Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Okay, we’ve done the World of Goo Soundtrack before, but this is something else. Imagine if all electricity just disappeared and we were reduced to a feudal state. How would you bring back memories of that most glorious goo-featuring game? Well, you’d gather around the piano and have someone play its music. But how would they know it? That had me stumped too, until I saw on Indie Games that Sebastian Wolff has put up all the sheet piano music for the game on his site. Quickly! Print it out before electricity disappears. It could happen any second. And for those who foolishly consider me as a Cassandra, watch Mr Wolff play the songs below. It’s really rather lovely.
Read the rest of this entry »

Found via the redoubtable GameSetWatch, this excellent project combines two disparate arms of PC gaming – retro point’n'click adventuring, and the massed peopleage of MMOs. Plus it runs in a browser, so it’s all things to all PC gamers, really. Rejoice!
Read the rest of this entry »

Locked door, I hate you.
Read the rest of this entry »

What follows can’t really be said to be a review. The plan was that I would write up a “Wot I Think” discussion of Demigod for the week it was released, but that didn’t work out. Having suffered quite a bit of upset on launch, Demigod – which has been heavily patched and continues to evolve – remains troubled. The trouble is nothing to do with game design, it’s to do with the internet. A technical issue. I’ve only been able to connect to a single online game in countless hours of trying, troubleshooting, tweaking, crying. Alec seems similarly blighted. What follows is therefore is the incomplete account of an unhappy soul. But it should also be clear that I think this – in spite of it all – a brilliant game.
Read the rest of this entry »

Considering RPS’ communal adoration of James Cameron eighties action films, it’s perhaps surprising that we’ve done so little on third-person shooter Terminator: Salvation. Shooting robots… in the future. That’s our thing, surely? You give us a time machine and send us forward and we’d set upon the first robotic thing we’d see, just through our training-via-media. Anyway, maybe it’ll be good. Maybe it won’t. But one thing’s for sure – you’ll find footage of shootage beneath the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today is competition day on RPS. For the first time since it was released in 2003 the brilliant space-faring MMO Eve Online has a retail box, and to celebrate that CCP have sent us six copies to give away. Somewhat unusually for RPS competitions there is no region-constraint on any of our prizes today, so anyone may enter. If you want to find out how to win Eve Online then click onwards.
Read the rest of this entry »

Zeno Clash goes live today on Steam and Direct2Drive, and you’ll have noticed that we were really rather taken with it. The melee combat packs an extraordinary punch, accompanied by jaw-dropping world and character design. We’ve strongly recommended you buy it. But how about one better – we’ve arranged with developers Ace Team to give away ten copies of the game via Steam.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just out is this moving-picture displaying the introductory sequence to Raven’s upcoming Wolfenstein do-over. It’s a curious project, for once putting the mystical overtones of the Wolfenstein series front’n'centre, as opposed to the usual late-game burst of fantasy weirdness. This cinematic, though, aptly demonstrates its two conflicting elements – Nazi-shooting and crazy gothic magic, the latter this time to be wielded by you as well as your exaggerated foes. No in-game footage, and thus no enormous sense of how this sequel/remake (semake? Requel?) will play. But I guarantee you this: it will feature the shooting of pixel-based German men.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hoo boy, I was going to do these bi-weekly, wasn’t I? Oops. The time is definitely right, then, to do another best o’ the forum round-up – pointing you fine people at some of the more interesting goings-on over on the RPS Talk-o-Tron 3000. Squirreled away in there are news stories we’ve not had the chance to cover on the main site, community-arranged games of all sorts, and the occasional crazy man shouting into the uncaring night.

• Somehow we missed this when it happened back in February, but fortunately it’s been reposted on the forum. A clever chap’s reworked the boxart for most of the classic Lucasarts adventures into high-resolution, poster-sized images. He’s even removed the logos from several of them, painstakingly restoring the obscured areas of the image. I have no idea as to the legality of all this, but I’m going to try and get the Sam & Max one professionally printed up to decorate my worryingly bare walls with.

Read the rest of this entry »

News just in from Gamasutra. Bethesda’s Pete Hines, speaking in London, revealed that KOTOR2/NWN2 veterans Obsidian are working on a new Fallout game going under the name “Fallout: New Vegas”. The only facts we have are that it’s not Fallout Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel and doesn’t impact what the actual main Bethesda Fallout team are doing. Which does make the puzzle be exactly what it could be. My gut response guess would be something using the Fallout 3 engine, in a locale well away from where Bethesda are operating – perhaps, I dare say, in Vegas – and probably set in a different period. But that’s just nonsense I’ve just made up, obv. It could be a Fallout Slot Machine Game for all I know. The comments thread is your place for speculation.

The downloadable add-on “Survival Mode” for L4D is apparently out sometime this week, and Valve were kind enough to detail it on their L4D blog, last week. I was off being clever somewhere and so didn’t notice it until this morning. Anyway, it says that “given the extreme pace of Survival Mode, the number of zombies killed in a single round often outnumbers an entire campaign.” It also plots spawn-wave frequency against survival time to create the graph you see above. This, I suspect, is the science of game design. Full thing here.