The
Roberts Space Industries website has word that attendees of SXSW have received a code for
a "free fly week" in
Star Citizen's Arena Commander module. For those who
did not make the journey to the show, the good news is that the code has become
public knowledge, as
Polygon, among other outlets, reveal that SXSWFREEFLY2K15 is the way to
satisfy the gatekeeper to get to sample the space combat game. They also offer
an idea of what to expect, saying the client is around 20GB, and: "The demo
allows players to fly an Anvil Hornet F7C trainer ship in the Arena Commander
space combat module, and walk around the Hangar Module in first person mode."
There's an
article on Kotaku looking into the fact that Valve has an F grade from the
Better Business Bureau, the lowest mark the organization issues. Though
Valve's Erik Johnson does say that "the BBB is a far less useful proxy for
customer issues than Reddit," he does not deny there's an underlying issue,
saying: "The more important thing is that we don't feel like our customer
service support is where it needs to be right now," adding: "We have a lot of
work to do there. We have to do better." Here's more on their approach to this
going forward:
"We need to do a variety of things," he said. "We need to
build customer support directly into Steam. We need to understand what's the
most efficient way to solve customer problems. Right now we're in a state where
we're doing a bunch of technical work on thinking through how does a support
issue get raised, who has to see it, how do refunds get issued within
Steam—we've done a poor job on all of that up to this date. We think it's
something we really need to focus on."
Steam News announces the
release of
Hektor,
which is also now available through other digital distributors. They offer a 25%
launch discount, and the following explanation:
HEKTOR is a first-person,
psychological horror game where nothing ever stays the same for long. Explore a
world that literally moves with your every twist and turn, as corridors shift
and change before your eyes. Uncover cryptic clues to help you find your way and
elude the horrors that only madness can conjure.
You were a subject at HEKTOR, a now defunct, covert research facility buried
deep beneath northern Greenland. Forgotten in its dark corridors with only a
lighter and flashlight to guide your way, you must overcome a psychosis brought
on by years of torture and confinement to escape.
A
tweet
from Shams Jorjani outlines Paradox's approach to dealing with piracy of
Cities: Skylines involves providing better customer support, saying: "As
usual our plan for pirates is to make a great game even better through free
updates - making it more convenient to use Steam instead." He
goes on to
explain: "It's all about offering the superior service. That's how we bring
down piracy. By making the paid experience a superior one." Thanks
DSOGaming.
The Atlantic - Video Games Are Better Without Characters. By Ian
Bogost.
But making games about complex systems instead of tanks or plumbers or
hedgehogs or soldiers was always a long-shot. Culturally, video games are
often cast aside as vulgar and flagrantly violent. They’re maligned as
pointless drivel serving no purpose and simultaneously criticized for
encouraging outrageous, irresponsible behavior and delinquency. Some will
concede, at best, that video games offer harmless distraction, like the idle
dream of being a professional football player. These perceptions come from
the same place as video-game advocates’ own love for the form. Games are a
place to escape, a place to be powerful, a place to have agency in a world
that so often wrests it from us.
Happy Pi Day, which is the strongest argument for writing dates in MM/DD
notation, at least until they add two more months to the year. In fact, today is
also Pi Day in MM/DD/YY notation, as it's 3/14/15, or 3.1415, which makes for an
extra nerdy celebration.
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