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RSS FeedsVarious Video Game Stories and More from the Week of August 9, 2021
Posted: 08:47AM
Author: Guest_Jim_*
Another week has reached its end and so it is time to go through the various pieces of video game news from the week. Starting things off is some news from 2K as Borderlands 3 is turning two in a month and to celebrate it has begun five weeks of Loot the Universe mini-event series. Each week a different planet in the game will see its drops improved, including having an increased chance at certain legendary items in certain zones. For this first week, Pandora is the planet, followed by Promethea, then Eden-6, and lastly Nekrotafeyo. Following the last planet ending its Loot the Universe event at September 9, 9 AM PT, the Mayhem Made Wild and Show Me the Eridium mini-events will begin and also run for one week. September 13, the anniversary of the game's launch will see even more happen on it, but the plans are being kept a surprise for now.
Source: 2K (Borderlands 3)
Windjammers 2 is an evolution of the classic arcade game coming from Dotemu and this week the publisher and developer announced the title is not only coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in addition to PC, Nintendo Switch, and google Stadia, but also the start of an open beta on the PC and two PlayStation consoles. This open beta has already started and is going until August 22 with Steam players able to compete against it each while PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 gamers can go head to head. To help new players get a handle on how to play, a new trailer featuring the returning character Gary Scott goes through the mechanics and deeper strategies of the game. We do not have a release date for the game just yet.
Source: Press Release (Dotemu – Windjammers 2)
Back in June, Going Medieval released to Early Access, allowing players to get started building a settlement with survivors of the Dark Age. This week it received its first major update with version 0.5.31.8 that adds a number of fixes, improvements, and content such as shelves and racks. With these new pieces of furniture, players have more ways to store their resources, something that was so requested the developers apparently moved up releasing it. Shelves can be used to store food, textiles, and/or medicine, while bookshelves and weapon racks are more restricted. Armor racks and chests are a bit further into the research tree, but have also been added. Stockpile management has also been improved as now each stockpile can been given a priority and its settings can be copied and pasted onto others. Resource piles have also been optimized, addressing some memory leak issues that could significantly hurt performance. New options for map sizes have also been added, with the original 190x190 size now the smallest. A medium map is 220x220 and large is 250x250. A 320x320 map had been available in an experimental branch, but that has been removed because settlers can start to starve just from trying to cross the map. The developers state in the release notes that larger maps are possible, but will require significant changes to settler behavior.
There have been many other changes made with this update, which you can find and read about in the patch notes linked to below, but developer Foxy Voxel has also prepared a video showcasing the update as well.
Source: Press Release (The Irregular Corporation – Going Medieval) and Steam (Patch Notes)
Koch Media and Retro Games have announced THEA500 Mini, recreation of the classic console that, like other classic consoles, will come with 25 games. The inspiration for this is the Amiga 500 from 1987 that featured a 16/32 bit CPU paired with 512 KB of RAM, but the hardware will be able to emulate not only the original components but also the Enhanced Ship Set of later revisions and the Advanced Graphics Architecture of the A1200. For controls, it will come with an eight-button gamepad and two-button mouse matching the original style of the Amiga, but you can connect a standard keyboard for added functionality.
Of the 25 games THEA500 Mini will come with, 12 have been identified already: Alien Breed 3D; Another World; ATR: All Terrain Racing; Battle Chess; Cadaver; Kick Off 2; Pinball Dreams; Simon The Sorcerer; Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe; The Chaos Engine; Worms: The Director's Cut; and Zool: Ninja Of The 'nth Dimension. If that is not enough for you, the unit will support having side-loading games from USB drives with full WHDLoad support.
THEA500 Mini is expected to go on sale in early 2022 with an MSRP of $139.99.
Source: Press Release (Koch Media – THEA500 Mini)
Also announced by Koch Media this week is the presence of Clid the Snail from developers Weird Beluga at gamescom 2021. In this top-down shooter, players will be tasked with defeating slugs that have been plaguing the world, and keeping Clid from his drink at the bar. Fortunately he has plenty of weapons to help him get the task done, all while showing off how fast, deadly, and how much a badass he is. gamescom 2021 starts its digital events on August 25 and continues until Friday 27.
Source: Press Release (Koch Media – Clid the Snail)
Finishing this off with a piece of non-game news as TerraMaster announced a new storage server targeting businesses wanting their own cloud storage. The U12 Series sports a quad-core Intel Xeon paired with 8 GB of DDR4 RAM that can be upgraded to 64 GB. It also has two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots so you can add 10 GbE NIC or RAID cards to fit your purpose, though the specifications only list them as x8. It already has four 1 Gb network connections in addition to its four USB ports, two being USB 3.0 and two being USB 2.0. With its link aggregation feature, load will be balanced between the network links and if one fails, service will not be interrupted.
As the name suggests, the server can hold up to twelve 2.5 in or 3.5 in drives, and with SSD caching support, you can install larger if slower HDDs while SSDs improve the response of accessing data. It also has a host of security features, including AES256 disk encryption to keep your data safe even if the drives are stolen.
As the U12 Series is aimed at businesses, it has an MSRP targeting businesses as well, at $3499.
Source: TerraMaster [1] (U12 Series Announcement) and [2] (U12 Series Product Page)
