Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yay. Blurst’s latest in their plan to release four-hundred and twenty-two games this week hits. It’s Crane Wars. We’ve talked about it before but it’s a crane-physics game with a pleasingly-fun and even affectionately satirical Union members versus dirty-scabs scenario. You make your towers, as quickly as you can, topping them off with a top part to finish them. Alternatively, lob buildings or trucks at the scabs at work across the street. Or both. Real physics, agreeable mayhem and a video of it in play below…
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a tale to warm the cockles of your dark, bitter heart. Lest you’ve not been following the remarkable fallout to Jim’s quickie post concerning the recent demo of Derek Smart’s latest indie opus, its sprawling comments thread has become something of a biblical epic of hate, love, redemption and disagreements about where people’s arms appear when they swim. Initially, the thread was as miserably expected: a few of our local Grumpymen took an immediate pop at Derek and his games, labouring under the delusion that his… ah, spotty reputation as a gentleman of the internet gave them free reign to insult him here. He responded in kind, as he is known to do. We sighed, and deleted most of the shouting, because we like to keep a happy house here. We also stocked our desks with caffeinated beverages and salted snacks, in preparation for a long night of troll castration. And then, a remarkable thing happened….
Read the rest of this entry »

So I had planned to have a Wot I Think on Prototype up this evening, but my efforts have been stymied by The Worst Boss Fight Of All Time (TM) leaving me too tired and annoyed to celebrate the good stuff about the game. Tomorrow morning, when I am fresh and cheerful again… Until then, I shall type quickly but stoutly upon smaller subjects. First up, the demo/benchmark tool for the much-delayed Streetfighter IV PC. These curious 400Mb contain no playable code, but instead a technical demonstration of how the man-slapping opus looks and runs, complete with framerates should you care about such a thing. It’s surprisingly pretty, I found – colourful yet detailed, and with a real physicality despite being a 2D wolf in 3D sheep’s clothing. Seems to run very smoothly on my machine too, but then I do currently have a PC that could eat God. /Me flexes. Anyway, it’s all yours from here. Oh – turn off Vsync, or you’ll max out at 60fps.

Even before we work out how to play the bally thing, we know Backgammon is a good game.
Read the rest of this entry »

The chaps at SOE must be rather pleased with themselves. Their free-to-play-except-with-micropay-stuff MMO Free Realms has had three million registrations in just seven weeks. Not bad going, even by free-to-play standards. “We are pleased to be able to provide such a vast, in-depth and, most importantly, fun world to an average of 500,000 new gamers per week,” said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment. I bet you are, John. Those are the big numbers.

The game seems to have attracted folks with neat cartoon presentation and its kid-friendly demeanor, but it’ll be interesting to see how many of those millions stick around over time. I’m assuming some of you guys are included in that colossal figure? Anyone care to share their impressions? Any thoughts on long term appeal?

This went live last week, but I wanted to give it a chance to stabilize before linking. Home of the Underdogs is back. Kind of. It’s a revival, which plans to pick up where the last king of abandonware left off, and push forward with lots of new functionality (user reviews, additions, etc). Home of the Underdogs has been sadly missed since it went bankrupt in February. While existing well into a legal grey area, it was a singular historical resource which any lover of the medium really has to adore. Go bookmark it, eh?

Of course, there’s a little internet drama around it.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’re smart people at RPS. We can spot when we’re being hoodwinked. And all credit to Nimbly Games for organising players of their game, Altitude, into emailing us to write about it. It worked. You can stop now.

Altitude is a multiplayer 2D plane combat game, as cartoony as you can get, letting players engage in online aerial battles that have more in common with a old side-scrolling shooter than with Crimson Skies.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s good to start the week with something strange. How fortunate, then, that we have Somnia. This peculiar little 3D puzzle game contains one of those little moments of realisation – “Oh, that’s how it works” – which makes you smile, because it’s different, and so clever. If you don’t want that to be spoiled you should follow the link and play the game. Otherwise click onwards for more thoughts.
Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t notice my Eurogamer interview with Chris Delay at Introversion had been published, until the weekend. It is, strictly speaking, 360-related, in talking about their open-development process with Darwinia+ for Live Arcade. They’re basically showing a load of internal documents and papers from interactions with Microsoft. To quote Chris: “They suggested a few guidelines and we went ahead and pretty quickly stepped way over them and started publishing confidential reports with classified ‘Do Not Publish Outside Microsoft’ written on them”. There’s a lot about Introversion more generally as a company too. The interview was done the day after Chris had posted the 2008 in hindsight piece noting how close Introversion had come to closing and we talk a lot about that and the possibility of a “zombie Introversion”. Which would be sad, in many ways. Go read.

RPS chum Robin “Roburky” Burkinshaw is fast becoming something of a celebrity PC gaming diarist, with his recent Sims 3 diary blog attracting enormous attention from across the gaming sphere, and even from mainstream media. We, however, asked him to write something that definitely won’t get into Entertainment Weekly: the journal of a Dwarf Fortress campaign. What he came back with gives you some idea of just how insanely detailed the Dwarf Fortress world really is, and how much an incomplete simulation is likely to land hapless dwarves in trouble. Tales of fish dissectors, rivers of vomit, and doomed architectural improvisation follow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for sitting and compiling a list of interesting gaming reading from across the week, and finding myself remembering that the chatter by games journalists about a fall in standards is just ludicrous. We’d have been lucky to get pieces as splendid and varied as the ones gathered here in a whole year in the early nineties, let alone in a single fucking week. Wouldn’t it be good if someone would admit that games writing has never, ever been better than it is right here, right now? Wouldn’t it? WOULDN’T IT? AS IF A FUCKING TYPO IN A GAMESPOT PREVIEW MATTERS AT ALL IN THE LARGER SCALE OF CUNTING THINGS AND… oh, I better not include a link to a pop song.

• I suspect I shouldn’t have kept this for the Sunday Papers. Roburky has been writing an alternately hilarious and genuinely heart-breaking diary of playing as a homeless single-parent family in the Sims 3. If you haven’t picked up on it from any of the places its been linked to, you should go catch up now. It’s almost certainly going to end up the premier piece of popular games reportage of the year.

Read the rest of this entry »