Month: September 2024

Telltale has some strong bad news, and has announced it will no longer offer support or sell Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. “We no longer have the rights to the IP and so we can no longer sell or support the game series” reads a blog post announcing the news (thanks, RPS), though no cutoff date is mentioned and, at the time of writing, the game remains available on Steam.

Existing owners will still be able to download the game’s five episodes from the digital storefront where it was purchased, but it sounds like that’s yer lot for Homestar Runner fans. The latter is the highly popular online cartoon that the game is based on, Strong Bad himself being the lucha libre style character that stars in the game. 

If you’re slightly confused about which Telltale this is, exactly, you’re not alone. The Strong Bad game, alongside many others, was pulled from stores in 2018 when OG Telltale, the developers of the game, went under, before returning to sale when nu-Telltale rose from the ashes. The news of the game’s de-listing is certainly unfortunate for those who like Homestar Runner, because it’s written by the show’s crea…

Google’s streaming dream died in January this year: the Google Stadia streaming service joined a laundry list of projects the company has canned over the years. Google could open a Ben & Jerry’s-style flavor graveyard for them all. We know the streaming platform struggled with market share since its release in 2019, and I never was a fan of its business model, but today we do have some insight into why Google closed Stadia down, from the person in charge of doing so.

A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.

“For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).

At Sony’s recent PlayStation Showcase the company announced it will hit us with its very own handheld game streaming device. The handheld will allow you to stream installed games from your PS5 directly to its 8-inch “HD” panel, though details other than that are a little hazy. 

Known as project Q, it’s still very early days for the as-yet-unnamed game streaming handheld. Right now the concept looks like it’s essentially a PlayStation Dualsense controller stretched out to include a screen—which seems to have some super unnecessary 5mm+ bevels around the edge. Other than that, not many specs have been announced.

President & CEO Jim Ryan tells us it’ll have “All of the buttons and features of the Dualsense wireless controller.” That likely means haptic feedback, and adaptive triggers, though Sony’s Project Q doesn’t appear to have any additional paddle buttons attached to the back like that of the Steam Deck, as well as many other gaming handheld devices today.

It does look like it’ll come in Sony’s signature white and black PlayStation 5 colourway, at least. Whether there will be other colours available considering the wealth of options the Dualsen…