This week on Zed Games Hazel, Zahra, and Caroline talk playing with their plorts before Zahra brings us the week in Gaming News with the team talking Screen Queensland funding and monopoly. Zahra then plays god in the remake Age of Mythology: Retold. Then the crew touts the treasures awarded in this year’s Australian Game Design Awards.
This week Paul sends in his ball heavy review of the mighty morphin cosmic puzzler Cocoon, then the team chats Springfield Gamers‘ SpringCon ’23 & The 2023 Australian Game Development Awards.
This week Zed Games is helmed by Zahra, Hazel, and Caroline while they talk gaming news, this years Australian Game Development Awards, and the recent AND local SpringCon 2022!
Valve VR
Valve has posted a job listing. Nothing new, except that it gives us a hint of what’s to come, with the listing looking for someone to ‘prototype, ship, and support’ a virtual reality headset, saying “At Valve, we are pushing the boundaries of virtual reality experiences… The main scope of this position is to prototype, ship, and support consumer gaming products leveraging visual-inertial tracking, camera passthrough, environment understanding, eye tracking, and hand tracking.”
This certainly isn’t Valve’s first foray into VR, but it does signal a push to get ahead in the VR headset market.
Metaverse Isn’t Popular
Decentraland, a Metaverse project, hasn’t exactly been flourishing. It’s a sandbox environment where users can buy and sell virtual real estate, and has a market cap of $1.2 billion. The number of active users over a 24 hour period? 38.
Dencentraland do point out that active users are defined as unique blockchain wallet addresses, which leaves out users who just use it as a place to socialise and hang out, which may bring numbers up to 8000 users per day.
Doom’s On Notepad Now
You’ve seen Doom on PC, consoles, calculators, pregnancy tests, and more. Now get ready for 60 frames per second Doom gameplay in notepad, the very same notepad you have at home. It is playable, using text to create the visuals, much like ASCII art. In very quick, simplified terms, notepad is being used as a monitor, with other software running in the background doing the hard work.
Splatoon Gets a Bit… Rowdy
Nintendo had to release a public statement recently, reminding players of Nintendo’s streaming guidelines, and more specifically, how open streamers are to legal actions. Why? Streamers had started a trend of using chroma-key to superimpose explicit adult videos over the enemy’s ink, essentially treating it as a kind of greenscreen.
As it goes against Nintendo’s streaming guidelines, they can now take down posts, videos, and streams, and even pursue legal action.
AGDA Winners
The Interactive Games and Entertainment Association has announced the winners of the 2022 Australian Game Developer Awards. Judging goes through 70 game industry professionals, with winners from 13 categories announced, plus an additional 4 cultural awards, resulting in this year’s awards being filled with the highlights of what Australia has to offer.
Cult of the Lamb has left with four awards, including Game of the Year.
Julian Wilton, Creative Director of Massive Monster, says “After experiencing our success overseas, it was an amazing feeling to see our game really resonate with Australians as well. We received such strong support locally and we love that it’s being enjoyed, not just for the gameplay, but also for the art and music.”
Raymond Corrigan, the creator of Earthlingo, won the Rising Star award.
Ryan McMahon, art director at Playside Studios, won the Ambition award.
Clara Reeves, CEO of Hipster Whale, has been recognised for her ongoing contributions to the Australian games industry with the Adam Lancman award.
Gameloft Brisbane has come away with the last cultural award with the Studio of the Year award.
And now for some upcoming games!
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October 20
Australian Game Developer Awards Winners Announced!
The winners for the Australian Game Developer Awards have been announced, with Queensland and Victorian developers leading the way.
Local game Unpacking by Witch Beam has taken the Game of the Year Award, with the relaxing puzzle game also taking home the Excellence in Accessibility Award. Art Director and Designer Wren Brier says,
“It’s humbling to be part of a roster of amazing studios with incredible games that have won this award. We’re so pleased that Unpacking also took home the Excellence in Accessibility Award as we’re firm believers that video games can and should be enjoyed by everyone.”
Another local game, Webbed, the adorable game about spiders, received Excellence in Gameplay.
Beethoven & Dinosaur took home Excellence in Art and Excellence in Audio Awards for The Artful Escape. Black Lab Games won the Studio of the Year Award.
Steve Wang from Wargaming Sydney was awarded the Adam Lancman Award for his contribution and advocacy for the local games industry.
Chad Toprak, Kathleen Smart, and Ashley Van Wynngard were jointly awarded the Rising Star Award for the impact they’ve made to the industry in a short amount of time.
The Forgotten City by Modern Storyteller took home Excellence in Narrative, The Oregon Trail by Gameloft Brisbane won Excellence in Mobile Games, Sharmila by Chaos Theory Games and the World Food Programme took home Excellence in Serious Games. Pico Tanks by Panda Arcade was awarded Excellence in Ongoing Games, and Video World by Things for Humans won Excellence in Emerging Games.
Largest DDoS Attack Mitigated
Microsoft reveals that its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second denial of service attack this year, which makes this the largest DDoS attack recorded to date.
The attack was carried out using a botnet of around 70,000 bots primarily located across the Asia-Pacific region. The target of
the attack has been identified as an Azure customer in Europe. The record-breaking attack came in three short waves over the span of 10 minutes, with the first at 2.4 Tbps.
Thankfully the DDoS attack was mitigated, preventing Azure from going down. Previously the DDoS record was a 2.3 Tbps attack on Amazon in February 2020.
League of Legends Removing Opposing Team Chat
Riot Games has announced that chat between opposing teams in League of Legends will be disabled in an attempt to cut down on toxic behaviour.
“While chat can be the source of fun social interaction between teams as well as some good-hearted banter, right now negative interactions outweigh the positives. We’ll evaluate the impact of this change through verbal abuse reports and penalty rates, as well as surveys and direct feedback from you all.”
And now for some upcoming game releases!
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October 15
October 18
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October 20
The week in gaming news, a wonderful review of MO: Astray AND epic discussions about the Australian Game Developer Awards LIVE in studio from Maylee, Zahra and Evie. If you’d like to check out the full list of winners click here.