Octopus Overlords

Max Peck wrote: Mon May 02, 2022 9:51 am Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios—and their games—to Embracer

On Monday, Japanese game publisher Square-Enix confirmed that it was selling all three of its Western video game studios, along with many significant game series and IP attached to those studios, to the European game publisher Embracer.

The sale includes game studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and Square-Enix Montreal. All three had previously been wholly owned by Square-Enix, and Embracer will acquire their entire staffs, combined at roughly 1,100 people, along with popular IP such as Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain, and a game-publishing catalog of "over 50 games," for $300 million.

Not all of the deal's IP has been confirmed thus far, however, and an announcement from Square-Enix indicates that its Western operations "will continue to publish franchises such as Just Cause, Outriders, and Life Is Strange." This suggests that Square-Enix will retain some of its Western-specific IP and that its future collaborations with Western game makers will come via publishing deals with outside developers.

Max Peck wrote: Mon May 02, 2022 11:57 am Stray's release date has been pushed back to "summer 2022."

You're low on ammo. Wounded. Desperate. But you made it through the level and now you can take a deep sigh of relief and prepare for the next one. Time to heal, reload your weapons, and organize your backpack so you can fit all your gear neatly inside it.

That last bit is what you do in Save Room - Organization Puzzle. That's all you do, in fact. This inventory management puzzle game strips out the shooting and monsters and danger and literally everything else but the very act of healing, reloading weapons, and making all your guns, grenades, and gear fit neatly into your grid-based backpack.

And it's… pretty great?

Features
• Use your organizing skills to make all your items fit.
• Use your logical thinking to use the items in the right order to free some spaces.
• Understand the format of several items to find the best fitting.
• 40 unique handmade levels.
• Relaxing music and sound effects made for the game!

There aren't many games for which built-in integration with Microsoft Excel would be a major feature whose announcement would draw literal cheers from fans. But Eve Online showed itself to be the exception when developer CCP announced coming Excel integration during its Eve Fanfest keynote this morning.

Through an official partnership with Microsoft, CCP said it is creating a JavaScript API that will allow players to "seamlessly export data from Eve Online" into the popular spreadsheet program. That "will help players access and calculate everything from profit margins to battle strategy, making day-to-day Eve operations easier to execute," the company said in a press release.

"It's not April fools; this is real," Eve Online Creative Director Bergur Finnbogason said on the Fanfest stage, receiving bemused laughter in response. "I'm not lying—we actually reached out to [Microsoft] and they were like, 'Oh my god, we love Eve!'"

Skinypupy wrote: Mon May 02, 2022 11:57 am If you need a "chill" game, I would highly recommend Dorfomantik. It's a tile-based city builder(ish) that is incredibly relaxing and fun to play. Sat down to give it a try yesterday, and a couple hours disappeared in the blink of an eye. It's very relaxing and fun to build a landscape and see it evolve. Really enjoyed it/

If you’ve ever wondered how you’d fare in the stressful circumstances of a failing spaceship, new space survival simulation game Tin Can helps you find out. Soaring through space in the titular Tin Can, a tiny escape pod full of failing systems, you must manage your power resources and shift components around in an attempt to keep yourself alive until you can reach safety.

Forced to evacuate from a colony transport ship, you are left drifting in your pod with no sign of rescue. Much like popular space game FTL: Faster Than Light, you must now decide which systems are crucial for your survival at any one time. Can you afford to switch off the emergency lights to make sure the oxygen generator stays up and running? Is it okay to disable temperature control to ensure that the radiation shielding is solid?

Your character, controlled from a first-person perspective, will suffer what developer Tin Can Studio describes as ‘real medical symptoms’ as a result of problems aboard the ship, rather than relying on heath bars to determine your current status. A lack of oxygen, for example, will make the player breathe faster and will also cause your vision to blur and your movements to slow until you eventually lose consciousness.

Components will break and disable in different ways – faulty electrical connectors delivering insufficient power, damaged buttons not triggering properly when pressed. You must trace failures to their source and resolve the issues, aided only by an onboard manual which provides detailed information about your pod and its components.

You will also have to deal with the consequences of cosmic events, from overheating as the pod passes in close proximity to a star, to ull damage from asteroid fields.

The Game Workers Alliance, the union of quality assurance workers at Activision subsidiary studio Raven Software, has won their union vote. The votes were tallied today and the union passed with 19 out of 22 votes with two challenged ballots. The election makes the Game Workers Alliance (GWA) the first union for Activision Blizzard and only the second formal union in US video game industry.

hepcat wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:27 am I swear to God, I don't know how you do it. You finish games like 12 minutes after they're released.

I can't wait until you break the space time continuum and start finishing games BEFORE they're released.

coopasonic wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:36 am

You know all that time you spend playing board games both solo and in social settings? I spend that time playing video games. I wake up at 6am, shower and get on the computer. I don't start work until 9am. I play video games at lunch, I play games between leaving work and eating dinner and back to it after dinner. On weekends and holiday, it's basically just meal breaks. I watch at most 1 hour of TV a day except on Mondays when we have a "no video games" evening where I binge whatever is at the top of my list.

Max Peck wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:34 pm Owlcat (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous) is teasing a new project.

It's obviously set in space, and they are known for their CRPGs, so I'd guess they might be doing something with Starfinder.

8. Rest Less Mod — Adjust Party Fatigue

For better or worse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker embraced the more realistic aspects of the RPG life, like fatigue. When your character or party members are fatigued, they'll be affected negatively across the board. Until you rest, it will only get worse. The Rest Less mod allows you to adjust the rate at which this fatigue occurs. You can lower the value so much that fatigue is basically nonexistent and, if you hate yourself, you can raise the value to make the system even more annoying.

Max Peck wrote: Mon Apr 18, 2022 5:57 pm I kind of want an A500 Mini when it is eventually released, just for the brief nostalgia rush. I don't have a lot of confidence that I'll be able to find one at MSRP though.

Developer and publisher Epic Games will make its official foray into crypto with Grit, a battle royale game from blockchain video game company Gala Games.

Previously, Epic Games clashed with video game marketplace Steam, which took a firm no-NFT stance in 2021. Epic’s founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said at the time that “Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group.” And now the company is doing it. It’s really doing it.

Gala Games announced at its Galaverse convention on June 6 that it had “signed a partnership with Epic.” Because Grit was created by Team Grit not Gala Games (though the two separate companies entered a “partnership” in February), the game is currently listed as an early access game on Steam as well. This listing is clean of any reference to Web3, crypto, or the blockchain and hasn’t been updated since January 25, when Team Grit announced a delay and before it partnered with Gala. Gala Games did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Gala Games’ partnership with Epic, then, marks Grit’s formal online release. Gala implied in its presentation that there would be more blockchain games eventually released on the platform, though every title that Gala Games currently lists on its website is either in development, in beta, or in its “test” phases. You will likely have to wait a bit before the crypto gods descend and turn all of gaming into a Buttcoin valued at two whole cents.

“Grit is going to be one of the very first [NFT-based] games on the Epic Games store,” Gala Games said at Galaverse. “This is the moment that it’s all gonna start to change, and everybody’s gonna figure out that…why would you play any game where you don’t own what you buy in the game?”

Great question. I can think of a few reasons.

Daehawk wrote: Tue Jun 07, 2022 11:25 pm Kinda in the mood for a WW2 shooter. Whats one thats kinda newish but not so new that Id remember it so much? Well fun too.