#but it looks like the steam releases added a fast forward button

[the-cryptographer]

thinking of irvine kinneas and zelos wilder and wondering if stupid traumatised playboy manslut chad is still a jrpg stock character in this year 2023 (and if not can we bring that back for my sake pls thx)

[linuxgamenews]

Crowdfunding Campaign Coming for Nicolas Petton's Dreamed Away Adventure

Dreamed Away Kickstarter campaign for the action adventure RPG game is coming for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC. To bolster the efforts of developer Nicolas Petton, this is due to provide essential support. Then eventually make its way onto Steam. I'm always on the lookout for fresh and engaging titles on Linux. Dreamed Away caught my attention in April 2023, and I'm here to share my thoughts on it and the upcoming Kickstarter. First off, this project is the creation of French developer Nicolas Petton and is being brought to life with the support of Polish indie publisher Pineapple Works. Dreamed Away is kicking off its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign on February 1st, 2024. This is a big step for any indie project, as crowdfunding can be the make or break moment. The title itself is a pixel art action adventure RPG, and it's clear that it draws inspiration from iconic titles like Earthbound and Omori. But what makes it stand out is its setting – France in the 90s. This is also something you don't see every day in this genre. There's a nostalgic charm to it, especially for those who appreciate the era.

Dreamed Away Trailer (Mother Direct)

You step into the shoes of Théo, a little boy lost in a world that feels like a dream but is tinged with dark and mysterious elements. The storyline kicks off on a rainy summer night when Théo finds himself alone, his family missing. The narrative unfolds in crypts and other eerie locations as Théo searches for his sister, adding a psychological horror aspect to the adventure. Even the Kickstarter due out soon, the Dreamed Away artistic approach deserves a mention. The pixel art is not just functional; it's detailed, and aesthetic, and uses a varied color palette. This carefully transitions from vibrant and peaceful to dark and mysterious. This visual storytelling enhances the overall experience. Gameplay wise, it promises a deep and fast-paced combat system. This includes mini-games that blend turn-based strategy, bullet dodging, and unique time-based QTEs. It sounds like a dynamic approach that will keep players engaged. Plus, the absence of random encounters is a thoughtful touch, likely making for a more streamlined and less frustrating experience. Lastly, with the added help of Kickstarter, the Dreamed Away soundtrack by Nicolas Petton is something I'm personally looking forward to. Music in such games can be a powerful tool for setting the mood and improving the narrative. For those eager to get a taste of what Dreamed Away offers, there's a free demo available on the Steam page. Including native Linux support, with Mac and Windows PC. The action adventure RPG a great way to dive into its world and see if it resonates with you. With a planned release in Q1 2025, it's definitely one to keep an eye on. Also, be sure to hit the "notify me" button on the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

[aonorunic]

Daydreaming, Chapter 3: Edelgard, A Fire Emblem Fic

Summary:  Edelgard’s late night wanderings take her to a place she never before allowed herself to dream of.

Notes: Inspired by an ongoing conversation over at @pokemagines. The next requested character, and I am so excited for this because jokes, Hubert. Feel free to continue asking for other characters you would like to see.

Read of AO3.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2

“Edelgard?”

Edelgard stopped and sucked in a deep breath, the night air cool in her lungs. “Professor? What are you doing out so late?”

Byleth’s head tilted as she regarded Edelgard, but did not say a word. “Ah, yes, I guess I shouldn’t be making such inquiries when I am out and about myself.”

Edelgard turned to the side, the grip of her nightmare still clawing at her mind as it tried to reclaim her. She was aware of the footfalls coming toward her, but did not pay them any mind until a fluffy white towel was shoved in her face. “Professor?” she heard herself question for a second time.

“Come on,” Byleth said. She reached out for Edelgard’s hand, pulling the princess along behind her.

Edelgard offered no resistance. She felt the heat in her cheeks rise, unable to draw her eyes away from where their hands were connected. Occasionally when the Professor had lectured for the Black Eagles, switching for the day with Manuela, Edelgard had daydreamed about holding her hand. It was always simple things, like walking through the market or strolling through gardens, but always with the Professor at her side, their fingers intertwined. 

When Byleth let go of her hand Edelgard finally looked up and realized where Byleth had taken her. She was certain her entire body was covered in a blush as she recognized the door to the baths.

“Professor?” She had not realized her voice could go that high.

Byleth placed the hand that had just been holding Edelgard’s on the door handle, that warm and steady hand Edelgard had dreamed of so many times before. “The water will help you relax.” She opened the door and paused. “You do not have to come in if you do not wish, but I think it will do you good to allow yourself a moment of rest.” And with that Byleth left Edelgard standing outside.

The baths were a series of large pools, filled from hot springs underneath the monastery. Byleth had entered the one reserved for women, but there was a smaller one for nobles that would be unoccupied at this time of night. Edelgard could very easily go there instead. She could just go back to her room.

And yet, she wanted it. She wanted to do as Byleth had suggested and relax, and if she wasn’t alone there was less of a chance of the nightmare tearing at her mind again. Shaking off the fog that she felt she was previous moving through, Edelgard followed Byleth into the baths.

The room was warm, steam rising from the water. Byleth was already neck deep in the bath. Edelgard felt the heat come back to her skin, silently grateful that the heat now gave her an excuse for why her skin was turning a brilliant shade of pink. 

Byleth kept her eyes closed as Edelgard disrobed and placed her clothes on one of the shelves provided along the wall. She took a deep breath and stepped into the water, sighing as a new warmth enveloped her. Edelgard sank deeper, just allowing the water to surround her, the tension eased out of her muscles. It was a wonderful feeling. The feeling of weightlessness actually seemed to be helping.

The sound of water being displaced snapped open Edelgard’s eyes. She had actually forgotten Byleth was with her. The Professor had stood, the water lapping at her waist. Edelgard forgot to breathe. The steam did not give her a clear view, but she still saw quite a bit. And then Byleth lifted herself out of the bath.

Edelgard shoved a hand against her mouth to stifle the very unladylike squeal that escaped her. Byleth did not seem to care at all that she was naked in front of another person. She grabbed her own towel and began to dry off, Edelgard following every movement of those warm hands. All too soon Byleth was dressed again, her soaking wet hair dampening the cloth of her top of making it cling to her in an absolutely delicious way. (And now Edelgard realized why she had brought two towels in the first place.)

“Would you like me to stay?” she asked.

Edelgard shook her head without even thinking about it. “No, I’ll be fine. Thank you, Professor.”

Byleth nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Don’t fall asleep before you get out.”

And with that, Edelgard was alone.

Alone with her mind filled with thoughts of the woman who had just left. Edelgard had never allowed herself to fantasize anything more than holding Byleth’s hand, but after what she had just seen, she found herself too weak to deny her desires.

Byleth rose from the water, allowing Edelgard’s gaze to sweep over her. Only now the other woman did not move to leave the pool. She just stood there, stood there until Edelgard herself moved forward. Byleth’s hands rose ever so slightly toward her, but Edelgard was too fast, pulling Byleth into her arms as soon as she was close to the other woman.

Byleth moaned happily as Edelgard kissed her, their bodies flush against one another. The feel of Byleth’s skin against her own was nearly overwhelming. Edelgard allowed her hands to move over Byleth, exploring every curve she could reach, testing and teasing before moving on, greedy for more. One of Byleth’s own hands came up to tangle in Edelgard’s hair, trying to push their faces closer. 

Edelgard moved them back, breaking their kiss only long enough to breathe before diving back in, sitting back down on the ledge that ran the edge of the pool and pulling Byleth into her lap. Her hands moved to Byleth’s breasts, marveling at how they filled her hands so completely.

“Edelgard,” Byleth moaned as she threw her head back, bucking her hips forward, silently begging for more. 

Edelgard wished to tease her, wanted to make Byleth beg for her touch, but someone could easily walk in on them if they also decided on a midnight bath, and Edelgard did not want anyone else to see Byleth like this. No, this was for her and her alone. 

One hand moved down, the other continuing to tease Byleth’s breast, until it rested just under Byleth’s belly button. She was so close to everything she wanted from the other woman. “Do you want this, Byleth?” She had to be sure.

Despite the heat, Byleth shivered when Edelgard said her name. “Yes,” she hissed, trying to buck against Edelgard’s hand.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Edelgard chastised. She pinched Byleth’s nipple, smiling at the yelp that came out of the usually stoic woman. “Just relax, Byleth. Let me take care of you.”

Byleth whined and wrapped her arms around Edelgard’s neck, those wonderful hands clinging to her. She was Byleth’s world right now, and those hands anchored them together. “Please.”

Edelgard’s hand continued down, relishing the gasp Byleth gave when her fingers gave the lightest of touches over the other woman. She felt Byleth’s hips move again, but dropped her other hand to Byleth’s waist and pressed down. The way Byleth bit her lip to hold back her moan was absolutely adorable.

There would be other times when Edelgard could take her time with the Professor; other times when the world ceased except for the two of them. Right now, Edelgard had a goal to accomplish before she was interrupted.

A finger teased its way inside Byleth. Edelgard smirked against the skin of Byleth’s shoulder, pausing her kisses long enough to tease, “My, you’re already so slick down here.”

“Edelgard, please don’t tease me.” 

She was just too damn cute.

“All right.” Edelgard’s lips moved to Byleth’s chin, peppering kisses along her lover’s jaw as she added another finger. And then another. She worked Byleth, letting the other woman ride her hand and chase her release. Edelgard shifted her hand, drawing a cry from Byleth, so she could use her thumb to tease Byleth’s clit. She had never known Byleth could be so loud. She continued to pump her fingers in and out of Byleth’s body, determined to draw out every little moan and gasp. 

Fingers pulled at Edelgard’s hair and shoulder. “El!” Byleth tightened around Edelgard’s hand, her body shaking as she came. 

It was over too soon, and yet, Edelgard felt a joy in her chest her had not known before as Byleth curled up against her, sighing contentedly against Edelgard’s shoulder. “Don’t make me move for awhile,” Byleth requested.

“You can stay in my arms as long as you want.”

Edelgard allowed herself to imagine she was holding Byleth a moment longer before letting the fantasy go. She removed her fingers from her body as her breathing began to even out. With a deep sigh, Edelgard rose from the pool and toweled herself off before pulling her clothes back on. 

The entire way back to her room she curled and uncurled the hand Byleth had held, imaging the other woman leading her forward. 

/

End Notes:  This is the first time I've written for Edelgard's pov. I feel like her actual scene was shorter than the other two, but it just seemed to fit while I was writing it. I hope her chapter measures up to the other two.

[nerdyhuntress]

CSJJ Day 19: “Kiss It Better”

Summary: Killian and Emma make hot cocoa on a cold, winter evening :)

Rating: M for smut ;)

A/N: I mixed up a couple of the prompts together to make this story. I know it’s short, simple, and fluffy, but I hope you all like it! Special thanks to @csjanuaryjoy for creating this wonderful events and all the writers/creators for such wonderful works!

“Deck the halls with boughs of hollyyyyy-”

“Swan, are you going to help or not?” Killian said exasperatedly, slightly amused by her antics. “You said you wanted hot cocoa, remember?”

“Uh huh,” she said, not paying any attention to his words and focusing on the last drops of rum left in the bottle.

After dinner, the two had shared a bottle of hot buttered rum. Normally, Emma could definitely handle her liquor, but she had far too much to drink this time. She had definitely surpassed the definition of tipsy. Killian couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her this drunk. He found it endearing, amusing, but annoying too. She had turned on the radio and was singing along (rather awfully) to the Christmas carols.

“Darling, it’s not Christmas anymore,” he reminded her, taking out the hot cocoa mix from the cupboard. “And will you help me?”

“No, but I’ll tell ya what to do,” she said, voice slurring as she tried to sit up on the counter and nearly slipped off. Killian let out a gasp as she nearly fell to the ground, but she hastily righted herself and began humming to “Sleigh Ride”.

“Killian, I wanna have the best hot cocoa in the world. Don’t use water like you did last time!” she reminded him with a frown.

“I know, lass,” he said, drawing out a jug of milk from the fridge.

“Come on, it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with youuuu,” she sang as he boiled the milk and added the cocoa powder.

Everything went well and it was rather cozy to be in the kitchen. The snow softly pattered on the window outside and the kitchen’s warm glow shone brightly in the cold night. He loved spending evenings cooking with her. It was something they were both somewhat adequate at, but with their skills pooled together, the food was delicious. Perhaps it was the joy of making it with someone he loved.

“Almost done, love,” Killian said grinning, watching her hum another caroling tune as she set the empty rum bottle down.

He poured the hot chocolate into their respective mugs; it steamed and frothed, begging to be tasted. The aroma of the sweet liquid was enticing. He then realized why she loved it so much. Killian turned to look at her, expecting an expression of delight or excitement. Hell, he even looked forward to a kiss (or more) for gratitude, as she often gave him when he made something for her.

What he didn’t expect was her punching him in the shoulder and frowning, her pretty eyes blazing in annoyance and drunkenness.

“Killian, that’s all wrong!” she said petulantly. “You forgot to add cinnamon and whipped cream!”

“Alright, then tell me how to make it!” he groaned, vexed with how she was acting. He ran a hand over his face and sighed. He loved his wife, he truly did, but it was awfully rude of her to ac this way. “Bloody hell, Emma. You’re awfully frustrating right now, you know that?”

“Yeah, but you love me for it,” she giggled, tracing the outline of his face and peppering kisses over his cheek. Her shift in mood was awfully confusing and strange, but when she was drunk, she often teetered between differing emotions. Like right now.

He went to the cabinet and pulled out the cinnamon, noting where it was on the shelves. Emma really loved that spice and always wanted it in a place in reach. Opening the fridge, he found the canister of whipped cream, remembering to shake it before spraying it on the frothy mugs of hot chocolate. Almost immediately, it began melting into the sweet drink, making it more appetizing. Before he could sprinkle cinnamon on top of the cream, Emma came up from behind him, rubbing her face against his body. That was another thing; she was often clingy while drunk and it was adorable.

“Swan, don’t distract me. I have to concentrate,” he said in a serious tone, but his wink practically begged her to continue her affections. She ran her hands over his shoulder blades and back, her teasing touch welcoming, but unbearable. He could feel his arousal growing in his pants and he shifted quietly, hoping she didn’t notice.

“Are you almost done?” she asked with a sigh, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“Aye, love. Here you go,” he said, turning around and handing her the mug of hot chocolate. She let go of him to accept her drink.

“So perfect,” she said softly, slurping her preferred beverage rather quickly. She made an odd, indecent sound as she finished her drink, murmuring praises for his cooking skills. He was about to warn her to be careful (the last dregs were often the hottest) when she yelped and set down her mug.

“Ow, Killy. I burned my tongue,” she said.

“Would you like me to kiss it better, love?” he said with his signature smirk, setting his own mug down.

She nodded excitedly, squealing when he lifted her off the ground and drew her in a passionate kiss. He didn’t even need to finish his own drink. The taste of hot chocolate with cinnamon, mixed with the lovely taste of his wife, was far more alluring and tempting than anything he could ever savor. Instead of pulling away from him to finish her beverage, her slightly inebriated state kindled feelings of lust. Emma moved her hands away from his shoulders as he sat her down and touched his chest, opening the buttons on his shirt. She moaned at the sight of his chest hair and continued her touch further down, cupping his growing erection in her hand.

On most days, he would encourage such behavior, taking her to the nearest surface. He wasn’t picky either; they often coupled on the kitchen table and even the couch in the living room. But he wanted her in bed at that moment. His arousal was far too unbearable and he had to have his release. Nevertheless, he pushed his baser instincts aside and focused on the reality of the situation. His wife was drunk and he had to be a gentleman.

“Darling, you’re drunk. I won’t take you like this,” he said, trying to gently let her down.

“But I want to. I’m not that drunk, I promise,” Emma pleaded, giving him that look and biting her lower lips, causing him to groan and shift his position once more. Damn, this woman. He loved her so much and he would do anything for her. Truly anything.

Killian often wondered if her lie detector abilities had rubbed off on him. He could tell that she wasn’t lying and she was just as aroused as he was, if not more. He even speculated that if he were to push aside her skirt and run his fingers over her warm center, he would find it wet and wanting. With a nod that affirmed her words, he had his answer.

He kissed her once more and lifted her into his arms, carrying her upstairs to their bedroom. His own hot chocolate forgotten, he desired nothing more than to sate his lust with her. Once at the foot of their bed, he deposited her rather unceremoniously, causing her to squeal and fall to the bed. They quickly divested themselves of their clothing and Emma settled her head on the pillow. Killian removed her panties and groaned at the sight of her warm center.

“Bloody hell, you’re so wet, love,” he moaned, lapping up her arousal. She grasped the back of his head and held tightly. He always managed to find the right spots that brought her closer and closer to her climax. Like a pirate to his treasure, he knew exactly what to do and where to go.

“Get inside me, already,” Emma begged, feeling the tingling of an impending orgasm.

He wasted no time and did as his wife bid. Grasping his erection, he positioned it and entered her, making them both moan. It wasn’t long before Emma came, clutching his shoulders tightly as she climaxed. He collapsed atop his wife as he released himself inside her. They panted and laid their in each other’s embrace for several minutes before Killian stood up, intending to clean her up.

Once he emerged from the bathroom with a washcloth, he was surprised to see his love fast asleep, murmuring something indistinctly. With a grin, he softly cleaned her up, taking great caution to not wake her. He considered himself a fortuitous man to have such a stunning woman in his life. When he finished, he settled himself in bed with his wife. Instinctively, she curled to his touch, pushing her body against his, seeking comfort and warmth in the winter cold.

“Sweet dreams, my wife,” he said into her ear, brushing a few kisses atop her forehead.

She whispered something in her sleep, completely unintelligible, but the meaning came through to him. They were words he always yearned to hear from her. And he knew she felt the same.

“I love you.”

[anapedias]

How To Get Ceramic In Astroneer 35

This is a very common material to find on planets, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble. All discussions screenshots artwork broadcasts videos news guides reviews.

Steam Community Guide ASTRONEER Advanced Guide Up

In the tutorial you find a free oxygenator, but i don't think i've ever seen a free one in the wild in a new game.

How to get ceramic in astroneer. How to make glass in astroneer. Solar arrays get their energy from the sun at a rate of 8 per second. How to get rubber in astroneer.

On pc, it's right click to move the camera, w key to move forward, and space to jump. The soil centrifuge produces 6 clay with two full canisters of soil. Clay is a natural resource in astroneer.

You can find it on the starting planet, so get in that tractor and start exploring! Ceramic is a refined resource in astroneer. Left joystick to move, right joystick to look, a button to jump.

Astroneer energy sources can range from the solar panels and windmills on the game. It cost 2 scrap for 1 titanite. Similar to how heating clay in real life results in a harder clay pot.

I’ve left the starting planet many times, and it always helps to remember what you’ll need, new or veteran to the game, a recent update added quests, so i am making a new guide, and i will be leaving off some of those quests as they are more. In astroneer, vehicles are very helpful in exploring the planets. When you have the plastic and rubber that you need, you can use the medium printer to make the medium rover.

In order to get ceramic, you will need to find yourself some clay. When it was fully released, there were a ton of new mechanics and items added to the game that just made the experience a hundred times better. Ceramic is a crafted resource that is made from cooking clay.

Personally, i just get enough bytes to get drill mod 1, tunnel down to the core and get astronium to fast track my research. With the following steps, you will quickly expand your base with basic objects and get your first vehicle. How do you get ceramic?

First you need to get out there and find some soil. How do you make ceramic in astroneer? Where do u find ceramic in astroneer?

Similar to how heating clay in real life results in a harder clay pot. This can be a bit of an elusive resource as it look like regular rocks in the terrain and only appears in fairly small batches. Yes it would be a bit tedious to have to build it but if it is all you got you would be able to build it with time.

If you find clay, put it into the smelting furnace and it will create ceramic for you. To create rubber in astroneer, simply mix organic and resin in the chemistry lab. Making glass isn’t a hugely complicated process.

Rubber is also made using the chemistry lab. This can be a bit of an elusive resource as it look like regular rocks in the terrain and only appears in fairly small batches. Astroneer is a massive game that takes a lot of time to learn.

It’s bright green in most cases, and it’s usually nearby regardless of what planet you’re on. Insert the laterite into the smelting furnace and wait until it has been completed to get your first piece of aluminium. These actions will greatly help you with your first contact with astroneer.

How to get ammonium in astroneer Even stranded you can craft an oxygenator it only is aluminum and ceramic which can be found on all planets and a small printer. The last step is to place the titanite on your smelter and smelt it into titanium.

By the time it's run out i've got around 9k bytes and there's usually enough astronium to go back and get more if needed. Wind turbines get their power from the wind. From teleporters to huge vehicles, this game is just a fun, relaxing time you can have by yourself or with.

What makes ceramic in astroneer? In order to get ceramic, you will need to find yourself some clay. Clay, which is refined into ceramic,.

It's under small prints, first entry in the journal. Clay can be found on all of the planets. R/astroneer the subreddit for astroneer, an interplanetary sandbox adventure/exploration game developed by system era softworks.

How do you unlock a soil centrifuge? Where to find ceramic in astroneer? Once you get all that you need, you can head back to your base.

You can find it on the starting planet, so get in that tractor and start exploring! I also want to mention that you can trade scrap for titanite on your trade platform. In order to get ceramic, you will need to find yourself some clay.

This can be a bit of an elusive resource as it look like regular rocks in the terrain and only appears in fairly small batches. You can find it on the starting planet, so get in that tractor and start exploring!oct 1, 2020. Build outposts, shape landscapes to.

Create a large printer and a large platform. The oxygenator is available from the start, at the landing pad. You have to make one with ceramic and aluminum.

First off let me say, no matter the stage of the game you’re at the astroneer wiki [astroneer.fandom.com]. How do you get ceramic? About press copyright contact us creators advertise developers terms privacy policy & safety how youtube works test new features press copyright contact us creators.

If you find clay, put it into the smelting furnace and it will create ceramic for you. Small solar panels receive energy from the sun at a speed of 0.5 per second while medium solar panels receive sun’s rays at a rate of 2. Ceramic is a crafted resource that is made from cooking clay.

The trade platform gives 2. How do you get ceramic?

[deztinywarriors]

ES Spectre 2.0 Chapter 36

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/monthly-astro-forecasts-march-2020/

Monthly Astro-Forecasts March 2020

Monthly Astro-Forecasts March 2020

By Sarah-Jane Grace

Message for March 2020

Watching the stormy seas crash over the rocks and the sea wall (from the safety of the café!) is both invigorating and enlivening. As the waves grow larger and larger, their power and force become clear as they toss large pebbles and pieces of driftwood into the air without a care as though they are twigs. The booming crash is both exciting, but terrifying. The sea holds such power and majesty, as it shapes and defines the land, carving out new features as it goes. Whilst we, as humans, try to bend and shape the seas from sea walls to flood defences, the sea takes no prisoners. It just does what it does with grace and impunity.

Watching a tree changing from one season to the next invokes a great many different emotions from new life in the spring when the leaves grow green, blossoms burst and buds start to form, from the spectacular array of colour before the leaves start to fall in the autumn, to the quietening down as they rest in wintry slumber. Animal, plants, trees and the natural world move from season to season, accepting the cycle of life, constantly adapting, finding ways to thrive and survive even during times of challenge and adversity.

It’s easy to create a long list of the majesty of the natural world and the awe-inspiring presence it has in our lives, yet it is clear to see that nature is struggling with the rapid pace of change of the earth, from fires to floods, melting ice caps to extremes of temperatures. There is a sense of confusion as we struggle and flounder, trying to outwit and outsmart something far beyond our reach.

It seems clear that the time to outwit and outsmart is beyond us, but we are now in a time of reverence and respect. Instead of assuming that others will ‘sort it out’, we each need to take responsibility in order to live as respectfully as possible. Of course, we can carry on regardless, but the price is an ever-increasing unpredictability of the world in which we live.

When we create waste (plastic or otherwise) we each need to consider the impact of this. Whilst it may get burned, stuffed in landfill or shipped off overseas to be processed, our choices have consequences. When we insist on wanting more of nature’s more delicate crops and the result is increased use of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, we need to realise that our choices have consequences. When we lovingly clutch our new healing crystal, we need to realise the devastation the mines create and accept that our choices have consequences.

Yet, it’s not just about how we treat the earth and her non-human inhabitants, we also need to consider how we treat one another. In the age of social media, there seems to be a growing trend for individuals to bully and spout hate. Packs of ‘trolls’ lambast others for fun, not considering that their actions can destroy a life.

In a world where we can be anything, do we really want to be defined by the things we don’t want, rather than simply embracing the traits we know to be wholesome from kindness and wholehearted living? So many of us have forgotten how to be wholehearted as we have shut down in order to get through the business of everyday life.

It’s time to be loving, compassionate, kind and thoughtful, respecting all living things and trying to live in the best possible way, not just so future generations have an earth, but because it’s the right thing to do. So many people now seem to have adopted an attitude of let everyone else sort it out. If we all do that then the future doesn’t look bright.

Personally, I delight in watching the trees change season; seeing nature in her true majesty fills me with awe. Yet human beings create blocks to the natural flow by living in concrete jungles where an awareness of the natural cycles fade away. A chicken wrapped in plastic on the supermarket shelf is disconnected from the chicken who (hopefully) lived a good life. Chicken is just food, not a gift and certainly not honoured for the life it sacrificed. Many of us live juxtaposed to the natural flow. We can have foods all year round now, not just when they are in season. The fact that the food accumulates thousands of air miles in the process is forgotten. We want whatwe want, whenwe want it.

We may be an adaptable species, but there is a deeper sense of disconnection consuming so many hearts and souls as we step away from the natural cycles of life. Blue light pollution from phones, tablets and other items light up the sleep space, the outside world is often disregarded for the virtual world of 24/7 constant stimulation. So few have the time to notice the changing leaves, the birdsong, the majestic forests whispering in the moonlight.

As much as we may try, we simply cannot outsmart and outwit nature. The more we continue to live out of kilter with the rest of life feeds the disconnection and it becomes harder and harder to feel integrated and a part of the whole. Yet, we are. It’s easy to feel isolated from life, and more at home in a virtual world, but that’s not real. It’s understandable that so many seek retreat in technology as a distraction from life, but this only exacerbates the problem. It’s therefore important for us to start pushing back, to re-connect to the earth, to life and to each other.

March looks set to be a month where the momentum of re-connection starts to grow stronger. We each have a choice as to how we live. This is a time to stand up, to be whole-hearted and to consciously re-connect to the natural flows in life. Of course, we cannot know where such a path will lead us, nor will we know if others will follow suit, but we owe it to ourselves to do the very best we can do to live in the best way possible.

Change is happening on many different levels and in many different ways, and we need to stop losing ourselves in our virtual and concrete worlds and start to live once again. It’s time to breathe more deeply into life and to step fully into each and every moment. Intent is a powerful force, and not one to be underestimated. It’s our willingness and passion to create change that builds and grows, reaching out to others, being carried across space and time before being breathed in again somewhere else.

We are not insular beings and although we may shut ourselves away and close our eyes and ears to the bigger picture, we are each being pushed towards awakening fully in order to wholeheartedly acknowledge that every choice has a consequence and to connect consciously to the world in which we live rather than remaining locked away in a virtual state of disconnection and discord.

It’s easy to feel overcome with emotion when we look at the world around us, but we need to channel this into love, compassion and positive change. We each have our parts to play, however small. The time is now…

For now, I wish you all kinds of wonderful. 

With love,

Sarah-Jane

Aries

♈

Your life has been all-steam ahead lately, as though someone pressed the fast forward button and forgot to release it again. As a result, you’ve barely had time to take a breath, let alone take stock of your surroundings, as there has been so much to do, people to see, places to go and things to achieve. You have always placed yourself under pressure to do more, be more and achieve more, but the added fast pace of life seems to have sent you into something of a spin, as you’re not quite sure if you’re coming, going or somewhere in between. Whilst you do usually thrive under pressure, even you are wilting as you simply cannot keep up with the pace; although you have ticked a great many items off of your great big ‘to do’ list of life, you seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture. Your focus is on getting things done, but this seems to be at the cost of many of your goals and dreams gathering dust in the corner of your heart and soul.

It’s therefore easy to see why you are buckling under the load of things to do, people to see, places to go and tick lists to complete. Of course, with you being you, you also need to add to the mix the plethora of ought’s, must’s and should’s. It’s exhausting just reading about it! March looks set to bring you an opportunity to re-set the balance and to have a good re-think as to your true priorities in life. It’s time to stop trying to be superhuman and to start loving yourself more as you take care of your true needs and love yourself for all that you are rather than all that you do…

Taurus

♉

March looks set to be a month to create some more breathing space as you begin to find new ways of simplifying and streamlining your life. Whilst you don’t tend to choose to make your life more complicated, there is a sense that you have been overwhelmed with responsibilities and things to do recently, and this has left you tied up in knots, feeling rather bewildered and in a spin. It’s as though you have lost your usual earthy sure-footedness, and find yourself suspended in mid-air, trying to regain your footing in order to breathe deeply once again. The harder you try to return to solid ground, the more you seem to spin, so it’s important for you to realise that most (if not all) of the spin is in your control. You’re busy and stressed because you don’t like to say no, and you’ve over-complicated your life by not honouring your own needs.

The time has come for you to pause for a short while in order to regain your perspective. You are a wise, compassionate and creative soul, and in order to function to the best of your abilities, you thrive on the challenge of trying to be everything to everyone. Of course, you forget about your own needs in this, but you gain a sense of your self-worth from being the person that everyone else wants you to be. This takes skill and tenacity, and you have both by the bucket load, but you’ve spent so long with your breath held in, trying to do your best and be the best, and it feels slightly hollow unless you are wholeheartedly feeling it. In essence, it’s time to open up your heart and soul towards thriving and blooming once again as you take a big deep breath of life…

Gemini

♊

Life is full of a seemingly random collection of incongruent moments. Some flow together well, others are juxtaposed and awkward, unable to fit together as though they are like two repelling north magnets. Each moment is a fragment in time where you can experience an infinite possibility of emotions and thoughts; you never know what you’re going to get, but the rollercoaster ride of choices, decisions and consequences can sometimes leave you in a daze. On the whole, you manage these moments rather well as you’re open-minded and can see the different flows of consciousness with each moment, sometimes gaining wisdom from the bigger picture and other times feeling able to go with the flow. Of course, there are times when you want to know more and you push hard to dig, question and make sense of why things are the way they are. Sometimes you get an answer, mostly you don’t, and whilst this doesn’t stop you trying, it seems that you are beginning to realise the power and majesty in letting go and going with the flow.

March looks set to be something of a collision of moments; a coming together of many different facets of your life into something new. Such collisions do happen, and they usually take your breath away, but this one feels different as you seem so ready for it. It’s as though you have reached a turning point in your life, and you are eager to explore new terrain and reconnect to your emotional and spiritual roots. You have spent a great deal of your life trying to be the person you felt you ought to be, but the time has come to be yourself and to love yourself for it. You are vibrant, inspirational and intuitive, so use these gifts to shine brightly. This is your moment; enjoy it…

Cancer

♋

There is a powerful sense of release and renewal in the air throughout March as you begin the process of re-establishing your awareness in the here and now. You seem ready to let go of the past and to stop keeping your focus on the future, as you step more consciously into where you are now. You’re usually so busy keeping on keeping on that you don’t have the time to realise just how out of balance you’ve become. It’s only when you pause for a short while that you begin to realise just how much you’ve been drifting. Of course, both the past and the future have their uses, as both give context and meaning to the present, but the present moment is what you have now, and this is surely the most important thing? What may or may not happen tomorrow shouldn’t guide your today, nor should past experiences be the sole guide of choices made today.

In short, it’s time to trust your phenomenal intuition in order to live more consciously and in tune with your true essence. You seem ready now to stop thinking about the path you’ve walked and the path you want to walk to instead focus on the path you’re now walking. This isn’t to say that you should stop having dreams or stop gaining wisdom from past experiences, as both have learning potential, but use them as a reference point rather than a place to hang out. Be in the moment and you will quickly realise there really is no other place to be. It’s important to remember that yesterday is behind you and tomorrow hasn’t happened yet; by shifting more consciously into the here and now you can start to breathe more deeply into life whilst allowing life to breathe into you…

Leo

♌

March looks set to be a month of breakthrough as you begin to shift your awareness towards acknowledging your true priorities and dreams in life. You have spent a great deal of time trying to be the person you thought you ought to be and whilst this has seen you achieve a great deal, you seem ready now to listen to your heart and soul in order to be the person you truly are. A time of breakthrough may suggest change and shift, and both are likely as you step into a new chapter of your life. You may feel the fluttering of uncertainty inside, as you’re not yet clear as to what this new chapter entails, but despite this, intuitively you know you are not only ready, but you want it, need it and feel excited to welcome it into your life. Of course, alongside this excitement, there is a layer of apprehension and uncertainty, but you seem ready and open to the process now, so intuitively you know it’s time to believe in yourself. 

Try not to let those inner butterflies take over as your more cautious side may start to hold back as you step towards unchartered terrain. This is your moment to re-shape the story of your life and whilst what lies ahead cannot be set in stone, you know it’s the right path as your soul is burning brightly with passion and joy. It seems clear that the more you can acknowledge your true priorities, the more clarity you will gain when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff in all areas of your life. At the same time, stop feeling like you’re not enough as you are not only enough, you are extraordinary, glowing and magnificent…

Virgo

♍

Over recent weeks and months there is a sense that you have felt as though you’ve been torn into two, on one hand trying to be everything to everyone, but on the other, trying to acknowledge your own self-worth, sense of self and path of destiny. It’s as though you have split yourself in two, feeling as though it’s a case of either one or the other. Of course, intuitively you know this isn’t the case, but logically when you look at your life, you cannot see how you can honour yourself and your dreams when you give so much to so many. As a result, you have lost some of your sure-footedness as your inner landscape feels stormy and chaotic; you are doing battle with yourself trying to outwit…yourself. This may sound strange, but you are a master thinker and over-thinker, and whilst you can sense the inner divide, instead of pausing to find a way through it, you are oscillating in a kind of no-man’s land where you’re not really sure if you’re coming or going.

Your inner storms suggest you are now beginning to include yourself in the equation of your life, but this still seems to sit juxtaposed to your sense of purpose as though you think taking care of your own needs is somehow self-indulgent or selfish. It’s not! The stormy landscape reflects the turmoil within you as you want to honour yourself more, but feel guilty for doing so. This really needs to stop now, and you need to remember that you truly are the wisest person you know so listen to yourself and apply your wisdom to know that it’s perfectly possible to heal this inner divide in order to become whole again. In fact, it’s more than becoming whole, it’s realising just how marvellous you truly are…

Libra

♎

Finding peace with your true nature is something you have long strived to do. You have spent a great deal of time pondering this as you so easily see the bigger picture, as well as the finer details, of life. It’s as though you are nearing a point of shift where you are finally beginning to wholeheartedly accept your natural state of being. You have an active mind, and an expansive and vast consciousness, and these blend together to form the whirling, swirling inner maelstrom within your heart and soul. Of course, you have long done battle with your inner maelstrom, feeling as though peace and tranquillity should be your natural state of being as that is what so many others believe. However, you are not like other people and you really need to stop comparing yourself to them as this only serves to stifle your self-belief.

Your inner maelstrom may be troubling to a great many souls as they strive for inner peace, however, your path to peace and tranquillity is about living consciously and vibrantly at the heart of the maelstrom where your passion is on fire and you feeling deeply connected to everyone and everything. Being you is definitely an art and it may take a lifetime to perfect, but it’s time to live, breathe and love being yourself. You’re ready now to channel your courage into being the person you truly are as you let go of doubts and stop trying to blend in; let your true colours shine brightly and allow your gifts to blossom and unfurl. It’s time to stop thinking about the life you shouldn’t be living, or don’t want to be living, and instead start to focus on the living the best life possible. Let your vibrancy, creativity and maelstrom shine brightly. Love yourself for all that you are; your beautiful maelstrom is your gift…

Scorpio

♏

It seems you have spent a great deal of your life trying really hard to blend in; to become another face in the crowd. Your reasons for this are not overtly clear, although on one level there is a sense that blending in makes for an easier life. However, although you have certainly mastered the art of becoming a wallflower, you have found it hard not to want to be that one wallflower that sparkles and shines. In other words, trying not to get noticed when your soul illuminates so brightly makes for a frustrating challenge, as the harder you try to blend in, the more you stand out! Yet, rather than fighting even harder to blend in, it seems time to ask yourself why? Why is hiding your light away an easier path? Why is blending in so desirable?

It’s true that you have had your fingers burned in the past for being a trailblazer and you have felt the pain of the lack of understanding of some around you, but intuitively you know you thrive when you are riding on the crest of a wave or meandering upstream against the flow because you blossom when you allow yourself to be you. You have spent so long wanting to be you, but fought this in order to be the you that you think you should be. Confused? Well, you should be! Who are you? Are you a bright sparkly soul or another face in the crowd? Maybe you’re both? There are no easy answers to any of these questions as you are far from straightforward in the best possible way! It may therefore be wisest to move away from logic and ask your heart and soul what you truly want? Make your decision and find peace with it. Stop struggling and believe in yourself… 

Sagittarius

♐

As you continue to contemplate the bigger picture of your life, there is a sense that you are beginning to wholeheartedly lighten the load by letting go of a great deal. You have always been one for collecting ideas, skills and possibilities, keeping them all tucked away in case they one day become useful. As a result, you have learned a great deal, but you have also started to stand a little more hunched as the weight of that backpack is exponential! It’s time now to have the confidence to set yourself free, to trust that the skills and ideas you need will stay with you and to let the rest go. March looks set to be a month that is both liberating and invigorating, as you begin to stoke the fires of your soul. You are a passionate and compassionate free spirit; carrying such a huge backpack acts like a tether keeping you in one place, bringing you self-doubt and frustration. Although your intentions behind the backpack were good, it stopped serving a positive purpose quite some time ago.

It’s hard to let it go because it represents to much hard work and so many dreams, however that hard work and those dreams won’t vanish just because you put the backpack down. It’s time to start believing in yourself and realising that no size of backpack will ever be enough to replace your tenacity, wit and innovative skills. Thriving in life isn’t about carrying around possibilities and ideas, it’s about living those possibilities and ideas to the best of your ability. Stop feeling like you’re not enough or that you need to do more, be more or achieve more as you are so much more than you could ever truly know. Have the courage to believe in yourself, step beyond the backpack and be free…

Capricorn

♑

As you continue to breathe deeply into the nooks and crannies within your heart and soul, you are beginning to gain a stronger sense of purpose once again. For a long time now, you have been focused on the business of keeping on keeping on, not affording yourself the ‘luxury’ of connecting to your dreams or feeling free to open up your heart to your sense of purpose. It’s understandable, after all, you have been working hard to live your life and there has been little time to dream or ponder the bigger picture. However, the more you breathe deeply now, and the more you let go, the more you are beginning to realise that there could be so much more to your life as those nooks and crannies expand revealing untapped potential and hidden reserves. It’s not that you are particularly unhappy, but there is a low rumble of discontentment deep within you as you know just how much you have compromised over the years in order to keep the wheels turning and everyone happy.

Whilst you are not bitter about this, there is clearly some work to do on finding peace with the choices you’ve made and the pathways you’ve walked. In short, it’s time to let go of ‘if only’ in order to ‘just do it’. Now this isn’t to say you should throw caution to the wind, it’s more of a virtual prod in the ribs to remind you to live your life for you, not just for everyone else. Stop hovering on the edge of ‘if only’, as it’s time to find real solutions in order to embrace your dreams and breathe wholeheartedly into life. These solutions may not be obvious, but trust your instincts and let your intuition guide you as March looks set to be a month of revelation and inspiration…

Aquarius

♒

The art of acceptance looks set to take centre stage throughout March as you begin to see yourself, your life and others from a brand-new perspective. As you continue to let go of your in-built tendency to push yourself so hard and to have such high expectations of yourself, you are beginning to see the joy within your quirks and idiosyncrasies. It’s as though you have realised that your quest for perfection keeps you away from living your life as you are perpetually chasing the horizon, rather than being in the moment. Letting go of perfection isn’t giving up or giving in, it’s about acknowledging the beauty in your imperfections and loving yourself anyway.

Acceptance can be a tricky concept to grasp as it means changing the way you see yourself, your gifts, others and your life, but you seem ready now to stop giving yourself such a hard time to do more and be more. Instead you are allowing your aspirations to take on their own life as you breathe deeply into each and every moment, expanding your boundaries and evolving with the changing tides. With less focus on the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you are allowing yourself the opportunity to fully appreciate the value of the here and how. Chasing horizons can be addictive, but with time, you realise it can also be restrictive as well. Acceptance isn’t clear cut or black and white; it’s very personal to you and only you can find your way to this state of being. Yet, it’s not about perfecting acceptance, acceptance is about embracing life exactly as it is. You’re ready now to further expand your boundaries as you grow ever more fluid and free; not a piece of driftwood, but a majestic ship sailing gracefully towards unchartered waters…

Pisces

♓

March looks set to be a month which fills you with tingles of excitement and anticipation, as well as a good sprinkling of magic and sparkle, as a renewed sense of hope and optimism rise up from within you like a daffodil on a spring day. Life has been heavy and onerous lately, particularly on the emotional and energetic levels, and you have been bogged down and overwhelmed trying to get from one day to the next. As a result, there has been little or no time for creative or spiritual endeavours. Most, if not all, of your energy has been channelled towards keeping on keeping on, getting things done and making it through each day. The heaviness is palpable and it’s understandable why you have been feeling so out of sorts. Of course, you are extremely skilled at juggling (as you’ve mastered the art to Olympian level!). However, things are beginning to shift as you stand up and declare a new intention for creating breathing space and exploring pastures new.

You now need to step beyond the confinement your life circumstances have created for you and realise just how stifled your spirit has become. This has left you feeling disconnected and out of sorts, but it’s time to breathe deeply and open up your consciousness towards the bigger picture once again in order to reconnect and feel wholeheartedly alive. You are a vibrant, colourful and passionate soul, so don’t stay hidden in the shades of grey of life. Instead, start to wiggle, wriggle and move, stop juggling so much, learn how to say no, but also how to say yes as asking for help is a sign of strength! Don’t feel guilty for honouring yourself; love yourself, be yourself and allow yourself the freedom to wiggle, wriggle and dance. It’s time to nourish yourself from the inside, out…

******

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Anger Management // Winn x Reader

Request: Can you please do a rough Winn smut where he's upset about his father and the reader tells him to take his frustration out on her?

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Words About Games - Unreal Tournament 2004 (Epic Games, 2004)

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the greatest game ever crafted by human hands.  I was 12 when it came out, and I knew that then.  This is a game I still play on a semi-regular basis; I make sure I run a few matches at midnight every New Year because it deserves to be the first thing I play in a year.  I still tinker with the map editor, I still download new maps, and I still occasionally host servers for friends to join me.  For a game to hold my interest for 15 years like that, to that extent, there is nothing else I could call it other than the best game ever made.

Unreal Tournament 2004 did a lot of things.  It took the lackluster UT2003 and, rather than just roll in a couple patches, toss a few new maps here and there, and call it a full-priced game, it more than doubled the content across the board.  It released March 16, 2004 with 106 maps, 11 gamemodes, and 29 mutators making up the launch version, with a further 15 maps added via free downloadable packs.  Unreal Tournament 2004 is a big, big game, and we're gonna be here a while. 

To begin, a disclaimer:  I am biased as hell.  UT2004 is my favorite game of all time and the very fact that I've written four of these essays already should tell you my dedication to the series.  I try to remain objective as I explain things, but I am very biased when it comes to this game specifically.  When I say this is the best game ever made, I mean for me.  It is a game that has everything I could ever want to look for in it, and the ability to add or create anything not there.  

So, where to start?  Having already highlighted some of the changes, both popular and not, that UT2003 introduced, I may as well mention how they were handled in this sequel.  But even before that, let's address the fact that this is even a sequel at all, released merely a year and a half after UT2003 and containing all (nearly all, it dropped like 2 maps) of the content from the previous entry.  This was still years before Call of Duty became an annual event, so that so little time passed was certainly odd.  Well, much like how Unreal Tournament was born of too-big a project to just patch Unreal with, so too was the case for this game.  UT2004 ushered in significant engine upgrades, making the two incompatible for playing together, but with the benefit of having all (most, I'm sure there were some scripting exceptions) the maps and mods made for UT2003 work with 2004.  In addition, Epic offered customers a $10 rebate on their purchase if they mailed in the barcode from their UT2003 box.  Back then, digital distribution didn't exist (Half-Life 2 and Steam along with it was later that year), so this wasn't an unreasonable ask.  Given that back then a new game was 40 USD, bringing it down to $30 for owners of the version it was replacing turned it into the very approachable price point of an average expansion pack.  It was a nice gesture, and one they didn't have to make given that all the new content made up just as much of a game as UT2003 did.  

But, right, the changes to the changes.  People didn't like that UT2003 was so floaty and that people moved so fast in the air: Epic toned down acceleration after dodging off a wall.  Liked UT2003’s way of doing things?  They put a mutator in called UT2003 Style that reenables it.  People didn't like the weapon nerfs, various arc trajectory changes, reduced damage, and firemode changes:  Epic rebalanced some weapons again and, as a bonus, added the UT Classic mutator that makes every weapon perform exactly as it did in UT99 while also giving you the option of disabling double jump, walldodging, and more.  Yes, you can literally enable this and just play UT99 with better graphics.  People didn't like the Lightning Gun, Epic put the Sniper Rifle back in.  People hated Assault going away, Epic put it back in and made it even better.  People weren't crazy about UT2003 not having vehicles after Halo came out and got people excited about vehicles, Epic added an entirely new territory control gamemode with vehicles and huge maps.  People hated Double Domination and wanted the classic version back, Epic didn't listen to them and it's the biggest blemish on the game.  Whoops.

(Don't worry, there's a mod that adds it back in.)

To call Unreal Tournament 2004 a landmark in videogames is to do it a disservice.  It is one of the biggest examples of a developer taking user feedback into account and giving them more of what they wanted and expected.  It was, overall, a sort of last hurrah for the arena shooter, but there really couldn't have been a better way for the genre to go out.  

But before the end, let's talk about the middle.  What was UT2004?  Beyond rattling off a count of this or that, what was the core essence of the game itself?  What were the different parts that came together to make what I consider the Best Video Game?  

Let's look at weapons again, in their order in your loadout.  First up, the Shield Gun.  Replacing the Impact Hammer of UT99, this still filled the roll of last-resort-melee weapon, but added an alternate fire mode that protected you from weapon fire in the direction you look.  It helps to think of it as some sort of shield, as the name would imply.  When you hold down the button, a meter shows up to tell you how much charge the shield has left, which depletes as weapon fire hits it.  Just think of Reinhardt’s shield from Overwatch without the movement slowdown.  Most weapon fire is just stopped, but as a curious little quirk, shock rifle alt fires bounce off.  It's neat.  Also neat is a somewhat hidden function: the gun’s ability to mitigate falling damage by shielding towards the ground.  You can absolutely survive lethal falls this way, but they'll still kill you if you're too high up.  The Shield Gun also works like Quake’s rocket jumping where you can aim at the ground and fire as you jump to go a bit higher at the price of some self damage.

Next, the Assault Rifle.  The stupid, stupid Assault Rifle.  Sporting a new model from the one in UT2003 for some reason, the AR is a bad weapon.  Its primary fire spits low-damage bullets out in a direction that could be generously called ‘forward,’ while its secondary fire charges up a grenade.  Hold the button to make it go further and faster, or tap it to unceremoniously dribble the grenade out in front of you.  The grenade bounces a few times then explodes, or does so on contact with an enemy.  The grenade actually does a fair bit of damage if you can get past the floaty physics of the thing, but sadly it has its own ammo counter apart from the bullets.  And speaking of bullets, while UT99’s Enforcer shared ammo with the Minigun, the Assault Rifle uses its own unique pickup that is extremely rare on most maps, meaning that even if you are forced to use it, you'd better watch your ammo because you don't have many chances.  Like the Enforcer, you can pick up a second and dual-wield them.  They become slightly better like this, but I'd rather take my chances with the Shield Gun from just about the same distances as the AR is effective.  Keeping this hunk of trash in rather than re-adding the Enforcer was one of four big missteps UT2004 made, so make a note of that.  And, in unfortunate conjunction with that, while the UT Classic mutator can make the game otherwise behave just like UT99, it does not whip out a secret Enforcer to add in.  

Reigning champ of the third weapon slot is the Biorifle, here doing exactly what it's done since the original Unreal.  The Biorifle, as stated previously, has always been a bit overlooked in the series at large, but it had a decent niche as an area-denial weapon that saw most use in the CTF and Assault gamemodes.  But it was perhaps the biggest victim of UT2003/4’s new double jumping, and the small threat it posed got even smaller when a player can just jump over a minefield.  Ah well.

Number four is the equally as classic and certainly more recognizable ASMD Shock Rifle.  It was another weapon to get a model update from UT2003, and other than that the only change was how much ammo creating its famous shock combo took.  See, the combo is a powerful tool, dealing 200 damage to anyone unlucky enough to be in its radius.  In UT99, hitting the orb with the beam consumed 2 ammo as a kind of tax for that power, then UT2003 made it 3, and finally UT2004 upped it further to 5.  Of all the nerfs possible, this is perfectly fine.

Weapon slot five is reserved for the Link Gun, the successor to the Pulse Rifle.  They're pretty similar, but with a few small changes and some big ones.  Primary fire damage is exactly the same as in both previous UTs, but the secondary beam damage was lowered while increasing the rate at which it actually dealt ticks of damage.  This was put in place largely to combat the quick-tapping of the alt fire to deal damage faster while also taking less ammo.  It also got a minor facelift.  The biggest change, however, started in UT2003 and was expanded upon in 2004, and is the very reason it's now the Link Gun at all.  In UT2003, Epic added the ability to use the secondary fire - the sustained beam - on a player in your same team to give them a damage boost.  “Oh, neat!”  As long as the player being boosted is also using the Link Gun.  “Oh, hm.”  There's math behind it, but my takeaway was always that I'd rather have two people firing from different angles than just giving an admittedly-noticeable buff to one.  But!  In typical UT2004 fashion of making everything better than it was, the Link Gun was given more utility!  We'll get more into it later, but UT2004, as I said earlier, both brought back the Assault gamemode and added a new territory-control gamemode with vehicles, some of which now show up in Assault.  The Link Gun, therefore, can now not only heal friendly vehicles, but speed up capture point construction in that gamemode.

Number six is the Minigun.  Replacing Unreal and UT99’s “full auto/fuller auto” firemodes are full auto primary and a slower but more damaging alt fire, which was also more accurate.  There's not a whole lot to say about the minigun just given that it's such a simple concept, so I'll mention something I alway found a nice quality of life feature: when using the default reticle, the primary fire will always land within the circle it draws, giving you a perfectly accurate representation of where and what you'll be hitting at any range.

Up next, then, at seven, is the venerable Flak Cannon.  A perfect weapon, the Flak Cannon in UT2003 was given a slightly faster fire rate from the one in UT99, then UT2004 reduced it slightly.  We're talking matters of tenths of seconds here, so it's not really all that much to write home about.  Most different from UT99 to UT2004 is in the effective distance of the weapon, which is noticeably but not unreasonably higher than in UT99.  The primary fire travels a bit further, the arc on the alt fire isn't as severe, and the bits of flak both produce bounce a bit further.  Other than that, the direct impact damage of the alt fire was reduced so that someone with sufficient shields could survive one shot, if not a second.  In the interest of providing more opportunities for people to actually duel when they came into contact with each other, I support this particular nerf.

Weapon eight is the Rocket Launcher, and the most changed from its original incarations.  Whereas UT99’s version of it was just a remodeled version of Unreal’s, UT2003 halved the number of rockets it could charge up, from six to three.  As if that wasn't bad enough, UT2003 also removed the ability to fire the rockets as grenades, making the primary fire for a single rocket and the alt fire for charging up to three.  This is where I'd like to say that UT2004 put it back to normal, or even four or five, but sadly the change was sustained.  This is, to me, the second of UT2004’s biggest missteps.  They did still keep the lockon and being able to fire them as a spiral, so that's something.  And yes, here to save us all as usual is the UT Classic mutator that lets it charge up to six rockets and brings back the grenades.  Praise be to the UT Classic mutator.

All the way at number nine are both the Lightning Gun and the returning Sniper Rifle.  In a move I still don't quite understand, Epic included both and even balanced both differently, fully committing to neither upholding their decision to replace the Sniper Rifle or their decision to ignore the Lightning Gun in favor of what players largely wanted back in the game.  Strange to this day.  Anyway, the Lightning Gun does more damage per hit, has a slower fire rate (though increased from UT2003), and still leaves its visible trail to discourage camping.  In an effort to do the same for the Sniper Rifle, a mostly-opaque puff of smoke drifts out of the muzzle after each shot, both announcing a shooter’s presence and blocking their view, the latter of which is much more effective at getting someone to change position.  

Superweapons return in a big way, occupying the number zero on the keyboard.  The Redeemer is back and unchanged, and the Ion Painter and Target Painter join it.  Both behave roughly the same: holding primary fire gives you a beam to hold on a specific point for about a second, after which something will happen.  For the Ion Painter, this is a giant, quickly expanding blast of energy.  For the Target Painter, it's a strafing run by a spacejet that drops a line of bombs onto the field.  Both can only be used “outdoors” - a specific tag map authors place in an area to mark it as such, but trade that limited application for not being able to be stopped after firing, as the Redeemer’s giant missile can be shot down.  The Ion Painter first appeared in UT2003, while the Target Painter, and its wider area of effect, debuted in UT2004 as a complement to the Onslaught gamemode.

Ah, Onslaught.  Beautiful, beautiful Onslaught.  Perhaps the most extravagant use of the Unreal 2.5 engine and all its shiny new features, Onslaught is a territory control gamemode set in sprawling levels and stuffed full of vehicles.  Each team has a home base, and a field full of capturable nodes connects them in a jumbled line.  A team can only capture a node adjacent to one they already control (including their base), so the whole thing becomes and elaborate tug-of-war with lasers and rockets.  Nodes take time to build (that time can be reduced with the Link Gun), can be damaged and destroyed, but only the last node in a given “chain” is vulnerable.  If a node is adjacent to either an uncaptured node or an enemy node, it’s up for grabs.  Aided by the fact that you can choose to respawn at any node your team currently owns, and that nodes taking damage are highlighted on the gamemode-specific minimap, even the largest maps keep you in the fight.  

Vehicle spawns are different per node, making the territory control not just simply the objective of the game, but a way to control what tools you have access to.  But what tools are those, exactly?  Let’s take a quick look.

UT2004, of course, came out three years after Halo made its meteoric impact on the console market.  Halo was one of the first games to incorporate vehicles as such a big focus, and other games were quick to follow as technology marched forward.  Battlefield 2 was out around this time, Call of Duty 2 had tanks, and the Unreal Tournament series was feeling the pressure of not having what was quickly being seen as a standard feature.  After promising and failing to deliver that feature with an Xbox title, Unreal Championship (which itself would go on to be recobbled into UT2003), Epic knew they finally had to give people what they wanted.

People wanted vehicles like in Halo, so Epic gave people the vehicles from Halo.  

I had taken a break from UT2003 to play Halo 1’s PC release, so by the time UT2004 rolled in, I was pretty familiar with its vehicular arsenal.  There's the Manta, a single-person light attack hovercraft with twin rapid-fire plasma cannons.  There's the Hellbender, a three-man jeep with a turret in the back.  There's the Raptor, a single-man plane with twin plasma cannons and a heavy alt-fire.  And there's the Goliath, a main battle tank with a big cannon and a heavy machine gun.  Yes, they are basically the Ghost, Warthog, Banshee, and Scorpion by other names and different models, but Epic did do their fair share to make updates and changes, and there are even a couple other vehicles that aren't just ripped from Halo.  

The Manta has the fun ability to jump in order to evade weapon fire or clear obstacles, and pressing alt-fire jams it down from the air so you can cut people’s heads off as you skim by.  The Hellbender’s rear turret is a beefed up twin-linked Shock Rifle that you can charge up, or use in conjunction with the passenger seat’s own turret that shoots Shock Rifle alt fire orbs.  It's technically called the Skymine Launcher, because rather than just creating one big explosion, the rear turret’s beam will link every single one of the Skymines in a chain explosion.  It's great.  The Raptor is a VTOL plane rather than the Banshee always accelerating forward, allowing you to hover, and its secondary fire is actually a missile that automatically locks on to other Raptors and even Mantas, should either of those be around the general area of your reticle.  And while the Goliath doesn't have the exterior seating for passengers that the Scorpion did, it reserves its secondary machine gun for a dedicated gunner, and gives both the ability to zoom in.  

There are other vehicles, though.  The Scorpion - no, not the one I was just talking about, yes, it is a tad confusing - is a single-person assault jeep.  I'd extend that sentence to talk about the gun and secondary, but its gun requires a bit more.  The Scorpion’s gun is a weird affair, you see.  Tap to fire and its rear-mounted turret spits out what looks like Link Gun secondary fire, only it travels as a projectile and spreads out horizontally between three energy blobs.  Hold to charge it up, and you get more blobs, which means it spreads even further.  On contact with something, a blob will stick, while the other blobs - and the energy trailing between them - keep going.  In application, this quite effectively wraps targets up in energy webs, at which point damage occurs.  It's most effective as area denial, especially good at hitting large targets like control nodes or Goliaths, and devastating to anyone on foot nearby either.  Also devastating to anyone on foot are the Scorpion’s extendable side blades, which effectively triple the width of the car and are positioned at the perfect height to decapitate anyone in the immediate forward vicinity.  What a concept.

Also different from Halo is the Leviathan, a comically enormous superweapons platform that seats a gunner controlling auto-lock-on swarm energy missile things, and four gunners in plasma turrets on each corner.  If its monstrous size, absurd health, and devastating weapons weren't enough, its alt fire is to transform into a giant, stationary gun that now fires Ion Painter explosions after a short delay.  The Leviathan isn't on every map, and it becomes an immediate target when it is, but its power is truly awesome and unlike anything else you're likely to get in a shooter anymore.

So those were the vehicles at launch, but further free bonus packs added three more: the Paladin, a slow assault truck with a main gun that shoots bigger, deadlier, and faster Shock Rifle secondaries and can also project a giant energy shield in front of it; the Cicada, a two-man air-to-surface missile spewer with a belly gun and the ability to lock on to a specific point on the ground, charge up to sixteen missiles, and fire them almost all at once directly at that spot; and the SPMA, a mobile artillery platform with the ability to deploy a hovering camera drone that allows you to project a reticle onto the ground from above to aim from a strategic view.

There is one particularly large strike against it all, however, and that is that the actual physics for the vehicles themselves is a tad less than great.  Where Halo (and the Warthog especially) had the problem of far, far too loose suspension that would send you bouncing around every bump or particularly sharp turn, UT2004’s vehicles had the opposite problem.  Taking the equivalent of a speedbump is going to scrape up the bottom of your Hellbender a little more than you’d like, and good luck racing a Manta over rough terrain without smoke pouring from under the hood by the end of it.  There’s a stiffness present in the vehicle’s performance that’s hard to describe but instantly obvious when playing.  That, and it was still in that early-2000’s infancy of physics, so nothing feels as heavy as it should.  The Manta feels light, but so does the Goliath.  The Leviathan feels appropriately heavy until you take a fully charged Hellbender laser to the corner panel and spin almost 180 degrees in half a second.  I wish I could call it a small gripe, but the vehicle physics really do just seem quite bad at times, and there’s no real fix.  It’s the third of the big missteps, but still not the biggest.  There’s a ton of good to the vehicles, and only this is bad. It’s unfortunate, but not unforgivable.

The vehicles may have been the biggest and flashiest tools Onslaught offered, but they weren’t the only ones.  Three new weapons were native to the gamemode: the AVRiL (or Avril for my own sanity typing it over and over), the Grenade Launcher, and the Spidermine Layer.  The Avril is an anti-vehicle rocket launcher that shoves a slow moving but incredibly deadly missile at a vehicle, and its alt fire is a perfect lock-on that will ensure that missile reaches its target as long as it’s in view.  It doesn’t deal any sort of respectable damage to non-vehicle targets, though, so it doesn’t mess with the established balance of on-foot combat.  

The Grenade Launcher is different from its appearance in Return to Na Pali - no longer is it literally just Quake’s grenade launcher and/or the Rocket Launcher secondary, UT2004’s Grenade Launcher allows you to fire up to eight grenades at a time, all of which can be stuck to vehicles if you so choose, and detonated at your leisure with the alt fire.  Load your Manta up with a payload and take out a node with a well-aimed ghost ride, tag a passing Hellbender and get a multikill, or just drop a couple around a node you know is about to be contested to dissuade enemies from approaching.  But what happens if you die before you can blow them up?  Well, then you’d want the Spidermine Layer for that job.

Spidermines are, as the name would suggest or maybe if you’ve played Starcraft, mines that look like spiders.  You can have up to eight active at a time, and all they do is sit around waiting for an enemy to walk into their trigger radius so they can chase them down and blow up.  They’re not an uncounterable trap, however - they make a ton of noise and have very few hitpoints.  But as an added bonus, the spidermines can be guided with the Spidermine Layer’s alt fire, a simple laser pointer that sends the spiders scurrying after it towards whatever vulnerable target you choose.

So with all the technical aspects out of the way, what actually was Onslaught?  What did it mean for UT2004 as a big, open-ended gamemode with lots of open space and vehicles and weird weapons, when the core game was always about close-quarters dueling?  

Onslaught was fantastic, there’s no other way to say it.  Trying new things is kind of what the Unreal series at large wanted to do more than anything, and Onslaught was something very new indeed.  Halo and Battlefield had their vehicles, but neither made them such a center-stage spectacle, for better or worse.  There are small Onslaught maps with no vehicles you can find on UT map library sites, and they’re just not the same.  Fun, sure, because it’s UT, but the fact that you could be doing it with vehicles is always there.  Those vehicles may have been overly familiar to an eye-rolling extent, sure, but Epic was careful with what they copied and what they changed.  I won’t try to convince you of whether or not Halo or UT2004 did their vehicles better, because each game used the vehicles in the ways that were best for the game around them.  Onslaught was conceptualized and built from the ground up with the vehicles in mind.  The maps are huge, the sight lines are long, and the terrain is generous.

Onslaught was by far the most popular gamemode for UT2004 and even remains populated to this very day, fifteen years later.  So with all the efforts obvious in this gamemode, what else could Epic have offered to really wow people?  This had to be it, right?  Nowadays, the Onslaught mode could be sold as a full game, easily.  So what else did they bring in to win people back after UT2003 under-impressed?

Assault.

This scenario recreates the pacification of the riots all across Earth as it was announced that Unreal Tournament 2003 was dropping the series’ most venerated gamemode.  For months, angry players took to the streets, armed with whatever high explosives were at hand, and decried Epic Games’ lack of audience awareness.  Eighteen months later, a solution was found.  First, make your way through the rioting crowd.  A separate passage can be secured past the refreshment stand.  Then, you will need to infiltrate the Epic Games headquarters to secure the master copy of the Unreal Tournament 2004 game data.  Once the data disk is secure, push through the sewers into Atari Headquarters.  Finally, fight your way to the top of the building to broadcast the data disk to desperate PC gamers across the globe, ending the riots.

Assault came back in a big way, to put it lightly.  While UT99 had some solid Assault maps, there ultimately wasn’t a whole lot to the gamemode.  And while simplicity is often best, the framework for something better was there, and Epic found it again two games later.  Assault in UT2004 is more ambitious in every possible way.  Each map is bigger, each list of objectives longer, every objective more elaborate.  Let’s look.

As I said in the UT99 essay, an undercurrent of lore lent the game’s world a scope it almost didn’t deserve, and certainly didn’t need.  Epic noticed people like this, and leaned into it as hard as they could.  Assault scenarios are based off of fictional events in the workd of the game.  A daring recovery of stolen warheads on the planet Taron.  The suppression of violent revolts in a post-war Earth.  The theft of a prototype tank from one megacorporation by another.  A particularly noteworthy and infamous episode of a reality show.  Defense against a robot uprising on LBX-7683.  The final desperate attempt to destroy the Skaarj mothership during the Seven-Day Siege.  

UT2004?  More like UT200LORE.  

But we’ll get back to that soon.  We’re still on Assault, after all.  

Each Assault map starts with a (skippable, don’t worry) narrated overview of the map, the historical even it’s recreating, and your objectives within.  Ingame, a list of those objectives is displayed in the upper righthand corner, and pressing M or N on your keyboard summons a colored wisp that shows you the way to the next objective.  All are very welcome additions because quite honestly, the biggest issue with Assault in UT99 was that the objectives weren’t actually given to you unless you played the map in the tournament ladder, so popping into, say, the undersea lab map could leave you a bit lost if you hadn’t played it in a while.  

Other than that, the gameplay is the same, but greatly improved by all the new ideas inside of it.  Larger maps make for more opportunities to try new things, like Convoy starting out by having you hop across the back of an armed caravan speeding through the desert, clambering over cargo, avoiding sniper fire and machine gun turrets before taking a protected boarding tunnel over to your first objective.  The maps are more dynamic overall, still “go here and use/do a thing” at their core but more interesting moment to moment.  Other than just being in bigger, better looking maps, there’s a lot of incidental game design lessons Epic learned between games that are on full display.  Chokepoints still exist, but there’s probably an alternate route.  The few places in UT99 Assault maps that weren’t necessarily supposed to be chokepoints but turned into them are gone, in general there are fewer areas where an attacker is immediately in danger upon spawning, and overall the flow is easier to grasp.

I want to keep moving on to other gamemodes, but I can’t without stopping to seriously gush about how incredibly well the world of Unreal Tournament is expanded by the decision to turn all the Assault maps into these historical recreations.  Unreal and Unreal Tournament both suggested these massive worlds going on behind the game, and Unreal Tournament 2004 just drives that point home even more.  Things set up by casual mentions in other games are now the focal points of these giant, elaborate Assault maps.  The Corporation Wars get a nod in Glacier, where the full power of the Izanagi and Axon corporations is on display.  After the events of Unreal and Return to Na Pali, the Skaarj followed human ships back to Earth and began the Seven-Day Siege in response to Prisoner 849 destroying the Queen and mothership they had stationed on the Nali moon, and the level Mothership lets you replay the final hours of Earth’s last bid for survival.  It’s an exploration of these events through the same medium as the rest of the game, but what’s going on under the shooting lends so much to the world around it all.  AS-Mothership begins with an extended dogfight sequence as your team struggles to disable the exterior defenses of the Skaarj mothership so they can land inside and continue their mission.  As far as the gameplay is concerned, it’s a great little spacefighter section with full 6-degrees-of-freedom flight and easily identifiable targets.  In the context of the world, your small swarm of light attack fighters slowly are whittling down this massive mothership while it’s still actively raining down nuclear blasts on the Earth below you, while the bombastic, orchestral music swells to desperate highs, you feel the sort of thing they were going for.  This is Earth’s last chance, you are the one who will decide.  

So while Onslaught and Assault are the best the series has to offer, and are by far some of the most ambitious gamemodes in a shooter to begin with, Unreal Tournament 2004 did have to trade something for all that good.  Something that was bad enough to make up for two greats.  Something so inane and against everything the game is good at that there’s no way to rationalize any decision involved with its creation.  

Double Domination.

Double Domination is so bad, I’m pretty sure it was totally dead online within the first week of release.  Double Domination is so bad, it’s the only thing that can make me not want to play UT2004.  Double Domination is a tedious slog through a game of what should be a fun, fast-paced shooter, but the gamemode devolves into RED TEAM DOMINATING, AVERTED, BLUE TEAM DOMINATING, AVERTED, RED TEAM, BLUE TEAM DOMINATING, EIGHT, SEVEN, SIX, AVERTED, BLUE TEAM DOMINATING, EIGHT, AVERTED.  

Double Domination is a gamemode where each team has a control point, and they must capture the other team’s and then hold both for ten seconds to score a point.  The maps, because of this, are symmetrical, and the capture point base ends up just feeling like a flag base, and the whole thing feels like a bad version of capture the flag.  Because control of the point is still transferred instantly when a player touches it, it’s quite difficult for anything to actually happen on the more crowded maps, and on less populated maps the players will spend most of their time rotating around just trying to touch a point before ten seconds are up.  So the whole thing ends up almost not being a game at all, because the win condition is so hard to meet just by the very nature of the underlying design.  Double Domination is not a well thought out gamemode, it is by far the worst UT2004 has to offer, and I, to this day, have no idea what was so wrong with the classic Domination formula.

But past that massive disappointment the game is better than ever.  Using the same roster of maps are Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, joined by Last Man Standing, Mutant, and Invasion.  Capture the Flag and Bombing run both return with greatly expanded map pools, and Vehicle CTF makes its somewhat secret debut as a default gamemode in support only, as it had no official maps at launch.  It wasn't listed on the menu, but the framework was there for modders and mapmakers to start going to town.  

So what are some of these new gamemodes?  Last Man Standing is typical free-for-all deathmatch with an adjustable lives system, Mutant is Unreal’s King of the Hill and RtNP’s Cloak Match, but with yet another new twist.  The first kill of the match transforms the killer into the Mutant, granting them infinite ammo, partial invisibility, increased fire rate, and faster movement speed.  From that point on, only the Mutant can be damaged by other players’ weapon fire, except in the case of the last-place player who can kill anyone.  As before, killing the Mutant transfers those powers to their killer, and so on until a score threshold is reached.

Invasion is a little more extravagant.  This is a cooperative, wave-based score attack survival mode where a team of players is beset by hordes of enemies from Unreal.  There is an end to the mode, but unless you're really that good at massacring Skaarj Warlords, it's most likely going to end up as a “survive until you don't” sort of situation.  Dead players are revived at the start of the next round, but only then.  In the match setup menu, Invasion actually gives you a lot of control as to how long each wave is, how many enemies there are and what kinds, and so on.  Invasion isn't the flashiest gamemode, and seeing Unreal’s sparse collection of polygons running around the then-modern graphics of a tightly-crafted UT2004 level can be a bit silly, but it's a fun gamemode to mess around with every now and then, and the modding opportunities it opened up were very well exploited.

Capture the Flag returns, its roster of maps is doubled as with the rest of the game, and an old friend returns.  Yes indeed, Facing Worlds is back after its baffling absence and better than ever.  Well, pretty much entirely unchanged except for a facelift (hah), that is.  As silly as it sounds, Facing Worlds became something of a mascot for UT99 and its return here was much celebrated.

But Face wasn't the only map that made it back in.  Deck 17 is the new version of the classic and also missing-from-UT2003 Deck 16, bringing with it some minor and welcome upgrades.  A new, short hallway connects two rooms that were previously dead ends, which helps improve the flow.  A jump pad from the bottom level back to the central area gives a third way back up from below, and the ramps leading from the middle level to the small upper area are now slightly curved so those below them can enjoy better vertical sightlines.

The whole thing was given a change of location, as well, as you can see.  The cold greens of the Tarydium sludge refinery deck are now the warm glow of magma.  This is a minor change, obviously, but I like red more than green myself.  Also as a fun detail, a partially fenced-off doorway offers a view at the darkened Deck 16 nextdoor, sadly closed for repairs.  If you turn on noclip, a fair chunk of the level is actually modeled and you can run around the main platform and the overhead bridges.

And it's exactly that sort of fun detail that turns UT2004 into a powerhouse of expansive yet quiet worldbuilding.  If it seems like I've used that phrase before, it's because there's no better way to describe it.  The Instant Action menu has been overhauled, and now every single one of the 120+ maps that come with the game have a short description right there in the selection screen.  They talk about where the map is, what it was before becoming a Tournament arena, what planet it’s on or orbits.  They're small tales of ancient ruins, top secret military bases, forgotten structures left to rot.  There's a tangible history woven between the double jumping and headshots, something not just suggesting a bigger world but eagerly telling you about it.  Humanity has bounced back from the Seven-Day Siege and now builds skyscrapers that reach into space.  So many alien civilizations have been found that Liandri rents real estate in their temples and towns.  The Corporation Wars that threatened every human world are now sensationalized as profitable bloodsport.  

Through it all, Liandri Mining Corporation remains the goofy, overblown cartoon megacorp it's always been.  There's a map called Grendelkeep that has this description:

“Prieth Callas was a hard, cruel man, fond of torturing his enemies before sending them to their deaths. He raised creatures of great size and ferocity, setting them against his prisoners in arenas of his own creation. Grendelkeep is the last of his diabolical constructions, left to fall into ruin after Callas was dragged from the battlements by his own men and fed to the creatures he bred in the dark kennels below. The rain has washed away the blood, but the evil that bred here has left a much deeper stain.”

An entire story is told, as morbid as it ends up, just to suggest that a Liandri location scout went “Wow, that'll really draw in the crowds!”  It’s presenting the Tournament as a collection of tourist traps, and the thing to remember is that in-universe, the Tournament is the go-to entertainment.  It's a sport.  People compete and strive for a place at the top.  The Unreal universe has eliminated death with their respawning technology and the first thing they did with it was monetize the ability to brutally murder someone over and over.  So it stands to reason that the levels of the game would be a vast collection of areas, because sending eight competitors to their repeated deaths in a notorious, infamous location is good for the books.  Just imagine the novelty value of going to a paintball course built around the Statue of Liberty or at the beach at Normandy.  That's the sort of spectacle they're going for, and UT2004 revels in it.

But the levels aren't the things with buckets full of incidental lore.  The greatly expanded character roster is stuffed full of words that expand other events.  The Geneboosted team is an excuse for the Axon corporation to continue its research into genetic modification.  A Skaarj team competes in the post-war landscape to retain honor and relevancy.  The mercenary teams from UT99 are defending their titles and earning some cash.  The Gen Mo’kai race of aliens uses the Tournament to settle family scores and advance in their own hierarchy.  The team of robots competes as a way to kill humans.  The list goes on and includes an honestly staggering number of characters, all with their own short backstory explaining their place in their own society and why they compete.  

But they also have something else that sets them apart from each other, and stops them from being just an interchangeable bundle of pixels to gib: weapon and tactic preferences.

The Tournament ladder itself got a major overhaul in UT2003, and is expanded even more here.  No longer just a simple sequence of matches across various gamemodes, the Tournament in UT2004 is more of an actual sport facsimile.  A couple one-on-one and free-for-all matches kicks things off, then you select a team of allies from an available pool.  AI in UT2004 has four stats that determines how good they are at the game (and also being a sneaky way of showing you what actually controls AI difficulty - they’re just the various parameters that get adjusted) and, as mentioned a couple sentences ago, weapon and tactic preferences.  This comes across in gameplay as them favoring one weapon over others in combat, and being a bit better with it overall.  Better aim, faster reaction times with it, that sort of thing.  Tactics preferences comes across in whether they like to range out on their own or stick with a you or another teammate.  You can always give them specific instructions with the hotkey AI command menu, but this just determines how they act by default.  It’s a neat system that adds a bit of personality to the bots, and also makes you put a little consideration into the composition of your roster.  I like it.

Before they become your team for the rest of the Tournament, you must win one final FFA match against them to prove yourself fit to lead.  After that, it gets a bit “sport management sim” on you.  Due to some in-universe imperfection in the respawner technology, teammates can sometimes come out of lost matches with injuries, which must be treated.  You do so just by paying for it with credits you earn after matches.  Each match has a buy-in and a payout value, so if you trust your own skill enough to make up for any deficiencies in your AI partners, feel free to punch above your team’s weight.  Occasionally you’ll also find some matches that aren’t part of the direct ladder, such as when a losing team challenges you for a double-or-nothing rematch, when a team you haven’t fought gambles with one of their members - if you win, they trade you a man, but if you lose, you give one up, or maybe just a higher-stakes incidental challenge.  You can initiate these as well, but be careful, because losing a good teammate will be a blow felt for quite a while.

Because all the various Deathmatches get taken care of in qualification, the actual Tournament ladder is CTF, Assault, Double Domination, and Bombing Run, with a final few super-high-tier Deathmatch bouts at the end against the reigning champs.  Strangely, there’s no Onslaught present in the ladder, which just seems like an odd choice.  Clearly the effort they went to to actually make the gamemode wasn’t wasted as it still has regular players 15 years later, but the game definitely shipped with enough Onslaught maps to make a ladder out of.  Who knows.

And of course the gameplay contained in all of these gamemode and Tournament ladders is just as superb as it always was.  They toned down air acceleration from dodging, and while it didn’t win back UT99 fans who didn’t like the inclusion of doublejumping and walldodging, it did enough to bring projectile weapons back to relevance.  It’s still a game with quite a lot of high-flying acrobatics during gunfights, but that just makes it even better for me.  There are few feelings in games so interesting and neat as jumping off an elevator as it reaches the top for a giant boost, dodging off the wall it spits you out near, and slamming a trio of rockets down on someone’s head from twenty feet above while they try to figure out where you went.  Ah, arena shooters.  

UT2003 and 2004 also added a weird and contentious facet of gameplay in the form of Adrenaline.  Adrenaline is both a pickup and something you get for killing people, scoring goals, or really anything else that helps make you or your team win.  Adrenaline isn't lost on death unless you suicide, and once you get 100, you can activate a temporary buff by quickly tapping a sequence of movement keys.  There are four to choose from by default: speed, regen, berserk, and invisibility.  All of the buffs consume adrenaline while they're active and will run out once you're at zero, but you can extend that by simply getting more.  Adrenaline is a weird thing because it guarantees someone will have one of those powerups at some point, removing an element of the map control and knowledge that's part of what defines the genre.  But as with everything, there's a handy-dandy mutator called “No Adrenaline” that, well, makes it so there's no Adrenaline.

There are a lot of really nice mutators in UT2004.  Classics like Weapon Arena return, only a bit slimmed down because now you just select the one mutator and pick which weapon you want to replace every spawn with rather than having a distinct Arena mutator for each weapon.  A Big Head mode is partnered with Big Wheels, both of which rapidly increase the size of either head and/or vehicle wheels depending on how well you're doing.  There are mutators to force Lightning Gun spawns to be Sniper Rifles and vice versa, there's a mutator to make everyone fire twice as fast, a low gravity mutator, one for quad jumping, one to force the bonus vehicles onto maps built before they existed, and even just weird cosmetic things like making all the ragdolls move in slow motion.  Mutators are a wonderful system.

I don’t really know if there’s a whole lot left to talk about on the mechanical side, so let’s move on to the emotional appeal segment of this giant essay.  I’ve already spoken at length in various others of these just how much I am in love with the way the series builds its lore, but there’s just so much to say about that lore in the first place.  Of course there are the planet-conquering Skaarj, the corporate intrigue between Liandri, Axon, and Izanagi, the genetic experiments, and all the usual stuff, but then there're the more off-the-wall details that get thrown in for fun.  Take the fact that the entire Egyptian mythos is - in this universe - a bunch of space aliens from another planet who have now recontacted humanity to participate in the Tournament.  What does this mean for the game?  Well, there's an Egyptian team and a bunch of maps with a super rad techno-Egyptian theme that I really, really love.  It's all pale yellow sandstone with bright lapis and teal highlights and glittering gold, but a bunch of holograms and coursing energy tubes in those same colors.  It's just so neat, and oh man the colors.  UT2004 snuck in just before it wasn't cool to have color in your game anymore, so while the tone may be serious and all about killing each other, you do so in fantastically colored arenas.  The new Deck 17 of course radiates its warm red glow, but then you have Icetomb, a stark blue-white palace with vaulted ceilings, or the gloomy shadows of Curse4, lit with gaudy splashes of green and blue.  Colossus, a map used in both CTF and Bombing Run, stretches out over a shaded nighttime field as the construction-yellow and metallic gray structures loom overhead, adorned with team-colored lighting.  Every color is just so rich that the game can't help but look amazing.

Without a general theme between a lot of the maps, they have to rely on bite-sized bits of your time to have their artstyle make an impression, and I think they all do it wonderfully.  Sure, there's a hefty collection of grungy or high-tech industrial settings, but Asbestos doesn't feel like Junkyard doesn't feel like Sulfur doesn't feel like Metallurgy.  Then you have more setpiecey things like the aforementioned Icetomb or Hell or the returning Morpheus.  120+ maps is a lot, and while there's definitely some that don't totally land, the game as a whole has an unnaturally positive skew to the quality of its playing fields.  

And of course, to go along with all of those maps, Unreal Tournament 2004 gives us a wide variety of music to frag to, and it is glorious.  Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos are sadly absent from the soundtrack, but three other composers step in to offer a staggering variety of new sounds.  Will Nevins, Starsky Partridge, and Kevin Reipl are the trio that gave this game its music, and they all do a great job.  Of the three though, Kevin Reipl is the indisputable star.  His music for the game is so varied and imaginative that I barely believe he did so much of it.  But it's true, he did 39 of the game’s 62 tracks, and each one sounds unique.  So many different styles, sounds, and instruments are present in his work, and they're all great.  I'll just drop a list of six tracks of his to illustrate how much range this guy has, because it's really hard to understate just how impressive it is.  

Action 2v2

Atlantis

Conduit v2

Metallurgy

Skaarj Assault

Hyperblast Redux

Even his take on the classic GoDown is great with Hyperblast Redux.  A new sound, kind of a big band inspired thing with light electronic elements to the late 90s techno boops of the original.  

Stage music really is a lost art, but I never get tired of this soundtrack.  Epic had a knack for picking their composers, and UT2004 is right alongside UT99 and Unreal for tracks I've long since incorporated into my regular playlist.  The music is weighty, exciting, and downright danceable in some cases.  UT2004’s music is incomparable.  No game I've played beyond it has done so well with mixing so many different styles with so many maps and locales, gamemodes, characters, or just sheer options.  And as before, if something isn't there, feel free to make it.

Epic once again included the Unreal Editor for free, allowing users to create their most expansive desires with the very tools used to make the base game.  I recently downloaded a pack totalling nineteen gigabytes of UT2004 maps, mutators, gamemodes, character skins, and more.  People made new guns, new vehicles, new games.  Counter-Strike and Team Fortress might be the most noteworthy examples of mods becoming full games, but UT2004 was the petri dish for a good number of its own.  Rocket League, Air Buccaneers, Alien Swarm, and Killing Floor all started their lives as UT2004 total conversions, now grown up to be fully realized.  

Unreal Tournament 2004 is a massive behemoth of content in a way that games never will be again.  It came out at a time before the push for an insane level of realism, a push that was partly Epic’s own fault with the Unreal Engine 3.  Games haven't shipped with more than a dozen maps on offer for over a decade, and we're lucky if we get anything beyond Deathmatch anymore.  Our old nemesis Half-Life would come around later the year of UT2004’s release with Half-Life 2 to once again shift attention to the more guided side of videogames, but this time the fight wasn't between two competing singleplayer narratives.  Half-Life’s mark in 1998 had been made and copied, and Half-Life 2 only made it bigger.  Halo’s success on console influenced the shooter genre from an entirely new angle.  Call of Duty 2 was one of dozens of WW2 shooters gaining traction, and the FPS genre had more eyes on it than ever.  It had been over a decade since the panic surrounding Doom, and shooters were changing.  Though I hardly have a reasonable stance to take against it, having played UT99 at the age I did, Halo’s presence on Xbox was attracting a much younger crowd than other shooters of the time.  Consoles were still seen more for children, and the colorful graphics and man-on-alien violence with minimal blood was palatable to a lot of parents, certainly moreso than UT’s or Quake’s showers of gibs, or Call of Duty 2’s or Counter-Strike’s emphasis on real imagery.  

This isn't a condemnation.  More options means more people are happy buying games, which means the industry progresses.  Trends come and go, it's just that fast-paced murderfests came first and were the first to stick around.  As much as games may be a passion for those making them, copies must be sold so the creation can continue.  As one thing becomes popular, new eyes are on it and eager for more, so companies shift focus.  It's how, after Halo and Half-Life 2 made their giant impacts, we got so many linear narrative-based scifi romps.  No game would exist without the others.  As Half-Life begat Halo, Half-Life 2 begat hordes of others.  Halo 2, Red Faction, FEAR, Quake 4.  Lots of variation between each, but all influenced by what came before.  FEAR has hints of arena shooters in its buckets of blood, but takes a horror slant.  Quake 4 wants to forget its predecessors and be the next Halo, with narrative cutscenes, vehicle rampage sections, and giant setpieces.  Call of Duty would go on to be the weird inconsistent monster it's remained.  Red Faction would, well, you know.  

2004 was a great year for videogames overall.  But it was also one of the last moments of the proverbial Wild West of the industry.  Things would soon become much, much more corporate as the next generation of consoles rolled in, and games suddenly grew massively inflated production costs.  Experimental titles were scaled down, relegated to single instances of experimental bits in something much safer to sell.  Killzone, Call of Duty 4, Epic’s own Gears of War.  After Doom 3 and Quake 4 both flopped harder than imaginable, id bowed out for years.  Unreal Tournament 2004 became a sort of marker as the last of the arena shooters, and it carried that torch proudly.  All those maps, all that music, all those mutators, and all those mods.  

And if only it had.  But Epic, good old Epic Megagames who I'd grown up with, kept making games.  Sure, they're a business, why wouldn't they.  2006 saw Gears of War chainsaw its way onto PCs and the Xbox 360, and while it was a fine game, it was a far cry from the franchise they'd spent the last five years tinkering with.  It was a narrative-based third person shooter with a slow pace and slow combat built with console controllers, regenerating health, and a cover system in mind.  So, kind of exactly the opposite of what Unreal Tournament was all about, but hey, always good to branch out and try new things, right?  It's not like it would end up negatively influencing the next Unreal Tournament game or anything.

. . .

Coming up at the end of the month, we'll wrap up this essay series with a look at Unreal Tournament 3, a game negatively influenced by the design philosophy present in Gears of War!  

[entergamingxp]

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is Receiving New DLC

March 23, 2020 6:55 PM EST

Bandai Namco revealed new paid and free content will be coming soon to its tactical RPG, SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays.

Looks like fans of last year’s Gundam tactical RPG, SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays, have more content coming their way.

In a press release this morning, Bandai Namco announced a new SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays expansion pack is available now on Steam! However, the pack is not included in the previously released Season Pass, but it can be purchased separately for $7.99.

Included in the Expansion Pack is a brand new increased difficulty mode known as “Inferno Mode”. In order to help you tackle the new challenges posed by the new difficulties and five new stages, you will need to take advantage of the new character abilities and optional parts coming with the pack, as well. You can look forward to new units, characters and dispatch missions too, to round out your dream teams.

Fans can also look forward to the free 1.50 game update, coming March 25th. With this update, players will receive a nice assortment of quality of life improvements and music tracks. Some of these features include the ability to fast-forward battle animations, swap button layouts, and 11 new earnable background tracks. Not bad for costing nothing!

Later in the spring, the 1.60 free update will roll out, focusing mostly on your custom pilots and increasing the level cap. Players will now have new voices and outfits available to them when they create their own pilots for their team. The big feature of this update, however, is the increase to both the unit and pilot level caps.

Pulling together casts and units from the Gundam series’ history, players battle on grid-based fields throughout various eras and universes. SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays offer long time fans their dream team of pilots and mobile suits to bring into battle.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is the first in the series to make the jump overseas, and it has seen a steady supply of new content since launch. Season pass content for the game just recently ended, so it’s nice to see that Bandai Namco hasn’t wasted any time in revealing that more is coming. The additional modes and music, as well as the increased level cap, make for great incentives for players to jump back into the cockpit. During my time with the game, I loved being able to rock out to my favorite Gundam tracks while watching my favorites suits wreck the enemy forces.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is currently available in the U.S. via Steam.

Full SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays Release Notes

Patch 1.50 on March 25:

Free downloadable content #5 “G Generation BGM Collection & Special Ability Acquisition Operation!” has been implemented. (Includes 11 BGMs and eight special abilities.)

Added fast-forward feature for battle animations. Hold down the Square button on PlayStation 4, Y button on Switch, or the accelerate / multiple-input button (input key allocation can be configured via “Keyboard Settings”) on PC to fast-forward the battle animations.

Added remaining dispatch timing in Group Dispatch operation list.

Added BGM selection feature for Super High Morale and higher in weapon BGMs 01 to 06 within “Change Character BGM.”

Added BGM selection for Title and Group Dispatch screens.

Adjusted selectable stage BGM available for respective series.

Added cut feature for Simplified Battle.

Added feature to swap positions for save and load selection.

Added master volume settings.

Added feature to swap button between enter and cancel for PC

1.60 patch coming later this spring:

New custom pilot outfits

additional settings

new custom pilot voices

increase in the level cap for pilots and units

Exclusive to the paid Expansion Pack:

New higher difficulty options, including “Inferno Mode”

New character abilities

New optional parts

5 new Expansion stages

New Units, characters, quests and group dispatch missions.

March 23, 2020 6:55 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/sd-gundam-g-generation-cross-rays-is-receiving-new-dlc/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sd-gundam-g-generation-cross-rays-is-receiving-new-dlc

[torentialtribute]

Leicester Tigers’ Youngs brothers admits club has lost its aura… but insist they’ll stay up 

If these Tigers start burning too late, someone has to light the flames of a revival – and fast.

With five games to go in the Premiership season, the most decorated club of English rugby – with 10 titles and two European Cups – is five points from the bottom.

Relegation is unthinkable for a club that has produced some greats of the game. Martin Johnson, Dean Richards, Dusty Hare, Rory Underwood, Neil Back and so many others know little other than success on Welford Road.

[Jonge mannen en vrouwen] [Jonge mannen en vrouwen] <img id = "i-617a22f53ded1a38" src = "https://dailym.ai/2CYdfvj 2019/04/05/21 / 11920522-0-image-a-21_1554494502828.jpg "height =" 414 "width =" 634 "alt =" Ben Youngs (left) and Tom Youngs (left) and Tom Youngs (right) right) insists that Leicester Tigers stays up

Last year, when the Tigers first missed the end-of-year playoffs for the first time for 14 seasons club captain Tom Youngs described himself as & # 39; heartbreaking, hurt and emotional & # 39; so how the hell is he feeling now?

& # 39; Gosh I know, you don't think that it can get worse until the time comes, & the skipper simply tells Sportsmail.

& # 39; People smell blood when they come to Welford Road, we have a little bit, probably have some self-confidence is lost and eventually ends up at the bottom of the pile. & # 39;

Youngs, 32, and his brother, Engel and scrum-half Ben, 29, are the squadron's longest-serving players – along with Matt Smith center who has been injured since December –

Then the club reached the European Final Cup, losing to Wasps and winning their seventh national title. Gradually, however, the success is so great that Leicester played 27 games in all competitions this season and lost 20. The harsh reality is starting to get home.

Now the Youngs brothers are ready to give grim recognition. & # 39; I do not disagree that we have lost our identity and aura & # 39 ;, Ben revealed. & # 39; I would say we did that, & # 39; Tom added. & # 39; If you lose the many games we've lost on Welford Road, you'll miss something. As a player you scratch your head. & # 39;

Struggling with what happened this year, Tom concludes that Leicester's gilded history has become a burden. & # 39; With Leicester, one of the things you get is the expectation of winning something, "he explains. & # 39; We have tried to pursue you by doing what you have done in the past. Ben Youngs (right) wants the Leicester board to share responsibility for recent failures "

] Ben Youngs (right) wants the Leicester board to share responsibility for recent failures"

Ben Youngs (right) wants the Leicester board to share the responsibility of recent failures

& # 39; The reality is that we are likely to reset in some respects hit a button, right?

& # 39; It's not a problem with this club because it's great that you have to win, get to the top four, be the top two and then win silverware, but it has probably also had a hard time for us for three or four years.

& # 39; Trying to achieve has almost hampered our growth. I think the board has realized that more than ever.

the besieged board of Tigers who fired three main trainers – Richard Cockerill, Aaron Mauger and Matt O & # 39; Connor – in two years to share responsibility for recent failures. O & # 39; Connor was overloaded this season after just one game – a 40-6 defeat of today's opponents, table-top Exeter.

Geordan Murphy, the 40-year-old former full back, was then pushed into the hot seat and was accompanied this week by 53-year-old Mike Ford, the father of Fly Half George. & # 39; We have been looking at short-term solutions for a while & # 39 ;, Ben said, missing the Saturday afternoon game with a pat on the back.

& # 39; Tried to pursue success & # 39 ;, Tom agreed, before Ben continues: & # 39; You cannot cheat on the way of success. Maybe we tried to do that a bit. & # 39; You immediately set yourself a bit of a task if you make a change after a game. You can't spend 12 weeks getting a whole game plan, keeping the philosophy in place, and then releasing it after one game and expecting the magic to come in. Tom Youngs believes it is a gilded history that was a burden "

Leicester's gilded history has been a burden"

Tom Youngs believes that Leicester's gilded history was a burden

& # 39; If you want Geordie to be your chief, give him the full preseason to catch all those pieces in place. Since the second round we try to chase our tail. Then we made another change when Phil Blake came out of the defense in January.

& # 39; The players, yes, we have responsibilities to act but just as well, like a club, there are responsibilities to ensure that everything is in place to give us the best chance. This year that is probably not synchronized yet.

Fans are also smoking. "Of course, football is big with the success of Leicester City, but rugby is still huge here," Ben said. & # 39; People only realize that when they come to Leicester. You are going to have brunch with your family and children and people will want to tell you what went wrong on Saturday.

Tom said: & You do all the work in the week and it still doesn't work you're damn frustrating. & # 39; There is a lot of negativity floating around the place and we are trying to work it out. & # 39;

Outside the field, Tom has had the head of family trauma. In 2017 his wife Tiffany got four weeks to live when her cancer got worse. Ben stopped the Lions tour to meet his brother.

Remarkably, Tiffany has recovered and has been in remission for almost a year. & # 39; It's a great story, & # 39; Tom laughed. & # 39; It was nice to like Mother's Day last week as a normal couple should do. She flies with us, has become stronger in the past year, is training again and is fit. & # 39; I no longer leave the practice field, look at my phone and make sure it is OK. It is now a completely different ball game. "

<img id =" i-77bb3a1abc58b3ac "src =" https://dailym.ai/2WV10HN a-26_1554494795749.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" Tom Youngs insists that Leicester Tigers & # 39; will soon be steaming forward again & # 39; Tom Youngs insists that Leicester Tigers will soon be steaming forward again & # 39; "

will soon be steamrolling again & # 39;

Naturally Ben bursts of pride. & # 39; It's a miracle, & he said. & # 39; Good things happen to good people. & # 39;

Back on the field, Leicester knows that a few victories they need to see safely. Degradation is not being considered. & # 39; I just don't see it happening & # 39 ;, said Ben, inspired by another European giant. I believe in this and my own ability.

& # 39; You know what? I watched Toulouse who won the European quarter-final last weekend and thought "wow!" I had a Toulouse shirt growing up and I loved everything about them. They were in a very similar position to where we are now, finished 12th in the Top 14 in 2017 and did not make Europe.

Now they are back to ancient Toulouse. & # 39; If you would say to me & # 39; This season you stay one point up, but then you get the rebirth and you come back & you know what? I'd take that. "

& # 39; This is not a bad place & # 39 ;, Tom decided." It is a great club with a lot of good things in it. It must touch a few things and will roll forward again soon. It will be fine. & # 39;

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[infotainmentplus-blog]

10 best new Android apps from May 2018! App developers are pushing the envelope on a daily basis trying to improve and enhance our smartphone and tablet experiences. In fact, so many Android apps come out every day that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. It’s difficult to usurp the best of the best but if you’re getting bored with what you’ve got and want to try something new, check out the best new Android apps from the last month! You can watch the videos from past months by clicking here! You can check out our selections for the best Android apps from 2017 in the video above! Looking for more awesome apps? Here are some more awesome Android app lists! 15 best Android apps of 2018! Here it is ladies and gentlemen. The crème de la crème. The Android apps that stand alone at the top of the pantheon. These apps have become ubiquitous with Android and if you're looking for … 10 best new Android games from April 2018! Android gaming is getting bigger and better every month it seems and there is always a slew of new titles coming to Google Play. Whether you're a casual gamer or you want something with a … CamToPlan Price: $3.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY CamToPlan is an ARCore app. It lets you map out rooms with your camera and AR technology. You move along the baseboards of your room. The app maps it out. It then creates a 2D representation of the room. This is useful for planning, construction, and other uses. It boasts a 2% margin of error in ideal conditions. The app works best with good lighting and a good contrast between the floor and the wall. It's far from perfect. However, this is one of the better uses of ARCore tech that we've seen. It runs for $3.99 with no additional in-app purchases or advertisements. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Forest Price: Free / Up to $1.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Forest is a neat little game for phone addicts. You open the app and plant a tree. 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One example of such progress are the best … Opera Touch Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Opera Touch is Opera's latest attempt at a browser app. Thankfully, this one is pretty decent. It features cross-platform syncing with its browser app, a feature that even Microsoft has at this point. However, unlike competitors, there is no login or account required. It uses a QR code that you scan with the app to your desktop version to sync the two together. There are also other features such as privacy browsing, a Fast Action Button, a search button, and more. It still needs work, but frankly, not that much. It's a decent web browser. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Siempo Price: Free / Up to $49.99 (eventually) DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Siempo is a new launcher for Android phones. It's also an app for smartphone addicts that want to kick the habit. The app has a variety of features to get you off of your phone. That includes batched notifications so you only get them occasionally. Additionally, it features a simplified home screen as well. The app even randomizes your app drawer on occasion. It's a goofy concept but it works strangely well. The app is entirely free right now. Google Play lists in-app purchases up to $49.99. However, we could not find them in the app during our testing. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Steam Link Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Steam Link is an interesting new app from Valve. It lets you play PC games on your mobile devices. It works like Nvidia's GameStream, except the game plays on your PC instead of the cloud. You connect a controller to your phone, enable the link, and play. The game plays on your PC and streams the visuals to your phone over local WiFi. It's a little janky as expected. It is a new release after all. The only downside is playing complex PC games with something as simple as a mobile phone controller. Otherwise, we liked it. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY VPNhub Price: Free / $11.99 per month / $74.99 per year DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY VPNhub is one of the most interesting releases of 2018 so far. It's a new VPN app by Pornhub. It's a strangely good VPN for a porn website. The app is unlimited and free on US servers. There is a monthly subscription for additional features like over 1,000 servers worldwide. It also boasts a no logging policy and we like that a lot. We didn't run into any issues during our testing. However, it is just a little bit expensive for a mobile VPN. Otherwise, this is actually legitimately good. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY YouTube Music Price: Free / $9.99 per month DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY YouTube launched its new music service this month, kind of! The update rolled out about a week ago. However, many are still waiting for it. It's only available in the US and many people in the US are on a waiting list. Anyway, the app features on-demand music streaming similar to Google Play Music, but also all of the YouTube Music features from before the update. Thus, it's a sort of combination of the two. It has some issues and there are questions about whether or not it'll be as good as Google Play Music in terms of selection and music quality. However, it's too soon to tell if this is going to be great or not. We have our hands-on linked up just below if you want to see it. DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Thank you for reading! Here are some final app lists if you want to keep reading! 15 best free Android apps of 2018! Android's biggest strength is its app ecosystem. There are a digital ton of Android apps. People downloaded them billions of times. Some of them cost money and some of them don't. Usually, the best apps … 15 best Android launcher apps of 2018! Android launcher apps have long been an integral part of the Android experience. If you don't like the way your home screens look or act, you can simply download an app to change all of … If we missed any great new Android apps, tell us about them in the comments! , via Android Authority http://bit.ly/2DQ4hCU