Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A post on the Steam forums suggests that ringing up EA’s support lines to complain about the untimely demise of APB might be fruitful. The poster in this instance managed to get 4000 Bioware points, which I think is about $50. Worth a shot, if you’re glum about your APB purchase, anyway.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the game gets resurrected long-term, as has been suggested in a number of rumours, and whether that will attract the original purchasers of the game. Personally, I suspect it will stay dead.

More on refunds here.

You may remember us setting up some lovely polls to see whether people wanted to hook up at the Eurogamer Expo. And you do! So, I’ve OBEYED YOUR WILL and done some phoning around and actually booked a room for RPS’ EVIL USES on Friday October 1st. Full details follow, including what I suggest folk do on the other nights.

EDIT: There’s a second map with a guide from the expo…
Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for writing fight scenes, making more tea than a human can possibly imbibe and compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related writing from across the week while trying to not link to some piece of bloody pop music.

• Rossignol writes why he considers himself a cyborg due to his videogames in his Prosthetic Imagination piece. You should all read this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quite a few people have pointed us at this, and I suspect most of ‘em got it from Kotaku, so let’s give ‘em a link. Brentalfloss adds his own lyrics to the always atmospheric Baba Yetu theme tune from Civ 4. Watch below!
Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, all you parents of Cardboard Children.

This week we had some big news from that board game publishing behemoth, Fantasy Flight Games. Mansions of Madness was announced, a new board game with an H.P. Lovecraft theme. Ol’ brown sauce himself. Apparently the game is a scenario-based effort, where one player tries to advance an evil plot while everyone else tries to put a stop to the bad player’s schemes. All set in a house. At night. Probably. Hey, It’ll be nice to actually be Nyarlathotep for a change, instead of just masturbating while looking at pictures of him.
Read the rest of this entry »

Aha! Below you’ll see I’ve posted some slightly dodgy footage taken by someone who attended the White Wolf convention, The Grand Masquerade, which is taking place in New Orleans at the moment. No game footage, it’s one of those animated concept art scene-setting things, but this is the first we’ve really seen of CCP’s world on the World of Darkness MMO. It turned up in this thread on QT3. I can’t see much more information than that at the moment, except that the game will be based on the older Masquerade system. More news as I dredge it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Witness my stoney-eyed stare. Perched on the rim of the bargain bucket, I see to the very heart and soul of all the merchants in the digital trading halls of the world wide web. I silently command them to reduce their prices slightly, all for your benefit. Have your payment solutions at the ready, and clear some space on your hard drive, because here’s another bountiful bucket of computer gaming savings. Remember to click on SavyGamer.co.uk regularly for up to the minute information on what games are being discounted right this very moment. If there is a bargain bucket next weekend, you’ll probably have to get it off me live. Poke me if you see me in or around the Eurogamer Expo, and I’ll probably know what’s cheap on Steam.
Read the rest of this entry »

Good news for fans of good news. All the Age of Wonders games have been re-released for the Direct Download market. At the time of writing, all three are available in a trilogy pack (plus soundtracks) on Impulse, the first is on Good Old Games and apparently they’ll be on Steam imminently. They’re some of my favourite turn-based strategy games of the last fifteen years, so I thought I’d grab the chance to talk to Triumph Studios’ original design director, Lennart Sas, about how the games came to be, his memories of them and the possibilities of a third one…
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Christmas in September! During the RPS summit yesterday the lot of us somehow found time in our packed schedule of shouting and dueling to do a podcast, making this the first RPS Electronic Wireless Show to feature five whole RPS writers. Hopefully hearing all five of us speak at the same time will finally dispel the rumours that John Walker is a character created and voiced by Kieron, Kieron is nothing but a fiction written by Alec Meer, and that I am a figment of John’s imagination. Download the podcast here, subscribe to it via RSS here, or get it on iTunes from here, abstractly, except it’s still not updating for no discernible reason. You can manually add the RSS feed to Itunes though, which works perfectly. Meticulous timetabling of our conversation follows…

Read the rest of this entry »

Poor old Team 17′s rebooted Alien Breed hasn’t had the best luck on PC, having had its thunder royally stolen by Valve’s rebooted (and, more to the point, free) Alien Swarm. Too many aliens, too many reboots happening at once. Unbowed – well, probably a little bowed, I suspect – they’re having another go, with the release and demo of Alien Breed 2: Assault. This is not the same as the original Alien Breed 2. It confuses me. I want to cry. But I also want to shoot aliens!
Read the rest of this entry »

The PC version of THQ’s demonic hack ‘em up adventure Darksiders is out today, and I’ve been having a bit of play. In it you thump your way through the hyperbolic story a fallen horseman of the apocalypse. With an ultimate goal of cosmic revenge, you chop many unpleasant creatures into pieces with a sword the size of an ironing board. A satisfying undertaking, you might think. And perhaps a welcome break from World War II RTS titles, too? Well, read on for some more thoughts.
Read the rest of this entry »