Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Off-road Velociraptor Safari. Jetpack Brontosaurus. Minotaur China Shop. Their names are legend. In fact, the names by themselves would be legendary, but Flashbang Studios devotion to webgame randomness has won our hearts. Like, totally. Their plans for 2009 are interesting to say the least. In a Wedding Present 12-singles-in-one-year-esque move, they plan to release 6 new games in 2009, each with an eight week development window. Madness. First up is a little baby called Blush. We chat to the Flashbang Hivemind and show off the first video footage beneath the cut…
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One of 2009′s more interesting FPS projects is Assault On Dark Athena, which is both a remake of the original Chronicles Of Riddick and also its sequel. The titular Dark Athena section follows on from the first game, and takes place aboard some kind of crazy spacelane pirating merc ship, onto which the begoggled space murderer finds his way. I was lucky enough to preview this for PC Gamer UK recently, and I was fairly impressed with what I saw. GameTrailers meanwhile have managed to get even more exclusive access to the game, with a huge, two-part developer walkthrough. I’ve embedded the two videos beyond the jump for your perusal.
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That’s right, the free-to-play cartoon shooter from Digital Illusions is not dead, and is now taking beta sign ups again. You can sign up here. There’s no word on the start date to this new phase of testing, but it should hopefully have benefited from the intervening months of back end fiddling that the devs have been doing since the last session.

I’ll be genuinely interested to see this game finally claw its way to release, as I’m still mystified as to whether the shiny and approachable carapace really contains something we’ll all want to play. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I just noticed that Hemisphere Games have an alpha demo up for their IGF 2009 Seumas McNally Grand Prize nominated ambient puzzler, Osmos. The 7mb installer is here. It’s a game of cellular absorption, in which your self-propelled blob must absorb those smaller than itself to progress, while avoiding being absorbed itself. The trick is not to lose too much matter as your propel yourself. The resulting puzzle game is astonishingly soothing.

Trailer after the click.

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FEAR 2 seems like it’s been in development for over a hundred years, but at last you can play it, for at least a short while. The demo has been released today, and gives you a good 20 to 30 minutes (so long as you don’t rush like an idiot) of the spooksome world. You can get the demo here. Impressions below.

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Obama might be shutting down Guantanamo and opening negotiations with Iran, but he’s not addressing the real threat to Western society: those bally Commies. Thank goodness the lost World in Conflict expansion pack, Soviet Assault, has finally been unearthed – the true tale of this Red menace will be told at last.
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LLamasoft’s last – Space Giraffe – was a gloriously misunderstood classic. Llamasoft’s next move is to return to the scene of a previous triumph. Despite being a Pocket-PC-Port, Gridrunner++ was one of my favourite shooters of this decade. For one of the greatest all-time arcades creators to want to expand upon it is the sort of thing which makes me order in a new set of adrenaline glands from my developing-world meat-banks. I suspect I’m going need them. We talk to ungulate-in-chief Jeff Minter about it, and its PC-first release in April…
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Indiegames linked us to a lovely little prototype demo from Pieces Interactive. It’s a side-scrolling smash ‘em up called Walkie Tonky. In it you play an alien robot with telescopic legs, who, having been dropped off on the mothership, is off on a rampage. Kick and flail arms to do damage, or simply extend legs to step your way over trouble. I love the silhouette/shadow-puppet visuals on this one. There’s a direct link to the 20mb download here.

I wanted to post about this quickly. We’ve mentioned Plain Sight before, but the charming and sociopathic multiplayer action game has just entered its Open Beta. You can download its client from here. In fact, that’s what I’ve just done, as Eurogamer want me to write about it. Is it good? Let’s hope so. Because the trailer certainly is…
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It’s a name which is already on the lips of many who pine after a classical school of RPGs. But not nearly enough, for our reckoning. The last time we talked to designer Vince D. Weller, he proved himself the indie-RPG equivalent of the early Manic Street Preachers in a I-hate-dumbed-down-RPGs-more-than-Hitler sort of way. Is he similarly angry today? Not really. But he’s still more outspoken than any forty other given developers and takes time to shares his and his team’s vision of what the RPG should be.
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To tie in with the early access to the Dawn of War beta kicking off, I wrote up some impressions over at Eurogamer. I had to resist just making Tyranid impressions for my entire word-count, because I’m weak like that. The beta turns open on January 28th, but until then anyone with a Dawn of War: Soulstorm key can play. It’s now available at 75% off on steam – so about four quid – which sounds a highly acceptable price for a game we weren’t totally enamoured with. (Actually, if you’ve never played DoW at all, I think for four quid, Soulstorm is where I’d suggest you start, even without the early access stuff). Alternatively, Eurogamer are giving away 3000 (count ‘em!) keys at the weekend.

Press release beneath the cut? Sounds about right.
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