Your avatar is a brave warrior who has fallen in battle. But instead of finding well-deserved peace in Asgard, his soul is trapped in the harsh world of Niffelheim. Survive in this hostile world, ransack the neighboring lands, explore dangerous dungeons and find your way to Valhalla.
After all, this is our epic livestream celebration of Minecraft, where we’ll be sharing exciting new announcements, giving you the chance to vote for which biome we update next, hosting panels with the developers and maybe even giving you a sneak peek behind-the-blocks at how we make Minecraft!
At 3:30PM GMT today join the Mojang team, OMGChad, Aureylian, Big B Statz, Yammy and InTheLittleWood for the annual Minecraft live show featuring announcements, panels, sneak peaks, competitions and more! Click here to learn more about Minecon Earth, or watch below!
Warner Bros. is running a sizable sale on Steam this weekend, offering up to 75% off the many games it publishes. So if you're into Lego, Harry Potter, Batman, Lord of the Rings, and WB's many other licenses, you'll want to take a look at the discounts. Just make sure to lock down your purchases before the sale ends on October 1. Let's check out some of the highlights of the sale.
Becoming a Batman: Arkham series completist has probably never been cheaper than it is this weekend for PC gamers. Each installment in the series, from Asylum to Knight--and including Origins, which often sits these sales out--is down to $5 / £4. The open-world game Mad Max is on sale for the same price.
You'll find links to those and more of our picks for the WB sale below, or you can click here to see every Steam game on sale. In other game discount news, Green Man Gaming is doing a site-wide 23% off promotion this weekend as well--and that includes most pre-orders.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-30-2018, 06:51 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Big Discount On Almost All PC Games And Pre-Orders This Weekend At GMG
Green Man Gaming isn't the only online video game retailer, but right now it's one of the cheapest. That's because, all weekend long, you can get 23% off of nearly every PC game on the site--including pre-orders and games that are already on sale. To get the offer, all you have to do is enter promo code PAYDAY23 at checkout. A few exclusions apply, and most of the games come in the form of Steam codes. Let's take a look at some of the highlights.
Speaking of RPGs, World of Final Fantasy is already on sale for 56% off, so when you knock an additional 23% off the sale price, it ends up costing just $14. Nioh: Complete Edition is similarly discounted outside of this offer, which means you can get it this weekend for $23. And although the first episode is all that's been released so far, you can order the whole season of Life is Strange 2 for $31.
As mentioned above, the offer extends to pre-orders as well, so if you're planning on getting an upcoming PC game, it's worth checking if GMG has it available. You save $14 on any game with a normal retail price of $60, so you can get upcoming games like Devil May Cry 5, Just Cause 4, and Hitman 2 for $46 each. Mega Man 11 and Disgaea 5 Complete are down to $23 apiece.
You'll find more of our picks below, or you can visit the site to look at the rest of the games. Now go save some money--just make sure to add the promo code before you check out.
There’s perhaps no genre synonymous with mobile platforms – especially iPhone or Android devices – than puzzle games. Low intensity inputs are good for a device with no buttons, and the pace of these games plays well with the low session time, start-and-stop nature of mobile gaming. Puzzle games also take so many unique forms nowadays that a top list in the genre can produce completely different looking games.
As you’ll see below, we have our own menagerie of titles that we feel represent the best Puzzle games have to offer across iPhone, iPad and Android devices…
This recent release is an easy inclusion in our best-of collection not only for its accessible nature, but also because it requires a lot of careful thought and planning. It’s more of a high-score puzzler than anything else, but the floral theme and impressive nuances make for some entertaining sessions. Evergarden’s developers estimate that the game will take between four to eight hours to fully explore. After this, it is all about breaking into the global high score tables.
Consequently, it is more of a Tetris high score chaser rather than the type of puzzler where you have to pit your wits against increasingly difficult levels. Unlocking all of the game’s secrets does not require particularly high levels of skill, just the persistence to keep playing and adding to your gem collection.
Death Coming is a cute pixel game of Where’s Wally twisted in with Final Destination. It’s a murder simulator with the player taking the role of an omnipresent servant of Death. You are tasked with offing a certain number of people in a detailed pixel-art scene through manipulating the environment towards various horrible accidents and mayhem. The pixel artwork is awesome, reminiscent of a really great Kairosoft game. Everything is clear and distinct even at a distance, although the game is definitely better sized for tablets and larger phones. The characters are cute and expressive in their tiny little animations. It’s a shame the devs didn’t trust their core gameplay enough to avoid gumming it up with unnecessary frustrations.
Developer: ustwo games Platforms: iOS, Android Price: $3.99
Every intrepid fan of puzzles is intimately familiar with the eureka moment after which everything falls into place. With Monument Valley, these insights are found by rotating and manipulating the world and its unlikely, Escher-esque geometry. Visual insights coincide with mental ones. And what visual twists and turns there are! Paths bridge on towards infinite loops, curve around corners and angles which display cleanly on the tablet’s surface but will warp the mind. The challenges and spatial awareness necessary are minimal, yet the game never feels reductive or simplistic despite its pared-down nature.
Developer: APE-X GAmes Platforms: iOS, Android Price: Free with IAPs
Infinite West is a puzzler that resembles more boardgame than match-3. It’s difficult to find which had a bigger influence on it, the sombre motif of the Ed Porter/Sergio Leone style western or Square Enix Montreal’s critically acclaimed GO series. What’s easy to see is that developers APE-X have a clear reverence of both and have done their best to highlight what makes both strong while adapting it to a unique vision. Achievement hunting and score chasing in Infinite West can throw you in that fervent, ‘just one more map’ loop because of the solid core concept, and the presence of IAPs is by no means a deal-breaker as you get given a modest amount of freebies anyway.
Many a sterling series has seen its reputation dinged by weaker entries. In particular, the sophomore slump, that challenge to recapture what made the original great without slavish repetition. Every member of the GO series has its unique merits and mechanics, but Lara Croft GO stands as the series best. Hitman GO was plagued by odd turn-counter challenges which offer only derivative challenges and pad the playtime without expanding content; Deus Ex GO’s grand plan for daily challenges and community-generated puzzles largely fell flat, but Lara Croft GO along with its two expansions hit the sweet spot of challenge, presentation and pacing. Its focused treasure hunts will keep the best minds, most any mind, really, engaged. (There’s even a maddening hidden-object sidegame to unlock cosmetic goodies if either of those are your wont) Its solutions were exclusive and in many cases immune to the kind of brute-force, mindlessly-spam-moves approach to puzzling, and the whole adventure felt like just that.
The Witness is an excellent game to binge, forget, and then revisit. Its puzzles are sorted into wholly distinct environs (treehouses, greenhouses, forests, deserts, mountains, castles) with each of the regions introducing a unique mechanic. Powering on the panels by drawing glowing lines. The game is open world, with players free to wander around and be as enlightened or confounded as they like, and the ultimate nature of the island and its nameless visitor (Witness?) is left up for interpretation. Still, the puzzles are incredibly varied and numerous, and the island is a wonder to explore and idly consider just what in the world is going on.
Cute little aliens harumph and squidge themselves into unlikely spherical compartments as they commute to their destinations in outer space. In Cosmic Express, the puzzles are pickup-and-deliver, drawing train paths for a route that allows for no cross-overs or doubling-back. The game includes a ton of levels and gets surprisingly difficult (or rather: uncompromising, since difficulty is always a relative, judgmental term) sooner rather than later. Every level feels crystal clear in the post-solved hindsight; nothing is superfluous. Cosmic Express winds its way through the galaxy and wends its way into your heart.
Beglitched is the story of the Glitch Witch’s sudden disappearance from a computer OS and the player character’s sudden quest to train and replace her. You’ll open ‘files’ to find items, other avatars and programs, and enemies. The game is split between overland mode, which utilizes a minesweeper-like method of divining connecting spaces, and the match-three battle mode. The tone is light and idiosyncratic, and the level design is inspired and gimmicky in a good way. Constraints, properly applied, stimulate creativity. (Or else we’d be without the phrase ‘thinking outside of the box’). Beglitched was released without much fanfare and then subsequently ported to mobile, where it shines even more because of its screen-within-a-screen schtick.
Developer: Dinosaur Polo Club Platforms: iOS, Android Price: $4.99
Logistics makes the world go around. These often break down into math and logic puzzles, even to the point that we have fields dedicated to studying the topology of knots. But maybe none of this matters and you just need to get to work. Well, Mini Metro folds all of this and makes for an amusing, minimalistic puzzle about ordering and sequencing the right trains in the right time to complete the right route. So, programming motion to meet specific goals, and tinkering towards that end. Some puzzles rely unduly on shifts in perspective or tricks of the light to interpret what happens next; not so with Mini Metro. The needs and requirements of the puzzles are always clear, the demand is upfront: all the player has to supply is the way forward, that vital connection which will close the gap and make everything come together.
The search for the story is the story in Framed 2. Cleverly partitioning and recombining what made the original so great, the follow-up refines and refreshes the initial conceit. Comic book action meets stealth in a cheesy noirish setting. One could even say it…re-frames…what made the original great. Yes, it is probably the shortest and most easily exhausted member of this list but it still has a little extra panache that merits some special attention. There are games to play for months or years, trying to crack their mysteries or refine skills. Then there are those games to consume in an afternoon, letting the whole experience become a unified and unbroken memory. Framed 2 belongs to the latter category, a class of brief puzzlers definitely worth playing.
Developer: Fireproof Games Platforms: iOS, Android Price: $3.99
What can be said about The Room series that hasn’t been said before? Its excellent value and construction, or the heaps of critical awards? Not to mention the host of mistaken-identity jokes based on the so-bad-it-is-a-phenomenon film of the same name. Puzzle boxes are a unique tactile treat which shrink a world into a single object and then propel one to open it based on nothing more than curiosity and the hint that something might wait inside. The Room has digitized this experience as well as it could have been, all while making the experience portable and affordable and just a skosh mysterious.
What would your list of the best puzzle games look like? Let us know in the comments!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-30-2018, 12:49 AM - Forum: Lounge
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The Best Game Deals Of The Week: Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, And PC (US)
We all love playing video games, but with new titles going for $60 or more depending on the edition, the hobby gets expensive fast. Thankfully, many gaming retailers have regular sales to save you money. But even so, it's hard to know if you're getting the best deal available at any given time. To help solve that problem, we've gone through the week's video game sales and highlighted the best game deals for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Before looking at the discounts, though, you should make sure you've picked up all the free games you can get. PlayStation Plus members can download some fantastic games for free this month, including Destiny 2 (for next month's freebies, see the video above). Xbox Live Gold subscribers can also grab a few freebies right now, and if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can get five free PC games from Twitch.
With that out of the way, let's look at this week's best discounts on individual games.
Madden NFL 19
The latest installment of the best football game franchise around is $20 off this week.
September 26, 2013 was Outbreak Day, the day the fungus zombies in The Last of Us took over the country. Each year, Naughty Dog celebrates Outbreak Day by putting The Last of Us Remastered on sale.
A roguelike inspired by classic Zelda games, The Binding of Isaac has you pick up all kinds of weapons and abilities as you explore a monster-filled cellar--just try not to step in the piles of poo.
Like the previous entries in this strategy series, Civilization VI starts you out with a small settlement and has you build it into a colossal world power.
Music/rhythm games might seem passé now that the plastic instrument fad is over, but Thumper doesn't bear much resemblance to anything that came before. This is a trippy, hard-hitting rhythm game that requires deep concentration and is guaranteed to get your blood pumping.
Get the best of Scribblenauts with Scribblenauts Mega Pack: two classic games with ALL-NEW content. Use the power of your imagination to solve puzzles in endless ways.
Follow the ascent of boxer Adonis Creed as you go toe-to-toe with the world?s top opponents in an intense boxing experience that lets you train, fight, and win like a Creed.
Disney shuts down Club Penguin Island, lays off developers
Though Club Penguin was shut down in 2017, its mobile successor, Club Penguin Island, has been striving to take the place of the once-popular children’s online RPG.
A letter from Disney HR obtained by Kotaku blames the shutdown on “global competition,” and states that a need to reduce costs is partly what is driving the layoffs. Employees are apparently receiving roughly five weeks of severance and benefits.
Kotaku also spoke with multiple employees who felt blindsided since they were under the impression that new projects were coming into the studio. They also lamented that with Disney Canada’s layoffs, they’d likely have to move their families to find new work in video games. “There aren’t many opportunities in a city like Kelowna, so most of us will have to move our families if we want to pursue games,” said one employee.
If you have been impacted by these layoffs, you can e-mail Gamasutra and share your story anonymously.
Video: Sid Meier explores ‘interesting decisions’ in gameplay
One of Sid Meier’s most thought-provoking quotes for aspiring game developers was his long-ago proposition that gameplay is a series of “meaningful choices.”
It was this quote that Meier revisted when he took the stage at GDC 2012, with his talk about how games create “interesting decisions” for players. At the time, he was fully aware that this quote had become sort of a debate among game developers and writers, and he sought an opportunity to further explore this foundational idea.
Now, thanks to the magic of the GDC YouTube channel, you too can revisit Meier’s musings on game design and what exactly makes an interesting decision in gameplay. If this talk has you inspired, be sure to swing by the GDC YouTube channel for other great talks on the art of game design!
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa.
