The democratization of game development has long been touted as a fresh, original idea, each and every time a developer does it. From releasing daily public builds to frequently updated Early Access editions, it’s been done many times for many years. The difference with Dr “Herschel Beahm IV” Disrespect’s upcoming FPS project, a battle royale-cum-extraction shooter from his Midnight Society studio? You have to buy a fucking NFT to play it.

Midnight Society’s goal—currently titled “Project Moon”—is to create “the next AAA competitive PvPvE first-person shooter,” which they say they will do “openly and transparently,” via releasing what they’re calling “Snapshots.”

These are effectively vertical slice builds of a game, which would more usually be created by a developer in pre-alpha to try to secure a publishing deal, or to show off during events like E3. Such samples of what a game will offer give an idea of ​​the developer’s ambitions, but in this case will apparently be used so backers—sorry, “Founders Action Pass holders”—can give feedback, and vote for features they’d like to see removed or included. Which is otherwise called “playtesting,” a position developers or publishers share people to perform, often poorly.

Midnight Society describes itself as a team made up of “ambitious game industry veterans,” with its leadership team built from Robert Bowling, original member of Infinity Ward and executive producer of Cat Girl Without Salad: Amuse-Bouchemoney-man Sumit Gupta, and Beahm himself, a former community manager at Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games. It also boasts Quinn Delhoyo, sandbox design lead on Halo: Infinitewho has also worked on multiplayer for previous halo games and Gears of War IIIand previously had the honor of being a level designer for Duke Nukem Forever.

They’ve already put together a further team of 10 experienced developers, plus a further 12 non-development crew, amongst whom a few have the word “crypto” written through their CVs.

It’s a pretty small team to try to put together what appears to be a battle royale-meets-extraction shooter (think Hunt: Showdown meets plunkbat), the genres via which Beahm first gained streaming fame. Yet, it’ll be very simple to see how they’re doing, given that every six weeks they intend to release a playable build to those who’ve invested in the project.

“Our high-level gameplay goals are to capture the essence of arena shooter level design,” says Midnight Society’s latest blog“with the scale and scope of battle royale player counts, and the session-to-session gameplay mechanics of extraction-based shooters.”

The development studio previously attempted to garner attention a couple of weeks back by paying for a pricey Times Square billboard. On it was teased the name of the studio, and little else, beyond a suggestion that some sort of announcement is due July 29. This, it seems, is to be the first “Founders Event,” where those who bought in before the game existed will get to meet up in Los Angeles to, er, “discuss the first Snapshot of the game.” What a time.

Back in March, Beahm and company sold off 10,000 NFTs that represent these Founders Active Passes, for the not-inconsiderable sum of $50 each. Midnight Society claims it received 400,000 applications, and clearly further rounds of selling off such passes will be an intended revenue stream. Half a million bucks for that first round won’t cover the salaries of the current team.

It’s interesting to note that in all the vague descriptions of what Project Moon will actually be, there’s no mention of further cryptoshit. Whether that’s canny marketing, to try to avoid the vast amount of negativity the topic rightly generates, is unclear. But given the hiring of crypto types, it’d not be a surprise to start to see some “Web3″ BS getting mentioned eventually.

Of course, given the promises of transparency, and that backers are allowed to make public video content from the six-weekly builds, we’ll get a fascinating perspective on the project as it goes along. Thanks to those making the odd choice to pay to perform a usually paid development role.

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<p>The post YouTube Star Dr. Disrespect’s NFT Game Charges You To Playtest first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is free for members of Amazon’s Prime Gaming service this week. It’s one of six games being given out by the e-commerce giant—which has struggleddespite pouring gazillions into various projects, to produce an acclaimed game of its own—for Prime Day, its annual ritual about bleeding you dry at the altar of capitalism. They join roughly two dozen other games Amazon put up last month as a promotion for Prime Day.

Every year, Amazon runs a series of promotions called Prime Day, meant to spur you into spending money on products you otherwise wouldn’t have looked twice at. In other words, as our friends at lifehacker note, unless you approach the process thoughtfully and methodically, shopping on Prime Day doesn’t actually save you any money in the long run. But between the lines, there’s the occasional solid deal, especially when it comes with a $0 price tag. (Of the offers that do have a price attached, our colleagues at The Inventory will be monitoring to see what’s actually worth your time.)

Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a bundled 4K re-release of BioWare’s landmark trilogy of space RPGs, is the big one. Amazon is also giving out the racing games Grid Legends and Need For Speed ​​Heatwith three Star Wars games: the terrific squad shooter Republic Commandoand two entries from the Jedi Knight series of action games, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. Amazon refer to the act of claiming these games as “freeloading” (how fun). You can grab them tomorrow and Wednesday.

Beyond roving space operas and two singularly competent racing games, Amazon is also giving away a handful of under-the-radar titles, including the excellent co-op puzzler Death Squared and two entries from the classic fighting series King of Fighters. They’re currently available—have been since the middle of June—and will continue to be through Wednesday. Here’s the full list:

• 8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure
• Adding Adventures
• Bang Bang Racing
• Clouds & Sheep 2
• Death Squared
• Fatal Fury Special
• Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
• Gone Viral
• HUE
• Manual Samuel
• Metal Slug 2
• Metal Unit
• Pumped BMX Pro
• Puzzle of the Year — 10 Pack
• Rain World
• Road Trip — 3 Packs
• Samurai Shodown II
• Serial Cleaner
• The Crow’s Eye
• The Darkside Detective
• The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark
• The King of Fighters 2000
• The King of Fighters 2002
• The Metronomicon: Slay the Dance Floor

The catch to all of this is that you need to be signed up for Prime Gaming, which costs $15 a month and includes all of the stuff, like the streaming service and the “free” shipping, you get with Amazon Prime. (You get Prime Gaming access at no extra cost with a standard Prime subscription; they’re…basically the same thing.) Amazon says games are yours to keep “forever.” Here’s where I point out you can register for a 30-day trial for free.

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<p>The post Mass Effect Legendary Edition Free first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Last week a racist joke originating from a shitty corner of the internet got quickly out of hand, and before long French politicians and Greek news channels—among others—were erroneously reporting that an old photograph of legendary game designer Hideo Kojima was actually a photo of Tetsuya YamagamiThe 41 year-old who assassinated former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday.

I say “joke”, but that’s really doing a disservice to things that are even remotely funny, since there was absolutely nothing linking the two men, in terms of appearance or otherwise, other than the fact they were both Japanese.

If you’re just joining this, here’s Zack reporting the news on Friday:

Shortly after today’s assassination, some shitty people in a dank corner of the internet joked that Abe’s suspected killer looked like Kojima. eventually, this reached Twitterwhere far-right French politician Damien Rieu—perhaps not understanding that it was a joke—retweeted images of Kojima with a comment that translates to “The extreme left kills,” helping spread it more. While Rieu did eventually delete the tweetsit seems the damage was already done and might have helped mislead at least one news station in Greece that covered the assassination.

Obviously that’s incredibly dangerous reporting, especially since it concerns someone already in the public eye, so Kojima Productions issued a statement on Friday evening saying:

Kojima Productions strongly condemns the spread of fake news and rumors that convey false information. We do not tolerate such libel and will consider taking legal action in some cases.

Far-right French politician Damien Rieu has since deleted his tweets, and the Greek news channel ANT TV1 has also removed its video featuring the photograph. It’s unknown at time of posting however just how far this information has spread, and how many people saw the original reports from both and have yet to see any of the corrections made.

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<p>The post Kojima Productions Threatens Legal Action Over ‘Assassin’ Photo first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Harry Alisavakis is a technical and VFX artist working in the video game business. He is also the creator of one of the most delicious-looking pieces of 3D art I have ever seen.

as part of #TechnicallyAChallengea technical artist community challenge that grew out of a discord that was actually started by Alisavakis, he decided to take a shot at the latest theme, which was “food”.

In just one night, totalling around 5-6 hours work, Alisavakis was able to build this scene in Unity, crafting all the models from scratch. He tells me most of his time was spent “tweaking and moving lights around”, and that while most of the shaders used were already on-hand, the one he made just for this project—a “bespoke soup shader”—has been blowing up on Twitter over the weekend, and with good reason:

The steam, the glistening broth, the glint on the eggs, gah, I’m getting hungry just looking at this. If you’re wondering how the whole thing looks so “anime”, Alisavakis says “it was a combination of figuring out how food looks in anime and how to stop things from looking 3D”.

“I used a shallow field of view to make the scene look almost orthographic, cause perspective distortion can betray that a scene is 3D, and I didn’t use any of unity’s default shaders as they are too soft on the shading and lighting”, he says. “A cheat I also do with these effects is lowering the frame rate of some animations to make them look as if they’re hand drawn.”

If you’re more technically-minded, Alisavakis has written a thread where he gets into the finer details of how he put the piece together. Here, for example, is a gif showing all the individual components he had to model:

If you want to see more of Alisavakis’ work, you can check it out at his personal site, ArtStation page and twitter account.

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<p>The post Artist Builds Delicious 3D Ramen Bowl In Gaming’s Unity Engine first appeared on harchi90.</p>

It’s common for games to have multiple endings, usually classified as “good” or “bad” depending on their content and the consequences leading up to their conclusions. Elechead is a little different, if only because it turns that paradigm on its, well, head.

I don’t know why you’re even here if you’re worried about Elechead spoilers but stop reading if you don’t want to learn more about the thing I specifically mentioned in the headline (ie the only thing most people read anyway).

As of June 23, Elechead is available on Switch, which means I finally had a chance to try out its electrifying brain teasers without resorting to playing the Steam version on the same laptop where I work nine hours a day. I spent my nights exploring its futuristic environments from the comfort of my bed and ultimately finished the game in less than a week.

I loved it. Elechead was everything folks said it was after its 2021 launch, providing hours of adorable puzzle platforming without overstaying its welcome. And then I decided to unlock the true ending.

While playing Elechead, you’ll inevitably stumble upon data chip-like items that serve as the game’s main collectibles. Some are in plain sight, while others are hidden and require some clever manipulation of Elechead‘s mechanics to discover. By the time I got to the end of the game, I was still missing a few and thus relegated to watching what I assumed was the “bad” ending.

Pretty melancholy stuff. Elechead the robot puts its electric head in some sort of machine, the space station upon which the entire game apparently takes place goes supernova, and the light of the resulting explosion illuminates a nearby Earth. After a smash cut to a late title screen and some intense music, the short credits roll—Elechead was made by only two people—and you’re taken back to the beginning of the game.

Not wanting to be done with Elechead Quite so soon, I immediately set about collecting the last few data chips to unlock the “good” ending (again, its good-ness merely an assumption on my part). It didn’t take long before I found myself walking through a conspicuous door, now unlocked thanks to my brief treasure hunt, and then watching as an elevator carried the game’s eponymous hero towards destiny.

“Elechead basically died in the other ending,” I thought to myself, “so this one might be a little more happy.” It wasn’t.

Instead of the space station blowing up as in the other ending, the “true” Elechead conclusion sees your tiny robotic protagonist activate a gigantic cannon that completely obliterates Earth. Title screen, credits, what the fuck just happened.

I’ve been taught to expect certain tropes from video games. When one has collectibles, for instance, the ending you get after grabbing everything is generally considered “good,” or at least better than the ending you get otherwise. Gathering all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 back in 1992, for instance, rewarded the player with a new conclusion to the story where Sonic becomes Super Sonic. It barely changed the story, but watching the Blue Blur go Super Saiyan felt like a great reward for beating all those frustrating special stages.

Trying to fit Elechead into this mold broke my brain. Earth is far from perfect, but is it bad enough to make its total destruction a “good” ending? Maybe in the world of Elechead, the planet’s been taken over by even more dangerous nutjobs hellbent on, I don’t know, destroying the entire universe with some sort of impossibly massive nuclear weapon? In that case, Elechead’s death and subsequent inability to destroy Earth would be a “bad” ending for more than just seeing a cute character bite the dust.

Maybe it’s deeper than that. While Elechead seems like a simplistic indie game on the surface, it’s possible the devs were trying to make a larger point about the medium’s cliched good-bad ending dichotomy. What is good? What is evil? Aren’t we all capable of both great beauty and great destruction? And for that matter, is creating something beautiful inherently good and destruction always an act of evil? I think we can all agree killing babies is bad, but killing baby Hitler is a bit more complicated.

Of course, like most great works of art, Elechead leaves that conversation up to the player. It’s not even a topic you need to consider to fully enjoy the game. Elechead is very much worth your time from a pure gameplay standpoint thanks to its gorgeous presentation and clever puzzles. But sometimes it’s fun to take things a little too seriously to prompt these sorts of thought experiments. I obviously don’t have all the answers, so I’d love to hear how other folks felt about these endings.

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<p>The post Elechead’s Multiple Endings Completely Broke My Brain first appeared on harchi90.</p>

As has been reported by Gaming on Linuxand chatted about on reddit, the Steam Deck has got a bit of a security problem concerning its pretty badly outdated version of Firefox. Valve has reportedly promised a fix, but it won’t come until the next SteamOS update. That’s less than ideal.

The current version of the popular non-chromium browser is 102.0.1, while SteamOS sports the six-month-old version 96.0.3. You don’t need to be a Def Con hacking conference regular to know that you shouldn’t run around with an out-of-date web browser, particularly one you use to store passwords for, oh, I don’t know, social media websites, banking websites, or even Steam itself. (By the way: Don’t store passwords in your browser. That’s what password managers are for.)

Valve’s last major SteamOS update arrived on May 26, with frequent client updates in the weeks that followed. None updated the January build of Firefox, however. There is also a beta available for the next OS update, but you’ll have to opt into that and it isn’t a finalized build. That beta also does not update Firefox, nor is switching to a beta build of an operating system typically a good way to improve one’s security posture.

Kotaku has reached out to Valve for comment.

While drawing this specific issue out too much might be making a mountain out of a molehill (to be fair, I’m far from a security expert), it does bring up a challenge with SteamOS and Linux gaming in general.

As of the most recent Steam hardware and software survey results, Linux users account for only 1.18% of Steam’s population. A tiny amount for sure, but one that is growing with the rising popularity of the Linux-native Steam Deck. The folks who typically run Linux operating systems are more than capable of keeping them secure, but what happens when the SteamOS population grows to a point that it becomes an attractive target for exploiting vulnerabilities and distributing malware? And with the Steam Deck being advertised to the general public and not just hackers, the “dos and don’ts” of keeping a Linux machine safe are only going to become more important.

If you have a Windows background, the way Linux handles app installs may seem odd, with terms like “Flatpak,” “Snap,” and “repository” flying around. Linux has its own way of doing things, and it’s a little more complex than double-clicking a setup.exe. There’s also no “Linux Defender” at the ready to always ask you “are you sure you want to install this?” Steam Deck’s “Desktop Mode” might look similar to Windows or macOS, and I trust Valve has prioritized security, but adding in the wrong repository by grabbing random commands from the internet to do things as simple as getting Epic Games Store or GOG games to show up in Steam can easily land you in trouble if you aren’t 100% sure of how to keep your machine safe.

For many, the Steam Deck might not just be their first Linux gaming device, but their first experience with Linux period (Android doesn’t count). As Steam Deck and SteamOS continue to gain users, many will be more interested in just getting their games to run properly with the least possible hassle than learning how to safely manage a Linux OS from the ground up. Right now, most “noob Linux gaming questions” are answered by generous, helpful enthusiasts, not bad actors. But it’s not hard to imagine someone with malicious intentions and the knowledge of how to exploit situations like outdated software stepping in to take advantage of users who don’t know, say, the dangers of running random scripts.

Consoles are locked-down gaming environments for many reasons, but security certainly is chief among them. And while Windows security can definitely be compromised, most of us just assume Windows Defender will keep us from complete disaster. And it usually does. Valve may be right by going all in on Linux for the future of gaming, but security challenges are only going to grow as the Steam Deck gains in popularity. Moving forward, Valve would be wise to do its best to keep security considerations at the forefront, and that’s going to demand more timely updates with an eye toward patching potentially critical vulnerabilities as its userbase grows large enough to attract nefarious interests.

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<p>The post Steam Deck’s Web Browser Badly Needs An Update first appeared on harchi90.</p>

This year’s Steam Summer Sale is over, so say goodbye to all the deals. But say hello to some rad-looking art! With the sale over, an artist at Valve is now free to share all the fake video game key art and covers that she helped create that were hidden inside Steam’s large digital catalog as part of the sale’s scavenger hunt. Sure, the games are fake, but I really want to play most of them.

The art for these non-existent video games was created by Valve developer Claire Hummel. She’s previously worked on games like Half-Life: Alyx and Westworld Awakening VR. And now, with the Steam sale over and its related time-traveling event ended, Hummel shared on Twitter all the cool covers she made for a variety of fake games spanning various genres.

For example, here’s what appears to be a fishing game about failing to catch fish. I’d play that.

And here’s some key art for a game about helping a very important king get to the bathroom. Yeah, I’d play that, too.

According to Hummel, the idea behind the art was to make it look “relatively convincing” so it would blend in with the thousands of other games on Steam. However, the art and game titles are just odd enough that you might notice something “a little weird on second glance.”

The various game names and ideas were created by Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton, longtime Valve writers. Once Hummel had a fake game name, she went to work making art for it.

“I just tried to match their energy in the final art,” explained Hummel on Twitter. “Super fun trying to make plausibly polished logos in a whole bunch of different styles/genres.”

This process led to some wonderfully strange but also very intriguing fake video games. For example, who wouldn’t want to at least see a trailer for Custard Castle Small Claims Court?

On Twitter, Hummel shared that creating all these fictional video games from the future “ended up being a whole lot of work” but it was still fun to do.

“I hope everyone got a kick out of finding each of these as much as we did making ’em.”

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<p>The post Valve Made A Load Of Fake Games For Steam Summer Sale first appeared on harchi90.</p>

It’s been a hot minute since I traded rungs in the middle of the hearthstone seasonal ranked ladder. But some players who recently returned to Blizzard’s take on Magic: The Gathering were greeted with a generous surprise: dozens of free card packs. Before you go getting your hopes up, however, the reward-spree was only for a random set of players in Europe.

One of them was a Reddit user who goes by access547. “Come back to hearthstone and enjoy 20 Card Packs, on us!” read a message from the game they shared on the subreddit. Ten of the packs were from the core set, while the other 10 were from the most recent Voyage to the Sunken City expansion for a combined value of over $25.

But that was at the low end of Blizzard’s gift-giving. Other players reported getting 150 packs. “Saw the post earlier, thought it was fake, got mine today wtf,” wrote Reddit user Altorode. Again, they were evenly split between the newest expansion and the core set, though this time with a combined value of nearly $200.

ace PC Gamer reports, this wasn’t a glitch or someone at Blizzard going rogue. Instead, it was part of a limited-time experiment specifically targeting players in France and the UK. “We run many different limited and targeted tests such as this to better determine what drives former, new or current players’ interest, which is a common industry practice,” a Blizzard spokesperson told PC Gamer.

A subset of “relevant players” were randomly sorted into groups and then each of those groups were randomly assigned free bonus packs for returning to the game between 20 and 150. Just like what cards players get in each pack, luck alone determines how many packs the lucky winners receive. Fitting for a game where RNG can sometimes play such a big role.

The Blizzard spokesperson didn’t say anything about whether this program would eventually circulate around to other regions as well. hearthstone‘s next expansion, Murder at Castle Nathria, launches in August. In the meantime, if you weren’t one of the lucky players in France or the UK, there are plenty of other card games to try out, including CD Projekt Red’s latest roguelike twist on the witcher mini-game Gwent called Rogue Mage.

And don’t begrudge the UK’s hearthstone players’ good fortune too much. You might not have heard but their government is currently in shambles. Though who are we to cast stones.

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<p>The post Hearthstone Randomly Awards Some Players A Ton Of Free Packs first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Up until now, reverse bullet-hell shooter Vampire Survivors, one of the year’s must-play indie hits, did not have a final boss. That’s no longer the case in the wake of a recent update, which adds a new version of the game’s final stage.

Still in early access, and technically first released in the twilight of last year, Vampire Survivors work a Castlevania-inspired survival game. Though it may look like a top-down bullet hell shoot-’em-up, the core concept isn’t really about dodging projects: You’re the one shooting them, obliterating thousands of enemies. And thanks to a handful of roguelike elements, Vampire Survivors can easily put you into that “just five more minutes” mindset. here’s Kotaku‘s Ian Walker:

Vampire Survivors‘ true power, however, is in its near-constant dopamine rush. It feels like a mobile game without all the mobile game bullshit, or maybe one of those mindless Flash distractions you used to secretly pull up on your school’s study hall computers. Not only is clearing the screen of baddies satisfying, but every so often rare, stronger enemies reward you with a treasure chest that showers you in additional items and money for unlocks with a flashy sequence that rivals even the best loot boxes.

The latest update, 0.8.0 (patch notes here), showers you with even more stuff, inching Vampire Survivors closer to a full release via a slew of new abilities, achievements, and weapons. But the biggest change is the addition of a reworked final stage, “Cappella Magna.” If you survive to the 30-minute mark, ace polygon notesall of the stage’s enemies will coalesce, Voltron-style, into a giant reaper. that’s the final boss. Once you defeat it the first time, “Cappella Magna” will revert to the easier—but still really freakin’ difficult—version. For your efforts, you’ll unlock the Great Gospel relic, which allows you to upgrade weapons beyond their max level.

If you haven’t played yet, Vampire Survivors is worth a spin. it’s part of the PC library for Game Passmicrosoft’s games-on-demand subscription service. Or, and this is key, it costs $3.

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<p>The post Vampire Survivors, A 2022 Best Game, Gets Final Boss In Update first appeared on harchi90.</p>

Back in 2000 Sony released a game called aconcagua for the PlayStation 1. An adventure game set in the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes, it has spent the last 22 years only available in Japanese. Until now!

hilltop—who we covered last year for their work on Racing Lagoon—will be releasing an English-language patch on July 11 that will finally make the game playable for, well, anyone who is able to be reading this post.

I’ll be honest, I had never heard of this game until today, and a quick search reveals that it’s not exactly considered as a classic (a 29/40 from Famitsu is never great, even back then), but like Racing Lagoon, that’s not really the point here. The point is that this game is interestingand practically none of us have ever got the chance to play it, so it’ll be cool to get the chance to check it out.

aconcagua has you playing as a number of characters (you can swap between them), after only five people (including a journalist and political leader) survive a plane crash in South America caused by a terrorist bombing. It’s got a third-person viewpoint, and has you wandering around a snowy mountaintop solving puzzles and helping the other survivors get down to the bottom without being murdered by said terrorists.

Here’s some footage of the original Japanese release: note that it actually has a lot of English in it already, but only for cutscenes and voice acting; the text you needed to actually play the game was all in Japanese:

Here’s the English patch’s trailer, showing that the subtitles have now been translated:

You’ll be able to get the patch when it’s out here.

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<p>The post Obscure Japanese PS1 Game Aconcagua Soon Available In English first appeared on harchi90.</p>