Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Darkness, aka “that game from the Riddick guys where you could spend half an hour watching TV with your in-game girlfriend.” An action game with a heart of – ahahahah – darkness and a bunch of great ideas and atmosphere, even if it perhaps didn’t attain Modern Classic status. Happening at perhaps the apex of the big publishers’ “nah, fuggedaboutit” dismissal of our sacred boxes, the PC lost out. It doesn’t this time – 2K just announced the Darkness II, and we’re getting it!

Someone who isn’t getting it, however, is original developer Starbreeze.
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A poster on the ever-mighty NeoGAF forums has paraphrased the new details on Battlefield 3 from the new issue of Game Informer. There’s a lot here, but here’s the gem- the PC version is not only the lead version, it’ll boast the 64 player limit of Battlefield 2, while console versions of Battlefield 3 will only support 24 players. When was the last time a PC version of a AAA game had a benefit like that? Yikes.
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Gamasutra have a wide-ranging interview with Bill Roper, the juciest portion of which talks about how Hellgate: London went wrong. He says: “It still eventually comes down to dollars and cents and time. I mean, I think when Hellgate: London came out… we knew it needed another four to six months. The publishers knew it needed another four to six months. Everybody was all in. That was kind of the mindset.”. And much more. Go read.

Mythos, Flagship’s other project, is now in beta.

A patch will soon be arriving for Dead Space 2 to make it more accessible to disabled players. It’s perhaps not something most of us think about, but for a number of players it’s essential that they be able to freely map controls if they’re going to be able to play. And Dead Space 2 currently doesn’t allow you to set moving forward to the mouse. This meant that gareth170 on the Overclockers forum couldn’t play the game. And of course he’s not the only one – his post, linked with an ongoing campaign by quadriplegic comic Chuck Bittner, and has seen a huge response of support for the matter, and ultimately the announcement from Visceral that they’ll be patching the game accordingly.

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This is the second part of our extensive interview with Arcen Games’ Chris Park about their forthcoming procedurally-generated action-adventure survival game, A Valley Without Wind. Read on…
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Alec was pleasantly surprised last week by Dungeons – a German reinvention of Dungeon Keeper themes, with enough of its own twists and turns to make it a worthwhile game in its own right. But until this very day there was no English demo to check out. Thank the ears of Horace, that’s all now changed, with Kalypso releasing three single-player levels, and a survival mode map for freeeeee. You can get this morsel here, here, or perhaps here. Go, be villainous.

Funny, I wrote the word “Dungeon” in our headline bar because I was going to write about the Dungeons English-language demo, only I can’t actually find the link, despite having seen it earlier. What has happened to it? We may never know. Anyway, that word didn’t go to waste, because our info-cousins at Eurogamer have posted another look at Dungeon Siege III, only with actual moving game footage this time. There are explosions and skeletons and exploding skeletons. So it all turned out for the best. Go take a look, below.
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How’s this for another proud example of why the PC is the most wordly and intelligent gaming platform in existence. Hot Throttle is a new browser racing game where instead of cars you control men who believe they are cars. It’s a collaboration by Doomlaser and indie powerhouse Cactus, though I suspect if Cactus were really a house he’d be an overpopulated squat with an unidentifiable corpse in the upstairs bathtub. You can watch some footage of Hot Throttle after the jump in the form of someone’s video review, plus two more secret bonus videos! Yes. Thanks to the Indie Games blog for the tipoff (and header image! I am cheeky).
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I’m not sure what the AGS community stands to gain from its running joke of claiming to be the American Girl Scouts, but persist with it they do. It’s bound to lead to some sort of hilarious mix-up that sees an epidemic of American teenage girls making point and click adventures, while a lot of people spend time in prison. It is in fact the Adventure Game Studio. (Which itself has the URL “bigbluecup”…) Anyhow, their annual awards are up and running, with the second round of voting taking place over the next few weeks. Each category has been narrowed down to five finalists, with Calin Leafshade’s Eternally Us, and Ascovel and Baron’s Snakes Of Avalon receiving a lot of nominations. If you want to vote, you need to wait about three days we’re told. Then a voting page will appear. Which gives you plenty of time to have a play of the finalists.

I’ll be taking a look at a few of the nominees this week, and will let you know my thoughts.

The Bulletstorm tweeting-thing announced that People Can Fly’s free Call Of Duty parody, Duty Calls, has been download 1.25 million times over the weekend. The brief game, which mocks the “realistic” shooter genre, was an advert for Bulletstorm’s more science fictional approach on the macho manshoot. And, well, it was actually pretty funny. As adverts go, it was one of the more inventive ones we’ve seen. A kind of anti-demo. “Bulletstorm is not this,” being the message. It also, perhaps, goes some small way toward making up for the lack of an actual demo. Well, they say laughter is the best medicine. We’ll see about that.

At the recent A Winter World of Love indie developer conference in London, RPS was kindly invited by event organisers Mudlark to host a panel. We thought long and hard about the many fascinating and complex issues surrounding and facing independent games, and before too long it was entirely clear what our panel should focus on.

Winkies, of course.
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