The Evening Report, Friday, February 1, 2013: Double Fine

The Evening Report, Friday, February 1, 2013: Double Fine

These Double Fine Boxes are Double FINE

If you haven’t checked out Double Fine’s latest Amnesia Fortnight line-up, you probably should.

Ordering the special edition bundle nets you a copy of 2 Player Productions’ Double Fine documentary, signed copies of the game prototypes, a soundtrack and prototypes from some of the company’s past downloadable efforts. Most importantly, however, the $70 package gets you signed, boxed copies of each of the titles. While I’m sure collectors will mostly care about the signatures, it’s what they’re written on that has me drooling.

Just look at the box art for Autonomous and White Birch.

[Source: Double Fine]

Playstation 4 Specifications

Edge posted some new design details about the next Playstation today, citing “…sources with working knowledge of both next generation consoles…”

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of it here, since you can just check out the original article, but highlights include the ability to record in-game footage on the fly, a redesigned controller with touch capability and innards that appear to be very slightly superior to the upcoming Xbox successor.

[Source: Edge]

Team Fortress 2 Content Generators Generate Big Money

Gabe Newell is nothing if not a purveyor of interesting information.

For instance, did you know that the most anyone makes selling user-generated hats in Team Fortress 2 is $500,000 per year? No? Well, now you do.

Newell went on to drop many more interesting facts in his talk at the University of Texas. I very much encourage you to watch the whole video (handily embedded above). You might learn something. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got virtual hats to craft.

[Source: Gabe Newell, Via: PC Gamer]

Steven’s Game of the Week – Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

I’m almost too terrified of spoiling something to talk about Virtue’s Last Reward at all.

It’s a visual novel and a sequel to 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. At its most basic level, VLR is about escaping from convolution puzzle rooms in order to unlock story branches, make choices and interact with characters.

Most of the game is presented as incredibly well-voice acted and localized dialogue sequences. It can get a bit tedious at times as the game insists on explaining the same story beats over and over again. Luckily, and unlike the game’s predecessor, there is an option to fast forward through anything you’ve already seen. That comes in very handy towards the final third of the game, which absolutely makes any tedious repetition not only forgivable, but ultimately necessary.

There’s so very, very much more to it than that though, and to get into detail would spoil a plot that is, if I’m not mistaken, one of the only examples of the hard science fiction genre in video games. It’s available for both 3DS and Vita and while I haven’t tried the 3DS version I have been assured that anyone with the option should purchase the latter.