Henke

Oh man, I was at the peak of my John Woo obsession when Mission Impossible 2 came out. From the film mag articles I'd read and the trailer it looked amazing. I was HYPED! Waited all summer for it to come to the cinema in my small town, and when it finally arrived? Ah... kinda underwhelming. I've since rewatched it a few times, and in it's favor I will say that the final half hour is the best string of action scenes Woo has made since leaving Hong Kong. It's just that it's like one and a half hours of dull bullshit leading up to it.

Good stuff brendon! Loved the look of your last (cancelled) Jam game, hope this one turns out good.

Heh, I've saved the PT demo on my PS4 as well. Didn't really care for it, but I'm keeping it around in the vain hope that one day I'll be able to sell the system and retire in style!

I will most likely not make any game this time around, but I would love to get in some 3D modelling practice with Oculus Medium. For a preview of what kinda stuff you can expect here's a video where I make my own, off-brand, DOT GOBBLER. Download the Off-Brand Dot Gobbler as a Unity package (5 MB) What I can deliver: 3D models of organic things: cartoony characters, vegetation, food, etc. Oculus Medium is not much good for making mechanical, realistic-looking things with straight edges and so on. Cartoony-looking mechanical things might work tho. I can deliver models as: -OBJ or FBX. -with Diffuse and Normal maps as PNG or TGA. -if you're using Unity I can set up the materials as well, and deliver as a unitypackage. -I'm not doing any character rigging and the pivots of individual parts will likely not be in optimal places by default. If you want me to make you something, please specify: -object? -what kinda style do you have in mind? -can it all be 1 mesh, or should it be split up? If so, into how many parts? For instance in the above example the arms and legs are separate meshes so they can be moved/animated individually. -are you using Unity? Contact: PM me on the forums Timezone: GMT +3 Portfolio: My previous games, that monstrosity up there.

Very nice aesthetic! Oh... And what's this? Looks like an eager TENNIS FAN showing up to the game!

Hahaha, great idea.

Great trailer! Amazing production values. UHHH, QUESTION: I'm thinking about making a VR version of my WizJam game from last year "In Search Of Paradise". Would that be an acceptable entry in this Jam, or would it be regarded as kind of a dick move to just update an old game and try to sneak it in again?

This has potential! Good luck with it!

Also here's some of my earlier artworks. Fireball Plant Breakfast Mr. Snake Vampire Fella Shouty Boy Shouty Boy (close up)

Yes! That's definitely something I can do.

Played through a couple more VR games over the past few days. SUPERHOT VR To compare this to the non-VR version, this feels more like a puzzle. Being able to move around freely in regular Superhot I found myself experimenting a lot on each respawn, trying out new paths that might lead to success, but here, because of your fixed position and the enemies' behaviour (they're either stationary or they're running towards you) you're more or less locked into one path, and success comes from refining that path until you're doing it perfectly. Normally I'd balk at something like that, but Superhot VR's scenarios are so beautifully crafted that I loved playing them over and over again. However, there are still some slight variation of certain variables on each restart, for instance it didn't seem to be entirely consistent whether an enemy would fling his gun towards you on death, and that often being a crucial factor in whether a run was successful or not it sometimes felt like failure was caused by an unlucky roll of the dice, rather than player mistake, which is annoying.Still, regardless of any complaints I have about it, this is still a fantastic experience. I enjoyed it more than non-VR Superhot and Robo Recall. With RR I often took days between sessions, but with this I was so enraptured I finished it's (maybe 2 hours-ish) campaign over the course of a day. Conductor Very atmospheric VR adventure, where you ride a small train along a track, and occasionally stop at stations to do puzzles that'll clear the path up ahead. My fave part of this, though, is when you've finished a puzzle and cleared the way, you climb into your train, load it up with coal, throw in a match, and push the lever into forward motion. You don your conductor's cap, pull the lever on the steam whistle a couple times and watch as the previous station dissappears into the darkness behind you. Then you turn on the radio, tune in to a station playing moody music and look ahead as you chug along through the dark, creepy woods.My only complaint is that the ending is very abrupt. But still well worth a tenner!

Mafia III Overall, it's a game built on strong systems but weak mission-design. The driving is great, the shooting and stealth are good, and there's ample opportunity for emergent gameplay moments to spring up in it's open world. But the missions, man. Good God. I don't know if anyone here played the Godfather 2 game, but this is pretty much exactly like that. You take over districts one by one and there's barely any effort put into diversifying what you actually do in the game. It starts off strong, with a mission where you rob a bank, dump the money through a hole you blew in the floor, and escape by boat through the canals. But after that pretty much every mission follows the same structure of "sneak/shoot your way into a place, and kill the boss-guy". That's it. Over and over for 20-30 hours. I get that the game is going for a down-to-earth tone so it's understandable that the missions won't be GTA V or Watch Dogs 2-style hijinks, but even GTA IV managed to have more interesting missions while still sticking with a more grounded narrative.However, like I said, the underlying systems are strong, and I enjoyed driving around and blasting gangsters enough to stick with it till the end, so, eh. 7/10? Here's some gameplay I recorded.

Great episode! Loved the Witcher 3 and Wildlands analysis.

Most of this falls flat for me. People make memes because it will get them likes(we all want to be popular on the internet), and they make mods because they love the games, not because Valve mindtricked them into it. People have been making Fan Missions for Thief 1 and 2 since they came out 17 years ago, and noone has received a cent for it. Did the evil Looking Glass Studios trick them into it? No, people love making mods and levels for the games they love! Simple as that. It only gets shady when Valve starts paying people to make mods and then only gives them 25% of the cut. Would've been better if they hadn't tainted the hobby of mod-making by bringing money into it at all. There's a saying that goes something like: "A man will gladly do a hobby for free, but start paying him for it and he'll immediately want a raise." And is 30% cut of sales that bad? You're still gonna get much more visibility, and thus sales, than if you sell it on your website or itch.io. It's not like you're getting nothing for those 30%. The whole infrastructure of the store, forums, refund-system, built-in screenshot and sharing functions, easy way to distribute patches, Steam Workshop which makes installing mods WAY less of a headache than in the old days, smoother ways to connect with friends in online games, etc. No, I don't think Steam/Valve is some benevolent force for good. They simply provide a service, and that service is better than anything else on the market.

AWWWW YEAH

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is one of my favourite games ever. Everything in it just clicked with me. The setting, the stealth, the fighting. I love stealth games, but EfBB managed to introduce a new twist on the genre I hadn't seen before: you could shoot out all the lights so a room would be pitch black. You couldn't see the baddies, and they couldn't see you. You'd only be able to determine their position by sound or if their body obscured a far-off light point. Made for some very tense sneaking bits. Later on of course you get the night-vision and it changes the dynamic of the stealth quite a bit. The story was great as well, and very well paced. There's some great sci-fi concepts and settings in there, like the container-storage-cells and the cryo-prison sequence. That latter one was a terrifying mindfuck as I kept messing up and passing out and wondering how many years were passing by in the outside-world while I was struggling in vain to escape. The Dark Athena chapter added later was decent enough, but EfBB is just about a perfect game. Shame it didn't click with you, Ben. Re: Far Cry. Yeah it was a good one. Tho I think the main selling points was it's graphical oomph, sometimes-clever AI, and the ability to drive vehicles. All things which have been improved on by later games, so I dunno if it's all that special anymore. I liked it well enough until (SPOILERS) the silly mutants show up.

I don't have that much, let's see. Stuff I'm totally gonna play at some point, promise: ABZÜ Hard West House of the Dying Sun Kona Life is Strange Overgrowth Project CARS Renowned Explorers Stuff I might get around to eventually, we'll see: The Beginner's Guide MX vs ATV: Supercross Moon Hunters Subnautica Zombie Army Trilogy I'm probably not gonna play this: Stardew Valley Technobabylon

Hey I hope the Jam is still gonna happen at some point! Tho actually I don't think I'll be making a game of my own this time, but I would like to make 3D models for other people's projects.

After all the hype it got ITT, I went and poked at Medium a bit, and ended up spending a lot of the weekend with it. It's a lot of fun, and I was surprised by how enjoyable the tutorials were. There's something so mellow and relaxing about those VR sculpting classes that I'd recommend them even to folks with no interest in 3D modelling! Anyway, I've mostly just been making food. I also made breakfast, which was a bit more complex, but that video's not viewable in the US because of the Hank Williams tune I soundtracked it with.

I've also been poking at VRTK for a few days. This is what I've made so far. Really pleased with how well the scope works.

I've started VR development as well, integrating support into my Wizard Jam game In Search Of Paradise. Not sure yet on far I'm gonna take it. Might just add it as a free update to the existing game, or maybe I'll turn this into something more ambitious.

I watched the new Ghost In The Shell and I liked it GOD DAMMIT I've seen the '95 anime probably 20 times. It was a big inspiration on a young Henke who wanted to grow up to be an action movie director. It of course influenced lots of people, including the Wachowskis who cited it as a big influence for The Matrix. But beyond it's fantastic action scenes, it wasn't a perfect movie or anything. The plot was often slow and parts of it felt like you had to have read the manga to keep up, also the ending was pretty limp. While the new movie is so generic it likely won't influence any future generations of filmmakers, it does at least improve on the pacing and storytelling of the original. ScarJo does a great job and I felt much more connected to the Major's story here. The actionscenes? So-so. Visuals? Great. Overall it's a solid sci-fi action movie.

Alrightey, I've had the Rift for 3 weeks, and finished 3 games. Reviews time! ADR1FT In this you play an astronaut whose station has had some sort of catastrophic accident. As you prepare for evac you'll need to travel to different parts of the ruined station. Along the way you find audiologs detailing the events leading up to the accident. The story and the voiceacting are very good. The gameplay is a tad monotonous with a lot of just floating slowly through space and the objectives are basically just a series of fetch quests. I did appreciate the complexity of the flight system though, with full controls over pitch/yaw/roll. The VR implementation is both good and bad. On the good side, it looks amazing, and really makes you feel like you're in a space movie, like 2001 or Gravity. On the bad side, this is one of the more nauseating games I've played with the Rift. I couldn't play for more than an hour at a time. Robo Recall There were times while I was playing this, when it felt like the most revolutionary action game I'd played since Max Payne. The very act of shooting things in VR is cool enough on it's own, but Robo Recall heaps so much added complexity on that core mechanic. It allows for experimentation on a similar scale as Epic's earlier Bulletstorm game. And I was initially skeptical of the teleportation movement, but after a while it felt like an obvious part of the game. Not a limitation of VR, but an essential power in your arsenal. That's me, kicking robo-butt. Yet, for all of that, Robo Recall is missing something. It's amazing as an experience, but not so much as a game. My play sessions rarely went for longer than a level at a time, and I was never really dying to get back into it. The story is too lightweight, and so is the challenge. I don't think I ever died in this game, only failed missions occasionally because I didn't recall robots fast enough. And though it initially looks like a AAA game, it's not. The entirety of it's 10 levels are spread out over the same 3 environments(which all look very similar). Reportedly it had a budget of under $10M. It's impressive what Epic has done here, and it shows the way for future VR shooters, but it's not the VR killer app we'd hoped for. Chronos In contrast to Robo Recall, this doesn't do much with VR(besides the occasional neat trick), but as a game it shines, at least if you're into Souls-alikes. Started playing this late last week and I've been spending several hours with it every day since, finished it last night. Unlike Dark Souls, you don't drop souls when you die, instead pressure to not fuck up is provided by the fact that your character ages one year every time you die. You start the game at age 18. I played on Medium and was in my mid-40's by the time I reached the end, but apparently you can play until your late 80's before it's over for good. The combat is very Souls-like, but it has considerably less complexity to it's systems. Only 7 weapons(IIRC), and 4 stats to level up. Also there's more focus on adventure gaming and puzzles solving. The story starts out so-so but gets increasingly interesting the further you get, and the ending is a real mind-fuck. Overall, yeah, I loved this.

I think if he was gonna get fired for the shitpost thing it would've been back when it happened, not half a year later when it's died down. And the Zenimax court case isn't really because of anything Luckey has done(as far as I can tell).

What makes you think he was "thrown out"? The article doesn't say much about why he left.