Boldly Going Into More Detail On Star Trek: Bridge Crew

Star Trek: Bridge Crew [official site] was one of the games which caught my eye this E3. It basically looked like Artemis Bridge Simulator in VR and I figured that would be really fun. Also Levar Burton was on my screen being enthusiastic about things and that’s always infectious. Well played, Burton.

But then I was a bit hazy about the specifics (because: wine) and I got distracted by all manner of other things in the days since so it wasn’t until reading the Ubiblog about Star Trek: Bridge Crew this morning that I learned a bit more of the fine detail.

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Children Of The ADOM: Vanilla Bagel – The Roguelike

Vanilla Bagel [Steam page] is a proper roguelike. None of that roguelite or roguelikelike stuff here – you’ve got a big old inventory to manage, dungeons to explore, impossible odds stacked against you, and a whole lot of things to learn. It appeared on Steam a couple of weeks ago and that was the first I’d heard of it. Last night I decided to take it for a spin and have decided that it has enough in common with one of my faves, ADOM, that it’s earned a spot on my weekend playlist.

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Press Play Folks Build New Studio, Vehicles In Pioneers

I think there’s a fundamental human reason why Lego is so popular. The fact is, we all just really, really like building stuff. From the looks of things, Pioneers [official site] is a game all about building stuff, and like Lego, there’s a kind of childlike charm that is drawing me to it. Pioneers is the first game from Lightbulb Games, a new studio founded by former members of Kalimba and Max & The Magic Marker studio Press Play after Microsoft shut them down alongside Lionhead.

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IF Only: Hadean Lands Will Teach You Alchemy

Back when Kickstarter was relatively young, Andrew Plotkin proved that there was some money in interactive fiction by raising more than $30,000 to develop Hadean Lands. The game concerned the crash of a starship driven by alchemy, one in which the player would have to complete various rituals in order to get the ship moving again.

In full disclosure, I backed the game in its crowdfunding stage, and later helped to beta-test it. But I’m not alone in thinking Hadean Lands is one of the most extraordinary pieces of parser IF ever written, both as a technical achievement and as a piece of escalating puzzle design. Indeed, almost the first response when I started this column was a plea that I would cover Hadean Lands as soon as possible.

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Blood Knights Ride To Total Warhammer Tomorrow

The vampiric Blood Knights will be sinking their teeth into Total Warhammer [official site] tomorrow, arriving as part of the strategy game’s first big update. Also expect stability improvements, balance tweaks, bug fixes, and more-ticklish goblins.

Oh, and if you like to live on the bleeding edge of technology – watch out! That’ll surely attract vampires. Jokes. But if you like new and fancy things, you might want to have a crack at the DirectX 12 version launching into beta tomorrow.

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Hands On: Shadow Warrior 2 Is Like First-Person Diablo

Demons, in Shadow Warrior 2 [official site], appear to be made of jelly. I’m carving one particularly big bastard open like a Christmas turkey and the segments that slide away are like the gelatinous gloop and gristle sliding from a tin of cheap dogfood. They wibble and wobble, quivering beneath the teeth of my chainsaw. They fold and flop, eventually disintegrating.

The ultraviolence is more over the top than in the game’s predecessor, but it’s nothing new. That’s just about the only place that the sequel takes the “more of the same” approach though. Almost everything has changed.

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THUMPER THUMPING THUMPTOBER THUMPTEENTH

You have to understand: I’m not supposed to be here. Something went wrong and I ended up in this dimension, one where we live on land not in water and our FPSs don’t roar like Devil Daggers and our rhythm games don’t rock faces like Thumper [official site]. This world is not right. But I am delighted that Devil Daggers slipped through a crack in reality, and now we have a date for when Thumper will follow – October 13th.

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