Wiper

That is extremely depressing, particularly as this is utterly brilliant: a refinement and expansion of what was already a brilliant game. A real shame that the market just isn't there for it

Well, I backed it so I own it... but I also won't get a chance to sit down and play it until the weekend, and at that point it will be vying with Hitman 2 for my attention :/

Ignoring the fact that anyone who prioritises RDR2 over this* is obviously a wrong-un, there's also the bit where I will never understand early-week launches. I don't imagine that I'm alone in having my free time limited on week nights, and with a Hitman game particularly I want to have a couple of solid hours clear to really explore a level in one sitting. So it is that I've had it installed all week, but won't get to play it until Friday at the earliest. *or, well, prioritises RDR2 over pretty much anything

Fixed that for you.

Very much looking forward to this, but that press release is missing the most important piece of news: Frank Klepacki is back on music duty

This seems a little harsh - Protocol's 'in the bin after ten minutes' comment is severe, but I can see why you might bounce off a games magazine for being a bit heavy going if that's not what you're expecting, and the chart-centric article they mention is certainly unnecessarily jargon-heavy, explaining a simple set of concepts in as many words as humanly possible. And, well, the magazine is in no way a programming guide, aside really from that Python snippet, so I don't see how criticising the magazine for being dry has any bearing on Protocol's interest or otherwise in learning to code.

It'll be out this evening on Steam, but I don't think it was a midnight launch here on any system (and, you know, it's a workday so even had it released at midnight many of us wouldn't have had much opportunity to play it yet!)

Oh I'd absolutely have done the same if I'd had the money to spare! I'm glad to hear the new maps are good, can't wait to get my teeth into them

I mean, it's not yet out for those of us who didn't preorder the fancy pants edition, so... Very much looking forward to playing it when I can, though! Not tonight, alas, as I'm not home until late, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be getting my murder on.

I've had the chance to read through the magazine in full, and I have... thoughts. I'm worried that I might come across as overly negative here,* so I do want to preface my comments with the fact that overall I quite enjoyed the magazine and have subscribed to it, and particularly appreciated its inclusion of dev-side articles and technical/hobbyist bits and pieces, and its happy coverage of games and companies of all scales. It was pleasantly refreshing to have a slight but dense magazine to read too, not padded out with adverts and round ups. I also want to note that this is of course a first issue, and I imagine a lot, if not all, of the kinks are likely to be ironed out as the magazine establishes itself and finds its focus. But, at the same time, exactly for those reasons I want to flag up the bits I felt were 'off'; if this were the tenth issue of the magazine then I would assume the design and guidelines were set in stone, but this being the first issue I'm hopeful that maybe some of this criticism will have constructive effect. A few of the things have already been flagged up here (by me and others), so I'll cover them only briefly: The opening opinion piece set unmet expectations; as much as it was explained in here that it was just an opinion piece and not meant to be taken as a statement of intent for the magazine, its placement and prominence naturally made it seem like it was leading into a magazine planning to deliver on the potential for games criticism as something more than a buyer's guide, making the mundanity of the reviews section quite the disappointment. An unfortunate juxtaposition. The Kim Justice piece was a little... light. It was a perfectly enjoyable thing to read through, but for a magazine whose other articles are so clearly targetted at people already engaged with the games industry, it felt like it was pitched at an odd level. Outside of that, I had a couple of other minor gripes Ikaruga is described as a 'horizontal shooter'. I mean, that's obviously just a typo that's slipped through copy editing, but I'm a pedant and it made me wince to read it. If that made me wince, the Will Luton article made me grimace throughout. A large part of that was preference - an article presented as something that 'all game designers' should use, when what it's describing are the mathematical underpinnings of compulsive game loops, is something I fundamentally disagree with. But bypassing that, on a professional level I found it a painful read - I'm an analyst by trade, so I'm pretty familiar with the mathematical concepts that were being discussed, and the way the article was structured just rubbed me the wrong way. The way it went jumping between mathematical equations, pretty charts, simple tables, and then anecdotes about how beautiful logarithmic and exponential curves are reflective of nature - ooh look at this shell! - unlike those ugly linear charts, yuck - struck me as exactly that moment where a new consultant has come in to the business and is talking absolute woo in order to win over the executive team on some new and exciting failed-endeavour-to-be. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I found myself at odds with pretty much everything in the article. More generally, the magazine doesn't quite seem to have a clear focus. Which is natural for a first issue. Does it want to be a reasonably heavy, technical, dev-focussed thing? Or is it going for lightweight, pop games history? Does it really need a scored review section to try and fit in with the crowd? I'm looking forward to seeing what it eventually decides on! None of the above are dramatic issues by any means - reading an article I disagree with is hardly unique, nor are minor copy errors, and again the issues of direction are understandable in a first issue, but they did niggle at me. My final issue, however, I see as a rather more unequivocal problem. It's an issue of, well, pedantry again, but this time with some significance beyond that: My real problem is with the Python script in the Defender explosions article - or rather, its documentation. This is an actively misleading script. There were a couple of minor things I can overlook; the formatting not following Python guidelines (the lack of parentheses when defining tuples in particular) was non-ideal, I'm not entirely in agreement with the choice of the particularly Python-newbie-unfriendly-to-install-and-use Pygame Zero rather than something integrated into an IDE,** and I think it could have been enhanced by offering suggestions for building upon the code (e.g. "Why not try randomising the colour of the particles too"), but those are more preference than anything. What I can't ignore are the repeated references to 'arrays' being defined within the script, when what have actually been created are lists. This sounds pedantic, but it's a significant distinction, and one likely to trip up beginner programmers (or, indeed, experienced coders who aren't used to Python). Python has both list and array data structures (and tuples, and dicts, and sets...), and they function quite differently from one another. I won't go into the details, but as an over-simplified summary: lists can hold any combination of things; arrays can hold one type of thing. While arrays have their uses (in fact, I think they could have been used in parts this particular code, they just weren't), they are generally much less commonly used in Python than, well, any of the other data structures I named. To the point where they aren't even loaded in by default; the array library has to be imported at the start of the script if you want to use them. Lists, by contrast, are probably the most fundamental data structure in Python, and indeed much of the initial challenge of moving from a language like, say, C or Java, is moving from array logic to list logic (and, indeed, vice-versa when moving away from Python). To conflate the two is really not helpful. Again, this may sound very pedantic, but it's the exact type of error that could confuse and mislead anyone new to Python/coding in general, and is the sort of thing I'd really hope to not see published in a magazine, and particularly not regarding a data structure so integral to working with Python. The thing is, I would love - love - for the magazine to continue fitting in little bits of script to type in, work with, explore. That's a fantastic idea. But it needs to be executed well; it needs to be written and edited by people who understand the language they're working with, because if the choice is between being given no example and being given a bad example, the former is preferable. *shocked gasps from the crowd, no doubt **I'm guessing its compatibility with Raspberry Pi may have been a factor here, in fact!

Last year I bought Forza Horizon 3 from the store, which worked perfectly! Until I installed the Hot Wheels expansion, which caused the game to prompt the store to complain that I hadn't installed the game whenever I tried to play it. So I uninstalled the game, but when I tried to reinstall the game, the store told me that the game was already installed, and refused to download it! Meanwhile repairing the install just errored, because presumably because there's nothing to repair. After a back and forth with a Microsoft rep, the suggested solution was to completely reinstall Windows. I opted for the alternate solution of not playing FH3 again.

I think you'll find that what they actually need is to wrest a certain post-apocalyptic license from a certain unworthy publisher that are currently doing their best to wilfully misunderstand the point and appeal of said setting before they do more damage to it.

A shame that they can't 'enhance' the XIII's into being, you know, not shit.

Obsidian and inXile - that's some heavy CRPG development focus there, and specifically lots of links to 90s Interplay RPGs between the two of them. Curious to see what Microsoft have them working on.

Picking radishes, however, is deeply compelling: