Tag: inspired
How to manage uncertainty with Habi and Inspired Capital on TechCrunch Live
I’m excited to announce the co-founder and CEO of Habi, Brynne McNulty Rojas, is joining me on an extra-special edition of TechCrunch Live on April 12 at 12 p.m. PDT. Brynne leads the hot real estate startup out of Colombia, which reached unicorn status last year with a $200 million raise. The topic is uncertainty. […]
How to manage uncertainty with Habi and Inspired Capital on TechCrunch Live by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch
One of John Wick 4’s most exhilarating moments was inspired by a top-down indie shooter
Somehow, the ultra-violent Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie is clearly inspired by Resident Evil 4 – here’s proof
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a roaring carnival of witless bullshit. There are things in this movie which defy any sane classification: simply saying them out loud makes you seem as if you’re confessing to some crime or other. At about 15 separate points during the movie, your mind will whisper ‘can everyone else see this, or have I totally snapped? Am I dead?’. In the Silent Hill 2 remake, when James finds that tape, this will be what he sees.
There’s a section with a swimming pool which is, and I’m not being over-the-top here, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Pooh – PIGLET – drives a BMW Estate, which sounds mundane (where’s he going after he kills all these people, the driving range?) until you say it out loud and wonder if you’ve accidentally seen something only the crew of the Event Horizon were meant to. Go on, say it out loud. ‘Pooh drives a BMW Estate’. Over someone’s head, granted. Does that make what I’m saying better? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU ON ABOUT, MATE. See it immediately.
While you’re there, after everyone in the cinema has sliced open their thumbs into a petri dish to prove to each other, despite their life choices, that they are real people, you may begin to notice what seems like a pervasive influence on Blood and Honey: Resident Evil 4. Again, that sounds bizarre, but we’re here now. Go with it.
Barotrauma, the sci-fi submarine sim inspired by Dwarf Fortress and fever dreams, gets a full release
Quick question: what’s scarier than the incomprehensible depths of our oceans, where totally undocumented sea life roams in a life of perpetual darkness and where human life is simply impossible? That, but on an alien planet’s frozen moon, whose topside we also haven’t documented and is ram-packed with unspeakable, harmful things. And what’s scarier than both of those things? Being stuck in a submarine with other people.
That’s the setup, more or less, to hardcore multiplayer sci-fi submarine survival sim Barotrauma. You and a team of 15 other players – or AI, since there is a singleplayer mode too – descend the depths of Jupiter’s moon Europa, keep the sub operational, moving between underwater biomes to complete missions and fend of the aforementioned unspeakable, harmful things. You communicate. You delegate. You each work diligently in your assigned roles, and you complete the missions as a team.
I mean, presumably that’s happened at least once since Bartrauma released in Early Access in 2019. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but even though it’s got over 2.5 million players, I think it’s safe to say that 99.99991% of play sessions have not turned out that way. In reality, Barotrauma is a game about the most outlandish, chaotic and hilarious sabotage, subterfuge and skullduggery ever committed below sea level. It’s got a little bit of Among Us about it in that way, if Among Us was a grindhouse horror where crewmates injected each other with deadly parasitic viruses that paralysed and muted them.
Now that the full release has arrived, players have the chance to check out new tutorials and and a totally overhauled campaign, replete with a scripted event system. Like there wasn’t already enough to worry about down here with some guy singing to you while simultaneously holding a shotgun to your face, and giant shrimp-like creatures destroying the deck below you.
Graphics and environments have also been polished considerably over the course of Barotraum’s Early Access phase, leading to a V1.0 that looks genuinely unsettling, moody, and distinct from just about anything else out there. Light and darkness are the key theme here, visually: light is a rare commodity down in the waters of a frozen moon, and awful, awful things happen outside it.
Barotrauma’s community is closely involved in the game’s development, all the way along. Lead developer Joonas Rikkonen had been toying with the idea of making a totally unscripted, sandbox-style experience in the vein of Dwarf Fortress, and first put a playable public build live way back in 2016. It was the encouraging player response to that build that led to Rikkonen taking a job at Finnish studio Fakefish to continue its development.
Barotrauma’s Discord community is now more than 30,000 members strong. Their feedback has shaped the game over the last four years, and they’ve been active in expanding on the game’s framework, too. Fakefish made the source code and all the dev tools used to create the game available to that community, which has spawned quite the modding community. Its Steam Workshop has 60,000+ different entries. I’ve yet to find one that stops me being terribly frightened. Fakefish have included one of those player-made ships in this 1.0 release of the base game, as part of a community competition.
Also new to players who haven’t submerged since v1.0 arrived are explorable outposts, wrecks of other submarines and improved alien ruins. There are more monsters and missions out there, and character progression goes deeper thanks to a talent system. Barotrauma’s full 1.0 release is available now on Steam.
Sons of the Forest: 5 horror films you didn’t know inspired the game
Sons of the Forest may not come with a grainy VHS filter (yet), but the moment you fire it up it’s clear this Steam Early Access survival game has one foot in the 80s. The menu theme sounds like it’s ripped straight from a mid-tier VHS movie, the sort that was made to sate rental-hungry video owners.
Its influences are, however, more specific than general 80s shlock. The Forest and, by extension, Sons of the Forest, owe a lot to 80s shockers like the infamous Cannibal Holocaust. Oh, and Disney – but we’ll get to that later. So let’s dive into five movies that, as confirmed by developer Endnight, Sons of the Forest wouldn’t have existed without.
An infamous video nasties, Cannibal Holocaust is one of the first found footage films and was muddying reality long before The Blair Witch Project. It follows the story of four film makers who head into the Amazon Rainforest in an effort to make a documentary about cannibal tribes. They never come back, but their footage is found and it doesn’t tell a pretty story.
The Real-Life Hauntings that Inspired Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Creed 3 and the anime that inspired it
I was raped by David Carrick – and Sarah Everard’s mother inspired me to come forward
Phil Tippett Inspired This Week’s Poker Face—and Here Are All the Awesome Creations
Have you been keeping up with the best superhero show on television? We’re talking, of course, about Poker Face, the episodic detective show created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne. Lyonne plays Charlie, a woman with a secret ability to detect a lie, which Johnson himself admitted that, yes, i…