Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As Dragon Age edges ever closer more details about the game world are beginning to appear. Now we are given snippets of the city of Denerim, a capital city rife with corruption. Ooh, and you get to hear Tim Curry for a bit.

Read the rest of this entry »

No! But yes. Continuing this morning’s transportation theme there’s a new 18 Wheels Of Steel game on the horizon, Extreme Trucker, and it’s almost sexual: “Experience the freedom and charm of a trucker’s life, as trucks of chrome and metal pound the hot asphalt highway.” Man! Check out the extreme environments of the latest American Longhaul below. I’m sure there’ll be a demo along soon, and I, for one, cannot wait.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is rather cute: World Train Royale is roughly equivalent to PuzzleQuest with trains. The match-3 part of the game is you gathering resources to ship to parts of a fantasy-Steampunkish Empire, which allows you to head out across the map and gain connections to other towns and cities. You can get the trial version of the game here, which is good for an hour’s play. I’d be surprised if many people exceeded that, but the picture-book art-style might snag of few of the kids.

The original, ever-seminal STALKER’s longevity is impressive – the fan/mod community just keep on jiggery-pokering it to astonishing effect. Perhaps it’s a result of the game’s singular gestation – so much content and concepts from its long development jettisoned for the final release, and a superficially wobbly engine positively bubbling with power and potential once the surface muck was wiped away. It is and always will be an important moment in PC gaming, and I’m starting to wonder if it might be becoming almost a weird sci-fi cousin to the original Operation Flashpoint: a game that’s, over time, redesigned so thoroughly by its community that the original form is almost forgotten.

First STALKER’s community needs to join hands and sing It’s A Small World, though – for instance, there are two competing projects for the status of ULTIMATE STALKER MOD…
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official – Gabe Newell is heading for Australia. If you missed the story of how 19 year old L4D modder Joe W-A ended up raising $3000 (US) to fly Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson out to see his L4D map in order to convince Newell to stop boycotting it… Er, you need to go read this and this. Now Valve have confirmed that they’ll be heading to Oz next week, and less official sources are stating that of course they’re paying their own way so the money goes straight to charity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Edit-edit – original download links now contain the fixed version too
Edit – fixed, faster downloads are here, here and here. (Thanks, Batolemaeus).

1.09 Gigabytes of vast, highly-anticipated-by-some, German-made roleplaying game await you just here or here. In either case, it’s the earliest stages of what’s a huge, free-roaming and non-didactic game, casting you as a recent shipwreckee, washed ashore on a rather nasty island. Adventures!
Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking to Shacknews, Brad Wardell says:

“I started out as a big Games for Windows Live advocate. I intended for Elemental to be on Games for Windows Live, but then as we got closer, the Xbox group took it over more and more. And they have things where, oh, if you want to use Games for Windows Live to update your game, you have to go through [their] certification. And if you do it more than X number of times, you have to pay money. It’s like, “My friends, you can’t do that on the PC.” … If Games for Windows Live maintains that strategy and they take over, I’m done. I’m not making PC games. I would be done.”

I hereby declare this slagging thread for GFWL open!

Balloon travel and “an exploration game set in a dream-like open world” mean that I was immediately intrigued by the announcement of Neverending Islands by Solipsism Studios. A promise of being able to “travel the world in a hot air balloon that reacts realistically to the environment” concerns me a little, but when you thrown in the flying turtle city, well, it means I’m definitely going to take a look when the game comes out later this year. Fully expecting this to be another broken obscurity, but you never know… (Thanks, Blues.)

It’s a four-minute overview of the whole game, plus voice-over. It features the phrase “Pretty little agricultural backwater” in the first 10 seconds. If that’s not worth watching, I don’t know what is. If you agree, you’ll find it beneath the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes… bless Champions Online. Bless those SA kids.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m scared. Here’s what I fear: I fear The Void is going to be the subject of unjust moral outrage because it features female nudity.
Read the rest of this entry »