This is a PC game. If there are going to be console or tablet or something versions sometime, they haven't been announced yet. The PC game will be out later this year, though.
Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy are two of my favorite games ever. They're probably my favorite action-RPGs ever, in fact... or at minimum they are very high on the list. Amazing, amazing games... but Midway's last Gauntlet game, Seven Sorrows, was a horrendous debacle of a game. It's not a Gauntlet game in any imaginable way. It was originally supposed to be something, but it totally fell apart during development; I'm glad that the PC version was cancelled, or else I'd have surely actually spent more than a few bucks on that terrible thing. After that came a DS Gauntlet game which was far in development but didn't release because Midway went under and it died with the company, sadly.
Now, after several years, WB (who bought Midway) has decided to resurrect the franchise with this reboot that is a modern topdown action-RPG somewhat inspired by the original Gauntlet game. The game is looking fun, but it's nothing like either Legends or Seven Sorrows, for sure; it's a generic-looking topdown action-RPG, of a style that there are a fair number of these days. It looks like fun for sure, and I"ll definitely get it eventually, but it's clearly no Gauntlet Legends. Ah well... Gauntlet here looks more like something like Hammerwatch (PC) but in 3d, or something like that. It's kind of like Diablo or other such games, but simpler and more arcadey, appropriately for the license. But it doesn't look like it had a lot of budget, sadly. Hopefully it'll be fun despite its simplicity.
This new Gauntlet game is from Arrowhead, the developers of Magicka, and you can kind of see that here, though as I've said this one looks like a pretty quick project. The game has okay but not great 3d graphics, and a strict overhead-only viewpoint. Does it seriously not even have an announcer guy? And ugh, warrior and valkyrie are melee-only... come on, in Gauntlet all characters have ranged attacks! I know Seven Sorrows ignored that in favor of generic beat 'em up gameplay, but that's one of the many reasons why it's so, so awful. Also, if you just run around for a few seconds the other characters all respawn? Unlimited? Modern gaming... Sure, they do charge you gold for each death so there is a punishment, but still.
Even so, the game looks fun and I'm sure I'll like it. But as a Gauntlet game, it could be better. This game looks a lot better than Seven Sorrows for sure, at least! It looks like a decently fun topdown hack and slash dungeon crawling action game, and I like such games. (Oh, and yes, the game is PC only and is releasing this September.)
Who's excited? I am! Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft's press conferences are today (Monday), and Nintendo's webstream is Tuesday, when the show opens. I hope it'll be good... :)
Hmm... well, I hope that it works with GC-controller-compatible Wii games! Otherwise they're releasing this thing for Smash and just about nothing else, since who knows how many other Wii U games would really support this when the Wii U Pro controller's got more buttons and is more standard for the system. But there are a bunch of Wii games that can play on the Wii U and work with Gamecube controllers, so I hope this will work with those as well as with Smash.
Also, of course, it's very interesting that Nintendo is both releasing a GC controller adapter for the Wii U mostly just for SSB, and that they're holding a SSB Wii U tournament during E3. They're obviously interested in getting the hardcore SSBM competitive community interested in this game. Well, I hope the game's great!
Yes, this is a real game. :barf: For those who don't know, this year Valve completely abandoned all previous attempts at quality control on Steam. Now you can pretty much publish anything there. The result is that there have already been more Steam releases this year than there were in all of last year, and the numbers keep increasing quickly. Valve also added a thing called "Early Access", which lets people sell games before they are finished, on the promise that, really, someday we will finish the thing! Paid alphas or betas of games which may never be finished, mountains of terrible games clogging up Steam... this is the new Steam store.
And I should note, the game in those two videos up there is not Early Access; even many Early Access games aren't that atrocious. But it is in no way finished or even remotely competent. Still though, based on that second video... man is that game hilarious! I laughed more than I have to a game in a while.
So what do I think? Well, allowing more games isn't all bad. There are lots of PC games, and Steam had probably been too restrictive in the past. But Valve now has probably gone too far in the opposite direction. And also, they need a better store! Of course I have never liked Steam's interface much, but with so many more game releases its problems show even more now. Steam's very basic game listing system in the store doesn't work well with so many releases! And they need to categorize stuff, too... there should be some way of sorting out awful garbage like Air Control there from actual decent games. So yeah, Steam has issues, and it's getting even worse. That people who used to defend Steam now have problems with it now shows that...
New game announcement by Interceptor, the studio which made Rise of the Triad (2013) and after that bought up the remains of 3D Realms, since they are big Apogee/3DR fans. They were originally working on a Duke Nukem game, but now Gearbox and Interceptor are in court over who exactly owns Duke (and Gearbox could well win, we'll see), but either way, Interceptor had to work on something in the meantime...
And this game, kind of a Duke spinoff, is what exists instead. The basic gameplay is the same as the Duke game they were working on -- it's an isometric action game with some RPG elements. Only now you play as the female character Bombshell instead of Duke. Bombshell, in prior form, was originally created as a Duke Nukem Forever character, and she was going to be Duke's AI companion pretty much. However, at some point probably later in development she was cut (perhaps a a part of the "cut everything not done so we can ship SOMETHING effort as 3DR went down), so she's not in the DNF that was released. She is in one of the old ('98 or '01) DNF trailers, though... or rather, another character with the same name is. Bombshell the game is its own thing, and really only shares a character name with the DNF character. The new Bombshell is entirely redesigned; she now has dark hair and a cyborg arm, for instance. I see a lot of criticism for the intro trailer and skepticism about the game, but I think the screenshots look quite good and the interview (watch the interview video on the site) was pretty good and definitely made me want to try this! I don't know if it'll be good or not, but I am an Apogee fan for sure and the idea of an Apogee/3DR-inspired action-RPG like this is a good one. So yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the game. It could be good, we'll see. :)
No, not like this... this is not okay! Sponsored tabs... what a horrible idea for users. And whether or not Mozilla goes through with this, I'm sure we'll see it eventually. I can't see Google passing on another moneymaking opportunity!
I've never been particularly interested in online shooters, or, for some years now, online games much at all, but for a few years in the late '90s and early '00s, I did like a few online FPS games. I never loved them, as the games get old quickly -- they're so repetitive, and just didn't hold my interest anywhere near like what online RTS games did -- but still, I did enjoy some Jedi Knight 1, Unreal Tournament, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force online once in a while. And I've always thought of UT as probably the best arena shooter series; I didn't play all that much of UT3, but what I have played of it I like (story aside, that was stupid). And the original UT is of course a classic.
So yeah, this interests me for sure! Game development only just started, so there's nothing to look at for it yet of course, but I hope it turns out well. I like that it's going to be free, I don't love FPSes enough to actually buy them often, but free UT? Yeah, I'll play at least a little of this for sure. Apparently Teamfortress 2 has been successful with a similar free-but-with-pay-mod store system, so they're basing it on that I guess. I never really played TF2 though, so I wouldn't know myself. They're also looking for a lot of feedback for fans about the direction the game should go in.
For anyone who hasn't heard, the issue is that Tomodachi Collection, a 3DS game releasing soon (watch the quite amusing Nintendo Direct!), doesn't allow for gay relationships or marriages -- it's heterosexual only. Naturally, while this wasn't too controversial in Japan where gay rights aren't nearly as far along, it's caused quite a problem here, even though the game isn't out yet. Here's a good summary of why this is an important issue:
This doesn't surprise me at all, of course. Nintendo has always been a conservative company, with backwards views on gender roles present in many of their games. I wouldn't have expected anything else on the issue of gay rights from them, unfortunately. I just hope that they change in the future, because greater equality is the future. They do seem to have been trying for the past year or so to have more female characters in some of their games; hopefully this is next.
Oh, for another issue that came up a while back, Animal Crossing (the newest one, for 3DS) was criticized for not having any darker skin colors available; it's light-skin only, unless a character gets tanned from the sun or something.
![[Image: bombshell_may_02.jpg]](http://alloutofgum.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/static/img/bombshell_may_02.jpg)
![[Image: bombshell_may_01.jpg]](http://alloutofgum.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/static/img/bombshell_may_01.jpg)