Black Viper manages, whether intentionally or not, to find game equivalents for all the shortcomings in typical Eurospy films.
The best part of this year’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the tomb raiding. This may seem like a banal observation, but there’s a large percent of the game that’s spent not tomb raiding. I do highly recommend the tomb raiding, though…
In this episode Joel and I get our groove on with Crypt of the Necrodancer. Well, Joel gets his groove on. I just die a lot.
The indie RPG that everyone is talking about this season is a Gamemaker game called Undertale. I really enjoyed this game and think it’s absolutely worth playing. But the fan enthusiasm came near to putting me off, as fan enthusiasm can do. So here is Thought One: If you think you may at all have an interest in a quirky indie RPG, play Undertale without reading any spoilers. I didn’t even watch the trailer, and I think that’s for the best. Don’t listen to any fans until you’ve finished the game, because they’re gonna get all weird about it on you.
Speaking of which, the other two segments of this article contain spoilers – the first, vague but meaningful spoilers – the second, slightly more. So if you haven’t played it, you can stop now like I suggest, or keep reading a little until you know if this is a thing you want to pick up. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has another take on it that actually tells you more about what the game is like.
Bridging the gap between the PC and console – and by extension, between the mouse and the controller – is no easy task. There’s a reason it’s never been done; a reason that despite all these years and all these innovations nobody has come up with a suitable control scheme that allows the best of both worlds. As Valve’s own marketing video muses, “For too long, players have had to choose between the precision of a mouse and the familiarity of a controller.”
Note: I’ve updated this article a bit based on some more hours with the Steam Controller. Major changes are noted, others are just in there.
The official release of Valve’s first venture into hardware doesn’t happen until November, but those consumer whores among us are already testing out the Steam Controller and Steam Link thanks to the power of pre-orders we’d completely forgotten about until FedEx sent a nastygram to our email saying “answer your door, ya feckin’ shut-in.”
Episode 2 is upon us and this week we’re taking a look at Psyonix’s smash hit car-to-ball game Rocket League.
Havok, the Ireland-based physics middleware developer, has been hockey-pucked over to Microsoft by its former masters at Intel. While this news is unlikely to affect consumers much one way or another, it does mean that one of the leading developers of physics software for games is now technically in the hands of a first party publisher, though the companies have already announced that Havok technology will still be available for license by third party developers.
The bottom line: I started out immensely hyped for Batman: Arkham Knight, but ended up feeling burned out. The actual timeline of events below the jump.
The wait is over! You can now, at long last, refresh the Side by Side tab you’ve had open since the end of season 1 to see that season 2 is upon us! Bigger, better, harder, faster… uh, stronger? Actually, while season 2 won’t necessarily be bigger, we hope it’ll be better. Harder? No. Faster? No. Snappier? I didn’t say that, but yes. Sexier? Now now, don’t push it.
Time is running out to avoid a general strike among video game voice actors represented by SAG-AFTRA. The union has been in negotiations with major publishers for several months now, but so far neither side seems willing to give on its expectations. Eighty percent of game voice talent isn’t union, which makes their side a difficult one. Strike may be the only way to be heard.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata died on 11 July at the age of 55, of complications caused by cancer from which he had been thought to be recovering. Any time someone dies young it’s a blow, all the more when the individual lost is such a significant and well-liked figure – an avalanche of tributes, many quite moving, appeared in the days following his death. Satoru Iwata became president of Nintendo in 2002, having risen through the ranks on various projects since the 1980s. Iwata-san’s personality was unusual for a titan of industry, and the way in which his personality fit into Nintendo’s character was also unique.
In 2005, he made a remark that sums himself up quite well.
I apologize for the long silences around the Tap-Repeatedly bonfire of late. We were never a multiple-article-a-day type of place, but over the past year or so it’s really slowed down, partly because we’ve had fewer contributors shouldering more of the workload, and partly because I haven’t been pulling my own weight. But despite how it may seem, I have no plans to call it a day.
Some of you may remember Celebrity Guest Editor Zeke Iddon visiting us here on Tap. His hilarious review of Bientôt l’été is still among my top favorite guest posts. Now he’s back, sharing wisdoms and intelligences and Yoda-like prognostications. Believe me, you’re going to want to click that Read More link.
You may recall that Microsoft bought out Mojang Specifications almost a year ago, spending a cool $2.5 billion on the Minecraft developer. So far the Redmond giant has done very little with its new toy, and Minecraft has gone on more or less like it always has. Now it looks like the Redmond giant has some plans to extend the sandbox game into the classroom. This won’t be the first time Minecraft is treated as an educational tool, but I’m eager to see the results when Microsoft puts its muscle behind the project.