Demonstrably: Citywars Savage Is A Cute Little Demo


This week I played the demo for an upcoming MMO called Citywars Savage.

Citywars Savage is a quaint little upcoming MMORPG with a pretty cool premise. On the surface the game promises hack and slash combat coupled with crafting and resource management. Dig a little deeper and on the list of planned features you’ll find the ability to build and claim your own territory to battle against other players and their cities.

The demo itself took me roughly 45 minutes to play through, it takes you through a mostly linear pathway where you’ll learn how to make money, how to buy and equip better gear, and battle it out against the monsters dotting the small landscape. If Citywars showcases any idea well, it’s how good you can make a game look with some filters, lighting, and fog effects. It runs great, and ends with you killing the Death Knight.

Of course the big feature that’s being advertised with Citywars is the ability to hire and program your own NPCs. Looking at the store page, Citywars will have a graphical interface to streamline the process of coding your own NPCs to do stuff like gather resources and handle crafting while you’re out doing better things. I’ll be fully satisfied if I can program my NPCs to chatter while they are going about their business. It’ll be like having my own RuneScape bot farm.

I’m pretty sure I also encountered a dev while playing, as the game has voice chat and immediately zipped over to me and started chatting about how to access various interfaces. Now that’s customer service.

I can’t wait for more of Citywars to come out and I recommend checking out the short alpha that is available on Steam.

Early Access Fraudsters: Cyber Watch Is Cyber Shovelware


Cyber Watch is a shovelware title hastily cobbled together in the Unreal Engine and tossed onto Steam for a couple of bucks in the hopes that enough people will buy it and not refund it to make a little bit of profit. Tossed onto Steam by a ragtag group of seven named individuals, Cyber Watch hopes to abuse the fact that it is “under development” to avoid criticism while not making use of Steam’s Early Access label.

The first thing you see on Cyber Watch’s store page is:

*****NOTE*****
THE GAME IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT AND IT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL VERSION OF THE GAME.THERE IS STILL A LOT TO IMPROVE AND ADD
SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL EXPERIENCE OF THIS GAME PLEASE WAIT FOR THE FINAL VERSION TO RELEASE.UNNECESSARY REVIEWS WOULD NOT BE APPRECIATED.

What you get is a barely functioning pre-alpha build of a game whose working components I have to assume were built into the Unreal engine or available as an asset pack on the Unreal store. From untextured, very basic maps to weapons that may function halfway or break your character (see aim-down-sights in the screenshot below), to “vehicles” being nothing more than untextured RC cars that sloppily plant your character mode behind it.

Cyber Watch also blasts Neffex songs through your speakers at about ten times the volume of the rest of the game.

To further cement the idea that Cyber Watch is a hastily cobbled together mess of a prototype, as of one week ago this game wasn’t actually called Cyber Watch. SteamDB’s history shows that Cyber Watch was previously titled The Battle Of Bellum up to January 1, 2020. It was previously listed for a January 18 release date before the team just dumped it on the store on January 12. The Battle Of Bellum it seems would have been a third person action adventure game judging from a prior description:

“This game is a third person shooter game.This game is full of acton and adventures.”

Prior Steam listings also have The Battle Of Bellum listed as a single player game with achievements, so it seems like the team threw out what they had at the last minute and opted instead to push a rushed featureless prototype of a shooter on the store in the hopes that slapping a “this is unfinished” sticker would stifle criticism and people would buy the game regardless. It might have worked if they had listed the game as early access. They didn’t.

It isn’t going to work. I personally bought the game to drop a review and received this response from the developer:

“THERE IS A BIG NOTE IN THE DESCRIPTION……MAYBE….. MAYBE YOU DIDNT SEE IT…..ITS OKAY ……EVERYTHING YOU ARE SAYING IS ALREADY MENTIONED IN THE DESCRIPTION……SO DONT WASTE YOUR TIME ON COMMENTING LIKE THIS”

Posting in all caps always makes you correct, and trust me there is no way anything associated with this game is not a huge waste of time.

Thankfully with the way Steam goes, Cyber Watch will be buried in the history books with the rest of the low-effort shovelware to come out on Steam.

Roblox Claims Tommy Tallarico Does Not Own “Oof” Sound


If you haven’t been paying attention to his Twitter account over the past while, Tommy Tallarico of the Amico Tallarico clan has been in a back and forth kerfuffle with Roblox over allegations that Tommy owns the rights to the “oof” sound effect that has become iconic to Roblox over the past decade or so, and that Roblox is continuing to use the sound effect without his permission and without compensation. Tommy has been attempting to negotiate a settlement to avoid a potential legal battle but has yet to have any luck.

Roblox has officially responded to the allegations, claiming that the oof sound was obtained from a stock sound CD-ROM that was legally purchased consisting of copyright free sounds. They further claim that Tommy has furnished no proof of ownership, although admit that they have been working to reach a fair resolution (which would be needless if Tommy didn’t own the sound).

Roblox’s founders, Erik and David, got the oof sound (along with all the original Roblox sounds) from a stock sound CD-ROM they purchased of licensed, copyright free sounds (not from an illegal website as Tommy has suggested on social media).

We deeply respect the rights of IP creators, and we have built our platform over the past 12+ years based on respecting and honoring creators.
Despite the fact that Tommy has no copyright to the “oof” sound (and in response to our requests he has presented us no proof of ownership to it) we’ve nevertheless been working in good faith to reach a fair resolution with him. As part of that, we have asked Tommy to become part of our creative community and we look forward to exploring that opportunity with him further.

The full statement can be found at the following link. Tommy alleges that he created the sound effect for the game Messiah which readers can listen to at the embedded video below. Tommy has also stated that he has possession of the original recordings of the sound.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

 

Bad Press: Reuters Uses School Shooter To Blame Video Games Again


It wouldn’t be a day ending in Y if incompetent “journalists” and opportunistic politicians weren’t using the death of children to forward an agenda of nonsensical fear. Cue in this week where an 11 year old in Mexico entered a school and shot a teacher and six others before killing himself. The culprit? Video games of course. Just check out the opening sentence on Reuters.

“An 11-year-old boy armed with two guns entered a school in northern Mexico, shot dead a teacher and wounded at least six others before killing himself, possibly under the influence of a violent video game, local officials said on Friday.”

Under the influence of a violent video game, like the kid drank a 40oz of violent games and drunkenly stumbled into school with a gun in his hand and rage in his heart. Notice the use of the term “possibly,” an easy out for when rational minds come in to call out the underhanded fear mongering. Meanwhile Governor Miguel Riquelme, who might otherwise have to take responsibility for violence occurring in his state, pushed the blame to video games as well.

“He was well behaved, but he told some of his classmates that ‘Today was the day,'” he said. “And what we can observe is that the boy was influenced by a video game.”

How was the kid influenced by a video game? Governor Riquelme doesn’t have the time, the resources, or the actual facts to explain. Just take his word for it and remember to vote Riquelme in the next election.

The game getting blamed is Natural Selection because the kid was wearing a shirt with “natural selection” written on it and we can only assume that Governor Riquelme had one of his assistants Google “Natural Selection video game” and came up with the first result. Of course nobody from Reuters took the time to investigate what Natural Selection is because they would have found a game almost as old as the shooter and could not conceivably have inspired the incident.

Or they did research it and realized that nobody would buy their narrative, so they hid the finer details. Natural Selection is a first person shooter/real time strategy hybrid that pits marines against aliens in various sci-fi locations that are not a Mexican school. It came out in 2012 and has a population of a few hundred people still playing it. Given the game’s age and small player base, it’s probably safe to assume that the kid had never played the game or heard of it.

 

“Experts have long debated whether there is a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior.”

Experts have also pretty unanimously sided with the conclusion that there are no links between violent video games and aggressive behavior, but that doesn’t make for a good story. Experts have also agreed that mass shooters like to copycat other mass shooters, and do you know who else was obsessed with the idea of natural selection? The Columbine shooters. And numerous other violent wackadoodles who believe that they are just culling the weak so that the strong can survive. I wouldn’t expect Dave Graham over at Reuters to be familiar with the Columbine shooting, since discovering that information would require outside research that wasn’t hand-fed to him for the article in question.

Oh and the shooter’s mom died years ago. But it’s the video games for sure. He was a perfectly peaceful, just like how the Columbine shooters were just peaceful loners.

What’s incredible is that it took five credited names to shove out this low quality work only to get outmatched by one blogger in probably half the time it took them to go to print.

Diaries From King’s Row: Space Comabat Pilot Issue


Out of a Tweet and into King’s Row, it’s the ongoing copyright-infringing adventures of none other than Space Comabat! With the blindness of a bat, the strength of a bat, the constantly orbiting flock of bats, and the ability to wield two large sharp metal objects…like a bat, Space Comabat uses his echolocation abilities to seek out the fruity nectar of evil!

This week Space Comabat travels to King’s Row to visit his informant Genevieve Sanders and discover what is sending the city’s hooligans to the hospital.

“Space Comabat, it’s a good thing you showed up. The Skulls have been pushing their drug Superadine to Galaxy City refugees, and the crime rate is skyrocketing! You need to find out who is supplying The Skulls.” Space Comabat is on the job. Time to seek out some Skull Gang ne’er do wells and politely coerce some information out of them, with justice!

Looks like these ruffians haven’t been getting their daily iron. Space Comabat can fix that!

After giving his adversaries a little lesson in how crime doesn’t pay, Space Comabat finds a clue to who might be behind the Superadine. It’s a printed receipt with a business address and phone number plus Twitter account and IRS employer ID. “Who knew street drug dealers accept all major credit cards except American Express,” says Space Comabat. “Now let’s see who is running this shindig. It looks like the operator is one Toothbreaker Jones.”

“I wonder how he got the name Toothbreaker Jones,” Space Comabat asks nobody in particular.

At the Superadine dealer, Space Comabat enters to find a building full of desperate addicts. “There are a lot of crime junkies in this building,” says Space Comabat, “and thankfully I’ve got plenty of detox to go around.”

“Space Comabat? I thought yous got moidered by Joey Fatone back in Atlas Park!”

“Nobody likes a liar, and I’m going to wash your mouth out…with justice!” Space Comabat continues to deliver some much deserved retribution to The Skulls littered throughout the building until he finally comes upon Toothbreaker Jones flanked by his two henchmen.

“If we knock Space Comabat out of the picture, maybe the boss will let us in on the next shipment.” Space Comabat quickly dispatches Toothbreaker Jones’ henchmen and draws out the boss man himself.

“Space Comabat! I’m going to break your teeth!”

“The only thing that’s going to be broken here is the clavicle of evil” shouts Space Comabat as he shatters Toothbreaker Jones’ clavicle with his metal rod. Space Comabat leaves Toothbreaker Jones to lie in a puddle of regret until the police can come by and pick him up. He returns to Genevieve to report his success.

“You’ve taken down one of the suppliers, but Toothbreaker Jones mentioned something about a shipment headed for King’s Row. We’ve discovered another Superadine den, head over and find out what you can about this shipment. If we don’t stop The Skulls, this drug problem could become a full pandemic.”

“Oh there’s going to be a pandemic. A pandemic of justice!”

Will The Skulls obtain their shipment of Superadine? Can our heroes stop this dastardly drug before it turns King’s Row into a psychotic nightmare? Tune in to the next episode; same Space Comabat time, same Space Comabat place.

Drink your Ovaltine, and buy war bonds!

NM: Grand Theft Auto IV Has Disappeared From PC


Update: A Rockstar Games spokesperson responded to our request for a comment, providing the following statement;

Grand Theft Auto IV was originally created for the Games For Windows Live platform. With Microsoft no longer supporting Games For Windows Live, it is no longer possible to generate the additional keys needed to continue selling the current version of the game. We are looking at other options for distributing GTAIV for PC and will share more information as soon as we can.

Rockstar Games has pulled Grand Theft Auto IV from sale on Steam and the Rockstar Launcher for…reasons that are not entirely clear as nobody involved has made a statement. It is Friday afternoon after all. The game was delisted for sale mid-afternoon on Friday January 10 (today for those reading this as it comes out) although the two expansion collection is still available for sale as is Grand Theft Auto IV via the Playstation store and Xbox.

On Steam the page for Grand Theft Auto IV still exists but the ability to add it to your cart has been disabled. It is not accompanied by any notice from Valve that the publisher requested removal. The Rockstar website still lists Grand Theft Auto IV but any links to buy the game digitally on PC are broken and simply redirect to the front page.

MMO Fallout has reached out to Rockstar’s PR folks and will update if they haven’t gone home for the weekend.

Public Response To Magic: Legends Gameplay Reveal Is Mixed


This week marked the first gameplay reveal of Magic: Legends, shown exclusively through Game Informer, and the reaction from gamers has been mixed. Almost literally 50/50 positive and negative. While players might have been expecting something more along the lines of the Neverwinter MMO from developer Perfect World Entertainment, what they got is more akin to a Diablo game.

In other words, not much of an MMO. Reaction to the Youtube video has been split down the middle, with 848 thumbs up votes and 841 thumbs down. Game Informer has a more in-depth coverage of the game in this month’s issue and you can see more discussion on the game in the latest podcast.

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Whatever Happened To: Those City of Heroes Successors


Every once in a while I get an email asking “Connor, why don’t you talk about those various City of Heroes successor games?” That’s an oddly specific question, and one that harkens back to a time where any article I wrote about NCSoft would result in a flurry of emails threatening to boycott my website or trying to get me fired for not mentioning whatever CoH successor was crowdfunding. Now I’m not going to name names (because I don’t actually remember who did it) but having a PR rep from a volunteer project reach out to chastise me for not mentioning their game in an article about City of Heroes, and to imply that I was being paid by another project to not mention them? Eventually it’s not worth talking about anybody.

But 2020 is a new year and a new decade and the fervor over NCSoft is over, and I’d like to know where the Kickstarter money I threw in seven years ago went, so it’s time to catch up on those City of Heroes successors. Do we even need these titles now that they have taken so long to release that a secret underground moleman community has been discovered and shared their private server with the world? Who knows. Are any of these games actually going to see their way to completion? It’s been eight years.

In no particular order because God forbid I get emails asking why one project was listed above another, let’s just dive in.

1. Valiance Online – It’s In Alpha

Valiance Online is the Unity-built successor to City of Heroes and one of the few on this list that did not run a (successful) Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaign. The investor alpha was made available back in October 2017 and those interested in getting in on the project can donate a minimum of $25 to gain access to founders perks. From a quick glance it looks like the alpha server was taken down back in November 2019 for a big update and has not yet come back up.

If there is one complaint that can be lobbied at the Valiance Online people it is that their communication is terrible. The news section hasn’t seen an update since November 2018, the forum is a mess to navigate, and the Twitter also has not been updated since November 2019 during the latest maintenance update. As a title that started very early compared to the other COH successors, I feel like Valiance Online may have blew its load too soon. I remember playing a pre-alpha four or five years ago and just very quickly losing interest as the game was many years off of release.

Who knows, Valiance Online is clearly in active development with things to show for it. Hopefully they can take that stretch toward beta and make the game more widely available.

2. Ship of Heroes – Character Creator Beta

Ship of Heroes has progressed far enough to have released a character creator beta test back in November where players could go in and create characters, have a costume contest, and even test out their powers and walk around the ship. Ship of Heroes is a City of Heroes successor set on a spaceship traveling through space (as they do). It is built on the Unreal Engine and pretty regularly puts out news updates with screenshots of how the game is progressing.

Of the games on this list, Ship of Heroes seems to be in the best position to put out a launch product first considering it is being run by an actual company with faces instead of a rag tag group of unpaid volunteers. Not to diminish the work of the other games on this list, but Ship of Heroes just seems to be in the strongest position as an organization of developers.

3. City of Titans – Character Creator

Of course I would be remiss to talk about Ship of Heroes launching its character creator tool without also mentioning City of Titans by Missing Worlds Media who launched their own character creator a couple weeks earlier. Out of everything on this list, I have to say City of Titans feels like the closest to an actual spiritual successor to City of Heroes. Where the other games on the list are creating a modern superhero MMO, the videos and screenshots released by Missing Worlds Media make the game look like it is trying to stay true to form and bring gamers back to the world that they had once lost but can incidentally now play again.

Admittedly out of everything on this list, City of Titans is the game I’m most looking forward to.

Missing Worlds Media is a bit of an enigma for me as they regularly want to have their cake and eat it too. City of Titans was funded in 2013 to the tune of 678 thousand smackers, yet whenever I talk about the game coming along at a snail’s pace and far beyond the campaign’s original delivery date, I get inundated with comments about how the team is staffed by unpaid volunteers and that I should just shut my stupid face about it. I don’t know what to tell you; you’re either a dev pulling 700 grand plus to fund development or you’re a group of volunteers making this game for free in your spare time (ie; people complaining about efficiency should shut up). You can’t expect to be treated as both when it’s most convenient.

4. Heroes & Villains – ??????????????

Heroes and Villains is a superhero MMO created and run by the players with an official website that looks like it was optimized to run on Windows 95. Of the current titles on the list (#5 notwithstanding), Heroes & Villains gives me the least confidence. If the team is working hard behind the scenes, they are keeping a very tight hold on things. They regularly update the website with new notes about progress being made but it’s three or four lines of commentary with nothing of actual substance to show or back up that the game is making any real progress.

The website has concept art from 2013-2015 and the Youtube channel was last updated three years ago with test animations while most of the forum has been abandoned for years. Plan Z is made up of volunteers similar to City of Titans but unlike Missing Worlds Media doesn’t have $700 grand in crowdfunding revenue to work with. Out of everything on this list (again, #5 notwithstanding) it is literally a hobby project that some folks are working on in their spare time.

If this game does launch or for that matter even release a beta, it will be quite a surprise.

5. Redside – Dead As A Corpse

Redside was an attempt by Brass Lampworks to make a City of Villains successor. Unfortunately the project launched its Kickstarter to the complete disinterest of nearly everyone with a dollar to spare and ultimately pulled in $170 from four backers. The website for developer Brass Lampworks is no longer in operation and it’s clear that the game has been killed in the crib.

“This game is designed in the spirit of NCSoft’s closed MMO “City of Villains”  This MMO will work the same premise, but a new direction.  We will have a cast of completely different characters on masterfully crafted storylines, updated graphics, cross platform functionality, and possible VR in future updates.”

Maybe it’s because the Kickstarter expressly stated that the money was to “get the ball rolling” and not to create an actual product. Maybe it’s because the creator was not a game developer and had no idea what he was doing, instilling no confidence that pumping money into this void would result in anything except a bunch of backers getting swindled by someone playing on their nostalgia.

In Conclusion

If you want to play City of Heroes, you can absolutely do so right now thanks to the Homecoming server. It is just as jank as you remember and boy howdy is it glorious.

Review: Avabel On Steam Is Lowest Of Low Effort


What can I say about Avabel Online?

Its interface is hideous.

The translation is as low effort as it gets.

The game doesn’t work half the time.

And it literally suggests starting out with auto-quest on before you’ve even taken your first step. Yes, Avabel makes no pretence on being fun to play, just throw that auto-play on and maybe toss developer Asobimo a few hundred bucks for the privilege of having a dull, uninspired ripoff of a mobile game play itself.

Now that Bluestacks is bridging the gap between low effort mobile games and low effort PC games, any fly by night developer can pay $100 to have their mobile title developed on the budget of a White Castle slider foisted onto the Steam Store where it will get buried under a sea of other low effort cash grabs with the only hopes of coverage in the form of ridicule from some loser living in his own basement.

Final Score: 0/10 – I’m sure at least one desperate fanboy will tell me that this game is better than anything that came out on PC.

Black Desert Releases Kunoichi (XB1) and Valkyrie (PS4) Classes


If you play Black Desert on either console, you now have a new toy to play with.

Pearl Abyss announced this week the release of two new classes for console Black Desert players bringing both titles a little more in line with the PC version. The first class is the Kunoichi, mistress of the blades, available now on the Xbox One. The Kunoichi class uses the kunai shortsword to deliver a flurry attack. The second class which will be available on Playstation 4 tomorrow is the Valkyrie. The Valkyrie uses a sword and shield for offensive and defensive abilities.

Xbox players can take part in a Kunoichi level up event running from today (Jan. 8) to January 21 and receive rewards for creating and leveling up a Kunoichi character. More information on Black Desert can be found at the official website.

Source: Press release