Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Indie climate change strategy game Fate of the World has been on RPS’ radar for a while. As of this Monday, the beta’s been made available to all pre-order customers. Can RPS rescue our doomed world? There’s only one way to find out.

I’ll admit to it now. I approached saving planet Earth with the same attitude I have to most games – figuring I’d beat the odds with nothing but some quick learning, lateral thinking and a dash of roguish risk-taking.

Yeah. About that.
Read the rest of this entry »

Have you tried comic book-looking platformer/manfighter Shank? It came out on Steam last week, boasting a demo and a beefy £10 pricetag. Maybe £10 sounds like a lot, but then maybe you didn’t know that Shank is a game where guns, knives and your chainsaw are simply three different buttons, and protagonist Shank juggles them all like a flair bartender.

I didn’t get along much with Shank when it came out on Xbox Live, but reviews were pretty mixed. As a litmus test, you can watch a video of Shank doing his thing after the jump. If you giggle continuously or start pumping your fist in the air while watching it, Shank might just be for you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night saw the first hearings in the case known as Schwarzenegger vs EMA, which concerns the Governator’s attempt to bring about a US-wide ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. Which sounds eminently reasonable, save for the fact that the US already has the ESRB ratings system, which anyone with even an eighth of a brain uses and enforces effectively. This law would remove all parental responsibility concerning what games their kids can play, and instead make it a criminal offence for retailers to sell adult-rated games to under 18s – as well as effectively putting the judgment as to which games contain “deviant violence” in the capricious hands of state authorities.

While the case for the defence has been that this contravenes First Amendment rights regarding freedom of speech, the real problem is that notoriously conservative mega-chains like Walmart would likely refuse to stock adult-rated games at all (considering them pretty much up there with hardcore porn), which means sales will plummet and publishers will focus efforts on family-friendly stuff instead. Much as it’s enormously important to ensure kids don’t have easy access to games with violent or saucy content, we really don’t want our choice of games to diminish sharply as a result. Fortunately, California’s arguments appear to be vague, contradictory and poorly thought-out, which a number of US Supreme Court judges quickly caught onto…
Read the rest of this entry »

James Bond: Blood Stone seems to have rather sneaked up on us. Perhaps it’s going to shoot us with a silenced pistol. It’s out in only two days, and to commemorate this, there’s a launch trailer. It can be watched, with either or both eyes, below.

Read the rest of this entry »

EG report that Easy, developers of Battlefield Heroes, will be announcing a “completely new” Battlefield title this Friday. Easy’s general manager also let it be known that the title won’t be (a) Battlefield 3, or (b) Battlefield Assault, which is the name of a domain EA picked up recently.

Sometimes I think RPS is two sites. One of them is called Hot Manshoots, and the other is called The Indie Lagoon, and I don’t think they can co-exist forever. There will come a time when we’ll all have to pick sides. Which side would you fight for, readers?

The Dejobaan guys are best. This much we know. But what are they working on now? We don’t know! Unacceptable. I dispatched a squad of RPS fightbots to find out, but they came back half an hour later with the postman’s wang on a skewer, so I just checked the Dejobaan site instead.

The Musorqua Project is another score-based flying (or, falling) game, with levels that are procedurally generated depending on the mp3 you play the game with. The game’s still in pre-alpha, but Dejobaan “hope to sexify things up a bit” soon. I don’t know what that means, but you can watch a couple of videos below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Turn-based neon 3D artillery-based strategy game DigiTanks is rather cute, and it now has a demo out, so you can sample it for yourself. The game has two modes, a pure artillery mode where you fight against squads of tanks in a last-man standing sort of affair, and a tactical mode that involves a bit more building and resource-management. The demo limits the tactical mode to 100 turns, but it’s otherwise the full game (as far as I can tell), including online multiplayer.

I’ve posted some footage below.
Read the rest of this entry »

As everyone clever knows, 2003′s Tron 2.0 was an imperfect shooter stuffed to the neon gills with thoughtful design – both thematically and visually. As current shooters hunt for ever-more shades of brown, it is only proper to hang our heads and think of where we might be today had Tron 2.0 taken off.

We’ll never know. But we can at least play free Unreal 3-based hacking/shooting game Sp.A.I.
Read the rest of this entry »

The free-to-play launch of Lord Of The Rings Online in Europe is upon us, and to celebrate Codemasters have provided us with a number of 500 points (roughly £5) vouchers of in-game cash tokens, which you can spend on trinkets and treasures from the game’s item store. Want one? Then email us here with your best idea for the name of an ent. The best ent names will win the virtual elf bucks. All the usual rules apply, with the additional caveat that you need to be resident in an EU country to apply.We will select the winners on Monday and then LOTRO folk will be in touch with the vouchers.

You can always play the game for free, of course.

EDIT: Compo closed. Winners will be contacted with their cash soonish by agents of Codemasters/Turbine.

Hooray! The MoWAS Steam group finally hit 10,000 people, and the open beta has commenced. DigitalMindSoft say: “Players will be able to try out the new skirmish game mode on two maps with up to four players, and play other popular online game modes such as Assault Zone, Combat and Frontlines, which have all been improved. For instance players can now use Special Units throughout the entire battle.”

Join us! You can get the beta here. (And it uses Steam.)

After the excitement of last night’s Antiques Roadshow demo, I’ve got the adrenaline buzz. I need another fix. Something, anything! Oooh, Farming Simulator 2011. Can it be only a year since Farming Simulator 2009 wowed us all? (FS 2010 is mysteriously absent.) A nation was taken with farm machinery fever, as fields were ploughed, straw was baled, and memberships to UKIP were renewed. So it’s time to dust off your work boots, grab your tractor keys, and madly insist on endangering children with Daylight Saving Time, via the demo of this latest version.

Read the rest of this entry »