Speaking of Cultist Simulator, I appear to have acquired a duplicate Steam key from the latest Humble Monthly Bundle; if any Stately Player wants it, let me know. (Edit: now claimed.)
(Actually, hmm, a dedicated thread for passing on duplicate keys might not be a terrible idea…)
Found this on r/civ today… Aspyr seeming to confirm Rise and Fall AND Gathering Storm for iOS and Switch? @Neumannium, can you confirm?
Dammit…I don’t have time for that. I had just made peace with the fact that I probably wasn’t going to be playing Civ VI anymore, and now this.
Sigh.
I will see if I can get anyone from Aspyr to officially confirm and, hopefully, snag a date (or at least a ‘soon’ or ‘down the road’, I’m not picky).
Eli Hodapp’s departure from TouchArcade this Friday has him landing “as VP of Business Development and will be helping lead the fight to preserve the history of iOS gaming” at GameClub, “a new company that’s hoping to find ways to bring back some of the App Store’s lost classics and reintroduce them to the world.”
My first order of business next week will be to kick off an early access program to get people playing the games that GameClub has already updated (which you can sign up for right now by visiting the GameClub website) and along with that my role will be half digital archaeologist and half museum curator of the best collection of premium game experiences anyone will ever see on the App Store.
I’m Leaving TouchArcade to Join GameClub
Jared Nelson says “I’ll have more to say about my role and the future direction of TouchArcade at some point as well.”
Hmm, good luck with any kind of digital preservation in a marketplace as actively hostile to legacy apps as the Apple app store.
And, premium legacy apps, to boot … my heart is with them, but my head is not optimistic. 
I wish them the best, and I hope (probably pointlessly) that Battle Academy might be playable on the iPad again some day, but I’m not very optimistic.
Never say never though. 
Newest PlayStation 4 Firmware Update adds Remote Play via iDevices. I didn’t do remote play when it was possible with the PSVita is this something to bexcited about?
It can be nice for turn-based games. I used remote play every once in a while with my Vita. There was some lag, but it wasn’t difficult to overcome with RPGs. Sony was so close to doing with the Vita/PS4 what Nintendo managed with the Switch that it is really sad that they never made more of the technology.
I assume the app is free, so it might be worth trying with a game like Disgaea. I read a bit about the app ad it uses either virtual controls or MFi controllers, I believe, though some buttons will be missing.
If you do try it out, let us know.
Diablo 1 is available on GoG now. I believe Blizzard has plans for other classic titles releasing on GoG. As I am loathe to play games with DRM, I find this pretty cool.
A couple days ago, Stonemaier Games posted a behind-the-scenes shareholder report, linked at the bottom. It is a pretty interesting read. Of note, Jamey posted that:
“Scythe is a start, and Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator are great, but for the reasons mentioned in this article (https://stonemaiergames.com/the-truth-about-digital-board-games/), I’d really like to offer more digital ports of our games. We currently have development partners working on Viticulture, Charterstone, Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and Wingspan.”
That sounds like I can clean another couple games of my amazon wishlist and pick up the digital versions instead. Had Viti, Charter, and Wingspan on my list.
Well, a great deal of the joy in Charterstone is opening new stuff up as the game goes along. There are a lot of plain white boxes of different sizes in the game box, and you open them when told to by things happening in the game, and that’s the fun of it. It’s got a satisfying tactile feel and high quality components. The actual gameplay itself is ok. I mean, it’s not bad, but it’s not great. And there are (were?) numerous rules issues that are FAQ’d that must be overcome (that I assume the digital version will fix). I’m mildly curious to see how they will try to translate that to digital, but opening digital mystery boxes and adding digital stickers to the board and cards feels a lot less exciting to me.
Personally, I tend to be happy owning both physical and digital versions of games as long as digital costs remain low enough to support this double-dip.
I believe I’ve heard that Charterstone is repeatedly playable after the legacy “campaign” is completed? If this is the case, I suppose there is a chance that the digital game merely offers that final, repeatable game? Just brainstorming.
But the final game post-campaign will be different for every group…I’m not sure how this will work in digital form, but legacy games in digital format makes more sense to me than cardboard versions, actually.
Some Clark Kent-like intrepid reporter over at BGG reported that Tides of Time is coming to iOS soon. My thoughts:
Most of the appeal of the game is the beautiful cards. There are only 16 or so in the game. Gameplay itself is a quick card draft, trying to rack up the most points.
Tides of Madness is an alternative version of the same game with Cthulhu and a madness mechanic. I wonder if we will see that as an option at some point?
Is this Portal’s first release? Will we ever see a Neuroshima Hex update now that they have the rights back?
Playing Pandemic Legacy S1 with my Wife (we did three meeples between the two of us, one representing our daughter who’s only like 1) was one of the most rewarding co-operative experiences I’ve played. I’ve always wondered whether anyone would try doing a ‘digital’ legacy game, but then digital games in general are, in their own way, ‘legacy’ games because of the way the game world can evolve through your actions (thanks to the magic of software).
Actually taking the cardboard legacy systems (which are influenced by the restrictions imposed by physical components), would be interesting to see at any rate. You could make it tied to a specific save… like how two playthoughs of a Paradox Grand Strategy game are never the same. So in one save you made this choice, and that choice… and the game ends up being like A. And another save other things happen and you get the B state, and so on…
I guess the danger is, how many potential outcomes can you design into a game via choice, and what happens when you’ve explored them all?
I own Charterstone put haven’t started playing it yet. The way it was described to be was that the ‘legacy’ bit has you building your semi-custom worker placement game, and at the end you have your own unique game that you can play infinitely (just without any more legacy choices to make). The Aeon’s End legacy game is similar, from what I understand.
I’d enjoy seeing them puzzle out the sudden disappearance of Battlefleet Gothic: Leviathan, as well as bring it and the DLC back to iOS. 
