There isn’t a single in-game trailer or screenshot available for DOTA 2, Valve’s sequel to the Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients. Yet, remarkably, they are showing the game off publically for the first time by hosting a huge tournament for it. For the next few days, you can watch the action live, right here. There’s also a CGI trailer out, which I’ve embedded below.
I didn’t play the original Warcraft 3 mod, but it is widely heralded as one of the best of its kind. Mixing tower defense with real-time strategy elements, you control various ‘hero’ characters and their allies against other teams, while defending your own base. Valve have never made anything outside the FPS genre before, so I’m curious to see how this turns out.
I was watching the live feed earlier, and from first glance I can see it has plenty of character and style to it. Embarrassingly, there seems to be some lag, and the match was paused by the ‘referee’. Technical hiccups aside, this is a really interesting way of unveiling a new game. It’s clear that Valve are trying to get a slice of the RTS tournament pie, spear headed by the likes of Starcraft and League of Legends. DOTA has a huge fanbase, so there’s a good chance this will get a decent following when it’s released. The only remaining question is whether it’ll be free-to-play or not.
Here’s that CGI trailer:
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
WoW consumed my life for almost the entirety of 2004/05, when I was studying for my A-levels, and was probably a key contributor to my D-grades. I’m probably not the only person who would admit to daydreaming of roaming through Elwynn Forest, even many years after I stopped playing. I just spent so much time there, and other places of that world, sometimes roleplaying, always questing, but best of all simply exploring an unknown land. Even though I LOVE what Blizzard did in Cataclysm, my favourite memories all come from what they call Vanilla WoW, the original version of the game.
Format: PC
Release date: 2013
Well, fuck. A FPS horror game, set in a mental asylum where all the patients are violent hyper crazed lunatics, and you are a guy armed only with a night vision video camera and can’t fight back? Better get Clarkie to play that shit.
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