Arma 2 mod Day Z has completely obsessed Jim and thousands of others. But what makes it so enthralling? Read →
We'll have a lot to say about Diablo III over the next few days. Keep up to date with our celebrations of clicking, fury at DRM, and discussions of our favourite flavours of jelly. Read →
Is Paradox's new fantasy strategy up to scratch? Adam dons his magical robe and teleports ahead. Read →
ALSO: John's Dad In A Dungeon, Why An MMOFPS Was Born From The Ashes Of Stalker 2
Adventure at a price
By John Walker on May 21st, 2012 at 9:00 pm.
Former AGS adventure, The Journey Down, has now had its first (and so far only) chapter remade and re-released as a commercial product. How does it do going from retro-pixel adventure to something more modern, voiced and priced? Here’s Wot I Think.
By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 6:00 pm.
EA understand indie games, they really do, that’s why they have their very own indie bundle. They also understand crowd-funding, or at least they understand that it’s becoming a force that they must reckon with, one way or another. This could go one of two ways. Either Kickstarter HQ is about to be breached by corporate assault drones, or all the profits from FIFA 13 will be pledged to the Kick it Forward scheme. Or perhaps there is a third way. Perhaps EA will waive its cut of sales on Origin for 90 days if the game in question was crowd-funded.
By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 5:00 pm.
Back in February 2008 when Kieron first wrote that Gearbox were working on an Aliens game, you’d have had to be the sort of maniac who believes Prometheus is a sensible name for a hubris-invoking scientific expedition to propose that the game wouldn’t be released until February 2013. Today, any such maniacs can be released from the padded cells that hold them because it turns out they were right all along and it’s the rest of us who are mad for not invoking The Walker Principle with enough gusto. Randy Pitchford has today taken to the airwaves and declared that Colonial Marines will be released on February 12, 2013. There’s also a new trailer to get you all excited about something that is happening more than a half a year from now.
By Alec Meer on May 21st, 2012 at 4:00 pm.
Remember, remember the 6th of Julember. For that is the date that the two-day Rezzed game show, orchestrated by Eurogamer with lots of help from the nerds at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, kicks off in my current home town of Brighton, UK. It’s also my girlfriend’s birthday, which means I won’t be at the show until Saturday July 7th. And that I will very sadly miss the most recently-announced session, Stainless Games talking about how they’re bringing back Carmageddon with the forthcoming Reincarnation, and how/why they’re using Kickstarter to do it. A public chat about crowdsourced game funding only makes sense in these rapid-fire Kickstarted times.
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By Alec Meer on May 21st, 2012 at 3:00 pm.
This may well be an example of the dread medium known as UnNews, but I post it purely because it at least allays fears that the forthcoming extended cut of Mass Effect 3, which fleshes out the game’s notoriously damp-squibby ending, will simply be a montage of still images with captions like ‘Garrus Vakarion retired to found the first inter-planetary branch of Gregg’s Pasties’ and ‘Tali discovered her mask had a hole in it all along and she had only 2.8 seconds left to live. She spent them playing Minesweeper.’
Instead, it transpires that many of Mass Effect’s voice cast have returned to the studio to record new lines of dialogue. One of these is Lance ‘Bishop’ Hendriksen, who offered perhaps the most succint yet accurate encapsulation of just why the internet lost its rag a couple of months ago.
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By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 2:00 pm.
Tiny Troopers, which had previously been announced as a cleverphone game, will be bringing its Cannon Fodder inspired japes to PC and Mac later in the year. From Finnish studio Kukouri, the game adds mid-mission upgrades, inventory drops and specialists to the core of its spiritual forefather, which was, in the developers’ words: “commanding little soldiers that die easily on the battlefield and get promoted if they survive. That’s it.” Sounds about right to me. Hopefully the control system will be tailored to a non-touch interface and there will be a giant graveyard to contain all the Tiny Troopers who die under my command. As there’s no trailer for Tiny Troopers yet, below you shall find Cannon Fodder’s music video.
By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 1:00 pm.
Ludum Dare is the gift that keeps on giving, the jam that keeps on jamming. The latest jar full of sweet goodness to spread all over your monitor is Gravity, picked out by the observant folk over at IndieGames. A tiny island floats above lava, which is rather silly of it, and blocks slowly fall from above. If they hit the island, all life ceases to exist immediately and the final score is tallied, which is what happens when you die. A leaderboard appears. At least here the objective is clear; survive as long as possible. This is achieved by shooting the blocks and either deflecting them into the lava with your bullets, or shoving them off the island once they crash. They’re heavy, you see, and they’ll drag you down if you’re not careful. Play in your browser now.
By Alec Meer on May 21st, 2012 at 12:00 pm.
Seems a trifle odd to be saying this given 2009′s foremost angry internet man-generator was the perceived too-soon release of a sequel to Left 4 Dead, but Valve’s zombathons seem to me to have been left a little fallow of late. Team Fortress 2′s ongoing transformation into QVC, Portal 2′s awards-hogging and fever-pitch speculation about Half Life has been the order of the day for the last couple of years. You could – aheh- say that Left 4 Dead has been – aheh – left for dead. Aheh-heh-heh. Just my little joke, there.
Something is suddenly stirring, however (editor’s note – I really need more elegant alternatives to ‘however’ and ‘though’, which I know full well are often seen to be cludgy writing. Suggestions?), and it comes not from Valve, but from Payday: The Heist devs and recent Starbreeze acquisition Overkill.
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By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 11:00 am.
The fancy remake of AGS point and clicker The Journey Down: Over the Edge is now available. It’s certainly a looker, with a style very much its own, and John proclaimed that the original was “a point-and-clicker that really understood the genre”. The story of gas station owner Bwana and his attempts to escape debt and explore a forbidden region known as The Edge also seemed to please John, so much so that he’s been sitting on top of a copy of the extended and beautified first chapter and growling at anyone who tries to play it before him. Expect to read his thoughts on the game later today. In the meantime, look upon this launch trailer.
By Alec Meer on May 21st, 2012 at 10:00 am.
What… where…. Who? Videowhats? I’ve been away for a week (pleasure not work for once, although the weather did its best to undermine that) without internet teats to suckle upon and I currently have about as much idea of what’s going in the land of videogames as I do about ballroom dancing. While the RPS Hivemind straps me into the Rapid Retraining Device, I’ll leave you with news that Dead Island devs Techland’s next, and entirely who do the voodoo-free, offering will be turning up in a mere nine days’ time. After the dark, divisive concept album that was Dead Island, Mad Riders seems to be Techland’s equivalent of the ninety second punk single. It’s got quadbikes. They are ridden. Madly. Basically, it looks like Mario Kart but with crash helmets and no magic shells.
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By Adam Smith on May 21st, 2012 at 9:11 am.
I was comfortable in being incorrect in my predictions that Far Cry 3 would involve some form of free roaming excellence coupled with a thousand irritations, like a sleek engine attached to a ship of fools, grinding down the tracks, lopsided and soon to be derailed. What I didn’t expect was quite so much railroading in the game, or at least in this segment of the game. In a clip found over at Gametrailers, a man named Jason rescues a lady from a burning building in a scene that resembles a section of Uncharted 3 taking place in first person far more than it resembles any of my predictions regarding the eventual shape of Far Cry 3.
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