ALWAYS SOMETIMES MONSTERS TUGS AT YOUR HEARTSTRINGS TODAY, AVAILABLE NOW ON STEAM
– Inspired by True Events, a Game About Life, Love, and The Pursuit of Both –
Toronto, Canada – Independent developer Vagabond Dog and the emoting publishers at Devolver Digital announced today that the always sometimes semi-biographical and touching story-driven RPG, Always Sometimes Monsters, is available today on PC via Steam, GOG, and Humble. Demanding the answer to the question, ‘How far would you go to get what you really want?’, Always Sometimes Monsters takes players on a narrative-driven journey where they face tough life choices and the harsh reality of modern life.
Inspired by the real-life events of Vagabond Dog cofounder Justin Amirkhani while he hitchhiked his way across the U.S., Always Sometimes Monsters invites players to assume the role of a down-and-out character on the verge of collapse after learning the love of their life is set to marry someone else. And as in the real world, right isn’t always good, and wrong isn’t always bad; choice plays a huge role in the game.
Players will select characters of different gender, race and sexual orientation players and set off on a text-based story where they will quickly discover a world that reacts uniquely to who they are. Each play through is filled with a staggering number of diverging paths, creating a narrative tailored to the individual playing, their choices, and their personal ethical compass. Along the way, players are free to make their own choices as to who they want to become, where every single decision – whether as seemingly inconsequential like moving boxes for some quick temp work, or stepping in and assisting a band of union protesters in a riot – every action contributes to the overall course of narrative.
“Always Sometimes Monsters is an expression of our common struggle to exact choice in a reality where circumstance does not always provide us with the opportunity to do so. It is an experience heavily influenced by our personal journeys in life and the multitude of people whose roads have crossed ours,” said Justin Amirkhani from developer Vagabond Dog. “Our hope is that in playing the game you come to question what defines the decisions you make, not just in games but in life as well.”
Always Sometimes Monsters is now available on Steam, GOG and Humble via AlwaysSometimesMonsters.com with a 10% discount for a limited time during launch.
More information and discussion is ongoing at vagabonddog.com or on Twitter @VagabondDog.
The most expansive Gundam experience will arrive in Tecmo Koei Europe’s upcoming game DYNASTY WARRIORS®: GUNDAM Reborn on 27th June 2014 in retailers across Europe. Featuring Mobile Suits and their pilots from over 30 years of Gundam anime and manga, DYNASTY WARRIORS: GUNDAM Reborn boasts the largest in-game roster of Mobile Suits and number of missions yet.
Today Tecmo Koei Europe also revealed additional content, exclusively available to those who pre-order DYNASTY WARRIORS: GUNDAM Reborn.
Pre-orders through Game will receive a variation of mobile suit MSM-04 Acguy, the GPB-04B Beargguy (originally from Model Suit Gunpla Builders Beginning G). This particular suit, as the name suggests, has the form of a bear and it is not to be taken lightly as it carries a back-pack full of powerful guns. Other weapons include, among others, a particle gun and extendable claws.
Independent retailers –through Centresoft- will offer an additional scenario. In this battle mission, players are called to combat and defeat two of the most famous characters in the Gundam series, The Red Comet and the Crimson Lightning
New Batman: Arkham Knight Debut Gameplay Trailer Revealed
Today Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Entertainment debuted the first gameplay video from Batman: Arkham Knight. The Official Batman: Arkham KnightGameplay Trailer – “Evening the Odds” showcases Scarecrow’s return to Gotham City as he schemes to unite the Rogues Gallery and destroy Batman once and for all. As the citizens flee and criminal gangs take control, the Dark Knight evens the odds by taking to the streets in the legendary Batmobile to ignite the fight that will decide the future of the city that he is sworn to protect.
Batman: Arkham Knight is based on DC Comics’ core Batman license and will be available exclusively for the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, Xbox One, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, and Windows PC.
In the explosive finale to the Arkham series, Batman faces the ultimate threat against the city he is sworn to protect. The Scarecrow returns to unite an impressive roster of super villains, including Penguin, Two-Face and Harley Quinn, to destroy The Dark Knight forever. Batman: Arkham Knight introduces Rocksteady’s uniquely designed version of the Batmobile, which is drivable for the first time in the franchise. The addition of this legendary vehicle, combined with the acclaimed gameplay of the Batman Arkham series, offers gamers the ultimate and complete Batman experience as they tear through the streets and soar across the skyline of the entirety of Gotham City.
KING’S BUBBLE WITCH SAGA 2 IS BREWING AND COMING SOON TO FACEBOOK AND MOBILE DEVICES
LONDON & NEW YORK, 21 May 2014: It’s the witching hour once again! King Digital Entertainment plc (NYSE: KING), the leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world and creator of global sensations Candy Crush Saga and Farm Heroes Saga,today announced it will be bringing players back under the spell of one of its original breakout hits with the upcoming launch of Bubble Witch Saga 2. Coming soon to Facebook and mobile, this all-new instalment of the ever-popular bubblicious bubble shooter will enchant players with a wide variety of all-new bubble bursting game action.
Bubble Witch Saga 2 will present a spellbinding next chapter to Bubble Witch Saga, which has been played by millions of devoted players on both Facebook and mobile devices since it launched on Facebook in September 2011. Where the original Bubble Witch Saga was set in the East and drew from the wicked world of evil, Bubble Witch Saga 2 will bring gamers into the enchanted land of the West with the goal of doing good. Each exciting level of Bubble Witch Saga 2 will offer an exciting range of all-new game mechanics that will keep players engaged and on the edge of their broomsticks throughout their journey. In the pursuit of good, players can go further into the world of Witch Country by utilising additional boosters and game-play modes that allow them to more easily collect and clear groups of bubbles and magical elements.
Additionally, as with all King games, Bubble Witch Saga 2 on mobile will sync to Facebook so players can unlock new levels and access leader boards without losing their progress in the game. More details will be revealed closer to the game’s official release.
ICEBERG INTERACTIVE CELEBRATES FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY WITH BIGGEST LINE-UP EVER
Independently Financed Publisher Conquers Space as a Winning Business Strategy
Haarlem, The Netherlands – May 21, 2014 – During the past five years and through one of the toughest periods in recent economic history, Iceberg Interactive has strived to become a major force in PC game publishing by striking a rich vein of gold in the dark reaches of space and fantasy. By concentrating on a small number of niche genres that continue to grow in popularity including space and fantasy worlds, 4X, strategy, and simulation, Iceberg Interactive is celebrating its fifth year of growth with its biggest, most impressive line-up to date.
Headlining the five-game 2014 roster is Amplitude Studios’ fantasy-based 4X game Endless Legend, the 4X space strategy title StarDrive 2, the space sim Starpoint Gemini 2, the 4X space strategy title Lords of the Black Sun, and the arcade combat flight game, Vector Thrust, the majority of which are currently in Steam’s Early Access program.
Since its inception in 2009, Iceberg Interactive has carved out a unique niche as a resilient, resourceful, and fleet-footed indie publisher. By taking risks with rookie developers, managing its costs wisely, and investing in genres that big publishers have left for dead, Iceberg has positioned itself as a leader in the 4X, sci-fi, and strategy genres.
“Iceberg’s progress to date stems from the fact that we are all gamers, and we like to play the games we publish – this gives us a certain affinity with our customers – we are all about games, and it reflects in the deep, rich games we publish,” says Erik Schreuder, CEO of Iceberg Interactive. “The demand for strategy, 4X, and space games never stops. It’s just that most of the larger publishers feel that, because these games aren’t multi-million unit sellers, they are not commercially viable. This is where we see our opportunity. PC gamers are a very vocal lot, and have responded in kind by letting us know how much they love our games and consistently ask us to keep them coming.”
Among the 70-plus titles published and distributed since 2009, Iceberg has created a name for itself with standout titles Killing Floor, Wings of Prey, Armada 2526, Starpoint Gemini, APB Reloaded and Dark Fall: Lost Souls. More recent hits include Horizon, Gas Guzzlers Extreme, Endless Space, and StarDrive.
Erik Schreuder is available for interviews to reveal how Iceberg’s strategies and approaches to the indie PC market, its knowledge of Steam, and its passionate embrace of the 4X strategy genre, have buoyed the company and carved out a reliable niche for growth. For interviews or more information, please contact Douglass C. Perry via email at [email protected] or by phone at (209) 586-1495 x105.
ABOUT ICEBERG INTERACTIVE Iceberg Interactive is an independent video game publisher founded in 2009 by an international group of games industry veterans and is located in Haarlem, The Netherlands. While keeping its roots in the European retail games market, Iceberg has rapidly increased its focus towards the global digital games market, by building strong direct relationships with dozens of Game Portals. Staffed with avid gamers, Iceberg works closely with an international assembly of game developers, both midsize and indie. With a distinct focus on the strategy, action, simulation and adventure game genres, the company has garnered attention with acclaimed releases including Killing Floor, Wings of Prey, APB Reloaded and Endless Space among its 70+ game arsenal – with more promising games in the pipeline.
Professional Farmer 2014, developed by Playwar S.A. and published by United Independent Entertainment GmbH, is a game firmly in the vein of the ‘European Simulator’ style of the simulation genre. This means that in these kinds of games the developers aimed to create as much of direct replication of the experience of a particular profession, with less focus on the ludological aspects of game design (the ‘gamey’ parts of a game). These types of games are especially intriguing to those with an interest in game design as, when done well, they provide a strong example of how pretty much any aspect of life can be made fun through minimalistic but efficient application of game mechanics. I imagined the game as a bit like a more hardcore version of the Harvest Moon series, and with this in mind I doffed my cap and pulled on boots to trudge with an open mind into the open fields of the latest iteration of the Professional Farmer series.
Story
This game’s narrative is the soul of brevity. You are a farmer trying to eke out a living in either the American or French countryside. That is it. Nothing more nothing less. This is a simulator of farming and you should expect nothing more or less. Following the mediocre tutorial at the start of career mode,which didn’t teach me about such things as how the heck I’m meant to use the manure that my animals produce (my farmstead is literally being overrun with bull$%^&), you’re thrust directly into the brunt of the gameplay: farming.
This is an area in which I found the game to be sorely lacking. The lack of an overarching narrative in game never bothered me before and I’m fine with drawing my magic circle around any game that I play (to seperate the world of the game entirely from the reality I occupy), but the world of Pro Farmer feels completely static and immobile. There are no rivals to compete against, no random occurrences which might force the player to make decisions, or even any obstacles for the player to overcome beyond a bank loan and the occasional pest invading your fields.
Gameplay
As mentioned above, you play this game as the eponymous farmer. You start with a farmstead with cows, chickens, and a couple of fields. The gameplay of Pro Farmer largely focuses on the business of farming (surprise, surprise). The farming tools are all mechanised, so most farming activities like plowing and planting require you to get into your tractor, attach various farm implements, and then drive across a field. This is largely what the game boils down to: driving over a field repeatedly. Most of the time, this is brain-numbingly boring with little player input and at others it is just plain annoying as your vehicle can list to one side or the other if the field is on the side of hill. Nothing annoys my obsessive-compulsive desires more than having my attempts to plow in nice, straight lines repeatedly foiled because my tractor keeps sliding down the hillside. I originally assumed that this listing might have been resistance which was caused by the plow, but having obtained a field on flat terrain and testing out this hypothesis; I have discovered that this is not the case.
Outside of caring for these fields, there doesn’t appear to be all that much that you can actively do in the game. You can buy animals such as hens and cows which produce eggs, milk, and the aforementioned manure. This all done automatically, however, without any input from the player other than deciding when to buy and sell individual animals. This does provide some small level of management alongside buying other essentials such as seed, fertilizer, and fuel but ultimately there isn’t all that much that you can exert yourself in.
Ultimately, the game only allows you to work the fields as the only activity where you can actually have some manner of greater control and exert effort. I resigned myself to this notion and after slaving away for a whole game year and stockpiling my harvests, I was dismayed to find that my work earned me a pittance. Perhaps this was meant to be thoughtful commentary on the state of affairs for modern day farmers or I might just be a terrible business man. All I know for certain is that in two hours of gameplay and working 3 fields, I had earned about 10 000 euros. This figure did not include the money I would have spent on seed, fuel, and fertilizer, and would not have put much of a dent into the sizeable 250 000 euro loan which I was working to pay off. I would liken this experience to paying off the loan to Tom Nook in Animal Crossing but with less cartoon animal loan skarks and more spreadsheets.
There is DLC in the platinum edition which includes the opportunity to ride around on older tractors from the history of farming, with models from the turn of the century. These vehicles are accurate to their real-world counterpart and are much slower than your default vehicle, so I doubt many players would actually use them as anything other than historical ornaments. There is also an American map added in, which other than visual differences, does not play all that differently from what I’ve seen of the standard French map.
Visuals
The graphics in this game are nothing to write home about. The interior of each vehicle has been lovingly recreated for each vehicle and can be seen in the first-person view, but it is not practical for the player to play the game from this view for too long and so you’ll probably end up using your camera in a third-person view. Trees, shrubs, and crops are rendered with 2 or more intersecting, 2D images. I found this to be an unusual choice for the game as this produces an effect which is nice at a distance but ugly up close. I imagine that rendering each individual stalk of wheat would have been taxing on most systems, so I understand why the developers made this decision. There are still some nice visuals to be experience such as the waves of gold of fully grown wheat, as long as you don’t zoom in too close to the field. Textures for buildings and people were similarly roughshod with my farmstead clearly being located somewhere in the uncanny valley region of France.
Audio
The game’s sound design is largely mediocre. The sound effects for all the farm vehicles are all present and working. The music does get a bit annoying due to the limited soundtrack and the somewhat uninspired score which sounded like it was lifted off of the Sims 2. For some reason, the music turns itself off when you leave your vehicle which I guess might be a subtle way of telling the player that this game is played from the behind the wheel of a virtual tractor… or possibly a glitch. What disturbed me was the lack of sound emanating from the farmyard animals when I was near their pens and cages. Occasionally I’d hear a cluck or a moo but from my experience on farms I know that animals are not normally this quiet. I rationalized this phenomenon as the outcome of years of behavioural conditioning which causes the animals to become silent with fear whenever I approached.
Overall
Ultimately, the game design is what irked me the most in this title as I was so limited in input into the game world. There is so little to do and so little variance in the actions that you do have available, which ultimately made this game feel more like a chore and less like a retreat into pastoral bliss. There is so much more which could have been added to this game to increase player interactivity. The easiest way I could think of off the top of my head is to give players more choices in shaping their farm. For example; players could be given the choice about whether or not practice factory farming with their livestock, or whether to use genetically modified crops in their fields. These are both controversial topics, to be certain, but they are choices which are made by actual farmers in the real world, today. By giving players choices such as these, they could have made a more accurate simulation and also can give players a sense of agency which, unfortunately, this game is sorely lacking.
I admit that the simplicity and the grind can probably appeal to some players and from what I’ve read, micromanaging the small details which the game does give you can apparently turn out to be quite profitable but considering there is so little that you can actually spend this money on, I doubt I would feel much accomplishment or joy. There is still some small fun to be had in this grind which I experienced when I harvested my fields of grain the first time, but there isn’t all that much which can actually hold my attention to get me to play long enough to capitalise on this investment. This title runs smoothly and does have some nice visuals to experience here and there but ultimately, the devs need to put more effort into the game design itself as right now Professional Farmer 2014 is more simulation than game.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
Compatibility: Requires iOS 6.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.
Description
Solve the mystery behind the suspicious death of Jeremy Hartwood! Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Alone in the Dark® was originally released for PC in 1992. This action-adventure horror 3D game was the first of its kind inspiring future franchises in the Survival Horror genre.
SURVIVE
Complete challenges and puzzles deep within the lugubrious Hartwood mansion to make it out alive.
CONTROLS
Choose to play as the private detective, Edward Cornby, or Jeremy’s niece, Emily Hartwood, with new controls fitted for your mobile device.
The match-three genre is without a doubt one of the most popular on the mobile platform, and Disney have not shyed away from the party. First with Frozen and now Maleficent is joining in on the action to celebrate her new movie. Maleficent Free Fall takes all of the fun and excitement of the match-three puzzle genre with some unique and magical twists and turns that make it a completely unique experience, and best of all it is free!
Key features of Maleficent Free Fall include:
Switch and slide the board of enchanted gemstones to create matches of 3 or more while triggering cascading combos and conquering objectives
Discover mysterious surprises throughout the journey, like unlocking Maleficent’s raven, Diaval
Use unique power-ups like Maleficent’s staff or her powerful wings
You can grab Maleficent Free Fall now through the App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone and Windows Store so hit download and weave your magic. Remember that Maleficent will be casting her wicked spell on theaters next week, May 29th so make sure you stay tuned to Capsule Computers for all the Maleficent news as it becomes available.
If you have been waiting to pick up NIS America‘s Mugen Souls Z then you will be happy to know that you can now do so as the title is now available both at retailers and from the PlayStation Store in North America. As for gamers in Europe, you still have a few days to wait as the game will be released in your region on May 23rd.
You can find our full review of Mugen Souls Z herebut for a brief summary; Mugen Souls Z follows the story of Chou-Chou after the first game where she ends up losing all of her abilities due to Syrma’s coffin and now she must team up with Syrma to put a stop to an ancient threat and try to get her powers back.
You may remember a certain shojo series called Millennium Snow as it started being released in North America back in 2007. Unfortunately at that time only the first two volumes were released in North America because the author, Bisco Hatori, had stopped working on the series for a decade before picking it back up and producing the final two volumes for the series. The story of Millennium Snow follows the romance between an ailing teenage girl and a handsome young vampire.
As such now that those two volumes have been released in Japan Viz Media is working on bringing those volumes over to English and the third volume of Millennium Snow will be released in a couple of weeks on June 3rd. This third volume is going to be printed under the Shojo Beat label and will be priced at $9.99. Also since such a long time has passed since the first two volumes were released and they are likely out of print and difficult to find, Viz is also releasing a 2-in-1 omnibus version of the first two volumes on June 3rd. This release will be priced at $14.99 and is also being handled by the Shojo Beat label.
You may remember a certain shojo series called