Beloved real-time strategy classics StarCraft and StarCraft II will soon be available in Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription for PC, the company announced during the Tokyo Game Show.
It’s already free to play both StarCraft and StarCraft II‘s multiplayer modes on PC. This move to Game Pass will make the equally excellent single-player campaigns available to anyone with a subscription, though. Game Pass will also offer all the expansions for both games.
The subscription will provide access to StarCraft Remastered, a revamped version of the original 1998 game that came out in 2017, as well as the StarCraft II Campaign Collection, which includes all 70-plus single-player missions from StarCraft II‘s Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, Legacy of the Void, and Nova Covert Ops.
The announcement was the lone bit of new information in a brief video by Xbox boss Phil Spencer. He appeared in the video wearing a StarCraft T-shirt, which might have gotten StarCraft fans’ hopes up that the franchise would be getting a new game for the first time in over a decade.
That didn’t happen, of course, but the games’ addition to Game Pass will likely expose them to many new players who may have been too young to play the influential strategy titles when they debuted in 1998 and 2010.
These aren’t the first Blizzard games to be added to Game Pass since Microsoft acquired Activision-Blizzard. First came Diablo IV, then Overwatch 2—the latter was free-to-play already by the time it came to Game Pass, but Microsoft included it in the Game Pass distribution platform and offered cosmetics and goodies to Game Pass subscribers.
The StarCraft games will launch for PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate subscribers on November 5.
Enlarge/ The dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the long-anticipated next major edition in the popular historical, open-world game franchise, has been moved back from its previously announced November 15, 2024 release date.
The new date is February 14, 2025, according to an open letter posted to X by franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté. “We realize we need more time to polish and refine the experience, pushing further some of our key features,” Côté wrote. “As such, we’ve made the decision to postpone the release date.”
He went on to promise a same-day launch on Steam as well as the console platforms for that date.
Côté wrote the note to players, but a letter from publisher Ubisoft to investors went into more detail. “While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title,” it says. “This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles.” (It was previously announced that the game allows players to play as two characters: a samurai warrior and a stealthy assassin.)
The investor note also says that “the game will mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1,” so that’s a silver lining for PC players.
A precarious position
The massive-budget Star Wars Outlaws was positioned as an “Assassin’s Creed, but in the Star Wars universe” game and was released on August 30. However, it was met with a mixed reception. Players, reviewers, and streamers praised its meticulous, high-fidelity presentation of Star Wars locales and characters, but they criticized its stealth gameplay as repetitive and frustrating.
Among other things, the game involved lengthy stealth sequences that forced the player to start over if they were discovered; it also didn’t do a very good job of giving players the information and tools they needed to complete these sequences without resorting to trial and error. Shortly after the launch, one of the game’s creative leads promised a patch (which arrived) that would fix one of the earlier missions, but his suggestion in an interview that the problem was simply with a single mission early in the game rather than something more fundamental rang hollow for many players.
Ubisoft acknowledged publicly that Star Wars Outlaws did not meet expectations in terms of either sales or critical reception.
It’s unclear exactly which lessons Ubisoft intends to take from the misfire of Star Wars Outlaws. But Assassin’s Creed is its most vital franchise, so after a big failure like that, the company can’t afford anything other than an enthusiastic reception for Shadows from players. It’s the first tentpole release in the storied franchise in four years.
Of course, this delay now means that Ubisoft’s big-budget open-world samurai game will launch in the same year as Ghost of Yōtei, a sequel to the Sony exclusive big-budget open-world samurai game called Ghost of Tsushima that many players felt did the Assassin’s Creed formula more justice than most Ubisoft titles. Shadows will also launch just a few months before the planned release of Grand Theft Auto VI, which is likely to suck all the oxygen out of the room in gaming spaces for some time. There remains some possibility that GTA6 will be delayed, though.
This is the first time an Assassin’s Creed game from the main franchise has been delayed in a decade; the last delay was Assassin’s Creed Unity, which saw its release date bump from October 28, 2014, to November 11. Despite the delay, that game launched with significant technical problems, which were mostly fixed in later updates.
The prototype Orion AR glasses Zuckerberg showed off today don’t mean Meta will be ready to release a pair of consumer AR glasses anytime soon. But the demo represents a new vision for lightweight, wide-ranging, see-through smartglasses that Zuckerberg calls “a glimpse of the future” and “the dream of Reality Labs.”
Not your average screen
The core challenge of building a pair of comfortable augmented-reality glasses, Zuckerberg said, is that “they have to be glasses.” That means no bulky headset (a la Quest), no wires (a la Apple Vision Pro), and a weight of less than 100 grams (compared to a full 515 g for the Meta Quest 3). While there’s a tiny battery and “custom silicon” in those lightweight glasses, Zuckerberg admitted that some processing is done in a “small puck” that connects wirelessly to the glasses themselves.
Orion is a little thicker than actual glasses, but a whole lot smaller than VR headsets.
A wireless “puck” helps a bit with Orion’s processing, while a wristband provides for the “neural interface.”
Goodbye screens, hello “waveguides.”
You, too, could look this suave while wearing an AR headset.
Average Orion user shown in actual size.
The “neural interface” wristband lets Orion users interact without vocal commands or awkward, large hand gestures.
To achieve true augmented reality, Zuckerberg said Orion uses a screen that “is not actually a screen.” Instead, the glasses use tiny projectors embedded in the arms, which shoot light into specially designed waveguides. From there, the light hits “nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses” to show holographic images that can be layered at various depths and sizes on top of a natural view of the real world as seen through transparent lenses.
Zuckerberg said it has been a challenge making sure those images are sharp enough to capture fine details and bright enough to be seen in all sorts of lighting conditions. “This isn’t passthrough,” Zuckerberg stressed during the keynote. “This is the physical world with holograms displayed on it.”
Orion’s microprojection technology allows for a field of view that Meta says is “the largest… in the smallest AR glasses form to date.” In live demos to press, Meta said that the field of view reaches 70 degrees, compared to just 52 degrees for Microsoft’s older Hololens 2 or 50 degrees for the Magic Leap One, to cite some more limited examples of consumer AR.
To control these holograms, Orion users can use voice commands or hand- and eye-tracking like that already seen on Quest VR headsets. But Zuckerberg also talked up a “neural interface” wristband—which the company has teased previously—that can read tiny wrist and finger movements even without line of sight to the glasses themselves. That will let you interact with what’s on your glasses without having to awkwardly speak out loud or hold your hands in front of you like a zombie, Zuckerberg said.
Enlarge /Frostpunk 2 has you planning and building districts, rather than individual buildings or roads. You make plans, and a particularly icy god laughs.
11 Bit Studios
I can’t remember every interaction I had with the advisers in Civilization games, but I don’t believe I ever had to send my guards to put down a protest one of them staged in a new settlement.
Nor could I ask any of them for “Favours” to scrape a few more heat stamps necessary for a new food district, indebting me to them at some future point when they decide they’ve had enough of some other faction’s people and ideas. In Frostpunk 2 (out today), the people who pop up to tell you how they’re feeling aren’t just helpful indicators, they’re a vital part of the strategy. To keep these people going, you’ve got to make some of them mad, some of them happy, and balance a ledger of all you’ve gained and demanded from them.
That’s the biggest difference you’ll notice in Frostpunk 2 if you’re coming from the original. The original had you making choices that affected people, but you were the Captain, in full control of your people, at least until you angered them enough to revolt. In Frostpunk 2, you manage factions and communities rather than groups of survivors. You place districts, not hospitals. Time moves in days and weeks, not hours. You play multiple chapters across a landscape in a world that is 30 years removed from its initial peril.
The challenge of Frostpunk 2 is no longer simply getting everyone through this winter. There is now some thought of what kind of people you want to be once you have enough fuel, food, and children. Are you in managed decline, or can you build something better, despite the world trying to kill you?
You’re still building a city in a radius around the generator, but it’s big hexes and districts, not buildings on grids.
11 Bit Studios
When your city gets built up, it can be mesmerizing to just watch it glow.
11 Bit Studios
Exploring the places beyond your city’s reach can be rewarding, and risky, of course.
11 Bit Studios
Each Faction has their priorities (Cornerstones). You can ask favors, promise things, and track their favor.
11 Bit Studios
A lot of the original Frostpunk feel remains in the game. Should we teach our perfectly pipe-sized kids how to weld inside the oil tubes? What could go wrong?
11 Bit Studios
A beautiful grid with brutal choices
Those are the big-picture changes to Frostpunk 2. At the ground level, the general feeling is quite familiar. It’s cold, it sometimes gets colder, and there’s a furnace to feed. This time, you need to do “Icebreaking” to unlock tiles for development, but you don’t have to worry so much about the exact placement of individual bits. Your colony or city will link itself up and look beautiful in the game’s grim Victorian cryo-future style. You have to figure out how to scrimp the resources to put an extraction district on the oil reserves, making enough heat for the residents to stop getting sick so you can then send them out to recover goods from a decimated wagon and then icebreak some more toward a food source, all while planning to build a research center and council building.
The research and political trees you climb are more varied and even harder to choose in this sequel. Early in Frostpunk 2, your explorers find a body in the ice with the insignia of the first game’s city on his jacket, and they ask you if it stands for Order or Faith. However you answer, you will have more than just two ideas to choose from. At the base level are two communities, Progress-focused New Londoners and Adaptation-minded Frostlanders. Then you get Order-obsessed Stalwarts, Faithkeepers, and their respective opposition, Pilgrims and Evolvers. Playing the game’s “Utopia Builder” mode after the chapter-based story mode brings in a lot more communities and factions. You know, for this fun thing you do in your spare time.
At the Council Hall, you will need to negotiate with these factions to get votes out of the 100 members, divided up by faction influence. Most votes need 51, but votes that change your power require 66. If a faction is on the fence, you can promise them something, like future research projects or other law changes. Break that promise, and they will work against you in the future. Radicals will show up inside each faction, requiring you to either appease them or find support elsewhere. You can look at all the players and “Cornerstones” (ideologies) at play in one of the game’s beautifully informative screens. You can ponder this while, all around you, the basic needs like fuel, materials, food, and shelter keep needing to be managed.
Your settlers can now lose faith in you not because they’re starving and freezing, but because of political factions. Huzzah!
The PS5 Pro version of the 30th anniversary bundle comes with both varieties of DualSense controller, a plate for an (optional) optical drive, and other accessories.
Sony
The regular PS5 version of the limited edition console.
Sony
This is still a PS5 Pro, despite the PS1-inspired casing.
Sony
It’s possible that Sony should have never stopped using the multicolor PS logo.
Sony
The limited-edition PlayStation Portal.
Sony
Sony launched the original PlayStation console in Japan on December 3, 1994, and Sony isn’t letting the 30th anniversary pass by quietly. Today the company has announced limited-edition versions of both the PS5 and PS5 Pro with gray plastic shells and multicolored PlayStation logos, inspired by the gray plastic shells of the original. The retro-inspired modern consoles will be released on November 21 and will be available for preorder starting September 26 from Sony’s direct.playstation.com site.
Sony is also releasing DualSense and DualSense Edge controllers with gray shells and colorful PS logo buttons and a gray version of the Switch-esque PlayStation Portal streaming console. Sony says that the limited-edition PS5 Pro will be limited to 12,300 units—a reference to the December 3 launch date—but didn’t mention any specific manufacturing numbers for the regular PS5, either DualSense controller design, or the PlayStation Portal.
Both console bundles also come with a handful of other accessories: a PS logo sticker, a PS logo paperclip, cable ties, and (my personal favorite) a regular USB-C cable with a giant, chunky PS1-style controller connector on one end.
Though they’re inspired by the original PlayStation, neither limited edition console comes with a built-in optical drive; however, they do include the gray plastic enclosure for anyone who chooses to add an $80 optical drive after the fact.
Enlarge/ The USB-C cable with the PS1-style connector housing on it may be my favorite part of this entire announcement.
Sony
Sony has, notably, announced no pricing information for either console or any of the controllers or other accessories, though it almost doesn’t matter—the nature of limited-edition gaming-related collectibles is such that enthusiasts and scalpers will snap these consoles up shortly after launch, regardless of whether Sony sells them at the usual MSRP or not.
Enlarge/ The final boss of the new WoW raid, who will now be beatable as a solo player in Story Mode.
Blizzard
After 20 years, it’s now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid.
That’s thanks to “Story Mode,” a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion.
Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they’re at in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there’s Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn’t nearly as challenging and can typically be completed by a pick-up group within a few tries.
The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you’re matched up with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it’s even easier than Raid Finder.
How Story Mode works
In Story Mode, you fight only the raid’s final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it’s beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects.
There are some rewards, but they’re not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way.
So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn’t been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.
Supporting new (well, actually, old) play styles
Throughout WoW‘s history, it’s been common for the conclusion of a major storyline to involve defeating the final boss of a raid or dungeon. In the earlier years, Raid Finder didn’t exist, so only a small percentage of players who were willing to take on hardcore raiding could see those narrative outcomes.
Raid Finder was added in the Cataclysm expansion, but that still required grouping with other players, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For some players, the social aspect of WoW is simply guild chat while doing solo activities at their own pace. Some people even play WoW without interacting directly with other players at all, treating others in the game as background crowds that add immersion to the experience.
In most areas, WoW has been better than most of its peers at supporting this kind of play. I played WoW socially early on, but I’ve played almost exclusively solo for the past several years. To see the endings of storylines I encountered while questing, I often turned to YouTube to see the cutscenes players got when they beat the raids.
Story Mode is also relevant for older content; Blizzard wisely introduced a new approach to leveling new characters where players can essentially pick a past expansion to level through. It’s tuned so that the players reach the level cap and are ready for current live content at more or less the same time they finish the final story in that expansion. But it’s only during special Timewalking events that those players got the opportunity to find other players to do the raids with, so they often didn’t get to finish the stories.
Story Mode solves both of those scenarios, and it’s a fundamental philosophy shift for how WoW approaches endgame content.
A lot of players enjoy WoW‘s positive community aspects but don’t like the pressure of having to perform for others in a high-stress situation. Raid Finder addressed some of their concerns, but since some people just play for the story, there was no good reason for Blizzard not to have done this ages ago.
Story Mode might even be enough to get lapsed players back who might have left because they didn’t have time for the demanding social schedules associated with raiding. It also doesn’t take away from hardcore players’ satisfaction or enjoyment if casual solos can see some version of the final encounter and cutscene of a story arc, especially since the rewards are so distinct.
Sometimes, casual and hardcore players can play the same game without ruining each other’s experience. That’s a fine line that Blizzard has struggled to walk sometimes, but Story Mode is one of a handful of cases where it’s a win for everyone.
Enlarge/ I hope you like radial menus, because you’ll be looking at a lot of them.
Age of Mythology: Retold brings a lot of the usual advancements that you’d expect for a reboot of both the increasingly dated 2002 original game and its previous reboot: 2014’s Extended Edition, which is still perfectly playable and available on Steam. The newest version of this real-time strategy classic comes with the requisite improvements in graphics and user interface, making the whole game much easier to look at and parse at a glance. And while the updated voice acting isn’t going to win any awards, neither is the stilted, bare bones dialogue that those actors are working with (which seems faithful to the original game, for better or worse).
But Retold does add one thing that I wasn’t really expecting in a modern real-time strategy game—full support for a handheld controller. Developers have been trying to make RTS games work without the traditional mouse and keyboard since the days of SNES Populous and Starcraft 64, usually with limited success. Microsoft hasn’t given up on the dream, though, fully integrating controller support for Age of Mythology: Retold into both the PC version (which we sampled) and, obviously, the Xbox Series X|S release.
The result is definitely the best version of an RTS controller interface that I’ve tried and proof that a modern controller can be a perfectly functional option for the genre. In the end, though, there are just a few too many annoyances associated with a handheld controller to make it the preferred way to play a game like this.
To get a feel for what I mean, just look at the “Controls Popup” summarizing all the things a single controller needs to do in a game like Age of Mythology. The game makes full use of every single button and directional input on the Xbox gamepad for some function or other. Things are so crowded that commands like Stop and Delete need to be mapped to a combination of two shoulder buttons, with different functions for holding and tapping (and there are a few other multi-button menu toggles that aren’t even listed here).
If anything, this diagram undersells the control complexity here. Tapping either trigger brings up context-sensitive radial menus full of general commands or construction options for the currently selected building. Finding the right option then often means scrolling through multiple pages of radial menus in this full-screen interface, an awkward solution to the problem of having too many options for too few buttons.
To the game’s credit, it does its best to limit how much of this menu-based fumbling you have to do. Tapping the Y button when a building is selected, for instance, automatically starts construction on the most common unit you’d want to create with that building. And holding down the Y button maximizes the production queue for that building quickly, saving the need to spend a few seconds clicking through menus to do so.
Final Fantasy PC mods that are way too inappropriate for publication on Ars.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/clouddress-800×450.png”>
Enlarge/ This screenshot of a “Cloud in a dress” mod is being used in place of some other Final Fantasy PC mods that are way too inappropriate for publication on Ars.
For game producer Naoki Yoshida, though, that new opportunity comes along with a plea for the user community to behave themselves when modifying the game. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Yoshida felt the need to step in when director Hiroshi Takai was asked about what “goofy mods” he would like to see in the game.
“If we said, ‘It’d be great if someone made xyz,’ it might come across as a request, so I’ll avoid mentioning any specifics here!” Yoshida told PC Gamer. “The only thing I will say is that we definitely don’t want to say anything offensive or inappropriate, so please don’t make or install anything like that.”
This isn’t exactly a new type of concern for Japanese game developers. In 2015, Dead or Alive 5 producer Yosuke Hayashi asked “PC users to play our game in good moral and manner” (a bit ironic for a series so focused on scantily clad, buxom female competitors). Last year, Capcom went even further by likening PC game modding to “cheating,” citing the “reputational damage caused by malicious mods” that can be “offensive to public order and morals.”
Enlarge/ Please don’t do anything immoral with this Dead or Alive character, modders.
“When these [offensive mods] are disseminated, the image of the product is tarnished and branding is affected,” Capcom said, adding that when these mods are “mistaken for legitimate implementations” it can cause “reputational damage” and “bad publicity.”
Um … Sure, Elden is a Bandai Namco-funded title, and I was the production general manager in charge of Elden, so it’s not irrelevant … it’s ridiculously well-made mod but plz stop it lol https://t.co/ISlXLrjfhM
“Personally, I wouldn’t say anything for your personal enjoyment,” Harada said in a follow-up post. “The only problem is that many people misunderstand it as official and ask us to support the problems it causes (I’m tired of this wrong inquiry).”
While we understand how annoying it is for random players to confuse a fan mod with a developer’s core product, it’s well past time for these developers to start accepting that this is how PC gaming works. When you publish a game on an open platform like the PC, you relinquish some level of control over what the community does with the gaming canvas you’ve given them. If a developer isn’t comfortable with that, they should stay out of PC games altogether.
Rather than chastising “inappropriate” mods, maybe developers should try to embrace the attitude that FFXVI director Takai was able to express in an interview posted on the Epic Games Store: “Feel free to have fun on your own,” he said. “Within reason, of course!”
Enlarge/ Imagine owning one of those funky birds as an NFT!
Fans of ultra-viral mobile gaming hit Flappy Bird who were stunned by the game’s sudden removal from the iOS App Store 10 years ago were probably even more stunned by last week’s equally sudden announcement that Flappy Bird is coming back with a raft of new characters and game modes. Unfortunately, the new version of Flappy Bird seems to be the result of a yearslong set of legal maneuvers by a crypto-adjacent game developer intent on taking the “Flappy Bird” name from the game’s original creator, Dong Nguyen.
“No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything,” Nguyen wrote on social media over the weekend in his first post since 2017. “I also don’t support crypto,” Nguyen added.
No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything. I also don’t support crypto.
“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” Nguyen said in a 2014 interview after removing the game from mobile app stores. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”
“A decade-long, convoluted journey to get here”
So how can another company release a game named Flappy Bird without Nguyen’s approval or sale of the rights? Court filings show that a company called Gametech Holdings filed a “notice of opposition” against Nguyen with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in late 2023, seeking to invalidate his claim on the “Flappy Bird” name. When Nguyen, who lives in Vietnam, didn’t respond to that notice by November, the US Patent and Trademark Office entered a default judgment against him and officially canceled his trademark in January, allowing Gametech to legally claim the name.
But Gametech’s efforts to legally acquire the Flappy Bird name seem to go back much further than that. Back in 2014, an outfit called Mobile Media Partners tried to claim the Flappy Bird trademark in a filing made mere days after Nguyen pulled the game from the App Store. Coincidentally enough, the specific New Jersey address listed by Mobile Media Partners on that 2014 application matches an address used by Gametech Holdings in the paperwork for its 2023 legal efforts.
Mobile Media Partners’ 2014 application makes reference to a (now-defunct) FlappyBirdReturns.com and asserts that the company had “reserved/acquired the name from Apple in their Apps Store [sic].” It also claims that “Flappy Bird” is “not being used by any other companies and/or people,” taking quick advantage of Nguyen’s decision to take the game down.
Enlarge/ A section from the USPTO’s 2018 trademark certificate granting “Flappy Bird” to “Mobile Media Partners.”
In a press release, a spokesperson for the newly formed Flappy Bird Foundation—which acquired the trademark from Gametech—summed this all up as “a decade-long, convoluted journey to get here.” The new company said it also acquired the legal rights to Piou Piou vs. Cactus, a little-known 2011 web game that seems to have heavily inspired Flappy Bird.
The newly launched FlappyBird.org website proudly refers to “the decade-long mission” to revive the game, which “involved acquiring legal rights.” The post also mentions “working with my predecessor to uncage me and re-hatch…” in phrasing that seems to imply a link to the original Flappy Bird but which could also reference the Piou Piou vs. Cactus acquisition.
Enlarge / Just some of the inventive character designs included in UFO 50.
Mossmouth
If you’ve spent any time with retro gaming emulators, you’re likely familiar with the joy of browsing through a long list of (legally obtained) ROMs and feeling overwhelmed at a wide range of titles you’ve never even heard of. Picking randomly through such a game list is like wandering through a foreign country, searching for hidden jewels among all the shovelware in the bewildering and wildly imaginative early video game history.
UFO 50 captures that feeling perfectly, combining the freewheeling inventiveness of old-school game design with modern refinements and more consistent baseline quality bred over the ensuing decades. The result is an extremely playable love letter to the gaming history that will charm even the most jaded retro game fan.
A loving homage
UFO 50 presents itself as a collection of 50 dusty game cartridges made by UFO Soft, a fictional developer that operated from 1982 to 1989. Working through the company’s catalog, you’ll see evolution in graphics, music, and gameplay design that mirror the ever-changing gaming market of the real-world ’80s. You’ll also see the same characters, motifs, and credited “developers” appearing over and over again, building a convincing world behind the games themselves.
The individual games in UFO 50 definitely wear their influences on their sleeves, with countless, almost overt homages to specific ’80s arcade and console games. But there isn’t a single title here that I’d consider a simple clone or knock-off of an old gaming concept; each sub-game brings its own twist or novel idea that makes it feel new.
Ah, the joys of marching through a cavern of hallways with perfect 90-degree angles.
Mossmouth
Aw, you always get to be the shirtless muscle guy. Can I be Player 1 this time?
Mossmouth
A giant animal wearing only high-top boots? Sure, why not?
Mossmouth
The real-time positional strategy of Attactics feels like chess mixed with Advance Wars
Mossmouth
The titular “UFO” appears in a lot of different UFO 50 games, naturally
Mossmouth
Bubble Bobble homage Kick Club, for instance, replaces its inspiration’s bubble-blowing dinosaurs with a soccer player that has to constantly chase down his only weapon: a soccer ball. Vainger combines Metroid-style shooting and gated, maze-like exploration with the gravity-flipping of Metal Storm. Magic Garden combines the avoid-your-own-tail gameplay of Snake with items that let you eat up obstacles, Pac-Man-style.
Anyone who remembers playing games in the ’80s will instantly clock plenty of other clear references. A small sampling of ones I noticed includes: Bad Dudes, Blaster Master, Gradius, River City Ransom, Shadowgate, Super Dodge Ball, Smash TV, Space Harrier, and Super Sprint. And, just like any list of ’80s ROMs, you’ll also encounter plenty of grid-based puzzle games and shoot-em-ups, each with their own take on the popular genres.
But other UFO 50 offerings are retro-stylized versions of genres and games that didn’t really exist in the ’80s. If you ever wondered what a caveman-themed tower defense game would look like on the NES, Rock On! Island has the answer. Or if you want to see a positional arena fighter in the style of Super Smash Bros. (complete with original characters that sport their own moves and weapons) then Hyper Contender has you covered. Then there’s Velgress, which combines the retro run-and-gun platforming of the NES with the roguelike procedural generation of a modern classic like Downwell.
Still, other UFO 50 games squeeze completely original concepts (as far as I can tell) into the limited technology of the time period. Lords of Diskonia is a tactical battler that has you flinging units represented by Crokinole-style disks at the other side. Party House asks you to manage a Rolodex of party guests to maximize your money and popularity without attracting unwelcome attention from the cops. Waldorf’s Journey involves flinging the titular walrus on lengthy blind jumps while carefully adjusting his landing with hilarious, energy-consuming flaps of his flippers.
Hot Foot is an incredibly endearing and fun take on the Super Dodge Ball formula.
Mossmouth
Magic Garden combines the addictive qualities of Snake and Pac-Man.
Mossmouth
Each game comes complete with its own title screen, cut scenes, etc.
Mossmouth
There are a lot of shoot-em-ups in UFO 50, as befits the time period.
Mossmouth
It’s not all action. Night Manor is a full-fledged point-and-click adventure title.
Mossmouth
The sheer variety of different gameplay ideas on offer here is incredible. There are real-time strategy games and cooperative two-player brawlers. There’s a full-fledged golf RPG and also a 2D golf game with pinball-style hazards. There’s a Dave the Diver-esque undersea exploration adventure and a couple of Final Fantasy–style RPGs. There’s a game that combines Crazy Taxi and the original, overhead Grand Theft Auto. There’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles homage that combines five different genres with five unique, fully realized anthropomorphic human-animal hybrids.
Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee’s initial announcement.
In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue “democratizing game development” without “a partnership built on trust.” Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in “a novel and controversial new form.” So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.
“Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners,” Bromberg writes.
A year of discontent
Unity’s announcement of a new “Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs” in mid-September 2023 (Wayback archive), while joined by cloud storage and “AI at runtime,” would have been costly for smaller developers who found success. The Runtime Fee would have cost 20 cents per install on the otherwise free Personal tier after a game had reached $200,000 in revenue and more than 200,000 installs. Fees decreased slightly for Pro and Enterprise customers after $1 million in revenue and 1 million installs.
The move led to almost immediate backlash from many developers. Unity, whose then-CEO John Riccitiello had described in 2015 as having “no royalties, no [f-ing] around,” was “quite simply not a company to be trusted,” wrote Necrosoft Games’ Brandon Sheffield. Developers said they would hold off updates or switch engines rather than absorb the fee, which would have retroactively counted installs before January 2024 toward its calculations.
Unity’s terms of service seemed to allow for such sudden shifts. Unity softened the impact of the fee on Personal users, removed the backdated install counting, and capped fees at 2.5 percent of revenue. Unity Create President and General Manager Marc Whitten told Ars at that time that while the fee would seemingly not affect the vast majority of Unity users, he understood that a stable agreement should be a feature of the engine.
However coincidentally or not, Riccitiello announced his retirement the next month, which led to some celebration among devs, but not total restoration of trust. A massive wave of layoffs throughout the winter of 2023 and 2024 showed that Unity’s financial position was precarious, partly due to acquisitions during Riccitiello’s term. The Runtime Fee would have minimal impact in 2024, the company said in filings, but would “ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases.”
Instead of ramping from there, the Runtime Fee is now gone, and Unity has made other changes to its pricing structure:
Unity Personal remains free, and its revenue/funding ceiling increases from $100,000 to $200,000
Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2,200 per seat
Unity Enterprise, with customized packages for those over $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.
“From this point forward, it’s our intention to revert to a more traditional cycle of considering any potential price increases only on an annual basis,” Bromberg wrote in his post. Changes to Unity’s Editor software should allow customers to keep using their existing version under previously agreed terms, he wrote.
Enlarge/ The “VP” on the cab light is a nice touch.
Last month, in a profile of newly named Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, The New York Times included a throwaway line about “the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess.” Weeks later, that anecdote formed the unlikely basis for the unlikely Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition mod, which inserts the Minnesota governor (and top-of-the-ticket running mate Kamala Harris) into the Dreamcast classic driving game.
“Rumor has it that Tim Walz played Crazy Taxi so much his wife took his Dreamcast away from him… so I decided to put him in the game,” modder Edward La Barbera wrote on the game’s Itch.io page.
Unfortunately, the pay-what-you-want mod can’t just be burned to a CD-R and played on actual Dreamcast hardware. Currently, the mod’s visual files are tuned to work only with Dreamcast emulator Flycast, which includes built-in features for replacing in-game textures.
After a few minutes of playing with settings and folder structures, launching the mod replaces the Crazy Taxi character Gus with a model of Walz sporting an open-buttoned black and red flannel shirt (a look The Wall Street Journal said has “made him a DNC fashion icon”). There are plenty of little visual touches beyond the Walz character, too, including “D” and “R” gears labeled as “Democrat” and “Republican,” a fare counter that’s labeled as “campaign $$$,” and a countdown measuring the seconds “till election time.”
The mod files also include new voice lines for Walz and Harris sourced from “their respective DNC speeches.” Getting those files to work in a standard Crazy Taxi ROM requires a good deal of fiddling with third-party ISO management programs, though, so you might be better off watching a gameplay video if you just want to hear a taxi-driving Walz cry out, “Mind your own business” to an impatient passenger.
Enlarge/ Current owner Bryn Tanner poses with the actual Dreamcast once owned by Tim Walz.
While Walz and the campaign haven’t commented publicly on his reported Dreamcast addiction, there’s been a surprising amount of detailed reporting on the fate of the Governor’s fabled Dreamcast itself. Former Walz student and campaign intern Tom Johnson told IGN that Walz brought the old console in as a potential donation in the summer of 2007. Tanner said it didn’t get much use in the office break room, but after the campaign, he took the system—complete with a copy of Crazy Taxi in the drive—home to play with roommate Alex Gaterud.
From there, Gaterud sold the console on Craigslist for a mere $25 in 2012—he recalled to IGN that, at the time, “advertising something ‘formerly owned by a US Congressman’ doesn’t add any value on Craigslist.” The customer in that Craigslist sale, Bryn Tanner, was posting about the acquisition online years before Walz became a national political celebrity.
More recently, Tanner has taken to posting TikTok videos about his relatively notable console and showing it off at local gaming convention 2D Con. “I’m basically famous,” Tanner joked in a post following the NYT story.
But some of Walz’s political opponents have tried to make hay of the fact that he was apparently hooked on a console that came out when he was in his mid-30s. “This is reported as a fun, relatable story, but doesn’t anybody else find a 35-year-old man getting that addicted to video games a little sad?” conservative activist Charlie Kirk posted on social media.
To the people who knew Walz as a gamer, though, it just makes him more human. “I think it’s sort of the specificity of it that really gets me,” Tanner told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last month. “The fact that it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, my wife took away my video game,’ because that could be anything. It was the Dreamcast. It was this kind of underrated flash in the pan.”
