Stellaris: MegaCorp is the latest full expansion for Paradox Development Studio?s iconic sci-fi grand strategy game, which has players ushering in an era of prosperity and profit on a galactic scale. In this economy-focused expansion, players can become the CEO of a powerful corporate empire to expand operations across the stars.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 12-24-2018, 03:46 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Free Steam PC Game For A Limited Time: Lego The Lord Of The Rings
Sure, you could peruse the Steam Winter Sale for big discounts on PC games. Or you could hop on over to the Humble Store and grab a copy of Lego The Lord of the Rings for free. All you need is a Humble account and a willingness to subscribe to the Humble newsletter (you can always unsubscribe later), and you can add it to your library. No other strings are attached. Get your copy here.
The only problem is that the deal doesn't last long. It goes away December 22 at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET). It's also possible codes for the game will run out, so head to the Humble Store quickly to secure your freebie.
As for the game itself, like the book and film trilogy it's based on, it follows the adventures of Frodo Baggins, an unlikely hero who ends up transporting a ring of great power into the realm of the enemy to see to its destruction. The big differences are that many parts of the game are made of destructible Legos, and it's suffused with the Lego franchise's signature brand of humor.
In GameSpot's 8.5/10 Lego The Lord of the Rings review, Jason Venter wrote, "TT Games and Lego struck gold when they united for Lego Star Wars in 2005, and that rich vein is still yielding worthwhile results. Lego The Lord of the Rings is perhaps the finest treasure that the partnership has yet produced, a compelling mixture of cooperative gameplay, secrets galore, and a story that remains one of the most fantastic that Hollywood has ever captured on film. If you haven't given the Lego games a chance yet, there has never been a better time to start."
Grab your copy before the game goes back to regular price.
Nintendo Reveals Ten Most Watched Switch News Feed Videos In 2018
When he’s not paying off a loan to Tom Nook, Liam likes to report on the latest Nintendo news and admire his library of video games. His favourite Nintendo character used to be a guitar-playing dog, but nowadays he prefers to hang out with Judd the cat.
Square Enix Preparing Dragon Quest XI S Surprise For 1st January
We last heard about Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age S in September, when the name for the title was officially confirmed at the 2018 Tokyo Game Show. At the time, the series creator Yuji Horii said the Switch version would take much longer for Square Enix to develop, but could not lock in when exactly it would arrive.
What we know now – if it wasn’t already evident – is that the game won’t be released in 2018. At Jump Festa 2019, Square Enix simply announced the game would launch within Japan next year (2019). This version will include over 200 voiced characters, excluding the main character and as previously revealed is powered by Unreal Engine 4.
In addition to providing the year of the game’s release, Square Enix also teased it was preparing a surprise Dragon Quest XI S announcement for the first day of 2019. The official website is now open as well and below is a short trailer for the game:
More details about the upcoming Switch release will be revealed during a Square Enix “Dragon Quest XI Channel S” live stream on YouTube and Niconico in January. This broadcast will feature the creator of the series, producer Hokuto Okamoto and multiple other individuals involved with the project.
In the meantime, what do you think the surprise could be? Leave a comment below.
Telltale's The Walking Dead Final Season Becomes Epic Store Exclusive
Skybound Games has announced that the final two episodes of the PC version of Telltale's The Walking Dead: The Final Season will be exclusively available through the Epic Games Store. The PC version of the previous two episodes of the final season will also be added to the store.
This does not apply to anyone who's already purchased the Season Pass for TWD: The Final Season. If you've purchased the Season Pass through another PC game store--such as Steam--then you will still get the last two episodes through said retailer. However, if you've been buying episodes of the PC version of The Final Season individually, then you'll have to go through Epic for the last bits of the story.
"The team at Epic owns a major chapter in the history of the game industry," wrote Skybound Games CEO Ian Howe and president of interactive Dan Muray in a prepared joint-statement, according to Variety. "We're excited to work together on their latest transformative event with the launch of the Epic Games Store. Epic stepped up to the plate immediately to work with us in order to bring the original team back together and ensure fans will receive the completed season of Telltale's The Walking Dead: The Final Season."
Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Christmas? (Special Edition)
As regular readers will know, each Saturday we all get together to discuss our weekend gaming plans and see what our fellow community members are up to. This week is a little different, however, with many of us taking a little time away to celebrate the holidays and enjoy time with friends or family, or even taking some much-needed alone time for a bit of peace and quiet.
As such, this week’s ‘What Are You Playing?’ feature is dedicated to the holidays, all wrapped up in a super-special bumper edition. Feel free to read through the Nintendo Life team’s entries, and then tell us about your own plans via the poll and comments below. Enjoy!
Darren Calvert, operations director
As Christmas is a time for spending with the family, I’m sure I’ll be having lots of games of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with my munchkins aged 7 and 10. They’ve been practising tirelessly since it came out on the Switch earlier this month, so I’m sure I will get beaten mercilessly as I resort to button-mashing to survive.
When the wider family come over, I’m sure we’ll be having a few games of Super Mario Party to pass the time with the kids. It’s a lot more fun than Monopoly anyway. I’m hoping we can find time for lots of races together in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also, I’m quietly confident of holding my own in Mario Kart still. After a few laps of Sherbet Land we’ll all be in the festive mood. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas!
Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer
This Christmas I’ll be taking a well-earned break, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be catching up or completing some of the games I’ve missed on Nintendo Switch. So I’ll be finishing up Manticore: Galaxy on Fire, Attack on Titan 2 and Armello. I’ll likely be returning to my two portable loves – Paladins and Warframe – while continuing to shoot hoops and grind for VC in NBA 2K19. I’m nothing if not productive. Merry Christmas, all!
Gavin Lane, contributing writer
Christmas used to be a time to sit down with something shiny and new, but now it’s my chance to flush the backlog and catch up with things I missed throughout the year – Switch has made that list quite substantial in 2018! So, while I’ll be dipping into Overcooked 2’s free DLC with the family, I’ll hopefully get to chill the beans with Firewatch and ABZU once everyone is snoozing after overindulging on mince pies. I’m also determined to start Wolfenstein II so I can polish off those spoiler-filled GOTY podcasts that have been languishing unplayed on my phone since 2017 before tucking into this year’s editions!
Have a great one everybody!
Glen Fox, guides editor
So I haven’t had much chance to play my Switch the past few months, as I’ve been an absolute heathen and have been mildly addicted to Black Ops 4, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2. I’m going away for Christmas though, so will have my trusty Switch to keep me company.
I’ve missed a couple of gems that I’d like to dig into, like Pokémon: Let’s Go, Warframe, and Hollow Knight. No, I simply don’t like Smash Bros. so I won’t be playing that – it’s just the way it is. No doubt I’ll double-dip into Splatoon 2 and stuff like that too.
This is also my last one of these as I’m leaving Nintendo Life in January to pursue a different line of work. I’d like to say a huge thank you to the supportive and lovely staff, and to the readers who make this site and community as awesome as it is. It’s been a pleasure writing for you all and I’m sure you’ll see my name crop up occasionally as freelance. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer
As 2018 comes to an end, you will find me doing the most cliché possible Nintendo thing one would expect: plugging in my SNES Classic and enjoying some sweet retro-gaming sessions for the holidays. The Super Nintendo reminds me of simpler times, exquisite memories, family and friends who are no longer among us. I honour all of those with a big smile from ear to ear you will rarely find among adults nowadays, caused by such simple pleasures as completing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, finishing F-Zero on Master difficulty, enjoying the soundtrack in Secret of Mana, turning Dracula do dust in Super Castlevania IV or just replaying the ice levels of Donkey Kong Country over and over again. Oh yes, I will also re-watch Die Hard between SNES gaming sessions! Maybe this time Hans gets away with it…
This was yet another incredible year as part of the Nintendo Life crew, one I could never have imagined in my wildest optimistic expectations. I do not know what the future holds in 2019 (hopefully a new F-Zero to go along with Metroid Prime 4), so allow me to take this opportunity to wish YOU, fellow gamer reading these humble words: Happy Holidays, tons of awesome video games, and all the joys this life has to offer.
Liam Doolan, news reporter
This Christmas I intend to play a lot of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!. When I’m not in either of these games, I’ll be attempting to wrap up multiple other titles before 2018 comes to an end. This includes Diablo III: Eternal Collection, Katamari Damacy Reroll and my most recent eShop purchase, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero.
As none of these games are actually Christmas-themed, I’ll have to go elsewhere for my appropriately-themed fix. Maybe Rocket League’s Frosty Fest will be able to help me out. Else I’ll build a snowman in Minecraft.
Ryan Craddock, staff writer
As horrifying as the concept sounds, I’ll likely be spending the majority of my Christmas break away from games for once – even working here at the Nintendo Life Factory of Dreams and Magic™ can take its toll after a while. Having said that, I have been working towards unlocking as many Super Smash Bros. Ultimate characters as possible for any potential games with family when I go to visit, so I doubt my gaming break will last for long.
Similarly, I’ve already planned to pack Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Mario Party, and maybe even Pokémon, Let’s Go, Eevee! for the odd multiplayer session (or in Pokémon’s case, just to show off my collection). Now that I think about it, it doesn’t sound like I’m having a break from gaming at all, does it? Ah well… Happy holidays, everyone!
Steve Bowling, US editor
The holiday means we have a long break ahead and things will be a little quieter than usual. For me, that means it’s time to sink my teeth into some of the Switch’s more time-consuming games. Over the holiday I’ll be playing Octopath Traveler and Valkyria Chronicles 4. I’ve been curious about Octopath since its reveal and have somehow managed to remain spoiler free so far, but I have a feeling I’ll be working on both of these games well into the new year.
Which games are you playing over Christmas? (513 votes)
As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the holidays. Whatever you plan to do this year, we hope you have a wonderful time!
Ever since the launch of Nintendo Switch back in March 2017 gamers have been faced with the difficult decision as to go digital or stay physical.
Naturally there are pros and cons to each of these choices. Digital means the game can be always available on your system, without the need to carry around extra carts, however, often comes at an ironically higher price tag for the privilege. Physical, on the other hand, comes with a pretty box you can display on your shelf, doesn’t take up as much system space and can be resold when you’re done.
Just from surveying our own team we know that everyone seems to have their own take on this matter, some are strict and stick to one format or the other, whereas some make the decision on a game by game basis.
We thought it would be interesting to see how you, the Nintendo Life community, feel about the matter by answering the following questions:
So there we have it. Do you prefer digital or physical for any other reasons? Let us know in the comments below.
Video: How some early MUDs compare to today’s games
In this GDC 2010 Online session Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD, explains the concept behind its original design and corrects some of the misconceptions about what it must have been like to play.
Bartle also goes into detail about how MMO development has advanced dramatically since 1978, and how there are still some areas where early MUDs were more capable than today’s behemoths.
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa
Q& A: Developing the stylish indie hit fighting game Lethal League Blaze
Indie success story and gonzo projectile beatdown sensation Lethal League recently got a sequel in Lethal League Blaze. The games combine a fighting game setup with play that involves manipulating a third entity, a ball that floats around the playfield and bounces off of walls like the ball in Breakout. When smacked by a player, it gains gratifyingly greater speeds and becomes able to do huge damage to opponents.
One of the game’s creators, Dion Koster of Team Reptile, agreed to answer out questions about this engaging and kinetic take on fighting games.
This interview has been slightly edited for publication.
[…] I’m Dion Koster, I like dancing and making things. Me and Tim Remmers are the two bosses of Team Reptile. We’re a concentrated team of about five people. We also bring in lots of artists for specific things so the credits roll a bit longer than that. My own role is that of a game director. Determining the style and vision both visual and gameplay-wise are the things on my plate. Tim is on the business and management side, but both of us still spend most of our time hands-on with the game. We released our first game, called Megabyte Punch, in 2013 and then our first heavy hitter, Lethal League, in 2014.
Lethal League did really well, both of us moved out and from that point on we were truly self sufficient. We never worked with a publisher or received any funds for development either, mostly because we can’t work without full creative control. Lethal League Blaze is our latest release and it did even better for us than the original Lethal League. All of our games made their investment back and a bunch more for the Lethal League series. So as an independent studio we’re pretty well off. Of course, we don’t want to sit back too much. We do our best to challenge ourselves in new ways for every new game and if the fans can see our sincerity with that then I’m as happy as can be.
Sure! While we were making Megabyte Punch, there was a mechanic that reflected projectiles. There were projectiles that were one-hit-kill in that game which made it really exciting to reflect them back and forth. We decided to make this into a mini game, which became the Lethal League prototype.
I made it in flash in a space of two weeks, put it on our site for free and we sent it off to a few websites (you can actually still play it over here). It appeared on the radar of Adam Heart, who people might know from Divekick, who was at Shoryuken.com at the time. He featured it at the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 9 as the grand final mystery game and that really boosted our popularity early on.
We finished Megabyte Punch and it was clear we should just head straight into making Lethal League into a proper full game. A year later, in 2014, we showcased the game on EVO and released it on Steam. Before the release we didn’t get a lot of attention outside of the FGC. Thereafter however, Youtubers jumped on it one by one. TotalBiscuit, Game Grumps, PewDiePie, Markiplier, it probably was the extremity and big anticipation moments that attracted them. We kept updating the game for a while and we managed to port it to PS4 and Xbox One in-house.
While that was going on we decided to do a sequel with 3D graphics, since we ported the thing to Unity anyway. It was also a good way to up our ‘game dev game,’ to scale up a bit without taking that big of a risk. I didn’t want to name it Lethal League 2 because it implies that you’d had to have played the original. So we went with Lethal League Blaze instead.
The Blaze is actually the get-up move you can do in this version after being knocked down, signifying the fact that you won’t die in one hit anymore. On high speeds you still have the one-hit-kill shots so the hype is not lost. We added more moves, like pitching and spiking. The pitch is especially important because it directly counters parrying (which is like blocking in Lethal League).
Of course the main attraction are the new characters, stages, modes and music. We have double the characters that the original had at launch. One of the modes you can unlock is called Lethal Volley, we had a lot of 2v2 fun with that one. We also made a story mode in this iteration. Even though Lethal League doesn’t really shine in singleplayer, most people will be buying this game by themselves and I want them to get some fun out of it even before finding a homie to play against.
The style comes from my experiences in street culture and hip hop with the skating, b-boying and graffiti I was doing. This is what drew me to Jet Set Radio Future at the time, which blew my mind with near-future versions of the styles I was familiar with.
Hip hop originated in America of course, but what they had done was use inspiration from the French sci-fi artist Moebius and the backdrop of Tokyo to advance it into new territory. Although I admit it hit me more than others because I saw where it was coming from; this mix between west and east influenced my personal style heavily. So yeah I’m a fan of Ryuta Ueda, the art director for Jet Set Radio. Looking for similar Japanese artists, I also came across Ippei Gyoubu and Daisuke Nakayama. Add to that my friends in the European underground dance scene and graffiti writers from all over the world and you get something that looks like Lethal League Blaze.
It wasn’t really tempting to add more elements perse. When looking at people picking up the games we make, they usually seem to have more fun with something deep instead of something complex, if you get what I mean. There are still not that many elements compared to most top of the bill fighting games, but the interactions in certain contexts or with certain additional inputs actually number quite a few.
It’s true that I like to hide extra mechanics inside others. Some definitely disagree with me here, but I believe the fun of discovering and sharing these is a big part of enjoying the game. It’s also a way to keep it interesting for both beginners and experienced players. There’s many techniques to learn, but they won’t get in the way when you’re playing free-for-all at a house party.
In action games there’s an old trick to give more impact to any hit, be it fighting games, beat ’em ups or sports. You would pause the animation at the moment of impact to give the feel that the thing you’re hitting has more resistance. I added this (hitpause as we call it) without a thought to the prototype and when I had the ball speed up it made sense to increase this pause along with it. Of course, the speed of the ball can be increased exponentially so you would be hanging there for multiple seconds after a while. This upped the hype by a ton so it felt like it was the right direction.
We really wanted to show the characters close up, but the gameplay doesn’t really allow for that. Although it was very late in development we still needed a K.O. moment anyway, so I went ahead and tried a few camera movements. It turned out it didn’t take much to look dope, because with the way we handle animation the characters are in poses that work by themselves pretty much all the time. You see, sometime during development we switched to limited animation instead of 60fps full animation for the characters for better readability and a more stylized appeal. [This tweet from Team Reptile’s Twitter account demonstrates the animation.]
This means that almost all animation frames are handpicked poses. We did, however, have trouble with the backgrounds not supporting all the new angles and positions of the camera, you could see through all the smoke and mirrors so to speak. In the end, the teaser we made to announce the game a year before inspired the solution to this problem. In that teaser we used hard opaque colors to save time and have it stand out. We did the same with the K.O. camera and turned the background into a big red canvas. I’m sure everyone thought we planned it all along!
So I have a kind of backwards way to do that. What is important to me is that the visual design sort of activates your mind by surprising you with a big contrast or extremity that still makes sense. I’ll refrain from going really deep into this, but the characters’ appearance is really important to me because they embody the style of the game not only to those who are playing the game, but also the ones who haven’t seen any gameplay yet at all.
So I design the visuals first and then think about how they would play in the game. I’ll test out ideas for their movement and actions on existing characters. Having the special ability be fun and work even for beginners is the most important thing in that phase. Sometimes I’ll go back and forth a bit with the design at this point to better fit with the gameplay. Of course, I’ll only know if it’s fun for real once I let others try it, so I make sure to let my critical friends try it out.
As I explained earlier I always feel like improving upon our previous work in a big or different way. So I set a couple of goals for myself. These just came from seeing beginners picking it up at conventions and the hardcore players doing the online tournaments every other week. First was to have the game not be as punishing for new players, but to retain its hype play. Second was to add a few new moves to make it a game that you could play for longer, with the requirement that each action has a proper place and time to use. Thirdly, we one-up the game in every other way. Graphics, characters, stages, modes, music, outfits and so on.
