Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Killer words, quiet skiing and the thing in the desert
Screenshot Saturday Sundays!
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It's awful windy out, so let's gather around the kitchen table and see what screenshots, gifs, and clips have been offered up by the game development community over the last few days. This week: there's something in the sands, a quiet winter break, wobbly junkyard airships and murderous vocabulary.
All hands on deck for our first vessel, a vibrant sky-bound shipment from Hyperluminal creative director Rob Madden.
Madden's airships are consciously cribbing from Scottish artist Ian McQue. But that's alright, really, because McQue's cobbled-together mechanics were probably the best bit of The Signal From Tölva's quiet open-world robot romp. Currently, in the works as an unnamed side project, Madden's ship is steering itself towards being a rather good-looking exploration and delivery trip through the skies.
Between a global lockdown on travel and it being the height of Summer, now's hardly the time for a ski trip... right?
I do quite miss skiing, mind. It's been a decade or so since I last hit the slopes, but Au fil de l'eau developer Samson Auroux's simple slope is already setting my nostalgia racing. It's nice to see a less arcadey approach to snowsports, too, opting for the quiet crunch of the snow under your skis as you tentatively path your first route down a new hillside.
Mashing keyboards with guns is nothing new (hello, Typing Of The Dead). But early access shooter Maximum Action really, really wants your enemies to eat their words.
The obvious highlight of the clip is when Szymanski backs out into Windows explorer, opens up a notepad file, and changes the words blasted out of his literary handgun - adding a lovely, personalised touch to each kill. After all, why go to the trouble of engraving your target's name on a bullet when you can blast them with their own name?
Finally - if you've been paying attention to my run at Screenshot Saturday Sundays over the last few months, you'll know nothing gets me excited more than massive structures in empty spaces.
Yahia Zakaria might just be tooling around with Unity, but I'm desperately curious to see where this track leads. Repeated pylons, vast complexes and a trembling mass watching over it all - frankly, this scene would be right at home with the far future tourism of Connor Sherlock's Walking Simulator A Month Club.