Tag: Game

An MMO On Steam: Spelling Quest Online


Spelling Quest Online is certainly a game and is absolutely on Steam.

I’ll come right out and admit that I downloaded Spelling Quest Online because it is free to play and in early access, and also because it is tagged in the MMO category. Spelling Quest Online is multiplayer free-form scrabble, which is a fancy way of saying that nobody takes turns as much as you just throw down tiles and hope for the best. You can connect to random boards and just go to town for the ten minutes until the game gets boring and you want to stop and play something fun.

The boards have words that people can easily spell, like anal and bruv. There is a dictionary check when you want to make a word, but I’m not sure what dictionary the game cross-references that thinks bruv is a word because while the Cambridge dictionary recognizes it, the Oxford dictionary does not. There are daily quests that offer you gold which can be used to replace letters. I assume that most of the people playing this game are cheating. I cheated and used a Scrabble helper website because my gaming skills are only second in their inadequacy to my knowledge of words.

I will readily admit that I quit after ten minutes when completing words left me with a hand consisting almost entirely of Y’s, V’s, and X’s and literally no way to continue playing (I didn’t have any gold) on that map. I probably could have found a spot to put one or two of the Y’s but I didn’t feel like putting more effort than this game is worth. Which is nothing.

As for the developer Craig Schwartz, I will continue to love your character in the film Being John Malkovich, even if they didn’t give you anything to do in the sequel; Being John Malkovich 2: District Dafoe.

Steam: Strike Mole, The $199 Single Player MMO Hamster Game?


Strike Mole labeled itself a Massive Multiplayer game, so I can technically talk about it without attracting those “why does this belong on MMO Fallout” comments.

Strike Mole caught my eye because it is listed in the MMO section of Steam releases, contains a $200 price tag, and doesn’t appear to actually be called Strike Mole. If you click on the store page, it offers you the opportunity to buy “Physical Ball” for $199 USD. The screenshots look like a whack-a-mole game, which makes sense if the game is titled Strike Mole.

“This is a 3D casual hamster game with 12 levels. The first four levels are training levels, which are relatively simple, and the subsequent levels will require you to complete more in a shorter period of time as the level increases. Mole strikes, you need to destroy them in a short time to unlock more levels.”

Strike Mole is developed and published by Lize. It is literally an asset flip of Whack a Mole from the Unity Asset store, so you can save $175 and buy the pack, compile it, and just play it if you REALLY want to play this game. There is currently one review in Chinese which simply asks “why is this game 500?”

MMO Fallout will update when Mole Strike is inevitably banned off of the Steam platform.

Human Head Studios Sued For Abandoning Rune II


Human Head Studios will always hold a special place in many hearts as the company that made Prey 2006. About three weeks ago, the company launched Rune II on the Epic Game Store. Set in Norse mythology during the end times, Rune II puts you in the shoes of a warrior chosen by the gods to end Ragnarok and save Midgard from the treachery of that trickster Loki.

Rune II is also the focus of a lawsuit alleging fraud, contract breach, and fraudulent concealment, among other charges. The lawsuit stems from the events that occurred after Rune II launched on the Epic Game Store. Right after, as literally a day later they announced that Human Head Studios would immediately shut down with its developers transferred to a new studio under Bethesda’s management. Rune II’s publisher and financier Ragnarok Game LLC is understandably not happy with this turn of events, especially since Human Head is allegedly refusing to turn over source code and assets that Ragnarok now legally owns, in order to allow continued support of the game.

A notice was posted to the Rune II forums discussing the details of the lawsuit.

“Since Human Head’s sudden closure, announcement, and discovering the active concealment of their acquisition, we have repeatedly requested access to the final launch build source code and RUNE II game assets. This is so we can continue to support, update, and execute future DLC for our community. As part of the publishing agreement on RUNE II, Ragnarok Game LLC has paid for the development of these assets and is the rightful owner of them. After repeated refusals by Human Head to produce these assets, we’ve had no choice but to file a legal complaint in order to obtain the RUNE II game assets. We have exhausted all possible options before getting to this point.  This is not the step we wanted to take, but it is necessary in order to fulfill our promises to our community.”

The lawsuit itself which can be read online accuses Ben Gokey, Christopher Rhinehart, and Paul MacArthur, all Human Head Principals, of intentionally damaging the Rune II brand and image by failing to perform and then conspiring to abandon the property, with the studio intentionally closing when it did to maximize that damage.

“In summary: (a) Human Head entered into a long-term agreement with Ragnarok — the whole goal of which was to launch Rune II and to provide the necessary support for its commercial success, (b) Human Head accepted millions of dollars in payment, but failed to perform, (c) instead of curing its deficient work, Human Head secretly conspired to abandon Ragnarok and the Rune II community in an apparent attempt to defraud and harm Ragnarok and the game, and (d) Human Head timed the unveiling of its plan to cause maximum damage. By this time, Ragnarok had learned its lesson. Ragnarok refused to be blackmailed and pay the ransom, repeatedly requesting the return of its property. What did Ben Gokey, Christopher Rhinehart, and Paul MacArthur do? They made unauthorized alterations to the code and attempted (unsuccessfully) to make public the unauthorized changes. Of course, since Human Head no longer existed, Gokey, Rhinehart, and MacArthur were not altering the code on behalf of Human Head. Regardless, alter the code they did. “

The lawsuit goes on to accuse Human Head of holding code hostage as ransom for monetary payments, as well as accusing the studio of attempting to upload altered versions of the game to the Epic Game Store despite demands to cease. If even half of the lawsuit is true, it’s a pretty damning story against Human Head heads Gokey, Rinehart, and MacArthur.

Source: Eurogamer

Steam Releases: Stay Out


Want a new MMORPG loosely based on the Stalker games? You’re in luck. Last week saw the launch of a new survival MMO on Steam. Stay Out is the latest in Stalker-inspired games developed by Mobile Technologies LLC. The title was previously called Stalker Online and may have changed its name to avoid copyright problems with the guys that created the actual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

And it is free to play.

“Discover a world full of dangers and incredible events, which has its own laws and principles.
Become one of the “Stalkers” – people living the romance of the unknown, able to overcome any trials in search of artifacts on the territory of the Alienation Zone.
Take a look beyond the edge of the unknown, where the secrets of nature and deadly dangers await the daredevils at every turn.
Survive in harsh conditions, when you count every sip of water and every match.
Secret laboratories, life forms of unknown origin, mysterious anomalies, and strange artifacts that challenge our knowledge of the laws of nature – all this is a huge world of “Stay Out”.”

Reviews for the game are presently mixed, with players noting a pay-to-win cash shop as well as horrible translations into English and a tutorial that is boring and doesn’t really do much to teach you about the game. There are also complaints about people griefing as well as the pvp system that allows players to camp outside of towns and kill newer players to steal their inventory.

Play at your own risk.

Source: Steam

Bloodbath Steam: Valve Burns Down The House In Mass Game Ban


(Update: It looks like a total of 833 games have been banned by Valve today)

Bloodbath Kavkaz? Nah, Bloodbath Steam.

Valve is currently in the midst of what appears to be a massive ban wave of shady Steam developers, with hundreds of games caught in the crossfire and no sign of slowing down. The ban wave began just over an hour ago as of this publishing and has been knocking out games left and right.

Chief among the ban list is Dagestan Technology, a Russian publisher of titles such as Bloodbath Kazkov.

We will update if more information become available.

Source: Sentinels of the Store

Legends of Aria Announces Big Content Drop/Free Accounts


Legends of Aria dropped a new announcement today revealing upcoming content coming December 5.

The big update brings back the wilderness to reintroduce the risk-vs-reward system allowing you to take out murderous players or rob the defenseless. Warriors will now have access to a number of new skills. Townships will act as a hub for players to trade in local currency while militias can be formed to capture wilderness locations. Leagues of Celador promises to offer episodic content to push the game’s lore forward, while world bosses will provide a powerful enemy for players to group together and fight.

More details can be found at the official website.

It Came From Origin Premiere: Let’s Talk Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order


Boy what a ride.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the most video game-ass video game to come from the AAA sector in recent memory. It makes me a bit sad to recognize the fact that this is the first Star Wars game in over a decade that feels like it was made foremost to be a fun game and not to be a vehicle for disgustingly greedy microtransactions. In fact, the game doesn’t have microtransactions period. I know, right? From a subsidiary of Electronic Arts and in 2019 no less.

There are a lot of things that Fallen Order does not have. It doesn’t have a tacked-on half-baked multiplayer mode that would be dead within a month. It does not have shoddily-implemented RPG mechanics to artificially extend the game’s lifetime by forcing the player to grind for gear with incrementally higher numbers. There are no daily missions, no loot boxes, no weekly checklists or login rewards. No season passes or ridiculous cosmetics to give Vade pink armor. It’s like the developers at Respawn fell out of 1998 and said “let’s make a modern Star Wars game.”

Fallen Order is set shortly after the events of Revenge of the Sith. The Jedi are mostly wiped out, Yoda and Obi Wan are headed to their respective hidey holes for the next couple of decades, and the newly formed Empire is on the prowl wiping out the good guys wherever they may be hiding. Luke and Leia are probably just reaching the age of saying their first words, so don’t count on them for help. You are Cal Kestis, a name you’ll probably forget about two minutes after hearing it. Cal is living his life as a normal scrap miner (who would have thought) when his life is flipped turned upside down; the Empire knows he’s a Jedi. With the help of the mysterious Cere Junda (played by Debra Wilson) and space pilot from Space Bronx Greez Dritus (Daniel Roebuck), your goal is to rebuild the Jedi Order.

1. Exploration Is Encouraged, Not Forced

Exploration in Fallen Order tastes like Respawn made a gumbo using a 50/50 blend of Metroid and Uncharted. You’ll visit several planets over your trip that amount to a variety of open world locations with twisted, winding paths and a variety of local wildlife. Each zone basically amounts to taking the long way to your goal while simultaneously opening up shortcuts for when you come back. And you’ll come back, they always come back. After all, you’ll need to return to the planets you’ve visited (of which there are roughly half a dozen) to unlock new areas.

As you journey through the world, you’ll obtain new force powers, upgrade your BD-1 unit to access more areas of the map, and find more unlockables. The unlockables are wholly optional and amount to new cosmetics, bits of lore, and doodads that incrementally increase your max health/force. The map is also very handy for showing you areas that you can access and those that you can’t, so you’ll never be scouring an area for a frustratingly long amount of time wondering where to go next.

2. The Darkest of Souls

I am legally obligated to point out that Fallen Order is the Dark Souls of Star Wars games, and the analogy actually works this time. Let me summarize: Fallen Order is a game where your capabilities in combat are tuned around timing your strikes, parries, and rolling dodges. You come up against enemies, many of whom can strike you down within a handful of well-placed hits. Defeating enemies grants you experience that translates into skill points that must be spent at meditation points. If you die in battle, you lose your accumulated unspent points and must go back and strike the NPC that hit you to get them back. Meditating, dying, and leaving resets all enemies on the map. For healing you have limited stims (estus flasks).

For Soulsborne fans, I recommend playing on higher difficulties. Respawn’s difficulty system is rather ingenious in that it doesn’t change much. Lower difficulties make enemies hit for less damage and moderately increase the parry window. Regardless, this game will beat the crap out of you on pretty much any mode except for Story Mode. You are expected to die, and die a lot.

3. Artificial Unintelligence

That being said, Fallen Order can be cheesed by playing the game in ways that it was clearly not meant to be played.

Fallen Order’s artificial intelligence is fantastic in a very closed environment. Respawn manages to keep a tense atmosphere from start to finish by pitting you in a world where even the lowliest stormtrooper can knock you silly if you aren’t careful enough. Enemies parry your attacks, anticipate your movements, and generally fight like intelligent creatures with real experience.

Pull it out of that environment, and Respawn’s AI falls apart. I was able to get through several areas that should have been difficult simply by force pulling mini-bosses into adjacent rooms. The mini-bosses didn’t understand the layout and ignored me bashing at them with my lightsaber while slowly waltzing back to their zone. Mobs will often just stop pursuing you at the boundary point between rooms at which point they just sort of shut off and won’t acknowledge your presence until you walk back into their zone. Even worse than the dead-brain mode when getting pulled into other rooms, I found that some mobs will just hit a kill switch and die if they wind up on unfamiliar terrain. It kills the atmosphere when you pull a mini-boss on to solid ground and he just keels over for no reason.

When it works, it works. The few lightsaber battles you’ll get into with Fallen Order’s bosses are some of the best since the old Star Wars Jedi Knight titles. You’ll go from getting your ass completely kicked by a boss to doing better, then even getting an advantage, and finally you’ll be finishing the fight without taking more than a couple of hits. And you’ll know that you accomplished that on your own, not because you min-maxed or overleveled the game but because you paid attention and learned the cues.

4. I F*#@ING LOVE STAR WARS

My interest in Star Wars in general has been rekindled thanks to the impressive launch of The Mandalorian, and Fallen Order couldn’t come at a better time for the franchise. This game has a lot of what you’d want out of a Star Wars Jedi game. Customizing your lightsaber? You can do it, even though it’s a thing you don’t exactly see the details of when it is slicing through a stormtrooper. Your lightsaber works like a lightsaber should, cutting things in half with ease. The game does make tougher enemies take more hits which can pull out of the experience, but you have to make some compromises otherwise you’d be the One Punch Man of a galaxy far far away.

Fighting AT-ST’s? Check. Scaling the side of an AT-AT Walker? Double check. One of my favorite bits showcasing the attention to detail is in the stormtrooper dialogue. You can sneak up on stormtroopers and hear them chattering amongst themselves (“it’s your turn to fill out casualty reports!”) and it’s just jump up on a group of soldiers to hear them amping themselves up for the battle only to see that enthusiasm drop away as their comrades fall one by one.

The gameplay and story are compelling enough to make you almost forget that Cal is on a path of failure. Yea, Fallen Order takes place within the canonical universe of Star Wars. In case you hadn’t noticed by the end of Return of the Jedi, the Jedi Order is still not a thing. The ending isn’t clear until well after the three quarter mark, when you kind of get an idea as to how everything is going to summarize itself. It is a powerful ending and one that makes sense in the greater universe. After all, the future does not know who Cal Kestis is.

If I had to nitpick, I’d also point out that the game does absolutely nothing to explain or acknowledge the fact that Cal respawns at meditation points when he dies, or the fact that zones respawn when you meditate. In Dark Souls the mechanic makes sense, here it’s thrown in with no real connection to the world or lore.

5. In Conclusion

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not an open world RPG but instead a mostly linear storytelling experience with some optional exploration sprinkled in. It tells a great story though, one that gives me hope for the future of Star Wars as a video game franchise (one which ironically was also killed by the same publisher). Fallen Order has great characters, a fantastic story, and combat mechanics that keep the game exciting from the moment you pick it up to the moment you put it down and the credits roll.

Finishing the main story without doing much in the way of exploring the optional mechanics took me roughly fifteen hours and some change. Your mileage may vary. That said, there is little in the way of replayability outside of going back and roughing through the game at a higher difficulty.

If playing on PC, I highly recommend just footing the month of Origin Premiere and playing through Fallen Order over the weekend for $15 and then spend the rest of the month doing whatever with the remaining library of games. For Xbox or PS4? Rent it from your local Redbox. It’s a fantastic game by all means, but I feel like most people will be done with it once the first playthrough is over with.

Vicious Circle Goes Free To Play, Refunds Everyone


Back in September we reported on the failed launch of Vicious Circle, the latest title from Rooster Teeth Games. In that time, the crew has been working behind the scenes and at the start of the month announced that not only would Vicious Circle be going free to play, but that those who bought founders packs would be refunded.

“Why is Vicious Circle going Free to Play? In short, the game didn’t succeed. We came together on a super creative ambitious new project, put our hearts into it, did our best to support it, and it didn’t work out, and that’s okay. Not every idea we have will be a success. We have to fail to find success. Servers will remain up because we made a game and we want the community to still have a chance to play it. We don’t want price to get in the way. We remain proud of the work that was put into the game and want as many people to have the chance to experience it as possible.”

Don’t get too excited about that free to play, though. While the game is going free to play, Rooster Teeth has no intention of supporting the title outside of some bug fixes.

Source: Steam

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.

[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.

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