Category: Gaming & Collectibles

Stuff to fill your shelves and entertainment unit with.

After 9 years, World of Warcraft’s Worgen are getting a fresh new look

From Blizzard WatchWowhead, and a bunch of other sites that cover breaking video game news comes some worgen-related excitement today. Blizzard’s annual gaming convention BlizzCon kicked off today with a bunch of announcements, one of which promises a fresh new look for World of Warcraft’s werewolf-like player race. Says Blizzard Watch:

One of the most requested features in WoW is an update for the Cataclysm-era goblin and worgen models. At the BlizzCon What’s Next panel, Blizzard announced that both races would finally receive model updates in patch 8.2.5 — immediately invalidating about 80% of the questions for tomorrow’s Q&A panel.

Given that these are among the least popular races in the game and still among the newer ones, a model update was low on Blizzard’s priority list. But it was sorely needed, especially for Worgen, who never turned out quite right. Even back in Cataclysm, players were unhappy with how the Worgen looked.

I was pretty happy with how the Worgen looked when Cataclysm came out over nine years ago, but these updated models are even better. Have a look at these screengrabs from the BlizzCon stream, courtesy of Wowhead.

Note that these updated models won’t likely arrive until sometime in early 2019.

Pose details for the updated male Worgen model

Head details for the updated male Worgen model

Pose details for the updated female Worgen model

Head details for the updated female Worgen model

 

Trash your house and ruin a babysitter’s life as a tiny werewolf in “Where’s Baby?”

Where’s Baby? is an award-winning asymmetrical multiplayer game. Each player assumes the role of a rowdy monster baby or a beleaguered babysitter, and respectively trashes the house while escaping capture or tries to fix all the broken furniture before slam-dunk the kid back in their crib.

One of four playable babysitters attempts to un-trash a bookshelf while a baby werewolf goes buckwild

From the developer’s web site:

Play as a baby critter, wrecking everything in the house and having a blast! Power ups along the way will help amplify your natural toddler abilities, including diaper bombs and a foot-powered pink plastic car (beep beep)! OR play as the baby sitter, and try to keep things together until the parents get home and the round ends! If you are lucky, you’ll be able to find a blanket, put that little guy to bed, and have a little peace!

It’s a Steam Early Access game that you can download for Mac or Windows for less than the cost of a bad cup of coffee. Currently included:

  • Single Player AI Verses!
  • Local Split Screen Multiplayer!
  • Beta-ish Online Multiplayer (via Steam Chat’s Join Me Function)!
  • 4 Power Ups for Both Sitter and Critter!
  • 4 Sitters!
  • 2 Critters!
  • 2 Levels!
  • And a whole lotta love!

All vampires are terrible and this baby is no exception.

One of the two critters is a baby werewolf who seems just as adorable as they are destructive, and the other is a baby vampire who – well, I’m not going to write profanity about a cartoon infant, but you know how I feel about vampires.

Here’s the announcement trailer, which shows some gameplay:

You can check out the game on Steam and follow its development on Twitter at @WellBredRhino.

Werewolf House: Synthincisor is the kind of weird, wonderful werewolf game that could only exist online

An itch.io browser/mobile game styled after 8-bit text adventures? I think I’ll pass. I make corporate web applications with middling JavaScript for a living and I don’t need to be reminded of the radical shit that people have made with bad JavaScript.

But what’s that, you say? The game plunges you into an eerily synth-scored story where you play as a vaping EDM DJ who gets hired to play a gig at Werewolf House, but who has their fresh new beat blasted out of their head by lightning, and who must have “an unforgettable, Webby-deserving interactive adventure in the Werewolf House in an attempt to create a new beat before the moon is full”?

Don’t mind if I do.

This is Werewolf House: Synthincisor, the third and final instalment in writer/musician Andy Kneis‘s trilogy of absurd browser-based werewolf-laden choose your own adventure games. I haven’t played any of them for longer than 10 minutes, having only just learned about them, but they all look deeply funny in a way that blends the chunky GIF-style graphics of the point & click text adventure genre with Kneis’s beautifully slapdash/smartass writing.

I beat this computer’s haunted web site by clicking past a GIF of a werewolf labelled “sensuality”.

The first two games in the trilogy, Werewolf House Rising: Werewolf House of Wolves and Werewolf House Rising: Werewolf House of Wolves – Arbor Day Edition, seem to be single-page HTML documents stacked with wonderful GIFs, music embeds, and links that jump you around in the narrative. Synthincisor is quite a bit more involved, though.

The full moon is out and what started as a choose-your-own adventure site has transformed into a full-on interactive fiction game with a unique mechanic that lets you to add new layers the game’s soundtrack as you progress.

“The art in the game is silly and the writing is really silly,” he told the Los Feliz Ledger in an interview, “so I wanted the music to be as good as possible.”

An animation from a Werewolf House pop-up ad

The music seems quite good indeed. During my brief playthrough, I made it through the ground-level room of Werewolf House, which was just far enough to enhance the pulsing 80’s slasher flick style music with some “modem sounds” I earned by helping a (potentially evil) web site exorcise itself by banishing 2002-era pop-up ads for werewolf pills.

This is the kind of weird, wonderful, fully-committed-to-the-goof stuff that I love. I made myself click the “save” button and come over here to write this post. As soon as I hit “publish” I’m going back over to that other browser tab to resume my game. I need to recover that missing beat, play a killer set for the Werewolf House denizens, and then maybe down some werewolf pills.

Fright Rags launches official Teen Wolf shirt collection

The OG, very good, very 1980s Teen Wolf movie spawned a lot of knock-off “Dicknose” t-shirts, but as far as I can tell, it’s never had an official line of apparel, until now. The venerable horror & sci-fi t-shirt company Fright Rags has secured the official Teen Wolf license – it says it right there in the banner! – and they aren’t sleeping on it. Starting today, you can buy one of six different designs on a variety of shirt styles. I think my favourite is the cartoon-style “85” design, but the Howard’s Hardware flyer is pretty great, too.

SDCC pop-up shop debuts limited-edition, low-appeal “The Wolf Man” shoes

If you’re at San Diego Comic Con this weekend and you have no taste and cash to waste, why not line up at the “Boodega Monstore” (701 Eighth Ave, San Diego, CA 9210) for a chance to buy a Super7 / Saucony / Universal Monsters triple-co-branded “The Wolf Man” shoe?

Combining high cost ($95), artificial scarcity (only 12 pairs per size [7 through 13] exist), and zero werewolf design aesthetics other than colours referenced from a character who debuted in a black and white film, this shoe is presumably precision-crafted to appeal to sneakerheads (maybe) and Universal Monsters fans who don’t have to justify their expenditures to anyone.

Saucony makes good gear, or so I’m told, so they’ll probably be comfortable shoes to wear, but these things are utterly unremarkable in appearance, particularly in comparison to the other Universal Monster shoes (thank you, Daily Dead) at the Boodega pop-up shop. At least the other shoes have some graphical elements. These have all the visual appeal of an overripe avocado. The high price and the artificial scarcity are in keeping with the nature of SDCC collectibles, I guess, but I just can’t imagine anyone getting excited to line up for what seems like a deeply cynical cash-grab.

I’m mad about the shoes. What an overpriced waste of an opportunity to do something new, fun and interesting with the dorkiest werewolf intellectual property ever.

Werewolf art timelapse – Ryan Pancoast’s “Lambholt Pacifist / Lambholt Butcher”

Here’s a video of Ryan Pancoast painting the art featured on the two sides of “Lambholt Pacifist / Lambholt Butcher“, a Magic: The Gathering card from 2016’s “Shadows Over Innistrad” expansion.

From what I understand of the game mechanics, which is very little (this is the most I have thought about Magic since the afternoon in 1995 when my uncle tried and failed to get me interested), this card’s two sides represent the same person. Even if you’re clueless about the game, the identical background foliage and the discarded cowl in the nighttime / werewolf image are lovely clues. Therefore what we’re seeing in the completed images are this mysterious woman’s binary states of existence: “I am cool with birds” and “I absolutely fucking hate birds”.

Both paintings are available for purchase as prints, because sometimes the Internet is good! You can see more of Ryan’s amazing paintings at his site and on his YouTube channel.

Thanks to friend of the site (and wonderful artist in his own right) Doruk Golcu for posting this video.

Only 6 days left for the wildly successful GROWL card game Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Joey Vigour’s “turn everyone into a werewolf” card game has been funded 16 times over, and there’s still almost a week left! You can check out the post I wrote about GROWL a few months ago for details about how the game works, and here’s a recap from the campaign page:

There are werewolves among us! We’ll stab each other and try to avoid getting bitten, but when a human receives their third bite, they secretly become a wolf and turn against us!
GROWL is like Werewolf (aka Mafia), but as a quick 10-15 minute card game for 4-10 players of all ages

  • The cards in your hand reveal whether you are a human or a werewolf
  • Humans turn into werewolves if they get bitten 3 times!
  • Everyone gets to bite, stab, heal, and give gold, so we all have power, not just the loud people
  • Doesn’t require a moderator or phone app

There’s a lot going on with this campaign. There were 2o stretch goals, all of which have been obliterated, a bunch of add-ons, and a social engagement aspect called “The Wolf Hunt” that seems way too complicated for me, but which obviously works, given how well things are going. If you just want the game, you can sidestep the shenanigans and go directly to the $16 or $24 dollar tiers.

Congrats to Joey and his team for what looks like a super successful project! If you want to get a copy for yourself, head this way.

“Werewolf: The Apocalypse” video game storyline & game mechanics preview

Zoe Delahunty-Light of Games Radar recently spoke to Julien Desourteaux and Guillaume Blanchard of White Wolf about the status of the upcoming and widely-anticipated Werewolf: The Apocalypse video game.

The interview was conducted as part of publisher Focus Home Interactive’s yearly press event, “Le What’s Next De Focus Home Interactive”. Delahunty-Light explains the concepts and mechanics of the W:tA universe (Wyrm, Weaver, Pantex, rage, it’s all in the game) and outlines what the game proposes to do with those ingredients.

This action RPG has you step into the shoes – or paws – of a member of the Fianna tribe, an Irish group of werewolves who prize family over everything. Yet you’re an outcast, a veteran of battle that has turned into a lone wolf (literally). After spending some time alone in the wild, you’ll be called back to help your ex-pack out of a spot of bother, as something’s happened to your son, which probably doesn’t bode well. At its heart Werewolf: The Apocalypse is a story of the bond between a father and son, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting about your son thanks to all the general devastation in the world around you.

The franchise’s tagline “when will you rage?” is a literal game mechanic. Environmental elements and plot points will max out your rage meter, which you can ameliorate through anger management techniques or through the less stealthy (but more fun-sounding) practice of killing everyone around you… including, if you take it too far and wind up in a Frenzy, your allies.

“You have to kill your allies as well,” [Desourteaux] says, “because you see them as a threat. When you go into Frenzy, you’re not able to recognise everybody – everyone looks like a threat”. Like an awkward family reunion, the game will remember that you massacred your friends. Your brutality will affect future quests, the ways NPCs behave towards you, and even what kind of enemies you face.

Everything about the game seems designed to satisfy the Wt:A super-fans out there. I, for better or worse, am not among those folks, being a reprehensible “casual” gamer and, frankly, increasingly disenchanted by Wt:A as a property and a delivery mechanism for the werewolf content I crave. That said, I’m happy on behalf of folks who have been waiting for the franchise to receive a proper video game adaptation – it’s long overdue.

No screenshots or gameplay footage have been shared – maybe a tiny bit worrisome, since the game’s been in development for a year. No release date has been announced, either, but with expectations high, I think it’s wise for Focus and the developers to take a “when it’s finished” approach.

The Infection is spreading! Pre-order KingGuro’s werewolf claw pin

In May of year artist Kris Starlein made available a gorgeous 1.75″ enamel pin of a (mostly) human skull, ensconced in a ferocious werewolf silhouette. I purchased one as a gift for my wife, and have envied it ever since. Now Kris (who goes by KingGuro) has started accepting pre-orders for a new pin that serves as a sequel to the original one and re-contextualizes the set as an ongoing transformation.

You can pre-order “The Spread” – depicting a human hand transforming into a furred claw – for $10 USD plus shipping.

If you missed the original pin when it came out, you can snag both as “The Infected Set” for $20 USD plus shipping.

Just fill out this Google form with your choice and details and you’ll be sent a PayPal invoice when the time comes. You’ll also get updates on the pin’s manufacturing progress and shipping dates (currently estimated as mid-April). If you live outside the United States you can still place a pre-order, but be aware that you’ll pay more for shipping.

I love the design so much (and was so impressed with the quality of last year’s pin) that I’ve asked to order both options – The Spread, to complete my wife’s set, and The Infected, so I can add both to my own pin & badge-laden vest. If you’re interested, act fast – the pre-order is likely to close in the next week or two.

Game Review: “Hunter’s Moon” for Android

Last week I wrote about Hunter’s Moon – an endless runner game by Seb Woodland – but without an Android device of my own, I’ve unable to play the game, a generally-accepted prerequisite for writing a review of the game. Leave that to Werewolf News reader, Werewolves Versus contributor and friend Juan C. Moreno, who shared his thoughts in the Werewolf News Slack group (want an invite? hit me up). Here’s Juan’s take on Hunter’s Moon:

I downloaded the Hunter’s Moon infinite runner game this weekend and it’s definitely a fun little time-spender. The controls and mechanics are pretty simple (tapping makes you jump or double jump) and anyone familiar with runner sidescrollers will know what to do from a few tries. It took me a few attempts to keep from falling into the trap-filled forest below and meeting a spiky end. When you finally get the hang of dodging traps and leaping over rooftops, you get to duel a werewolf (tap up to block, tap down to attack) who can dodge and attack as well.

The first time you fall victim to a trap or take a paw to the face, you can watch an ad to get a free resurrection and try the section again. Subsequent revivals can be bought for a bit of the gold coins you can collect as you run and defeat werewolves.

Falling into the forest of misery is tense and exciting since the traps are more frustrating than any creatures of the night. However, survive enough traps and defeat a wolf (which is harder in the dark forest because their attacks are harder to see coming) and you can return to the lovely rooftops. That’s a cool idea, and it works well.

There are power ups to give the hunter some help, although I only know how to use one, and you can only use it once for 100 coins before you need to buy it again. Overall, it’s a fun game with a great gothic atmosphere I would love to see more of! If the creator wants to add more or make more games in this setting, I will definitely leap at the chance to try them out!

Want to play it yourself? Click around here. Wish you could play as a werewolf? Seb knows – and even thought about making a “play as a werewolf” game as an earlier project – and as I mentioned in my previous post, the best way to motivate a creator to make more stuff is to support the stuff they’ve already made.

Thanks again to Juan for the review!