Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve spent rather a lot of time of late in the lands of Lego Universe, the kid-friendly MMO from Auto Assault creators, NetDevil. It’s been out for a couple of weeks now, so how does the brick-built world fare? Read on to find out Wot I Think.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Codes are yet to be sent out, while we investigate an issue that means they don’t work in the US. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon and codes will go out later today.

You! You there! In the trousers and/or shorts and/or skirt and/or leggings and/or underwear! Do you want to buy Bloody Good Time for half-price? That being the latest game from Outerlight, makers of respected Half-Life mod The Ship. This one’s Source-based, so all pretty and stuff, and features Murder Most Horrid at the hands of warring wannabe film-stars. It’s a ‘toonish slasher pic, essentially. Details here.

Alas, it may be Outerlight’s last too, as the studio is apparently clinging to life by a thread whilst it waits for royalties to arrive. If you feel like chucking a bob or two their way and/or want to play their comedy assassination multiplayer game, you might as well do it at minimal expense to yourself. To whit, by saving 50% off the Steam version of the game (though you have to buy it via Ubi’s webshop, confusingly) – which means you get it for £2/$2.50 rather than £4/$5.

The first 900 readers to fill out the below form get a code. You should also click-forth to see what the game’s like, if you don’t already know. I.e. don’t snaffle discount codes that could go to someone else if this ain’t your kind of thing, greedy.
Read the rest of this entry »

This April, Jim sluggishly wobbled into action when German publishers The Game Company announced they’d be publishing a Polish 3rd person survival horror shooter called Afterfall: Insanity. This morning, we got a press release from German publishers Just A Game will be publishing Afterfall: Insanity in 2011. Why? Oh. Turns out The Game Company declared insolvency earlier this year. They will be missed.

The new press release has more details on Afterfall’s “sinister post-apocalyptic setting” and “very sophisticated story”. RPS readers! I hereby invite you to be the judge of that.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is mad. Over on StarCraft 2 forum Teamliquid, a poster who goes by Lomilar has been talking about a program he’s coded called EvolutionChamber. It uses genetic algorithms to find powerful build orders, meaning his program takes a population of build orders, kills off the useless ones, and has the most successful ones reproduce asexually to create a new population, which tests itself again, and so on. I’m taking all this from this blog post by programmer Louis Brandy, wherein he breaks down what Lomilar’s done so that lay folk can understand it.

EvolutionChamber’s already come up with one ludicrous build order, which I’ve posted beneath the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, only two multiplayer games, but they are games. One is zero-G astronaut battler (with excellent space furniture), Shattered Horizon, and the other is slightly wonky Wild West shoot ‘em up Lead & Gold: Gangs Of The Wild West. They’re temporarily free to play on Steam over the weekend, with a large discount for actual permanent purchase if the freeness persuades you of long-term appeal.

Hmm. That – Shattered Horizon, I mean – would have made a good game club outing. As Phill pointed out, it’s benefited great from its updates. Oh well, maybe we squeeze in some astronaut deathmatchery between the Arma II exploits. Hell, I bet Notch goes and makes SMP work properly before the weekend and then I will have to play that too.

Next, another tale of glitz and glamour from the PC’s drug-soaked, rock-n-roll interactive fiction community. And by “another” I mean “possibly the first, ever”.

Highly respected IF author Andrew Plotkin (Spider and Web, Shade and much more) wants to make the switch to writing IF full-time. He created a Kickstarter page, saying that if he raised $8,000 in a month he’d proceed across the rocky tundra of self-employment and start making IF games for iOS devices (a pledge of $25 or more WILL get you a PC version on CD, though). What happened next? Well…
Read the rest of this entry »

Red Five have been abroad in China to demo their persistent world shooter Firefall, and they’ve come up with a bit more footage for the purpose, which I’ve posted below. The impressive dropship flyovers here give us a bit more sense of the scale of the game world, and the battles going on below make me recollect fine evenings spent haring about in PlanetSide. The more impressive stuff, perhaps, is the world design as a whole, including the freaky creatures which inhabit it, and the environments you will be fighting through. Tribes Universe was certainly a welcome announcement last month, but I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on Firefall.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Defense of The Ancients 2 site has now gone live, and IceFrog has answered a bunch of questions derived from (presumably) the DOTA-playing community: it will support reconnecting, there will be no region limitations, there will be bot support, there will be a spectator function. There are also a few pieces of artwork from the original announcement, but no screenshots as yet. We shall be keeping an eye on this one, particularly in light of the potential funny stuff going on between Valve and Blizzard.

The phenomenon of the Antiques Roadshow cannot be ignored. What was once the obscurity of Sunday evening BBC 1, watched by old ladies and those waiting for Lovejoy to start, has now become one of the hottest properties on Earth. With primetime viewing figures outstripping both the X Factor and American Idol, and a movie franchise about to release its third blockbuster film, it was inevitable that a tie-in videogame would be coming along…

Wait, what, the Antiques Roadshow? Sorry, I was thinking of something else. Dinner, maybe. They’ve made a game, and released a demo, of the Antiques Roadshow?

Read the rest of this entry »

If there was a significant problem with fleet-management game Gratuitous Space Battles, it was that it was almost too gratuitous. There were a lot of space battles, with nothing to link or contextualise them. To fix this black hole in the space-time of his creation, Cliff “Positech” Harris has been constructing some DLC, a “massively single-player” non-linear campaign, which is now nearing completion. I had a quick chat with him about this development, which you can read below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Our chums over at Eurogamer are running an article about the catastrophic failure of APB:

After receiving the news, most of the former employees left for the pub straight away. But a core of the now jobless staff remained at the studio well into the night. Though the studio was finished and APB was effectively dead they didn’t want to say goodbye, to each other or the game.

“We stayed on, even though we knew we were fired,” say Bateman. “We were running the servers, trying to get contingency plans in place, so we could try to do stuff from home. It was like the Titanic was sinking but people were trying to patch it up just in case.”

It’s large, comprehensive, filled with insider quotes, and worth a read.