More Cyberpunk Demos in Unreal Engine 5

A year or so ago I posted some freaky Cyberpunk Unreal 5 demo videos and thankfully the talented fellow behind them has continued to make more. Some of these are just mindblowing!

8-bit Civilizations – a Civ 1 & 2 like game for Commodore 64!

Wow.. I love a good classic console homebrew game, especially when they involve Sid Meier’s Civilization haha! I was pretty blown away by Tupi’s Civ1 for Sega Megadrive/Genesis fan port project a while back but this one is even crazier lol! A fellow named Fabian Hertel has made a Civ1&2 hybrid like homebrew game for the good old 1980s Commodore 64! Sadly it looks like he hasn’t worked on it for a few years but I’ll try to contact him and see if he’s still going with it. There’s a playable demo that apparently has working AIs and you can play from start to finish on so it’s mostly complete.

Links:
https://www.protovision.games/development/8_bit_civ.php?language=en
https://csdb.dk/release/?id=153098

Screenshots:

Videos:

Sleepy Hollow Film and Quest For Glory 4 Game Similarities

Long time followers will know from my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen GZDoom mod and my Quest For Glory maps that I’m a big fan of the old Sierra point & click adventure Quest for Glory series by Lori & Cory Cole, with Quest for Glory 4 being my favourite! Many years ago I posted the below on the long gone Quest For More Glory forum about this and thanks to the Internet Archive I found it again and thought I’d resurrect it here and expand on it a bit!

Have you ever seen Tim Burton’s 1999 classic dark Gothic Halloween blockbuster Sleepy Hollow? I could be alone on this one lol, but every time I’ve watched it over the years it has always made me want to go play Quest for Glory 4. While I realise the movie is set in colonial America and not Transylvanian Europe (not that QFG4 is technically there either lol 😉 ) there’s so many story and visual similarities that I love.

In Sleepy Hollow when our reluctant main hero (Ichabod) travels to the town he passes through dark but colourful autumn forests that hint of approaching danger and a long cold winter. The town & graveyard are surrounded by cursed dark misty forests and swamps that seem to come alive at night. Most of the town’s people are strange looking elderly individuals that don’t trust strangers. The love interest (also named Katrina) is beautiful, elusive, mysterious and may be involved in dark magic. Ichabod has dreams of stunning colourful magical gardens mixed with horrible nightmares of torture and death from the past. His adversary is an undead immortal villain under the control of a dark magic user. Different worlds but quite similar stuff!

Whenever I see those misty forests and the tree of the dead it always makes me want to boot up QFG4 and visit the evil swamp lands. When Ichabod visits the town and gets a frosty reception I want to go visit Mordavia and chat with the grumpy locals. When Ichabod meets Katrina in the forest outside of town I think of doing the same in QFG4. If you haven’t seen Sleepy Hollow you should check it out next time it’s Halloween or a dark stormy night with QFG4 in mind. I love those special crossover/hybrid relationships that can some times happen between video games and books or films. When you do one you think of the other and both somehow become enriched and more enjoyable as a result. 🙂

Cloudpunk Nivalis and Cyberpunk 2077 updates in 2023

Been a few years since I last posted about the final Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire episodes and talked about the cool indie game Cloudpunk tiding us over until Cyberpunk 2077’s release which of course happened and was a bit of a disaster lol! However over the years since much has happened with these 2 great games so I though I’d look back and forwards at what’s going on with both of them!

Cloudpunk / Nivalis
Starting with Cloudpunk the original game proved to be quite a hit (likely due to so many people waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 jumping over to it) so they quickly released a cool addon pack in 2021 called City of Ghosts that added several more playable characters and stories. Then in 2022 the really big announcement came when they decided to massively overhaul, upgrade and expand their engine and city to create a huge life sim game called Nivalis that looks super cool! Trailers below!

Cyberpunk 2077
Yeah we all know how things went down with the cluster F release of Cyberpunk 2077, however as expected CD Projekt Red worked away on all the bugs and judging by it’s glowing reviews on steam the game we have today in 2023 is pretty much what we should have got back in 2020. So naturally in 2022 the new content started getting announced! Firstly a cool Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime series came out on Netflix with a new Night City Wire episode announcing TV series content being added to the game that brought a lot of players back (which was thankfully by then in far better condition) and now in 2023 we’re getting the big addon pack Phantom Liberty with a new area of the city opened up, Keanu Reeves back as Johnny Silverhand and Idris Elba playing a new character. Videos below!