Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Eurogamer Expo is taking place at Earls Court in London from 1st-3rd October. One of the enticements there will be the Indie Games Arcade, organised by indie champions Pixel-Lab. They invited submissions for the expo, as we reported here. Those have now been boiled down to a shortlist, which I’ve posted below. Expo attendees will be able to play a demonstration version of each of those games at the show. Also, splendidly, Pixel-Lab’s David Hayward has invited the Rock, Paper, Shotgun team to be the judges of the best game at the arcade, which will win its own special award. So, indie games, we will be judging you. Even more than normal.
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There’s been some developments from yesterday’s story where assorted organs have implicated the board-game Smallworld in a child-neglect tragedy. As we updated, the erroneous Warhammer shot’s been pulled but the makers of both games have spoken out about the tragedy, both actually denying it’s their game. You’ll find the statements and my thoughts below…
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As possibly the biggest PC indie hit in years (despite still being in Alpha), MineCraft demands your attention. What kind of game is it? What makes it special? Maybe you don’t know, and you expect us to tell you. Well, okay.

MineCraft is a building game, essentially. You’re dropped into a randomised, overwhelmingly cuboid world with no goals but continued survival, and you build. Every day this week I’ll be playing a game of MineCraft on the hardest setting and reporting on my progress, giving you not so much a taste of the game but a juicy banquet. It’s probably worth mentioning that I haven’t actually played MineCraft before, either. Dig into the first course right after the jump. It features sheep, flowers, a burial and a dreadful boating accident.
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More medical news from University of Rochester, NY, who have long been experts in gaming science. Their most recent research shows that action games help us with quick decision-making. The study by Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green shows that shooter-playing gamers make faster decisions that are no less accurate than their The Sims-playing counterparts. “It’s not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier said. “Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”

Full release here. Have a read of that for the methodology, before speculating about the methodology, eh?

There’s something about a lonely sociopathic drug-addict being the lead character in one of the most popular TV shows in the world that puts a spring in my step. I can never quite get enough of that acerbic patter and underlying existential horror. So you can imagine I leaped at the House M.D. demo. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be a lo-fi point ‘n’ click puzzler punctuated with quips that are as insulting as the actual TV dialogue, without the charming delivery. Pretty much everything is in place, apart from the misdirection in the opening illness scene, with the differential diagnosis and various icky medical procedures all laid out for you in the predictable structure of one of the TV episodes. I can’t really recommend anyone download it or anything like that, but the hour-long demo exists just here if you do want to examine swollen pixels on a low-res 50-something Caucasian male.

Trailer below. “No-one is immune from Dr. House’s biting zingers!” Quite.
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So, the chaps at Cynical Brit brought up some of the concerns around the depiction of a female torture victim in The Witcher 2 directly to CD Projekt Red, which led to a surprising revelation. Based on various comments about said torture victim arguably being presented somewhat… lustily, the developers are having a bit of a rethink about that scene.

They don’t want people to be thinking sexy thoughts when presented with a tortured woman, basically – so they’re going to alter how the character in question is presented.

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Via Tim Schafer’s twitter, here’s Inceptionauts. Psychonaut visuals with Inception dialogue. Bless. Watch it below…
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Between finishing Amnesia and watching the final Twin Peaks episode, I had something of a nerve-racking day yesterday. Thankfully, Tom Chick at Fidgit has found a way to take the edge off the former. In short, he’s found Frictional’s footage of making various sound-effects in games. You’ll find it below…
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PC co-op friendly-fire-athon Magicka is out in Q1 2011, and it’s looking tight like a kitten trapped in a coke bottle. How did the kitten get in the coke bottle? Nobody knows. You might as well ask how the awesome got into Magicka. I am quite excited about Magicka, I don’t know if you can tell. You can read my GamesCom impressions here, but basically it’s a game where you all play wizards without having to bother with cooldowns, mana or learning spells, and instead simply mix ten elements on the fly. Some elements react well together, some not so well. There’s a lot of resurrecting your friends, let’s put it that way.

Anyway, as of today there’s a new site up, and another excellent trailer which you can watch just after the jump.
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Game endings, then. They’re crap, aren’t they? Even games that tell engaging and creative stories have a habit of foundering abruptly instead of providing a satisfying finale. Maybe it’s because statistically, developers know less people will see the ending than any other part of their game, and a finale is a lot of work. Maybe it’s because creating closure is an entirely different discipline to holding someone’s attention.

We could have sat theorising in the RPS chatroom all day, but instead we collaborated on something far more proactive and arrogant: rewriting the endings of five of our favourite games. Check out our maddened riffing on Borderlands, Half-life, The Longest Journey, Morrowind and System Shock 2 after the jump.
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Cliffski really does have a knack at this. He’s just released his latest bit of Gratuitous Space Battles DLC, introducing the Nomads, a whole new race with ships, weapons and similar. Oldest race in the galaxy, according to the GSB fiction. But the trick is the spin he’s given to this. There’s two editions of the DLC you can buy. One is $5.99, the other is $2.99. There’s no difference between ‘em. It’s simply an experiment, to try and cater for the people who say they can’t afford that amount of money. Look at your life, decide what you can afford, then pay it. He’s also keeping a running tally of the results. Currently, 28 $5.99 editions and 10 $2.99 editions. And if you’ve never played GSB, you can try the demo. Oh – the new trailer follows.
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