Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £6.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Ah, Jackbox, purveyors of party games that you can play anywhere… Y’know, so long as you have something that can connect to the internet, and at least one person who owns the game. Who’s streaming. And here is where a score-based review of Quiplash would fall down, because it would really have to have two separate pretty numbers: One for the game client itself (£6.99), and one for the actual player experience (jackbox.tv, price: Fuck all, but you will never host the game, nor will you be able to play without a room code.) One of these scores would, to many, be a fair bit lower.

Sometimes you get cool things, and your friends smile.

But not to me. You see, the client, in its way, is equally as hamfisted as the jackbox.tv, player input end. As a host, I get to see all sorts of pretty pictures, hear pretty voices and noises, and, if I’m feeling generous, stream them to the less fortunate players (And audience.) Without that last one, none of the players will ever know how well they did, because the player side client won’t tell you. On the other hand, I can’t do a damn thing through the client (like join the game I created), having to rely on the simple, almost HTML form-ish nature of the jackbox site to do things, rather than all these pretty visuals.

Put them together, along with some mates, a voice chat, and the ability to show all the other players what the hell is going on, however, and all of a sudden, the magic happens. Through brute-force and the magic of socialising, the bits of interface come together, and the result is laughter, groans, all the noises that you associate with people playing and enjoying a party game. The rules are pretty simple. Three rounds, 2 questions each to answer in 2 of them, as many questions as there are players in the first two rounds to vote on, and the third round is a single free-for-all question. Twice the points in round 2, three times the points in round 3, and if your suggestion is the only one to get all player or audience votes in a question (and wins), that’s a QUIPLASH, worth bonus points, oww! Oh, yeah… The game is pretty much built for streaming, or a packed party, because the audience actually matters, and anyone with the room code can vote, even if they can’t play.

…And sometimes you think “Uhhh… Do I know these people? I don’t know these people, really I don’t, Officer”

People have likened it to Cards Against Humanity, but with improv, and… That kinda works. I’ve seen some terrible suggestions (Armenian Genocide as a sound that weirdly makes someone sleep better), and some beautiful ones (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as a Crackerjack box prize. Step right up, one in every box!) I’ve seen injustices (Forget-Me-Not was a terrible name for a Goldfish, and, on reflection, worse than Edward Cullen… It’s just we all hate Twilight more) and deserved victories (“If anyone says CUMquat is a better name for Kumquat, they lose” was, considering how filthy minded the group was, an excellent choice)… But one thing cannot be denied. All of us had fun. We agreed it would be cool to do this again. And all of us playing agreed it was good, despite having to stream the client window somehow.

So yeah, this game is good. It looks like it’ll last a while. But be aware, if you buy it, that you’ll need friends. That you’ll need some way of showing the client window to the other players, and talking to them. Otherwise, all I can really say is: The voting system rewards playing to a crowd, and if you play well with others, folks, then you’ll have fun. Let yourself go a bit, and have a laugh with it.

The Mad Welshman learned many things from this game. For example, people claim that Bears are a good substitute for toilet paper. Truly, the world is a strange place.

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Much of the time, conversations with fellow members of the games industry (writers, developers… Doesn’t matter) are either shop talk or just shooting the breeze. But sometimes, things get interesting. Segue achieved for this comment, by MAIA developer Simon Roth:

“While we are on the subject, we genuinely need the equivalent of an ISBN for games.”

Most of you will at least have noticed that books have a 13 digit number on the bottom, or seen ISBN on a book’s Amazon page, but not realised how powerful those thirteen digits can be. Each edition of a book has a different ISBN. Want to find the specific edition with that typo or cover or introduction you liked, or want to compare editions? The ISBN has you covered. And I could immediately see at least part of why it’s important.

There are several different versions, for example, of roguelikes, and some of them are drastically different, such as Nethack. There are many games with exactly the same name as other games out there (While this is less often true with AAA titles, there are definitely examples, such as Powerdrome, which has an older version… And a PS2 reboot), and, to make matters worse, some games almost completely fall under the radar (For example, when choosing titles for the side videos of my current Let’s Play, which are to do with Future Racing games, I completely missed quite a few titles, including… “Future Racer”. It wasn’t very good, but it was embarassing to have missed something so obvious, because so few places refer to it.)

It would be of great use to do this, not just for gamers, who can pass around a… Let’s call it an ISGN (Because that’s the easiest acronym) instead of trying to find a reference to a game that’s only mentioned in rare places. It would be useful to archivists, and game academics, who could then have an easier time referring to the specific game when using academic notation such as the Harvard Method. It has a lot of uses… And it’s already a thing that isn’t restricted to books, with music and magazines also having their own identifiers.

…But obviously, it’s not a thing that can spring up overnight. So all I’m going to do here is leave this article, just proposing the idea (And giving fair credit to the person who originated it), and let game devs who read this to talk it over. I’ll be happy to put discussion on the subject in article form, via the usual contacts, and if enough of the games industry likes the idea, keep people posted on the progress.

But for now, it’s just an interesting and useful idea.

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Disclosurey Type Stuff: I backed this project for £20 on Kickstarter. Because hey, I try to back games I want to see more of.
Other Reviews: Early Access 2, Release

I don’t normally write much about releases. I don’t normally write about them the day they come out. I especially don’t tend to write much about games where it’s way too early to tell whether it’s going to be good or not. But Formula Fusion is a special case for a couple of reasons. And one of them is the return of an old friend from the Wipeout series.

I’mmmm aaaaaa highwaaaaay staaaar!

…Well, to be fair, the marketing of Formula Fusion (A combat racing game set in a dystopian future) has been pretty much “Spiritual Successor to Wipeout, on all platforms, by Wipeout devs” , but this returning friend hasn’t been seen since Wipeout Fusion, to my knowledge: The Barrier. The Barrier was first seen in Wipeout 3, and it was the bane of many a Wipeout player’s life. All it did was drop a little wall that you could pass through, but others couldn’t. But ohhhh, it was enough. If you were good with it, you could drop it into the track on the side you wanted, and laugh as you watched three or four fellow racers pile into it and carom off one another.

And now it’s back, seemingly in even easier form (It just drops behind you.) If that were all the early promise shown in an alpha version of the game, I most likely wouldn’t write this article. But the controls are tight, responsive (Whether on keyboard or gamepad), and simple (W to accelerate, A and D to turn, left and right arrows to airbrake, allowing for sharper turns, and space to fire a weapon). I’m not so hot on the current UI, but the first track is a good example of an early track in a campaign, with only a few airbrake turns. At first, when playing the track, you’re inevitably going to hit things (other racers, the walls, barriers), and maybe even see the dreaded Pinballing (Where your attempts to correct from the collision send you into another wall) before exploding, but it’s exhiliarating when you start to master the track, moving from side to side as you hit the keys to turn.

New York (The first, and currently only track available) is a nice mix. Be warned, you will need airbrake turning.

Is it worth the £20 fee to get into Early Access at this stage? Not unless you really want this game to succeed. Does it, however, show promise? Hell yes. It’s a good first vertical slice, the music is pretty pumping, and the fact that, even in this early alpha, the controls and physics seem tight, shows that the devs know what’s important. And that’s the other reason I’m writing this. I wanted to point at an example of a solidly produced alpha slice. It’s by no means perfect (The Low resolution, for example, definitely means Low, as the final screenshot will show), but at this particular time, I don’t expect it to be. All I expect it to do is give me a taste of what I’m looking forward to. And that, it does.

Formula Fusion was released on Early Access on the 3rd of August, 2015. It costs £19.54 until the 10th, where it shall be £22.99, and The Mad Welshman believes in the AG Revolution.

Low Res is not joking. But if your graphics card is hurting, I think you can forgive a little jagginess for that extra speed.

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Cardiff is a city where old and new meet in sometimes unexpected ways. A good place for Games Wales.

To many of you, dear readers, Wales will be known for sheep jokes, being where lots of Doctor Who is filmed, and little else. This even applies to many of our readers from just across the way in England, or, as we like to call it, The Land of Our Oppressors. I joke, of course. Except about the sheep jokes thing. As such, it may surprise you to know that we have a games industry, and that it’s growing. I had the privilege of attending one of our gaming events today: Games Wales 2015 (And the BAFTA Cymru Video Game Awards. More on that in a bit.) This is the article you must have been sort of expecting, considering the name of the place.

Games Wales is, as you might expect for a smallish country made mostly of crinkles in space-time, seemingly quite small. There is, however, a very important “but” approaching. An extremely important “but”. And that is that it was perhaps the most balanced games show I have seen in some time. Many games shows are all about the games. There’ll be some hardware guys, the stalls selling games (second hand, imported, or new), with the universities (decently accredited or otherwise) and indie developers sort of hanging round… But edutainment or children’s games are not always represented, and in fact, there is a sort of sentiment that kid’s games, of any kind, are a death spiral for someone’s game dev career. Games Wales was somewhat different.

A relatively small space, but packed with more variety than the average expo or con.

There were three universities, all of which are actually universities, with actual degrees that actually produce bits of paper you can wave without being laughed at. Representatives of the Unity engine, S4C (Wales’ very own television channel), the BAFTA folks… Even government and legal representation was present.

I’d just like that to sink in for a second, because it’s part of why I’m confident that the games industry in Wales at least has a chance to thrive. The Welsh government has, over the past few years, been made aware that yes, media is a thing we do well, and games are part of that, so there is at least some support out there. Games Wales didn’t discriminate on the games end either. In one corner, two brand new devs, with their first products. The games they present are simple, but quite decently show that yes, this is how game designers start: Small. Next to that, the stall of the creators of an upcoming monster fighting game called Creature Battle Lab… And across the way from them, the Unity Technologies representative stood happily between the developers of a piano teaching game for young children, and the stall of the aforementioned Welsh Government’s Department for Business, Enterprise, Technology and Science. It was, if you’ll forgive me stating the obvious, slightly awe inspiring how much planning had gone into what would be 32 stalls in Cardiff’s City Hall.

Welsh developer Alida Watters shows off her musical edutainment app, Chroma Crabs.

Attendance was, much like the event, small, but growing, and, by the time I’d left (About ten minutes after the BAFTA Cymru 2015 Games Winners were declared), my leaving was as much due to feeling a bit crowded and unable to feel comfortable hogging a demo or a studio lead as it was my poor aching feet. As to the BAFTA Cymru Awards themselves, this year had some strong competitors (Including Wales Interactive, who have already shown some strong game-dev-fu with Infinity Runner, which was nominated this year, and Soul Axiom, an interesting sci-fi adventure game, currently in Early Access.) The winners, however, definitely deserved their seats. A Mechanical Story (In which the players progress by building contraptions to solve puzzles) took the general award, while the other four awards went to Boj Digs (Thud Media, Gameplay Design Commendation), Madron (Glasscube/S4C, Artistic Achievement), the 360 VR project (Atticus Digital, Technical Achievement Commendation), and, also from Thud Media, winning the Sound and Music category, was Toot’s Harbour.

I’ll hopefully be interviewing developers, lawyers, and government reps alike about the Welsh games industry, and perceptions of the state of the industry at large. I look forward to sharing these interviews with you, as we sometimes forget, in this international and internetted community of developers, players, and businessfolks, to see things on a national, or even a local level.

You can keep up with welsh games events and welsh game developers through GamesWales.

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