Archive for October, 2011
By Adam Smith on October 24th, 2011.
While Valve prepare to release their Team Fortress 2 Halloween update, the mod community have been highlighting some of the most bone-chilling, spine-tingling items submitted to the Steam Workshop in a week-long event rather splendidly titled, Night of the Living Update. So, do you want the temperature of your skeletal apparatus to decrease? Do you desire spinal sensations of a peculiar nature? Traipse to the website and explore the blood-soaked offerings on display, some of which may make their way into the official update. This is particularly horrible. With two more nights of updates to go, I’m hoping for a Cthulhu mask. What’s the neatest thing you’ve found in the Workshop?
Halloween, Mods, Steam Workshop, Team Fortress 2, Valve.
Orcs Must Dye
By Jim Rossignol on October 24th, 2011.
The tower defence genre seems to be filling out a bit now. Not in a bad way. It’s not getting flabby or anything. Perhaps more cuddly, at least if Orcs Must Die and Dungeon Defenders are anything to go by. Dungeon Defenders in particular is super delightful to the point of being saccharine. As violent as the theme is – murdering convoys of fantasy creatures with spikes and spears and magic – you just want to pick it up by its Unreal-rendered polygons and give it a squeeze. So cute!
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dungeon defenders, feature, review, Trendy entertainment, wot i think.
A Knight's Tale
By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
I was recently sat down to watch one of the opening sections for Funcom’s MMO, The Secret World. A game that promised much, and so far seems to be confusing everyone by delivering on those promises. Is that still the case? I consider such things below.
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feature, Funcom, MMO, preview, The Secret World.
By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
There’s a lot we don’t understand about pricing games. But as more and more evidence pours in, the most common pattern appears to be: the less you charge, the more you make. There are so very many examples of this, from iOS pricing phenomena, to the extraordinary revenue generated by the Humble Bundle pay-what-you-want schemes. Further to this come comments from Valve’s boss, Gabe Newell, who recently explained how erratic pricing results can be, but the undoubtable success of offering massive discounts. And perhaps more surprisingly, they seem to have discovered the importance of using the phrase “Free to play”.
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gabe-newell, Geek Wire, pricing, Valve.
By Adam Smith on October 24th, 2011.
New from Digital Eel, the wonderbrains behind Weird Worlds and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Data Jammers: FastForward is reminiscent of all that is good in the world. Or at least some of the things that are good in the world, like Tempest and speeding through cyberspace. The demo of this wireframey hacking-as-racing delight has been entertaining me for the past few minutes and the full version, available for $9.95, is clamouring for my attention. But my attention is needed elsewhere, so I leave it to others to discover its myriad joys. Observe the trailer, with obligatory posh-voiced computer lady.
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Data Jammers: FastForward, demo, free, indie, Shrapnel Games.
By Adam Smith on October 24th, 2011.
What is a day without spikes? Brazilian indie game Mr Bree: Returning Home is mostly about a pig repeatedly falling onto spikes and spikes repeatedly falling onto a pig. As with other spike-themed platformers, it’s rather tricky and, as the trailer shows, it has a resemblance to the fiendish Super Meat Boy, except with a pig instead of a sentient meat-chunk. Let’s be honest, there is precious little difference between the two. The game is currently in beta and shall be out on PC and Mac this winter, hopefully preceded by a demo. I’ve played a little already, enough to confirm my understanding that abattoirs are unpleasant and pointy metal things are my least favourite acquaintance.
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indie, Mr Bree: Returning Home, platformer, spikes, TawStudio.
By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
Hello. I am not Alec Meer. He’s in charge of this, not me. But Alec is on holiday on Cybertron for a week, so I’m going to have a go. Charts, right? Like they used to have for pop music, but with games instead? I think I can do this.
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byte vs brick, dungeon defenders, Football Manager 2012, Grand Theft Auto.
By Adam Smith on October 24th, 2011.
Sometimes games brood, sitting in a corner and calculating their every internal component with a die that has unlimited sides. That can be agreeable, but it’s much more agreeable when a new game approaches wearing a jester’s hat and jigging merrily into view. Such is the case with Blizzard DOTA, the trailer for which has all the appearance of a wonderful parody. But this is reality and you will indeed be able to play a DOTA-styled game, pitching Blizzard characters against each other, with no regard for lore or legacy. It is to be an officially released Starcraft 2 mod, although you won’t even need to buy Starcraft 2 to play it.
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Blizzard, Blizzard DOTA, dota, Starcraft-2.
Eliminate the hooligans
By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
As everyone knows, Syndicate is back. And as everyone also knows, it’s a first-person shooter, which perhaps isn’t the direction everyone was expecting it to head in. I’ve sat down and played a small section of the game, and below you can read my thoughts.
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Electronic Arts, feature, hands on, preview, Starbreeze Studios, Syndicate.
By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
One of the IGF 2012 entries to catch people’s eyes is Parallax, a brain-hurting pan-dimensional first-person puzzle game from indies Toasty Games. You can see the IGF submission video below.
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IGF 2012, indie, Parallax, Toasty Games, trailer.
By Jim Rossignol on October 23rd, 2011.
There was something else that Blizzard were talking about at Blizzcon this weekend, which was the next instalment of Starcraft II. The beta for Heart Of The Swarm is apparently “months” away, so it looks like we can expect the next game before the end of next year. Anyway, the trailer (below) shows a bunch of CG and in-game scenes, basically telling the story of Kerrigan’s lust for revenge, as well as teasing a bunch of the stuff that’s going to happen (and the units that are going to appear) in the new campaign.
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Blizzard, Starcraft II, StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm, StarCraft II: Wings Of Liberty.
