By John Walker on July 12th, 2011.
It’s International George R. R. Martin day today, of course, with the whole world taking a holiday to read his latest book, A Dance With Dragons, which incidentally is a terrible title. So while you’re wearing your A Song Of Ice And Fire t-shirt, petting your wolf cub, and waggling swords, you should also check out the new screenshots from Cyanide’s game based on the first book, A Game Of Thrones: Genesis.
By Alec Meer on July 12th, 2011.
Oh, Octodad. Your mere existence makes me happier than I could ever truly describe. So happy, in fact, that I’m willing to break the unofficial ‘no posting about Kickstarter projects unless/until there’s playable proof of concept’ RPS rule. Octopad, I think it’s safe to say, has very much proved itself. As any game simulating the life of an octopus who is also the father and husband in a human family naturally would.
So what comes next? Well, some money, hopefully. The devs deserve it. And once they have that money, they can make Octodad 2: bigger, better, octopusier. Rather than going down the Octodads route, they’re exploring more of the strange, wobbly life of the original Cephalopod patriarch.
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Aberrant Psychic Signals
By Mark Wallace on July 12th, 2011.
“Situational Analysis”. That’s what Funcom are calling the crackling radio reports that reach characters in their upcoming MMO The Secret World, as they make their way through instances like the one unveiled (the first so far) at EA’s recent summer showcase at their Redwood studio. Warning of “aberrant psychic signals” in the wreck of the container ship Polaris and “a highly volatile biological mass” (though I could have sworn I cleaned that up), the transmissions seemed to serve more as glaring signposts reading “Boss fight this way!” than any kind of actionable tactical intelligence.
A missed opportunity?
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By Jim Rossignol on July 12th, 2011.
Watching the final shuttle launch last week had me thinking about how I would have to look for a game about managing a space program, so that I could post relevantly here on RPS. I never got around to looking for one, but it turned up in my inbox from a dozen sources anyway. The game is called Kerbal Space Program and it’s about building rockets (in a Spore-like rocket-building editor) and trying to get aliens called “Kerbals” into space. The game comes with a full SDK and even though it’s only been out for a few weeks, people are already modding in new bits and pieces to play with. Right now the game features a host of rocket-building systems, along with a 600km planet to try and get into orbit from. Try being the significant part of that sentence: because failure is part of the fun. Long term, the team are planning moon landings, bases on other worlds, and a detailed astronaut recruitment and training management subgame. It’s certainly promising stuff.
You can download it, and also watch amusing illustrative videos below.
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By Alec Meer on July 12th, 2011.
There’s been a fair bit of grumbling and grief about the upcoming closure of olden MMO Star Wars: Galaxies, with some players reckoning the decision makes no sense and wasn’t necessary. I should probably insert some sort of Star Wars quote here, but I’m a 32 year old man – can’t I stop doing that now? There’s a petition against the closure, of course. There’s always a petition. Whether 3000 signatures are enough to change SOE’s mind seems unlikely – especially given SOE boss John Smedley has shone a little more light on just why Galaxies was fed to the Sarlacc pit.
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By Lewie Procter on July 12th, 2011.
Remember Fez? The perspective shifting 2D platformer where you can shift your perspective around? Hang on, haven’t we been here before? Yes, Sky Island is not the first game to be, uh, heavily influenced by Fez, but it’s a good spot of fun, and you get to use mouselook to rotate your perspective. Read the rest of this entry »
By John Walker on July 12th, 2011.
It’s good to play a puzzle game that knows it’s a puzzle game. Browser game Impasse has no story, no faux-justification for its existence, no attempt to claim you’re saving the world by solving its stages. It’s simply a challenge, and it’s an excellent one.
By Lewie Procter on July 12th, 2011.
Did you hear? After having been stuck in an undetermined state for a long time, Limbo is now PC-bound, releasing via Steam on August 2nd. I caught up with Dino Patti, CEO & Co-founder of Playdead, to ask him some questions about it. He was kind enough answer them all, so I thought I’d share his responses with you: Read the rest of this entry »
By Jim Rossignol on July 12th, 2011.
Pic-Soft send word that their platform tower defence game, Mini Robot Wars, now has a demo out. The game has a pungent whiff of Plants Vs Zombies to it, but in this case features painfully cute robots and is set in a familiar sort of Mario-esque cartoon world. The full game apparently features 150 levels and a bunch of mini-games and weighs in at $10. Oof, all that cute is too much for me. I’d better medicate myself with something brutal, gritty, and Eastern European.
By Jim Rossignol on July 12th, 2011.
Valve have posted an bunch of the outtakes from Meet The Medic over on the TF2 blog. These are genuine outtakes, and are animated storybaord mock ups and rough animated sequences, rather than the “comedy” outtakes that the animated films now so often bookend their credits with. Valve explain some of the process behind the decisions made, and how the story told in the final movie came to be: “Instead of the medigun we’d explain the origin of the ubercharge, giving us a chance to explore the Heavy and Medic’s relationship a bit, not to mention a few gross-out surgery gags. Better yet, this new opening segued into our big finish far better than our old story ever had: The significance of the big ubercharge moment had some dramatic heft to it now. Even the doves were now explained, instead of just being a neat visual effect.”
I’ve posted Meet The Medic below, just in case you needed cheering up.
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By Alec Meer on July 11th, 2011.
Dishonored being, you might recall, the next game from Arkane (now augmented with Deus Ex mega-brain Harvey Smith), and one with a very pleasant whiff of the immersive sim about it. Meaty facts are reserved for the latest dead tree edition of Game Informer, but a new overview gives us the first screenshot and a better sense of what’s going on in this world of optional assassination and rodent-bothering.
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