Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s Monday! I am sorry. Here, I’ve prepped a reward for you (yes, you) for finding the strength to climb out of bed this morning. Brother, sister, I know it’s tough. I know The Man is chipping at your soul like a poor-quality ice sculptor, so here are some trailers of Fireburst, a racing game coming this Summer featuring cars that are prone to catching fire. I hope it’ll also have pitstops which are just eight nervous-looking guys with fire extinguishers. That’d be fun.
Read the rest of this entry »

Morning, giggles. How’s every little thing? To start you off for the new week, let’s have a good old belly-laugh at leaked marketing materials for the mysterious Hitman: Absolution. Or, as these presumably work in progress box covers (via Kotaku) claim it’s called, “Hitman: Subtitle.” Y’know what, I’d have bought extra copies if it really was called that. There’s an honesty to it. “The bit after the colon doesn’t mean anything but people expect it – just put any old melodramatic guff in there.” So Hitman: Subtitle it must officially remain on RPS, forever. Coming up next – Red Faction: Sequel.

Our forward scout in the realms of war, Sgt. Stone, has pointed out to me that Deep Silver and X1 Software have announced their new game, Iron Front. What is interesting about this is that it is an all-encompassing soldier sim set on the Eastern Front in World War II, using the Arma II engine. Oh my. It’s going to have a big old campaign filled with infantryman experiences, but also – and the phrasing here made me smile – “Using their computers, tacticians will control tanks, including the famous German battle tank Panzerkampfwagen VI or “Königstiger” and the Russian Stalin tank JS2, or fighter planes such as the Focke Wulf 190 and dive bombers like the Stuka or the Petlyakov PE-2.”

The game is out later this year, and we’ll bring you more details on it when we can procure them.

Sundays are for brains. The body may rest, but the mind climbs its strange ladders into realms of thought. A book here, a movie there, a videogame in the afternoon, a daydream in the evening. Let’s make the most of that time, shall we? Here are some ways in.

• Battleground of the week was in this post on Lost Garden, in which the engineer author criticised the state of games journalism, and suggested – roughly speaking – that the probelm with it was that most of the writers weren’t developers. He got a bit of a roasting the comments section, and there have been a number of useful responses to it, including this one. I’d say that he has a point, but only about the usefulness of types of writing to different people. The trick is finding the people who write about games in a way that is useful to you. RPS, I think, exists precisely because there wasn’t a site writing about games in the way that we do, and when we started up we found there was an audience for it. Also, I am pleased to point out that Danc’s criticism is no longer entirely relevant to RPS.

Read the rest of this entry »

Petroglyph have sent over five hundred beta keys for their forthcoming MOBA game, Rise Of The Immortals, and UPDATE: they are all gone.

This week I’ve been playing a card game called THUNDERSTONE! It has to be written like that, in all caps, and if you’re saying it you have to pronounce it in a voice like somebody who eats trumpets for every meal. THUNDERSTONE!

THUNDERSTONE! is a deck building game. Do you know what that is? Because it’s not like Magic: The Gathering or any of the other collectible card games where you’re expected to build a deck before the game starts. No. Deck building games are much, much friendlier. They’re where you construct a deck as you play, gradually bulking up your intial, runty booster-pack sized deck into a magnificent engine. Do you see? No? Alright, well you will, and you should. These games are a clever bit of design.
Read the rest of this entry »

In this week’s Spotlight on Biscuit, inimitable UK games commenter Total Biscuit (inimitable unless you have a thick British accent and a pot of coffee that’s more sugar than liquid, anyway) has taken a closer look at Age of Empires Online. A wise choice, seeing as it’s a curious game that’s better seen in motion than read about. Also, I put a rare biscuit to the test- the Boland’s Jam Mallow.
Read the rest of this entry »

10 years ago this week, the great British author and dramatist Douglas Adams passed away suddenly at the age of just 49 – leaving behind a wealth of fiction, scripts, essays, humour and remarkable insight into the role of technology and the internet. Of course, it was the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a revered sci-fi comedy series which spanned radio, novels and video games, for which he will always be most renowned.

Here, Victoria Regan looks back to Adams’ seminal 1984 Hitchhiker’s text adventure game – a monochrome tale of the everyman, intergalactic absurdity and the bewildering cruelty of life.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a funny week for leaks and attacks. Deus Ex Human Revolution’s website getting hacked (which does seem a bit like Thief 4′s website getting stolen), an MP leaking a game announcement (which is my favourite embargo break ever – presumably Creative Assembly will be punishing Vaizey by refusing to give him preview code), and then the rather astonishing complete spoil-fest of not only huge amounts of content for Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, but even that Modern Warfare 3 exists. Activision and Infinity Ward have sprung into action and created four teaser trailers that confirm it all for themselves. You can watch them below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Four out of five of this week’s best value PC downloads are in the two pound fifty price range. This is significant because one serving of alcohol in a public house normally costs around that, so purchases of this amount are firmly lodged in the “Impulse buy” node of the human brain. As always, you can find more of this sort of thing over at SavyGamer, where I keep watch over the best deals on all platforms throughout the week. Here’s this weekends best download deals.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oh dear, it’s a terrible day for the games industry. First, pretty much everything about Modern Warfare 3 gets spoiled six months before release, and now the plots of a whole slew of other upcoming sequels have been laid bare. Read on, if you dare…
Read the rest of this entry »