Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Look, I’m sorry about the perfunctory headline, but I spent ages trying to think of a pun for the title, and eventually had to accept that every possible word-gag about cats has already been made, three hundred and over thousand agonisingly unfunny times over. I can’t imagine how torturous things must be for the loyal staff of Your Cat magazine. Month after month, “purr-fect” again and again. I bet those guys loathe cats by now.

I, however, could never detest cats, which is why I inevitably found myself clicking on the link to this browser-based snack from Indiecade finalists Cats In The Sky. It’s not really about cats, however. It’s a game about a witch with a piece of magic string.
Read the rest of this entry »

Late breaking news is that Cryptic Comet, creators of Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum, have just announced their new project. It’s Six Gun Saga , a primarily single-player game which span off his continuing attempts to make an old-west Rogue-like. “It will remind you of some games like Race For the Galaxy, Dominion and of course Poker,” says Vic Davis. The mention of Dominions is splendid, as I’ve been hoping someone would draw some more inspiration from the German-style card game. The first shot is above – click through for the full size one – and will hopefully be out in a couple of months. “If you have played any of my previous games you’ll find a lot that is familiar and hopefully that feeling that you can’t always quite do what you want and a bunch of hard choices,” he adds. Phew.

Worth reading the full, short post for all the details including saying the rogue-like is still in development, along with a Solium Infernum mini-expansion. And perhaps predictably, we’ve hit up Vic for more details. You’ll know when we know.

CitiesXL was half okay. It was an okay city builder, which was precisely what lots of people wanted. Sadly it wasn’t a great MMO, and that bit of the game soon curled up and died. Fortunately it didn’t mean the end for the series, which is back again for 2010/2011, hopefully improved in its single player capacities. There’s a little video and some information over on the new site, which was revealed today. The release date is October 14th, but the interesting news is that the next game will keep the “world” system, just in what appears to be an offline capacity. So you’ll be able to build a series of cities across a planet of your own, something like that. Will it just be the old game patched up to work offline? I’ll drop them a line and find out some more about what we should expect.

PC Gamer have got terribly excited over revealing the “incredible new art style” for League of Legends. There’s more in their issue, but they show how two of the legendary leaguers and – er – trees have been changed. Generally speaking, it looks like the increased-detail sort of retexturing and seriousing-up which you know will be rife after Diablo III is released. We’re also pleased to see that Riot Games have discovered desaturation in photoshop. Incredible.

Sadness. According to a post on MineCraft developer Notch’s blog, PayPal have limited access to his PayPal account due to “a suspicious withdrawal or deposit”. That’d be the same PayPal account people drop money into when they buy MineCraft. In the post, Notch says that there’s more than €600,000 in there, and if PayPal decide something untoward is going on they’re going to keep that money.

This news comes hot on the heels of Notch stating his intent to use that money to start his own development studio, which could only be a huge boon for PC gaming. “I’m sure I’ll get it sorted out,” says Notch, “but this is kind of frustrating.”

In PayPal’s defense, a PC indie developer racking up 600 thousand euros is pretty suspicious, albeit only in a “What brand of racehorse steroids did Notch import that made him this amazing” kind of way. Notch! Our hearts and prayers are with you. Thanks to RPS reader Dan Lowrie for the heads up.

A Friday afternoon distraction here. Langman is really just a conceptually pure thing. It’s a unity-powered combination between the word-game hangman and a platformer, so you have to jump between the letters to select them. Fall to your death, and you lose a guess. Guess wrong and you lose a guess. Guess right, and you may add another guess. Battling against my (perhaps predictable) intrinsic dislike of word-games involving spelling, this managed to charm me with its Retro aesthetics and chiptune sounds, plus increasingly complicated levels. Cute. Play here or watch a trailer below…
Read the rest of this entry »

And henceforth Ruse, because game names with extraneous punctuation in are just silly. Right, Stalker? Right. There can be much in a name, too. In this new real-time strategy from Eugen Systems and Ubisoft everything is based on that one titular conceit: trickery, misdirection, the flow of information. The ruse is the game. Some RTS games make a nod to this stuff with their fog of war, or even stealth tanks or whatnot, but here it’s the key to success. It’s remarkably refreshing. Also, I flagrantly kicked out my network cable and I didn’t care! Why not? Because there’s no always-on DRM. But enough pre-blather bombardment. Let’s launch the landing craft of criticism directly into what I think about Ruse…

Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone version of Armor Games’ original Crush The Castle has been a guilty pleasure of mine for a while. I was about to pick up the Android port now I’ve changed to an HTC Erotic or whatever it’s called, but then helpful reader Norskov appraised pointed our eye-machines at to the arrival of a browser-based sequel. This highly-emprettified follow-up to the game I like to call “Angry Birds For Medieval Sadists” is going to fulfill all my royalty-splatting needs for the time being.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Friday, so time to quickly nose around and see if there are any key stories we’ve missed. And Blizzard releasing their first official custom map for Starcraft 2? That’s a key story. Not an enormous key, like the one Superman uses to keep his Fortress of Solitude locked, but certainly some manner of key. Perhaps one for a padlock for a bike or something. ANYWAY! The map’s called Burning Tide and is basically a 3v3 map riffing off the Devil’s Playground mission from the campaign, with all the fun rising and lowering lava flows and desperate rushing to get Ore. Or, as I prefer to call it “Space-Iron”. You’ll find it in your Custom Games folder in Starcraft II if you just play now.

Some kind of embargo has ended! The genetically engineered newsbats of VG247 have posted a collection of new Shogun: Total War 2 screenshots showing the as-yet unseen campaign map, and IGN’s trained news dolphins have posted a preview talking about it. Or rather, the dolphins squeaked and clicked about it, and this was transcribed by an interpreter.

But I know you don’t like to hear your news from these cost-effective animals. That’s why I’ve collated all the information and images for you, and you can find it right after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

As the subject line says. Which is sad, but is just something that occasionally happens. As long as it’s a proper delay, and not just one format being treated as an afterthoug… what? Oh no. Really? Man! Yeah, it’s just the PC one that’s been delayed until early next year. Ubisoft, you loveable funsters. You know how to make a dying format feel special.

In other notes, this talking about the Doctor’s deadly syringe seems very skeezy to me. MAN SYRINGE, etc.