Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
Cheltenham, in the leafy Cotswolds of England, has a long history of Music, Art and Gaming. It was the home of developers Acclaim, way back in the day and artists like Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles and more, over the years have regularly played at the various venues and events held at the yearly festivals the beautiful spa town holds.
It’s also the home, of course, to Sanitarium.FM and lots of great business’, and has been the venue for Guinness World Record attempts over the years too. This weekend will add to that list as Joe Kelly, of Flaming Paper, a local video production company, is attempting to beat the CURRENT WORLD RECORD for playing Minecraft. The current record for this stands at 24 hours and 10 minutes. Joe hopes to beat this, and will be streaming his attempt live online from the Holiday Inn Express in Cheltenham. It all starts this Saturday at 8:30am and I will be standing as an expert witness to the record attempt aswell, which I am immensely proud to do.
Joe is attempting this record in order to raise money for Cancer Research UK. You can visit his Just Giving page for more information, plus Sanitarium.FM will be donating any of the station’s monthly donations (for October) to this cause aswell as it’s a great cause.
Joe will be livestreaming the record attempt to his Youtube channel over the weekend while he plays, but he has also made a series of films on his Youtube channel about the difficulty of record attempts and how to not only prepare for them, but survive the attempts
Once again, myself and the Sanitarium.FM are very proud to be supporting this attempt and we wish Joe every luck possible with it!
IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!
The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,
“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”
It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.
Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.
But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.
So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.
You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!
This year’s EGX featured games of all genres and titles, and I was lucky enough to be assigned Hellblade. Presented by Ninja Theory’s Dominic Mathews, this developer session was as much about the process of creating a game as it was about the game itself. For their latest game release, Ninja Theory are taking the novel approach of allowing the audience to follow the production of Hellblade from concept to animation and story-building to completion. Whilst they realise this can leave the small team of 15 staff open to a lot of criticism, it also provides people outside of the games production industry a unique insight to how our beloved games come to be realised.
Another unique aim of the team who created ‘Devil May Cry’, is the type of title they want to release. Dominic detailed the main draw-backs of triple A titles being a set budget, spiralling costs and a loss of creative ownership in order to deliver a product expected from customers of triple A titles. Instead, the team are aiming for a title hallway between triple A and Indie, lovingly named “independent Triple A”. This will allow the developers to take creative risks and ensure an immersive storyline and gamer experience, without limited their production values.
The game Hellblade, follows the fantasy adventures of Celtic warrior “Senua”; a female protagonist plagued by psychosis and visual and auditory hallucinations. The thing that impressed me most about tackling such a controversial subject is the amount of research the team conducted to portraying the reality of mental illness in everyday life. Not only did the team interview people who deal with psychosis on a daily basis, but they worked with prominent psychiatrist Professor Paul Fletcher to create a truthful representation of psychosis. In this author’s opinion, mental illness is a subject that is only just receiving the attention it requires in wider media. The developers of Hellblade are striving to disband the usual stereotypes and to really help those with no experience, understand what sufferers all over the world have to cope with.
Continuing with the open development style, we were shown a ‘vertical slice’ of the game. This is a small cut scene created to demonstrate the sound, graphics and storyline standards the game will eventually be made to. To stay true to the Independent Triple A title, the team have created an in-house performance capture studio using materials obtained from Amazon and Ikea to keep costs down. Using Vicon 30 technology, not only have the actors portraying in-game characters been captured, but also rocks and trees in the real world have been scanned. The single environment artist on the team will be using these objects to create the background to Senua’s adventures, allowing a realistic environment for the player to experience.
The journey of Hellblade has already begun, and you can follow them at www.hellblade.com. Here you can catch up on developer’s diary videos, weekly blogging and Q and A sessions. All in all, Hellblade promises to be an immersive, creative experience, which I can’t wait to play.
To watch the entire developer session for yourself, click below:
Today’s Homefront: The Revolution developer session was a bit of a surprise today here at geek towers. We all expected Homefront 2, as the Devs from Dambuster Studios also joked about at the start of the session.
What we got, was a more than pleasant surprise. We started seeing what we first thought was another open world dirge fest. What we saw, was a structured area game (including green, yellow and red zones where gameplay takes place as separate maps), that including stunning graphics and effects including weather effects, such as fog and rain that creates puddles that then dry out naturally as the tarmac warms up again and a real day/night cycle (an overly inflated one by the devs to show it off to better effect). To the near end of the presentation showing off the dynamic enemy spawn areas, meaning that no two people doing the same mission will see the same troubles.
It’s this dynamic enemy placement that Digmbot and I most found interesting. The idea that a snipe could be around any corner, or as you walk through a building, a full enemy patrol with an APC may be there to surprise you (or for you to surprise)
They ended the session with a bit of info about the map they were using at EGX this week, which also happened to be the Gamescom map aswell this year, and that they had been pulling player activity info the whole time. Including where people died in the map, how they died and which enemy killed them, including one sniper who accounted for the most players deaths (apart from self inflicted ones). The funniest statistic was how many players had set themselves on fire. Not been set on fire from an enemy as none in that zone had flamethrowers or similar, but had walked through flame (your clothes are flammable) and even those that had misused Molotov cocktails (including one guy who must have dropped one at his own feet at the very start of the zone, which they took great delight in laughing about, I hope that guy wasn’t watching)
This all culminated in a beautiful looking game that I went from not caring about to being determined to play it tomorrow when I’m back at EGX and may even get early next year when it’s out!
Great Job Dambuster Studios!
Homefront: The Revolution is slated for a Spring 2016 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and STEAM
That’s about standard for one of Steam’s free weekends, but Sega has used the occasion to add some new content to both games.
The original Dawn of War is receiving a new, official multiplayer map, while its sequel is offering up some extra gear. Here’s a rundown from Sega of what’s included:
“The Temple of Cyrene is a brand new, official multiplayer map we’re adding into the Dawn of War I rotation. This map will be playable in DoW I, as well as the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm expansions. The Temple of Cyrene sits on the blasted landscape of a world scoured clean by the Exterminatus of the Imperial Inquisition. Homeworld of Gabriel Angelos, Cyrene is now a ghost-world of ruined cities and ashen fields. Fight for supremacy amidst the remains of Cyrene’s once-mighty temples. Claim the three critical locations at the heart of the ruins or drive into enemy bases and deliver annihilation.”
Dawn of War II is getting some love aswell:
“In Dawn of War II, we’re giving away four free sets of Wargear; The Vanguard, Sniper, Sternguard, and Destroyer, to equip in the main campaign that were previously only available as pre-order DLC, or as rare loot drops. Now everyone will be able to equip items like the Veteran’s Grenades, Blade of Ulyus, Armor of the Destroyer, and many more to complete your sets!”
