By Tim Stone on June 14th, 2009.
As the night sky pales over a dusty plateau near Damascus, two Wolf Land Rovers and two Jackal patrol vehicles parked in the lee of a ruined wall, start their engines and move off in search of the enemy. My first Combat Mission Shock Force: British Forces battle is underway. Wish me luck.
By RPS on June 14th, 2009.
Apologies we’re a little late with this weekend’s round-up of agreeably-priced electric videogames: the Hivemind was busy fighting squirrels in the park when bargainmeister LewieP‘s article arrived in our inbox. Damned squirrels ruin everything. But there is yet time to indulge in one of these splendid bargains…
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By Jim Rossignol on June 13th, 2009.
IGF-entrancing Blueberry Garden has found its way into the realm of (incredibly cheap) release, and it also has a demo. The game is indeed a kind of garden: an open-ended side-scrolling world in which many different things can by made to happen. Your flying, beaked protagonist is like something out of a child’s illustrated storybook, and travels about the strangely sketched landscape interacting with the beautifully imagined flora, fauna and inanimate stuff that resides there. Developer Erik Svedang says it’s “about curiosity and exploration”, and that pretty much sums this oddity up. You’re going to want to experience this one for yourself, I think, so go and download that demo.
By Jim Rossignol on June 13th, 2009.
Games which have other, real human beings in are often bettered simply by have a human intelligence at work in them. That’s never been more true than in the indie-multiplayer building toy/game thing, Minecraft. The randomly generated levels of the single player system are interesting, and an useful way to figure out how you can build with nine types of blocks, or delete them. But it’s only when you go onto the multiplayer servers, and see the astonishing pixel-art landscapes that people have created, that you realise what a brilliant piece of software this is. Somehow, by being limited to just nine blocks, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The beauty of simplification, or something. Anyway, enough babbling from me, go sign up, explore, build. It’s awesome. That image above is from the Great Pyramid server (which seems to have public editing disabled?), but there’s a whole load of amazing projects. I quite like the floating islands servers for their amazing vistas.
By Alec Meer on June 12th, 2009.
I downloaded the demo of this cruelty ‘em up sequel yesterday, and was intending on posting about it only once I’d played it. Sadly, it sternly refuses to install on my system (I’m running Windows 7, so have no-one to blame except myself. And the hair thieves who come in the night and steal my eyebrows, obviously), so instead all I can say is this: there is a demo, which is just under a gig in size. And you should play it, because this game of imp-herding and people-murdering looks very promising. Right, I’m going to go see if I’ve still got a hard drive with poxy Vista installed somewhere…
Edit – turns out my download was borked. A new’un has installed fine – whee!
By Alec Meer on June 12th, 2009.
This = proper lovely. It’s a very short, incredibly charming browser-based puzzle game, starring that old indie staple, a cute robot. Familiar elements perhaps, but with a gorgeous, genuinely delightful execution. This is exactly the kind of game that should be played on a Friday lunchtime, leaving you with a warm and fuzzy feeling all weekend.
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By Kieron Gillen on June 12th, 2009.
Blimey. when Jim twittered “These two videos are about the most impressive videogame spectacle you’ll see this month”. He’s not entirely stupid that man. Tim Edwards of PCG found them, and they show some of the sheer scale of the bloody thing. The first video’s the biggest aerial dogfight I’ve ever seen in my life. The second is a 1000 AI battle. ArmA2 is really looking like nothing else. Just look at these…
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By Alec Meer on June 11th, 2009.
Now we’ve been all introspective with clever HL2 mod Polaris, let’s go for another HL2 mod that indulges our more bloodthirsty side. We are nothing if not balanced. The hotly-anticipated Curse is an improbably lavish total conversion, booting the Source engine into a particularly shiny and towering ancient Egypt. There are mummies. There are physics puzzles. There is a floating spectral hammer with spikes. There is a whole lot of Doom.
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By Alec Meer on June 11th, 2009.
2009 is looking very much like being the year that mods grew up. A little while back, Dear Esther nudged real emotion out of gamers’ stony hearts, and now experimental, one-room Half-Life 2 mod Radiator successfully creates a sad, beautiful sense of moment and place through minimalistic events and controls. Oh, and it also teaches basic astronomy to boot.
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By Kieron Gillen on June 11th, 2009.
The Hexmaster Tim Stone has already written that Illustrious have released Conquest! Medieval Realms. But he complained there isn’t a demo! But in the time between then and now, that’s changed in one, very important way. That there’s a demo. There’s totally a demo. And you can get it from here. It’s a considerably cut down version of the full game, containing two missions instead of the kertrillions of randomly generated ones, multiple campaigns, map editor and all that good strategy malarkey. On a score of “genre” it rates “turn based strategy”. I had a little play of the demo…
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By Kieron Gillen on June 11th, 2009.
In the realm of rumour right now, but Variety are reporting that sources have told them that the now Atari-owned Crytic are working on a Neverwinter Nights MMO for a 2011 release. In fact – I quote – “this reportedly was the primary reason Atari was interested in acquiring Cryptic late last year”. This would make three MMOs currently in development at Cryptic, which is quite the workload. This doesn’t actually surprise me that much, as last year when interviewing Jack Emmert about Champions, he talked about how it’s totally possible to make an MMO in 2 years – just not from scratch. He talks about lessons learned and knowledge, but here’s an interesting quote: “Here’s a business tip. Don’t keep building new engines. Take an engine, and improve it. Make three, four, five games out of it before you need to reboot. That’s a business thing”. More as it emerges, but it’s an interesting one to speculate on. NWN was never just a D&D RPG – level creation and virtual DMing was very much part of it. If they’re developing it, surely Cryptic will have to push this angle?
