Polygon has a really great article that covers the history of the infamous Blizzard game StarCraft: Ghost. Ghost was a game that was aimed at consoles and featured stealth gameplay starring the Ghost character Nova. I remember hearing quite a big of buzz about the game and as with many upcoming Blizzard games, I was really interested in playing it. Eventually Blizzard stopped talking about the game entirely and then we found out the game wasn't in active development but never properly cancelled. Up until now we didn't know much as to why the game was scrapped but Polygon has a very well written article that covers the story of Ghost from conception to it changing hands to an entirely new team.

"The story of StarCraft: Ghost is a complicated one that spans two development studios, a buyout by Blizzard and declarations that, even though no work was being done on the game, it was never technically canceled. Polygon recently spoke with nine developers involved to look back at the project.

"StarCraft: Ghost was in the wrong place at the wrong time," says James Goddard, a fighting game veteran who worked on Ghost for years.
"

http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-what-went-wrong

Recently Mighty No. 9 launched to very mixed reviews. Some Kickstarter backers didn't get the correct game codes for the platforms they pledged to and many more experienced some unfortunate game glitches at launch. In one of his latest videos, Cygnus Destroyer runs Mighty No. 9 through the Innocent and Proven Guilty courtroom and I found his verdict fair. As a fan of the original Mega Man series I had high hopes for Mighty No. 9 but I had mixed feelings about picking it up until I saw this video.

Chucklefish is finally releasing Starbound 1.0 coming July 22nd. After making a huge early access splash, Chucklefish hit a few snags with some pretty large delays and as such garnered some community backlash. I am happy to see the game finally hit this milestone and as such am really eager to play it in it's final form.

"In case you missed it, Starbound is coming out of Early Access on 22 July, 2016.

After ~5 years, the game we set out to make finally exists, and to say that it all feels a bit surreal would be a massive understatement!

While Starbound will be finished in two weeks, this isn’t the end. We will continue to update and support Starbound for as long as we can. We’ve got loads of cool ideas we couldn’t fit into 1.0 but hope to put into future updates.

Thanks again for all your support over the years! You’ve stuck with us, and it means so much."

After Diablo became a huge success on PC, Blizzard partnered with EA to port it to the original Playstation. This bit of retro knowledge wasn't something I was aware of until I saw RetroSnow's recent review of Playstation Diablo. From his review, the port seems to be very well done if not a bit dark in certain levels. It's nice to see Diablo III make a strong comeback on modern consoles and if you have a PS3, PS4, 360 or XBone I seriously recommend you download the Diablo III demo to see how well it plays.

I recently found a video that catalogs the history of Doom and also briefly discusses iD Software. I've posted videos before talking about iD Software but this is a bit different in that it mostly covers Doom, it's origins and the most recent Doom 2016 installment. Not a huge amount of new information here but if you don't know the story of Doom, this is a very good way to get it.

Speedrunning charity stream Summer Games Done Quick will be blasting through the gaming stream-o-sphere starting July 3rd @ 9.30am and wrapping up on the 9th. As with every year, the game speedrunning lineup is a buffet of classic retro titles and many hot new modern titles such as Goonies II, Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening DX, BioShock, Dishonored, Hexen and Fallout 4.

I've created an Event you can join to add to you calendar to remind you of the event or just queue it up on Twitch starting July 3rd. As with every year there will be some great speedruns of this event and i'll share the ones I really enjoy. Let me know if you plan on watching and what games you are going to tune in for!

Summer Games Done Quick is supporting the Doctors Without Borders Charity and it's a very special one and well worth you considering making a donation during the event!

"Every year, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides emergency medical care to millions of people caught in crises in more than 60 countries around the world. MSF provides assistance when catastrophic events—such as armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, or natural disasters—overwhelm local health systems. MSF also assists people who face discrimination or neglect from their local health systems or when populations are otherwise excluded from health care."

https://gamesdonequick.com/schedule
https://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick

"Relive the depths of Rapture and sail through Columbia in BioShock: The Collection! Remastered for current-gen, this edition includes all three #BioShock games, complete with all single-player DLC and a never-before-seen video series with commentary from Ken Levine. Available September 13, 2016 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC."

If you haven't jumped into BioShock yet this upcoming collection will be a great time to do so. Whereas the original game didn't sit as well with me as others, I thought BioShock Infinite and both DLC missions were incredible. If you enjoy heady sci-fi games with compelling stories, characters and gameplay or simply want to head back and experience Rapture again, the BioShock Collection drops September 13th on PC, XBone & PS4.

After Game/Show launched I posted quite a few episodes to Cheerful Ghost because I liked the style of the show and what it had to say. Today I watched the latest episode that sort of just let us all know the show was over using a title roll and series of clips. Not that everything that ends needs to wave goodbye, but this doesn't seem like the shows style and I wonder what the story here is?

All that said, Game/Show had a really solid two year run and like many I appreciated it's perspective and what it added to the discussion.

*waves goodbye*

If you've ever played a GameCube or Wii game you owned in Dolphin you know it can at times be both very good and at times strange. The upscaling ability of Dolphin on Wii and GameCube games is well worth the price of admission alone as experiencing these classic titles in HD is incredible. For me, my classic hardware sometimes breaks so I try and backup all my games so I can play them on my PC. Recently Dolphin released 5.0 which is a notable milestone in that it optimizes for speed and also makes many games run much better than they did before.

"The long awaited Dolphin 5.0 release is finally here! After nearly a year of bug-hunting and handling the release process, everything has come together for our biggest release yet! The three previous releases followed a very distinct pattern: sacrifice performance, hacks, and features in exchange for higher accuracy. As such, Dolphin 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 progressively grew slower. But thanks to the cleanups put forward throughout those releases, Dolphin 5.0 is the fastest Dolphin has ever been!

By removing all of those hacks and outdated features while cleaning up the codebase, Dolphin has reached a new level of efficiency, powered by a revitalized dynamic recompiler. On the GPU side, OpenGL and D3D11 have seen tons of optimizations and accuracy improvements, and have been joined by a brand new D3D12 backend for huge performance gains. If there's a CPU or GPU extension that can make Dolphin faster, we take advantage of it."

https://dolphin-emu.org/

Last year Cheerful Ghost published Starship Rubicon and I am really proud of that. Working alongside Wick to get the game launched, promoted and sold has been one of the more enjoyable things I've been part of. When I approached him about publishing his game, I had a fledgling idea of how to approach and in the end I believe we did well by the game and its fans. Together we've learned a lot: firstly, making an Indie game doesn't mean you make big money (because as of now we haven't made very much), and secondly, you need to be aware of what is out there that can potentially harm your game. One such thing that can chip away at the money you can make in the industry is the CD Key grey market.

Tiny Build Games is a relatively new publisher from Seattle I admire quite a bit. They started modestly and had a hit with Speedrunners that catapulted them into a really great spot in the Indie community. Since then, they've published Party Hard and Punch Club which are really great games that are well worth your time. They also recently wrote a blog post about the CD key grey market called "G2A sold $450k worth of our game keys" and after it was posted on their blog it lit a fire in certain parts of the game scene. The blog post is fairly detailed but the long and short of it is that over time G2A, a CD key reselling site, has made over $450k in resold keys from their published games. These keys were __NOT__ given to G2A by Tiny Build but resold through the CD key grey market where keys are acquired through bots scamming storefronts, purchased through low cost bundles or sold directly from crooked partners. Very frequently, CD Key resellers like this end up with a massive dump of keys from stolen credit cards, and there are no checks in place to ensure that keys are legitimate.

Again, it's an interesting read and I recommend you check it out.

http://tinybuild.com/g2a-sold-450k-worth-of-our-game-keys

Why Do You Care That I Sell Or Giveaway A Game Key I’ll Never Play?

To be honest, I don't. I don’t have a problem with a normal gamer getting a copy of Starship Rubicon and selling it or giving it away. I think there is a huge difference between a normal person reselling a key to make a couple bucks and having a CD key grey market middleman scam hundreds to thousands of keys to resell. Again, just to be super clear here I have zero problem if you giveaway or sell a Starship Rubicon key to your friend or internet stranger, as normal people are not the problem. Grey mass-market CD key resellers that use G2A and sites like them are the problem.

It’s also not wrong that people want to buy a game at a reduced price; sales are the lifeblood of the game industry! But there is a huge difference between buying a game in a Steam or Humble sale than on sites like G2A because the developer gets nothing from G2A.

By the way, Starship Rubicon is now 60% off in this current Steam Sale so if you love massive discounts and awesome Indie rogue-lites you need to check that out! CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/372030

We are also handing out free 10 copies in a Giveaway but that will only last for the next couple days so enter now! FREE? WHAT? ARE WE CRAZY? DON’T ANSWER THAT!

http://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/giveaways/14/kicking-off-the-summer-with-free-lamjets-zukovs-warbirds

Cheerful Ghost Won’t Make Money From Developer Misery

G2A and other reselling sites can be a big problem for developers and as such I want to make it known that until they and other sites make drastic changes we won't be supporting them. Websites like ours can make big money recommending you purchase games through CD key resellers but we aren’t going to do that and to-date we've declined each request. Let's be clear here in that if we partnered with these sites we’d make quite a bit of money it’s just not right for us to do that. In one such deal we have been offered 6% commission for displaying a banner ad and re-directing gamers to make purchases on a reseller site. We’d also get 5% for direct purchases and it sort of breaks down a bit in terms of percentages based on use-case. Needless to say, if we made some hard recommendations and altered Cheerful Ghost to recommend these sites, we’d do really well.

Many Twitch streamers are financially supported by G2A because the money is pretty darn good. That’s because the CD key grey market is a gold mine, it's just banked on developer misery. We’ve decided to not partner with these sites and give up that revenue because we feel this position is better for developers making great games and the gamers that play them. I was also heartened to see the Reddit Hearthstone community take a stand on this issue and reach out to Twitch streamers to re-think their partnership with G2A.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/4ped4m/clean_up_our_community_ditch_g2a/

It’s good for gamers to care about this and make their thoughts on this issue known. The kinds of partnerships we make as video game sites and streamers matter and we need to think what kind of world we are creating by making them.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Ultimately CD Key Reselling sites will either change their rules to disallow massive CD Key sales from unofficial sources or continue with their morally bankrupt model. I have my doubts we will see much more than platitudes here but I remain hopeful to change. Ultimately these discussions are good to have because they raise awareness to gamers and developers on the health of the industry we all love. Curious what you think about this issue and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Here is another article well worth your time.

https://medium.com/@mode7games/the-key-masters-reselling-and-the-games-industry-6bb01a6a4963#.kkj9vddwd

A developer is recommending piracy over buying a game on G2A, can’t say I disagree with that thinking. I’d rather lose a sale than see G2A get money.

http://www.fortressofdoors.com/g2a-piracy-and-the-four-currencies/

Looks like G2A is attempting to address some of these issues if at least, very slowly. I think this is an interesting attempt but as the article states…

“Unless they actually solve the main issue — fraud on their platform — this initiative invites developers to become accomplices.”

http://www.polygon.com/2016/6/28/12050942/gray-market-reseller-rolls-over-agrees-to-incremental-changes-at-g2a