Ready Up opens with a shot of the CS:GO grand finals at ESL One. The size of the stadium dwarfs the players on the stage, who all wear deadly serious expressions. There are thousands of people in the audience, many of them frantically waving inflatable tubes covered in sponsorship scrawls. A member of one team makes a clutch pistol play, and the room erupts in a roar of screaming and thunderous chanting. The player solemnly acknowledges the applause with a showboating chef kiss, but he doesn’t look like he’s having much fun. Then, we change rooms. A few dozen people are sitting in front of a screen, watching their friends compete at a Team Fortress 2 LAN event. The players seem focused, yet relaxed. “Ah, I’m dead” says one of them, half-grinning at his misfortune. At the heart of the competitive TF2 scene, it transpires, is a community with bonds that transcend the tribalism you might see in other esports. I spoke to Alex “Dashner” Pylyshyn … [Read more...] about We spoke to the co-director of Ready Up, a documentary showcasing competitive TF2
Accessing retirement funds early
Sunless Skies Delayed Indefinitely as Failbetter Games Navigates Financial Difficulty
While you may not have heard about Sunless Skies, nearly everyone has heard of the game’s predecessor — Sunless Sea. This, itself, is one of the noted woes and difficulties facing indie developer Failbetter Games in their latest Kickstarter update for the game which paints a gloomy-yet-realistic picture on the uncertainty of indie game development. The kicker of the update seems to be a delay for the studios’ biggest project, and a shuttering of a smaller side project. The news comes following a fairly uplifting Kickstarter update roughly a week ago where they revealed “the biggest appreciable change to [Sunless Skies] during Early Access” for players, speaking about a new region that was opening up in-game. However, it seems this announcement was the calm before the storm on the news that Sunless Skies was being pushed from its May 2018 launch window to an unspecified time. Thankfully, Failbetter Games … [Read more...] about Sunless Skies Delayed Indefinitely as Failbetter Games Navigates Financial Difficulty
The Flare Path: Catch of the Day
Not an easy week to be a wargame and simulation correspondent. If I bite my lip and try really hard I think I’ll be able to rattle off today’s column without mentioning the lovely DUSK, but I know I won’t be able to get through without acknowledging that cetacean in the room, Nantucket. Released yesterday, Picaresque’s piquant and pacy whaling RPG is far too close to that Age of Sail game we’ve been discussing for years to pass unhailed. I hope it hasn’t arrived too late to influence HMS, Every Single Soldier’s cutaway captaincy title. If Adam’s well-turned Wot I Think hasn’t convinced you to make for Massachusetts, a few paragraphs of praise in FP are unlikely to do the trick. All the same, here are those few paragraphs of praise. My early experiences were a little different from Adam’s. Early on I opted for globetrotting rather than local narwhal hunts, and, possibly as a consequence, found repetitiveness less of … [Read more...] about The Flare Path: Catch of the Day