By John Walker on February 1st, 2010.
Today’s best thing ever: An entrant to the Australian sector of the Global Game Jam, GNILLEY was originally intended to be a game about pitch and colour. It’s a game about shouting. Really loud.
It’s the creation of Glen Forrester, who has been making peculiar indie ideas for a while, which can all be found here. Below is his presentation video for GNILLEY at the Sydney Jam, and there’s to be no more introduction than that.
By Jim Rossignol on February 1st, 2010.
Sci-fi shooter with clever MMO territory bits, Global Agenda, launches today at 12pm EST, which I think is about an hour from now. Are there any RPS folks playing? I’ve not had a chance to play yet, but I’ll be looking to hook up with RPS folks for high-fives and game-worth-examination purposes over the coming week. Post in comments if you’re in-game and we’ll try and get some sort of RPS team established.
Launch trailer and bunch of other videos below.
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By Alec Meer on February 1st, 2010.
EA are bloody up to something. Something that might just involve seizing back a prime cut of PC gaming rump. Browser Tiger Woods, browser Ultima fan-baiting and, soon browser FIFA. The next time you hear someone say that the major publishers don’t care about PC gaming anymore, tell ‘em about this sinister-but-exciting plan.
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By Quintin Smith on February 1st, 2010.
Pay any attention to that irreverent, smiling spectre we call technology journalism and you’ll probably know two things about Second Life. ONE: That it’s very successful, and the millions of dollars it rakes in are shared with its dashing player entrepreneurs. TWO: That it’s full of sex. You’ll know this from the chocolate-box of articles ranging from I Was A Prostitute In Second Life to I Hired A Prostitute In Second Life to I Was Raped In Second Life to I Was A Rapist In Second Life. Wait, maybe not that last one. Wow. Must remember to pitch that to The Escapist.
Thing is, these two headlines have a habit of existing independently from one another. What I feel no-one’s talking about is that if Second Life is even partially successful because of the sexual freedom it offers, that raises a fat question about the games industry as a whole. If you’ll pardon the euphemism, I think there’s a huge, important point this game is making, and it’s waving it in our direction. Come over here and look at this, will you? [Needless to say, it's NSFW from this point.]
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By Alec Meer on February 1st, 2010.
A rifle amongst the oily rags, Toblerone wrappers and bat skulls that litter the floor of the RPS engine room reveals we’ve never posted about open source Civilization clone FreeCiv before. By turn, that means we’ve never written about its newish browser-based offshot FreeCiv.net either. This is exactly the kind of site that should be telling you it’s possible to play one of the most important names in PC gaming history in your browser, for free. Unfortunately, we’ve been washing our hair since December 13th, so we didn’t. Now we all look like Jennifer Aniston circa 1995 (Jim looks especially glamorous), we have time to tell you.
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By Jim Rossignol on February 1st, 2010.
RPS Beta Army, you are hereby required to conquer Mortal Online, which goes into open beta today. “But what is Mortal Online?” Well, I’ve only gone and answered that particular inquiry over at Eurogamer by performing the ritual of the preview ritual here. In it I explain:
Mortal, being developed by Swedish studio StarVault, is focused on creating an experience that lives up to the legacy of Ultima Online: returning to that philosophy of freedom and player co-operation while at the same time carving out its own niche with modern tech. Mortal Online is powered by the Unreal 3 engine – employing a new landscape engine to create an immense terrain – and is played with a first-person camera. While StarVault has evidently been galvanised by the Ultima way of doing things, its game has a look and feel of its own. You might be able to grind up resources like in UO, but exploring a 3D world is quite a different experience.
And so on. Anyway, go, see, beta, conquer.
By John Walker on February 1st, 2010.
It’s not exactly jam-packed with detail, but there’s a new Dragon Age: Awakening trailer that features a spectral skellington dragon, The Queen of Black Marsh. That’s good enough, right? Which also affords me the opportunity to let you know that the long, long delayed Return To Ostagar DLC is finally available for the PC (the poor PS3 crowd still don’t have it). Almost a month late, and held up by a series of fiascos, we’ll be taking a look at it just as soon as we can.
By Kieron Gillen on February 1st, 2010.
I started the week by playing the experimental gameplay game that Jake Elliot sent us – Beluah & The Hundred Birds. The current theme is 100 things – Jake’s is a dream-like platformer, which externalises the inevitable collectibles to tiny birds which follow you around. While the main platform levels are a little uninteresting – I suspect an attempt to work a frustration/euphoria sort of dynamic between the flying and platforming bits, but while it does works like that, it doesn’t quite work well enough to justify it – I kept playing due to some lovely crystalline music and the simple joy of building this flock behind me. It’s like Syndicate, without miniguns. It also put me in the mind to listen to Grandaddy’s The Crystal Lake…
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