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Unless you’ve been actively avoiding the news this week, you can’t help but have heard about the death of David Bowie.
Now Square Enix have made a game he played a major role in – as well as lending musical talent to – free to download while stocks last. Or until next Friday, 9am UK time at least.
Omikron: The Nomad Soul can be acquired from The Square Store and if you are accessing from the UK all you need to do is add the game to your basket and check it out, getting a useable Steam code for the game that you can redeem for the game. If you’re using the US store, the game will still show a price but you can get it free by using the special promotional code: ‘omikron’.
So if you want to game to pay your tributes to Bowie, just fancy hearing some of his music again while you play or even just want a free game, head over to the Square Store now. Just be aware that you might hit some traffic, so be patient.
DOOM was instrumental in the world of PC modding, being one of the most heavily modded games ever, even to this day. It’s modding community is still quite active but one of the latest entries comes from quite a source: the co-founder of id Software himself.
John Romero hasn’t made a level for DOOM is over 20 years, but he has just released a level that apparently he worked on for “several hours” in his spare time over the last two weeks, announcing its release through his Twiter:
Whether it’s because he was involved with the game itself or not, the replies so far seem to suggest that it’s a good level. It’s accessed through that DropBox link and according to the reply given to a fan it works with “most source ports”.
So, if you’re still into DOOM it seems this new level is one to at least consider giving a go. The fact that it’s made by Romero has to count for quite a bit.
While the Wasteland of Fallout 4 is, as always, awe-inspiring, large and full of things to do; most people can agree that one thing it lacks is… well that simple natural beauty it had before the War. Side-effect of nuclear fallout don’t you know? It also lacks much in the way of the changing of the seasons as time moves on, even though there is a dating system in the game (which decorates Diamond City in festive cheer if the date hits December 25th in-game fyi). That might also be down to the nuclear fallout, but it’s a little less clear.
However, it’s been over 200 years by this point and obviously there are some modders out there who thought that Boston and the Commonwealth really ought to have recovered a little bit better than this. So a number of mods have been released through Steam Workshop and NexusMods for the game, and one person released a mod that not only brings some green life back to Boston, but allows for the cycling of the seasons as the days pass:
The video seen here demonstrates how the Seasons mod changes the game around you, with an apparently minimal impact on the FPS of your game depending on your machine’s specifications. Imagine leaving Diamond City in its festively decorated form on December 25th and stepping out into the winter wasteland outside. A white Christmas never felt so awesome or felt so dangerous.
Of course, the video maker has used other mods in the video to enhance the effect. Those mods are the Subtle ENB mod that plays with the colour balance to make the colours crisper in the daytime and darker at night, the True Storms mod that enhances the weather effects of the storms that blow in from time to time in the Wasteland (rain, thunder, storms and radiation rains) and a character modeller mod called Caliente’s Better Bodies Enhancer that gives your some more options to play with upon character creation. All four of the mods seem to work together nicely with no suggested framerate drops in the gameplay section of the video, which is always nice to see.
If you’re aching to get a little bit more from Fallout 4, the mods are linked below from their NexusMod pages.
SMITE has released it’s first god in the Japanese Pantheon, Amaterasu the Shining Light. As always, its time to jump into an Arena match and test out the new god’s abilities!
Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked hit Steam Early Access in December, and already it seems to be shaping up to be just as good a game as Don’t Starve was. Now the official forums have had a ‘roadmap’ published that outlines how Klei are going to build the game.
Designer Bryce Doig was the writer of the forum post, promising some new content and tweaks to come. New content itself will be added to the game every three weeks started mid-January and will continue until the end of February, after which the studio will spend time squashing the bugs out of the code as well as making sure the balance is fair.
“In the December 17th update we released Walani, but we still have three more characters to go,” writes Doig. You can also look forward to new beasties who’ll be looking to devour your survivor when extra bosses are introduced to the game. “The world in Shipwrecked has a noticeable absence of large creatures,” says Doig. “Right now, we have three new bosses planned for Shipwrecked: the Tiger Shark and two other yet to be named horrors.”
There’s even going to be a link between the island worlds of Shipwrecked and those settings from the original game, with a portal that will allow you to move between them which work very much like Caves already do in the game, unloading the current world and loading in the one you’re travelling to.
If you’re wanting to go along for the development ride, the game is on Steam now for £3.99/$4.99.
