Not a ton of great news out of E3(yet) but there has been some and this is definitely one of them. Hotline Miami 2 will ship with a pretty fully featured level editor. In a E3 developer Q&A the Dennation Games folks mentioned that they are working on Steam cloud sync for our levels making it easy for us to all share our creations.

"Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative is a Portal 2 Mod. It's time to think with Gels! The Portal-Gun is gone, and the test must go on! Grab the Paint-Gun Device and solve the test chambers in ways you've never solved them before."

Any reason to get back into Portal 2 is a good one and this looks to be a very good one. Exploring more of the paint based mechanics, Aperture Tag also ships with a few other things too:

• A new 27 maps campaign!


• A new character with full voice acting!


• Custom paint gun model!


• Custom Soundtrack!

That said, this doesn't seem to be the only Portal 2 mod on Steam. "Thinking with Time Machine" is another such mod that is out now.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/286080/

I see many reviews on Steam like this. They basically give the game a bad review but play it... a lot.

So you dislike the game, don't recommend it but you suffered through it for 452 hours? Games I don't like get a few hours at most.

I don't entirely understand many parts of gamer culture, this kind of thing in particular.

"In 1991, local newsstation reports Nintendo released their successor to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in America. But the parents wasn't too happy about it. The parents thought Nintendo was exploiting their children into buying new and expensive hardware for new games when the improvements to the new hardware were obvious."

It's fun to look back at video games to see how far we've come. I watched this news clip from the 90's that made me laugh a bit. I still remember the first time I played Super Mario World and experienced the Super Nintendo for the first time. The music, graphics and controls were very good. We got a Super Nintedo a few years after launch and to this day is one of my more memorable Christmases. Glad we didn't have a video camera as my reaction was mostly a ton of excited screaming.

I was pretty happy.

It's a pre-rendered fight scene but even if the game looks half that good with some of the mechanics they showed, it should be fun. I played a bit of the latest Mortal Kombat incarnation and I was a pretty big fan.

Hopefully it skims a nice balance between doing service to the old characters and game as well as bringing something new to the table.

The game will ship in 2015 on PS3, PS4, 360, XBox One and PC.

Boogie2998 is one of the YouTube personalities I enjoy watching. Not only do I enjoy his Francis character rage against the latest video game news, but I enjoy listening to his commentary too. In this latest vlog he talks a bit about AAA pricing and dat $60 price tag. I agree with him that not every AAA game is $60 and he notes that will most likely or is already changing.

He also notes that he felt, to make the game FEEL like it was worth $60 that the fetch quests in Wolfenstein were tacked on. He also though missions were added in to make the game longer and give people more value. Whereas I don't feel that when I play it myself, I can see the criticism. Often time game developer pad in content to make it seem like you got your moneys worth when it's just a huge slog and grind. Personally, I felt Borderlands 2 suffered from this quite a bit.

What do you think about the $60 AAA price tag and have you played a game recently that felt like it added content to make it longer?

I am not a huge Team Fortress 2 fan, but this mashup trailer of the Hotline Miami universe with the Team Fortress 2 universe is pretty epic.

That said, it is also pretty violent so be forewarned.

Compare it to the original Hotline Miami 2 trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exg_OxsaHyY

Remember when the tide started turning and publishers were coming on board to port more games to SteamOS and Linux? I do too, because that time is now as seen in this latest news of XCOM Enemy Unknown coming to Linux. 2K has tapped Feral Interactive to do the port, which is interesting considering they port games to Mac.

If this is a broader move by 2K to port successful titles to SteamOS/Linux this will make for a very interesting year.

When I first saw the intro scene for Another World, I was really impressed. The kind of 3D graphics it showcases blew my mind as it seemed computer graphics had leaped years into the future. I really liked playing the demo of Another World and then the full version at my friends house, but due to not having the full version I never beat it.

Can't tell you how many times I watched this intro scene and played the first parts of this game. To this day, I am pretty good at jumping over the worm and dodging that wolf thing at the beginning of the game because that's about as far I made it.

Checkout a fan recreation of the original intro scene above. The recreation is pretty accurate and does the original game quite a bit of justice.

You can watch the original here. The original brings a lot more subtle and lonely horror and is a bit better in my opinion. That said, it's nice to see different versions of classic game scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1EGP2EyWe0

I started Cheerful Ghost because I wanted to create a place where I could talk about video games with my friends. When the site shipped it needed to do three things: hold my video games to my list, allow me to write about any game in my list and share that conversation on the everyone on the web. As the site marched on we started interviewing people in gaming, the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable started & the event system was built. Over the last year I have been involved in the Portland Indie game scene and in our last Roundtable episode, was able to get Will Lewis, the founder of PIGSquad to join us.

As Cheerful Ghost has evolved as a community we have become much closer to the Indie Games movement and as such am happy to announce that by years end we will publish our first Indie Game.

As I have been thinking about this announcement I decided the best way to convey the information is to break it up into two parts. Feel free to read it all or just the relevant bits for you.

What Does This Mean For The Cheerful Ghost Community?

If you love Indie Games, this will give you a better look at them as we will have a unique perspective of the games we will publish. I have talked to a few community members before this announcement to get a list of concerns they had and because of this I think we will get the balance right between talking about awesome stuff and not being annoying.

One of the things community members have mentioned is transparency about what games we are publishing. Since I love talking about stuff I love, this seemed like a no-brainer. We will note on the site if a particular game you are looking at is published by us so there is no confusion what is going on.

We will still be covering other games as we are currently have no plans to change that. Ultimately anyone can post an article to Cheerful Ghost and if it isn't junk or SPAM it gets promoted to the main page. This won't change because we publish games.

What Does This Mean For Indie Game Developers?

As we have been talking to the developer of our first game we are publishing I have been thinking a lot about how to approach publishing. I want to create a system where it's easy to join as a creator. As someone who created this site and plans on making video games too, I want to create a system that I would want to join. Because of that I think way we approach publishing is pretty special.

Most publishers make you sign away the exclusive right to publish your game until the end of time. With us, it's a few years and developers love this.

Most publishers take a huge cut of the game price, leaving you with little in return. With us, you get the biggest slice of the pie and developers love this.

We will take care of helping Indie Game developers get their games out on all the digital game stores we can and work to promote their games. Since we start with a vibrant community, this allows us a pretty unique perspective to do good work.

If you are making something amazing, we would love to know about it to see if we can help you release it.

A Few Ending Thoughts

Cheerful Ghost is walking humbly into an area very close to our hearts. The independent games movement is one that I am really passionate about and I can't wait to help game developers release great stuff. At the end of the day if Cheerful Ghost can make Indie game developers happy by helping them find an audience of people that love the games they build, we are doing what we set out to do. Hopefully you are intrigued by this news and if you have any questions, feel free to drop them on this thread or send them to me directly.

-jon