Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is much earlier than I’d normally cover an indie game, especially one without even some flashy bells and whistles for you to coo at, but Damzel caught my attention, so I thought I should bring it to yours. (Checking around, Indiegames said close to the same thing, which says much). The work of ex-Team 17 Veteran Phil Carlisle, Damzel is basically a bodyguard game played from (primarily) the first person. You’re basically escorting a famous bod through simulated crowds in a procedurally generated city, deciding how much force is appropriate. Its reference points are Syndicate, Ico and the early planning-heavy Rainbow Six games. And if I were going to choose a short list of three entirely disparate RPS-iconic games I’d like to see mashed together, that trio would have come up pretty early. A few more details on the site and some very early tech stuff on Phil’s youtube channel…
Read the rest of this entry »

The precision-piranha of the games press, VG247, strike again. Analysing a small fragment in a video interview with gamers.fr where he alludes to the possibility of a Demigod 2. “We’ve got a lot of interest in a sequel to Demigod” he says, before moving on hope of recouping the money they invested in the first one. And sending children to college. Go to VG247 for all the rest of the quotes, including some eye-rolls at pirates. The video’s below, with the Demigod related stuff 2:40 or so in…
Read the rest of this entry »

A micro choose your own adventure. 1) Are you very excited by the Patrician IV? If yes, go to 2. If no, go to 5. 2) Do you speak German? If yes, go to 4. If no, go to 3. 3) Do you care enough about Patrician IV to deal with the fact the demo isn’t in a language you understand and you figure that you can get by just clicking stuff randomly? If yes, go to 4. If no, go to 5. 4) There’s a 700Mb Patrician IV German demo out you can download. Woo! If you’re excited enough to just go and get it now, go here. If you can’t remember what it looks like, go to 6. 5) Go Sumotori! 6)…
Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Martin was playing this short visual novel earlier, so I decided to join him. Hummingbird Mind is a game about working from home and distractions. It leans more surreal than the hard-realism – there’s a distinct lack of quick-one-off-the-wrist breaks – but certainly catches the mood of doing work. Or not doing work, as is more often the case. Play here.

You might recollect that our recent verdict on Valve’s mini co-op shooter Alien Swarm concluded that the game would have been improved somewhat if it utilised the same kind of AI director routines that make the Left 4 Dead games so interesting to play. Well, soon it will do so. Steam News reports: “…we’ve added “Onslaught” mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad’s stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice.”

So hurrah for that.

Ashes. All is ashes. All I’ve eaten is ashes. I’ve slept on ashes. I’m covered in ashes, following an unfortunate incident in which 31 Finnish journalists mistook me for an ashtray. I thought of Quintin, and how he had talked of sleeping on a mattress made of phoenix down. Perhaps he could spare a cup of water to throw at me, to wash some of the soot from my face. But then I thought of how he’d sneer and say how that water came from the highest mountain spring in Scotland, and that I owed him £500 for it. No. Better to carry on, to my next appointment, to a real world of ashes. To New Vegas!
Read the rest of this entry »

When Introversion do one of their sporadic candid posts, it’s normally worth reading. Mark Morris’ latest one is no different, talking about their last six months. They knew within an hour Darwinia+ hadn’t done well enough, and eventually they realised they couldn’t go on. Instead, they ended up selling the office, going back down to 3 staff, selling tables and chairs and working from their bedrooms again. However – and for me, the key thing in the story – they still needed some operating funds. Defcon had Steam achievements added, in hope that Valve would let a promotion go ahead. And they did…

This was the game-changer. When we started Introversion we’d had a string of successes and believed we were undefeatable, but it was a long time since we’d had a victory and we really needed one. Right on cue, Valve delivered. The promo exceeded all of our expectations and when combined with our low burn rate (no office or staff now) we had gone from being fearful about paying our mortgages to having a year’s operating capital in the bank.

In other words, on with Subversion. And Chris is continuing his development diaries here. It’s the second time Steam saved Introversion, of course, with Darwinia’s original launch there changing the course of a game which seemed to be not finding an audience.

This Chinese Indie-RPG has released released final version of its English translation, which prompted me to play its trial. And I happily burned through its free half-hour and was disappointed I couldn’t play any more. Which is what a trial version is supposed to do. While made with RPG maker, it’s a quite beautiful, atmospheric short-form RPG which managed to conjure a somber mood quickly and has a mean line in mean, red lines slashed across your opponents (Which then fall apart, leaving lots of goop). It perhaps leans a little heavy on the genre tropes for the really jRPG-phobic, but I suspect anyone else would find something worthwhile here. The full game is apparently only 3-6 hours, and can be bought for ten dollars. And here’s the first part of a long-play below to give a taste of how it works…
Read the rest of this entry »

You remember One Button Bob? Lambchops brings One Button Arthur - a sequel – to my attention, which is a little snazzier but works an identical “one button to solve whatever problem you’re facing” axis. You can play it here. Lambchops did it in what he describes as a “pathetic” 646. I did it in an even more pathetic 668. How pathetic can you be? MORE PATHETIC as evidenced by the following Rage Quit video I’ve just found…
Read the rest of this entry »

Troubled action space-MMO Black Prophecy seems to have had a fairly good showing at GamesCom 2010, and both trailer and off-screen wobblecam footage of the demo (via MMOReviews) suggest that it is looking like one of the most promising free-to-play games in Gamigo’s rapidly-swelling portfolio. The “real” flight model combined with persistent world stuff might just make this a viable alternative for all those folks who wanted to like Eve but couldn’t swallow the third-person model. There are beta sign-ups going on over at the game’s main site, and the beta apparently starts soon.

No firm release date yet either, but it’s out later this year.
Read the rest of this entry »

Confirming rumours from a previous point in our temporal existence, Cryptic are “do”ing a new Neverwinter game. Specifically, called “Neverwinter”. From the details in its press release and about page, it’s a persistent world Neverwinter Nights (Including content creation tools) based around co-operative groups of five (with the computer controlling the NPCs if you haven’t got the right number) plus fourth edition D&D rules (which is a definite plus for Co-op groups, I suspect) and all the character customisation that Cryptic excel at (though you are kind wonder how much variety can you get out of dudes wearing leather). Interestingly, it’s also a “multi-platform event”. Except it doesn’t mean consoles. It means a trilogy of novels and a tabletop roleplaying game. Man, I hope we don’t have to dumb the game down for those readers. It’s planned before the end of next year and I find myself tentatively excited. Yay? Yes, yay.