Board game studio Awaken Realms has contracted with GSC Game World to create a board game based on the Stalker universe. The creators are promising to bring the same atmospheric richness to the board game that fans of the videogame expect. It’ll launch as a crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound (opens in new tab), a standard for the board game industry, sometime this spring.
A trailer accompanying the announcement is overlaid with the fanatical voice of a man proclaiming his love for The Zone. Composed mostly of small animatic scenes of the Zone itself, the trailer shows a spooky swamp, field of bloody poppies, a bridge being destroyed in an anomaly detonation, a glowing artifact in a tree, and a strange muddy half-collapsed house.
“I serve her, I care for her, I receive her gifts,” says the narrator of the Zone—so, you know, classic zone fanatic cultist stuff. Probably not the good guys.
The board game is described by Awaken as a “cooperative ‘zone-crawling’ story-driven experience based on stories from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Each story will consist of 2-4 scenarios to play through, and players should expect to spend approx 2 hours per scenario.” The description sounds a lot like other modern miniatures-heavy dungeon crawling board games, especially those of the kind that Awaken Realms is already known for.
The campaign page and images released by Awaken Realms show off pre-renders of game components like miniatures, cards, and tokens. The miniatures revealed so far include several Stalkers, a soldier, a gas-masked Snork, a tentacle-faced Bloodsucker, and a hulking Pseudogiant. The miniature renders are pretty detailed, so my guess is that the finals will be a resin of some kind.
Awaken Realms is the creator of one of the more beloved recent survival-horror board games, Nemesis, which holds a very high Rank 18 on Boardgamegeek (opens in new tab). For once, honestly, I have zero critique of the studio being chosen for a licensed game. Give me my pick, really, and Awaken Realms is actually the currently working board game studio I’d choose to make this game as someone who loves both Stalker and boardgames, since Awaken Realms is both Eastern European and has a clear love for the genre they’re making here with a proven track record of delivering fun games. For the curious on their prior work, Nemesis has a digital adaptation on Steam (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/A-Stalker-board-game-is-coming-and-of-course-I.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 19:18:362023-02-28 19:18:36A Stalker board game is coming and of course I want miniatures of the little zone men
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer can’t be too concerned about how the Activision acquisition (opens in new tab) is going, because he’s dedicated over ten days of his life to getting every single achievement in Vampire Survivors, including the ones in its Legacy of the Moonspell DLC. Spencer ticked off the Victory Sword achievement—held by a mere 4.74% of Xbox players at time of writing—last Sunday evening, thereby ascending to the pantheon of S-Rank Vampire Survivors players and finally proving himself better than me at playing videogames. Which was probably his intention.
All current achievements completed. Fantastic game @poncle_vampire #VampireSurvivors #XboxShare pic.twitter.com/LPqA5MZu3QFebruary 26, 2023
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Assuming we can take old Phil at his word, this also means he holds the coveted EXTRA: Chaos Malachite achievement, currently held by a mere 1.87% of players and the rarest one going (so far as I can tell). If you’d like to translate those stats into something more familiar to the likes of you and me, the Victory Sword and Chaos Malachite achievements are held by 8.7% and 2.7% of Steam users (opens in new tab), respectively.
Spencer is an avowed Vampire Survivors fanatic who had already managed to clock in 233 hours of the game on Xbox (opens in new tab) by December 20 last year. I have to assume Spencer, in his position as Xbox suzerain, used access to a pre-release version of the game to amass that hour count. If he didn’t, then he somehow managed to find 233 hours of spare time to dedicate to the game between its November 10 Xbox release date and just before Christmas. Either that or one day we’ll learn that the biggest videogame acquisition in history fell through because one of its key executives got too distracted fighting Dracula.
If you’re curious, Spencer is a garlic man, and he also wielded a King Bible, Santa Water, and a magic wand in his run to unlock the game’s final achievement. That’s not everything he used, mind you, but I literally don’t even recognise the rest of the weapons listed in his armoury in the screenshot he posted to Twitter. In fairness to me, I have a paltry 20 hours in Vampire Survivors, not even 10% of Spencer’s total.
As for the Activision acquisition, it continues to trudge through an often tedious and sometimes absurd regulatory quagmire. Most recently, the UK Competition and Markets Authority suggested that Activision Blizzard should be broken up (opens in new tab) before it would give the deal its stamp of approval, while the union organising Activision’s workers wrote to European regulators (opens in new tab) to urge them to give the acquisition the green light. Meanwhile, Microsoft is running around signing 10-year deals (opens in new tab) with anyone and everyone to bring Activision’s games to other platforms if the deal goes through in a desperate bid to show regulators it can be trusted to act responsibly. No wonder Phil’s keeping his head down and levelling up the garlic.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677609260_Xbox-boss-Phil-Spencer-somehow-managed-to-100-Vampire-Survivors.png6261114Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 18:04:362023-02-28 18:04:36Xbox boss Phil Spencer somehow managed to 100% Vampire Survivors while managing the biggest videogame acquisition in history
The funniest thing about the announcement of Elden Ring’s DLC is that it came two days after the game’s anniversary, which gave the community just enough time to gnash their teeth en masse at the lack of a DLC announcement. It is the most FromSoft move of all to let that date pass without comment and then unceremoniously announce it with a tweet at 3 am US time.
Still, now there’s an image, so computer: ENHANCE. No seriously, you can download this thing as a wallpaper from Bandai Namco’s press site (opens in new tab), and the 13331 x 7499 pixel image is a whopping 114MB.
First question: Who is riding Torrent? The go-to answer for the majority of folk is Miquella. Given his links to Malenia and alive-but-comatose presence in the game, that makes sense, but others think Marika, and I’ve even seen the cut character St. Trina suggested. Just to confuse things, St. Trina was probably going to be Miquella, but that’s based on cut content that wasn’t in the final product.
It’s Miquella that has the fan theory momentum however, mainly thanks to those long flowing locks. Miquella has an androgynous look and, of course, bright blonde hair that can be seen in the game: It’s the specific braids that have people convinced this is Malenia’s brother, as seen in this comparison image.
Malenia says this in the game: “My brother will keep his promise. He possesses the wisdom, the allure, of a god. He is the most fearsome Empyrean of all.”
If Miquella is the focus of this expansion, that raises the question of whether this is the ‘real’ Lands Between or some sort of demigod’s dream. In Elden Ring, Miquella is alive but in a state of suspended animation. No spoilers but a key part of the Dark Souls lore is a slumbering god that is deliberately kept that way, and what happens when they are woken by the player. Across the Soulslike games Miyazaki and his team have shown a fondness for painted worlds, time-travel loops into the past / future, and of course the whole of Bloodborne revolves around whether it’s all the Hunter’s dream… or nightmare.
So yeah… illusory spirit graves, the general fogginess of the lands, the corrupted tree or trees… this looks a lot like a dreamscape, and Miquella already being in a dream of some kind… well done internet, we did it!
Other details include the arches that share their design with those seen in the Uhl Castle Ruins and the Siofra Ruins, the description of the latter reading: “this vast region is said to be the grave of civilizations that flourished before the Erdtree.”
One thing I definitely didn’t notice when first looking at the image is that the tree in the distance actually looks like two trees twisted around one another, with the golden saplike substance oozing from where they meet. This looks like deathblight, but it could easily be something else (some fear this DLC will be a deathblight swamp, which would certainly fit with Miyazaki’s sense of humour (opens in new tab)). As for the trees: this could be the Erdtree wrapped around the Haligtree (which as they’re in different places supports the dream hypothesis), or something else entirely.
Another observation, from Redditor KillmepIss (opens in new tab), is that “The ghostly crosses are all making the Rune of Death sign no?” There is a definite resemblance there and in the logo, though these versions appear more stylised. The Rune of Death (opens in new tab) is core to the pre-game events of Elden Ring and was used by Marika to make her and her demigod offspring immortal and establish the Golden Order, the world’s main religion.
Finally, here’s one good reason to scrutinise the high-res version: Did you see the ghost warriors? They’re extremely hard to make out and can only be seen in the super-duper version (well, with my old eyes anyway), but here’s a zoomed-in view (opens in new tab) of what looks like horse-riding spirits around the graves. The Elden Ring’s own Wild Hunt? Dare to dream…
This is all speculation, and if there’s one thing FromSoft is good at it is misdirection. The studio has a habit of planting red herrings, both within and without its games, to the extent that whatever seems obvious is usually anything but. The evidence for this being somehow Miquella-related seems strong, but it could be someone else entirely, the expansion could be future or past, and so on: Don’t get too wedded to any theories.
Tiny violins and that but, to take us home, you do have to slightly feel for this YouTuber, who decided their latest stunt would be to kill one NPC a day until Elden Ring DLC was announced. They got to day two.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/1677667937_Lets-speculate-way-too-much-about-the-Elden-Ring-expansion.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 18:00:272023-02-28 18:00:27Let’s speculate way too much about the Elden Ring expansion image
What is it? Simultaneous single-player turn-based mecha tactics Release date Feb 28, 2023 Expect to pay: $30/£24 Developer: Brace Yourself Games Publisher: Brace Yourself Games Reviewed on: Windows 11, Nvidia 2080 Ti, Intel i9-9900k @ 4.9ghz, 32gb RAM Steam Deck TBA Link:Official site (opens in new tab)
At its heart, Phantom Brigade is a solo small-scale squad tactics game. You command up to four Gundam-esque mechs in small skirmishes against larger forces. While often outnumbered, you have the huge advantage of knowing what the enemy will be doing in each five-second turn. You plan your actions on a timeline, while projections show you where enemies are moving and who they’re targeting, like a more granular take on Into The Breach.
It’s satisfying to exploit, dodging out of a sniper’s aim at the last second, juking around incoming missiles or interrupting a charge with a swooping melee attack. Like you’re leading a squad of anime protagonists against an army of faceless goons, and it works great for the first couple dozen battles. After each fight, your little guerilla squad can salvage mech parts and weapons from the battlefield, melt down unwanted gear for resources, and upgrade your mobile repair base and strategic options. It’s an exciting progression loop, working your way across a strategic map of increasingly tough provinces, absorbing new enemy techs into your arsenal and then using it in a push to liberate that region, making it a safe place to retreat to and restock.
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
There’s so many little aspects that Phantom Brigade gets right. Visually, it’s a treat with clean UI design and sharp-looking robots inspired by Square’s classic Front Mission series. The turn replays are a joy—watching in slow motion that exact moment an enemy mech’s day was completely ruined never gets old—and there’s a real sense of heft to the mechs despite their jump-jet assisted agility. Mech weight also affects how collisions play out, with a heavier chassis allowing you to tackle lighter enemies, potentially concussing their pilot and letting you salvage their mech undamaged.
It makes a fine first impression, and there’s something special here. This is a formula that I want to see refined and expanded on. Unfortunately, the deeper I dug into Phantom Brigade, the more flaws I noticed in its glossy veneer, and the more obviously easy it was to exploit and break with even the slightest effort.
Mech-war for dummies
I can put my finger on the exact point the campaign broke for me; obtaining my first mech-sized minigun. Suddenly, smarts were optional. I could just park that mech on a hilltop and flense the armor from oncoming enemies with a sustained hail of lead. Even soaking up some self-damage from overheating was offset by how quickly enemies melted. And then I found another minigun. And another. And then my whole squad had them and could just stand at the start point and scythe across the entire map with surprising accuracy and the power to drill straight through buildings.
Phantom Brigade works best when you feel like a plucky guerrilla fighter working against the odds.
At this point it dawned on me that the enemy were effectively mindless. I was a mindreader able to predict their every move, but I often didn’t have to. In almost every battle they’d just run out of cover to engage me, even if they had indirect-fire missiles. Enemies are also unable to use or react to melee weapons (or at least never did in my campaign), letting me just combo sword attacks against helpless foes when my hail-of-lead strategy was getting boring. It felt like I was bullying the AI and, even as their stats inflated, they couldn’t do anything meaningful to counter my intensifying cheese.
This wouldn’t be such an issue if there was more variety to the missions and battlefields. There’s only a handful of map types (hills, villages, towns, industrial complexes and military bases) and aside from there being proximity-activated turrets in bases (solved by letting enemies come to you), they’re functionally identical in most regards. While there’s missions where you can technically win by getting in and securing an objective, it’s almost always quicker and easier to just wipe out the enemies as fast as possible, especially if reinforcement waves are due to arrive. Win the battle early and the reinforcements will never show up.
Phantom Brigade works best when you feel like a plucky guerrilla fighter working against the odds. It gives you so many pieces of equipment and gameplay systems that encourage you to overwhelm the enemy and exploit their unchanging weaknesses. Even late into the campaign, the same handful of enemy types repeat (mechs using the same parts system and two types of tank) with no fast-movers, helicopters or strategic modifiers. Enemy stats get higher as you push further into the campaign map but, as you can salvage parts so easily, that’s how you gain strength as well.
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(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
(Image credit: Brace Yourself Games)
Military madlibs
Possibly the most threadbare part of the whole game is the story, because there’s effectively nothing here. Outside of a couple lines of dialogue during the tutorial, there’s no voice acting, no cutscenes and no plot arc, just the broadest strokes of a narrative with no juicy lore to chew on, or characters beyond the generic pilots that you name.
You lead the Phantom Brigade, an independent partisan squad liberating The Homeland (a vaguely Nordic nation) from The Invaders, who have come from somewhere else and taken over all your stuff. You work alongside the Home Guard army to liberate one province at a time, while occasionally picking options in FTL-inspired multi-choice vignettes that often boil down to ‘sacrifice morale for speed or boost it by cheering up pilots or farmers’.
The story’s skeletal nature mirrors the rest of the game, and echoes its own modular mech endoskeletons. There’s a smart, forward-thinking system here that’s elegant and impressive to watch when working as intended. But once you attach all of the other elements to make a working game out of it, Phantom Brigade begins to creak and show its limitations. There’s the foundation for something great, but it will take a few expansions or an active modding scene to realize it. Phantom Brigade is an intriguing prototype, even if not quite ready for mass production.
Three GPS locators have been found in Sons of the Forest so far, and these gadgets can be useful if you want to keep track of a particular location so you can find it easily later. Initially, these are marked by purple pips on your own GPS that you picked up at the start of the game. If you’ve befriended Virginia (opens in new tab), you can use one to keep track of her too, so it’s worthwhile having one or two in your backpack for such a situation.
If you’re having trouble tracking down the shovel (opens in new tab), you need to pick up the rebreather (opens in new tab) and rope gun (opens in new tab) first. If you’re ready to find the GPS locators in Sons of the Forest, however, or want to know how to use them, here’s what you need to know.
Where to find Sons of the Forest GPS locators
GPS locator locations. (Image credit: Endnight Games / Mapgenie.io)
The first GPS locator I found was close to the camp where you find the winter jacket (opens in new tab). Head to the most southerly of the marked areas on the map above and you’ll come to a cliff face with a body hanging from a rope. You’ll know you’re in the right place because the beeping from your GPS Tracker will become much more frequent.
While facing the cliff, head to the left and find a place to climb up. Head back towards where you saw the body hanging, and find a rope tied around a rock, and supplies next to it. Pick up any of the items you need and use your axe to chop the rope holding the body. Now make your way back down the cliff and take the GPS locator from the fallen body. This is also where you’ll find the battery-powered flashlight, much better than using a lighter inside caves.
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Look for the hanging body. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
Find the rock with the rope tied around it, above. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
Chop the rope and return to the body to get the GPS locator. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
The second GPS locator is found in a dinghy floating a little off the shore on the island’s west coast. It’s possible to swim out there but look out for hungry sharks if you decide to make the journey. You can pull yourself up onto the inflatable raft, where you’ll find a body and some other goodies. Sadly, it doesn’t like you can paddle it back to the shore, so you’ll need to take the plunge again to get back to dry land. This is where you’ll find one of the Sons of the Forest guns, the pistol.
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The second GPS locator is found inside a dinghy. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
Pull yourself up and grab the GPS locator and other goodies. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
The third and final GPS locator is found buried in a grave marked with a wooden cross and is at the north-most mark on the map. The cross is draped with a red cloth which you can collect but you’ll need the shovel in order to get to the GPS locator as it’s been buried with its owner in a shallow grave.
The final GPS locator is buried in this grave. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
How to use GPS locators
There are a couple of ways to use a GPS locator and, unsurprisingly, it’s a good way to track something you want to come back to later. You can even change the icon that appears on the map by cycling through with a right-click of your mouse while you’ve got the locator “equipped” in your right hand.
It can also be used to track people: Kelvin already has one so you can see his location on the map, and you can give one to Virginia so you can track her movements too. Of course, you’ll need to befriend her first, but as soon as you have access to her backpack, you can equip her with it.
Another way to use a GPS locator is if you want to mark a specific location. Dig a stick into the ground vertically—right click with a stick equipped in your hand—then equip a GPS locator and left-click on the stick to place it.
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Change the icon by right-clicking. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
Attach the GPS locator to the top of the stick. (Image credit: Endnight Games)
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677605580_Where-to-find-the-GPS-locators-in-Sons-of-the.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 17:01:222023-02-28 17:01:22Where to find the GPS locators in Sons of the Forest
With Hitman’s freelancer mode in the rear-view mirror and an upcoming James Bond game (opens in new tab) boiling away somewhere behind the scenes, IO Interactive has revealed yet another project. The Danish studio has announced in a recent post to its website (opens in new tab) it’s working on the straightforwardly-titled “Project Fantasy,” an online fantasy RPG.
I was curious about what the “online” part of online fantasy RPG meant—after all, you could plausibly describe Hitman as an online game even though it’s single-player—but IOI makes it sound familiar. The studio says it’s “building a new world, a new IP […] a world and a game built from the core to entertain players and expand for many years to come,” and pays particular homage to tabletop gaming and the idea of “a diverse group of individuals with different skills and strengths” working together and becoming “more than the sum of their parts”. That certainly sounds a lot like a pitch for a live-service game to me!
That’s… pretty much your lot as far as announced detail goes, although we can tell from the artwork at the top of the page that we’re sure as heck gonna see some willowy elf-folk and wide, squat dwarven lads. Even the job postings associated with Project Fantasy on IOI’s site don’t reveal much. The posting for a senior product manager promises that the game will “revolutionize the online fantasy RPG genre,” while the post calling for a senior combat designer reveals that the game will, in fact, have combat. That’s as close to a revelation as we get, folks.
So don’t get too excited just yet: This one seems like it’s in the earliest of early stages. So early, in fact, that its announcement post was a call for job applications more than a proper reveal. The Meet the Team section on the page has a bunch of interviews (opens in new tab) with people working on the project, but they’re more keen on chatting about things like work-life balance rather than the game they’re working on. It does sound quite nice in Copenhagen, though. Maybe senior combat designer is my calling.
Whatever Project Fantasy ends up being, I’m excited to see it. I have fallen head over heels for Hitman’s freelancer mode in the last couple of weeks, dedicating an embarrassing amount of my free time to screwing up assassinations spectacularly in a range of exotic locations around the globe. IOI seems like it’s only going from strength to creative strength at the minute, so I’m intrigued to see what they do with a fantasy game.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677601937_Hitmans-developer-just-announced-its-next-project-an-online-fantasy.jpeg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 16:23:572023-02-28 16:23:57Hitman’s developer just announced its next project: an ‘online fantasy RPG’
Out of nowhere Capcom has released an update for the Steam version (opens in new tab) of Resident Evil 5, released in 2009, the main function of which is to strip-out the zombified corpse of Games for Windows Live. The latter was an ill-fated online service that linked PCs into Microsoft’s Live services—launched in 2007 and discontinued in 2014—which mainly served to annoy users with its lack of functionality and compatibility problems. Indeed, a theme in the aftermath of its closure was games one-by-one updating to remove the service.
Well Capcom took their sweet time (this is the first Resi 5 update since 2017) but it’s clear why this was on the to-do list: the presence of GfWL meant an in-built feature of the game had to be disabled. Resident Evil 5 launched as a GfWL title, with split-screen co-op included, but when ported to Steam the GfWL layer caused problems with player data and meant that the option was disabled (though there were workarounds with mods (opens in new tab)).
It’s always been a little odd, because co-op was baked-in to Resi 5 and the key differentiator with what had gone before. The fundamentals are carried-over from the peerless Resident Evil 4 (and doesn’t the remake of that look hot) but Resi 5’s schtick was two playable protagonists and a campaign that could be played the whole way through with a buddy.
The game sometimes gets a bad rap, mainly because it’s not as good as its classic predecessor, but in co-op it’s a great time and the game goes so OTT at the end you can’t help but laugh. This is the one where Chris literally punches back boulders, and you kill the final boss by shooting him with a rocket as he’s burning in a volcano.
The patch notes (opens in new tab) mention “other minor bug fixes”, though no indication of what they are. So a small surprise, but a welcome one. My anticipation for the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake is white-hot (opens in new tab) and, if you’re the same, maybe a little runthrough of this in co-op will help ease the wait.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677594546_14-years-later-Resident-Evil-5-finally-removes-Games-for.gif270480Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 14:17:092023-02-28 14:17:0914 years later Resident Evil 5 finally removes Games for Windows Live and restores splitscreen
Yanping Fulsome died a martyr. I met him in the park, just after I’d finished beating an amateur magician to death for his position on electoral reform, and our comradeship was immediate and firm. His talents as a locksmith were invaluable, and together we were the voice and hands of the liberal revolution: One silver tongue and ten deft fingers, capable of winning almost anyone to our side and robbing the rest in the night.
But we got sloppy. Yanping took one to the left arm while robbing an apartment block downtown (liberally). An arch-conservative construction worker had stayed home that day, and took issue when he noticed Yanping filling his pockets with jewellery and iPads. It was a matter of minutes before DethSquad officers showed up.
(Image credit: Bay 12 / King Drake)
Neither Yanping’s 9mm pistol nor his bodyguard Rane (a black belt martial artist I’d flirted with so hard he committed to a life of terrorism) could stand up to them. Rane went down first, and Yanping—soft, sentimental Yanping—wasted time dragging his body to the elevator before he succumbed to his wounds, one button-push away from escape. I replaced him with a 46-year-old football coach named Donovan. Donovan sells pot brownies to further the cause rather than dying in an elevator shaft. We’re actually making more money now.
We need a slogan!
This is Liberal Crime Squad (LCS), the under-discussed predecessor game from the devs behind Dwarf Fortress. A revolutionary cadre simulator that tasks you with implementing The Liberal Agenda through murder, sabotage, kidnapping and theft, LCS differs from Dwarf Fortress in that it actually has a goal in mind. Your task is, essentially, to make all of Glenn Beck’s nightmares come true at once.
By any means necessary, you have to construct a vast liberal conspiracy, building a nation-spanning spider web of activists who will stop at nothing to make sure gay people can marry and flags can be burnt, undermining tradition through means both subtle and overt. Sometimes, that means kidnapping a judge and breaking them to your will. At other times, it means, uh, making and selling tie-dye t-shirts. Hey, the Bolsheviks sold postcards (opens in new tab). Sometimes the revolution is about arts and crafts.
(Image credit: Bay 12 / King Drake)
You won’t do it alone, of course. You’re aided in this by your recruits, acquired by seduction and persuasion, who are divided into “active” liberals and sleeper agents embedded at the crucial interstices of conservative society, ready to wreak havoc whenever you send word.
You’re opposed by, well, pretty much the entire rest of the world. The police, the state, even public radio are all standing athwart history and yelling “Stop,” which means you have to be clever. By placing your sleepers within those institutions (and others), you can receive advance warning of police raids, get bailed out of a jam in the courts, even begin subtly spreading liberal ideology on the airwaves, if you dare.
You can end up in a situation where John Q. Public is willing to burn down an animal testing facility but thinks executing human beings for minor infractions is A-okay.
It’s satire, of course, heralding from a political era—the early 2000s—when the most radical left-of-centre voice in the American public eye was Jon Stewart. The idea of people as milquetoast as the mainstream liberals of 2004 forming some kind of New York Times Baader-Meinhof Group was patently absurd back in the day, even if the idea of radical and impolite political action from the left is easier to imagine in 2023.
(Image credit: Bay 12 / King Drake)
It’s a complex simulation, and it models various layers of public opinion and political power. You’re not just pushing a ‘liberal popularity’ meter one way or the other, you’re impacting what people think about a range of issues individually. There’s the presidential approval rating, naturally, which you’ll want to either keep buoyed up or send crashing to Earth depending on the ideology of the person in power, but people have their stances on the issues, too.
Focus strictly on acts of sabotage and activism around animal rights, for instance, and you can end up in a situation where John Q. Public is willing to burn down an animal testing facility but thinks executing human beings for minor infractions is A-okay. So it’s pretty realistic, is what I’m saying.
Wither liberalism?
LCS is a coarse and finite thing in comparison to the wild sprawl of Dwarf Fortress, but that’s not necessarily bad. Once upon a time, LCS was the go-to recommendation for newcomers looking to get into Tarn and Zach Adams’ beloved dwarf-management game: A way of dipping your toe into the strange waters of a systems-heavy, barely-navigable ASCII game without having to monitor systems of a ‘my chicken’s left knee is wet’ level of granularity.
But Dwarf Fortress has a graphical Steam version with (something resembling a) tutorial now, which means learning that game is probably best accomplished by playing it. But does that mean The Liberal Agenda will be left to languish?
(Image credit: Bay 12 / King Drake)
Bay 12 stopped working on LCS almost immediately after its first public release in 2004, so you might say it’s already been languishing for a while, but the cause has been taken up by a dedicated corps of fans. The version I’ve been playing is King Drake’s Liberal Crime Squad (opens in new tab) (which adds an opposing Conservative Crime Squad that uses your own tactics against you), but there are others you can find over on the LCS wiki (opens in new tab), including a fan-made graphical remake (opens in new tab) if you just can’t stand the charm of the ASCII version.
I suspect the game still has some life left in it yet, and might even see a surge of interest after the incredible success of Dwarf Fortress’ Steam version, but I’d hate to see it wither now that it no longer functions as a set of training wheels for its successor game. I guess what I’m saying is, Kitfox, you’ve done it once and you can do it again. Let’s get a prettied-up version of LCS on Steam, ideally with input from the open-source devs who have been keeping it going all this time. Do it for the revolution, comrades.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677587257_The-Dwarf-Fortress-devs-once-made-a-comedy-revolution-simulator.png300534Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 12:21:252023-02-28 12:21:25The Dwarf Fortress devs once made a comedy revolution simulator, and it’s time for heads to roll once more
Since its first trailer in 2008, Beyond Good and Evil 2 hasn’t been able to catch a break. That doesn’t look like it’s going to let up anytime soon: Reports suggest that Ubisoft Montpellier, the studio behind the game, is under investigation by its local government for an “unprecedented” amount of burnout and sick leave among staff, and it’s lost its managing director, too.
The news comes via three anonymous sources spoken to by Kotaku (opens in new tab), who said that the studio faced an investigation by the Inspection du Travail (France’s Labour Inspection body) after a year in which numerous staff—including several lead devs—took extended absences from the company due to sickness and stress, some of them eventually leaving altogether. The source said that a third-party has now been given the task of interviewing Ubisoft Montpellier employees to assess their physical and mental health.
I’ve reached out to Ubisoft Montpellier to ask about these reports, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.
BG&E2 isn’t the only game that Ubisoft Montpellier has worked on in the last few years, with the studio being credited on a few mobile games as well as Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Wildlands. Beyond Good and Evil 2 is probably its most notable ongoing project, though and it’s undergone multiple shakeups recently. In August last year, around the same time it beat Duke Nukem Forever’s record (opens in new tab) for longest development time, the project picked up Sarah Arellano as its new lead writer (opens in new tab). And now staff have reportedly been told that managing director Guillaume Carmona won’t be returning to Ubisoft after a long period of absence that began at the start of this year. The game is also said to have lost its creative director and game director in the most recent shake-up.
Whatever the game is at this point, it’s probably not the thing that was showcased (with a surprise guest appearance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, for some reason) at E3 2018 (opens in new tab), and it’s certainly not what anyone had in mind all the way back in 2008.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a game that we almost can’t believe is still in active development (opens in new tab) after all this time, and it looks like that’s not set to change in the near future. I adored the first Beyond Good and Evil, and have maintained a foolish, flickering hope for its sequel ever since we first glimpsed Jade meditating on the hood of that car 15 years ago (opens in new tab), but no game is worth this anguish. If BG&E2 is pushing its staff to the point that it damages their health after 15 years of development, maybe it’s best to just let the project go.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677590928_Staff-at-Ubisofts-Beyond-Good-and-Evil-2-studio-are.png6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 12:09:492023-02-28 12:09:49Staff at Ubisoft’s Beyond Good and Evil 2 studio are reportedly at breaking point
You’ll find all the help you need for today’s Wordle (opens in new tab) right here on PC Gamer. Learn how to make every guess count with our hints and tips for the February 28 (619) puzzle. Take a look at today’s clue if you’d like to find a little direction, or quickly scroll down to the answer to today’s Wordle if you just need to save your win streak.
Today’s Wordle was a pleasantly smooth experience for me, my opening duo complemented each other nicely, and although my third guess didn’t bring the success I was hoping for, it made a quick win on the fourth a sure thing. Here’s hoping tomorrow’s Wordle goes even better.
Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Tuesday, February 28
The answer to today’s Wordle is the name of an energetic dance originating from 19th century Bohemia, as well as a dotty sort of pattern used on fabrics and clothing. You’ll need to find two different vowels to solve this one.
Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle?
There are no double letters in today’s Wordle.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you’ve just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for some pointers. Whatever the reason you’re here, these quick tips can help push you in the right direction:
Start with a word that has a mix of common vowels and consonants.
The answer might repeat the same letter.
Try not to use guesses that include letters you’ve already eliminated.
There’s no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don’t need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
What is the Wordle #619 answer?
Let’s finish February with a win. The answer to the February 28 (619) Wordle is POLKA.
Previous answers
The last 10 Wordle answers
Wordle solutions that have already been used can help eliminate answers for today’s Wordle or give you inspiration for guesses to help uncover more of those greens. They can also give you some inspired ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle answers:
February 27: WORSE
February 26: SYRUP
February 25: FIFTY
February 24: ARBOR
February 23: VAGUE
February 22: RIPER
February 21: RUDDY
February 20: SWEAT
February 19: KIOSK
February 18: AVAIL
Learn more about Wordle
Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it’s up to you to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the popular daily puzzle.
It’s usually a good plan to start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ALERT—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels—and you should be off to a flying start, with a little luck anyway. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don’t waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you’ll see which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.
Your second guess should compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don’t forget to leave out any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don’t forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1677572539_Wordle-hint-and-answer-619-Tuesday-February-28.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-02-28 08:00:442023-02-28 08:00:44Wordle hint and answer #619: Tuesday, February 28
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