Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Any artists fancy getting involved with a cute-looking shooter? That’s the appeal from an ex-Crytek tester turned indie developer, Crunchy Leaf Games (contender for best dev name?). At the moment it’s a one-man project, looking to find someone who can replace the placeholder artwork that’s currently in there. It’s an old-school space shooter, like your grandmother used to play, built in Flash. You can watch a pre-alpha tech demo of it here (which is the AI playing, with varying outcomes), or see much more action (accompanied by ludicrously melodramatic music) below. However, exactly how the game will play is still up for grabs. It struck me as interesting to see a game in such an early stage, and ideally hook up an RPS reader to get involved with the art. Especially as developer Max Dohme is suggesting he wants to take it in a Metroid progression direction. Want.

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To look at the way I write, you’d think me a svelte, muscular man, a hit with the ladies and the gentlemen. But the tragic truth is I sport a belly of some substance. What I need is to find a way to exercise that involves sitting at my desk, playing games. But until someone finally invents that, I may have to let City Of Epic suffice.

Apparently there’s a current trend for mediocre “exergames”, but BitBot Media claim theirs is going to be different. It’s going to actually be a game. An RPG, in fact. Just, one that means you need to get off your bum and do some exercise. Hang on, I never signed up for this!

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When we first heard about the Facebook version of Civilization a couple of years back, the prospect was enormously exciting – a persistent online Civ, played from any PC, any time. Of course, back then we perhaps weren’t fully aware of the route Facebook games were broadly taking – the pay/spam friends/wait model popularised by FarmVille. There’s absolutely nothing to say that model can’t be successful and entertaining, but it does mean that Civ World, as the now fully-revealed Facebook Civ has been retitled, is necessarily a very different prospect to Civ itself. In-game footage and dev commentary below…
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Last night I mentioned Gotham City Imposters. The question I think everyone was left with was: if we’re all either Batman or the Joker, how much variety do we actually have? A piece of artwork released today suggests: and awful lot. Click on the pic above for a much bigger version, which suggests that as much as each side is themed by the one character, the differences will be striking. Even to the point of being a girl. (So essentially Batgirl and Harley Quinn (yay!), really.) Also, I’m still not over celebrating that it’s Monolith making this, despite its not being a game about sad people being scared on a depressing day!

Well, good. I’ve wanted a new in-game trailer for Dead Island, and now I’ve got one. Now I want £10m, and a speedboat. You can watch the trailer below. You can deliver the money/boat to my house.

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Super-spookfest Amnesia was one of our favourite games last year. Ridiculously scary, and mightily well crafted, the first person adventure had us shivering in our swivel chairs. And shitting in our trousers. (I think I’d gone a bit too mainstream in that previous sentence – rescued at the end.) So flipping hooray – they’re re-releasing their Potato Sack DLC, Justine, as a free addition to the game. Along with other other goodies. And it gets even free-er today. If you head to the OnLive forum you can get a code that will allow you to play the full game for no pennies.

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UPDATE: Hurray, made some progress. Seem to have unblocked the storyline and carrying on towards chapter two. To clear up some misconceptions from the comments below: I’m playing the retail version patched the same as anyone who would have bought the game today. My saves from the preview build do not work, and I am not using them – or I’d already be hours into chapter two!

Also, I am talking to CDP directly about this stuff. They are super-helpful, and annoying as it was to not get any early code, I certainly don’t bear any silly grudges. This is a huge game for the PC, and I’m just keep the conversation going over here.

There so seem to be some driver issues, too. Take a look in the comments below and you’ll see a bunch of updates for people with issues.

The game is clearly going to be patched a whole bunch more, and that’s a shame. I’ll be reviewing it as soon as I get it finished, whatever state it might be in at that time.

It’s safe to say I didn’t enjoy Hydrophobia: Prophecy so much, but when it comes to listening to players’ comments it’s hard to fault developers Dark Energy. Today they’re reporting some impressive success from their Darknet system – a context sensitive feedback system that lets the team see customer remarks exactly where they have them during the game.

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Playing Brink this weekend made me worry. But not about the usual things. I was worried that there would never be another way to experience the details of its world – no possibility for further exploration of the Ark and its precarious situation. This isn’t something I normally think about when faced with a multiplayer shooter. I certainly had no interest in finding out more about the world of Quake III, or Battlefield 2, because nothing in them really inferred anything outside those isolated battlegrounds. Their conflicts were their world entire. Not so with Brink, and, now that I come to think of it, a few other worlds, too. I begin to wonder whether game fictions might be too readily disposable.
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Now this is more like it. Dragon Age: Legends, the Facebook game intended to a) promote Dragon Age II and b) suck out your very soul, has been remixed by indie chaps Pixelante, creators of the lovely Pixel Legions. (But not the same lot as Auntie Pixelante aka Anna Anthropy – that would be something). The net result? Dragon Age: Legends becomes a romping good time, a festival of monster-splatting and levelling up rather than a glacially-paced exercise in begging.
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I think it must have crossed the mind of every person who’s played Portal what they’d do if they had a Portal gun. Me, I’d put one portal in Chicago, another in Bath, and then smash the gun so they’d never get removed. Oh, how I yearn for teleportation to the States. But it does seem reasonably obvious that after about, maybe five minutes, we’d all start using them for practical jokes. Take a look at the video below from YouTube SFXers Final Cut King and the VFX Bro.

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