wfmag.cc \ 15NewsAttract Mode
- Play Kunai-ce
The spectre of review bombing reared its
big daft face recently, with an apparently
angry Pokémon fan taking his frustrations
about something I won’t even pretend to
understand out on poor KUNAI, the little
Metroidvania that could. The point here
is that a person (semi-) randomly decided
to try and destroy the reputation of a
well-received indie game by sabotaging
its user rating on Metacritic, taking it
from an organic 8.1 to a less-deserved
1.7, simply by abusing the system’s
lack of IP checks and using hundreds
of free email sign-ups. The person
behind all this is irrelevant; the real issue
highlighted here is how Metacritic –
once famously tied to developer bonus
payouts and still with a decent amount
of clout – can still be successfully, easily
gamed in certain ways.
- Not coffee
After making your own version of GTA
San Andreas’s infamous Hot Coffee
sexytime mod, this time for Red Dead
Redemption 2, you might sit back and
chuckle. First, because it’s a pretty
rubbish effort of a lowbrow idea,
introducing hacked-together sex scenes
to the western opus. Second, because
it’s clearly something done ‘for the lulz’
or whatever the internet says these
days. Rockstar, however, did not see the
funny side when this very mod did pop
up online, raining down legal fury like
the hammer (or gavel) of Thor, resulting
in the awkward sex-based silliness to be
removed from its mod-hosting home.
Sex doesn’t sell (free mods), folks.- Gotta go (to the
cinema) fast
After the horror of that face, hopes
were somewhat middling for Sonic the
Hedgehog’s cinematic debut. But here
we are, in the year 2020, with a blue
alien hedgehog that can run quick and
doesn’t have a face that haunts your
very soul (also: human teeth), and a
movie that brought in the most for any
video game tie-in across its US opening
weekend (£45m, fact fans). Sonic’s wider
performance at the time of writing had
it as the 13th highest-grossing video
game movie ever released, with a £208m
worldwide take – though of course, that
figure will have risen by the time you’re
reading this. Will the blue one be able to
tackle 2019’s Pokémon Detective Pikachu?
No, because the Ryan Reynolds vehicle
bagged £334m worldwide. Sorry, oh
speedy one.2003’s Need For Speed: Underground
gets ray tracing via modEx-BioWare dev: “92% of Mass Effect
players were Paragon,” for some reason
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