The Atari you knew and loved is long-dead, and perhaps one day you might sleep inside its corpse. The company currently wearing the skin of Atari have licensed the name to people wishing to build Atari Hotels, who recently revealed their big dreams for sleep-in mausoleums in Las Vegas and Phoenix. They are: big. They are: flashy. They are: absurd. They are also far from…
Posts tagged “Atari”
The creature wearing the skin of Atari have revisited perhaps the most iconic video game of the company whose bones it sucked clean of marrow then crunched to dust and swallowed, today releasing Pong Quest. It's Pong, but also sort of a dungeon-crawler. I am sceptical of everything the creature wearing the skin of Atari does, especially after terrible decisions like rebooting Asteroids as a…
Feature: Pack it in
I’ve written a few times now about my family’s fabled first PC, a 1995 Packard Bell that had the faint air of a sickly Victorian child, resurrected as a sullen robot a century after finally succumbing to an ill-defined but fatal spluttering sickness. It was a machine that seemed to be ailing from day one, but since it was the first PC we’d had, we…
Feature: Crack the code
If you played Max Payne, you basically played Enter The Matrix. It was like that pastiche slo-mo shooter, except you had the music from The Matrix trilogy following you as you bullet-timed across rooftops and sprinted through the streets. To be fair, there was wall-running and kung fu, something Max never learned, the layabout.
Blood: Fresh Supply drags the classic horror FPS out of the DOS era
For the first time ever, there is an official Windows version of Blood, Monolith Software's classic horror-themed FPS. Blood: Fresh Supply is out today, and a subtle update produced by Night Dive and their porting maestro Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal, brains behind their Turok, Strife and System Shock updates. It's a surprisingly straightforward port to modern systems, retaining the old look while adding widescreen, high-refresh and…
THQ Nordic buy Alone In The Dark and Act Of War series, might consider sequels
Continuing to hoover up every neglected video game series that's remembered half-fondly, THQ Nordic today announced they're buying the rights to horror series Alone In The Dark and Eugen's real-time strategy 'em up Act Of War. These two had been owned by The Creature Wearing The Skin Of Atari - who largely seem poor carers for old series, while The Creature Wearing The Skin Of…
Jeff Minter of tiny indie outfit Llamasoft is back and hasn't changed a bit, if Tempest 4000's launch today is any indication. Take the 1981 vector-graphics arcade shooter Tempest, and pile on the psychedelic laser effects, pumping '90s techno music and weird Welsh humour until comfortably numb. It is almost excessively retro, very loud and is out now.
Americans don't know Jeff Minter in the way he's known elsewhere. At least, that's what I've been told, and it tracks because I didn't know who Minter was either. The game creator has repeatedly butted heads with The Creature That Wears The Skin Of Atari, so it is delightful to see that some kind of common ground was reached to allow Minter to make this…
First launched in 2016, Hearts of Iron IV is yet another of the grand strategy games to come from the great grand strategy Santa's Workshop known as Paradox Interactive. Mixing sandbox style play and real-time war simulation, the title allows you to start in 1936 or 1939 and take one control of one great power -- leading them to victory over the rest of the,…
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 mysteriously delisted from Steam & GOG
Back in January, zombie publisher Atari suffered the legal ire of its past-life contractor Frontier Developments over unpaid royalties for 2004's theme park sim RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. There's been no word as yet of how that particular dust - alleged by gossip site TMZ to be worth some $2.2m - settled, but I suspect many of us would raise an eyebrow or six if someone…
In the least expected re-release of 2018, Bullet Witch is coming to Steam
Everyone loves witches. That's just like, you know, facts. Bullets? Some people are into bullets. Some people are not. But a witch that has bullets? How could that possibly go wrong? Well, three years before we were gifted with Bayonetta, developer Cavia attempted to fuse Western and Japanese sensibilities into a post-apocalyptic monster battle adventure game. Unfortunately, the reviews for the game were just brutal.…
Feature: Pong: Sweat Edition
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.I had never seen a sweatier man.Deep into the battle that would decide his fate and the way his story lived on or dwindled to nothing, my custom-built character was part-way between solid and fluid. A jelly of a man; a moist pink marshmallow on wobbly legs.…
Feature: A real crowd-pleaser
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.Has anyone made a fighting game more realistic than Pit-Fighter? Released in arcades in 1990 and to home computers a year later, it used actual people as the models for its characters, digitising them through some sort of sorcery and allowing them to punch and kick one…
"EAT ELECTRIC DEATH" declares Tempest 4000 as noises and colours and particles and numbers explode all over. Yup, that's certainly what I'd expect from Jeff Minter's return to the arcade shooter series. Minter was behind Tempest 2000 and 3000, Minterised remakes for Atari of the '80s arcade game. But when he tried to make the similar TxK for himself, the creature wearing the skin of…
Feature: Big Boss
Since its foundation in 2003, Obsidian Entertainment has worked with seven different publishers. Commencing with LucasArts on Knights of the Old Republic II, Obsidian has since signed contracts with Atari, SEGA, Bethesda, Square Enix, Ubisoft and most recently, Paradox Interactive. In fact, up until Pillars of Eternity [official site], every single game Obsidian had made was funded and distributed by a different publisher.This is a…
Jeff Minter is revisiting Tempest later this year in Tempest 4000, the creature wearing the skin of Atari announced today. This is mighty surprising, considering Minter has said the creature tried to kill his TxK, the Tempest-ish shooter he released in 2014. Their apparent reconciliation is definitely welcome news, mind. No one does loud, colourful, intense, and silly arcade action just like Minter. He was…
Scream If You’re Confused: RollerCoaster Tycoon World Launching Day Before Planet Coaster
The creature wearing the skin of Atari has announced astonishing plans to launch RollerCoaster Tycoon World [official site] next Wednesday, November 16th. It's been on Steam early Access for seven months. The surprising part is: Frontier's theme park sim Planet Coaster comes out the very next day, Thursday the 17th. Given that Planet Coaster looks the better game by far, it's a bit silly. Perhaps…
Rollercoaster Tycoon World [official site] will have players create their own parks and rides in-game, of course, but it'll also let people make brand new things outside the game. The theme park-building game will have simple tools to create new scenery objects and people and doodahs through a Unity plugin then share them over the Steam Workshop, a new trailer explains. Come see how that works…
It's been a ride full of... (if I say "ups and downs" will you continuing reading, dear reader?) turbulence for Rollercoaster Tycoon World [official site]. Since it was first announced in 2014, it's already been through three different developers and has long passed its original "early 2015" release window. It was then scheduled for a December 10th launch, however has now been pushed back to…
Rollercoaster Tycoon World Is On Its Third Developer, But Finally Has A Release Date
The current inhabitants of the Atari skinsuit have finally stuck a release date on their latest attempt to revive beloved management sim/construction toyRollercoaster Tycoon. Series creator Chris Sawyer is sadly not involved in Rollercoaster Tycoon World [official site], which is the fourth game in the main series, and rather worryingly the project has been through three different developers since its announcement last year.
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