Some of you live high atop remote mountains with no other people around, which means local multiplayer game and gelatinous brawler Gang Beasts [official site] has thus far been useless to you. No more! The game of haphazard punching in comically hazardous locations now has an online multiplayer beta, so mountain-dwellers everywhere can play together – assuming you can get access.
Besides being misspelled, Asemblance [official site] is an upcoming first-person psychological horror game from Nilo Studios – a newish crew of ex-Bungie, Monolith and Visceral bodies – that’s set to launch its first episode next month. As far as I can gather, its story is centered around a memory simulating machine that you’re trapped inside/forced to view the world through without immediately obvious reason. “What do you remember? Do you remember your home? Your wife? How you met?” it asks. “Are you sure you want to remember?”
Activision today announced Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare [official site], the latest in their long-running mega-hit military FPS series, and I am sorely disappointed. Firstly, today is a holiday in the UK, so I’m not even supposed to be here. Secondly, Infinite Warfare is about futurewar with spaceships and everything, not the Escherian nightmare that we were assured it would be. This ‘real’ Infinite Warfare does sound exciting, but I can only assume we were deceived as someone’s idea of a ‘joke’.
Activision also announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, a revamp of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – the game which defined the next nine years of CoD.
The Raccoon Who Lost Their Shape [Itch page] is a strange game about an unnamed raccoon medium who possesses the ability to converse with recently deceased Shape People. Shape People, for those of you wondering, are simply shapes with faces who, in this instance, seek your inter-realm services in order to connect with other shapes that’ve passed on. Its themes of self-discovery and morality remind me of Wadget Eye’s The Shivah. It’s also free, so you can come to your own conclusions yourself.
Neon Chrome [official site] is a game that’s sure of two things: what it is and who it hopes to entertain. It’s a top-down roguelike shooter, you see, that asks you to run frantically around procedurally generated battlegrounds, blast waves of baddies until they stop moving/explode/both, and climb a hierarchy of levels before facing off against a grand final boss. If you don’t like games of this nature, for there are a lot of them, then you probably won’t like like this one. If you do, however, then I think you will like Neon Chrome. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played.
Over and above its management and strategy groundings, Big Pharma [official site] shines a light on the billion dollar, often unscrupulous, pharmaceutical industry. While Alec enjoyed his hands-on time with Twice Circled’s medicine manufacturing sim last year, he noted it didn’t “go for pharmaceutical industry’s jugular”. Its first expansion – Marketing and Malpractice – takes a distinguished step towards doing exactly that by introducing dodgy tactics and the ability to manually set medicine prices.
Sundays are for baby baby baby baby bab–
Fridays are for preparing a collection of the week’s (and then some) best games writing. Since I haven’t been around for the past month, some of these articles are a little older than normal.
At Sub-Q – an “interactive magazine for interactive fiction” – A. Johanna DeNiro looks at the work of a forgotten, maybe-bad, maybe-great IF creator, Rybread Celsius.
