Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Fisher Diver is a Flash game about fishing. Fisher Diver is a game about shooting writhing wireframe abominations in the spine with a harpoon, waiting for them to bleed out and then collecting their lifeless fish-flesh to sell for a few dollars. Fisher Diver has an upgrade system. Fisher Diver encourages you to buy licenses so that you can dive ever deeper and confront increasingly dangerous creatures that thrash idiotically and blasphemously in the deepest trenches. Fisher Diver tells a story through diaries and dreams. Fisher Diver contains terrible nightmares and sinister diaries that are found drifting beneath the waves, or slowly digesting in the guts of the hungering horrors that lurk beneath. Play it here.

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Lists! Two of ‘em, in fact. But what do these lists do? They compare the top-ten selling PC games of last week on Steam with the top-ten selling PC games of last week at UK retail. What could we learn from them? Nothing, probably. Apart from which game companies became slightly richer over the last few days. Well done, those companies.
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We already mentioned this briefly in The Sunday Papers, but really it deserves its own post – both because of how flat-out tragic the situation is, and because a vocal subset of the online response to it has been repellent. To summarise: The Indie Stone, developers of Project Zomboid (as yet unreleased, but playable builds are offered to anyone who pre-orders) suffered a break-in over the weekend, with the thief making off with two of their laptops. One of these laptops contained the current and in-development code for the game and future updates. The other laptop contained the only backups of the latest code.

Needless to say, the team – just four guys making them game themselves, and funding it solely via pre-order money – are distraught, apologetic and enormously self-recriminatory. There’s a statement from PZ’s writer Will Porter here, but the long and short of it is that, while the game will continue, clearly it’s going to delay the next update. The finished game has never been given a release date, but the community has come to expect a regular trickle of new builds and features. The current build is still online and running however, and I’m assured the game’s wider integrity is not compromised. All will be well again very soon.
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As science has proven, everything is better with portals. And that, it seems, includes Mega Man. Which we can totally justify posting a Dorkly video of below, because it’s got portals in it, and they’re from PC. OKAY?

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When twas announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic was releasing on the 22nd December in Europe, people stared at the screen and mumbled, “But… Christmas?” Admittedly it was only slightly louder mumbling than that from America, where the given date was the 20th. An odd choice, presumably trying to capture that elusive, “I hate my family” market, but one that’s at least been made slightly less odd by bringing them together. Us EU types will now be seeing the game on the same day as you US types, which both acknowledges that there are no oceans on the internet, and that people might want to get to level 15 before Santa arrives. How do we know this? Joystiq told us so. We’ll have lots of lovely new SW:TOR info for you in a few days.

A demo approaches! It’s a rather hefty 1.4 gigabyte download containing the majority of the second chapter of The Book Of Unwritten Tales, the comedic fantasy adventure that John is anticipating with some excitement. The version we’re awaiting is an English translation, which seems to be strong, and the original German release received a great deal of praise. The narrative follows three controllable characters, switching between their stories, so having the demo plunge into chapter 2 is no doubt more sensible than it may at first appear. I haven’t had chance to give it a try yet but as a fan of both pointing and clicking, I certainly will be. The full game is out October 28th, the demo is here and there’s a trailer below.

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My choice of feckless, work-dodging pursuit while a student (due to being too poor to afford a PC at the time) was PlayStation man-thumper Tekken, specifically 2 and 3 in the series. While I haven’t explored its strange lands of fighting bears and suicidal undead samaurai for many years, a certain nostalgia tickles at my childlike soul upon news that Namco’s longstanding brawler is to make its first foray onto PC.

In a manner of speaking, at least – the upcoming console licence mash-up Street Fighter x Tekken had its Windows version confirmed by Capcom over the weekend. No details yet, simply that the PC edition “just began development.” Rather surprising, to be honest, but it’s always heartening to see the platform tyrannies of the past slowly dissipate. It rather suggests the PC versions of Street Fighter IV’s assorted flavours did quite well, too.

Sundays are for writing cryptic introductory paragraphs that lead into a list of videogame writings collected from across the internet. What could it possibly mean? Let’s see if we can decode the cypher.

• There’s a lot been said about Rage this week, here’s Dead End Thrills’ take on it. It’s interesting to see what megatextures mean for taking someone intent on taking screenshots – yes, there are some spectacular vistas, but just don’t look too closely: “It’s an old-school faker. The abrupt colour-grading that simulates HDR; the tiny flocks of birds against a flat and frozen sky; the vast shadowmaps imposing the stage’s authority on the actors: these aren’t ugly, just conspicuous. Then there’s sparse virtual texturing (aka the MegaTexture), an illusion so data-intensive that it would, some suggest, take something in the region of 80-130gb more data to give it the consistent detail you’d expect.”

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Here’s the Bargain Bucket: The Bargain Bucket is here. Filled with tonnes of heavily discounted PC games, ready for you to play as soon as you can download them. This week’s selection highlights how much digital distribution has created a lucrative opportunity for PC developers to have an extended long tail on their earnings, by discounting games to impulse-buy prices after the initial full price boom. For always up to date intel on what games are cheap, you can count on SavyGamer.co.uk. Read the rest of this entry »

Gentlethings, prepare to perform your happy dance. Unexpectedly and suddenly, Psychonauts-makers Double Fine have ended their silly sabbatical from PC games, and announced that they’ll be releasing their Halloween-themed RPG Costume Quest on Steam. When? Why, it’s there right now.

Happy, happy days. And hopefully CQ is but the first of many of the Tim Schafer-headed studio’s titles due to return to the motherland. In fact, they imply as much below.
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