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.
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!
October 14
October 15
October 18
October 19
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.