Month: September 2024

My mom recently showed me that you can pick a point on Pikmin 4’s map and then press a button to return to the game with your character looking in that direction—a delightfully convenient feature. Nintendo really has a knack for designing in-game maps. Bethesda, however… well, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, don’t we?

Among all the praise and other commentary, “bad maps” has emerged as a common Starfield criticism as players make their first excursions into outer space. The starmaps aren’t very exciting, but it’s really the surface maps that are the target here. They’re rendered as topographical point fields, which looks sort of cool, but communicates little, especially in cities, where buildings and streets aren’t represented at all. To illustrate how devoid of information they are, the map above represents the city of New Atlantis, which looks like this from the ground:

We’ve all played enough GTAs or the like to expect at least a basic street map, so when he started working on his Starfield review, Chris reasonably wondered if the maps were bugged or something—nah, that’s just how they are.

Others have had the same feeling: A Red…

Remember that incredibly goofy dance music video with the dancing crabs that everyone loved back in like 2018? People did a bunch of memes of it. Anyway, the artist who made that, Noisestorm, made a roguelike third-person action shooter about crabs. It’s called Crab Champions, and though it released into early access on April 1st, 2023 it’s anything but a joke. It’s actually kind of… good?

No joke, as of this writing, it has 1,314 reviews on Steam—and 98% of them are positive. Turns out this isn’t a gimmick at all. It’s not just the Crab Rave game: It’s Crab Champions and it is here to slay.

In the shooter you blast through island after island of crabby foes collecting loot, guns, and generally becoming godlike via making an overpowered build. You plow through 20-40 minute roguelike runs which feature remarkably smooth movement and combat mechanics. 

You can play it solo or with up to three other people cooperatively, and in this it’s pretty much like Risk of Rain 2 but everything’s crabs. It’s just crabs everywhere, goofy clacking claws and sideways walkin and long leggedy hops galore. The weapons have good variety and there are all manner of weir…

Starfield can be an inventory management nightmare sometimes. Whenever you make a modification to your ship, the game sends all your loose miscellany to your cargo hold, filling it with junk. 

Not to mention it’s an open-world RPG—while a lot of the loot really isn’t worth snagging, it’s hard to swat away that reflex to hoover up every loose book, sandwich and pencil holder. Fortunately, it seems like players are finding a use for all this tat—elaborate Rube Goldberg machines.

The first of these comes from sandwich pirate Muaxh03 on YouTube, who combo’d a pile of books into a football, leading to a row of tasty dominoes. Not sure about the food wastage, though—considering the sheer amount of man-hours and quicksaving that must’ve gone into arranging all of these, I think we’re way past the five-second rule. Maybe the floors are just cleaner in space.

Then there’s this monstrosity by Holy Moe which makes use of a whole library of books and several lunch trays to achieve their physics dreams of punting a football at a wall.

While I’m a big fan of the excessive physics experiments, like dropping thousands of potatoes i…

PowerWash Simulator just keeps on truckin’ man: The first person shooter(?) where you blast muck off the environment to make it shiny and new again just got two new free maps, and I’m kind of in love with their summertime vibes.

The aquarium and submarine were the winner and runner-up respectively of PowerWash Sim’s second community map vote, where they won out against other potential levels like a luxury yacht or rock climbing gym. While I would have loved to see PowerWash Sim’s take on some crystal caves, the one-two punch of nautical fun that did win out is extremely charming.

Watch On

Instead of the cramped confines of a submersible, PowerWash Sim’s new level sees you cleaning one up from the outside while it’s in dry dock. The sub’s a bright orange, scientific affair, the sort of thing that “Jackpots” Jimmy Cameron would use to go down and hang out by the Titanic while dreaming up a new Avatar film to enchant our hearts and heal the world.

The aquarium looks to be a much more involved affair, with twisting hallways and multiple enclosures to clean⁠—a level of attention that probably befits the contest winner. What really got my goat is that you…

I just discovered Victor Love, also known as Master Boot Record (MBR), an Italian musician forging impeccable chiptune compositions with a doomy, apocalyptic twist. His music seems to be the perfect soundtrack to life as we amble ever closer to an impending hostile AI takeover (or at least some big-tech company willing the Torment Nexus to open).

Not only does MBR use synthetic 8-bit music samples, he takes a lot of inspiration from IT in terms of nomenclature, too. Many of his songs are named after command prompts, and “Master Boot Record” itself is the name given to information found in the first segment of a storage drive.

Love makes it clear that his songs are decidedly “100% synthesized, 100% dehumanized”. His discography consist of “486DX-33MHz-64MB processing avant-garde chiptune, synthesised heavy metal and classical symphonic music.”

In other words, it’s dark, intelligent music for hackers and axe-wielders alike.

The music wills you to “configure yourself for optimal performance”, and that it does. Frenetic and hyperactive, Love’s music is full on from the start. It’s marked by fanciful cybernetic trills, rising operatic chord progressions, and t…