After yonks of warning signs, hints, puzzles, and tense first encounters in Elite Dangerous: Horizons [official site], the alien Thargoids are almost ready to start preparing to properly arrive in a bit. Frontier Developments have announced that the space ’em up’s Update 2.4, codenamed The Return, will kick off story events that will finally see Thargoids return to Elite as a proper part of the game. Yup, the wait continues but the end is in sight. When the Thargoids arrive, Frontier say, they’ll shake the galaxy up. Read the rest of this entry »

Space trucking sim Elite Dangerous [official site] recently held one of its public events for players. This time a special NPC would be racing back to the “bubble” (the populated core worlds of the galactic frisbee) from a mysterious place known as the Formidine Rift. Her name was Salomé and she had “vital information.” I am using the past tense to describe her because – surprise surprise – she never reached her destination. She was murdered by a player called Harry Potter, a prolific troll who had somehow infiltrated the huge coalition of players who swore to protect her.
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A bunch of maps and tools for space sim Elite: Dangerous [official site] were shut down today by their creators as part of a protest over what they called a “lack of consistency from Frontier in effectively fostering third-party development”. The picket line of third-party tools was set to last until Sunday and included some very useful stuff for pilots like maps, trading databases and ship designers. The main complaint these folks had is that Frontier was not communicating with them well when it comes to updates (when a patch comes out the tools are often thrown into disarray without much warning, introducing new bugs and problems for the toolfolk). But spacetalks have already been held and most of the sites will be back up tonight, leaving me in the lurch with absolutely no drama. Disgraceful.
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Elitists can now fly ships with their chums and create their own spaceface, thanks to the big Elite Dangerous: Horizons [official site] update today launched. The headline feature of Horizons version 2.3, nicknamed ‘The Commanders’, is multicrew spaceshipping, letting several players take stations on the bridge. The auxiliary roles don’t sound super exciting in themselves as Elite wasn’t built with them in mind but hanging with your friends is surely a lark.

Non-Horizons Elitists aren’t left out. The whole game benefits today from an update adding sights like asteroid bases and roaming ‘megaships’. Have a look at it all: Read the rest of this entry »

When I played Theme Park with my brother, he’d ask me to hire dozens of mascots so he could watch thugs roll in to beat up the pogoing teddy bears. It’s the small things in life, y’know. Planet Coaster [official site] today celebrates the joys of crimes with the addition of pickpockets and vandals, and security guards to thwart them. Also arriving in today’s Spring Update are Go-Karts and other new rides and coasters, along with exciting options for ‘Duelling’ coasters which launch in sync. Here, have a peek in this trailer marking the update’s launch: Read the rest of this entry »

Right now, the worst thing that can happen to the population of Planet Coaster [official site] is an upset tummy, or a lack of cash on-hand to pay for overpriced pop and burgers. Of course, combine the upset tummy and the overpriced food, and you end up with puddles of vomit, so perhaps the worst thing that can happen to the population of Planet Coaster is the involuntary, forceful expulsion of undigested, overpriced nosh through their noses and mouths.

That’ll all change on April 11th, when a free update brings pickpockets and vandals to your parks, along with a stack of new rides.

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Elite Dangerous [official site] has excellent hands. See how the fingers twitch, watch how they waggle a flightstick – just hanging around in a cockpit is oddly mesmerising. And by God I’m worried about how much inadvertent innuendo crept into those last couple of lines. Anyway: Frontier’s spaceship demi-MMO is gearing up to progress far beyond hands and into bodies and faces. They’ve just shown off their seemingly highly configurable ‘Commander’ creation tool. Whole lotta faces going on here. Read the rest of this entry »