect loot which is dropped by enemies in the form of coins, gold and diamonds; there are also other drops – a healing potion that restores you to full health again and a potion that briefly gives you invincibility and allows you to plow through lines of opponents.

So, how is it as a game? Okay but not great.

Sure, charging across the screen with only a lance between yourself and death is more fun than just repeatedly clicking on enemies or waiting for the game to dispatch your opponent for you, and upon a Critical Hit an enemy will go flying backwards off the screen which is a nice and quite funny little touch. The ability to backtrack is also nice, because being knocked down upon losing all your health will make you lose a portion of the loot you have gained – and the costs scale highly for upgrades. The game will encourage you to backtrack, and you should probably listen – you’ll need to do it at least in the beginning of the game.

However, once you have done the grind a little and made a few upgrades you probably won’t struggle with this game anymore – especially if you get lucky with your drops of both the health potion and invincibility potion. Each level is not that long really and there is a little variety in enemies with them getting progressively tougher as you charge forward until you run into the big final boss at the end. Add this to the fact that there’s only really 9 levels that keep looping around only slightly more difficult next time and you really don’t have a game with a lot of variety. Beating the dragon at the end of the 9th level does unlock a Miner to generate gold for you but at that point you really don’t need them. The loot also scales with the levels so you can generate massive amounts without ever having to rely on your miners.

Because of the lack of levels and the fact that you need only really do a little grinding, you can easily make a 9 level circuit in very little time. My first time around took me less than 30 minutes and because of how OP I was compared to the very minor difficulty hike for the lower levels the second time round, I didn’t have any trouble at all until I got to around the 7^th or 8^th level, by which time I’d built up a staggering amount of treasure to spend on upgrades so that I would no longer have that trouble.

I also had a lot of fun trying to capture it for my video review as well, with framerates bouncing between 10 and 60 FPS even at the slowest speed that the character moved. I included a little of that footage in the review just so you can see what I’m on about.

Loot Hero DX is okay. I prefer it to Tap Heroes immensely and I did have fun with this game for a bit. However, you can tell that it’s not meant for long play sessions, it’s meant to be picked up and played when you can snatch a few minutes of playtime and that sort of game is made for mobiles, which is where Loot Hero DX has been ported from. There’s just not enough content for a long-time session, although the fact that it is so cheap means that you probably won’t mind it too much. For that i have to give it 6/10.

If you’re looking for a nice juicy story today, boy have I got a good one for you.

Back in 2013, the board of directors voted out of the company Red 5 Studios ex-CEO and lead design on their MMO game Firefall, Mark Kern. Now Kern is appealing to the sci-fi MMO’s community to “let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be” – i.e. as he wants it to be.

Kern made the appeal through a post on Firefall’s subreddit, which has since been deleted, in which he said that he would buy the rights to the game, but only once it was a failure. He also claimed that the company had taken his vision for the game and ruined it, so he wanted to buy the rights and remake it in his ideal.

“I would only offer to buy Firefall if the IP fails and the game is shuttered or due for shuttering,” Kern wrote on Thursday. “Also, buying a failed IP is cheap. You get the code, the art assets, the tools, the name, the customer lists, the story and characters, etc, but nothing else.

“So why buy it at all? First, its my game. I created it, and I hate to see what they did to it and what they did to the vets. Second, I want to finish what I was not allowed to finish because the Executive Team thought “WoW with guns” would be better. But first, Firefall has to die. There can be no confusion that the version I want to make is DIFFERENT and not a continuation. For that, Firefall (current) must end. So don’t play it, don’t buy anything for the game. Just let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be.”

Understandably the community reacted with a bit of confusion and a lot of outrage, which resulted in the then deletion of the post. The most upvoted reply to the post was by another worker ‘gotkerned’ who basically called all that Kern was claiming “full of shit” and said that he must be “so delusional at this point that you really believe yourself.”

“There was no “Executive Team” making actual decisions. Nobody except Mark could make real decisions. Mark rarely showed up to work though, so lots of decisions were made in absentia, and many were countermanded when he decided to show up. The state of Firefall is the result.

 

The eSports focus? Mark. Founders Packs? Mark. Higher-tier frames? Mark. (He wanted to sell a new one monthly, so he could be like League.) Real-money, per-use paint jobs? Mark. Vehicles, Pets, and dozens of other random features that were irrelevant to the core gameplay? Mark. The completely fucked up UI? Mark. He thinks he’s a UI genius, and put himself directly in charge. Stage 5 and the clusterfuck that was the bus? All Mark. Cutting PvP? Mark again (and he told the forums before the devs).

 

The vaunted “story”? All bullshit. Was in constant flux. Major rewrites to support whatever feature was the flavor of the month.”

Of course the game and its developer have been having a lot of troubles recently with a soft-launch in China Nov 2015 also coming with a memo to staff members that payroll couldn’t afford to pay them over the holiday period. Then Feb saw investors The9 pull out of Firefall, leaving Red 5 to sell off shares for $76.5 million to a Cayman Islands holding corporation in March.

Still, in terms of ballsy moves this takes the cake. Too bad the post was deleted…

… But thank goodness for webcache. The post and replies can be read here if you’re interested.