By Alec Meer on September 3rd, 2009.
Seems RPS’ noble attempts to stage a cross-continental conquest of the galaxy in the utterly splendid indie 4X game AI War is now threatened by more than our innate inability to organise ourselves. The lovely thing has just enjoyed a substantial new patch, which improves the game (and its graphics) in all kinds of ways, but likely means our savegames are now redundant. Back to the cosmic drawing board!
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By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2009.
It’s werewolf o’clock. Reader Ian Hetherington says he sent us a link to Kongregate game Vox Populi Vox Dei (a werewolf thriller) “because a combination of platforming and punching werewolves to death seems like RPS’ sort of thing.” Hrm. Well Ian, we can’t say we disagree with you. The game itself is a mixture of subtle pixel art, punching werewolves to death, tricky timing, and mild annoyance. Some of the werewolf-passing puzzles vexed me mightily, but overall I give it some stars out of an arbitrary total. Good job.
By Kieron Gillen on September 3rd, 2009.
This broke yesterday, but I thought was worth giving a nod towards. Showing some kind of developmental superspeed, Cryptic have announced the first update for Champions, which is due for late October. And being that period… well, Halloween. It’s actually thematically right on in terms of the superhero zeitgeist, with both Marvel and DC having stories around zombie superheroes. Some people call this Superhero Decadence, and – oh – I’m going to have words with them sooner or later. Anyway – there’s lots of battling fallen heroes, becoming infected as a zombie in PvP, Werewolves and a new powerset based around Celestial power. More details here. At the least, already giving players something to look forward to strikes me as good marketing.
By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2009.
In this, the final part of my look back on five years of the Eve Online corporation, Statecorp, we see our plucky heroes wander Eve, struggle for survival, and ultimately burn out in the long search for a home. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
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By Kieron Gillen on September 3rd, 2009.
Yesterday, in between discussing how much better my Champions build was than his, Rob Hale mentioned the Unreal Mod Prometheus.. He suggested – in the wake of Time Donkey - an RPS theme day of time-travel. What a wonderful thing that would have been. If we could actually have time-travel, I’d have gone back in time to do it. Alas, I can’t. Instead, watch the fine video that follows and consider going to play Prometheus: Neat stuff.
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By Kieron Gillen on September 3rd, 2009.
This is splendid news. Rogue-like-platformer Spelunky has inched out of Beta status and gained that shiny Gold. You can go get it here. If you need a reason to do so – well, I direct you at the long feature Quinns wrote on its joys, in which he took time to insult me in passing. You remember Quinns. Nice guy. Doesn’t have much iron. Anyway, well done, Derek, maker of Spelunky. Also, the news that he’s bringing another version to XBox Live means we can all look forward to when it’s released in a year’s time, and all the console journalists finally realise it’s awesome, and it really gets on my fucking wick because I’ve been telling them to play the bastard thing for the last two years (Cross-ref: Trials HD).
And to give a taste of what you’ll be doing a lot in Spelunky, here are some death montage vids.
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By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2009.
While on the surface this is act of love… it’s rather peculiar. It’s a Fallout 3 mod created for a single purpose, and a single person: to ask a Fallout 3 player player to marry the girl who – with the help of the Fallout 3 modding community – made it. The full story begins here on the Bethesda forums, and continues here. To cut a very long story short: a video of the marriage proposal mod being played is below. And he said yes.
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By Kieron Gillen on September 3rd, 2009.
Oh, the humanity. More seriously, this is quite a fun experiment which Master Denby lobbed at me. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab have made a pair of games. In terms of actual mechanics, they’re identical. But one – Woosh - uses purely abstract art and the other – Waker - uses a narrative story, with cut-scenes, voice-overs and an art style which supports its theme. From examining how the responses to the games differ “Researchers will study whether either the narrative or abstract form of the game is more effective in promoting student engagement with, and understanding of, the physics topics”. Which, as far as high concepts go, is a fun one – and it helps that both games are neat little platform puzzlers, and worth playing. Of course it also got me thinking…
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By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2009.
Turn-based strategy RPG (think King’s Bounty without the Warcraftian cartoonishness) Disciples III: Renaissance has the a splendid website. You even “turn” the pages of an ancient book to read about the game features. In fact, the entire game’s art-direction is exquisite, apart from the hex-based battle maps, which seem peculiarly deserted. Impossibly gothic cathedral cities, endlessly knotted and gnarled forests, warped supernatural creatures aplenty: it’s got the dark fantasy thing down. And the game looks suitably epic from a player’s point of view too, demanding a RPGTBS mentality for long-term fantasy adventuring. A developer walkthrough from GamesCom explains some of the game mechanics below, but I’d go take a look at their site (English switch top right) to leaf through some more of the game assets, it really does go overboard.
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By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2009.
We’re going to be taking a closer look at Bruce Wayne’s secret identity on PC soon, but until we do there’s a rather shiny “showcase” trailer showing off how implementation of physics engine tech looks on nVidia-powered PCs. Stuff swirls and swishes and dudes get kicked. It’s quite impressive. It’s still the same gloomy, doomy Arkham Asylum, but there’s quite a lot more detail. And, my, it is good lookin’.
For those that missed it: there’s a demo out.
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By John Walker on September 3rd, 2009.
TF2 has recently suffered a plague of some of cheating. Rather than cheating to win matches, players have been cheating to gain in-game items, using “external idling applications”. The drops came at random, so people hung around on specifically designed servers until they’d collected what they were after. (I think.) Valve have announced this Will Not Do, and anyone who has accrued items this way will find they have vanished from their inventory. And this is the their gentle, generous response.
