Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Recettear, o Recettear. The out-of-nowhere translation of EasyGameStation’s Japanese indie shopkeeping/dungeoneering hybrid has done pretty well for itself, recently passing 100,000 sales with barely a whiff of marketing or promotion. While that’s just 10% of Minecraft’s paying userbase, it does proves that you don’t need to go mega-viral to make the creation and selling of indie games a plausible career choice. Given that milestone and given the recent announcement that Chantelise will be US translat-o-developers Carpe Fulgur’s next project, it seemed like a good time to chat to the team’s Andrew Dice about what happened, what he expected to happen, more about Chantelise’s when and why, and what game(s) they’re hoping to turn their attention to next. Go words!
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Almost confirming what we already thought we knew, cleverly-named Windows rumours site WinRumours states that: “Microsoft is set to unveil driver support and an SDK in the coming months and will allow third-party developers to create titles that utilize the Kinect sensor when plugged into a PC. According to sources familiar with the plans, Microsoft will distribute the drivers under the “beta” tag.” This follows Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer responding to questions about Kinect on PC by saying: “We’ll support that in a formal way in the right time.” Did he mean at the right time? Probably.

Anyway, we can totally expect a wave of PC dancing games and robot-controlling apps! An exciting future, I think you’ll agree.

Thanks to an image leaked last week we now know three new things about upcoming Spitfire-serenade Storm of War: Battle of Britain. 1) It’s no longer called Storm of War: Battle of Britain. 2) Ubisoft are publishing. 3) The luscious-looking Collector’s Edition with its cloth maps and plump manuals may be about to give today’s teenagers a taste of what it was like to be a simmer in the Nineties. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I was in the Houses of Parliament doing some actual reporting. Yes! Outside, where the diseases live. This is because the 12th of January was the first Parliamentary Games Day, as organised by UK volunteer consumer interests group Gamers’ Voice. The thinking behind the event was that it would allow politicians to interact with members of the games industry, play some games and basically learn a thing or two about these modern video shootems that they’re expected to legislate.

“Games Day” is a misnomer- the event would only be two hours long, thereby limiting my chances of contracting Spongeskin, Pauper’s Wilt or any of the other infections which are rife in the city. I like my immune system like I like my women: clean and inexperienced. But I digress. How did Games Day go? Well, let me tell you. It had some moments.
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A new rumour has entered the ring! Silicon Era has posted about a recent live Q&A session with Capcom USA’s Vice-president of Strategic Planning & Business Development, Christian Svensson, in which the question of Super Street Fighter IV on PC raised its hopeful and bruised head once again. Silicon Era point out that Capcom USA are always the first branch of Capcom to come out with PC ports, so Svensson’s answer carries plenty weight. Let’s see what he said…
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How classy? Well, each of the upcoming MMORPG’s four classes, Warrior, Rogue, Cleric and Mage, has eight sub-classes called “Souls”, from which you pick three. So you won’t just be a Warrior, but a Reaver-Beastmaster-Warlord, capable of switching your powers out for that of a Riftblade-Void Knight-Beastmaster (or anything else) at the touch of a button. With hundreds and hundreds of different class combinations, Rift is most definitely a classy creation. Look, there’s a new video proving as much after the jump.
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It’s hard not to think that musical blocks weren’t added to Minecraft with the sole intention of ensuring a trillion new YouTube videos that we all can’t resist posting. Double that down with the internet’s endless love for Portal’s Still Alive (how will they ever compete with that in Portal 2?), and you’ve got a post that has to be there first thing on a Monday morning to correctly start your week. And this isn’t a half-arsed job. Incredibly only taking five or six hours to put together, this is a remarkable piano rendition of the Coulton song.

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Big Block Games recently posted up a rather entertaining Flash game, Goblin War Machine. It’s like a silly physics version of that old side-scroller, Walker. Remember that? With the robot and the tiny, doomed people? Anyway, Goblin War Machine has you crush your enemies, see them run before, and all that, with some optional war machine customisation. You should play it. If you can’t play it, you can watch the video below, and wish that you could.
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Stardock have had some more to say about Fallen Enchantress, the recently-revealed expansion for their fantasy strategy game, Elemental – War Of Magic. The game, which will be free to everyone who bought Elemental before 2011, will be a standalone title, and should, Stardock have said, be regarded as a new game. Not least because it has a new team behind it: “Fallen Enchantress gives us the opportunity to have a very different fantasy strategy game than War of Magic. While the original intent was simply to eliminate an unnecessary SCU (we can simply have Fallen Enchantress with an upgrade price for people who have War of Magic), in this case, it lets us make an even bigger break from War of Magic because it has a new Lead Designer (Kael instead of myself) with Jon Shafer helping as well as we begin pre-production of Jon’s new game along with many other changes. It’s still Stardock but it’s a very different Stardock than what made War of Magic (or GalCiv II for that matter).”

More here.

Sundays are for catching up on all the things that the action of the week let lag behind. Sleep. Food. Gaming. Murmuring. Fidgeting in a corner. And yet all of those things pale into insignificance next to the heap of neglected reading. So allow me to pile it up in your In tray, and provide you some quiet time to leaf through the pages of internet chatter generated by the human race, and their obsession with electronic games.

• I suppose we’ve gone out of our way to avoid talking about how CityVille now has more registered players than there are people who have ever lived, but it’s worth remembering that this PC game is a brutal phenomenon of free-to-play success. Gamasutra took some time to explain it, in a two part article. It’s buzzword-tastic, and heavy on the attempted theory, but if you can swallow those, there’s useful analysis. Here’s a bit of that: “Games tap into our need to close loops. Social games like CityVille are expert at doing so because what they create is a never-ending series of open loops. No matter how quickly you play or how much money you spend, there is always something to do, some gate to unlock, some task tree to complete, some daily bonus to claim, some new set to gather, some crop to harvest or some level to attain. It never really ends, and it overlaps various loops over one another such that even if you have run out of cash or coins, there is always something to do – but not for extended sessions. The loops that the game creates in your mind cannot be closed until you come back later. In the mean time, have a cake!”

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Thought I would write down a list of things I want to do in my weekly column for RPS in 2010. I really need to get on top of things a bit more. BE ORGANISED. Just off the top of my head I’ll fire down what I want and need to do this yea

1. Boast about my Deathwatch Collector’s Edition. Well, not boast about it. That would make me look terrible. But I certainly need to cover the Deathwatch RPG, paying particular attention to how well it captures that whole “being a Space Marine” thing. Of course, while covering Deathwatch I can also post photos of my Deathwatch Collector’s Edition. And boast about it. Bingo. This should be the first thing I cover when I start the normal columns next week. I need to step up RPG coverage across the board in 2010 – should be easy enough with the D&D adventures I’ll be running and my big Warhammer 40K RPG campaign. NOTE: REMEMBER TO BOAST ABOUT DEATHWATCH COLLECTOR’S EDITION.
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