Author: dpugh007

Anyone who pays attention to the PC world knows that there are so many new games that release on computers every week, and aside from the really huge releases, it’s hard to tell whether you might enjoy something or not. That’s where STEAM PUNKS comes in–we’re taking some of that guesswork away, and showing you the best hidden gems we find.

This week, Edmond takes a look at unforgiving shooter Synthetik, a rougelite where firing your gun is the hardest, and most satisfying part of the game. He also throws some spare change at mech strategy/shooter hybrid Armed to the Gears, and we ponder the perceptions of cost being an indication of quality.

Speaking of cost and quality, Jess plays free adventure game Traum and has a great, if not horrifying, time. She then gets slothful with her own hybrid pick of Lazy Galaxy, an RTS/idle clicker mashup that is taking unattended computers across the galaxy by storm!

Have you been playing any fantastic new PC games that we missed? We want to hear about them! Let us know on Twitter: @EdmondTran + @JessMcDonell

Steam store links: Synthetik | Armed to the Gears | Traum | Lazy Galaxy

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Many recent Ubisoft games have had you climb towers to unlock new sections of the in-game map. The company first used the mechanic in Assassin’s Creed, before later bringing it to Far Cry and Watch Dogs, and even The Crew. Now, with Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has poked fun at itself and the mechanic.

During the game’s opening, your handler–a character named Dutch–instructs you to climb a tower to activate an antenna. While doing so, he reassures you that, no, he won’t have you climbing towers all over the game’s fictional Hope County, Montana, USA, and that this is just a one-off. Take a look at the moment in the video above.

Previous Far Cry games have required you to climb towers scattered across their worlds to see what activities are available in their region. Far Cry 5 drops this mechanic in favor of more organic exploration: you’ll unlock activities and gain map markers by talking to NPCs and traveling past points of interest.

For more on the open-world shooter, take a look at our Far Cry 5 review-in-progress. Critic Edmond Tran has provisionally awarded the game a 9/10. “Despite some brief irritations and missed opportunities with its narrative, spending time in the world of Hope County remains absolutely delightful,” he wrote. “Far Cry 5 boasts a wonderfully harmonious flow to its adventure, with its smart changes to exploration, discovery, and progression distinctly bolstering the enjoyment of creatively engaging and experimenting with its spectacular open world.” Check out our Far Cry 5 review roundup for a wider view of critical opinion.

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It’s been over two years since the latest Far Cry game, Primal, was released, and nearly four years since Far Cry 4. Thankfully, Far Cry 5’s release date is nearly upon us.

The latest in the series takes us to Hope County, Montana, USA, and it appears to continue the franchise’s recent sillier tone. It even contains a killer bear named cheeseburger. Pre-release, Far Cry 5 had us confused, but what do we and others think of the final game?

Our critic, Edmond Tran, awarded the shooter a 9/10 in our Far Cry 5 review-in-progress. The game contains a number of network features and multiplayer components, so we’re waiting on the public launch before posting our final review, but until then you can take a look at a selection of critics’ opinions below. Alternatively, check out the game’s wider critical reception on GameSpot sister site Metacritic.

• Game: Far Cry 5
• Developer / Publisher: Ubisoft Montreal / Ubisoft
• Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC
• Release Date: March 27
• Price: US $60 / £55 / AU $100

GameSpot — 9/10 (Review-In-Progress)

“Despite some brief irritations and missed opportunities with its narrative, spending time in the world of Hope County remains absolutely delightful. Far Cry 5 boasts a wonderfully harmonious flow to its adventure, with its smart changes to exploration, discovery, and progression distinctly bolstering the enjoyment of creatively engaging and experimenting with its spectacular open world.” — Edmond Tran [Full review]

Eurogamer — No score

“This is the core truth of Far Cry, a series that still has a lot going for it, but remains in serious need of a revamp. It is a moribund apparatus of conquest that is unable to tell any story other than the rise to power of a well-armed outsider over a lushly imagined, exoticised realm, however urgently it might try.” — Edwin Evans-Thirlwell [Full review]

Game Informer — 7.5/10

“Far Cry 5’s world is meticulously constructed, and it’s a remarkable facsimile of Big Sky Country. Unfortunately, too much of the action in it is uninspired. It’s a beautiful but bland recitation of what’s come before, from both the series and Ubisoft’s open-world playbook. It’s never bad, but considering how great the past games have been, its overall predictability is disappointing.” — Jeff Cork [Full review]

USGamer — 4.5/5

“Far Cry 5 is a game that struggles in trying to serve two purposes. On one hand, there’s a dark, horrific tale of a cult taking over a small town. On the other, it’s a playground of destruction, letting players fly and drive around, blowing up things with a bear and a dog. Both sides are good, but they don’t really meet in the middle. If you can survive the tonal whiplash, you’ll find a great game here and Far Cry Arcade only makes it better.” — Mike Williams [Full review]

The Guardian — 3/5

“There are great individual moments in Far Cry 5. The gunplay is excellent, its unpredictable world generates daring stories of accidental heroism, and when it leans into the whole red-blooded American patriotism schtick, it’s genuinely funny. It doesn’t always fit together as well as it should, sometimes forcing the player to work around the game rather than with it – but the wildly vacillating tone is the bigger issue. It’s at once disorienting and noncommittal. Paradoxically, this is an extreme satire of modern America that says pretty much nothing about it.” — Keza MacDonald [Full review]

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EA’s deep learning division, Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division (SEED), has made a breakthrough of sorts. The outfit was able to create AI that was smart enough to teach itself to play Battlefield 1‘s fast and frenetic multiplayer. For real.

EA documented this in a brief video published during the Game Developers Conference (via Gamasutra). This is the regular Battlefield 1 multiplayer experience, but EA did give some of its AI “agents,” as they’re called, a bit of hand. As you can see, EA added boxes in the game world that contain ammo and health. Even with that advantage, the AI looks surprisingly smart for having learned everything by trial and error. That being said, EA fully acknowledges that it’s not perfect–you’ll see a group of AI soldiers running in circles at various points. Whoops.

“All players you see are controlled by a single neural network that has been trained to play the game from scratch through trial and error,” EA said. “The agents have learned to adapt their behaviour if they are low on ammo or health. Everything the agents do is the result of previous gameplay experience. We only give them encouragement for playing the objective.”

SEED has offices in Stockholm (where Battlefield developer DICE is located) and Los Angeles. The group’s mission is “to explore, build, and help define the future of interactive entertainment.” You can learn more about SEED on EA’s website here.

It’s expected that big video game publishers–and companies of all kinds–would have R&D divisions. What’s rarer, however, is that EA is talking about and showing off some of its efforts. We can only imagine what we’ll see next.

The next Battlefield game, meanwhile, is due out this year and is rumored to be set in World War II. The game has yet to be formally announced, but we know it will be playable at E3 in June, so an official reveal should happen soon.

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A TV show based on Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise is on the way. Media company Entertainment One is producing and financing the show, which is being developed by the same team that made the live-action internet series Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist.

According to Deadline, the new TV show will focus on Street Fighter’s “World Warrior” story, focusing on four main characters: Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Chun-Li.

“Together, they fight to take down M. Bison, the evil mastermind who runs Shadaloo, a global criminal organization,” reads a line from the show’s description. “Though on different journeys, our heroes’ paths will cross as they are drawn into the World Warrior Tournament, a competition devised by M. Bison to find the most powerful and capable fighter in the world. On the journey they come to share, they must draw on their strength, skills, intelligence and loyalty in a battle to survive and emerge as the World Warrior.”

eOne president Mark Gordon said part of what makes Street Fighter appealing to a wide audience is its diverse cast of characters. “A particular strength of Street Fighter is the wide range of ethnically diverse characters and powerful women featured in the game,” he said. “It will allow us to build an inclusive and engaging TV universe.”

For his part, Street Fighter series producer Yoshinori Ono said Capcom arrived at eOne after “long search” for the right partner. According to Ono, eOne has “the credentials to help us launch a faithful adaptation of Street Fighter as a major TV series.”

As mentioned, Assassin’s Fist creator Joey Ansah is returning for the new show. Producers Jacqueline Quella and Mark Wooding from Assassin’s Fist are back as well. There is no word yet as to who will star in the show or when it will premiere, or where.

The Street Fighter series has a history of transmedia efforts. Jean-Claude Van Damme starred in the 1994 movie Street Fighter, while 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li starred Oscar nominee Michael Clarke Duncan, Kristin Kreuk, Chris Klein, and Neal McDonough.

The next Street Fighter game is a compilation package called Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, which comes out in May for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, as well as PC. According to Capcom’s public data, the Street Fighter franchise has sold 40 million copies across 84 titles since the series debuted in 1987.

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The medium of TV–including Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon–presents a “clear and present danger” to traditional film, veteran and award-winning movie director Steven Spielberg said in a new interview. In the same interview, the director said Netflix movies should not be able to qualify for the Academy Awards. Speaking to ITV News, Spielberg said TV today is better than it’s ever been in terms of writing, performance, and directing, and this is a threat to the film business. Competition of course is nothing new, but what’s different today according to Spielberg is that companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are picking up some of the smaller films that might not be guaranteed hits at the box office.

“We are accustomed to being highly competitive with television,” he said. “The difference today is a lot of studios would rather make branded, tentpole, guaranteed box office hits from their inventory of branded, successful movies than take chances on smaller films. Those smaller films, which studios used to make routinely, are now going to Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.”

Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated The Post is an example of a “smaller” film, but the director said he still wanted to make it because it was a passion project of sorts. Not only that, but any project with Spielberg’s name attached is sure to get a lot of attention and awareness. “I’ll still make The Post, asking [the audience] to please go out and see The Post and not make it directly for Netflix,” he said.

Spielberg is of course in a unique position. He is one of the biggest and most respected names in Hollywood and presumably does not need to worry about financing and can release his movies wherever he wants. The same cannot be said for everyone.

Some movies that air on services like Netflix and Amazon have limited theatrical runs so they can qualify for the Academy Awards. Spielberg took a hard line against this, saying that this loophole should be closed.

“Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” he said. “You certainly–if it’s a good show, you deserve an Emmy. But not an Oscar. I don’t believe that films that just given token qualifications in a couple of theatres for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination.”

As Entertainment Weekly reminds us, the official Academy rules state that feature-length movies need to be shown in Los Angeles county for seven straight days to be considered.

Netflix’s drama Mudbound earned multiple Oscar nominations this year, while the Russian doping documentary Icarus won the Best Documentary Oscar this year.

Spielberg has been nominated for 17 Oscars, winning three; he is a member of the Academy’s board of governors. His next movie, Ready Player One, opens in the US on March 29.

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Cross-play support between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is technically possible, but the politics between Sony and Microsoft is keeping it from happening. According to Tim Sweeney, the head of Fortnite developer Epic Games, it is in the industry’s best interest to allow gamers on competing platforms to play together, and it’s “inevitable” that this will eventually happen. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference recently, Sweeney said PlayStation and Xbox gamers playing together is “the next logical step.”

He made his point by referencing Metcalfe’s Law. This is the idea that the value of a shared experience is related to the number of people who can connect to it.

“I think it’s inevitable now,” he said about cross-play, according to GI.biz. “Games have become social experiences in the same way that Facebook or Twitter have, and these experiences only really make sense if gamers can communicate with all of their friends.”

Sweeney went on to say that if Sony and Microsoft do not allow cross-play, they run the risk of “breaking up real-world social groups,” and this could be bad for business.

“For Sony and Microsoft to support their customers well they have to be open to all their customer’s friends–their real world friends–otherwise they’re breaking up real-world social groups,” he said. “Like kids in school have their friends, and do you expect this platform schism to divide them into two separate groups that can’t play together? No. It’s got to come together now. That one remaining barrier will inevitably come down.”

Go to GI.biz to read their full report on Sweeney’s talk at GDC.

Interestingly, back in September 2017, Epic enabled cross-platform play between PS4 and Xbox One for Fortnite: Save the World. However, that was quickly turned off and chalked up to an error, but it did show again that it appears to be a matter of politics.

Earlier this month, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said he wants to see cross-play support between PS4 and Xbox One added for Fortnite–and presumably other games.

Microsoft has famously been open to cross-play support in recent years. Rocket League is set to work across Xbox One, Switch, and PC, while the developer of Minecraft (which Microsoft owns) is also open to cross-play between Xbox One and PS4. For its part, Sony has not seemed eager to allow cross-play.

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