Latest news with #AWayOut
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
Far north suburban police chief retires after nearly 30 years on the job
ROUND LAKE BEACH, Ill. (WGN) — Round Lake Beach Police Chief Wayne Wilde announced his retirement Wednesday afternoon. Wilde, who has been with the Round Lake Beach Police Department for 28 years, said it has been his 'greatest honor to serve this outstanding community.' His retirement will become official April 17. 'I would like to thank the men and women of the Round Lake Beach Police Department for their hard work and dedication, and to the RL Fire Protection District and CenCom E911 telecommunicators, who together as a team, keep the citizens we serve safe,' Wilde said. Landscaper helps save driver trapped in submerged vehicle in Naperville He was hired in 1997 as a patrol officer before being promoted to sergeant in October 2007. He was promoted to commander in October 2014 before being named Deputy Chief in December 2016. Six years later, Wilde was named chief of police after former chief Gil Rivera retired in July 2022. 'We are deeply grateful to Wayne for his many years of dedicated service to the Village of Round Lake Beach,' Mayor Scott Nickles said. 'He's been an outstanding officer, commander, and chief. His expertise, dedication, leadership, and incredible personality will be greatly missed at Village Hall. We wish him all the best in whatever path he chooses next.' Throughout his service, Wilde was tapped to serve as the department's Field Training Officer, Baton and O.C. Spray Instructor, Firearms Instructor, Bicycle Officer, Emergency Vehicle Operations Instructor, Gang Officer, Juvenile Officer, served as the Law Enforcement Liaison with the Lake County Health Department 'A Way Out' program and as a member of the Warrant Service Team. He has also served as a Field Training Supervisor, Dash Camera/Body Camera Coordinator, Investigations Commander, Patrol Commander, and Police Fleet Manager. Suburban man charged with bringing gun into O'Hare Airport Wilde is a graduate of the Northwestern University School of Police Staff and Command in 2010, Police Executive Role in the 21st Century in 2015, FBI National Academy in 2017, and has a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from Winona State University (MN). 'I'd like to issue a special thank you to my wife and children, who understood the sacrifices I had to make throughout my career; I could not have done this job for this long without their love and support,' Wilde said. 'I have many fond memories of Round Lake Beach, but my fondest memory is getting to experience and be a part of the growing bond between our community and the police department throughout the years.' Round Lake Beach Police will swear in a new police chief at the April 21 board meeting. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The National
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Split Fiction and the best co-op games to play with a partner in 2025
These days, multiplayer gaming means connecting to the internet and playing with friends and strangers worldwide. However, that hasn't always been the case. Multiplayer gaming once meant being squeezed on a couch at your best friend's house, each with a controller in hand, likely for an unreasonable amount of time. The two types of multiplayer gaming have different names, with the "in real life" style being called co-op gaming, while the newer iteration is dubbed online multiplayer gaming. As more games have relied on online gaming, co-op gaming has been picked up once again by indie studios to create a fun, fulfilling experience. Last week, a new co-op game was released that has been scoring high with gamers and reviewers, with many saying it could be the best game of the year. Here, we look at that game and other co-op games worth picking up in 2025 to play with friends and loved ones. With its release, Swedish game design studio Hazelight has become the expert on co-op games. Under the guidance of Lebanese-Swedish director Josef Fares, the studio has produced some of the best experiences in the genre. Their latest game, Split Fiction, is about two writers – one penning a sci-fi and the second writing a fantasy – who both get sucked into virtually constructed versions of the stories they wrote. In Split Fiction, players take control of one of the two characters and attempt to survive as they are flung from one story to another. Each segment of the game is a homage to something from gaming, film or literature, which presents a wonderfully complete experience when brought together. Many who played the game have praised it, including pop star Abel Tesfaye (formerly known as The Weeknd) who posted on X: 'Split Fiction might be game of the year so far". The first of Hazelight's successes with co-op gaming was A Way Out, a game in which two inmates must work together to escape their prison sentence. The game requires a level of coordination and understanding between the players in order to traverse levels. The game also features several minigames such as Connect Four, darts, horseshoes, spearfishing, wheelchair wheelies and exercises such as chin-ups, dips, push-ups, sit-ups and bench presses. While Hazelight and Fares would perfect the formula with their later games, It Takes Two and Split Fiction, A Way Out shows all the many ways they experimented in making the experience as fun as it could be. Hazelight's second success in the genre was the winner of Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. It Takes Two also won Best Family Game and Best Multiplayer Game at the same ceremony, showing just how well received it was. In the game, two people going through a divorce are transformed into two small beings that must navigate their barn and all the inanimate objects that have suddenly sprung to life, creating obstacles for them to overcome. It Takes Two was praised for its fantastic and fresh approach to co-op gaming, but more importantly, for its honest way of presenting the difficulties of communication in a relationship. The couple in the game love one another but have experienced issues that made them grow apart. During the game, they speak openly about why they grew apart, allowing insight into what it takes to keep a loving relationship healthy. Running a kitchen between two people is already an arduous task – who cooks, who cleans, who delivers the food to the counter? In Overcooked 2, these responsibilities must be shared and divided smartly. But it doesn't end there. The game doesn't just up the ante with more orders or more complex recipes, it also creates havoc with moving platforms, earthquakes and meteor showers. It can get messy, in more ways than one. Relationships are tested and stretched when playing Overcooked 2. All you need to imagine is the heated temperament of chef Gordon Ramsey, multiply that by two, and you'll get an idea of the experience playing this game. It's also extremely fun. Less stressful than running a kitchen is the process of moving out of a house ... right? In Moving Out 2, two players run a furniture moving company. Jobs are allotted not only in the local town but also across space and time. The concept might sound dreary; what's fun about moving furniture from inside the house to a truck? Well, the furniture could become unruly. The floors could start moving. A large item might need to be catapulted through the window. There are arguments to be had still, and methods of extracting an item will be ridiculed if not outright refused, but there will be a massive sense of accomplishment once all the furniture is moved out successfully.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Jaw-Dropping Cooperative Game Lets Writers Run Wild
It seemed obvious after the first couple of hours of volleying frantic choreography instructions with my pal that Split Fiction will go down as one of the most beloved co-op games of this generation. There are so many moments in this split-screen adventure to savor with a companion, so many spectacles that make you pick your eyes up off the floor, that it's hard to knock its shortcomings. The latest title from the Swedish developer Hazelight (It Takes Two, A Way Out) is a manic mash-up of science fiction and fantasy that brings together space marines, trolls, cyberninjas, dragons, robots, magical cats and other stock figures. Over eight chapters, players hopscotch among settings to help two aspiring authors escape a computer simulation that has turned their imaginations against them. From the beginning, Zoe, a fantasy writer, and Mio, a science fiction writer, are presented as a classic odd couple — the former is bubbly and optimistic, the latter curt and wary. When they first run into each other in an elevator of the tech company Rader Publishing, Zoe tries to lure Mio into a light conversation only to be rebuffed. The two then meet the company's eponymous founder, who says they're about to take part in a pilot program that will allow them to live out a simulation of their creative work that will then be repackaged for sale to the public. Zoe embraces the proposition while Mio bristles. When the time comes for the writers to climb onto platforms that sprout enveloping pods connecting them to a machine, Mio refuses and gets in a physical altercation with Rader, who inadvertently pushes her into Zoe's pod. The mishap causes a glitch in the system. Early stages find the pair in a bucolic forest and a neon-lit cyberpunk city. In the forest level, the two work together to solve environmental puzzles by shape-shifting (Zoe transforms into a fairy and an ambling tree, Mio into a gorilla and an otter). The 'Blade Runner'-esque city sports some fantastic vehicle sequences that find Mio and Zoe dashing about on motorcycles, zipping up walls and over surfaces bedazzled by lights and glowing advertisements. All of this is accentuated by camerawork that moves smoothly from angle to angle, hinting at some of the astonishing kinetic sequences to come. Spread across the levels are incandescent globes that whisk the pair into side stories featuring some especially memorable moments. One of my favorites sees Zoe and Mio transformed into rainbow-farting pigs. Let's just say that by the end of that tale, which recreates one of Zoe's earliest storytelling efforts, my friend John and I were beside ourselves over its final, culinary twist. Another gorgeous side story, which John pointed, out may owe something to the famous Daffy Duck cartoon 'Duck Amuck,' finds the women — rendered as pencil sketches in a notebook — at the mercy of a child artist. I've always believed that some of the most potent sensory pleasures video games can offer are sharp transitions between radically different environments. Split Fiction delivers that in spades. While absorbing the many play styles thrown our way, we kept a loose tally of game influences: Contra, Marble Madness, Metroid, Portal, Mario, Halo and more. John and I were mindful of Split Fiction's penchant for pastiche, groaning when the inevitable Dark Souls allusion popped up. The game's obvious character arcs did little to move us; we had no trouble figuring out the tragic back story behind one character, or what the villain would do in the final chapter. We also found it ironic that a polished piece of entertainment indulging in some of the most obvious tropes — big guns, big swords, big dragons! — was structured around a story of a big corporation trying to steal ideas from creators. Over text, John noted, 'The game is a blast but, in the end, doesn't it commit the same sin as its antagonist? Corralling the various mechanics of past games and representing them as something made radical by the moniker of cultural progress.' By the penultimate level, however, our nit-picking grew silent. Piloting a two-headed insect through various platforming challenges was an experience unlike any we had encountered before. We were floored by the final level, which crosscuts between realities in ways so sublime that even as we gushed we admitted that an entire game like this would be too much. As far as major big-tent games that desperately want to please everyone go, Split Fiction is one of the best I've played in a long time. Take that, Astro Bot.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Split Fiction Hands-On: A Fun Co-Op Adventure to Grow (and Test) Friendships
What's better than playing a game as a cyberpunk ninja, shapeshifting ape, flying dragon and hopping hot dog? Playing it with a friend on the couch next to you -- and relying on each other to move from one wacky, earnest adventure to another. In a warehouse in Hollywood, California, I sat down next to a stranger and played a few hours of EA's Hazelight Studios' next game, Split Fiction. By the end of our session, which capped off with a particularly grueling pinball boss, we high-fived and shook hands. Bonded through narrow escapes and clutch wins, we were no longer strangers. Collaboration has been the appeal of Hazelight's prior games, its 2018 debut A Way Out and its award-winning 2021 follow-up It Takes Two. But whereas those games centered on well-established relationships -- between outlaw brothers and a married couple on the brink of divorce, respectively -- Split Fiction imitates my journey: Two strangers, Zoe and Mio, are shoved together and must rely on each other to escape a series of progressively outlandish challenges. Hazelight has built a reputation for inventive mechanics in its cooperative sections and moving stories. The former make up a lot of the trailer showcases and memorable gameplay moments from past games. From my few hours playing, I can tell that Split Fiction will have a lot of those, too. The studio spends tons of time developing one-off experiences that feel cinematic, Hazelight founder and Split Fiction director Joseph Fares told me. "We have scenes [in Split Fiction] with dragons that goes on for ten minutes where they have big dragons because [the players] evolve the dragons -- and just one dragon took, like, 18 months to create," Fares said, emphasizing that Hazelight doesn't want these moments to overstay their welcome. "If you look at a great movie, you have a great scene, you don't repeat that scene, because it takes the edge out of it." While these sequences are flashy, the overarching story is just as important. Each game Fares and his teams have made has a different thematic focus regarding the relationship between the two player characters, even going back to the pre-Hazelight game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. "Every [one of our] games has a word to it: Brothers is 'sorrow,' A Way Out is 'trust,' It Takes Two is 'collaboration,' and this one's about friendships," Fares said, describing Split Fiction as a "buddy movie" featuring two entirely different strangers who grow closer as you play. "We're going to go deep into their trauma, their back stories and learn more about them." My preview kicked off at the start of Split Fiction, when Mio and Zoe show up to the same call for writers to come see their creative stories visualized by a corporation, Rader Publishing, and its cutting-edge virtual reality pod technology. But when Mio gets unnerved by the company's exploitative vibes, she stumbles into Zoe's pod -- and players are off to the races, playing through stages made of each character's genre stories. Naturally, this leads to learning the inspiration behind Mio's exciting science fiction yarns and Zoe's cozy fantasy stories. Hazelight uses this premise to put players in a roulette of scenarios, and what I saw ran a wide gamut of co-op platforming mainstays, from jumping between cybercars to shapeshifting through fantastical lakes and valleys to hopping around a grill as a hot dog (the sillier vignettes are optional side stories). With several co-op games under Hazelight's belt, Fares prided his developers not just on how much they've developed their technical tools but also in refining the variety of mechanics (that is, the unique abilities given to players in each stage) to be fun but not overstay their welcome -- which are arguably the studio's signature elements. "That is [the] tricky part with a Hazelight game: finding these mechanics that kind of feed each other and help each other and complement each other in a great way," Fares said. Hazelight has gotten better at the technical side of things too, Fares said, even if players don't see it. "I think that people forget about our games is that we have to render two screens at the same time," he noted. Still, he assured that the game will maintain 60 frames per second on consoles, even with the more complex sequences Hazelight dreamed up. As another journalist at the preview pointed out to me, Split Fiction changes these challenges as you play. In the first few chapters, Zoe and Mio separately progress through their own slices of levels, but in the later game they're actively using these mechanics to aid and rely on each other -- for example, in the fantasy shape-changing section, I used my ape form to slam different panels that blew air currents for my partner (in fairy form) to fly through. These collaborative sections required a lot of timing and coordination, and in our chat, Fares admitted that balancing mechanics for different skill levels of players is "kind of like the hardest part." Reader, I believed it: The aforementioned pinball boss, in which my partner clung to walls like Samus' morph ball while I bounced them around with giant flippers, was one of my hardest gaming challenges in recent memory. I white-knuckled through to the end after many deaths due to missed timing on my or my partner's part. While we sealed our successful partnership with a high-five at the end of our session, I could imagine lots of partner pairs straining to finish these challenging chapters -- which hopefully won't fray their out-of-game friendships in ways that other tough co-op games like Overcooked tend to do. For creators, there's always a hidden temptation to make stories about creation, which results in a range of self-reflective commentaries from novel to navelgazing. Thankfully, Split Fiction seems more interested in using creativity as a lens for exploring the relationship between Zoe and Mio. From the outset, the game's heroines voice traditional critiques of each other's favorite genres: Mio doesn't understand the cozy fantasy Zoe writes in, while Zoe dismisses Mio's action-packed science fiction. Given my preview jumped liberally between slices of the game, I didn't see much development in these attitudes, though I'd expect they'll get closer as they share more about each other as creators: "It's not only about the stories they write, it's why they write them so we will understand that their stories are related to what they have experienced in their life," Fares said. And there's some real-world topical commentary about creation, too -- specifically about AI. Early in the game, it's revealed that Rader Publishing lured Zoe, Mio and the other writers to use their immersive pod technology in order to steal all their stories. "It is a little bit of a reference to AI -- I mean, it's a big company stealing ideas, it's something we talked about when we were writing this," Fares said, adding that Hazelight began working on and writing Split Fiction three years ago. "I think most people who play it can sense it." But Fares assured me that the game's main focus is on the growing friendship between Zoe and Mio. In an industry filled with narratives about seeking revenge or slaying gods, it's a relief that Hazelight's games put the spotlight on people and how they change -- often, how they become better versions of themselves through overcoming adversity together. With the dearth of local co-op games, Hazelight's oeuvre stands out -- which Fares credits to the passion in the studio's developers. "Look, we've always had success in our games. I truly believe that when you create something out of passion, people will feel it -- they will sense the passion, they will play it, and they will love it," Fares said. Players will get their chance on March 6 when Split Fiction gets released, but it's coming with inherited goodwill as the game's predecessor It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. I'll admit I was surprised that a co-op game won such high honors, but Fares is confident in Split Fiction's chances next year: "Why not? I don't see why it can't win again."
