In this week’s bulletin, we discuss Builders of Greece, LEGO Minecraft, the Colosseum in Minecraft, Flash, Call of the Sea, PS5 Google Searches, Triple Click Podcast, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization, Gayming Awards 2021, Valhalla, HUMANKIND and a new Imperator Rome video!
Builders of Greece
We like Greece and we like citybuilders. So we’ll probably like Builders of Greece. The game in development by Creative Forge Games is set to release in Q4 of 2021, and is focused around Perikleian Greece and lets the player enact economic and political reforms! There is not so many information out there, but it looks promising! More on Creative Forge Games.
A LEGO Minecraft that never was
The resemblance between Minecraft and LEGO is there. I mean, it’s both building with square stuff. However, that’s where most resemblance seems to end. But, if the past was different, we would have a LEGO-Minecraft game called ‘Brickcraft’. Basically it would be Minecraft, but with the plethora of LEGO brick we know (big, small, colored etc.). Unfortunately, it needed quite some legal action as many of the LEGO bricks are (of course) patented and copyrighted. In short: Notch thought it was too much legal effort, and Mojang abandoned the project. In the complete switcharoo, LEGO now produce Minecraft themed sets. Read more on the story on PC Gamer!
Minecraft Colosseum with RTX
Staying with Minecraft, NVIDIA made a very nice video showing off the RTX capabilties of their products. With the use of Minecraft and a very awesome Colosseum, you can see how beautiful stuff (even in Minecraft) can become. Even better, you can download the map for yourself! Read more on NVIDIA.
Flash last update
As already mentioned more times in this bulletin, the time of Flash is ending. This week, Adobe pushed a last update to the plugin, and from the 31st of December, support will end. Even worse, from the 12th of January, Adobe will block content running on Flash. It’s a sad day for all the games on the internet which used Flash. But do not dispair, as there are multiple projects to conserve the games (like Flashpoint, The Internet Archives and also Kongregrate!) Read more on the last update and conservation projects on The Verge.
Call of the Sea review
1930’s inspired mysterious island adventure game Call of the Sea was released last week, and it must be said that it’s pretty cool! Robert Purchese of Eurogamer wrote a review, and he was excited as well. Purchese praised the amount of adventure in the game, stating that: ‘It surprised me how much of an adventure game Call of the Sea is. The game is broken into chapters, and each of these takes place in a self-contained area of the island, which you cannot leave until you solve a handful of major puzzles there.’ Purchase also really liked the absence of combat in the game, making for a more adventurous experience and: ‘[…] makes more sense contextually with who you are in Call of the Sea.’ Call of the Sea is available for around €20 on every major platform. Watch the trailer below and read Purchese’s entire review on Eurogamer.
PS5 outranks toilet paper in Google Searches
Yeah, just a meme but relevant nonetheless: as it turns out, more people have searched ‘where to buy PS5’ than ‘where to buy toilet paper’ on Google this year. With both toilet paper and a PS5 becoming very rare commodities in this year, it is understandable that both are often searched for terms in the section ‘where to buy?’ The other top 5 searches? Face masks, Xbox Series X and hand sanitizer. It seems that 2020 was a weird year for Google Searches. The top 5 most searched games? Among Us, Fall Guys, Valorant, Genshin Impact and Ghost of Tsushima. It isn’t weird at all that the (sometimes free) games you can remotely play with your friends are the most searched games of 2020. Read more on Polygon!
What’s The Deal With: Console Launches
Staying kinda with the shitshow that was the PS5 Launch (and virtually any other electronical launch this year, like the RTX 3000 series), the Triple Click Podcast talk all about the recent launches of consoles and which console is better. As an added bonus, the Podcast starts with John House, an archaeologist working on Viking History in England (kinda)! An interesting listen for sure, and it’s also quite amusing. Check out more on Maximum Fun.
How to Rebuild Civilization?
We’re not saying that civilization will collapse, but what would happen if you’d visit medieval Europe with our current knowledge about the world? That’s exactly what The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization tries to exlpore. It is meant to be an encyclopedia of mechanisms, processes and materials that played a significant role in human history. The project is now in a Kickstarter phase, but has already been funded completely (with €343,938 of the original €6,581) pledged! However, you can still contribute to this cool project. Read more on Kickstarter.
Gayming Awards 2021
With all the Game of the Year competitions running now (like our own GOTY), we’d also like to draw your attention to next years Gayming Awards, which will be mainly about LGBTQ video gaming. With an ever growing community, it is important to stress the LGBTQ contributions to the world of gaming. Presented by EA, an initiative of Gayming Magazine, and broadcasted on Twitch, the awards will host multiple categories such as Game of the Year (obviously), Best LGBTQ Indie Game and Best LGBTQ Streamer. Most categories will be decided by a LGBTQ Jury, but the Streamer of the Year and the Gayming Magazine Readers Award are public votes. Read more on Gayming Magazine!
How Valhalla inspires re-interpretation of poetry
This might seem far-fetched, but it’s what Graham MacAree of SBNation experienced. Graham talks about the 8th/9th Century poem The Ruin, which roughly coincides with Valhalla’s timeframe, and references the Roman period which came before. Graham notes how playing Valhalla has made him to re-interpret the role of Romans in this period, and how the writer of The Ruin would have seen these people who came before. Read more on SBNation.
HUMANKIND – LUCY Trailer
Amplitude dropped another trailer for the upcoming so-called ‘Civ-killer’ HUMANKIND. Called Lucy, it focusses on the personal history of Lucy throughout history, but with some notable differences with the history we know (e.g. Japanese Samurai fighting with WW1 French soldiers). Accompanied by an adapted version of Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, it shows how in HUMANKIND players can mix and mash human history and culture together. As you might know, we’re still quite skeptical about HUMANKIND, and wonder if it can deliver what they set out to do. My hot take: they can’t. HUMANKIND will not have the promised ‘you can re-write human history in a unique way’, as they still only have 60 cultures to pick from (and that’s not a lot considering human history), and will not push Civ from it’s pedestal at the top of 4X games. But alas, I might be wrong!
New Imperator Rome video
In our Exploring Imperator Rome YouTube Series, our lovely intern TimesnewRoman created part 2 of the video’s about ‘Barbaric Britain’. Watch it below! And while you’re at it, don’t forget to nominate you Games of the Year!