Category: Gaming & Collectibles

Got an Android device? Great! Then you can play this new game Hunter’s Moon in the warm glow of your Galaxy or Pixel while I stand outside in the rain with my iPhone 7, pawing forlornly at the window. From the Google Play page:

Take on the role of a lone werewolf hunter. Leap across the rooftops of an ancient city in this infinite runner, and use your sword to vanquish the evil werewolves who await you. Collect gold along the way, always aiming to improve your score. Don’t fall into the forest below, or you’ll have to navigate a gauntlet of deadly traps.

This makes me think of Blood of the Werewolf and Altered Beast, except here you play as a human (or at least, as a non-werewolf) instead of a pissed-off werewolf mom or undead therianthrope wizzen fwum yo gwabe. Your dude’s whole deal, as depicted by the lovely pixel art animation in the trailer, is 1) running, 2) slashing at werewolves, and 3) wearing wide-brimmed hats.

Bristle at the idea of hunting werewolves instead of being one? Relax, the developer has you in mind. “I hope in the future to add some sort of powerup,” they wrote me, “where your character actually becomes a werewolf.”

Hunter’s Moon is free to play and supported by in-game advertising, which I mention specifically because it was developed by one person, which is bad-ass and worthy of support. Think of it this way: every ad you tap on gets you a little closer to the dev investing the time to add that “be a werewolf in the game” feature, and also gets them one step closer to dinner at the best restaurant in western Canada. Gosh, I miss the bread there.

It’s worth mentioning that the developer, Seb Woodland, also wrote all of the music in the game, which you can check out (along with a bunch of other music) at Seb’s Bandcamp page.

I don’t generally express strong opinions about which mobile phone platform is “best”, but I have to admit I’ve been shooting my iPhone dirty looks as I write this post.

Later today, Ryan Zanfei’s Tasty Peach Studios is putting this Werewolf Meowchi up for pre-order. It’s like if Pusheen was a Lykoi cat! From the Facebook post announcing it:

Sorry for the late post but here is a picture of Werewolf Meowchi releasing tomorrow at 4 PM EST! Trying to coordinate all of this while setting up for NYCC is a bit rough! But he is just as fluffy as the picture leads him to be. Probably one of our favorite Halloween designs yet just based on the fur we used and those little danger claws.

Being unfamiliar with how Tasty Peach usually runs these things I had to dig around in the post comments a bit to find out the practical details. They say the pre-order will be happening “on our website” at 4 PM EST (1 PM Pacific), the price will be $25 USD, and they expect orders to ship out to customers by October 15th or 16th.

Edit: the pre-order is now live and available on the Meowchi Plush Werewolf product page.

I’m on more of a monstery werewolf kick these days so I won’t be jumping on this one, but I cannot deny that I want to squish this butt:

Thanks to Penningtonbeast and guyver47 for the link!

Beast Mode: Night of the Werewolf is a “goofy, fun, over the top Arcade Beat ‘Em Up” from Apeirogon Games in which you play a werewolf whose “sole purpose in life is to decimate a group of hapless hippies as they party in the woods, the desert or even on the moon”.

Flex your paws, sharpen your claws and lay those hippies to rest! String together the highest kill combo and compete against the clock to earn the highest score and submit it to our online leader boards!

The game is Windows-only and is available for $4.99 at IndieGameStand. (It’s also on Steam, but doesn’t drop until July 14th for some reason.) It sounds like the kind of thing you could drop into to kill 10 minutes. Try it for yourself with the demo, which includes one of the game’s five maps, plus online leaderboards.

The story in the game’s press kit really doubles down on the hippy hate – “You breathe in, the scent of your enemies floating on the air; patchouli oil, how you loathe the smell of patchouli!” – but without having even played the demo, I get the feeling that the narrow range of (apparently harmless) victims could get stale fast. It would be nice to see additional victim/enemy types in a future update.

Hit up the Apeirogon Games site for more details, including media and purchase links. Thanks to @NicholasUnder for the link!

White Wolf rights-holders Paradox Interactive have just announced that they plan to release a game based on the World of Darkness roleplaying game Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Cyanide (Blood Bowl, Call of Cthulhu) will handle development, and Focus Home Interactive (Blood Bowl, Styx: Master of Shadows, Farming Simulator [!?]) will publish. The game will be available on PC and one or more as-of-yet unannounced consoles.

Things are still at the “corporate press release” stage, but a web site, Twitter account and Facebook page dedicated to the game have already popped up. Focus have said they will share more details at their “le What’s Next de Focus” event in Paris on February 1st and 2nd.

So far the reaction from the World of Darkness fan community has been a jittery mix of elation and scepticism. W:tA has a deep mythology and a lot of storylines and concepts from which to draw (as a certain film franchise is sort of proving). People have tried to mine this scene for video game gold twice before: a W:tA PC game was planned for a late 1999 / early 2000 release but the developer folded before it could be completed, and five years before that, Capcom was working on a PlayStation / Sega Saturn game that only ever surfaced as a prototype.

Can Cyanide and Focus succeed where others have failed, and deliver a Werewolf video game to satisfy fans who’ve been waiting all this time? One thing’s for sure: there’s no way for anyone to answer that question at all right now. You’ve waited over two decades; can you please be chill for, like, another twelve months? Eighteen, tops? Thank you.

From the Paradox Interactive press release:

White Wolf is pleased to announce its partnership with Paris-based video game publisher Focus Home Interactive for a licensed PC and console game set in the World of Darkness.

The partnership between Focus Home Interactive and White Wolf Publishing concerns the adaptation of a video game based on the acclaimed Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The game will be developed by the game development studio Cyanide (Styx: Master of Shadows, Blood Bowl, Call of Cthulhu…). In the game you will become a Garou, a rage-fuelled Werewolf warrior opposed to urban civilization and the destruction it brings. The Garou are born to fight the corruption of The Wyrm, a powerful supernatural force leading us towards an inevitable Apocalypse.

Thanks to @Somnilux for breaking the news to me, and to so many other folks on Twitter for providing additional details!

From the “writing about games I’ve never played” department: Last week the League of Legends YouTube channel posted a teaser to announce an update to Warwick, body-snatcher and wolfman. This nasty steampunk-werewolf-lookin’ Champion has a bunch of new abilities, artwork and skins, which is good news for people already playing him, and even better news for people who weren’t playing him because his previous abilities, artwork and skins were bad. Bad for the purposes of the game, League of Legends.

In case the previous sentence didn’t make it clear, I don’t know anything about League of Legends. I learned that Warwick was a thing at all from this tweet, and the research I did to put together this post was so laden with insider terms like “meta”, “gank” and “jungling” that I developed a lot more empathy for my non-programmer friends who have to hear me talk about “Node”, “Sass-compiling” and “shadow DOMs”. If you’re a seasoned LoL player and you want to know how Warwick’s “newfound power allows him to clean up the streets of Zaun through brutal violence”, I suggest you check out this rundown on The Rift Herald or the official update page.

As an outsider looking in, what interests me most about this update (aside from the sudden appearance of artwork depicting this brick shit-house of a werewolf dressed in nana-jammies) is the level of thought that went into the mechanical and in-game reasoning for his updates, and the extent to which Riot explains it all on their site.

So what are our goals with the Warwick update? Currently Warwick is very beginner friendly. We actually want to embrace that and push it even further than it is now. We want Warwick’s gameplay to actually teach new junglers how to be an effective jungler. Right now Warwick can’t gank until level 6, but what if Warwick’s kit actually encouraged players to gank often and early? We also have heard loud and clear that player think Warwick’s kit is kind of boring and outdated. While we don’t want to raise Warwick’s skill floor, we do want to increase his skill ceiling a bit and add more depth to his gameplay. We also want to bring Warwick’s art and thematics up to modern Riot standards by giving him a proper place in our world. We think violence is an important theme for Warwick and we want to see how far we can push that thematic.

What I get from this is “we all heard Warwick was the boring character that newbies played, so we made him good again by emphasizing his capacity for violence and commissioning a bunch of kick-ass new art assets to show him off.” Riot, I may never play League of Legends, but I appreciate your honesty, and the results are a lot of fun to look at.

Here’s a selection of Warwick splash screens showing some of his new skins, and a final one showing his origin.

When someone mentions Captain America, the first thought that occurs to me is not “he’s been a werewolf at least twice“, and that’s coming from a person whose brain is calibrated to play “six degrees of lycanthropic separation” with all input. And yet in its 2016 Legends “Red Skull Build-a-Figure” group of action figures, Marvel has chosen to package its most patriotic Avenger with an alternate head depicting his “Capwolf” mode.

I thought it was strange that they would acknowledge such an obscure edge-case for a prominent character’s appearance until I saw that this is the 16th time Captain America has appeared as a Marvel Legends figure. I guess there’s only so many variants of costumes and battle damage you can pitch before you have to start searching the supernatural corners of a character’s history.

In addition to the werewolf head, this figure comes with Cap’s shield, two alternate hands (one for pointing and one for… dabbing?) and the cape for the Build-a-Figure Red Skull / Red Onslaught figure.

This figure has only been out for a few months, so comic shops and even big-box retailers should still have it. As usual, you can snag it on Amazon, too. Thank you to Somnilux and wereshere for the heads up!