Gaming
Brass gets a facelift, and it was about time
Any self-respecting board gamer has played or at least has heard of Martin Wallace’s magnum opus: Brass. I myself managed to play it for the first time a couple of years ago. It was a warm summer evening. The local insect population was already swarming the lowly lit porch where we were sitting. Yet the intensity that game created was so exhilarating that not even mosquito bites managed to break the fun. I myself can attest that although we were just some dudes drinking beer and flipping tokens over a plain looking map of Lancashire, we could actually feel the heat coming from the newly built ironworks of Manchester. As the sun was setting, we were determined to grab the last contracts with the overseas market and develop our cotton mills before the board would be wiped clean. And that was just the beginning.
For those who can’t quite grasp the experience of playing Brass, Roxley Games has taken upon themselves to produce a visual update to the classic game that’s worthy of its spirit. Being now live on Kickstarter, Roxley Games is offering Brass: Lancashire along with Brass: Birmingham, a new implementation of the rules, but in a different setting and with the same outstanding production value.
What is it about?
Brass was originally released ten years ago. The game focused on the area of Lancashire, England which experienced a massive change due to the Industrial Revolution. The damp climate was a perfect environment for developing cotton wool, and so auxiliary industries such as coal extraction and iron smelting were also on the rise. Players take on the role of greedy industrialists seizing new business opportunities. Each player is dealt a hand of cards which must be used wisely in order to capitalize not only on the intrinsic cotton demand of the external market but also on the demands created by their competitors’ industries. New ports scream for shipping contracts while the iron market beckons with quick profits.
Surely enough, Liverpool was becoming an important link for commerce. However, transport boats could not keep up with the demands. The water canals from the late 18th century could no longer support the volume of goods and so, Lancashire went through a new phase. Railroads pumping coal now began reaching from all directions. At a certain point in the game, the board goes through a literal apocalypse.
The entire canal infrastructure gets removed and most if not all industries go into disarray. Players who have not prepared for the shift in paradigm need to push hard to recuperate. Only the strongest industries get to prosper as the land is reshaped to make way for the steam engine. The dance of industry continues and by the end of the game, Lancashire becomes dotted with coal mines and cotton mills. The coastline is busy with commercial traffic and ship manufacturing. Finally, industrialists get to count the final points, because ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass’.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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