Showing posts with label Steam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steam. Show all posts
Monday, 1 April 2019
Thimbleweed Park
Wednesday, 14 June 2017
Toybox Turbos
Who remembers Micro Machines? Those tiny cars furiously driving around a pool table, trying to take each other out of the game with anything at hand, be it a giant hammer, a pool ball or even an opposing car as a blocker.
Toybox Turbos is the spiritual successor to Micro Machines by which I mean pretty much the same game. Both are developed and published by Codemasters and both follow a similar theme; Top down racing around unconventional tracks like breakfast tables, pool tables, science rooms etc. Toybox Turbos is one of those games that is always good to have, its great for parties or groups of friends and even playing solo as its quick, easy, colourful and above all, fun.Veteran racing game players wont have an advantage here, the specifications of the car are non existent but that doesn't mean tactics aren't rewarded; Taking a car on the inside will give you the lead but also let your opponents sit in your slip stream to gain some speed on you, and when weapons are involved all bets are off. The weapons you have access to Toybox Turbos offer different effects but they all mainly slow you opponents down; The hammer allows you to smash another car to smithereens but limits you to a handful of uses before it disappears. The magnet is a great way of getting back into the race if you've dropped behind, it locks onto a car in whichever direction you're facing and rapidly draws you nearer to it, my personal favourite way of using the magnet is just before you're about to go over a jump as you get to lock onto a car in front of you and launch yourself off into the distance. The machine gun is what it sounds like. Its a rapid fire gun that last for a short period of time, but it does lock onto whoever is in front of you and, if hit enough, will blow them up. The EMP is probably the least effective weapon as it only hits cars in your general vicinity, as opposed to something like the machine guy, but for a few seconds it does slow down the effected cars and send them veering left and right. The land mines are fun. You can pick these up mid race or, if the race has gone on too long, they will spawn on the track randomly. Land mines cause the car that hit it to flip into the air, losing speed and maybe not even landing the right way up, I had a lot of fun trying to do some sweet flips whenever I hit one just to make it look like I meant to drive into it.
There are also pitfall built into the tracks. Land mines aside, on some tracks you will come across fire, maybe from a Bunsen burner or a gas hob, and this will give your car a boost in speed which could win you a point, but could just as easily blow you up if you hit anything, including other cars. The car you hit however is now in the same situation you were just in, so it could end up as a chain reaction of cars being lit on fire and blowing each other up.
The cars are all cosmetic so there isn't really a case of the fastest car or the most resilient to damage, but some of them have fun horns like the Ice cream truck or the Milk float. Others, like the Mini or the Double Decker bus, have normal horns but there is humor value in watching a Mini, an Ice cream truck, a Digger and a Double Decker bus line up to battle it out.
The objective is to get to ten points which is done by getting ahead of the pack, at which point the bottom of the screen will start eating the last place car. Each time this happens, first place gets two points, second place gets one point, third place loses one point and last place loses two points.
All in all I think Toybox Turbos is a fantastic game and will always result in laughs, especially when alcohol is involved.
Thanks for reading and keep checking back to Game Changers fore more gaming news and updates.
Toybox Turbos is the spiritual successor to Micro Machines by which I mean pretty much the same game. Both are developed and published by Codemasters and both follow a similar theme; Top down racing around unconventional tracks like breakfast tables, pool tables, science rooms etc. Toybox Turbos is one of those games that is always good to have, its great for parties or groups of friends and even playing solo as its quick, easy, colourful and above all, fun.Veteran racing game players wont have an advantage here, the specifications of the car are non existent but that doesn't mean tactics aren't rewarded; Taking a car on the inside will give you the lead but also let your opponents sit in your slip stream to gain some speed on you, and when weapons are involved all bets are off. The weapons you have access to Toybox Turbos offer different effects but they all mainly slow you opponents down; The hammer allows you to smash another car to smithereens but limits you to a handful of uses before it disappears. The magnet is a great way of getting back into the race if you've dropped behind, it locks onto a car in whichever direction you're facing and rapidly draws you nearer to it, my personal favourite way of using the magnet is just before you're about to go over a jump as you get to lock onto a car in front of you and launch yourself off into the distance. The machine gun is what it sounds like. Its a rapid fire gun that last for a short period of time, but it does lock onto whoever is in front of you and, if hit enough, will blow them up. The EMP is probably the least effective weapon as it only hits cars in your general vicinity, as opposed to something like the machine guy, but for a few seconds it does slow down the effected cars and send them veering left and right. The land mines are fun. You can pick these up mid race or, if the race has gone on too long, they will spawn on the track randomly. Land mines cause the car that hit it to flip into the air, losing speed and maybe not even landing the right way up, I had a lot of fun trying to do some sweet flips whenever I hit one just to make it look like I meant to drive into it.
There are also pitfall built into the tracks. Land mines aside, on some tracks you will come across fire, maybe from a Bunsen burner or a gas hob, and this will give your car a boost in speed which could win you a point, but could just as easily blow you up if you hit anything, including other cars. The car you hit however is now in the same situation you were just in, so it could end up as a chain reaction of cars being lit on fire and blowing each other up.
The cars are all cosmetic so there isn't really a case of the fastest car or the most resilient to damage, but some of them have fun horns like the Ice cream truck or the Milk float. Others, like the Mini or the Double Decker bus, have normal horns but there is humor value in watching a Mini, an Ice cream truck, a Digger and a Double Decker bus line up to battle it out.
The objective is to get to ten points which is done by getting ahead of the pack, at which point the bottom of the screen will start eating the last place car. Each time this happens, first place gets two points, second place gets one point, third place loses one point and last place loses two points.
All in all I think Toybox Turbos is a fantastic game and will always result in laughs, especially when alcohol is involved.
Thanks for reading and keep checking back to Game Changers fore more gaming news and updates.
Friday, 20 January 2017
When Gabe met Reddit
Gabe Newell, boss at Valve, one of the best game companies ever!, held an AMA on Reddit this week to discuss some questions put to him by fans. It was relatively short but when given the opportunity to talk almost face to face with someone at Valve it's always an enjoyable experience. Here are a few of the questions Gabe answered, some more technical than others and some just fun questions.
Some questions about Gabe's personal life and interests, like;
Q- What sparked your interest in video games?
A- Playing Trek on a mainframe using punch cards.
Q- Do people recognize you in public often?
A- Yes.
Q- How do you like your steak?
A- Medium Rare.
Q- If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam?
A- The biggest issue has been how we structured support.
A couple of fun questions;
Q- Wasn't there a movie (or set of 2 movies) coming in that universe be Valve and JJ Abrams?
A- Yep, they're coming.
Q- What is the status of Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Is Valve still working on any fully fledged single player games? An I identified anonymous source at Valve has said that HL3 has been cancelled, is this source legitimate?
A- The number 3 must not be said! Yes, I personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the internet.
Q- What are your favorite Steam games?
A- I think Portal 2 is our best single player game, I play DOTA 2 the most of our multiplayer games.
And some questions that are more business related;
Q- Do people often ask "When's Half-Life 3 coming?" Or similar things?
A- Yes.
Q- What's going on with Half-Life 3?
A- The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about the what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that I was less directive.
Q- What do you regret about Half-Life then? That's an interesting thing to say, regarding that the Half-Life series is one of the most critically acclaimed of all time.
A- if you're involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.
Q- Why does Valve not talk to its community about the games/apps it's developing as much as other companies?
A- Because our decision making is way more conditional than most other companies. The one thing we won't do is waste our customers time and money, which means we will cancel or change stuff much later in development. Tracking out choices would be annoying and frustrating.
Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products. We are all pretty devoted to reading and listening to the community - everyone here believes it is an integral part of their job to do so. And when it comes time to respond, we generally use Steam - shipping update that address issues or add functionality, obviously this doesn't work for everything. Working this way imposes latency on our communication - It takes long to ship and update than to do a blog post. This can lead to the feeling of an echo chamber, where it seems like Valve isn't listening. We're always listening. So sometimes the latency is rough for everyone, including us when we want to address issues quickly. On balance we things it's usually worth the trade off.
Q- Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming year? If so, what?
A- We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving DOTA 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.
Q- Any chance that there will be a new IP set in the Half-Life/Portal Universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to explore there.
A- Yep
And finally...
Q- What is your view on the direction Valve as a company should take in the future? Such as what would you like to see the company achieve/what improvements would you like to see Valve undergo/ what role would you like to see Valve serve/undertake in the industry as it evolves etc, and if any, have you made any past decisions that you look back on now with regret/could've handled differently?
A- The big thing right no is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences and we think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as were designing our own VR games. Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kind of areas where machine learning should work well.
Personally I'm looking at research in brain computing interfaces.
These have been a selection of questions from the AMA held by Gabe Newell on Reddit, hopefully we'll be hearing from the guys from Valve again soon, but until then keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates
Q- Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming year? If so, what?
A- We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving DOTA 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.
Q- Any chance that there will be a new IP set in the Half-Life/Portal Universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to explore there.
A- Yep
And finally...
Q- What is your view on the direction Valve as a company should take in the future? Such as what would you like to see the company achieve/what improvements would you like to see Valve undergo/ what role would you like to see Valve serve/undertake in the industry as it evolves etc, and if any, have you made any past decisions that you look back on now with regret/could've handled differently?
A- The big thing right no is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences and we think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as were designing our own VR games. Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kind of areas where machine learning should work well.
Personally I'm looking at research in brain computing interfaces.
These have been a selection of questions from the AMA held by Gabe Newell on Reddit, hopefully we'll be hearing from the guys from Valve again soon, but until then keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates
Thursday, 29 December 2016
Zombie Driver HD
Ahh Zombies. You gotta love 'em, from there decaying faces all the way to their shambling little feet. Zombies have been used in pretty much everything by now, but its nice to sit back and play a Zombie game every now and again, and whats more cathartic than smashing a Zombies head in with a sledgehammer? Running their undead arses over in a big car!
Zombie Driver HD is an HD re-release of a top down, vehicular based, Zombie apocalypse game, in which you choose from a range of eight vehicles to plow through legions of the living dead. This is all explained through between mission newspaper clippings and various support characters gabbing into your Walkie-Talkie, telling you what a good job you've done. Apparently there was some sort of biochemical accident or government project that's has gone wrong and turned the residents of whatever city you're in into Zombies.
Honestly, the story doesn't matter, If you've played any other Zombie games, i'm sure you get the general gist. Time to run some Zombie bastards over!
Like I said, Zombie Driver is presented from a top down perspective, like the old Grand Theft Autos (GTA), and it suffers with the same problems. You don't have that much range of vision, limited to the square around you rather than looking in front of you. This game isn't graphic intensive though, looking like a flash game at first glance, and thus doesn't need to show you the super detailed Zombies as they slowly advance with intentions of helping themselves to a mouthful of you.
Throughout Zombie Driver, you will be tasked with missions ranging from clearing out certain areas filled to the brim with Zombies, to rescuing NPCs that have held up in a hospital or shopping center, the obligatory Zombie apocalypse trope.
The annoying thing about most missions in this game is making sure you have gotten rid of every single Zombie, which can be difficult. You drive up to the red circle to rescue some NPCs and start massacring Zombies left, right and center, but more and more Zombies keep banding together and attacking from all angles. When you think you've killed them all and you're waiting for the people trapped inside to get into your car, low and behold there was one lone Zombie slowly making his was towards you, but you didn't notice, and by the time you have noticed, ten more have turned up for a brain sand-which and rendered the "soon to be rescued" party trapped once more.
When you do finally rescue them and get them back to the safe house, most of the time this will result in new cars to try out for future missions, or unlocking new weapons to find and attach to your car while you're driving around the city.
The cars are all relatively similar in regards to steering and weapons, but differ when it comes to passenger capacity or how much damage they can take. The capacity of the car is what I found myself focusing on the most, mainly because you often find yourself having to rescue a fair few people from various building scattered all over the city just to complete the mission. The weapons that I mentioned earlier are nice and varied, a simple machine gun or even flame thrower to gleefully spray as you roll through the streets, or, if you have somewhere to be, you can use the nitro boost to rapidly mow through the shambling remains of the once inhabitants.
Between missions you can upgrade any of the weapons you have found to increase the damage they can do or the duration you can use them for. You do this by collecting money either in a mission while driving around the city, or as a result of how well you did in the mission once completed.
All in all, I had fun with Zombie Driver HD and I think there could be a nice idea in this; a similar game in a sense that you drive around to kill Zombies but maybe from a third person perspective to give you more field of vision to work with. Its a cheap game with simple mechanics and a great way to burn a couple of hours and who knows, some day we might even see a Zombie Driver 2 from Exor studios in the future.
Keep checking back to Game Changers for more updates and news.
Zombie Driver HD is an HD re-release of a top down, vehicular based, Zombie apocalypse game, in which you choose from a range of eight vehicles to plow through legions of the living dead. This is all explained through between mission newspaper clippings and various support characters gabbing into your Walkie-Talkie, telling you what a good job you've done. Apparently there was some sort of biochemical accident or government project that's has gone wrong and turned the residents of whatever city you're in into Zombies.
Honestly, the story doesn't matter, If you've played any other Zombie games, i'm sure you get the general gist. Time to run some Zombie bastards over!
Like I said, Zombie Driver is presented from a top down perspective, like the old Grand Theft Autos (GTA), and it suffers with the same problems. You don't have that much range of vision, limited to the square around you rather than looking in front of you. This game isn't graphic intensive though, looking like a flash game at first glance, and thus doesn't need to show you the super detailed Zombies as they slowly advance with intentions of helping themselves to a mouthful of you.
Throughout Zombie Driver, you will be tasked with missions ranging from clearing out certain areas filled to the brim with Zombies, to rescuing NPCs that have held up in a hospital or shopping center, the obligatory Zombie apocalypse trope.
The annoying thing about most missions in this game is making sure you have gotten rid of every single Zombie, which can be difficult. You drive up to the red circle to rescue some NPCs and start massacring Zombies left, right and center, but more and more Zombies keep banding together and attacking from all angles. When you think you've killed them all and you're waiting for the people trapped inside to get into your car, low and behold there was one lone Zombie slowly making his was towards you, but you didn't notice, and by the time you have noticed, ten more have turned up for a brain sand-which and rendered the "soon to be rescued" party trapped once more.
When you do finally rescue them and get them back to the safe house, most of the time this will result in new cars to try out for future missions, or unlocking new weapons to find and attach to your car while you're driving around the city.
The cars are all relatively similar in regards to steering and weapons, but differ when it comes to passenger capacity or how much damage they can take. The capacity of the car is what I found myself focusing on the most, mainly because you often find yourself having to rescue a fair few people from various building scattered all over the city just to complete the mission. The weapons that I mentioned earlier are nice and varied, a simple machine gun or even flame thrower to gleefully spray as you roll through the streets, or, if you have somewhere to be, you can use the nitro boost to rapidly mow through the shambling remains of the once inhabitants.
Between missions you can upgrade any of the weapons you have found to increase the damage they can do or the duration you can use them for. You do this by collecting money either in a mission while driving around the city, or as a result of how well you did in the mission once completed.
All in all, I had fun with Zombie Driver HD and I think there could be a nice idea in this; a similar game in a sense that you drive around to kill Zombies but maybe from a third person perspective to give you more field of vision to work with. Its a cheap game with simple mechanics and a great way to burn a couple of hours and who knows, some day we might even see a Zombie Driver 2 from Exor studios in the future.
Keep checking back to Game Changers for more updates and news.
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