Posts Tagged ‘505 games’

RPS Feature Panned-emic

Premature Evaluation: Quarantine

Every week we send Brendan into the no-go zones of early access to take pus-filled samples of half-made games. This time, the infectious disease management of Quarantine [official site].

Beijing, Chengdu, and Dehli are all quarantined. Michael Clayborn, my crack medical operative who has served me faithfully, has died in the industrial Siberian wastes of Irkutsk. The entirety of South America has been sealed off from the rest of the world, and Manaus is now considered a “lost city” so infused with disease that it can’t be treated or approached in any way. People are stating to suffer “pustulent buboes” in Santiago, a highly contagious development that I need to deal with. A pop-up box aide comes to me with a decision to make. Do I want to distribute medicine and help the suffering masses of Latin America? Or should I send in some white coats to analyze these curious buboes? Of course, I send in the scientists.
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Quarantine looks a lot like board game Pandemic

A cursory glance at the newly announced Quarantine [official site] could easily lead you to say something like “oh, it looks like Plague Inc but from the human’s side”. But you are not thinking hard enough, cursory glancer. As board game aficionados will tell you, Quarantine looks a lot more like a single-player version of the much-loved Pandemic.
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Meet FBI Agent Anne Tarver In This New Virginia Trailer

David Lynch-inspired, small town whodunnit Virginia [official site] is gearing up for its launch next week and has released a new character trailer in preparation. We get a closer look at the game’s protagonist, Anne Tarver.

She’s an FBI agent, fresh on the scene after graduation. She drives around Virginia with her partner, Maria Halperin, as they try to solve the case of a missing boy. She has a very official looking badge. She can drive. There is a large telescope. Okay, so the trailer doesn’t actually tell us that much about the character, but the game sure looks pretty.

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Mysterious Girl: Virginia Gets Cinematic Trailer

Right, I’m going to level with you: I’m really behind on Virginia [official site] news because I want to go into it as fresh as is feasible while retaining my job on this PC gaming website. Single-player mystery thrillers involving FBI agents are very much my area of interest and I do prefer mysteries where I know very little about them going in.

With that in mind, I’m watching this cinematic trailer for Virginia, but I’m doing the kind of watching where I’m deliberately not paying attention, I’m just trying to ensure it’s definitely a trailer and there’s definitely a game and no-one’s accidentally left a bunch of porn halfway through or something:

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First-Person Investigator: Virginia Gets A Demo

It’s been ages since we last visited the Twin Peaks-inspired-ish first-person vignette ’em up Virginia [official site] but whoa hey hello, here’s a release date and a demo out of nowhere. The demo is about twenty minutes long, offering a taste of life as a ’90s FBI agent investigating a missing child in a small town and answering basic questions like “Okay but what is it and what do I do?” That is now answered for me and so I’m quite looking forward to its full launch on September 22nd.

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Payday 2 Drops Microtransactions, Payday 3 Confirmed

Last year, Overkill Games upset a pretty vocal corner of their Payday 2 [official site] community by introducing microtransactions to the co-op heist ’em up – something they’d previously promised to avoid. In an announcement made yesterday, Starbreeze – Overkill’s parent company – revealed they’ve now acquired full rights to the Payday franchise and as such will scrap paid-for in-game items via the next update. Oh, and Payday 3’s been confirmed.

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RPS Feature What is it with New Orleans and zombie apocalypses?

Premature Evaluation: How to Survive 2

A helpful still from Kovac's How to Survive TV series for children and zombies. It's realy troubling if you think about how he makes these.

Survival games seem to break down into two broad categories. On the one hand, you have the survivalist games, where the focus is on an endless battle against the elements, a hostile environment, and resource scarcity so severe that even basic needs like food and shelter are hard to satisfy.

Then there are survival games like EKO Software’s How to Survive 2, where some survival elements have been added to a rather conventional game design in order to make progress a little more meaningful, play a little harder, and your rewards a little less secure. In a word, you’re still an almost unstoppable badass able to impose your will on the world around you… but sometimes you need to stop for snacks and juice.

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