Rock, Paper, Shotgun

So says US market research group the NPD, who currently rule the roost in terms of game sales figures by dint of no-one else doing it properly. Today, they give with one hand and take with the other.

Give! US PC game download sales for the first six months of the year popularly known as Twenty Ten finally outweigh old-fashioned high street retail – by 11.2 million to 8.2 million units, to be precise. Well, I say precise… we’ll get to that in a minute. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve talked about my love for Robot Unicorn Attack before. That said, that short paragraph isn’t nearly enough. Frankly, this Canabalt-elaboration is one of my favourite games of the year. I’m terrible at it though, thus going onto the adult swim leaderboards is a bit of a waste of time. Now, however, it’s on Facebook, meaning you can challenge your friends and create a more even playing field with your equally useless friends. Hurrah! Of course, if you’re not on Facebook, and you haven’t played it, you can still play it here.

We call this one “Kicking It With Caverns”.

I wasn’t going to do another Mine The Gap. I decided that I’d hit the sweet spot of persuading you guys that you needed MineCraft in your lives without spoiling too much of it. HOWEVER, a guy called Deriuqer commented on Day 4 that if one of the things I loved about MineCraft was how it let me get lost, why did I build a compass specifically so that wouldn’t happen?

It was a good question. But what happened next in my game was a kind of perfect rebuttal.
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Bless. As we know, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is bringing all kinds of apocalyptic change to Azeroth, and what could be more apocalyptic than a quest recreating PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies? The new Peacebloom vs Ghouls quest can be found in the Hillsbrad Foothills, and is such an absurdly detailed recreation of PvZ (albeit with only 6 plants) that the whole thing must have been done with PopCap’s consent. Aww. A video of the level by RPS’s own eager commenter TotalBiscuit can be found beneath the jump.
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Following on from Jim’s individual discussion of RUSE, the RPS high-fiving fraternity elected to spend some time getting to grips with Eugen Systems’ latest RTS, and discovered they rather liked it. It was time for a verdict. But what would the collective verdict be? And were they wise to the tricks and traps the game laid out for them? And why was John on holiday? Did anyone care? There were so many unanswered questions. Read on to discover…

Jim: RUSE: A real-time strategy that seems to have surprised people. Did it surprise you guys? It surprised me.
Kieron: It certainly surprise attack-bonused me. Regularly. But I suspect we’ll get to that.
Quintin: I had no faith whatsoever in it before I played it. Not entirely sure why. So yes, I was surprised. Alarmed, even.
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When news broke on Thursday about Pirates of the Burning sea going Free-to-play, we got in contact with Flying Lab Software and DEMANDED TIME FOR INTERVIEW-CHAT. They submitted, fearing our mighty wrath. WE THANK THEM FOR THEIR TIME. Er… anyway, here’s CEO Russell Williams and Head Of The Design Department Declan O’Connell talking about this move to go free-to-play before the end of the year, what’s been happening on the Burning Seas and why people who launch subs-only MMOs from now “haven’t gotten the memo”…
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It’s Monday morning. VVVVVV‘s Terry Cavanagh has been busy, probably making another forty micro-games of the weekend. Here’s one of the latest which mashes together Dance Dance Revolution with – unless I’m mistaken – Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard , with inevitable consequences. You can play Graveyard Graveyard Revolution here.

With Valve talking about making the Half-Life movie themselves, you have to wonder whether they might be well advised to hire this chap for the process. His trailer for short film I’m The Freeman looks about as good as we could hope a Half-Life movie to be. Assuming it was to CG, in the spirit of the TF2 shorts, of course. Go take a look, if you’ve not seen it already. Hell, go watch it again. I can’t wait for the full thing. (And the other movies on the guy’s site are quite something, too.)
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What is going to happen to Bond? With the films on hiatus it seems all we really have to look forward to from the smooth agent is a Daniel Craig facsimile doing his “the Bourne Movies were quite good” routine in a tux. It’s a shame. It’s not that Blood Stone looks particularly bad, as you can see from the trailer below, it’s just that, well, I was watching Roger Moore and Christopher Walken ham about in A View To A Kill last night, and I couldn’t help feeling that Bond might be wandering too far from what made it great. Without humour, we are getting just another action movie, and without the classic billionaire-genius villains, well, what’s the point in deploying Britain’s greatest espionage asset? It wasn’t like this in my day. I remember when all this was green fields. These steamships are ruining everything.

In-game footage aplenty, below.
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Hrm. So there’s something going on over at DRM-free digital distribution site GoG.com. The site is down, and in its place a message that, in part, reads: “We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.” (And the message seems to have changed since I read it earlier, which is interesting.)

However, it’s not necessarily over, and there will be a solution for everyone to download their games. We contacted the GoG team and received this message: “As the message on the site says, this doesn’t mean GOG is gone. We’ll have more to share in the coming days.” So we wait and see. My guess? They’ll be assimilated into another digital distribution system, something like that.

EDIT: This unfortunately-timed Bit-tech article is worth a read.

This is beautiful. And two things we’re posting a lot about at the moment brought together, like some kind of nuclear fusion of pop-hype. Nukezilla discovered on the Irrational Forums – and the ever-loving Craig Pearson told us – that a load of chaps have got together and built Columbia (off the currently available screenshots) in Minecraft. Frankly, it’s all I can do to stop myself from climbing on my stairs, applauding, and then throwing myself out of the window in total despair, as I’m still impressed at myself for being able to build a wobbly tower.
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