Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This one-man-made indie platformer sports an unusually sinister style for something so lo-fi. Whilst I couldn’t say I personally experienced any moments of profundity from its messages of doomy gibber and images of mutilation, I was impressed by just how much tone and dark atmosphere it’s possible to evoke from so few colours and pixels. The all-black backgrounds are affectingly unsettling, while some of the monsters remind me of the shadow beasts of Another World. Awkward combat controls (though I appreciate they’re intended to reflect the frail heroine’s unfamiliarity with weapons) and some frustrating level design mean it’s not yet the slick, Castlevaniaesque thing I suspect it hopes to be, but it’s chock full of agreeably strange and inventive imagery. There’s a walkthrough video below if you don’t fancy a spot of gothic jumping’n'shooting yourself….
Read the rest of this entry »

When Chris SmallGods mailed me about this, I was determined to post about it. Primarily… well, to cover old sins, really. Not that I ever reviewed it – Sanitarium only was released when I first inched into Staffwriterdom – but it was pretty much ignored and/or brutalised by the British games press, and slowly climbed to a cult-status ever since. It’s basically – if you squint – John the Baptist to Planescape Torment’s Jesus Christ in terms of the failure of UK critical response of the period. Anyway – this psychological adventure game is now available on GoG. I’ve never played it, but – from what I’ve had grasped from God knows how many conversations about it from friends – that it’s basically Psychonauts if the designers didn’t find anything funny about mental illness. The examination of Lucasart’s influence on the adventure is manifold… but in reducing suitable topics for adventure games to “gags” if probably the most noticeable, were I to be critical.

Anyone played it? Do you think it’s still worth playing? And similar! The ever-handy youtube Footage follows…
Read the rest of this entry »

Argh! I’m swamped in Big Important Videogames at the moment, and during that one of the games I’ve most been looking forward to has dropped onto my hard drive. Not, not, not fair. It’s Armoured Princess (or Armored, if you’re from one of those countries that’s afraid of the letter U), the sequel/add-on to last year’s excellent strategy/RPG mad thing King’s Bounty. The Russian version’s been around for a little while, but the English edition is finally here. I am this: pleased. Yes, I am.
Read the rest of this entry »

The third Tropico game, this time developed by Haemimont games, has finally washed up on the perfect beaches of my interest. Having messed around with it for a few days, I’ve found time to issue a diktat. Here’s Wot I Think.
Read the rest of this entry »

Borderlands 2 is probably going to happen, if comments made in this interview are to be believed. Mike Neumann told the award-looting VG247.com that “Everyone here loves the franchise, and it seems like the public is really coming back with praise and love. So yeah, if everything makes sense, Borderlands 2 seems like a no-brainer to me.”

The downloadable content, Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, will reportedly cost $10 and is out on the 24th of November (not clear if that’s for the PC). Still no patch addressing voice and connection issues though, eh? Or did I miss that? Anyway, what do you want to see in a sequel?

Older gamers with elephantine memories will recall Archon: The Light & The Dark, which first graced out existence back in the 1980s. It’s being remade for PC by React Games, and can now be pre-ordered, if you’re feeling like a strange kind of fantasy adventure chess is your thing. I’ve posted their brief teaser below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oddly, Love isn’t the only trippy single-programmer MMOG with an emphasis on player landscaping and building that’s currently in beta. There’s also Neverdaunt 8Bit, or N8, which swaps procedurally generated gorgeousity and lethal roaming AI for a retro aesthetic and plain old messing around. I took a closer look at both of them recently and find myself liking one an awful lot more than the other. Find out which after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dunno about you, but I got pretty burned-out after a few days of psychotic grinding at Torchlight, feeling that, despite the fun I’d had, everything had gotten too samey. So the news of the impending editor, and the vast glut of moddery it promises, is good news – it hopefully means the game’s rather limited environments can be shaken up some, and we can have a broader, longer-lived experience. Ideally, one with different colours of cat too. Brown is boring!
Read the rest of this entry »

You might have noticed. You might have queued up at silly o’clock to get a copy. You might even have got some sort of tattoo to commemorate how excited you are about the prospect of shooting virtual men of assorted ethnic origins. Aye, today was Modern Warfare 2 day – a game that, for a lot of the industry and its consumers, has managed to become pretty much the only game of the year. I was at the UK launch last night – some thoughts on that and some of the rolling PC version problems follow.
Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoy posting this immediately after Jim’s last post on the future of modding. Paradox have just released the For The Glory demo, based on their Europa Universalis game. Which is expected. Except despite them having released Europa Universalis III, this is a standalone game covering 400 (Count ‘em!) years of history based on the Europa Universalis II engine. Crikey. The mod link is that it’s based on the AGCEEP mod, which I’ll admit I have even less experience with than Europa Universalis itself. And when I’ve never played Europa Universalis, I’m not even sure that’s possible. Still – 10,000 historical events. Crikey! Crikey! Anyway – demo’s here and the full version can be bought here. Oh – and a video!
Read the rest of this entry »

When Unity 3D went free a friend of mine started playing around with it and voiced the opinion that mods would now increasingly become free or indie games, because here was a 3D engine that was so easy to use, and so straightforward to port assets into. Then we had the UDK announcement, which gave us modder’s favourite, the Unreal Engine, as a free platform. So what does that mean for the future of modding?
Read the rest of this entry »