By John Walker on July 20th, 2011.
How much do you think you’d pay for Star Wars: The Old Republic? Signs point toward BioWare/EA opting for an old-school subscription model, as well as charging for a boxed copy of the game to start – so very 2007. So, perhaps £30 for the game and £8-£10 a month thereafter? You’d be happy with that? Well, some rumours revealed by NeoGAF, as posted on BetaCake, seem to suggest you could opt to pay an awful lot more for a special edition. A special edition with an awful lot of stuff.
Too Many Trains
By Tim Stone on July 20th, 2011.
Ok, this is getting silly now – British railways ticket-pricing silly. No-one was happier than me to hear that DLC-fecund iron horse simulator RailWorks is soon to be blessed with another sizeable free update. Canted tracks, better rolling-stock physics, rainier rain, syrupier shadows, new locomotives, a new route… the list of improvements is longer than a fairly short Canadian Pacific coal train. Bravo RS.com! But why in Brunel’s name, did you have to use the update as an excuse to make the already baffling tangle of train simulator names even more confusing? Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on July 20th, 2011.
If in doubt, alliteration. Don’t worry about the terrible harm it might wreak upon the English language – your reward will come in pun-heaven. Or hell. So hard to tell the difference these days.
Anyway, just a quickie for you, missus: spooky-tentacle ‘em up the Darkness II has been delayed. It’s slipping from this October to February 2012.
By Richard Cobbett on July 20th, 2011.
Much like The Neverending Story, I suspect The Book of Unwritten Tales of at least playing a little fast and loose with the truth. I’ve seen its main menu. It’s a book. That book quite clearly contains writing. In the words of wise Lord British, “Busted, you scoundrel bastard!”
Gilded And Guilded
By Jim Rossignol on July 20th, 2011.
GamersFirst – they of War Rock, APB Reloaded, and now Fallen Earth – have announced the development of their own, brand-new MMO, Hailan Rising. It’s going to be a traditional fantasy MMO with a rather untraditional level-free, PvP-focused design. Not only are there no levels, but you’re not even going to be skill-restricted by class. Read on for a bit more about how GamersFirst intend to pull this off for free, without making it “pay-to-win”.
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By John Walker on July 20th, 2011.
As if I needed any further proof that other people are wrong, BioWare have revealed to VG247 that only 18% of Mass Effect players pick the lady Shepard. With the obviously better choice finally getting recognised by the game’s marketing, that less than a fifth of gamers pick the Jennifer Hale-voiced heroine genuinely surprises me. Because, well, girls are best.
By Richard Cobbett on July 20th, 2011.
Before you even start Adventure: All In The Game, you’re asked whether you think your knowledge of adventure games is Minimal, Adequate or Extensive. I immediately quit and opened the Readme to see if it was made by Games For Richard Inc. It wasn’t. But it may as well have been. This is one of my favourite AGS adventures in ages, with great writing, solid design, and an excellent ‘behind the scenes’ premise that’s far more than just a cute gimmick.
By Alec Meer on July 20th, 2011.
The danger of a phrase like ‘Irrational Co-Founder’ is a bunch of people will probably presume you’re talking about Ken Levine. So let’s get that clear up-front: this is not a post about Ken Levine. This is a post about another founder member of System Shock 2/BioShock developers Irrational. Jon Chey has been with the studio since the very start, and prior to that did a stint at god-factory Looking Glass – so he’s someone you should take an interest in. Lately, he’s been heading up the former Aussie wing of Irrational, rebranded as 2K Australia and which did a bunch of the work on BioShock 2 and the upcoming XCOM (I know, I know) – but now he’s going it alone as an indie dev named Blu Manchu. The first project puts board games, card games, browser games, RPGs and strategy games into a blender, so he’s not exactly starting off small.
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By John Walker on July 20th, 2011.
You may remember that last week we suggested Zeboyd’s launch of their RPGs on Steam had gone a lot better than expected. It turns out that was something of an under-estimation.
In less than a week on Steam, Zeboyd’s Cthulhu Saves The World (see our review here) and Breath Of Death VII have already made more than they did in over a year on Xbox Live Indie Games. Let me repeat that: More in under a week on PC than in over a year on Xbox.
By Jim Rossignol on July 19th, 2011.
The shining miracle of content-unearthing that is Pixel Prospector forwarded us this earlier today, and it’s quite exciting. Recall, which you can see in action below, is a time-rewinding FPS concept. A neat idea that takes things a little further than Timeshift. Essentially it’s Braid in 3D, but it really gets going when the character stops time and uses time-frozen mid-air blocks that have stopped mid-fall as platforms to get somewhere. If famed concept-nappers Valve aren’t turning their talent-suction machine at this for inclusion in Portal 3 or similar, I’ll be surprised, sad, and a little bit indignant. Not unlike my cat.
Serendipitously, it’s also the exact concept I need to finish off a stalled piece about experimental videogame architecture for BLDGBLOG. So that’s hype for another blog I write for. Well done me.
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By Jim Rossignol on July 19th, 2011.
To my perception, “Auto Club Revolution” sounds like some kind of political movement whereby wrongdoers and malcontents are followed by implacable robots and automatically beaten about the head with a length of something heavy whenever they act for the worse. Back on the sober roads of reality, it is actually a game about shiny cars wot go fast. Auto Club Revolution, that’s the website. That is where you apparently have limited time to sign up to the closed beta which begins on the 25th of this month.
