It’s fitting A Story About My Uncle seems to have lept from the silver screen, given it’s a game all about, well, leaping. There’s a touch of the Percy Jackson or Inkhart about its story in which a young boy inherits a magical jumping glove from his explorer uncle and follows his trail through vast cloud cities, mystical mountain passes, and twinkling shrines. It’s pure children’s adventure fantasy.
One of the worst things that could happen in Goat Simulator is for there to be too few goats. The new Goat Simulator 1.1 update will preemptively strike against this terror with the promise that new goats will be added. There is a reason you are playing Goat Simulator after all: you want to be around goats.
From a design perspective, elaborating on Goat Simulator's features seems impossible. It has everything: goats; tongue-based physics; big, pretty score numbers; goats; a reckless disregard for property value. Still, Coffee Stain isn't yet done with the glory of goat, as a free 1.1 update hits June 3 with a new map, wall running, and local multiplayer support. From the recesses of the "just because" portion of the team's crazy minds comes another addition to the incoming patch: Minecraft—with goats.
If games are art, then what is Goat Simulator? Finger painting maybe. Or an abstract treatise on the futility of perfection. Whatever the analogy, it's about to get bigger. A free update is adding a new map, new goats, wall-running and four-player split-screen. Now, Coffee Stain Studios have announced that this extra goat action will be made available on June 3rd.
Thinking back, I doubt that any of the stories about my uncle would make for a compelling game concept. There was the time he napped through Family Fortunes, but, unfortunately, that never resulted in a magical grappling-hook adventure through a surreal and colourful land of floating islands. Some nephews have all the luck, as this trailer for the upcoming first-person platfomer—being published by Sanctum/Goat Simulator developer Coffee Stain Studios—can attest.
Earlier this month, Coffee Stain Studios made the case for giving their customers free DLC. Now the goat experts are doing exactly that in the first big patch for Goat Simulator. On its blog, Coffee Stain has detailed what the free DLC will include. Are you ready for goat parkour?
As consumers, we’d prefer to get content updates for free rather than pay for them. Yesterday, Coffee Stain Studios announced that it will patch more content into Goat Simulator for free in May, and according to the developer’s game designer and PR manager Armin Ibrisagic, that's not only great for us, but also good for business.
The bad news is that Coffee Stain Studios, developer of Goat Simulator, has announced that it’s not planning to sell any DLC for its not-quite-a-simulation game. The amazing news is that the team plans to add a bunch of free content to the game some time in the middle of May.
If Goat Simulator really was a goat simulator, you'd spend the whole game padding around a field eating grass and occasionally being milked, before ending up on a plate in some upmarket restaurant. But that would make for a rubbish game, so Coffee Stain Studios, the Swedish team behind the Sanctum series, have used artistic licence. Instead, you crash around a physics-enabled world knocking things over, headbutting people, dragging stuff around with your tongue, and generally being a pain in arse for points. Think Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but with a goat.
It's hard not to think that Goat Simulator's ascent from cheese dream inception to being one of the most talked about PC releases of the year owes a lot to just its name. Because you might think, in the same way SimCity theoretically lets you simulate a city (yes, I know), so the name Goat Simulator suggests it will simulate, hopefully in painstaking detail, the life and times of one of the world's lesser loved ungulates.
We're already strongly considering Goat Simulator, Sanctum 2 developer Coffee Stain Studios' physics playground (a goat joke that became real in record time), as our top pick for 2014. It might even lead our Game of the Year Awards. Heck, it's GOATY—Game of All The Years. Before we all lavish it with the accolades a AAA goat game truly deserves, we'll have to wait until April 1 before we can gleefully add Goat Simulator to our Steam libraries.
Last week, Sanctum 2 developers Coffee Stain Studios released "alpha footage" of "Goat Simulator", because jokes. The video's description even contained the warning, "we're just playing around a bit with programming stuff, this is not our next big IP, calm yourselves journalists." But, as Surgeon Simulator 2013's Bossa Studios once learned, comedy sims are a powerful thing. And so it came to pass that, on the 11th of Febuary, Twenty-Fourteen, Coffee Stain did relent, decreeing to all the land that Goat Simulator would move out of experimental alpha and be released on Steam.
The Road to Elysion is the first release of Sanctum 2's planned string of DLC, and it brings some seriously dark stuff to the otherwise colorful tower-defense world—so, naturally, Coffee Stain Studios thought it best to encapsulate the DLC's offerings in this demented, '90s-style live action trailer, replete with backwards-facing baseball caps and crappy plastic action figures.
Sanctum 2 is here! This fully rebuilt sequel to the impressive smooshing-together of the tower defense and FPS genres has been on our radars for awhile, and today is its debut on Steam. Haven't you just been dying to find out why those adorable alien-dogs are so intent on munching on your Cores?
In celebration of a trailer well done, the four heroes of Sanctum 2 spend the last 20 seconds or so wiggling their posteriors as a robot army crawls menacingly out of the sea. And who can blame them? This is a brief but exciting blast of gameplay footage from the tower def-FPS sequel, and a welcome surprise after that tantalising teaser trailer the other week. In it, we see far the game has come since its 2011 predecessor. We also see a big armoured crab-robot, who will likely be a right git to take down.
As a website, we don't have any presses. But if we did, I'd now be smacking the giant red stop button to insert the breaking, shock news that FPS Tower Defence sequel Sanctum 2 will have towers. That's about the only information that can be gleaned from this all-too-brief teaser for the game.
Okay, one more thing: assuming the video is representative of the in-game art, it seems the environments will be a whole lot more vibrant than the previous instalment. Sanctum's graphics were hardly its most notably feature - often forgotten in the frantic rush to secure cores and shoot the approaching hordes - but some extra visual sparkle is still welcome.
