Prison Architect Alpha 13 FULLY CRACKED

I've been designing some prisons recently. Well, I can scratch another item of my list of sentences I never expected to utter. I've been running them, too. Actually, facilitating the running of them, more often than not. I suspect that actual prison architects have a lot less hands-on time with functioning penitentiaries, but I don't know any to ask. 

I'm not sure why, but I thought it might be a good laugh, this whole Prison Architect lark. It's probably rather telling about my lack of experience with the prison system that I actually expected whimsy. I feel a bit foolish now. Like someone drinking toilet wine.

I started my first day of work with the best of intentions. I'm going to make the best darned prison in all the land, I thought to myself. I was looking forward to getting stuck in. Contrary to my real-life proclivities, I'm rather fond of management, and, indeed, micro-management in these here videogames. It is, as they say, my bag.

I had buckets of cash, a huge plot of land, and eight inmates arriving in a day. Luckily, construction workers are rather diligent in Prison Architect, so that left me with more than enough time to create the bare essentials. 

In a letter from some Prison CEO chap -- he had a mustache and thus appeared legit -- I was advised to construct a large communal holding cell instead of individual cells. The goal was to save money and time as I was just starting up. Sound advice, I thought, and I took it to heart. I was quite literally whistling as I worked, and things were coming together rather nicely.

                          

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Dragons Lair Remastered

If you're going to remaster Bambi and Dumbo, why not Dirk the Daring? The animated hero of 1983's arcade smash Dragon's Lair was created by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, and over the years, he's gotten a bit fuzzy. (Dirk has, anyway; we can't speak for Don.) So, it's back to the vaults for a year of restoration from the original Technicolor negative, and the result is the extremely pretty, mega-nostalgic Dragon's Lair HD.

Dragon's Lair was the first arcade game that let you play a cartoon; its hand-drawn scenes played off a laserdisc hidden within the cabinet. Leading Dirk the Daring on his quest to save Princess Daphne from the enormous dragon was a matter of trial and error. If your joystick moves and sword strikes matched the predetermined pattern, you'd survive and see the entire 20-minute adventure play out in 15-second chunks. More often, you'd be out 50 cents in roughly as many seconds.

Showing ever bit of its 1983 heritage, the "make the right choice or you're dead" gameplay is still frustratingly hard. Many times you'll enter a room with no clue what to do and die almost instantly as a monster attacks without warning or a pathway crumbles beneath your feet. It's simply not fun unless you know exactly what to do as soon as you find yourself in each specific scene. If the original arcade timing is too tough, there's an Easy mode, but you're still likely to wonder what you were supposed to do to defeat the Lizard King or exactly which way to leap when the stone floor disintegrated.

                                

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Dragons Lair II Time Warp Remastered

This is the first truly arcade perfect version of the classic Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp. Remastered with stunning MPEG1 video quality, the beautiful Don Bluth animation can be played full screen or within an authentic arcade cabinet window. Princess Daphne has been spirited away to a wrinkle in time by the Evil Wizard Mordroc who plans to force her into marriage. Only you, Dirk the Daring, can save her. Transported by a bumbling old time machine, you begin the rescue mission. But you must hurry, for once the Casket of Doom has opened, Mordroc will place the Death Ring upon Daphne's finger in marriage and she will be lost forever in the Time Warp! Only you can save Princess Daphne... 

Original arcade look and feel in every move: Completely remastered for CD-Rom Relive the arcade experience with spectacular full screen, full motion MPEG 1 Video Multiple levels of difficulty Total scene authentication "Watch" feature to view without playing Feature-film animation by Don Bluth, director of "Anastasia", "The Land Before Time" and "American Tail" System Requirements for Windows Windows XP/2000/Me/98/95 Pentium II 266 MHz 32 MB RAM or more 4X CD-ROM drive DirectX 8.0 compatible, SVGA video card capable of 16-bit color display DirectX 8.0 compatible 16-bit sound card Keyboard/Mouse

                              

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Space Ace Remastered

Yet while several other games were produced and released in a similar fashion, ultimately, Laserdisc was not to be the format of choice for advanced gaming, leaving 'Space Ace' (like 'Dragons Lair' before it) a technological oddity -- not really a video game as traditionally defined, and not really a movie, either. Without falling squarely in one or the other camp, one might assume that the game would have just faded away, but instead it has enjoyed a curiously strong afterlife in recent years, both as a traditional PC-based game and (more successfully) as a light-on-the-interactivity standard-def DVD game.

Following the success of 'Dragon's Lair' in 1982, Don Bluth Studios quickly went to work creating a follow-up that would again rock the arcade world. What emerged two years later was 'Space Ace,' not so much a sequel to 'Lair' but its cosmic cousin. It transposed the same basic story and gameplay to a futuristic setting, with players once again navigating an intrepid hero, Space Ace, through various scenarios while trying to rescue the beautiful damsel-in-distress Kimberly from the clutches of the dastardly Commander Borf. 'Space Ace' also utilized the identical technology of 'Lair,' with its unique hybrid of traditional hand-drawn animation, simple player joystick commands and a LaserDisc engine driving the the whole shebang, turning 'Space Ace' a truly one-of-a-kind creation.

                                    

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THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII STEAM EDITION

Zoomy pictures, music that sounds like bees trying to emulate Brian May, and punches that seem to be part of the CERN program. It can only mean it’s a Japanese fighting game, and it’s coming to the PC. Confession: I have no idea what I’m looking at, but if you’re excited to learn that THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII will be on Steam next month then I’m happy for you. It’s not the most populated of genres, particularly on the PC, so this probably calls for some sort of celebration. This is apparently the thirteenth in the series, which means you’d have to use your toes if you wanted to count up all the games. Trailer and info below.

SNK puncheriser will have 36 fighters, 3-on-3 team battlers, and most importantly for the PC there’s an online mode which claims to have “vastly improved netcode”. The one thing I do know about fighting games is that latency is the final boss, so here’s hoping that the new netcode can make the game playable. Here’s the trailer that leaked last week. We didn’t report on that.


                           

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Formula Truck Simulator 2013

Despite coming with plenty of fresh content and features and being a completely separate title, the new version is free for everyone who bought the initial Formula Truck title!As the name suggests, Formula Truck 2013 simulates the 2013 season with the new trucks, some of which have been extensively modified relative to their 2012 counterparts.2013 also adds two new extra-calendar tracks – Campo Grande and Santa Cruz do Sul. More is to come.Every front has received some level of attention to smooth any remaining rough edges from the original Formula Truck.Physics have been adjusted to latest 2013 specs and data, with wear&tear of engines, tires and brakes also fine-tuned for more realistic behavior.

AI has also been adjusted so the AI trucks behave better and more consistently, adopting more reasonable strategies – no more pitstops in full distance races with normal tire and fuel multipliers.A lot of work has been done to enhance road surface and terrain details, in general and specifically to each track – bumps, grip levels, grass, curbs – everywhere you can put a wheel in has a greater depth of detail – and depending where and how you put it, the smoke / dust clouds can be massive!

Another new feature is a (non-dynamic) racing line – step offline, and feel the loss of grip through the FFB as you kick up a cloud of offline dirt – careful not to outbrake yourself there!

                                  

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Divekick With Crack

I rushed hurriedly to the booth and hopped on a system with a two button arcade box, one of the most unnecessarily overengineered and beautiful pieces I had ever seen. Lovely art with two huge blue and yellow buttons in the middle proudly labeled Dive and Kick. Two matches later and I was hooked. I interviewed the creator, I bought a shirt, I kept up on the news, I raved about it whenever possible, and I waited with anxiousness. It came out yesterday and I was so excited, I wrote a haiku about it.

If all of the waxing poetic about the game wasn’t an indicator, I like it. Superficially, Divekick is a joke. Obviously. One of the characters is a doctor named Dr. Shoals who has rocket boots and its looking for a cure for a foot disease called Foot Dive. Of course it’s a joke.

But if you give it a chance (i.e. exactly one match), you quickly realize it’s so much more than that. It’s a fighting game that attempts, and succeeds in many ways, to equalize all competitors. Gone are people who juggle your character across the map for 30 seconds and leave you with 2 hits until death. No longer can you put your controller down while waiting for someone’s massive combo to end. And obliterated is the feeling that no matter what you do, there are some people that know way more about the game than you and will exploit programming flaws to eviscerate you. By limiting your input to jumping, kicking, and having a few variations on moves for other characters, it’s as close to one on one, equal combat as you can get. You always know exactly what you did wrong and the other player did right to get you.

                                        

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Sir, You Are Being Hunted

I’ll have to be quick. I took a wrong turn on the way to the office and now I’m lost in the woodlands, being tracked by posh, yet murderous robots. Coincidentally, it’s a situation reminiscent of Sir, You Are Being Hunted: the open world stealth-’em-up from Big Robot, which is now available to buy in alpha form. Here, let me hastily embed a trailer, before metallic dogs track my scent, or, even worse, this flask of tea goes cold.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted continues to impress and tantalize with its classy Tweed-coated killer robots. A new video by developer Jim Rossignol shows off the new fens biome (a wetland, essentially), announces a date for the alpha release, and teases some new content.

The forthcoming open-world game Sir, You Are Being Hunted is edging ever closer to completion. The game’s procedurally generated British landscape is getting a few new biomes in the closing months of development, and the first of which, the mountain biome, is revealed in a new trailer.It’s Sunday, it’s (sorta) sunny – it’s the perfect time for a picnic on the procedurally generated moors of Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

                                   

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Take on Mars

Take On Mars is a story mode simulator with what appears to be a fully working replica of the supremely expensive rover that is currently up there doing it's thing on the red planet's surface. Equipped with 6 cameras of various focal points and positions, a boom arm with scientific equipment, and 4 wheels of independently pivoting dust compactors, you start the game situated in a mission control room with all the bells and whistles of your very own Rocket City. 

From there you can either follow the tutorial's craftily presented by an Android magician or just get straight into researching drop zone's (the imagery for these comes at hefty cost in the game's economy it seem's) for your rover's wanderings once it lands on the surface. 

Since it's still in beta early access, there do seem to be several gaps in the content and storyline. However it's still a work in progress and nonetheless an interesting and fun way to play away a couple of hours imagining that you're Capcom of this kinda epic triumph of robotic martian terrestrial exploration engineering. 

As far as the game's software engineering goes, it seems to use a nicely polished lite version of the Arma III engine. High resolution textures push the envelope of the visuals almost into uncanny valley territory.



                               

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StarForge

Last week we reported on how Steam Early Access, giving customers the opportunity to buy into the development versions of games like Prison Architect and Arma 3, as well as granting them the full game upon release. You can read plenty elsewhere about the completed games that are available on Steam, but very little has been written about what you get if you pay up for early access. We’d like to change that and we’re going to take a close look at some of the more popular early access games over the next few weeks. This is a little bit of an experiment for us and we’re not entirely sure if it’s going to work, so we’d appreciate your feedback in the comments.

StarForge, currently in Steam’s best-seller’s list, is a good place to start. It’s a scifi game of sandbox construction across procedurally-generated worlds and its ambition is to let players “Dig an endless tunnel, fly out to the far reaches of space, and come back again.” That’s some pretty impressive scope and it helped to win StarForge over $135,000.

Now, for fifteen of your earth pounds, you can start StarForging right away, though naturally any alpha version of a game is going to be at least somewhat limited in what it can offer. As of it’s introduction to Steam, StarForge is at version 0.3.5. The important question to ask is: what do you get for your money?

                                   

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