Audiogames.net Monthly Digest - November 2023
Welcome to another audiogames.net monthly digest. Can you believe the year is almost over? Us neither, but here we are. What's definitely not over is the stream of new releases and updates. The theme this month is almost certainly CCG's, but fans of other genres will also find something interesting. On the update front, many of the major accessible mainstream games received big patches. So as always, sit back, enjoy the read and don't forget to tell your friends they can get these digests too!
New Releases
Cybercards, cyberpunk roguelike deck building game (iOS, Android)
Welcome to the gritty neon streets of Cybercards, the ultimate single player roguelike card game experience! Build your deck, unlock new cards and playable characters, and strategize your way through the cyberpunk world. With dynamic gameplay inspired by tabletop games, every draw of the deck can mean the difference between survival and failure. Do you have what it takes to outsmart your opponents and emerge victorious? Choose from a variety of fun, exciting characters to play as, each with their own unique abilities and strengths. Unlock new cards and build the ultimate deck to take on the toughest challenges the city has to offer. But beware, Cybercards is a true roguelike card game, meaning that every decision you make and every card you play has real consequences. One wrong move could mean the end of your journey, so choose your actions wisely! With intuitive mobile controls and addictive gameplay, Cybercards is the perfect way to dive into the world of cyberpunk roguelike card games. So what are you waiting for? Download now and start your journey to the top of the neon underworld!
Conjury (iOS, Android)
Make your way through the eternal darkness of Lumtham woods. It's a journey filled with monsters, peril, and tonnes of loot. Collect cards, weapons, and items as you make your way through this fast-paced deck building rogue-like to escape the darkness of the forest. Features
- 6 playable characters, each with unique abilities and gameplay
- Rogue-like gameplay and lots of replay-ability
- Over 50 different weapons
- Over 250 different cards to discover
- Tonnes of different Enemies and Bosses to defeat
Strange Road, a Chinese RPG (Windows)
I have asked by Luyi to share this here. Strange Road is a game developed by Luyi and another developer who's name translates to something like Keeper of strange things. This is an RPG in which you, the player purchase a badly made RPG and get annoyed with it, thinking that the author is just trying to scam people by charging for bad games. So you copy his code and decide to set up your own scam. But instead, your computer gets infected with a virus that then pulls you into the game. There is a more thorough explanation in the guide and exact strategy to complete the game if you need it. I will list the hot keys here for reference, however. First of all, when you launch the game, you will hear an opening sequence and must then press enter. If your game is not speaking, follow these instuctions. Once on the main menu, you should hear a musical box style loop. From here, press down arrow three times, enter twice, down arrow three times and enter. NVDA should now be speaking. Keys: WASD: movement JKLUIO: skills Space: Weapon attack. H: Health RTY: monster health from left to right. Z: Coordinates F1: Attributes F2: Inventory F3: Skills F4: equipment `: set quick item if on a usable item in inventory, otherwise use that item. Enter: Speak with villagers, use shops, etc. Shops are not menus, they sell a product which they tell you about the first time you press enter, and a second press buys the item.
The game does have a plus version that can be purchased for $10 USD. In order to do so you'll need to use a service paypal offers called xoom, which can send money to alipay.
Battle Against Darkness: an upcoming Rhythm game for iOS
We offer this meticulous workmanship, with a movie-like sound experience The game aims at "Definite rhythm", requring your rhythm sensation, where you can challenge the upper limit of your fingers' agility The game also provides audio visualization as a feature, for a new gaming experience We offer the blockbuster, AIGC, for you creating your exclusive BGMS. The game is in English, both the text and the dubing. There are some untranslated menu options, but keep in mind this is a beta. TTS volume and rate cannot be adjusted now.
New browser based strategic idle game: idle trillionaire
Description by Dakota:
Found this on ich today. The goal is obviously to gain insane amounts of money and happyness, but how you do this is a bit different than what I've seen so far. You start with a bass gain of $1 per hour (1 game hour =1 irl second), and 1 happyness per day. You have a set amount of living costs that you have to pay every day, and every game year you get a larger $ payout as a bonus. If your values fall below $-100000 or -10000 happyness you start over. The main way you advance is by buying cards with your hard-earned money and happyness. These cards can have any range of affects, and there are over 400 of them. Some will just give you a small bonus to your idle money income, others give you a large amount of happyness to spend but decrease the amount you gain in future, and lots more besides that. It's really a game where you have to be good at deciding when to buy what to see the best gains. There are also some cards that, at least as far as I know, only penalise you, so you can either avoid those entirely or buy them so they're out of the way once you're far enough to be able to take the hit. One card purchased at the wrong time can totally ruin a game though so be careful with that. Some things to point out about navigation: If you don't have it on, turn on emoji reading in your screen reader because things related to money use the money bag emoji and things related to happyness use a grinning face emoji. It'll make things easier to read. To easily navigate between cards and see what you can afford, press 5 and shift+5 on NVDA to move between heading levels 5, it'll move you to the next card and announce if you can purchase it or if you can't afford it. Finally, you can hide already purchased cards by pressing the magnifying glass button, though once you have them, its heading turns to a level 2 heading saying "owned" anyway, so they shouldn't bother you too much.
Race for the Galaxy: A Text-Based Card Game, Accessible Version 0.1 (Windows)
Hi All, I wanted to post here and announce my release of the Race for the Galaxy text-based UI, version 0.1. This is a way to play the card game RFTG against a powerful AI opponent. Note that the AI is not my work, but was based upon another open source project. What is RFTG? Race for the Galaxy is a game in which you attempt to develop a galactic civilization. You are basically responsible for playing cards that represent worlds, technologies, and the like, and are ultimately trying to obtain the largest amount of victory points. This is not a 4X-style strategy game, but is a famous and very deep card game which has been around for many years. The rules, as I mention below, are not included in the game but are available online and linked in the readme file. You can download version 0.1 compiled for Windows from My Dropbox. There is a small readme file inside which explains the commands, but I am happy to go into more detail about anything that is unclear. As I explain in the readme, the text UI does not currently support expansions. The rules are not included, but are available online and linked in my documentation. In order to run a game with more than two players, you need to run it from the command line, like this Rftg.exe -p 3 I will try and work on a more friendly menu system for game configuration later. The game autosaves at every decision point, so to start a new game you need to remove the autosave.rftg file. This may be a bit confusing but is convenient for testing and development. I hope that you enjoy this game. It’s been a passion project of mine for the past few weeks, and I’m very pleased with the progress so far.
Zero Hour Assault (Windows)
Zero Hour Assault is a game where players can eliminate each other, form teams, earn score points, and use those points to upgrade their characters in future updates. While the game mechanics may differ slightly from other first-person shooter games, the core concept is straightforward. In the current version, your objective is to eliminate other players using bombs and weapons to earn score points. These points can be used in future updates to enhance your character's power and agility. If you are on a team in the current version, eliminating an opponent also earns your team a kill. You can use the link below to download and try my game. Before you start playing the game, I suggest you read the read m e and rules files: https://nbmstudios.com/zero.php By the way, I forgot to correct a few mistakes in read me, sorry. There are 2 maps in the game, and if you don't want to fight with bots, you can go to the 2nd map and fight with players only! And finally, you still have molotov in the bag, and there are no grenades in the game at the moment. Have a good game everyone!
Idle Ikta (iOS, Android)
Idle Iktah is an incremental game set in a fictionalized Pacific Northwest where you start from nothing and create your own path to success. Level up, complete quests, and gain powerful rewards as you dive deeper into this hand-crafted adventure. hey everyone! so this game released a few weeks ago and i've been testing it since the first release. it has months of content. the description of the game is simple, but the game will add layers of new content and unlockable areas and surprises as you play. it has a storyline. if you have played melvor idle, i find this one much more enjoyable, because even though there are many skills like woodcutting, gathering, fishing, cooking, etc. things are much easier to understand with a mobile device. you can fight and read all stats in a screen easy to understand and track your hp. i've reported some accessibility issues and the developer is always listening and improving. i'll send a link to the testflight version in case of apple devices, because you can receive updates faster. you can also send feedback directly from the game by going to more settings and feedback. the android version also has a way to join the beta, i just don't remember how i did it. so i'll leave a link to the standard version in the play store, and if someone can report if you're running at least version 1.0.4 it should be the latest one. i hope you enjoy the game!
EchoVis Street (iOS, Android)
A simple audio game simulating visual disabilities. The goal is to cross the crowded street safely listening to the sounds of passing cars.
EchoVis Street is a simple audio game, aimed for blind and visually impaired people. The main goal of this game is to present one of many possibilities of use the mobile devices to develop ability to use hearing skills by visually impaired people. We recommend sight persons also to try their skills in this area.
This game consist several levels, each with a different traffic sounds simulation. The player's main objective is to cross the road in the virtual environment avoiding to be hit by a passing car or tram. This should be done in base of acoustic informations analysis arriving to the player's ears. Therefore, we recommend playing with stereophonic headphones connected to your smartphone and without looking at mobile phone screen. All of the necessary communicates are being read with use of text to speech synthesizer
In our opinion, this application can be successfully used, for example, by spatial orientation instructors or trainers conducting training in explaining to sighted people the way the blind perceive the world. To reach this goal, we have planned to create 3 games in the EchoVis project boundaries - more information can be obtained on www.echovis.tt.com.pl website. We encourage you to provide us with your opinions, ideas, application functionality issues, etc.
Watch out for speeding cars and trams.
Game Updates
- Sanctuary in Time 0.4.2 adds a new coaching option to "provide moral support" for your followers, as well as adding more side story events and the usual balance tweaks and bug fixes
- Brok the InvestiGator 1.4.0 now has local CoOp support, allowing up to 4 players to take on the game's fights and puzzles together. Many subsequent updates refined this mode and introduced other bug fixes, bringing the game up to version 1.5.1 which is also available on Mac and Linux.
- Warsim 1.1 - adds over 20 new throneroom encounters, a new type of shrine that can be encountered while exploring as well as fixes various bugs
- The Showdown in the Badlands Hearthstone Expansion is now live, bringing over 140 new cards featuring new excavate and quickdraw keywords. The game also had a few smaller updates with balance changes. Finally, The sixth season of Battlegrounds has been announced, which will bring purchasable spells to the tavern, 3 new heros as well as over 30 new minions. The season is due to begin on December 5th. Separately, the Hearthstone access mod is also being updated to keep up with the game. It also now has support for the bulk pack opening feature introduced by Blizzard earlier. And lastly yet again separately from the game itself and the access mod, ArenaTracker - a utility which can help with picking the best cards for the arena mode, is now accessible.
- Forza Motorsport update 2.0 introduced the new Las Marina track, started the next set of builders cup events featuring new car prizes, as well as beginning the next batch of weekly car pass deliveries. It also introduces many bug fixes, including to the narration feature which should now read more when it wasn't reading enough and less when it was reading too much.
- Mortal Kombat 1 also received an update with balance changes, which also introduced Omniman - the first of the upcoming DLC characters. The second season of Invasions has also begun.
- 3 new card games have been added to the QuentinC Playroom: - Fives and threes, - Golf - 1000
- Wave of the Undead 3.4.0 introduces a level creator, allowing anyone to make a campaign for the game which can then be shared with friends, or even submitted to developers for possible inclusion in community level packs.
- Aurora 4x 2.2 is a massive update with changes to every system of the game. This includes a new super nova feature, a few new events and much more. You can read the full changelog here on the Aurora 4x forum.
- Land of Livia 4.0 is a major release prepping the game for an exciting future, starting with a redesigned stats and item systems, balancing changes and bug fixes (including to VoiceOver labels)
- Corruption of Champions 2 patch 06.27 introduces a new explorable area - the windy peaks, as well as a few new enemy encounters and exploration events.
- The Classic Six Dragons mud has had a few small help file changes and will now have random events that occasionally happen on weekends, doing things like multiplying XP gained.
- November ALter Aeon updates completed transition to the new item composition system, which resulted in many changes to the game's crafting system, plus the usual area updates.
- ErionMud has had a major update introducing a faith system. Becoming a believer of a diety can unlock many new quests, rewards including new spells, skills and items and much more as you rank up in the faith system.
Other news
- Sony has announced that a remaster of The last of Us Part II is coming to PS5 on January 19th. In addition to taking advantage of the PS5's graphical, audio and controller features, the game will also include a new "no return" roguelike style mode with unlock able characters, a guitar freeplay mode, cut levels and developer commentary, as well as bringing over all of the accessibility enhancements introduced by the Part 1 remaster including audio descriptions. You can read the full announcement here on the Playstation blog.
- Voting has now opened for GAConf Awards 2023, an award ceremony intending to Show the best and most accessible games. Frequent readers of the digest will find many recognizable games have been short listed. If you have a favorite game, be sure to show your support for it by casting your vote!
Authors
This edition of the digest has been written by:
- Piotr Machacz (pitermach@dragonscave.space on Mastodon)
- Jack jackf723@mastodon.social on Mastodon