TGIF, Border House folks! This is the second installment of our new feature where we summarize the week in gaming and link to our favorite articles of the week. Be sure to add your own news and links in the comments section too, especially as I probably missed a lot what with Sandy and all. Okay, here we go:
This Week in Game News
The big releases this week were the two Assassin’s Creed titles, ACIII and Liberation…It was a great week for boobs in advertising, too; first of all Grand Theft Auto V was announced with this pretty bla bla advertisement poster that prompted many critics to wax nostalgic about when GTA was like, edgy; and a new French ad for the PS Vita equates its dual screens to a hot lady with four breasts. More on this later, guys, because we’re still trying to figure out where to start with this one….for game devs, Unity 4.0 is out in a free open beta…In better news, as we reported yesterday, two awesome women from 343 Industries announced that sexism on Halo 4 multiplayer would not be tolerated (Daily Dot)…also ICYMI from our news roundup yesterday, the developers of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare were caught with their sexism showing…and in best news, Red Thread Studios’ Ragnar Tørnquist announced a sequel to beloved game Dreamfall, entitled Dreamfall Chapters. You can check out Tørnquist’s other games in this Steam bundle for $24.99.
And although this isn’t video games per se I have to include it because it concerns us all: Star Wars Episode 7 is going to be a thing. Yes. George Lucas has sold LucasArts to Disney for $4.05 billion dollars, with the agreement that a seventh installment of the wildly successful science fiction franchise (presumably titled Star Wars VII: Really?) will be released in 2015. And the internet has responded (Buzzfeed).
Border House Editors’ Picks
- Kotaku’s Evan Narcisse wrote about the “blackness” of Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, a game set in colonial Louisiana starring a black female protagonist.
- This Gamasutra feature looks at upcoming game Apotheon, which drew its artistic inspiration from, of all places, Greek pottery.
- This amazing Gothic cathedral done in Minecraft.
- It’s not an article, but check out this “Super Indie Mega Mix,” a mashup of 61 indie games from Pixel Proxpector.
The indie megamix has lots of eye candy, but it’s basically 10 minutes of shooting stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I love to shoot stuff
, but it felt a bit one-sided to me. No point & click adventures, for one.
The thought of Star Wars Episode 7 scares me. To quote Rob Balder’s song “Sympathy for George Lucas”:
“Buy all my well-planned merchandise / Or I’ll make Seven, Eight, and Nine! (I’ll do it, too!)”
While I have no involvement with either game, I feel it’s only fair to point out that there are two entirely different games in the IGF this year made by unrelated people which BOTH use the orange-and-black Greek vase art style. But one gets article coverage ALL over the place and the other (‘Hellas’) doesn’t.
To the best of my knowledge it’s a complete coincidence, no one copied the other. It’s just worth noting and thinking about how easily the whims of fate and reporting can affect your prospects.
Hey, WhineAboutGames, thanks for pointing this out! I actually hadn’t heard of Hellas before. I will definitely put it on my radar. It’s crazy the way marketing works to push some games and bury others. Do you have a link to the other game we could check out?
And Prezzey, good point
Maybe we should make our own music video of our favorite indie games? The editors are planning on starting to cover more indie stuff on TBH, so if you’re into that scene definitely keep checking back!
I don’t know too much about it, I just remember noticing them both when I was doing my quick take of all the IGF games. The main link for Hellas is probably the tigsource development log thread here:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21485