Month: October 2024

As much as I’ve enjoyed Elden Ring, I’ve always thought the Lands Between don’t have enough giant robots stomping around—unless you count the Wandering Mausoleums, but that’s a philosophical debate for another time. Luckily, that’s a problem we might someday see solved thanks to modders like Zullie the Witch, a prolific Souls dataminer whose most recent work involves dropping a dang Armored Core into Elden Ring.  Before you get too excited: No, it’s not pilotable. Actually, it can’t even move, but let’s give modders time to cook. Mechs need to take baby steps, too.

In the YouTube video showcasing the Armored Core’s sortie across games, Zullie explains that the crossover was possible because both games share the same development engine. In fact, it’s a lineage that FromSoft games have shared since Armored Core 4 in 2006, each game built on an offshoot of the same foundational engine. The most recent games have enough technical similarities that modders, in pursuit of their great and terrible designs, can already use some tools built for Elden Ring with Armored Core 6. It was those same tools that enabled the horror of porting CJ into AC6 less than a day after th…

Since the surprise success of Townscaper a few years ago, a crop of other “radically casual” cozy city builders has been in the works, and Tiny Glade has definitely been at the top of my wishlist—and most other folks’, I suspect. Thank goodness we’re finally going to get to try painting lovely ivy-covered walls across a pastoral canvas: Pounce Light says a demo is coming on May 30.

Tiny Glade, from everything we’ve seen so far, is a very laid back building game that takes after some of the procedural building elements so many people enjoyed in Townscaper but with its own deeper set of building tools. You can draw castle-y curtain walls, raise towers, and scatter your choices of windows, lights, and other decor. Bits of your project will respond to one another as you build, like walls sprouting an arched gateway when you draw a footpath leading up to its edge. 

In its blog post, Pounce Light says that in the demo we’ll be able to play the “summer glade” map, the sunny, grass plains and woods backdrop that we’ve seen in so many of its sneak peeks and posts. From a screenshot, it looks like we’ll be able to build structures and paths, pla…

I’ve written a touch about Helldivers 2’s slapstick deaths, reinforced by rapid respawns and a low punishment for beefing it—its Magika-esque friendly fire systems also contributing to its ‘Warhammer 40k Gone Wrong’ vibes. It joins Lethal Company as a game where dying is just inherently funny, each panicked, scrambling doom its own punchline.

Arrowhead Games history of games centred around friendly fire fun is—according to the studio’s CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt—directly inspired by the chaos of tabletop roleplaying (thanks, GamesRadar). 

“[Comedy] is absolutely what I’m going for when I design games. The concept originates from years of playing [pen and paper] RPGs, where the players manage to turn everything into a farce. No matter if it’s Cthulhu or D&D, it always ends with us crying of laughter.”

As someone with a vested interest in running tabletop myself, Pilestedt is bang on the money here. The improv nature of most TTRPG games always leads to a chaotic network of stacking consequences, which can easily result in four grown adults giggling like school children around a bunch of dice and pencils. 

That …

An upcoming turn-based tactics game hearkens back to the earliest days of the genre: Archrebel Tactics, an in-development indie game from solo developer Ularis Badler, draws directly from the well of Rebelstar, the 1984 ZX Spectrum ur-tactics game from Julian Gollop, the man who would later steer the creation of X-Com.

Archrebel Tactics will put players in control of a few dozen units on a grid-based map, moving them with an action point system and picking out targets as they go. It’s a bit flashier than that, however: Shooting is on that pixel-based world, and shots can hit intervening terrain—some of which is destructible—or be shot down by countermeasures.

The current trailer shows off some cool effects: There’s copious use of modern particle and lighting effects in the graphics, both for smoke and fire as well as zappy lightning guns. There’s also some really cool tactics stuff, like the countermeasures I mentioned before, and a kind of room-scanning throwable device that picks out enemies inside a room before the soldiers enter.

Archrebel Tactics doesn’t yet have a release date, but it does have some planned post-release features: Graphics upgr…