Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As many people have wrote to say, Blendo Games’ Flotilla has been released. You can get the demo or buy the full game for ten dollars on their site. I’ve only managed to have a quick crack, but it marries random generation to the playfully cool presentation of his previous Gravity Bone to a turn-based game of tactical-space combat. The only sad thing about this release is that “Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Boating In Space…” won’t fit on the title line. I suspect we’ll have more on this soon enough, but until then, here’s the trailer…
Read the rest of this entry »

…which sounds like an account of what happens when you buy the game, but is actually a new race that Cliffski has added in over the weekend. I’m downloading it to take a proper look, but in the meantime you can cast a theological eye over the details and then watch the trailer below.
Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend saw my retrospective piece about Omikron: The Nomad Soul arrive on Eurogamer. It was an interesting one – the process I mean – the game being from David Cage was obviously interesting. Trying to get it working on PC ended in sadfaced failure when I discovered ATI has stopped supporting DX6.1. Amazingly, having been commissioned to write the piece and with time running out, I found I owned it on Dreamcast. And that I still owned a Dreamcast. So while this is first and foremost a PC game, my playing of it last week was a brief affair with a (very) old lover. It starts like this:

“David Cage is a man of extraordinary vision. Whether you believe his games match his ambition is a very personal thing. I will argue with you that Fahrenheit is one of the most exciting games I’ve ever played, even though it’s broken in about 657 ways. Perhaps this is what’s most exciting about Quantic Dream’s output. However, I cannot find a similar love for Omikron: The Nomad Soul. And that’s not because I can’t run it on my PC.”

It carries on here.

No, Microsoft haven’t taken the Empire franchise in an unforeseen direction after disbanding Ensemble. To celebrate the end of the Winter Olympics (aka Everyone I know spending far too much time lusting after the women’s curling teams), The Black Bandit suggested posting this highly accurate historical sim of curling would be worth posting. Never before has the art of lobbing stuff across ice and staring been so accurately re-created (Probably). You can get the demo or buy the full game on Blackish’s site, or watch some footage below.
Read the rest of this entry »