By Alec Meer on September 28th, 2010.
This I want to try. I want it try it bad. Oh, so bad, baby. Unfortunately I’m currently making zombies wear hats made of spinning drills in Dead Rising 2, but this fan-made fountain of youth for my beloved Dungeon Keeper is very much next on the agenda.
As its creator observes, a lot of game remakes never get off the ground – so instead Polish engineer Tomasz Lis has elected to update what already exists.
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By Kieron Gillen on September 28th, 2010.
The previously announced Sword of the Stars II? Well, they’ve only gone and released a trailer. HOT FOOTAGE of slowly rotating enormo-ships follow. There is nothing more PC gaming than enormous space-ships, except for terrain. Terrain remains number 1! Number 1 4EVA!
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By Kieron Gillen on September 28th, 2010.
Spoilers have been on my mind. Not the Darth Vader is Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense way, but whether the way we think about and talk about spoilers in reviews are actually appropriate for the form. In short: we spend a lot of time debating about things which barely affect our experiences at all while tearing other things free from the still living torso of a game which absolutely alters what everyone who reads then plays takes away. The first question I’m wondering is “why is there is this double-standard?” The second question “is there anything we do about it?” And the third is “should we”?
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By Quintin Smith on September 28th, 2010.
Cheating AI in racing games? We’re acquainted with it. Cheating AI in racing games gets a card with a robin on it at Christmas and an invitation to our birthday party. What’s emerging from F1 2010 is an order of magnitude more serious, though.
Codemasters has admitted that what the AI cars do during qualifying matches bears no relation to the lap times those cars post. As for the actual races in the game, Codemasters is keeping very quiet, though F1 players are having doubts about the legitimacy of the AI racing drivers there as well. Whether they’re actually racing at all, for instance.
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By John Walker on September 28th, 2010.
They said it couldn’t be done. We’re still not sure how it was done, but we called it. One of the most infamously impossible to release games of all time is now available to play on modern PCs. Good Old Games are probably forgiven all their recent naughty doings by securing one of the finest RPGs of all time, Planescape: Torment. It’s $9.95, and just over a GB to download from their re-launched website. Unless you managed to get the mysteriously released boxed copy from Amazon last year (which was a completely unpatched version), this is the first chance to get the classic RPG in many years. We’re chasing GoG for more details about how they secured this, and check out Kieron’s superb retrospective of the game. Also, take a look at Alec’s guide for getting the game to run in enormous widescreen-o-vision. Planescape’s back!
By RPS on September 28th, 2010.
This retrospective post was originally published on RPS in 2007, and we repost it here to celebrate the arrival of Planescape: Torment on Good Old Games. It was first written by Kieron for PC Gamer. Some spoilers follow, but nothing absolutely critical.
Ignored by the gaming press upon release, only receiving warmish reviews that stopped well short of open adulation and the victim of one of the most ill-judged marketing campaigns (“A corpse with irresistible sexual charisma”) in history, Planescape Torment is the classic Underdog. Inevitably, it became the (relatively speaking) commercial runt of the Baldur’s Gate litter. In the years since, the coin of its critical worth has accumulated to the point where aficionados regularly cite it as the greatest of the PC RPGs. In fact, it’s rehabilitation has gone too far, with its name being a simple byword for narrative excellence without anyone really feeling the need to say why. There’s more here than dogmatic romantic myth.
By John Walker on September 28th, 2010.
Last night I stayed up until 4.30am building a house in Minecraft. Not a good house. A very ordinary two-storey, flat-roofed house, that serves no purpose, and most pointlessly of all is immediately next to my main cave dwellings. I think I may have a problem. Unlike halnicholas, whose only problem is being too amazing. Oh good grief, this puts things into perspective: the Enterprise-D build 1:1 scale out of Minecraft blocks. Those words cannot convey the complexity of the project. Well, have a look at the video below.
By Quintin Smith on September 28th, 2010.
In which I make biscuits, make money, and begin making sense of things before something happens that makes me say “What the fuck” many, many times.
To clarify, what I’m trying to do with Onionbog is tell a story that’s also a basic introduction to how Dwarf Fortress works and what it’s like to play. There’s too much talk about how inaccessible DF is. What happens if you try and fumble your way through the game after only a few hours spent browsing tutorials? Onionbog is what happens.
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By Kieron Gillen on September 28th, 2010.
Wing Commander is 20, apparently. Mythic’s Paul Barnett has a plan: “My plan is Wing Commander 1, DRM free and security bypassed. For FREE.” he says on his twitter. The noble tech guys actually have a Security-cleaned DOS-Box-running version of the game running. What’s the problem? “Today we get data compare sign off for Wing Commander, Dr Ray will be hearing the pitch, from there only legal can stop us!” he says. And reading between the lines, it seems that EA Legal may be the sticking point. As he says to Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb: “You need to get your faithful to Re-tweet it, to shame EA legal into letting me do it !” I think the public shaming of a Legal department is the sort of thing RPS can get on side with. Shame! Shame! And – er – a firm manly handshake if you work out a way to make it happen, obv.
By Jim Rossignol on September 28th, 2010.
The rather pretty platformer NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits has turned up on Steam, where it also has a demo. It’s a playful retelling of the Icarus myth, with plenty of monsters and spikes to put an end to our winged lady as she makes her way through imaginary side-scrolling Greece. Worth a look, I would say. A trailer is having its sins addressed in the Hadean space beneath the click.
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By Jim Rossignol on September 28th, 2010.
While not exactly about playing games (this is more for the making of games) the launch of Unity 3, the third iteration of the free-to-use game engine, has me excited. Of all the game-making tools out there, Unity is the one I’ve spent the most time with, and it was actually responsible for the RPS game, RockPaperShotgunity, which we cobbled together last year. Also, I totally made some big spheres move about making booming noises. I am The Creator. People who know stuff are more excited about the unified editor, the post-processing and shader improvements, the occlusion culling, deferred rendering, and other tech stuff. Full What’s New list here, although some of that is for the paid-for Pro version, which I think is limited to a month demo, something like that.
Never made a game before? Spong In A Posty! Although that’s probably a bit out of date for Unity 3. Maybe it’s time to do another one.
