Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’ve had a lot of videos of the next game from King Arthur developers neocore which feature – like above – large groups of men getting handy with one another. What we haven’t had as much of is a look at menus. Because that’s what strategy games are about. Menus. That’s where the strategy happens. Yes, there’s some panoramas of the battles too, but rest assured, if you watch the following video, you’re going to see some hot menu manipulation. More info on the site, obv.
Read the rest of this entry »

As previously reported, Everquest II is adding a Free-to-Play option. The story is no longer true. It’s gone into Open Beta, so now totally has a free-to-play option. The unique twist is that it doesn’t touch the traditional game at all, instead offering a parallel Everquest II Extended free-to-play option. So if you want to play a sub game you can, and if you want to enter a more micro-payment option, you can do that too. You can download the client here, which has Guild-War-esque streaming tech to allow you to start playing rather than waiting for Gigabytes of stuff to squeeze out of your internet-pipe. Also, according to the FAQ, despite being a Beta, there won’t be a character wipe when it goes live properly, so all your progress (and expenditures) will carry across into the full launch. This free-to-play second-life for 3rd-wave MMOs is very much a trend of the year, and you can see the Gamescom trailer below…
Read the rest of this entry »

Crikey. How novel. News not from Gamescom. The third of the four Doctor Who Adventure games had the first detailed leaked. It’s called Tardis and – clearly not wanting to lead people astray with its title – features the Tardis prominently, allowing you to totally fly the now-anachronistic police-call-box through the time-stream. It also will allow you to step into the Doctor’s Drawing room, which the developers talked about extensively when I covered the game on release, and basically promises to be a Batman-style collection of objects, but done in the Sherlock Holmes style. Basically. Full press release below, because it’s all that’s been released so far and including it with the story really annoys someone who’s quite fun to bait.
Read the rest of this entry »

Following the release of Operation Arrowhead BIS have continued to add to their Arma II line-up, and the British Armed Forces pack is next in the pipeline, as DLC for Operation Arrowhead. You will be unsurprised to learn that it features a range of units that appear in real British military, including soldiers, weapons, and vehicles, which will be available to play in multiplayer battles. Trailer below, natch.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, QuakeCon leftovers. Delicious. Here we have two Brink videos via GameTrailers, one being Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood talking about the game in some depth – although with plenty of stuff we’ve heard before – and one talking about S.M.A.R.T., which is the game’s unusual movement system. It’s worth taking a look at that second one, at least, because it looks fairly intriguing. A free-running, sliding, leaping, vaulting, mantling approach to movement. And, well, blimey. Getting more excited about this one each time I see it.
Read the rest of this entry »

You care about the games. I understand. That’s why at 9am today I left the glittering party I was attending and went stumbling over to the convention centre for another tour of the PC’s most exciting upcoming releases.

I didn’t think they’d let me in. As I understand it, trousers are mandatory at these events and I’d lost mine around dawn. But as luck would have it, at the turnstiles someone mistook me for Cliff Bleszinski and I spent the whole day with a beefy minder shouldering the crowd out of my way. Marvellous!
Read the rest of this entry »

Paradox have announced a lot today, which we’ll get back to shortly – but the trailer to Cities In Motion especially caught my eye. It’s a transport-simulation game, set in Europe across 100 years from 1920 and generally covers pretty much any way that people get objects from A to B. Bar gyrocopters, which is only me, at night, in my alter ego of the Clockwork Basher. Anyway, here’s the trailer…
Read the rest of this entry »

You know Increpare? Aka Stephen Lavelle? He’s one of the hyper-prolific game creators on the British indie scene. We’ve blogged about a couple of his games before (The historian game Opera Omnia and the Mass Effect 2 parody Starfeld), but he does a whole lot more. His presentation at World of Love basically involved him just talking to everyone in the audience about what they were up to. He also basically worked in the industry as a coder in the games industry and doing it solely as a job – because he saved his creativity for churning out games. Anyway – the reason why I’m posting is that he’s just been made redundant and has put up a request for donations. If you’ve ever dug any of his games, now would be a good time to throw some Internetcoins in his direction. And if you haven’t, go to Increpare‘s site and be bewildered at where to start. I’ve just played Whale of Noise, based around one of our aquatic mammal sorts learning notes to sing to separate its body into increasingly distantly placed parts. And The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights features stuff so horrible I can’t even show you a screenshot. And the pictured Beatification is just plain odd. What have you found?

Puzzle Quest 2 is up on Steam for £14. The match-3 RPG madness shifts from top-down inbetweeny bits to isometric inbetweeny bits, with a few changes to the structure of the battles. Does it work? Is it as compelling? Does it still seem like it’s cheating? If you’d only read below you’ll find out Wot I Think.

Read the rest of this entry »

As Alec excitedly told us a week ago, German developers Realmforge are creating Dungeons – a game that’s very obviously an updated tribute to Dungeon Keeper. To get the man even more worked up, there’s a CGI teaser trailer below. It really doesn’t tell us anything useful about the game, but if you listen carefully you can hear Alec squealing all the way from Cologne.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Gamescom 2010 trailers keep on coming. VG247 noticed the latest one for DC Universe, which sort of sets up the moral question at the heart of the game. As in, is vigilante justice ever really justified, or is it just proto-fascism? As in, whether you want to be naughty or nice. Pictured is the Joker, who generally leans a little naughty. He’s punching Nightwing, who generally leans a little nice. Except isn’t Nightwing Batman at the moment? Would now be an apposite moment to mention Eddie Argos of Art Brut & friend’s new project, Spoiler Alert!, being songs about the Justice League. The Batman one which should enlighten you all about the current continuity. Anyway, out on November 2nd and here’s the videosity…
Read the rest of this entry »