Free Games

• Twitch

  • Dandara

    • 2018
    • 2D platformer and Metroidvania based on the Afro-Brazilian warrior of the same name that has you traversing the world by warping between white surfaces

  • Anarcute

    • 2016
    • In a kind of Katamari Damacy/Jet Set Radio mix, it’s a riot simulator combining adorable aesthetics with large-scale chaos and colourful destruction

  • Kingdom: New Lands

    • 2016
    • 2D pixel survival game that has you playing as a shipwrecked monarch trying to establish a long-lasting kingdom while being attacked by otherworldly monsters

  • A Normal Lost Phone

    • 2017
    • Puzzle game that has you voyeuristically searching through a found phone and discovering bits and pieces of the owner’s life

  • Splasher

    • 2017
    • Challenging 2D twitch platformer that looks like Super Meat Boy meets Splatoon by way of Portal 2’s gel mechanics

  • Enter the Gungeon

    • 2016
    • Roguelike bullet hell that follows four adventurers as they descend into the Gungeon to find a gun to kill their past

  • Ape Out

    • 2019
    • Top-down stylized beat-’em-up with a dynamic jazz soundtrack where you control a gorilla running through a maze while evading or attacking the gun-wielding human guards

  • Witcheye

    • 2019
    • Colourful old-school pixel platformer where you transform into a flying eyeball of vengeance to recover your spell ingredients that were stolen by a smarmy knight and his wizard friend

  • Gato Roboto

    • 2019
    • A streamlined Metroid style game that has you playing a cat in an armoured mech in an effort to save your stranded captain and his crashed ship

  • Heave Ho

    • 2019
    • 1-4 player shared screen game that shines when playing multiplayer where you need to grab, swing, and grapple your way to the finish

• Epic

  • Sundered: Eldritch Edition

    • 2017
    • Hand-drawn Metroidvania where you either resist or embrace ancient eldritch powers at the cost of your humanity, now with local co-op

• Sony

  • Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

    • 2015
    • Remastered port of the first three Uncharted games from the PS3 era: Drake’s Fortune, Among Thieves, and Drake’s Deception
    • Uncharted is known for its Tomb Raider style third-person action adventure gameplay including shooting, combat, and puzzle solving

  • Goat Simulator

    • 2015
    • Open-ended third-person exploration and experimentation game, where you play a goat aimed at doing as much damage as possible around an open world map

• Microsoft

  • Styx: Shards of Darkness

    • 2017
    • Sequel to the 2014 Styx: Master of Shadows, it’s a stealth game that lets you use powers like cloning and invisibility to trap your enemies and either engage or avoid them

  • Batman: The Telltale Series

    • 2016
    • Episodic point-and-click graphic adventure game published by Telltale before the studio’s downfall and resurrection, featuring a new Batman story with the usual Telltale Games mechanics of choice-driven branching stories

  • Tekken 6

    • 2009
    • The first main-series Tekken game produced for a non-Sony console, it’s a classic fighting game that introduced a new Rage system that increases a character’s strength as their health gets low

  • Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy

    • 2006
    • Classic family-friendly LEGO video game gameplay that has you exploring, building, and collecting LEGO studs in the Star Wars universe from episodes 4-6

CES- Highlights from the Consumer Electronics Show 2020

• The weirdest thing about CES in recent years is how it doesn’t really seem like it’s for consumers at all- it’s full of concept work and ideas that are in no way ready to ship. In many cases the companies behind them have no idea when they might ship in the future
  • You see a lot of folding phones, displays, laptops, but they’re all prototypes and in many cases kept entirely out of the hands of the public
  • The big problem, as pointed out by The Daring Fireball, is that a lot of these pieces have yet to get past the design phase- engineering and manufacturing still have to weigh in on if the tech is even really possible, never mind if it can be mass produced
    • So you get things like the Galaxy Fold, or the ThinkPad X1 Fold, that get shown off in a look-but-don’t-touch environment and huge planned pricetag, and then we get to wait for the eventual maybe release / maybe fiasco
• The Consumer Technology Association, the organization behind CES, also drew fire this year for inviting Ivanka Trump to deliver a keynote address
  • Trump’s talk, titled “The Path to the Future of Work” discussed job creation, apprenticeship program, and skills training in the US
  • Many felt that it was a political decision though, and ill-suited, as the CTA has routinely rejected proposals from other women for years citing that they didn’t have the credentials or tech-focused topic that their male counterparts brought to the table. How that jives with Ivanka Trump’s credentials and general talk about jobs is anyone’s guess
  • The CTA has previously taken heat for seemingly sexist policies by calling a female-focused hands-free orgasm device “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA’s image.” while at the same time allowing Naughty America to set up a VR porn exhibit in a main hall.
• Samsung introduced “Samsung Pass”, billed as “identity management as a service” to enable secure access through biometric authentication
  • All that is to say, they’re doing the same thing that Apple already does with Touch ID and Face ID by allowing developers to use those biometric locks to authenticate users instead of using their username and password
  • The most egregious part of this is that when they were explaining the tech during their CES keynote they bought up a slide with the Apple FaceID logo alongside other symbols representing the biometrics they use. Not even a ripoff of it, but the actual straight-up logo itself.
• Lenovo introduced the ThinkBook Plus, a business laptop with an e-ink display on the back of the lid
  • The idea here is apparently that it can show email and calendar notifications from Outlook, and you can use a stylus to take notes on it.
  • It seems kind of gimmicky, and in practice I’d worry about it showing information on the closed lid to everyone around you when you aren’t expecting it to
• Gatebox is bringing their holographic anime girl AI assistant to North America, now featuring westernized characters like a business-woman or a beefy gym-dude, aimed at doing things like acting as 24/7 concierges on cruise ships or facilitating gym check-ins without staff present
• Segway introduced the S-Pod, a futuristic lounge chair that will take you up to 43 miles on a 2 hour charge, topping out at 24mph
  • It’s got a ton of polish, with Segway’s experience in single-person transport really showing, but the use cases are a little tricky to see
• Hydraloop’s claim to fame is a water recycling system for houses that takes up about as much room as a flat refrigerator and hooks into the existing piping.
  • The idea is it takes outgoing waste water and processes is a bunch of different ways, then runs it through a bioreactor and disinfects it with UV light. The resulting water can be used in toilets, washing machines, pools, and even in the garden, saving up to 20,000 gallons of water per year
• Phonak’s new Virto Black hearing aids are bridging the gap between accessibility tool and smart wearable with high quality sound and automatic adjustments that adapt to ambient sound in your surroundings, as well as music streaming and call handling
  • They also offer a wireless puck loaded up with microphones that you can put anywhere within 30 feet of yourself that will stream audio directly to you
  • There’s also an optional dock for charging or connecting the device to other audio sources, so you can pipe your TV directly in for private listening
• Quibi’s new Turnstyle technology aims to let users watch videos in either portrait or landscape, dynamically switching while viewing
  • Instead of showing black bars the technology relies on creators filming two versions of their content, then both play with a synchronized audio track and only the compatible video is shown
• Sony made an electric car, but it just kind of looks like any other fancy electric car out there with assistive sensors for driving and the usual bells and whistles.
• Anything from CES catch your eye? Let us know!

Russian president Vladimir Putin signed legislation taking effect this July that bans the sale of smartphones, computers, and smart TV’s without Russian apps pre-installed

• The law will supposedly help Russian developers to better compete with foreign tech firms, and it’s been pitched as a way to spare unsophisticated users from the need to install apps themselves
• Unfortunately tech retailers were never consulted on the new law, and with the list of required apps not even available yet it could force many companies like Apple out of the country
  • An Apple source told Kommersant that “A mandate to add third-party applications to Apple’s ecosystem would be equivalent to jailbreaking” and would pose a security threat that the company cannot tolerate
• There are also concerns that Russia could use the apps to spy on its citizens, after the “sovereign internet law” was recently passed giving the government power to block access to web content in any situation it sees as an emergency

Tidbits

• The next Xbox has been announced, and it’s the Xbox Series X
  • They’re creating this generation of consoles as just ‘Xbox”, of which the Series X is one product line
  • The device seems to be continuing the evolution of consoles into computers, being basically a gaming PC tower you use with a controller, and one bonus it’s maintaining backward compatibility with all existing Xbox One software and accessories
• Sony’s also announced their next console, the PS5, and showed off the shiny new logo which is exactly the same as the old one but with a 5 instead of a 4
• The end of 2019 saw a crazy Fallout 76 inventory hack that allowed hackers to use other players as if they were containers, looting everything within with no consequences
  • Bethesda patched it after about a week in the wild, but we haven’t seen any reports of items being restored to their rightful owners
• The FBI is taking another crack at Apple and their encryption policies related to the shooting at a naval base in Pensacola last year
  • Apple has apparently already shared the relevant data they can access in the user’s iCloud storage, complying with the court order obtained by the FBI, but holds steady to the fact that they have no access to what users store on their phones regardless of how often the FBI asks

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A huge thanks to Dalton, for supporting us for so long. We really appreciate his support over the years.