Today we find out what the most popular indie games are on the Switch, learn how to use a calculator to beat a game, finally figure out what plans Google has for gaming, discover Belgium loves a gameshow featuring Tetris and hear a fun story from a QA tester. It’s another installment of Morning Checkpoint!
Great Kotaku Content From The Past Week
Like most weeks, Kotaku was filled with some great stories. Here are a few of my favorites!
I never to the final question in HQ Trivia, but I remember how fun that week or so was. I also wouldn’t have got this question right. Maybe you would have?
In this video, Tim Rogers, video game expert, avoids the smart advice of never reading YouTube comments and ends up creating some great content in the process.
Google got up on a stage this week and finally shared details about their streaming service. Will it work? Should people trust them? I don’t know. But I do know one thing, Stadia is a silly and dumb name for anything.
What a selection of great games! And folks on Switch really like Overcooked it seems. Both the first game and the sequel made the list.
Tweets!
So many popular TV shows in the US are based on shows from other countries. Yet we still don’t have our version of Blokken. This seems terrible and I need it to change.
I’m genuinely impressed by their rolling. I’m tall and a bit fat so I wouldn’t be able to do one damn roll, let alone multiple rolls in a row.
My family and friends had a rule that NOBODY could sing Creep in Rock Band after too many people kept picking it. Then one night someone, who was really drunk, picked it and got a perfect score. This was the only time they got a perfect score for singing ever and they didn’t remember it the next day.
The 90s really were a magical time. This is an elaborate commerical. I would love to read an oral history about this ad and the folks involved. I feel like it would be amazing.
Brand accounts need to calm down.
News
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection Won’t Be Part Of Xbox Play Anywhere
- Google Unveils Gaming Platform Stadia, A Competitor To Xbox, PlayStation & PC
- A Surprise Zelda Game Is Coming From An Acclaimed Indie Studio
- Vampire: the Masquerade– Bloodlines Is Getting A Sequel, And It Looks Pretty Good
- Return Of The Obra Dinn Wins Lots Of Awards At GDC, While God Of War Wins Game Of The Year
Some Good Comments
So, I had the pleasure to do QA on World at War and the DLC (...go ahead, try to find my name, there’s at least a hundred people credited...), and damn if the Zombie mode wasn’t a massive breath of fresh air when we got to pl- er, “test” it. Even just the first level, simple as it was, you had people figuring out the strategies, working out the call-outs, people shouting out reloading, getting enthusiastic when you’d finish one of the high-end waves.
I mean, sure, we were *testing*, but, uh, it was a new feature added late in development, we had to be *extra* vigorous in making sure that it was all fine, and if that meant spending an hour or two in this really exciting game mode in the best environment for 4 man coop (everyone sitting near each other)? Damn it, that’s what the job calls for!
Oh, and yeah, the Peleliu Ray Gun stuff... we were less amused by that. When we found out about it, QA kinda had to scramble in response. QA isn’t in the habit of pressing the use key on every single piece of the environment (we tend to have bigger issues), so we had to spend kinda the entire day spawning the ray gun and firing it at *everything*, looking for anything that might go wrong.
...and the leads were kinda hoping that it would crash the game or something, just so that there’d be something to rub the developer’s face in, saying “This is why you tell QA things!”
There weren’t any real problems with it, thankfully, but still, twas an odd day :) -Wraithfighter from “The Human Story Behind Call Of Duty’s Zombie Mode”
I guess I never thought about how annoying little secrets could be for testers. I wonder how many secrets are slipped in and nobody in QA notices or checks on it? Somewhere in a game there is an untested secret just waiting to cause a memory overflow bug.
My brother and I rented Startropics and got stuck at that point cause it didn’t have the manual or letter. My sister used a random number generator on her calculator and we kept trying till we got the right number.
Fortunately it didn’t take too long. -drkmethos from “StarTropics On Switch Is Missing The Clue You Need To Beat The Game”
I never had a cool calculator growing up. I remember kids who had some and they would play games on them or even program little things into them. I was jealous. Though in retrospect a fun calculator like that would have been way too much of distraction for me.
Holy shit transmillion, this looks great even in a prototype stage. GameFreak, give this person a budget and some resources.
Somewhat relevant: A friend of mine had built up a fairly successful SoT community that was very active within the community. Just within the last week, a few of his high-ranking crew basically mutinied and shared private crew information with some rival crews. He caught them, banned them from his Discord, and they basically took most of the rest of the crew with them when they left.
I’m not sure what my point here was, but it’s interesting that there’s somehow drama to be had in a game that’s been famously criticized for not having much to do. -Cake Tank! from “Sea Of Thieves, One Year Later”
Arrr, there be untrustworthy players in this here Discord server. These scallywags best be moving on to some other server, unless they be wanting a good banning across their bow.
Trailers & Videos You May Have Missed
“惭耻迟补迟颈辞苍!”
XCOM but with weird animals sounds like a solid concept. I should check this out.
Oh, I want to play the dog sledding game. I really want to play it.
Hey, did you want a new battle royale game? Well, here you go!
That is a really good and awful fatality.
Tell Me More!
What’s a weird way you solved a game? Did you use a sundial or maybe a series of mirrors? Let me know in the comments below!
Morning Checkpoint is all about catching you up on the past week, getting you ready for the next week, answering some questions, sharing stories and having a good time. You can email me anything you want or drop a comment below. Suggest tweets, comments, ideas, new sections and more for next week and thanks for reading!