So tonight i played borderlands 1 remaster past midnight, checked socials and... kosa has passed its senate committee vote with 86-1. Yes committee, not a full senate vote despite what i was lead to believe from the words of others. Apologies for that. So despite this news, there is still time to stop this, we just need to work hard to resist it.
The bill has not reached the finish line, it only a passed a checkpoint. We can still turn it around.
I'll see you all tomorrow..
KOSA is a censorship bill that won’t make kids safe. Instead, it'll put all internet users at risk, especially youth. If you believe in a fr
Midnight Gaming: The Heist (of my years and money) PART 1 - December 24th 2025
Welcome back to another round of Midnight Gaming. Its been a year..... not a great year.... but also personally speaking not an awful year. Its hard to say if next year will in anyway be decent or better. But at the very least, we can say we had some good memories.
And you know what, I kinda want to break the routine up for a bit, just for today. We won't be covering any news and the game is one I didnt play last week bit rather one I played for several years, or over 700 hours.
Its the coop heist em' up, Payday 2.
So as I was saying about memories, I wanna take a trip down the past from when the payday series first launched to where we are at today. I'm gonna give a quick summary of each major update as well as my own thoughts at the time as we make our way down the timeline.
First off....
18th October 2011 - This was the release date for the first game to start the payday series off, developed by an emerging game developer called Overkill software, it was a first person cooperative shooter series where you work with up to 3 players to pull off various heists and illegal capers, taking hostages, stealing various valuables and shooting a lot of law enforcement as you make your escape. At the time I was pretty into Valve's Left 4 Dead, a coop shooter where you try to survive making your way from one safehouse to the next while hordes of zombies try to kill your ass. It was a good time for teenage me, so when Payday: The heist was presented like it was Left 4 Dead but with bank robberies I was like, oh cool... yippie. I liked Payday the heist for what it brought to the table, but 2013 was when shit got real.
2013 - So Payday TH had a a secret arg of sorts, and solving it culminated in having to do the heist First World Bank on the hardest difficulty, getting past the 1st major gate leading into the vault lobby, then without destroying any of the cams there, have each crew member stand in a specific spot in a certain direction to open a hidden door, you then go in a complete a puzzle that you get the answer from following the arg to unveil a lock, and finally place drill on it that takes HOURS to open, repairing it everytime it jams, all the while police are regularly assaulting you and draining your resources. And what do you get for completing this monumental task? Several gold bars worth millions (and good for several lvl ups cause money = xp) and an achievement called Overdrill.
Course if you were part of the thousands who first accomplished this feat, you also got to recieve a beta for the games sequel. I never did Overdrill in The Heist so I never recieved a key... atleast not this way, see I managed to get to play the PD2 beta another way by simply doing what the pros call "buying my way in". There was a preorder available on Steam for Payday 2 called the career criminal edition that gave you some cosmetics along with some starting cash and the games soundtrack. But you also get a beta key to play the game in its pre-final launch state. So I bought the pre-order and played the beta and dang, a lot of the things they changed/added really made payday 2 a step up from The Heist, when launch day came I played the heck out of it robbing banks, moving bags of coke, trying and failing to stealth the fbi building. Payday 2 was a lot of fun in its early days though it was missing the cloaker, one of the specials from PDTH due to a game killing bug that they needed to figure out in the future, which they did next year.
Overkill made it clear they were going to do more with payday 2 then they did with The Heist and one of those being the amount of new content they were going to add, some of it being free and some of it being paid for. One of the first new heists added was Diamond Store which personally speaking, acted more like an expanded version of Jewellery Store since the map was bigger and stealth required you to disable the alarms with a code you get from the manager in order to loot the diamonds safely.
Later on we got the Armored Transport heists dlc which is a collection of maps where you rob some armored cars for loot, the interesting part was how you might uncover blueprints that'll let you do the train heist where you straight up steal a Team Fortress 2 sentry gun, course you also move ammo bags which could blow up if you threw them too far which was kinda annoying. This heist did get an update in the future with the removal of needing to find the blueprints each time you wanted to do it which was nice.
We also got some weapons from the Gage Weapon Pack 1 including the 1st throwable, the frag grenade, which I can kinda remember there being a controversy over it being a pay to win advantage? Even though it doesnt go very far when you throw it, you can end up accidently blowing up civilians and your own teamates with them and that cops can actually hit the frag grenade with gunfire therefore potentially blowing your own self up. I think it was a pretty big controversy since overkill ended up adding a new version of the grenade for free for people who joined the steam community group so who knows.
The holidays came around and we got some new seasonal heists, safehouse nightmare which was a heist that took place in a horror version of the og safehouse map and we then got GO Bank, a bank heist that doubles as a crossover as its a map from Counter-strike GO. Trying to go stealth on this heist ends up being a luck of the draw depending on if you manage to handle the guards, civvies and cams, if the random phone calls play nice and DON'T summon additional guards on you and if you and your teammates managed to time getting into and out of the vault without tripping the door laser. Loud wasnt much better since you had to construct a dang cage to extract the loot, out in the open where snipers can shoot at you from all sides. And god help you if ya didnt buy the ace pilot cause then the plane could crash and you get the fun task of moving all your loot through the sewers, under a time limit!
Did also get a xmas album starring hoxtons old va from PD:TH, Pete Gold cause he wasnt available for the sequel so they changed it to an american guy who was dallas brother. The community wanted to see old hoxton back and this was a nice tease for something in the future. You can give it a listen here: https://youtu.be/n0kftLGNjzU?si=iWSI2NbB_UISJZDw
2014 - 2014 was probably the golden age of Payday 2 with the amount of content and new features that were added to the game. For one? This saw the release of the 1st edition of the infamy feature, essentially a prestige system that lets you reset your level and lose a percentage of your money for a fancy number at the side of your name.... you also get a choice of mask and an xp booster so you can grind a bit faster. We also saw the 2nd weapon pack from our pal Gage, this time giving us LMGs which you couldnt aim with iron sights and were a bit underwhelming for a while until they got the update that made them pretty good.
This year also introduced Deathwish, a new harder difficulty to eclipse the old Overkill difficulty, increasing the danger to the point that it would only take 2 shots from a standard heavy swat to break armor even with wearing the heaviest armor. The election day heist released next was a fascinating one since it was a 2 day heist with the 2nd day being different depending on if you tagged the right truck in the 1st day. You managed to tag the right truck either through stealth or loud? You get to go to a warehouse and hack some ballots to rig the votes. Tagged the wrong truck? You now had to go on an impromptu bank heist as a cover to destroy some ballot boxes next door. This was a really cool concept... and overkill never really did it again for any future heist. Honestly I dont recall any other heist in the series that changed depending how well you did in the 1st day.... course as the game got updated, they drifted away from doing multi day heists and mainly just did single day heists...
We then got the courier mod pack which basically placed random hidden packages around the maps that you could collect and getting enough of a type of package awarded you some unique weapon mods. This was kinda hit or miss since the mods were kinda helpful but acquiring was a bit of hassle of memorising all the spawn spots. Still, it offered a nice distraction when your stealthing the local harvest and trustee and were waiting on the drill to finish. The sniper pack was more interesting since you get some sniper rifles to play around with, that were of course able to penetrate shields making that enemy type utterly worthless. You could also get a new asset for some heists in the form of a zipline that takes you to a vantage for the purpose of having a high point to snipe from, honestly didn't see many people really use it, it wasnt too useful during gameplay.
Shadow Raid did shake things up a bit being a stealth ONLY heist where raising an alarm leads to a failure, and this was honestly pretty dang fascinating... except doing stealth is kind of a pain in PD2 especially if you're doing it with others. Neat heist though not a personal favorite. Big Bank however was something else, bringing in a new feature of preplanning which got added in older heists, letting you choose where to place assets and factors so you can plan out a heist rather then simply buying the assets at the start. Big bank was a pretty good heist given the number of objectives you gotta do to get into the vault like trying to figure the right computer to hack, heading to the crane and moving the big pig to drop through the roof so you can collect the drill parts and then setup the big fucking drill by the bank vault. Course you can choose to forgo the drill and use thermite instead with the limited favours you have and you can pick your escape route, which in most of my runs tend to use the bus escape since it was the closest to the vault so less issues with securing the loot. Good shit that heist.
We then got a couple more Gage offerings with the shotgun pack that introduced different ammo types you can set with your shotguns like flechettes, slugs or high explosive (which was helpful in removing dozer faceplates) and we also got the Assault pack adding some new assault rifles that didnt quite manage to topple the Car-4 from its meta throne but we did see a return of the GL40 grenade launcher from PDTH's own dlc. The next new heist was an absolute doozy with it being a 2 day heist that acted as a crossover with the indie game Hotline Miami along with it being touted as a step towards freeing old hoxton thanks to a new character called the dentist (played by Giancarlo Esposito) whom we did the big bank heist for. The Hotline Miami heist was pretty great, being a 2 day heist that starts with ragebaiting a russian mobster by killing his men, burning some cars and blowing up a gas station while the "commissar" screams at you is treat. Theres also a meth lab on the map, in one of the motel rooms so you can cook up some profit like with day 1 of Rats. Day 2 of Hotline Miami kicks it up a notch with having you burst out of crates to ambush mobsters before hauling ass up an apartment to reach the penthouse where the commissar is hiding, and I mean haul ass causes theres drugs up there that will over time be destroyed until you get up there, meaning the sooner you make it up, the more you can loot. Good fucking heist.
And now, the moment has arrived, Old Hoxton came back. And the new Hoxton we were heisting up to this point became Houston. Hoxton Breakout was another 2 day heist that was pretty damn good, 1st day you're escorting an armored truck to the escape and the second day you break into the fbi hq to grab any case files on the payday crew to try and look for the name of a "rat". One other thing that this update brought along was the introduction of different playable heisters rather than one of the originals (& Houston), and the 1st new playable character was.... john wick, like from the film John Wick, full name and all, just without Keanu Reeves. Also Old Hoxton was playable. There was genuine controversy over Wicks inclusion since people felt he didnt fit into the PAYDAY universe. There was a hashtag called #KickTheWick where if you joined a lobby playing as wick, odds are you would be promptly be kicked. Apart from that we did see the inclusion of the new Perk Decks, a set of unique skills and buffs you can level up and equip to help you in heists. Im gonna give some brief thoughts on each perk deck as they get released, starting with the 6 we got. Crew Chief was kinda neat as a support deck but was the bane of anyone doing a berserker build. Armorer was a nice armor deck, buffing up your armorer and even giving you seconds of immunity upon armor break. Muscle was a beefy deck giving you massive health buffs, panic as a means of crowd control and health regen on top of it. Rouge was basically the go to for a while if you wanted to run a dodge build and was fine until other perk decks got released. Hitman was strange in that the armor recovery rate wasnt too useful and that this perk deck and the ambidextrous skill were the two ways your allowed to use akimbo weapons which was also added in this update, not a super helpful perk deck. Crook was fascinating in that in between Armor and Dodge builds, Crook was like "why not both?", just running around in one of three of the ballistic vest armors while still having some dodge, it was a neat deck during the day.
Ok so now we're at the holidays, some updates for safehouse nightmare and we now have a new xmas heist known as White Xmas. Here we got to meet Vlads brother in law, rescuing him after he crashed a plane full of coke, and we kinda have an endless sort of heist were we can stick around waiting for presents to drop to grab more while occasionally calling in the heli to extract loot. It was a pretty alright heist although a bit too open with too many angles you can be shot from. We later on get The Diamond, a museum heist with a special diamond thats the main target. Once you get to the room where it sits, you need to hack a panel to reveal a safe path through the trapped floor which if you do manage to cross it, you can just grab the diamond right away. Mess it up and you'll have to wait for the gas to dissipate before you drill the safe and get the diamond that way. We also saw Clover get added as a playable heister who is honestly the one character I played as the most next to jacket. The burglar deck she came with was pretty much the quintessential "stealth" deck since there wasnt much else at the time, rouge was pretty much the go to since what else were you going to use if you were only doing stealth? Meanwhile other perk decks that had uses in stealth werent released yet so at the time having faster pager calls, lockpicking and movement speed while crouched was useful as hell.
2015 - So while 2014 was more or less the golden age of Payday 2, 2015 was the year where things felt shakey before falling deep into despair, like a car stuck on the edge of a cliff thats about to fall in.
Starting off we got introduced to a new contracter called The Butcher played by the late Mira Furlan and we got introduced to Dragan whos played by an actual former bank heister turned reformed sports commentator. His Infiltrator perk deck does work within a certain niche and when it works, it works well enough to be worth equipping in some heists, that niche being close quarter engagements. There's an enforcer skill in the shotgunner tree called
Underdog thats gives you a damage increase/reduction if you happen to be targeted by 3 enemies that are near you and the infitrator deck works kinda like a beefed up version of that skill plus health recovery on melee hits and increased damage for concurrent melee strikes, I think it works well in some heists where you'll often be close to enemies but in larger more open heists it can become downright worthless, swap it in and out depending on the heist.
Anyways back to the butcher, this was around when overkill formed a side studio called Lion Game Lion whos first contracted work was the butchers two heists. And to be honest, they weren't too great. Dockyard was quite alright being a harbour heist where you try to lure a container ship into a spot where you can get on and grab the loot and leave. The forest however was honestly far too big, a lot of running around on a large grassy hill to various overturned train cars to drill into them and get the target loot. Not to mention if you jumped while running downwards, you could end up downing yourself from fall damage. Not my personal fave. There was also that butcher ak/car mod pack that added a number of weapon attachments for the AK and Car rifles in the game. Nothing too great and the achievements needed to unlock some of them was kinda egregious.
But guess who got released after the butcher heists. Its motherfucking Jacket, the guy from Hotline Miami, now part of the payday crew with a tape recorder of self help phrases to communicate for him. So his Sociopath perk deck was the perk deck I used the most and it could be placed on the same shelf as Infiltrator in terms of niche, though its not as trapped within close quarters engagements as the former. Sociopath has some similar traits as Infiltrator (aspects of underdog, health on melee "kills" and the melee damage boost though with a small timeframe) but it does have a couple of unique features such as gaing armor for close range and headshot kills along with a chance to proc panic, giving it some crowd control usage. I like that perk deck and I like jacket, cool to see him return in 3 (which we will get to eventually).
So after that dropped we ended up having a particular event show up called HYPETRAIN. What is it? Its a community event where new content can potentially be unlocked for the upcoming spring break one. Last time a similar event happened pre-hoxton breakout which is where we got playable hoxton and john wick, this time however? You gotta buy a $20 dlc to generate fuel for the.... train. Yeah right there is some alarm bells going off right now because this was a pretty high price for what was technically a ransom right? Did we get anything for the $20 we spent for this? Yes but also No, at least not yet. The limited time "Completely Overkill" pack was touted as something you buy now for the event but later you'll get something "very special" in the future. I dont know if there was much of an upset over this, i imagine there was but i think it mostly blew over peoples heads how troubling this was cause people liked Overkill atvthe time, there was enough good faith to give them the benefit of the doubt, in hindsight this was a mistake but we will get to that in due time. Now alongside the "completely" overkill pack, there was the cheaper Overkill pack that gave you a couple of weapons namely a minigun and an rpg cause you know.... overkill. That rpg was every griefers favourite toy since it can damage other players even if it could only be replinished via ammo bags.
So. The community got all the rewards and come spring break, all the content that was earned started getting released. Starting off we had a new character, the glasgowan Bonnie who brought with her a cool ass shotgun and the gambler perk deck. Gambler honestly sounded like a good support deck on paper but in practice it was finicky too use right and at the start it was deemed garbage until an update increased how much more healing you recieved based how much less you had compared to your teammates. Gambler essentially let you regain health via collecting ammo packs which is good since you'll be collecting them any way to refill your ammo supplies, and on top of that you can also give your teammates some health when you regain health which is really neat, and ON TOP OF THAT you can also occasionally give your teammates ammo when you collect an ammo pack. Gambler had the makings of a great perk deck but the amounts werent great, it was inconsistent and it wasnt worth using compared to other perk decks. It has its fans but im not one of them.
So after that there was the Car Shop heist which had a pretty interesting gimmick where you started needing to stealth it until you managed to both setup some c4 on the road and acquire some keys. You then go grab one of the sports cars in the lobby and have to drive it through an exploded tunnel, reach the end in order to stow it in some shipping crates to complete the heist. Yeah that was the first instance of actual drivable vehicles in this game, and it was kinda janky but also kind of neat to see.
Cook off got released afterwards and it was essentially rats day one except it was essentially endless with you and your crew needing to survive the ongoing waves while doing your best to follow bains instructions and use the right ingredients to produce meth (and to avoid blowing the place up). You need to gather the ingredients around the house before needing to order more ingredients to be airdropped so you can keep on cooking. Every now and then the escape van will show up for you to secure all the meth you cooked and provide a window of ending the heist if you want to. Honestly Cook off is probably the most iconic moment of the Payday franchise, most people are aware of that one mission where you're cooking drugs in the middle of a firefight of the police where someone used caustic soda instead of hydrogen chloride and blew the damn place up. It was a moment that ended up being reused in other heists, theres the standalone endless version of it sure but theres also a meth lab in day one of hotline miami where you can cook, there was a lab somewhere in the dockyard heist from the butcher bomb heists, there was another variant of cook off released in the future which i'll talk about when we get there. Heck its even the first classic heist brought back for Payday 3. I can't help but wonder why they don't just make more versions of cook off using some of the maps they already made cause this could've been series very own equivalent to Final Destination from the Smash Bros series.
But of course we instead got a new special enemy that can show up in some heists, please everyone welcome the Swat Van Turret. It stays in a point and will turn and shoot you when it has lone of sights, it will surround itself with tear gas if you get too close to it, it has a shield that can be shot off and if you damage it enough it will pop down to repair itself before coming back up, it does that twice. I know some people who primarily bring an rpg solely to remove the turret but honestly if you can avoid it or move past it on some heists then you can essentially avoid it as it is completely stationary. And if you can't, you just need to aim at where its targeting laser is emitting from to damage it properly and destroy it.
The last heist of the spring break event ended up being one related Hoxton Breakout, where we managed to locate the rat who betrayed the gang. Hey you remember I mentioned that day 1 of the rats heist was the single most iconic moment of the payday franchise? Well its kinda weird that the contracter of that heist only had 3 heists in the entire games history, and they're part of the games launch. Theres the aforementioned Rats with the final day involving disarming c4 on a bus, Watchdogs where you have to move bags of coke and Firestarter with the final day being a version of the normal bank heist job but with an electrified vault door and money you gotta burn. Only 3 heists in the whole game, The Elephant was one of the launch contracters who had 2 more heists added making his total number 4 and in the future they'll be beaten by Shayu who will only have 1 heist, meanwhile Vlad, Bain, Locke and The Dentist are laughing at being the biggest job creators on crime net. But yeah, how come Hector only has 3 heists? Well anyways Hoxton Revenge has you going in and taking out the rat depending on if you stealth it or not, before going on to steal all the evidence that's lying around the house.
And that's gonna do it for day 1, yeah look this is taking a while to go through and theres still so much to talk about. I'm not gonna get this done before xmas so screw it, this is a 2 parter now. I'll try to get part 2 out maybe after new years but for now i'm gonna leave things here. Thanks for reading Midnight Gaming and I'll see you afain for part 2 of this Payday timeline spiel.
Hello again and welcome back to Midnight Gaming as we take a look at another game I played the past week and cover some news that occured since then, lets begin with the intellectual survival craft game that recently released into 1.0, Abiotic Factor.
So.... remember Half-life? That monumental first person shooter by valve that caused a major shift in the gaming scene? What if instead of playing as gordon freeman running around in an hev suit and battling aliens and US soldiers, you were instead one of the scientists who had to survive in the collapsing underground research facility? Well thats what Abiotic Factor is essentially, you're a newly hired employee of GATE, heading down on your first day right as a resonance cascade event has occurred. So now you have to take any office supplies you find, raid any vending machine you come across and travel through some portal worlds to survive and find a way out of the facility.
Starting out in the game is certainly an experience as you go through the tutorial introduction, being driven to a shack and head into the facility before going through a training excercise to teach you some basic things like moving, crafting and healing before sending you down a elevator to start the game proper, setting up your project zomboid style strengths and weaknesses before creating your world and dropping you in the cafeteria area of the games 1st area, the office sector. Establishing a base is pretty much necessary in Abiotic Factor since it gives you a safe place to return to rest, store any loot you find, eat and craft before setting out again to explore once more and the core of every base is the crafting table which is where you'll turn any materials you find into various tools, armour, weapons and so on and so forth, provided the table is powered up. Main thing you'll find with base building is that a lot of stuff needs power in order to function and you get that from electrical sockets that are dotted around the facility. I don't say that lightly, any area you might come across that looks like it could be a good place to build a base, odds are that an electrical socket is nearby allowing you to do just that. Another thing to note about the power is that its linked to the games "day/night" cycle, at around 9 o clock the power will shut off, blanketing the facility in darkness and causing any security robots to activate and start patrolling the hallways as well shutting off all the electrical sockets essentially cutting you off from power until 6 o clock in the morning when everything turns back on. Course if you happened to build some batteries and add them in between your devices and the sockets, you can essentially keep them powered on reserve power so long as the batteries still have charge, which will recharge during the day.
All this along with building defences to keep your base protected against enemies and different raid events are what makes base building in this game very enjoyable for me. I like setting up a base to cover my needs and to store all the crap I find cause I find a lot of stuff around the cascade facility and I have to grab or craft some storage just to keep it all of it. Protip build a platform cart cause that will double your inventory letting you bring more stuff back to your base.
Ok so something I don't like is the skills or more specifically the tedium of training them. Now the skills are fine enough theres enough of a variety there but gaining experience requires you to do certain actions in order to gain that xp and gradually level them. Now for things likes crafting, cooking, reloading, accuracy, sprinting thats all well and good, its self explanatory but then theres sneaking which is a lil bit odd in how you level it. See you need to crouch near enemies and so long as they dont spot you, you'll continue to accrue xp. Its not too bad but it does take a bit as its unclear how close you need to crouch near them to gain xp but then you have strength where youd think just use heavy weapons right? No you need to carry enough for your encumberance bar to be atleast yellow or pink to gain strength xp but not fully red else you wont gain any. So you get yellow encumberance and as you move, you'll train strength. Ok you still with me here?...... Fortitude..... that one is real finicky and downright contradictory in regards to what it does. Its also an important stat as it covers your maximum hp as well as the rate you recover hp. How do you gain xp in fortitude? You get hurt.... you need to get hurt repeatedly so you can level up fortitude in the hopes of surviving more serious threats in the future. And whats the most effective way to self-harm yourself and level fortitude? Well its to find some hanging loose electrical wire in the office sector, build a bed underneath it and set it to be your respawn point, put all your items safely somewhere and then let the wire shock you to death before respawning to do it all over again....
Training honestly feels time consuming sometimes and theres thankfully ways to speed it up a lil bit. Theres soups you can create that grant an xp gain boost to different skills. You can cut up a human corpse with a bladed weapon to get their skull, scrap it to receive a brain and then eat it for a general xp boost in exchange for being sick and vomiting everywhere. But honestly, your best bet is picking wrinkly brain as one of your strengths at the start so you gain a permanent 30% xp increase.
NEWS ROUNDUP!!!
Quakecon starts with a shadowdrop for Heretic + Hexen remaster by Nightdive Studios - So the annual convention known as Quakecon has announced a remaster for a couple of old school fps games originally developed by Raven software. Its pretty similar in content compared to the doom 1 + 2 remaster that nightdive released before though it also has that mod browser thing like it did. That mod browser was geniune unmoderated trash with so much stolen work and myhouse.wad broken crap. Maybe its better here I havent really checked.
Cyberpunk 2077 modder adds landlords and rent - So Cyberpunk 2077 is meant to be a dystopia right? And yet I sometimes see people envy the folks in night city simply because while both parties live in a late stage capitalism nightmare, at least the chooms get cyberware augments and neon lit streets. All we got is puritan censorship and ai slop. Well someone has made a mod to add another element to Night Citys economy: Rent Control. After Act 2 you'll be notified by a landlord through text and have to have enough eddies to make rent else you'll be evicted. You can choose to forgo a home if you want or even do loyalty missions to get some bonus from your landlord like a 5% discount. Personally i'm waiting to see if someone will add those trashy mobile games ads into the ads of Night City so you can truly feel the entropic exploitation of the neon lit streets of this world.
A new Cyberpunk 2077 mod called Eviction Notice fleshes out your apartment with an in-depth rent system that includes terrifying texts from
NEWS ROUNDUP OVER!!!!
So back to Abiotic Factor, exploring the facility is very enjoyable mainly for grabbing any supplies you want to take back but also finding any laptops and audio logs to help flesh out the world and how GATE operated as an organisation before the whole incident. Now I've said before that Abiotic Factor takes a lotta inspiration from Half-Life and thats true with the whole portals and the expies of some of Half-lifes enemy roster ie the exor being vortigaunts and the order soldiers who are responsible for the incident being a stand in for the US armed forces. But it also takes some notes from another popular work namely the SCP series.
Chances are you know about SCP but if you don't, its that community driven horror series of several written documents detailing various anomalies and supernatural phenomenon from the context of scientists and reasearchers working in a secretive organisation founded to essentially Secure, Contain and Protect any such anomalies to research them and protect humanity as a whole. If you wanted to keep this within games then you can argue that the inspiration was from SCP Containment Breach which was a free indie game where you're within an SCP Facility that has had a containment breach and have to escape while avoiding various dangerous entities. The whole SCP relation does come up when you're reading various emails and audio logs but it becomes prominent when you reach the 3rd area, the Labs Sector where various containment cells hold a number of creatures and items that can either harm/assist you. One such entity that has garnered some mixed reception is that of the Leyak, a floating creature that stalks one person and can only be seen by the person it stalks, slowly floating to it until its gets close enough to start attacking unless the person stares at it until it leaves for a bit. Some people like it, some people hate it and I sit within the latter, this thing has killed me a couple of times and its mostly because I didnt notice it before it was too late and that it does some major damage as you frantically try to break line of sight for it to despawn. Now you can invent some defenses to deal with it and even contain it so it doesnt bother for a while but I often have to keep shifting my focus to deal with it just so it doesnt end me..... slight spoiler here but, the damn thing has a cousin and i'll leave it at that.
Despite that issue, I do enjoy Abiotic Factor quite a bit, I like that it uses its influences to create a unique sort of survival craft experience and create its own compelling narrative within the facility and the various folks that are stuck within, either those who are hostile or those are trying to survive just as a much as you are. And naturally while I speak from a solo persective, the game is playable in multiplayer allowing multiple folks to roam the cascade facility and create various contraptions made with various office equpipment and alien organs to blast order soldiers with. Its developers have pointed out that while 1.0 does finish the story somewhat, they are planning to continue and expand that story and the game itself. And I suppose one thing I wouldn't mind seeing added is a sort of survival mode of sorts.
So heres the thing, We Happy Few? That was technically a Survival-craftish sort of game that kind of knee-capped itself with procedural generation as well trying to be a survival thing and a bioshock kind of deal? It tried being a lot of things instead of one thing is what I'm getting at. Now Abiotic Factor thankfully is a bit more focused. It doesnt use procedual generation at all, all of its enviroments are hand-crafted, its survival mechanics are balanced and understandable instead of being nerfed and toothless. That being said I wouldnt mind one day seeing if they release a sort of survial mode that generates a random sandbox version of the cascade facility for you to navigate. Granted this might be difficult and possibly not easy to realise but it is a thought nonetheless.
Barring that? Maybe they'll open modding right up and let people go full Garrys Mod? Hard to say on how they intend to expand the game going forward but as of now, its an easy sell. Games good, go play it if you havent.
Ok thats gonna do it for this issue of Midnight Gaming. Good luck to all of you and feel free to leave game suggestions. Talk to you all another time.
Midnight Gaming: Residential Malevolence: The Gyatthazard Chronicles
Hello again folks, welcome back to Midnight Gaming, and a happy halloween to all of you. We're gonna talk some more games and news on here, such as one game from a series I played for last years halloween post.
You recall the Resident Evil 2 Remake? It was fairly well received wasnt it? It had a lot of the events and plot hooks from the original Resident Evil 2 while adding its own touches and gameplay mechanics to create a unique experience, being both a terrifying modern experience for new players and a familiar yet fresh experience for old vets. It reworked the zombies to be more a threat than a nuisance, it introduced Mr. X as a pursuer throughout most of the game rather than a reoccurring boss from the originals B scenario. The remake was good, but do you recall how much people have wanted a remake of resident evil 2 for quite a while? Do you know how so many forum threads and comment posts have called for a resident evil 2 remake? How the simple announcement from the lead developer saying "we do it!" lead to so much rejoicing from the general gaming public? You ever wondered why that is? Well, its because the remake for the previous game in the series was SO well received, it became the quote-unquote standard for how a video game remake ideally should be done.
Yeah we're gonna talk about the Resident Evil Remake from 2002...even though this really about the hd remaster from 2014 but dont worry about it.
So Resident Evil Remake was originally exclusive to the Nintendo Gamecube, being part of a deal between Capcom and Nintendo to bring the Resident Evil series to Gamecube as well as create two games "exclusively" for the gamecube, this is pretty much how we got Resident Evil 4 (for a while until they ported it to ps2 and then everywhere else) as well as the series prequel Resident Evil Zero and its how we got the Resident Evil remake and those ports of 2, 3 and code veronica on the gamecube.
To be clear, i'm not big on survival horror games, mostly due to the whole having to ration my limited resources to avoid the possibility of borking myself. I'm the type of person who needs to find most of the secrets in a boomer shooter so I could feel confident that I have enough to clear levels despite the fact that'd i'd probably be ok. Anxiety is a bitch...
Regardless, I did a resident evil game last year so i'd figure it be worth it to do another one this year as well. So the first you can notice is the graphics are a major upgrade to the original. A lot of the areas you go through in the mansion look vastly creepier compared to the original which has somewhat admittedly aged a bit with time, very much appreciated in this game but do you know how the original Resident Evil was a bit campy with its voice acting? Well along with the graphics being enchanced, they also changed a lot of the lines in this game. This... I dont think its a good change, I do feel the new lines work a bit better in keeping the horror tone of the game but it loses the fun campiness of the original, its like if they changed the iconic lines from Symphony of the Night..... which konami did..... FOR SOME REASON.
Though on the other hand, I can understand that if you're putting in the work in remaking the 1st game in your popular survival horror series, you would want to take the time to fix stuff that you feel could've been done better. I just think keeping the old lines would'nt have detracted from the remakes overall quality, though thats pretty easy to say since the remake is pretty damn good.
Cause while the dev team did recreate a lot of the areas and music of the original game, making it look and sound head over heels better, they also took the time to introduce some.... new stuff as well. Theres some new areas added to the spencer mansion along with some new puzzles to solve. You know how you can leave a room and any zombies still in that room will just stay there for the whole game? Well sometimes you may backtrack to a hallway you cleared out only to hear a door knocking and WHOOOPS some zombies you left alone in a room have decided to move into that hallway. I actually can't help but laugh at that because I wonder if that was purely to fuck with the old resi players who are used to never seeing zombies migrate from room to room. Oh yeah and this remake is also where we got introduced to Lisa Trevor, the tragic nigh-unkillable mutant who chases you in a couple of sections as well as her boss fight. And of course, the one part of the remake thats downright iconic is what happens when you kill a zombie and wonder why the body never seems to despawn..... the Crimson Head.
Yes, I genuinely like this enemy for how it works mechanicaly, essentially serving as a "bomb" that's made to be activated by the player in order to create a future problem for them to deal with through a number of methods. Either by disarming the "bomb" via burning either by using some incendiary rounds on your grenade launcher or using up two item slots to carry a lighter and an oil canteen with a limited amount of fuel spread throughput the mansion, you can also try setting the "bomb" at a place your not likely to go through or a room you dont need to return to, disable the "bomb" entirely with a lucky headshot with the pistol or by landing one with a shotgun by letting a zombie get close while you aim up and fire, mitigate the blast by being prepared to fight the crimson when its ready to go off or just avoid setting the "bomb" by leaving the zombie alive but dodging everytime you pass through. You're essentially trading a short term problem for a long term problem, with ways to circumvent that future problem, or even avoid it, if your smart about it, or if theres enough fuel in the game to enable that.
And its kind of a shame they hardly ever returned. There was maybe a few cameos involving that crimson bastard but I think the last time they had a major appearance was in that Operation Racoon City spinoff, you know? The 4 player coop game where you play as Umbrellas own clean up crew? Except I'm pretty sure crimson heads there worked differently compared to this game. Can't help but wonder if other survival horror games tried to copy this idea because I think its a mechanic that needs to be seen in more survival horror. I think Signalis has something like that? I did hear that enemies can come back and you need a limited item to remove them permanently.
Overall its a good remake, but that's been well established by this point, so many people have laid their praise for this game, what more can I say about this that hasnt already been said by others?
Well, I can certainly that backtracking kinda sucks, mainly due to the door opening sequences which yes, while they do contribute to the games tense atmosphere, they end up being quite annoying when your going through areas you know are safe or you accidently go through the wrong door and have to turn 180 and go through another door opening sequence. I did this alot in my playthrough.
Heck the geniunly worse part in my playthrough was at the 1st yawn fight where I was trying to do it right by grabbing the mask and leaving without being poisoned, course Richard Aiken who I saved with serum shows up and now I had to damage yawn enough to trigger dicks death so I can grab his assault shotgun. I had to reload SIX times till I got it right, and then I went through the hallway that filled with zombie spouring from the windows and got jumped by a crimson outside the door to the art gallery, leading to me using 6 shotgun shells and a full heal before doing the art gallery puzzle and opening a path to the back courtyard that you can go through to the main lobby. It... really didnt sit well with me considering I could've just used the door witn the loose handle, avoiding that hallway entirely and taken the crimson zombie proper without needing tp heal. But I didnt save after the yawn fight so....... 4 more reloads..... eugh..
Thing is? That was the probably most challenging event in my playthrough, most of it was pretty easy. Hell even the two tyrant fights at the end werent much of an issue. And to be honest, this is entirely my fault since i'm playing jills campaign with the diffuiculty set to easy rather than normal but I honestly wondered if I shouldve picked "like climbing a mountain" for the difficulty and have been fine with it.... Maybe i'll try that with Chris after this is posted.
In the end, I got it done with the best ending and with no first aid sprays used, and I do feel glad to have this done. It was a pretty great experience and the tension I felt through traversing the mansion was a welcome experience. If you havent played this remake then I recommend you do as it is spooky good fun. Just maybe have a little bit of confidence and try it on normal instead of easy or very easy.
NEWS ROUNDUP!!!!!
So its been a doozy folks. I have some news I collected during my week playing Resident evil but I also have a couple of breaking news thats worth hearing about. Lets roll this roundup out.
The Crew 2 now has an offline mode - If you remember the Stop Killing Games initiative, you'd recall it was a grassroots movement to push for end-of-life updates for games that ran on online servers, to ensure there was some means to still play them either through an official offline mode or some support for community run servers. Just anything other than straight up killing the game and ensuring no one can play it anymore. Now part of what initially drove this movement was when the racing, The Crew, was shut down by Ubisoft and while arguments can be had on whether the movement was successful or even helpful in the grand scheme, its hard to deny that it left some impact considering Ubisoft has revealed that the games sequel, The Crew 2, now has an official offline mode. You can check more details on this from the rockpapershotgun article if you're interested.
An offline mode for The Crew 2, dubbed hybrid mode, has been launch by Ubisoft following backlash to the original Crew's server shutdown.
Valve adds means to trade up Red quality items for knives and gloves, CS2 market crashes in response - So this one I saw posted on tumblr by user @squeakitties so big thanks to them but yeah. The Counter-Strike 2 item market is in shambles since Valve added a trade up offer into the game. Now that means nothing first, its just trade in some low quality skins you unboxed for a higher quality skin right? Well in this case its more like trade in a number of Red quality skins that are usually priced around $10 for a pair of gloves or a knife, one of the more "rarer" items you can unbox and as a result folks are now panic selling their inventories to cash out asap, leading to steam being a tad slow atm. Press F for the folks who spent considerable money to unbox a rare knife only to watch it become financially worthless. Actually, don't do that because investing your life savings into virtual items waa always going to be a bad idea, just look at NFT's.
Scarface The world is yours remaster is suddenly released, then delisted immediately - Games based on movies tend to suck. Thats the commonly held belief for many folks, particularly those growing up within the late 90s to early 10s where games based off of films and tv shows were quite common on most gaming platforms. But sometimes you do find the rare example of a good licensed game such as Goldeneye, Spider-man 2, The Warriors, Those two lord of the rings beat em up games and Peter Jacksons King Kong just to name a few examples. Personally, I say that Scarface: The World is Yours counts as an example of a decent licensed game, being a grand theft auto clone where you play as Tony Montana in a what if scenario where he survives the movies end and goes on to rebuild his criminal empire. I played that game a lot on the Wii and taunting enemies as I shoot them was a straight up mechanic to build up your "balls" meter. Fun game.
Sooo.... imagine my surprise when writing out this Midnight Game post, when I decided to glance pcgamer and saw that a straight up remaster for The world is yours was reported to have dropped on the epic games store, be suddenly removed and its listings on both egs and steam being promptly scrubbed clear. Like.... what??? I never knew there was remaster to begin with??? Well apparently this remaster by the group EC Digital had included community mods without the mod makers permission and that they havent worked out the licensing issues for the games soundtrack, let alone the license for the scarface movie itself, the very thing this game is based off of?????
*sigh* This is honestly weird... The pcgamer covers this along with some direct quotes from members of EC Digital and they now have an update to the article containing an archived steam community post before it was all scrubbed away. Give it a read, i'm just trying to wrap my head around this myself...
Who put this thing together?
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow gets dropped onto Steam - So moving on from the remaster mystery, we now have news that Ubisoft recently released Splinter Cells first sequel Pandora Tomorrow onto the Steam marketplace. You might think "Oh neat, a remaster of a splinter cell game" but the thing is, its not a remaster, its just straight up the pc version of Pandora Tomorrow, now available to buy on steam. Ok.... cool.... yay...
According to the rockpapershotgun article, folks have mentioned needing to go through Ubisoft Connect just to run the game and that the multiplayer features are unavailable. So if you're interested in picking this up, you may have to look around for some mods to add things like controller support. Details in the link.
Ubisoft have put out a re-release of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow on Steam.
Sega collabs with Satnav company Waze to release a Sonic the Hedgehog voice option - And on our final piece of news we have Sonic the hedgehog now being an option for your Waze Satnav device. In my honest opinion, having Sonic himself to tell you to "Take a left turn at the nearest junction" in his usual speedster attitude, sounds like an idea almost on the level as "listening to the initial d soundtrack while driving down an empty highway at the dead of night". I wonder if you were try to set the satnav to direct you to a restaurant, it'll just lead to the nearest place that sells chilli dogs, and when you try to resist it threatens to drive through a school classroom and frame you for it unless you comply with its demands. Eh whatever... more details in the link.
Sega has teamed up with satnav company Waze to offer Sonic the Hedgehog voice navigation.
NEWS ROUNDUP OVER!!!!
Alright so, now that we have had a little discussion about the Resident Evil Remake, you would think that would be it right? Or maybe you've caught on already, that i'm probably gonna cover a second game here that I played since i'm apparently done with the prevous game? Well yeah more or less. Honestly I did plan on covering just one game here but I wasnt sure how much I can fill out this post just talking about the RE remake since most folks have already covered it to death in videos up on youtube. The only unique thing I can really offer is my own unique experience. The other reason was that a major update released for a game I played before so I wanted to give that a bit of play only to end up levelling a character to endgame alongside the resident evil playthrough, so yeah, here you go, our second game of the evening.
ATLYSS
So question for all the folks reading this right now. You ever played Phantasy Star Online, no i'm not talking about the sequel, nor am I talking about the PSO: Episode games on xbox or gamecube, nor am I talking about zero or universe. I'm talking straight up Phantasy Star Online from like the dreamcast and pc. It was an action rpg dungeon crawler with a lot of sci-fi elements mixed with some of SEGA's general style. People enjoyed that game and while the offical servers are long gone, private servers are still available. I played a lil of it on a dreamcast once upon a time ago and it was enjoyable.
Flashforward to recent years and we see a couple of furry games blow up on the internet gaming space. We have on one hand webfishing which was a comforting fishing game with a sort of animal crossing aesthetic that you can enjoy with friends. And on the other hand theres Atlyss where you can create a caked up mouse shortstack spinning through dungeons with a bloody spear.
It had a major update that reworked a lot of the areas and added some new ones along with changing up a number of skills. So I decided I wanted to play it and see all the stuff they changed, I went with creating a new character to go for a more spellcasting kind of build and proceeded to enter the world of atlyss once more. They're a kobold and they're named Irn-Bru.
So in the early game, its a bit rough since you dont have any spells aside from chucking stones and a health regen skill along with your races ability. The only main ranged offense I had for a bit was a basic bitch wand that took a while to kill enemies with, and I had this until I finally got my first real spell, an ice spell that had a short range meaning I had to get close to an enemy to actually hit them with it..... but I can atleast do some ok damage with it, I even bought a skill scroll off an npc merchant for a firebolt spell so now I have a means of reliable damage.
I progressed through quests and ran through the crypts dungeon a few times till I get to lvl 10 where I can actually pick a class from one of the three main quest givers in the sanctum hub area. You can go visit the pantsless hunk in the back arena to become a fighter for a physical attack and tanky kinda of playstyle. You can go visit the trader suzy who you often buy and sell stuff to if you wanna become a bandit for a more fast paced playstyle that involves an evasion stat. And then finally theres the big lady by the main teleporter in the library who will let you become a mystic which is the class I went with, letting enjoy some more magic options at my disposal.
And around the mid to late game I ended up being pretty damn powerful with some of the mystic abilities. For one you have a couple of passive traits such as increased mana regen along with a blink ability for better mobility. I picked up Fluxbolt which ended being a major damage dealer since its a ranged spell that can hit multiple times, along with Cross which pretty much works like Ness's neutral B ability where you hold to release a ball forwards before releasing to create an explosion, not just damaging enemies in the radius but also lowering their magic defense so that Fluxbolt ends up being more damaging. I also had Imbue as my buff along with Restora and Prism as for healing/protection which when paired with my race ability Alacrity lets me cast them instant for free to spare some mana/ emergency heal.
Enemies do start to get a lot tougher around the end game, espcially in the hard mode crypts, the normal/hard mode crescent grove dungeons as well as the Buldarr fortress where the mekboars reside. I basically needed to stay on the move with my finger on block incase i'm about to get hit, all the while attacking with Cross, Fluxbolt and a charged attack off my Scepter while refreshing Imbue and Prism when they get off cooldown.
You can join some online lobbies and go explore with other players, but for me I played on solo the whole time. And you know what? Didnt die once. Cleared Hard Mode Crypts, Cleared Buldarr Fortress, Cleared Hard Mode Crescent Grove which had the hard version of Colossus which I heard was a real doozy, and he was, he was an absolute bastard with his attacks. But, I still cleared it. It honestly sounds like i'm gloating and I guess I suppose I am but I think part of it is that mystic is just a good class to play. Theres other spells in that class that I didnt pick up such as Fluxclaw so you could create a different sort of mystic build but for me right now, i'm really hoping the dev doesnt nerf mystic in the future. Given that the game is in early access, things will change and I can only hope Mysfic that mystic will continue to be powerful in the future.
Oh yeah.....uhhhh.... Atylss is fun. Its gameplay is fast paced with you moving around to be harder to hit along with timing a block in order to parry and punish an enemy. It definatly recreates a lot of the older 3d enviroments and aesthetics from the early millennium games along with its MMO-like styles and features. You know something? Webfishing, Atylss and another early access game called Erenshor seem to be potential start in indie games that are based on the nostalgia for online multiplayer games that you play in your youth. Stuff like Habbo Hotel, Gaia Online, 2007 World of Warcraft and even Runescape before it was called old-school Runescape. Just some games that are essentially MMO's but are playable offline or with a small lobby of friends rather than being a large community of players on an online server.
You know...... something that the .hack series has been squatting for the past few years.
So yeah. Atlyss is pretty good, up to you if you wanna hop in now or wait till 1.0. The resident evil remake is good and deserving of its reputation.
Have a happy halloween everyone :)
Thank you again for reading Midnight Gaming. I'll talk to you all another time in the future, feel free to leave comments or game suggestions. See ya!
Welcome once again to another edition of Midnight Gaming where I talk about a video game and some news while recovering from foot pain.
In this issue of Midnight Gaming i'll be covering one of the many works that Telltale games made before their eventual death and resurrection. A game where you start off lecturing a frog, beating up a lumberjack and hearing a working girl call you a good boy before finding her severed head on your doorstep, its The Wolf Among Us!!
So..... telltale games? They really made a great chicken sandwich didnt they, sure some of their earlier dishes had their fans, their Sam & Max club sandwich was a welcome delight helping to establish themselves as an adventure game developer before following up with the Wallace and Gromit Grilled Cheese, the Strong Bads Cool Game 4 Attractive People PB&J and the Tales of Monkey Island BLT. But the moment they really hit the mainstream was when they got the rights to develop a game based on the Walking Dead, which was still in its heyday and was prime real estate to develop a game on. And Telltale did a great job on it. It had the drama, the horror, the zombies, the well written characters, it had the "x will remember this" popup for the first time. Its episodic structure got people hooked waiting for the next episode to drop to continue the story of Lee Everett and Clementine. It was a damn good chicken sandwich, so good that Telltale as a company decided to make mostly chicken sandwiches from here on out.... for better or worse.
Telltale tried it best to recreate the success of that chicken sandwich with different breads, sauces, additional fillings, different kinds of chicken. They made chicken sandwiches for Borderlands, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, they even made sandwiches for additional seasons of the Walking Dead that followed the events of that first season. But in the end, it was still just chicken sandwiches, decent in their own right, but people got sick and tired of them and eventually Telltale was facing dwindling sales before having to declare bankruptcy in late 2018. Why am I talking about sandwiches in this monologue? Honestly it sounded smarter in my head but now its coming off as a bit pedantic.
The Wolf Among Us was released a year after the first season of telltales Walking Dead and was based on a comic book series called Fables which was about fairytale characters evacuating from their folklore home under siege, into the real world in the city of new york where they live secretly as refugees, hiding thier magical existence from the major mundane society. You had the big bad wolf as the sheriff along with Snow White as acting fairytale community mayor, you got pinocchio, jack and jill, cinderalla etc etc. It was a fairly well regarded series and The Wolf Among Us served as both an official piece of media of this franchise as well as an introduction to Fables as a whole since its set as a prequel before the events of the comics.
So we'll take a look into this game and I'll give my thoughts on it, but not before going through a news roundup first...
oh yeah...Wolf Among Us can be considered the bbq chicken sandwich in this analogy...
NEWS ROUNDUP!!
First ai powered ransomware has been discovered. - AI sucks, thats a no brainer. Its a hog on resources and an ecological nightmare, it takes away jobs from hard working folks in artistic fields and it doesnt even do the job they replace very well since its revealed a lot of businesses that have used ai have to keep people on just to fix it and make their expensive generated mess actually usable. Its an irredeemable wasted bit of tech and no I wont debate this, fuck off.
But now as it seems like AI is infecting a lot of areas in creative works, security and even government, now it seems like the field of malware is getting in on it with a sighting of a ransomware program that is powered on AI.
In an article for pcgamer, James Bentley writes and I quote "According to Eset Research (via Tom's Hardware), this new ransomware uses "the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly, which it then executes."
AI-powered is an operative term here. Promptlock isn't just ransomware that is created by a hacker generating code and then executing that code on a PC; it is instead said to be a series of prompts that are generated on your devices with scripts. According to Eset, these prompts suggest "the malware may exfiltrate data, encrypt it, or potentially destroy it. Although the destruction functionality appears to be not yet implemented." Phew."
The ransomware is said to run locally on an infected pc and can run without using online resources, thereby avoiding detection more easily than conventional malware. It is mostly a proof-of-concept rather than a fully unleashed program but its looking pretty disturbing considering what this crap can do. Be careful with what sites you browse and what links you click. And make sure your firewalls are stable.
Ah sweet, robot-made horror beyond my comprehension.
You can now rent your very own anime vtuber granny. No, really.... - So moving away from the dreadful cybersecurity news, we now look at a vtuber agency called Otagroup who employ women, aged 75 and up as vtubers...... yeah.
Apparently they became notable 2 years back when 86-year old Hiroko went viral on YouTube and social media, and now you can rent a vtubing granny for an online counselling session..... ok?
Quoting Tyler Colp who writes on his article for Pcgamer "In a report by ITMedia News (translated by Automaton West), the agency said it "realized that the experience of having someone that can rely on [you] greatly contributes to the wellbeing of the elderly," and that its goal is to "boost the self-esteem of the elderly, while also helping resolve issues of young people in urban areas as well."
After you apply to the program, Otagroup will pick the perfect vtuber grandma for you and will schedule counseling sessions to attend over Zoom and Google Meet. In addition to general life advice, you can apparently have your vtuber grandma help with other things, like paying them to show up as an extra in a movie.
Otagroup isn't playing around either. It hopes to turn this into a profitable enterprise and is currently looking to partner with nursing homes to expand its roster of grandmas."
I don't personally understand why this is a thing, at least the counselling part, not the vtuber part. We have seen some elderly content creators pop up with some notable fanbases such as Skyrim Grandma aka Shirley Curry who streams herself playing Elder Scrolls V Skyrim and then theres the channel cookingwithFred where an older man cooks food from various shows and films. So I can understand that for some old folks they can attract an online audience, even behind the mask of an anime avatar but.... counselling? I don't know but maybe theres a market for that...
Watch out, Skyrim Grandma.
Bungie offering $500 for people to play Marathon for a month. - So Bungie is having it pretty bad huh? Their biggest game Destiny 2 isnt doing so hot with a majority of its lifetime content having been sunsetted and whatevers left has been scrutinised heavily as being a dreadful grind. Their upcoming game Marathon seemed to be a return to an old series of their's from the apple computer days, orginally being an fps series and now their newest game is looking to be an... extraction shooter. Not exactly exciting especially when it got revealed some graphical assets were plagiarised from an online artist.
So yeah, it bears repeating, Bungie is having a rough time and the ceo responsible for a lot of these decisions having stepped down won't change that too soon. If you were to ask people about the new Marathon, you might hear a joking retort about how Bungie would have to "pay" them to actually play it and it seems that Bungie... agrees?
Yeah so Forbes has an article discussing how Bungie is offering a cash reward for people to participate in a "30 day research study" as part of thier closed alpha testing period. To quote Paul Tassi from his article "Now, Bungie is about to do its most significant test to date, recruiting select testers to play Marathon for an entire month straight, requiring players to play for one hour in a specific window of the day, every day. Do that, and you can receive $500 at the end of the month for hitting those metrics."
Would you play a video game for a month, 1 hour per day for $500? If so maybe look into how to join, though the terms and conditions to actually qualify is likely to be incredibly stringent.
Some players are able to get $500 for playing Marathon for a month, but the demands are a little more challenging than you might imagine.
NEWS ROUNDUP OVER!!!
Wolf Among Us covers the themes of government corruption, impoverished citizens and how certain characters will prey on desperate folk to further their own goals, using the flaws in established society to their advantage by sweeping up those whom said society has failed and offering them hope while concealing a ball and chain behind their back. And you go through this 5 episode journey as the community's sheriff, Bigby Wolf, the big bad wolf who has gained the ability to shift into a human form and given the task of handling domestic disputes and lecturing amphibians to buy some damn glamour.
Bigbys character is basically that of a tamed wild animal, they arent inherently hostile and depending on your choices, he can certainly try to be nice or avoid escalating issues, though when folks tend to be aggressive or even outright violent towards him or Snow, he'll absolutely answer aggression with aggression. And unfortunately this tends to be quite common since most of fabletowns community pretty much dislike/fear him, partly because hes essentially a cop for a government that people are starting to lose faith in as they struggle to survive, partly because he was a particularly villainous back in the past in his wolf days. And while this Bigby has reined in his huff and puff days, he often spend his nights bruised, tending his aches with whiskey and cheap cigarettes, resting his bloody hands on a crappy chair in the smallest apartment in the woodlands.
It definitely fits the noir vibes that the game and the fables series take cues from, the gruff detective shifting through the citys muck and grime to uncover the truth and enact some semblance of justice when civilization as a whole would hardly give a damn. Fables and Telltales TWAU uses this aesthetic but frames it around fairytale characters and how they adapt to their refuge in New York.
Telltale has done a fantastic job with the writing here with many of the characters having distinct personalities and quirks, with the voice actors giving them that extra kick of notoriety. Of course Bigby has the gritty styling that can go from calm but tense to looking to rip someones throat out. Snow White gives the impression of bittersweet temperance, wanting to do right for the fabletown community but recognises that they are being let down somewhat. In the earlier episodes she and Bigby work well as a team, being the blue oni to the wolfs red oni, handling the talking and deescalation better than bigby could while hes more suited in the more hands-on approach. Of course this makes the latter two chapters worse since she gets promoted to acting mayor of fabletown and effectively goes from bigbys partner in the case to simply his boss, leaving him to go chase the threat alone while she tries to handle running the governing body of the fabletown community.
I cant help but wonder if Bigby in the future often missed working with Snow instead of just working for her, I liked their little commentary and back and forth as they investigate a scene, I liked how Snow White seems to bring out Bigbys lighter side, it does help paint a picture as to how she even managed to convince him to accept the job. So her stepping back in the latter two episodes does hurt quite a bit but I suppose its is trying to adhere to the comics canon, in which Snow White is the Fabletown acting mayor where as here shes the assistant working under Ichabod Crane of sleepy hollow fame.
Often times you'll go to a place, investigate, even pick some dialog options and maybe theres a sequence where you need to do some quick time events. To be honest the "Telltale game" is hardly a game given how theres little interactivity or player agency, you can dictate what you choose to say and there are points where you have to make a decision, an early one being between seeing mr toad after he called for your help or go see the victims other half who is seen bleeding on a chair. This is in the era of player consequences being a marketed feature with the whole episodic structure and that "x will remember this" being a reminder that what you did will come into effect. This era in gaming really overpromised on how certain decisions will affect a future chapter or sequel, mass effect was well known to do this, but a lot of the time it mostly boils down to whos side you supported, who lives, who dies, who do you romance. Nobody's really made a butterfly effect kind of game where your actions can "rube goldberg" their way into biting you in the ass or something and Wolf Among Us is mostly gonna come down to where you go and how you talk to people, with some choices on whether or not someone dies. It can be neat for a 2nd playthrough to try something different but you shouldn't expect too much to change. The song may have different instruments but the beats the same.
Theres not a whole lot I can really criticise this game for to be honest, the writing is great, the voice acting is excellent, the mystery is laid out well with several leads and revelations until it ultimately leads into the full reveal and then the climax. Its a fantastic time, a wonderful introduction to the Fables series and I dont know when Wolf Among Us 2 is gonna come out, thats been in like development hell since the death and rebirth of Telltale but I am looking forward to it.
I'm sorry this isnt the most indepth analysis of this game but chances are someone on youtube has already made a video that accomplishes that and 2nd i'm tired as hell from the naproxen i'm taking for my foot injury. If nothing else the game is fantastic and I highly recommended you play it if you havent already (or recently for that matter).
Wanna just leave this whole thing off with one final question. Is Fables in the public domain? Because I heard the author of that series was fed up with DC's handling of residuals or something, so he had set the ip up into the public domain for everyones use. I don't know if legally it is in the public domain or if DC reeled it back. I'm leaning towards it not since if it had been in the public domain, a budget horror film would've been created already.... it happened with winne the pooh, steamboat willie and bambi already.
So that'll be it for Midnight Gaming, i'll ramble to you all another time, hopefully when i've recovered and not using a cane to help walk. Y'all have a good one and feel free to leave a suggestion for a game you'd like to see covered on here.
