Updates are coming for Terraria on the PC and to spoil some of them, Redigit, the developer working on them posted some screenshots to the official Terraria forums. After sending these screenshots to the official Cheerful Ghost labs for deep analysis we have figured out a few things.

• The new update contains turtles. From the looks of it, a possible pet and enemy turtle. Pet being the turtle in the house and hostile turtles in the over world.


• Waterfalls are coming to Terraria.


• New Wizard armor and a flying sword looks to be added.


• There is a pot with slightly different art.

I sent these results back to the lab many times but it came back with the same results as before. I am really looking forward to getting the new PC Terraria goods and I wonder how much of them include the recent console updates as well?

Time will tell.

http://www.terrariaonline.com/threads/its-been-a-while-since-i-posted-a-spoiler.97577/

Totally can't wait for Starbound to drop later this year. Heralded as a spiritual successor to Terraria in space with quests, planet exploration and a ton more awesomeness this game looks to be completely bad-ass. Recently Chucklefish released the Starbound Roadmap as well as added lots of information about its current completion level with all the games features.

Some of the larger features are mostly complete such as World & Universe Generation, Dungeons and Villages, Items & the User Interface. Many of the remaining items with much to go have quite a bit complete already.

When a more formal date drops for Starbound ill let you know. Can't wait to try this game and at some point run a Cheerful Ghost server for it :D

http://www.playstarbound.com/roadmap/

Doom: The Board Game is my favoriate board game of all time. So when I saw Plaid Hat Game's upcoming Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia I was pretty interested. The goal of the game is to build an army to fight booker for ultimate control of Columbia. It looks like you and the other players can have control of Elizabeth in some fashion but the details are a bit sparse as of now.

The game pieces and overall build look fantastic to me. I imagine ill see this in my local game store pretty soon and want to give it a shot when it does.

Have you picked up a board game for a video game before? If so how did it turn out for you? What do you think of Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia are you going to pick this up?

http://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/bioshock-infinite-the-siege-of-columbia

"After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles."

Can't say as this is really surprising. Making games is hard and LucasArts really hasn't had a home run in some time. They did create some fantastic games of the retro era in Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Tie Fighter and a ton more.

LucasArts was working on Star Wars 1313 and that seems to have been put on hold unless LucasArts can get someone to finish it up for them.

Goodbye LucasArts, we had some good times!

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/03/disney-closes-game-publisher-lucasarts.aspx
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/03/lucasarts-rep-says-star-wars-1313-might-be-saved.aspx

I have been pretty excited to try out Terraria on the PS3 and today I took it for a spin. Its a fairly small download and it was running in a few minutes. The demo has Tutorial mode available and as such, played that.

The tutorial is fairly interesting as it runs you thorough a few game basics from mining to crafting a few pieces of starter gear. I never realized how much stuff Terraria packs in to the PC version. The console version has to make sense of all that and as such, its a very dense system of menus to navigate through and is a bit overwhelming at first. That said, after a few minutes I was fairly acclimated to things and didn't have a problem crafting and equipping. The tutorial places you on a decent sized floating island and allows you the ability to do whatever you can within that space. You can't save your progress in the demo, but that is fairly par for the course.

Movement and attack is very fluid. You can switch between your items with L1 & R1. Its easy to bring up your inventory and switching between that and your crafting and equip screens is pretty simple.

The graphics looked very good on my HD TV. It was fun seeing Terraria in the living room and got a kick hearing the iconic music in my living room. Speaking of music, it seems they have remixed the in game music and some of the sound effects sound slightly different. All told its not bad, its just different and thought it was worth mentioning.

All told, if you have a console and haven't played Terraria yet, I recommend you give the demo a shot. Its a very good port of the game and if you do the majority of your gaming on your couch you should check this up!

Today I launched the first pass at "ULTRA DELUXE SUPER-ENHANCED PLATFORM SUPPORT HD!" Which is to say, Game Platforms on Cheerful Ghost are now first class citizens.

Click around on the site and you will not see platforms as clickable tag links. Clicking a Platform tag will take you to the new Platform pages. Each Platform has its own page and a few bits of interesting data on it like a Wikipedia reference link as well as the most popular games the site has in reference to it.

Some platforms have a ton of games and some are very new and have only a few. Ill be working over the next bit to flesh out these pages even more with a description and other bits.

http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/snes
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/ps3
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/2600

We have also added a few new platforms and over the next bit will add more games to the platforms as well.

http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/mac
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/linux
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/ps4
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/vita
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/ouya
http://cheerfulghost.com/platform/wiiu

If you are considering buying a new platform on Amazon, I recommend you purchase it through the Amazon link on the Platform page. It doesn't cost you more and gives the site a bit of a kickback.

If you want to write a description for one of the Platform pages, send it my way and ill add it to the page.

FTL recently won the GDC Audience Award and Excellence in Design. Both awards are very well deserved and FTL is the game I am playing right now. Each one of my games lasts an hour or less. I have made it about 75% of the way to the end on Easy and am currently refining my strategy to go further but I heard there is a boss battle at the end that I am kind of nervous about. Ill have a party when I beat this one.

Gamasutra recently posted an Interview with the FTL devs about the games design.

“We started with a very vague idea for a concept and used that as a guiding light for the entire project,” said Davis. “By having one singular focus we were able to abandon everything else that didn’t fit in line with that vision.”

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/189353/Designing_without_a_pitch__An_FTL_postmortem.php

Blizzard recently celebrated the 15 year anniversary of Starcraft. And in other news, I feel very old.

"Following its release on March 31, 1998, StarCraft warped millions of us through time and space to the 25th century, where we explored the unruly Koprulu Sector for the first time. We built armies and brought ruin to countless enemy bases as we helped the terrans, protoss, and zerg wage war against each other. The release of StarCraft: Brood War just nine months later saw the Queen of Blades become one of the most iconic villains of all time, and the popularization of professional StarCraft competition in South Korea....

Blizzards post gives a good brief of Starcraft and its history up to the modern era. They are also handing out special classic Starcraft BattleNet portraits if you...

"Play one game of StarCraft II in any online mode before 11:59 p.m. PDT on April 17"

Ill be nabbing those portraits over the next few days as I raise my glass to 15 years of Zerg rushing. 15 years.... doesn't feel that long.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/9369230

I need to take a break from playing amazing EA games to talk about the crown jewel in its chalice of badassery, the Battlefield series. Battlefield is the best franchise of all time and EA is the best company in the industry to bring us this series of games. We totally need to all slam a Pepsi™ as the ensuing bro-dom sugar rush as I take us back to look at this franchise.

You’d better put on them headphones, because I am going to RAWK you EAStyle™!

The first Battlefield game was 2002’s Battlefield 1942. This game was solely unique in that it offered all us dude-bros a way to live our shared dreams of fighting in World War 2. No game to that point brought us gamers the ability to run and gun in the setting of WW2 and was seen by many as a essential evolution of the genre.

Battlefield 1942: Road to Rome dialed things up considerably by launching on less platforms, contained less guns and less maps. EA was really taking things to the next level and I laud them for the design and approach they took to this game.

EA consulted with Zeus and Thor to bring us the next installment Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII. Some people thought this game was too expensive and brought little to the table. History will judge this game as a liberation of features and an expanse of cost!

Battlefield Vietnam changed the Battlefield landscape by doing something radical. They changed the locations you fought in! This gaming advancement was felt throughout the universe and in one offshoot timeline, blew up the planet Vulcan before Nero. Utilizing such powerful technology as 3D and Music, Battlefield Vietnam plunged us into deep combat never before seen in a shooter to date. Plus it added new skins to guns that previously didn’t use them.

After so many home runs EA decided to progress the Battlefield franchise by gifting the world with Battlefield 2. Providing more value by shipping on only one platform, EA realized to meet the demand of a modern audience they needed to up the ante by allowing people the ability to shoot guns from our modern time. Battlefield 2 also incorporated many more polygons in each model allowing all players the ability to buy faster computers.

Battlefield 2: Special Forces tore the video game industry to pieces when it shipped in 2005. I can’t write enough about how absolutely epic-tastic this game truly is. I used to own Shakespeare but after I played this game I destroyed my copies of this work because it makes King Lear look like horse shit. The writing alone propels this game to the largest heights of human creativity.

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for its attempt to solve the conflict in the Middle East as seen through its epic narrative. After its release, Battlefield 2 went on to start a charity organization to help Earthquake victims in third world countries. Plus it added a new feature to the franchise, shooting people with guns who are on the other side of a battle.

Battlefield 2: Euro Force saw the series take a sharp turn in that it was an economic policy simulator. In Euro Force you took control of the Eurozone Bank as you attempt to sway all the remaining countries in Europe to adopt the Euro. Utilizing such tactics as more modern fiscal arguments, trade imbalance regulations and shooting people in the face, Euro Force was a really interesting take on the franchise. Largely considered one of the most influential treatises of modern Economic policy, Euro Force was a radical departure from the Battlefield forumla.

Battlefield 2: Armored Fury won IGF’s Best Video Game Award in 2006. Some people only viewed this release as only adding a few maps and vehicles to Battlefield 2. Whereas that might be factually true, what I find more interesting is what this game didn’t ship with. In Jazz, less is more and in keeping with that spirit, Armored Fury is one of the biggest expansions to the Battlefield series to date.

Battlefield 2142 answered the question that Battlefield fans had been wondering for years. “What would happen if they added 200 to 1942?” The Battlefield franchise had innovated so much by bringing us the combat of the past as well as modern combat to fans so the next logical step was to tackle the future. Unlike Battlefield games of the past, 2142 saw players shooting at each other with guns on land, flying planes shooting guns and driving things to shoot guns. Innovating even further these guns required ammunition and reloading, a huge leap in advancement to come in the upcoming 200 years of human combat.

Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike took the series focus to Europe, an area previously left untouched by the Battlefield franchise. EA, daring to never return to the success of its past really floored the gaming industry by showcasing future combat in Europe.

Battlefield: Bad Company took the franchise in an entirely new direction and focused on a human dinner protocol simulator. Bad Company allowed you to play the host of a dinner where you had to outline the flow and pacing of the unfolding event. EA offered players a challenging set of guests all related to the theme of “Bad Company.” One set of guests as seen in the Protagonists parents saw the conversation turn to uncomfortable territory such as “you will never amount to anything” and “why don’t we have grandkids yet?” Other Bad Company missions saw the protagonist navigating such awkward situations as serving steak for your very vocal vegan friends, accidentally mentioning politics around strong political activists and people that eat like pigs.

For many years Battlefield players complained that they could only pay for a game once. EA heard this complaint and attempted to sway fans with Battlefield Heroes. Battlefield Heroes solves the painful problem of not being able to give video game companies enough money by incorporating a Microtransaction model and a Free to Play atmosphere. No longer burdened by the shackles of paying for things once, Battlefield Heroes is one of the most beloved games in the franchise.

Battlefield 1943. If I have to spend time talking about how epic this game was, then Hitler will be magically resurrected as a Unicorn hell bent on destroying Eurasia.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 built on the human dining protocol simulation that the original Bad Company built and took it to the next level. Adding amazing features such as more guests and dialog options, Bad Company 2 really pushed the genre forward. The game is also noteworthy because it also featured vocal work by Dom Deluise.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam really showcased EA’s subtle attention to detail. As the development team enhanced the dining protocol simulation’s core rendering pipline a new outer meshing 3D polygon count block wave vertical flux particle enhancement was made to its spatial transformation protocol rendering. This radical transformation allowed the games artists to simulate clothing at a level unseen by most modern games. Polyester and cotton never looked so real and as such EA won a IGF technical excellence in artistry award for making clothing look “Even more realer than the real looking shit in the last game.”

The Battlefield franchise had made so much progress to advance video games as art that EA decided to take an entirely new direction. Hiring young children and partially illiterate marketers EA employed its short lived “lets start naming games like children and illiterate marketers” initiative. Battlefield Play4Free was the result of that initiative and as such the game became an instant hit with the very young and incompetent.

Battlefield 3 was largely considered by all gamers to be EA’s shining work in multi-player innovation and creativity. Long time video gamers had been complaining for years that online multi-player was way too free and as such implemented an online pass for its console versions. Since most players also despise purchasing used games this allowed EA the ability to give players the ability to purchase a new online code when they made the mistake of buying a used copy of Battlefield 3. “We are unleashing our most valued customers from the tyranny of the used games market. This public service in our online pass we sell to enable multi-player is our way of hugging our customers into doing the right thing.”

Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand might have technically been DLC that just recycled old Battlefield maps and just added some new gun and vehicle reskins but thats only scratches the surface. The development team was experimenting with a new feature that would, according to some leaked memos “Allow the customer to question why they would spend $15 on this stupid bullshit and instead do something creative.” The feature was very controversial as it enabled free thinking and was later stricken in favor of the shipped feature that impressed upon users “Oh whatever, i'll just buy this as its only $15 and I wasn’t doing anything anyway.”

Battlefield 3: Close Quarters saw the inclusion of EA’s new Crosshair 4,000 technology. Never before had players experienced pointing guns at people with as much visual detail and clarity.

Battlefield 3: Armored Kill was the first Battlefield game to feature in game players with armor that you had to kill. Also allowing the player to ride in armored tanks and planes, this advancement of the genre actually informed the United States military in its most recent combat operations.

Battlefield 4 is the next installment in the mind bendingly diverse Battlefield series. Boasting such features as next gen console support, Battlefield 4 will be the set the new standard for video game excellence. Pushing the envelope, EA now supports the HD graphics of the Playstation 4 and PC. “Shooting the other team has never looked better” reported IGN in a recent hands on with the Battlefield 4 Alpha. Battlefield 4 will push the genre forward by allowing online multiplayer, matchmaking and the ability to switch between a few guns. I am really looking forward to this game as it will be a modern masterpiece!

This was posted April 1st, 2013

Recently at a GDC Panel, former Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson spoke a bit on his thoughts on the auction house. He believes the auction houses really hurt the game and they are looking into ways to address this in the future.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/29/diablo-3-auction-house-jay-wilson/

YouTube is entering the game video streaming space currently occupied by Twitch.tv. They cite the popularity of certain game videos and the massive ascent in game videos as entertainment.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/28/4157298/youtube-announces-new-live-streaming-video-platform-for-game-developers

Looks like the Ouya will see its retail launch June 4th. With a initial cost of $99 I could see myself picking one of these up, will you?

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/ouya-launches-at-retail-june-4-for-99/

The Free Bundle hits its 5th release including: Super Smash Land, Burn & Turn, The Witch's House, Alter Ego and The Battle For Wesnoth. With all the free to play games and the free bundle yet again proves you need not spend a dime to have fun on your PC.

http://www.thefreebundle.com/