Great show as always.
I loved the Tardis, I also loved the Sabre Cat Mount... The market stall is a good idea, all it needed, in order for people to come along and actually buy something is...
A SALES PITCH SHOUT?
A shout that comes with the mod, that allows you to talk as a Cockney Market Seller in the voice of Ray Winston or better yet Del-Boy Trotter.
Now that would be excellent!?
Lovely Jubbly.
every other bastard guard has had both of his knees capped in my game so the knowledge that some of you have heard it sparingly or not at all is somewhat annoying... ive heard 3, or was it 4, guards saying it in a round... now that is a sight to see.... or hear as it is. an arrow in, an arrow in, an arrow in, an arrow in the knee, the knee, the knee, the kneeeeeee.
This week Seb and Cam hob aboard the Tardis to travel through time and relative dimensions in Skyrim. Also, they build a shop.
TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimensions In Space by ShatteredSteel
Steam Workshop Link
Grace Darklings Elven Scout Armor by Grace Darkling
Skyrim Nexus Link
Your Market Stall by wgstein
Skyrim Nexus Link
Armored SabreCat Mount by tumbajamba
Skyrim Nexus Link
Superb ENB-RL by sung9533 and Alakan
Skyrim Nexus Link
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When not busy curating her novelty t-shirt collection, Sarah can be found shouting endless streams of nonsense into the great void of the internets. Greatest life achievement: finally having her very own crocheted Link hat.
I kept hoping for a VERY long time that they would announce this game for consoles. I really don't have a powerful enough PC for it. It's been years, and still no word, which sucks because I sure aren't spending $$$$ to build another rig just to play it. If they release it on the PS4, that's fine I'm all for that, but otherwise I can't play it.
Like in any extreme survival situation, the early moments of Don't Starve's grueling-yet-fascinating struggle to stay alive are electric. Suddenly the clock is ticking. Confidence is high as you first explore a vast open-world wilderness teeming with danger. From trapping a rabbit for the first time to crafting an axe to chop precious firewood before nightfall, every minor accomplishment that keeps you ticking is immediately gratifying. But as the days draw on and dodging death's icy grip gets harder, the rigors of this unflinchingly brutal roguelike adventure chip away at your patience.
Don't Starve casts you in the unfortunate role of Wilson, a scientist who has been mysteriously transported to a strange and deadly world by a demon-gentleman. With little more than a quick greeting, your adversary vanishes, and you're left alone to figure out how to stay alive. Story and dialogue are pretty minimal, aside from a few encounters in the super tough adventure mode, which is accessed by first locating a portal hidden in the randomly generated survival mode world. The hands-off nature of the story is a strength, allowing the heavy atmosphere and outstanding visual design of this grim land draw you in. There's little time for dalliances anyway. A great many things in the game's eerie world are out to kill you from the get-go.
Survival doesn't come easy, but there's an undeniable thrill to the challenge. Your first few minutes of exploration hinge on harvesting whatever basic resources you stumble upon: a few twigs, some flint, rocks, a handful of grass. Collect enough of these raw materials, and you can make an axe, a torch, rope, a spear, and other crucial tools that increase your chances of survival. Don't Starve's deep resource harvesting and crafting system brings previous open-world games like Minecraft and Terraria to mind, and it's one of the game's strongest hooks. Figuring out how to put each item you collect to good use is a fun process of experimentation. Basic items are relatively easy to cobble together with minimal materials, though creating science and alchemy stations also pushes you further down the crafting rabbit hole by unlocking tons of more elaborate item recipes to pursue. Of course, staying alive long enough to build everything is another story.
Dangers are frequently stacked against you in inventive and sometimes frustrating ways. Exploring, scavenging, harvesting resources, and building are best done in the day. Without a torch or a campfire to provide illumination when night falls, you will be torn to pieces by the demonic creatures that roam the darkness within seconds. Building a fire isn't enough either. You have to have enough wood or other fuel sources to keep it lit throughout the night, which creates a constant state of near panic every time the twilight phase of the day/night cycle arrives. Getting caught without the necessary ingredients for a fire or ample burnable materials to last the night spells instant doom.
Changing seasons also usher in new problems to tackle. Live long enough, and winter rears its frosty head, bringing subzero temperatures that cause you bodily harm if you venture too far from a heat source. Admittedly, these interesting wrinkles add depth and additional difficulty to the already challenging survival mechanics at play. They sometimes tip the scale too far, however, particularly given the plentiful supply of other potentially life-ending obstacles thrown in your path.
Many games require decision making, but Soul Sacrifice emphasizes choice more than most. Everything, from the abilities you possess to the monsters you battle, is subject to choice: to save or to sacrifice? This notion is ingrained in both story and character progression, presenting you with limitations and dilemmas that make this grim monster-hunting game very appealing. Decision making alone isn't the only reason to give Soul Sacrifice a try. It's rich with evocative characters, has creatively fiendish enemy designs, and is coated with an effective layer of gloom and doom. Pleasingly, the captivating presentation and narration overshadow the game's repetitive tendencies, and the weight of every decision makes the otherwise straightforward action a truly thought-provoking affair.
Before your journey begins, you're locked away in a cage made from flesh and bone, awaiting sacrifice at the hand of the ultimate sorcerer, Magusar. A mysterious book, the chatty Librom, emerges from the remains of the sorcerer's last victim. Part necronomicon and part snarky companion, Librom is your portal to the past of Magusar's former partner, and through it, you experience Magusar's rise to power. As the game's quest hub, customization menu, and glossary, it's an inventive approach that suits a portable game quite well. The lack of an overworld is odd at first, but since you're a prisoner, it makes sense in context.
While reliving the life of a sorcerer once sworn to hunt possessed humans and animals, your primary charge is simple: defeat and sacrifice your enemies in order to rid the land of foul beasts. You trudge through rotten wastelands to frozen caves, casting spells, pummeling enemies, and dodging incoming attacks while managing your limited pool of resources. Every mission has clear-cut conditions; you must defeat a set number of common enemies, locate hidden items, or topple horrific archfiend juggernauts. In order to surmount the often difficult campaign missions, you're often forced to beef up your character by undertaking optional Avalon Pact missions. This is unfortunate, since most Avalon Pact missions lack challenge or variety, especially in the first half of the game. It's a blessing, then, that there are so many interesting side stories peppered throughout to distract you from the repetition at hand.
You head into every mission with a set of six abilities, or offerings, ranging from melee weapons to summon spells. You start with a small selection, but every mission rewards victory with new offerings based on your performance. An offering can turn your arm to stone, heal your party, trap your enemy, and even stop time. Without a stock of offerings, all you can do is run. Offerings can be used only a certain number of times during the course of a single quest, though sacrificing enemies and tapping into one-time-use environmental pools lets you replenish an individual offering's cast count. If, however, you get sloppy and sacrifice all of a particular offering during the course of a mission, you must wait until the end before replenishing your ability to use it.
Coordinating the relationship between your various offerings is critical during the challenging archfiend battles, and losing access to just one is often enough to tip the scales in your enemies' favor. You could carry more than one of a particular offering into battle, but it's better to diversify your capabilities. Thankfully when you possess multiples of a single offering, you can sacrifice the extras to boost the cast count of another. Like most actions in Soul Sacrifice, this action carries ramifications. The decision to boost an offering's cast count diminishes your resources for fusion, a process that lets you create completely new and advanced offerings. Fusing offerings isn't critical to success, but it gives you a chance to delve a little deeper into the elemental variations for most of your existing inventory.
Once an enemy is defeated, it's up to you to choose whether to save or sacrifice its soul, permanently boosting either your stamina or strength stat, respectively. Souls also act as replenishments during battle: sacrifices refill some of your offerings, and saved souls restore a bit of health. The decision usually comes down to your needs at the time, but the smart player will take the time to coordinate their decisions. Since your choices effect skill levels, you may find that too many snap decisions shape your character's traits in ways you never intended. However, outside of a few pivotal instances, your decision bears little weight on the story at large.
While you don't have equipment in the traditional sense, you can equip sigils, which are symbols carved into your right arm. When you defeat enemies and absorb their soul shards, new sigils are unlocked. Each sigil has two conditions attached, but the second becomes active only when you've struck the proper balance between sacrificing and saving your enemies, reflected by the affinity of your arm, and determined by your tendency to save or sacrifice.
Like gathering new offerings for fusion, you may find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to grind through old missions to acquire the right ingredients to produce a new sigil. That's not so bad, but limiting certain abilities to your arm's affinity seems unfair given how it's managed. You have to spend resources on lowering your life or magic levels, and then replay missions in order level up the opposite levels. Sacrificing items and resources is one thing, but asking the player to sacrifice hours of hard work takes the notion of sacrifice a bit too far for the game's own good, especially when you consider the repetitive nature of most missions.
Michael Chang, creator of the third-person swordfighting game Blade Symphony, meets the man who inspired him to dive into game design: Mike Gummelt.
Behind every great idea, there's a spark of inspiration. Video games are no different, and as the next generation of developers unveil their creations, you can often spot the source of their ideas. A few weeks ago, I met with Michael Chang, creator of the stylized swordfighting game Blade Symphony. Seeing the game in motion, I was instantly reminded of the lightsaber combat from Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast--and this wasn't a coincidence.
As it turns out, Jedi Outcast--a game now over a decade old--was a major influence during Blade Symphony's development, and Chang himself had been a regular in Outcast's lightsaber dueling community. I was then surprised to learn he had never crossed paths with Mike Gummelt, the man who designed that saber combat system. Now, in the almost hour-long interview below, these two developers meet for the first time to deconstruct Outcast's lightsaber mechanics and talk about classic samurai movies. It's a highly technical discussion of a game that greatly impacted both of their lives.
Blade Symphony is a third-person swordfighting game unlike anything I've seen recently in the fighting genre. It combines classical architecture, cyber ninjas, and an extremely robust combat system into a high-speed blend of slicing and dicing. As Chang describes it, in Blade Symphony, "you're basically playing filmed and staged swordfighting. We didn't want to go hyperrealistic. It's not supposed to be a swordfighting simulation; it's supposed to be highly stylized and fluid."
Blade Symphony began as a humble Half-Life 2 mod using Valve's Source engine. In 2011--after Chang and his team merged with fellow modders Team Dystopia--a Blade Symphony Kickstarter campaign was launched to help make the game into a full retail release. The campaign was a success, and today, development is running strong on Blade Symphony. An early version is now available through Steam's early-access program, and on the game's official page.
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was the fourth game in LucasArts' Jedi Knight series (assuming you include Dark Forces). It mixed third- and first-person combat with an array of lightsabers, blasters, and Force powers. This diversity of weapons and powers could lead to some hilarious scenarios if you--like me--switched on the game's console commands and spawned an entire army of Lando Calrissians to fight by your side. And to push off a building. And to battle a Rancor.
The game was a critical success--garnering a 9.0 from GameSpot's own Amer Ajami--and was praised for combining several different mechanics and modes into one, well-executed package. For a dedicated segment of the Outcast community, one-on-one lightsaber dueling became an obsession. Within this futuristic fight club, there were no Force powers or fancy gadgets, just the purity of saber-on-saber competition. This robust fighting mechanic, designed by Mike Gummelt, took on a life of its own and would ultimately inspire a young Michael Chang to create Blade Symphony.
Krillbite Studio's Adrian Tingstad Husby talks about designing this unusual horror game in which you play as a 2-year-old.
For very young children, the line between what's imagined and what's real can be impossible to discern. Sometimes, a child's imagination brings him or her joy and comfort; for instance, a stuffed animal can become a beloved companion imbued with a personality of its own. However, that same imagination can also tinge the world with terror, creating the sense that there really is a monster lurking in the shadows under the bed. The rich creative potential for horror that lingers in the imaginations of children has gone largely unexplored in games, but Norway's Krillbite Studio is changing that. In Krillbite's upcoming game Among the Sleep, you play as a 2-year-old, and this influences every aspect of the game, including the placement of the camera, your interactions with the environment, and the ways in which the game attempts to create its frightening atmosphere.
I asked Krillbite's Adrian Tingstad Husby about the inspirations for and influences on Among the Sleep's unusual approach to horror. "A first-person horror game from the perspective of a toddler targets a rather primal stage that everybody has been through and can relate to," said Husby. "The whole team has drawn a lot of inspiration from our own dreams and childhood memories. We hope this will help to make the game more personal. But we continue to draw inspiration from all over the place, from The Shining, to Amnesia, to child psychology--a lot of things have influenced the game in some way or another."
"We don't limit ourselves by realism. We're not making a baby simulator, but a creative experience for adults."
I was curious how important research on actual children was, and how much the team at Krillbite was letting their creative instincts guide them. Husby said, "We combine a creative and research-based approach. For instance, we've been in contact with people of competence within the fields of child development and psychology, as well as reading books and research ourselves. In addition, we've been recording footage of nephews and the like for animation and behavior-related research. But even though all of this research provides a lot of inspiration, we don't limit ourselves by realism. We're not making a baby simulator, but a creative experience for adults. The perspective, imagination, and dream theme also provide a lot of creative freedom to do exactly what we want."
One of the most immediately noticeable things that sets Among the Sleep apart from other first-person games is the way the camera sits lower in the environments than we're accustomed to. But Krillbite is eager to establish that this isn't just a normal first-person game with the camera closer to the ground. "The perspective is central to almost all aspects of the game, from the story to the visuals and the gameplay," Husby said. "When you see your own small hands crawling quickly into a tight spot to hide, it doesn't exactly feel like a traditional FPS! We hope that the player is brought back to their childhood--not understanding what is going on, but always exploring how the world works. We also want to bring players back to their childhood's overactive imagination. When you hear things you can't place or recognize, your mind automatically fills in the gaps--and our graphics will never compete with people's own imagination."
Of course, many horror games rely on combat to generate some of their tension. Sometimes, fear in a game comes from not knowing when the next zombie, xenomorph, or other hideous threat will leap out of the shadows and force you to desperately fight for your life. But the notion of a game in which you play as a 2-year-old involving combat seemed unlikely to me. Husby confirmed my suspicions that Among the Sleep does not involve combat, and talked about how combat can also undermine a game's attempts to be scary. "We feel a combat system is exactly that: a system. People will often master it, or be frustrated by it; either way, the horror disappears. [In Among the Sleep], players will have to explore and find places to hide and avoid confrontation, something that also maintains some of the crucial mystique of horror. Threats still leap at you from the shadows, so [the absence of combat] only changes what actions you must do to overcome them. You'll be thinking, 'What was that thing!?' instead of studying and shooting every creature. While we were still [in the early stages of development], Amnesia was released, and it really reinforced our belief that our 'passive' protagonist would work in practice."
"We feel a combat system is exactly that: a system. People will often master it, or be frustrated by it; either way, the horror disappears."
Watching the gameplay teaser that Krillbite has released (embedded above), it seems clear that the way your perspective tilts and totters as you move around and the way that you see your hands in front of you as you crawl along the ground go a long way toward creating the unusual sensation that you really are inhabiting and interacting with the game's world as a toddler. The game begins with you waking up in the middle of the night in a seemingly empty house. I'm very curious about where your journey takes you over the course of the game, but I deliberately shied away from asking Husby questions about the game's story. I want to uncover its mysteries for myself.
When we all might get the chance to uncover those mysteries depends on whether or not Among the Sleep's Kickstarter campaign succeeds. Currently, the members of Krillbite are balancing work on the game with part-time jobs to pay the bills, and though they say they will continue to work on the game if the Kickstarter fails, they also say that it will take longer and that some content will, of necessity, be cut. As someone who both wants to see more games take creative risks like the one Among the Sleep is taking and who just really wants to play this unusual and atmospheric horror game, I hope this Kickstarter is a success. In a landscape where games in which you shoot zombies have gone from being creepy to being commonplace, the opportunity to return to those hazy days of memory, when every shadowy closet was a potential source of danger and every ordinary bump in the night was a reason to be afraid, sounds truly scary. Among the Sleep could end up being that rare nightmare that's actually worth having.
Something's rotten in the state of GameSpot. How else to explain why Tom Mc Shea takes the hosting reigns in this Grand Theft Auto-infused podcast?
Turnabout is fair play. Case in point: usual host Kevin VanOrd gets forced into a panelist position so that Tom Mc Shea can see how well he handles the grueling quizzes. Spoiler! He doesn't do so hot, proving that he knows more about Tchaikovsky than he knows about DMA Designs.
More to the point, Kevin, Tom, Carolyn Petit, Chris Watters, and Tyler Winegarner flesh out the Grand Theft Auto V trailers to determine which gets them most excited for the upcoming sequel. We also consider Nintendo's E3 presence, analyze whether "Cream" is an appropriate name for an animated rabbit, and somehow skip over the usual Dark Souls Appreciation Hour!
You can access all previous episodes on GameSpot here.
GameSpot GamePlay Episode 38: Sexual Dismemberment
GameSpot GamePlay Episode 37: Mascara Galaxy
GameSpot GamePlay Special Edition Spoilercast: BioShock Infinite
GameSpot GamePlay Episode 36: Nosebleed Seats
GameSpot GamePlay Episode 35: Drink, Hamburger, and Afro Pick
GameSpot GamePlay Episode 34: Junk Deodorant
Kevin VanOrd is a lifelong RPG lover and violin player. When he isn't busy building PCs and composing symphonies, he watches American Dad reruns with his fat cat, Ollie.
