Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here’s a spot of good news for the world’s unluckiest indie developer, The Indie Stone: It’s looking as though Project Zomboid – their really very good zombie survival game – may be coming to Steam. Using the same technology that brought the news that TF2 was going free, keen eyes on our forum have spotted the Magical Box Thing that says what’s being added soon listing Project Zomboid as a retail product. Which is fabbo, because it deserves to be played, and those poor bastards deserve some luck. So just give your best guesses as to how this will go spectacularly wrong. (Cheers to Will and SilverSilence.)

Sundays are for sitting somewhere in the Cambridgeshire countryside, hoping that RPS’ shonky automated scheduling has actually published The Sunday Papers that you prepared the day before. There’s simply no way of telling. Maybe it’ll end up getting published on Monday. Or perhaps it’s already been published and folks are merrily commenting away on the selection of links and things that you have compiled. The not knowing is the worst.

• Eurogamer have a huge breakdown of the relationship between LA Noire creators Rockstar and Team Bondi. It makes for quite a read: “Every dog has its day and there’s going to be hell to pay for this one. I’ll never forget being treated like an absolute **** by these people,” says Team Bondi lead Brendan McNamara. Oof.

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You ready for some discounted gaming fun? I hope so, because that’s exactly what you’re about to find. It’s the Bargain Bucket, and it’s full to the brim of cut price downloads. As always, if you want to keep abreast of all the cheap games as and when they happen, you should get over to SavyGamer.co.uk.
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The Limbo folks have sent word that the spooky silhouetted platformer (and one of the prettiest side-scrollers on the playboxes) will be turning up on Steam on August 2nd. That’s about it really, but we’ll probably WIT it or something before it hits.

Hey look, here comes a video! It’s actually one of my favourite trailers ever. Grim.
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Ooh, EA have announced that Dragon Age 2′s first big bit of story-driven DLC is nearing. Legacy, which features Hawke going into a Grey Warden prison to deal with a particularly unpleasant darkspawn nasty, is going to arrive on 26th of July. Needless to say, magicks which imprisoned the unpleasantness have worn out, because magic sort of “goes off” if you leave it in a dark dungeon for too long, and Hawke will have to deal with the consequences. Will it be any good? How much will it cost? I don’t know, but one of our sinister agents has seen Legacy and talked to the team behind it, so we’ll have more on that stuff soon.

In the meantime, you can watch the trailer, beloooooooow.
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I’ve had a few chances to see Pirates Of The Black Cove in action and I have to say it looks rather pleasing. It’s got a strong whiff of Sid Meier’s Pirates! to it, with roaming about in an open world in your ship, picking fights as you wish, while also being largely quest driven, so that it has a sort of Pirate-gang Diablo aspect to it. You build up various pirate towns with facilities enabling recruitment of ever more gruff and dangerous pirate type units which you can then take ashore to loot and pillage. But you no longer need rely on my reportage for an idea of whether it’s any good, because there’s a demo, containing a good chunk of the full game. Go check it out.
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The news-horn of VG247 has sounded: Ubisoft will be releasing Eric Chahi’s quirky terraforming God-sim From Dust on PC on 27th of July. We still don’t know all that much about this game, but a little more is revealed in the latest developer diary which is, conveniently, posted below. We seem to lack God-sims of late, so I am looking forward to seeing how my insane whims and weird omnipotence might threaten the lives of tiny hat-wearing people.

And. In. The. Game.
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Speaking to SOE Creative Director Matt Higby, we have learned that Planetside 2 will be PC-only, and that it will be a straight remake of the original game with modern technology. There will be no instancing, and Higby says: “we’re only limited by how many can physically fit into a small area.” The territory capture is now far more detailed, featuring more than just towers and bases: “All of our maps are completely hand-crafted so that every square inch supports gameplay. The size of our environments is completely unrivalled.” Combat is now powered by a generative mission system, filling in some of the biggest holes in the original game.

Skills too have radically changed: “It uses an offline time-based learning method – if you’re familiar with Eve Online, how they unlock skills, it’s similar to that.” No word on pricing or release date yet, but I am so excited I might burst. Go read the full preview.