Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Greetings from the past, readers. For a change, I’ve decided to spend this Saturday in a field in Somerset, waiting for Glastonbury festival to start. As such, I had a poke around on Thursday, and found some of the best deals that were already available for this weekend, and have stuck them in a wordpress time capsule, set to go live right about now. SavyGamer‘s going to be quiet (but probably not silent) whilst I’m away, and I’ve drafted in some subs for next week’s bucket. Since I’ll be missing some of the last minute discounts, please share any noteworthy games on sale in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Added SEGA’s official word on this below.

And yet it goes on. We might as well just have a ticker tape at the top of the site saying who’s been hacked, it’ll be quicker than posting every time… Latest game firm to suffer a security breach/attack is SEGA. It’s not just a DDoS this time though – their online gaming service SEGA Pass has been broken into, and details made off with. “We have identified that a subset of SEGA Pass members’ emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained. To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text,” says the publisher. SEGA Pass seems to involve plenty of PC games, including stuff like registering for info on Total War and stuff like that, so it’s more than possible you’ve signed up at some point without entirely realising.

Lulzsec have claimed they’re not responsible for this one, which raises the alarming idea that there’s more than one group of people up to this kind of thing. SEGA have automatically reset everyone’s password already and taken the service offline for the time being, but if you’d signed up for one or some of their sites/games with login details you use for other stuff, you’d better go change everything. Again. You know the drill by now, right?
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Come on then. Own up to your plans for spending the entire weekend playing Terraria, along with 432,000 other people. (I know!) Or have your gone back to one of the Battlefields after that hype for 3? I know I have. We’re totally having an RPS Battlefield 3 clan, you know that, right?

I’m also oddly tempted by Spiral Knights. But I can’t be sure.

Vertex Dispenser is a game by Michael “Smestorp” Brough, and it’s really rather clever. It’s an action puzzler (and I would put the emphasis on the action, despite the puzzle aspects being quite complicated) in which you battle for control of vertices across geometric territories. It’s a tricky single player game, and a fascinating multiplayer one. I have more thoughts on all this below.
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Would you look! Eurogamer published my review of the console-toy version of Dungeon Siege III. Did I like it? I did. Though that didn’t stop me from having a pop at the loot system. Click past the jump to read that and another choice extract, or just go read the full thing. The choice is yours, adventurer.
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The latest trailer for cowboys-in-the-now game Call Of Juarez: The Cartel (below, natch) shows its co-op game. What’s interesting about it is this word: “Co-opetition.” What the word means is that each of the players in the co-op game is going to have his or her own agenda, and executing it might get you in big trouble, (or even executed, judging by the end of the trailer). While you have to fight the NPC carterl goons together, there’s going to be side-missions all the way for deciding which if you is actually the best at sneaky manshoots. I’m keen to see this in action – I wonder whether it will stand up to repeated play. For now though, check out the trailer.

The game is out on July 19th.
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Every time I visit the IndieGames blog I am rewarded. Just look at this- Dinosaur Zookeeper, which I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes playing and/or laughing in horror at, is a game from (I gather) the developers of Super Crate Box that tasks you with running a dinosaur wildlife park. Remember everything that went wrong in Jurassic Park? OK, it’s your job to make sure none of that happens. And you will fail.

Here are some tips: (1) Don’t panic, your dinosaurs will do that for you, (2) The Triceratops is a bastard, and (3) It’s literally not the end of the day if you lose a dinosaur or a visitor. Is that not the finest tips list for any game ever made? Now go play.

Heartening news from Sir Carmack, lord of pixels: preliminary id design discussion about the next Quake game has turned up a hankering to return to the Gothic, semi-fantasy setting and vibe of the original Quake. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damned bored of bio-mechanical environs and beasts after id Tech 4′s quad-whammy of Doom 3, Quake IV, Prey and Quake Wars, so something potentially a little weirder rather takes my fancy.
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Strong news! Hot on the heels of the announcement that Mass Effect 3 will boast the series’ first optional male-on-male “romance”, RPS reader Daniel Żak writes in to point us torwards some tweets from Bioware marketing director David Silverman in which he reveals that not only are Bioware working on a trailer showing female Shepard, but she’ll feature on the box of the Collector’s Edition, which will show male and female Shepards on either side.

It sounds like the buff, tough, buzzcut-sporting, all-that-is-man male Shepard as the series’ figurehead, but this is still a step away from a deeply male-centric way of selling games, so hooray for that. A fan-made video of lady shepard doing what she does best follows…
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