Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If games have taught me three things, it’s that humans have a secret love of (1) shooting other humans in the dick, (2) numbers going up, and (3) blobs. Blob-lovers! Listen close, because IGF 2011 entrant Confetti Carnival is quite literally the best-looking blob game I’ve seen all morning.

The game will see us flinging different-coloured blobs at delicate confetti bombs, trying to match colours and string together the most wonderful confetti explosions. It… I guess it sounds kind of mundane, but just watch the trailer below. It’s a masterclass in exciting editing.
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I’ll not beat around the bush here. Fantasy University is a new Facebook game that’s pretty much Kingdom of Loathing, except instead of willfully crap art and surrealist text, it tries to be pretty and has a more satirical tone. But the appeal is just the same- free, lo-fi character development in an overtly funny, monochrome world.

It’s also just as addictive as Kingdom of Loathing. Probably don’t go and check it out if you have a high power job, a baby, or a high power baby who ejects you from windows when displeased. Thanks to ex-PC Zoner Ed Zitron for the tipoff. Fittingly, I used to go to school with Ed. He was in the year above me, but I was taller.

Tribes Universe is now open for alpha testing applications. Here’s the message from Hi-Rez: “We are very proud and humbled to be carrying the banner of the Tribes Franchise,” said Stewart Chisam, Executive Producer of Tribes Universe. “Because the game will be focused around huge battles on huge landscapes, we need a solid group of very dedicated testers that can help us from the games’ earliest stages to validate the scalability and performance of the game, while also helping tune and refine gameplay. We look forward to starting Alpha testing early next year and will certainly be providing much more information over the coming months.”

Head over to the site to sign up.

Grab your Jarate bottles, it’s about to get all Halloweeny. In the second, and thus now annual, All Hallows Eve update for Team Fortress 2, the game has added its first ever NPC boss monster. He’s the Horseless Headless Horsemann (indeed, a long lost member of the Mann family), and only appears in a new spooky map, Mann Manor. He’s randomly generated, and DOESN’T HAVE A HEAD… OR A HORSE. Cripes!

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Just to say, my girlfriend is best of all the girlfriends.

But I’m also convinced that there must be other game related cakes that people have had and, ideally, photographed. So post links below, and I’ll magic them into images in the comments. Thus we will win at the internet.

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Lord only knows what manner of many-tentacled beast Minecraft will be in the years to come, but right now the most anticipated change to The Game That Surprised The World is biomes. That there being a fancy-falutin’ word for ‘environments.’ Well, multiple environments within the overarching game environment, to put it with crude specificity.

As the frankly gorgeous video below demonstrates, biomes are what will further cement Minecraft’s status as an explorer’s paradise. No one repeating climate or land-style any more, but instead huge, sprawling worlds full of different aesthetics, different weather, different flora and different fauna. Adventure! Beautiful, blocky adventure!
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Previously canned DLCs for Bioshock 2 will be arrive on PC after all. That’s what “2K Elizabeth” has said over here. The post reads: “I have some good news concerning the BioShock 2 PC patch as well as the development of Protector Trials and Minerva’s Den for the PC. Not to keep you in suspense any longer, I’ll sum it up with one sentence: We have resumed development on all three and they will be coming to PC.”

It also looks like the patch and the Protector Trials will be due roughly December time and they will be free. This is: Good News.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this. Arcen Games has released an update for A.I. War of such magnitude that I’m not sure our long-running A.I. War diary will ever be the same again.

Arcen Games describe the free 4.0 update as “unreservedly huge”, which sounds fair: 147 new ships, a new interface, total overhauling of most of the game’s rules and mechanics, updated tutorials, more advanced “teach-yourself-to-play-better” features AND a graphical overhaul. A.I. War now runs in Unity, meaning it’s not just prettier but Mac and Linux compatible. Oh, and the $4 Children of the Neinzul expansion’s been released, too. 3 new Neinzul factions, 6 new AI types, 36 new ship and 6 new AI special weapons. Christ. Trailers after the jump.
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Ron Gilbert’s comedy Diablo-alike, Deathspank, is out now on Steam for £9.99! I mean, technically it was also out yesterday on Steam for £9.99, but it’s RPS’s firm belief that news gets better with age. You know, like fine wine, or the Bond films of Roger Moore.

I played DeathSpank when it first came out on Xbox Live and really enjoyed myself. The jokes are hit and miss, but come at you in such relentless volleys that you can end up doing a fair bit of giggling. Combat and progression were tighter than I was expecting, too. Ye olde trailere after the jump.
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My personal jury’s still out on Facebook games (it’s still an incredibly young games platform, after all), but one thing I really don’t like about them is that they’ve been truncated from ‘social network games’ to ‘social games.’ That’s far too evocative a term to be applied to posting high scores and begging people for sheep. ‘Social games’ evokes playing games together, socially. For instance, chaining a bunch of PCs together and pretending they’re the bridge of the Enterprise. This is a social game. This is also the final frontier of space simulation.

The below is the nerdiest thing you’ve ever seen, and also the greatest.
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Loads of demon hunter footage. A little bit of PvP.

You know the classic “angel on one shoulder, devil on the other” thing? Well I like to think there’s a third, rational, truly neutral character sat atop my head (perhaps an emotionless robot) and he’s saying that I shouldn’t be quite so excited about Diablo III. Nevertheless it just looks… tight. I have a pretty high tolerance for dungeon crawling as it is, but when it’s going to be as robust and punchy as this is almost certainly going to be. Oh, it’s unhealthy.
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