Goat’s stepping on toes, or going for the viral takedown?
Developers of Goat Simulator 3, Coffee Stain Studios, have been slapped with a takedown notice from Rockstar Games for using footage from the September GTA 6 leaks. The now-removed video featured an interview with Shaun, a professional NPC, where he talked about his many experiences as an NPC in games, including in the leaked GTA 6 footage. After being removed from Twitter, it was replaced with a tweet from the company with the following gif…
Act of stupidity or marketing genius? You decide.
Why all the Updates Nintendo?
You may have noticed the recent slew of updates hitting some old and new favourites from Nintendo, coming with the patch notes;
“Several issues have been addressed to improve the gameplay experience.”
These patches have been pushed for many games such as Mario Kart 7 for 3DS, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 2&3, ARMS, Super Mario Maker 2, Nintendo Switch Sports and are probably needed for many more. This patch is actually to prevent an exploit called “ENLBufferPwn” which allowed full takeover of the system without detection through security holes in online play, allowing access to saved payment information, as well as in-built peripherals such as cameras and microphones. The worst part? While the issue is relatively easy to patch on the Switch, the Wii U and 3DS eShops’ ability to roll out patches for this and future exploits will close in Feb 2023, leaving any vulnerability open for future exploitation.
Aurora taking Sky: Children of Light into the Stratosphere.
In a recent interview Jenova Chen, founder and CEO of Thatgamecompany, creators of Sky: Children of Light, revealed that more than 1.6 million players have attended the Aurora Concert that first occurred on December 8. This has been achieved through the intense work of the programmers and servers to maintain instances of around 4000 players, each with emote interactivity to the entire instance and a text based proximal chat with players in their row. Contrasted to other games’ concerts, such as Fortnite with only 40 people per room, highlights the near year of work of the team at Thatgamecompany to make it happen. The show officially called “The Musical Voyage” contains several performances from Aurora where players are collectively involved in the visual space. The performance has been playing every 4 hours since, with the last show to play January 1st.
Now, normally I’d do games coming out… but since there are none, I thought I’d list some of the games that Shutdown this year.
Long standing tactical shooter America’s Army
Released 4th July 2002,
Shutdown 5th May 2022.
MOBA that couldn’t break League of Legends’ hold Heroes of Newerth
Released 12th May 2010,
Shutdown 20th June 2022.
Fantasy MMO Tera, who’s developers just wanted to move on,
Released 25th January 2011,
Shutdown 30th June 2022.
Car sim Project Cars 1 & 2 succumbed to car and track licence expiry date blues,
With one released 6th May 2015,
Shutdown 3rd October 2022
And two released 21st September 2017,
Shutdown 21st September 2022
Overwatch
Released 3rd May 2016,
Shutdown 3rd October 2022
Just a year and a bit of life, the MMO Crowfall fell,
Released 6th July 2021,
Shutdown 22nd November 2022
Free-2-Play Super Bomberman R Online bombed out
Released 1st September 2020,
Shutdown 1st December 2022
Fuser, the Harmonix successor to Guitar Hero and Rock Band and reviewed by our own Paul, just didn’t hit the bigtime
Released 10th November 2020,
Shutdown 19th December 2022
Square Enix’s Final Fantasy kart game, Chocobo GP… not quite gone, but the store and purchased mithril will be worthless past the shutdown date
Released 12th January 2022,
Last Update 21st December 2022,
Shutdown 1st June 2023
Literally every game that was released for Google Stadia
Released 19th November 2019,
Slated to be shutdown 18th January 2023.
That’s all this week in gaming news.
