Gaming

Looks fun and funny. There's a demo and here's a trailer.

Game copy follows.

After a whole afternoon at home with your sibling, the kitchen’s a mess, your room’s in disarray, you haven't hung the laundry: a normal day. SUDDENLY... you see on that phone notification that your dad will be coming home early - you hear the garage screeching and opening and... RUN!! DAD'S COMING!!

Meet Bob, the goofy, clumsy brother who’s panicking thinking of the horrible things might happen to him if dad finds out they made a mess - like not playing video games for the rest of the night. Terrifying!

Kate, on the other hand, was born for this. She's had years of intensive training: putting everything away and pretending she's asleep as soon as she hears dad in the hallway on the way to her bedroom, never once being spotted! And this time it won't be different.

But be careful! Your adorable cat Jack won't stop knocking things over!

And many other challenges! Cooperate by throwing objects between floors!

Be careful not to break windows or fragile objects like grandma's urn - your dad won't be too happy if your grandma bites the dust twice!

Keep an eye on Jack, the siblings’ cat! He is always messing around and knocking things over.

Use the means in each house to be even quicker, such as service elevators!

Watch out for blackouts in blizzards! Sometimes you will have to reactivate the circuit breaker!

And much more!

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/28819332

So… this is news to me, because I don’t have a VR headset, but I can set my Viture Pro XR glasses into SBS (side by side) mode by pressing the small button longer. Some games, like EliteDangerous, can do this as well without fiddling around with Reshade. I didn’t really expect it but it just works. This way I even get 3D on foot, which is not supported for VR in Elite Dangerous Odyssey at all! Side by side Crosseye mode (right eye left, left eye right) though? Add some head tracking to the mix, which is totally possible, and I get a very nice VR-like experience even on foot in Elite Dangerous – and on Linux PC!

This is the SBS version that does REQUIRE VR/XR glasses and mebbe something like xr-video-player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEtRijojBx8

This is the MONO version that does NOT require VR/XR glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPTk1vygM4

The FOV is somewhat cramped. No idea if this can be tweaked any further but I’ll fiddle with the settings on my next test. Mebbe this can be tweaked (or I use #Breezy Desktop to zoom in somewhat).

Update: I got the aspect ratio somewhat under control. It’s not perfect but much better and an odd combination of window mode and resolution and upscaling, that somehow affects the HUD only but make no sense to me at all. At this point I think it’s simply a bug of Elite. It’s like the HUD doesn’t get the memo to scale up after the intro played. I’m also not sure if this is a side effect of gamescope but I can totally live with this result.

New footage with better aspect ratio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qdvfdpTy_k

New footage with better aspect ratio framepacked, which MAY just work with VR (or fall back to anaglyph) – the YT FAQ is very thin on 3D content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYYJTqnpz8

It's tough to express how much of a bummer this whole mess has been. Veilguard is such an embarrassingly lazy, shallow experience.

Placing all of the blame on Busche isn't fair, as she was brought in at the end of the development process, but it was her leadership that prevented the game from getting the extra time it needed.

The creative and design aspects of the game's failure falls primarily on John Epler's lap.

BioWare was so special for such a long time. Watching them fumble the ball directly into the deepest part of the toilet three times in a row feels completely insane.

Fuck EA forever, man.

Considering the Switch 2 (with those pretty joystick well covers to protect from drift, omg) and the Ryzen Z2 Go announcements, the low cost and availability of Steam Deck & parity level APU machines for purchase now, and the giant 1080p gaming install base represented by current gen consoles, it sure seems like low spec & 1080p gaming is going to have a pretty sunny future. I am hoping this gives small and medium sized development teams a chance to show up what is left of AAA gaming.

What are your favorite low spec gaming setups right now? I'm enjoying a 5700g APU system the most these days. Mainstream wise, I've been playing Elden Ring and Injustice 2 and Vampire Survivors. The last Indie I played is this beat-em-up / horde survival game An American Werewolf in LA which was pretty cool.

An indie dev's response to NYT's "Games Can’t Afford To Look This Good" and the meme of "I want smaller games with less graphics and I'm not kidding".

Curious to see what they do with the "mouse" function, as well as how well the new Joycon attachment system works (as well as if they have Hall Effect sensors...)

"DOOM is a classic game to implement on a variety of platforms, but doompdf by [ading2210] is one we didn’t see coming. It runs a bit slow and controls are a little awkward but it does run. Entirely within a PDF file, at that."

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18015158

Archived link

Chinese game 'Marvel' has been accused of censorship after players of its new video game were unable to chat about topics that are banned in China.

Marvel Rivals is a new release featuring battles between heroic characters such as Captain America and Iron Man and the villains Loki and Venom. The plot revolves around Doctor Doom and his future counterpart Doom 2099.

The game was developed by Marvel in conjunction with the Chinese developer NetEase and released in December. However, players have been blocked from typing in words such as “Tiananmen Square” and “Wuhan virus” in the chat function. They are met with the warning: “text contains inappropriate content”.

Marvel Rivals game artwork featuring Iron Man, Spider-Man, and other characters.

Other restricted phrases include “free Taiwan”, “free Hong Kong”, “free Tibet”, “Taiwan is a country”, “Taiwan No 1” and even “1989”, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chatting about Mao Zedong or the Dalai Lama is also banned.

Winnie-the-Pooh, a name associated with President Xi, is blocked. Xi was compared to the character after appearing in a photograph with Barack Obama in 2017.

Popular gamers have posted videos of themselves trying to type in the words. Asmongold, the YouTuber, is allowed to type in the words “Taiwan sucks” and “Taiwan is bad” only to be blocked when trying “free Taiwan”. At the end of the video he added sarcastically: “Marvel Rivals is a very interesting game that has no censorship at all and lets people think whatever they want and that’s just the way it is guys.”

[...]

China has a long history of censoring the content of video games and films for the domestic market. The Second World War strategy game Hearts of Iron was banned for depicting Tibet, Manchuria and Xinjiang as independent nations. Command & Conquer: Generals, a game depicting a hypothetical Third World War, was said to “smear the image of China and the Chinese army”.

Marvel has also been accused of altering films so they would be accepted in the Chinese market. In the 2016 film Doctor Strange the main character is trained by a Celtic woman played by Tilda Swinton rather than a Tibetan monk who appeared in the original comics. A screenwriter claimed it was to appease the Chinese authorities and Marvel later admitted the move was a mistake.

[...]

Like it or not, horror gaming is often built on jump scares. Deriding a good cheap scare ignores the endorphin rush that draws so many players to the genre, in the same way that the "elevated horror" trend forfeits some of the soul of schlocky slasher flicks and ghost movies. Don’t get me wrong, Silent Hill and Alan Wake deserve their flowers - but even those games would wither on the screen if Pyramid Head didn’t bust through a wall from time to time.

One unsung jump scare game in particular pioneered horror in the internet age, blazing everywhere from nascent social media to major television networks. In fact, if you had an internet connection circa 2005, there’s a good chance you played it. Alas, it was too ahead of its time, too successful at leveraging virality before viral horror was sought after. Next time you see a streamer throw their headphones across the room in fright, beware: the spirit of Scary Maze Game is right behind you.

Like Rick Rolls and chain emails, "screamers" propagated from the ability to share media with little pretext. Screamers existed before The Maze in the form of short animations and videos—even inspiring a series of German energy drink commercials—but Winterrowd’s game set itself apart by dint of being a game. You had to initiate the jump scare yourself, and doing so required sharp focus. It was less like watching a car crash and more like cranking a jack-in-the-box.

Understandably, reactions were big. And if you couldn’t stand by your victim and watch their freakout yourself, you were in luck, because there was this shiny new website called YouTube. Reaction videos are The Maze’s first milestone contribution to online horror, and they were responsible for the game’s mainstream popularity. Internet historian Jake Lee found Maze reaction videos as early 2006, which were shown on Web Junk, The Soup, and America’s Funniest Home Videos (which was the style at the time) and parodied on Saturday Night Live in 2010.

A surprisingly interesting video that taught me some new things about the NES and this era of gaming. Highly recommended!

What have you been playing?

I'm almost done with Indiana Jones and have been absolutely loving it. Expect to finish it this week.

Also @[email protected] might like to know I finally got my Playdate yesterday! Been super excited to check out more of the season of games as well as your project! :) I also set up a dev environment today and am going to start making a small little thing for it!

I just stumbled upon a website named Gaming Alexandria. Their main goal is to preserve videogames related stuff like artwork scans, posters, articles, interviews and even game dumps. My main focus is on playable game Roms, specifically on the Type-in Programs from magazines for the Family BASIC.

Last month, 461 video game workers with Microsoft’s ZeniMax Online Studios announced they were unionizing with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees–Communications Workers of America (CODE-CWA). ZeniMax employees join over six thousand workers across the tech and video game industry in the United States and Canada who have now unionized with CODE-CWA since its creation in 2020. That now includes unions at major video game studios like Sega of America, Blizzard, and Bethesda, as well as games like World of Warcraft.

For Jacobin, CODE-CWA senior director of organizing Tom Smith recently moderated a roundtable with a number of video game workers and organizers who have been trying to unionize the industry in recent years. They discussed how union efforts at their workplaces started, how unions have helped workers navigate difficult times in the industry, and what might be next for the labor movement in video games.

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba - the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about "a land full of people being made into a people without land."

The campaign still has a few days to go, but surpassed its initial goal earlier this week. Abu-Eideh says the reaction has been overwhelming. "I know people care," he says, but he never expected so much support, and so many kind words. The funding launched with the acknowledgement that he’d need more than twice the goal to fully "pay for salaries, outsourcing, and asset creation". But this does mean he and a small team of artists, calligraphers, and coders can begin production.

"We needed talented people who believed in this project," Abu-Eideh says. "That’s like the basic requirement for something like this, because it's not a normal project. You need people that believe in your cause". While the team and he prepare to move on from pre-production, I ask what his day-to-day currently looks like from his home in the West Bank.

"It’s very hard, daily life. Just taking your kids to the school is a big deal because you don't know which road you should take. You don't know where the checkpoints are and if they’re going to block the roads today or not. On a daily basis, there are multiple attacks in different villages in cities by the soldiers or by the settlers. Burning houses. Cutting trees and burning trees. Destroying the main roads. So it’s kind of the daily hustle that we live in."