Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Except not as sexy as that sounds. There’s a webgame version of Plants Versus Zombies available. It features three game modes – 14 levels of Adventure, Endless Survival and Vasebreaker – with 12 plans and 6 zombie types. And a new zombie type. Crikey. The biggest problem for me it actually shares with the new game. I lost my save, so would have to play through all the tediously easy early adventure levels to get to the actually interesting challenge modes. But for newcomers to the game, it’s a fine place to newly come.

As assorted bods has been rushing to tell us, ASCIIportal is out. It’s Portal in ASCII, which we’ve previously talked about. I just had a quick crack now, but stopped almost immediately because it involved thinking and I need to save all my puny brainpower today for working out novel ways for one superchap to hit another superchap. It’s a living. AN AWESOME LIVING. Anyway – you can get the game here and the most recent update video about development can be found below…
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Crawl out of bed late to see Simon Parkin pointing this out before being very mean indeed to RPS, the bast. Anyway – The Deepening is basically the Beastie Boys’ old Sabotage video, but done as a mildly-NSFW choose your own adventure. It has one ending with basically the routine artist-comrade Jamie McKelvie and I do in front of other people at cons, which is always good to see. I quite like it. See what you think.

September 29th. Yep, that’s the latest bit of DLC (free on PC) for Left 4 Dead, which is a new campaign set between the events of No Mercy and Death Toll, with support for both survival and versus modes. Valve says: “While containing both Survival maps and a Co-operative Campaign, the primary goal of Crash Course is to deliver a complete Versus mode experience in just 30 minutes, resulting in a streamlined version of the game’s existing Versus campaigns. A recharge timer for infected teammates has also been added, and item spawn behavior has changed for more balanced gameplay.” There will also be a L4D2 demo from Valve on October 27th, accordingly to reports from Tokyo Games Show.

I’m pretty surprised that there’s another Runaway game coming. The previous two, while extremely pretty, I found horrible. The point and click adventures were remarkably charmless, and sometimes even offensively so. Which makes the news of a third one not the best news I’ve heard. But hey, you might disagree – clearly enough people do – and this one could be different. There’s a trailer below.

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You may already have visited the new forum we built when we redesigned the site. The tech and structure was about eight-four million percent better than the amorphous horror we were using previously, but it was ultra-bare and perhaps a little uninviting, like an evil refrigerator. Well, now we’ve redesigned the redesigned forum. Shiny! Loving!
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RunMan is a good name for a game. The crazed Flash scrawlings of a deranged child is an excellent graphical style for a game. Which is why I rather like the look of RunMan: Race Around the World, a game arriving on October 1st from Tom Sennett and Matt Thorson. It’s a game about doing your best. There’s little point in my trying to describe it’s frantic, lunatic nature. You can watch it for yourself.

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There’s an element of military titillation in this latest Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising trailer (below), with the development team get a bit hyperbolic about smoke, impact effects, environmental detail and visual feedback for the player in this contemporary soldier game. I’ve seen the game running on PC a couple of times during its development, and it has impressed me each time, particularly with these battlefield smoke effects and other war-grime detail. Also: the dying. There’s a lot of that. Go take a look, anyway, and hopefully we’ll have a verdict on the game for you in the next few weeks. It’s out on October 6th in the US and October 9th in Europe.
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Now things get tricky.
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Floppy-haired Brightonian games proper-journalist Simon Parkin describes Icycle as ‘Naked, ice-age themed Trials HD [or Trials 2 to PC-you and PC-I] in Flash.’ He’s not wrong. And hey, even if you couldn’t stand Trials, let’s re-emphasise the naked thing – this is a game about a bloke riding his pushbike through a snowy wasteland, wearing only his birthday suit. Ouch.
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I just wanted to flag up the new RPS Eve community, details for which can be found on the forum here. If you’ve never been able to brave the dark waters of Eve Online, but still find yourself interested, then this might be a good place to start. (Along with the free trial.) I’m taking a break from Eve at the moment, so it’s good to see RPS community members pitching in to help beginners on their way. I’ll certainly be checking in with this lot when I do log back on.

Did you know there’s an Eve star system called RPS-0K?