Not Massive: Fortnite Corroborates Child’s Knowledge of Guns


Who said video games would never offer real world experience?

Today’s human interest piece comes to us from a child custody case in the Eastern District of New York. The petitioner is the father of a child who had petitioned the court for the return of his son to Ecuador. The child, a nine year old, had been retained in the United States by the mother and without the consent of the father since mid-2018. The father (petitioner) owns a gun shop and warehouse in Ecuador and is a dealer of firearms and accessories (Editor’s note: It should be noted that the firearm business is legal/legitimate). During the custody hearing, the child testified to the father having guns in the house, on display, within the reach of a child. How did the child know the identity of the guns? Fortnite.

According to the testimony, the child was able to verify what he had seen in the house including a silencer and a shotgun because he had seen something similar in Fortnite.

The story does not have a great ending, as the court eventually ruled that the child would be returned to Ecuador under Hague Convention. Still, the court did not seem to have any reason to doubt the child’s game-based knowledge.

The full entry can be found at the link below. Content Warning: The document below has been included for those who wish to view it. It contains numerous detailed allegations of the repeated physical and verbal abuse of a child by a parental figure.

Source: Eastern District of New York

[Video] Twitch Plays The Outer Worlds


It was bound to happen eventually.

This week marks the launch of The Outer Worlds, but if you want to play the game you can do so right now…Sort of. Being the crazy people they are, Obsidian Entertainment has decided to throw The Outer Worlds up for the world to play…on Twitch. This technically makes The Outer Worlds the first pre-release game to be given the Twitch Plays treatment.

Streaming is going on right now. You can head over to the Obsidian Twitch channel and play along in the chat yourself. Create the kind of playthrough that even Polygon would be proud of.

Mobility: TeeTINY Online Second Beta Launches


Teeny.studio, a Korean game developer and publisher, today released the second closed beta of their new mobile MMORPG, TeeTINY Online.

TeeTINY Online is an open world, anime-themed, fantasy casual MMORPG where players are encouraged to join together in teams and take on the world. Take on dungeons, boss monsters, raids, towers, and more. The beta is available until November 3 and includes daily quests that will span the closed beta period. The full version is set to launch at sometime in 2020.

The beta build of TeeTINY Online can be found at the Google Play store.

Source: TeeTINY Press Release

Planetside 3 Is Surely Happening, Says Daybreak


Planetside 3 is absolutely happening, says developer who suffered at least four rounds of substantive layoffs over the past two years. With Planetside 2 chugging along and Planetside Arena floundering and virtually dead in the water, Daybreak is ready to talk Planetside 3. In a post on the official website, executive producer Andy Sites noted that the studio views Planetside Arena as a stepping stone to Planetside 3 which will feature very different gameplay mechanics than Planetside 2.

So when we think about what the PlanetSide 3 experience needs to be, we know that there are incredibly high expectations from all of you. PlanetSide Arena is intended to be the stepping stone to PlanetSide 3, which we envision expanding from the current battlefields of Auraxis, to full-fledged galactic war with empires exploring, colonizing and conquering one another within an expansive galaxy. We envision PlanetSide Arena as a way to allow us to link present day PlanetSide 2 and PlanetSide 3 story lines, as well as providing an opportunity to try out new features, styles of play, etc.

We’ll see about that.

Source: Planetside 2

Free Steamy Sundaes: October 20 Edition


Today’s Free Steamy Sundaes is brought to you by caffeine, toxic consumer advocacy, and viewers like you. I don’t know how to casually introduce a new column I had the idea for while shopping for a new coffee grinder, so I’m just going to refer to Free Steamy Sundaes like it’s been going on for weeks and you’re all very familiar with it. So naturally everyone knows that this column is a weekly list of free to play games and demos that released on Steam last week.

Not Massive: Humble Monthly Increases Prices, Substantially Decreases Value


Humble Monthly is rebranding as Humble Choice and that can only mean one thing: Higher prices? Check. Lower value? Double check. Holding current subscribers hostage? Triple check.

Humble Monthly is a pretty damn good deal if you look at it. $12 per month or $132 per year for ten games per month is crazy. Add in the fact that they offer some otherwise expensive titles like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot and you’ve got an even better deal. Don’t like the games? Sell the keys and you’ll probably make back more than what you’re buying them for.

But Humble Monthly is changing. Starting in a few months the service will reboot as Humble Choice, a cynical marketing decision to make it seem like you’re getting more while stripping away value and increasing prices. The basic package will now cost $14.99, a $2 increase per month, and give you three games to choose from out of that month’s selection. Yes, you are going to pay a roughly 15% increase for 70% less product. If you want something closely resembling the Humble Monthly bundle, you’ll have to pay $20 per month and even then you don’t get all of the games. Current subscribers will need to remain subscribed in order to keep their “classic” plan in effect.

Everyone wanted to know how long it would take IGN to flip the table and start gouging Humble Monthly and it looks like the answer is two years. The most entertaining part of this announcement is seeing Humble’s PR people try to spin this as even vicariously resembling something pro-consumer.

[Video] Outer Worlds Launch Trailer


Obsidian Entertainment today released the launch trailer for The Outer Worlds, the latest science fiction game hitting PC and consoles in just under a week. The Outer Worlds sticks players in a world where giant megacorporations have taken over entire planets. Featuring branching paths, your story will change depending on how you play.

Check it out.

Food Reviews: FPS Gaming Supplement


Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I’m a hardcore gamer with hardcore gamer needs. Coffee? Forget that casual nonsense, I mainline Red Bull and Mountain Dew via IV drip 24 hours a day. I’ve had six heart attacks in the last forty five seconds, but you wouldn’t know it while I’m 360 no-scope headshotting scrubs and getting those chicken dinners. Are chicken dinners still a thing? Time to floss dance.

Anyway, I had the opportunity to score a sample pack of FPS gaming supplement in devastated dew flavor. This isn’t a sponsored article, but it absolutely can be. First thing I want to say about this packet is that it tells me I am absolutely going blind. Maybe it’s just the small print but I can’t read the back of the package without a magnifying glass. Actually it might be the lack of focus from not having FPS in my body.

So you mix the package with 8-12 oz of water. Since I’m not a baby, I decided to use as little water as recommended. I also chose my toxic consumer advocacy mug to drink this out of, since I thought it would be funny that if FPS kills me that my death be somewhat related to a SidAlpha product. Some fuel for those Kotaku “the gaming industry just got a little better” articles that would no doubt follow.

This stuff doesn’t look great.

But how does it taste? FPS Devastated Dew tastes a bit like flat Mountain Dew that someone dropped battery acid into. It starts out on the sweet side but you quickly get kicked in the teeth with a very bitter aftertaste that digs deep into your throat and nestles in the back of your tonsils and refuses to go away. It has the same bitterness like chewing on the rind of an orange, and I’d hate to call it painful to drink, but it is. It really is.

I understand the bitterness since the ingredient list is just a ton of bitter components and no sugar, but it doesn’t change the fact that every time I burp I get the taste of stomach acid in my mouth. It probably doesn’t help that against my better judgment I forced myself to drink the entire cup.

So how well does it work? I will admit, pretty well. It does exactly what it says it does and I found myself more energetic, better focused, and video games. Also video games. Don’t judge me.

Video games.

Planetside Arena Virtually Unplayable; Pop Drops Under 50


Planetside Arena needs a miracle.

What started out as a bad launch has now turned into an unmitigated disaster, as Planetside Arena’s population numbers are starting to drift consistently below the 50 player line making the game effectively unplayable. Planetside Arena is a battle royale spinoff to Daybreak’s Planetside franchise (go figure) and promises matches with up to 300 players on squads of 12. Well, theoretically it does.

In reality the game is virtually unplayable at this point as populations have hit a level where it may be impossible to actually start a game due to a lack of people. Planetside Arena fills out squads by 12 which means that if you don’t have 24 people, you’re going to have one squad of 12 and probably one squad of five. It doesn’t make for a fun match, and that assumes you’ll even be able to cross the minimal threshold to get a match going.

This makes Planetside Arena Daybreak’s least popular product on Steam, considering Planetside 2 can still hit over two thousand at peak hours, even the Everquest games hit over 100, and Z1 Battle Royale can still occasionally break 1,000. And that’s not counting the people playing off-Steam.

Considering that Daybreak just laid off a bunch of people from the Planetside team and there is apparently almost nobody left, it might be a good idea to skip this one.

Google Gives Us Another Reason To Have No Faith In Stadia


Google Stadia is one of the few places where your money would be better invested in Enron stocks or Zimbabwe currencies.

Now, those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I consider Google Stadia to be a multi-million dollar scam. Here you have a company selling you a service where you are forced to pay monthly in order to access games that you have to pay full price for as part of a service whose quality wholly depends on the reliability of Google’s servers as well as their connection to your home. What happens when Google decides to shut down Stadia? Product director and accessory to fraud Andrey Doronichev refuses to answer the question and has consistently dodged the question because we all know the answer: You lose access to your purchases for good.

“I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary,” he said. “I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it’s hard to find a CD player these days :)”

Maybe it is if you’re in the Google echo chamber, but I was able to find a CD player at just about every store I went to outside of the grocery store.

I tacitly endorse people avoiding Google Stadia at all cost, and for a simple reason: Google doesn’t care about its products. It doesn’t care about you as a customer. It treats its products as “experiments” and will readily abandon them and shut down services at a whim, because they no longer feel like doing that anymore. And the people who put money into that product? Google couldn’t care less about ripping them off, it just moves on to the next “experiment” funded off of eager customers.

Don’t believe me? In 2019, Google shut down or announced the shuttering of:

  • Chromecast audio
  • Google Realtime API
  • Youtube video annotations
  • Google notification widget
  • Google Allo
  • URL Shortener
  • Google+
  • Inbox by Google
  • Data Saver Extension
  • Cloud Messaging
  • Youtube Gaming
  • Areo
  • Blog Compass
  • Google Jump
  • Google Trips
  • Works with Nest
  • Youtube for 3DS
  • Youtube Messages
  • G-Suite Training
  • Google Daydream
  • Google Clips
  • Google Bulletin
  • Google Fusion Tables
  • Google translator toolkit
  • Google Correlate
  • Hangouts on Air
  • Fabric
  • Hire by Google
  • Google Hangouts
  • Daydream VR

And we’re supposed to have faith that Stadia will be run for years to come?

I don’t trust Google Stadia because I don’t trust Google. I don’t trust when they say they’re in it for the long haul because anything they could say to reassure me has already been used to lie about previous, now defunct products. I don’t trust that Google won’t suddenly lose interest in the product and then abandon it at a moment’s notice. And what good is the promise today that they are going to keep it going in two years when they sadly announce that it’s coming to an end?

It’s worthless. Google’s word in supporting its products is worthless.