By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
Night will always follow day, controversy will always follow a highly-anticipated game scoring less than 9/10 on a mainstream videogaming website, and X-COM will always see remakes. Xenonauts is the one to watch at present, of course, but Xenowar caught my attention because it’s going for a hyper-stripped down, simplistic, scrappy mini-take on the oft-aped formula.
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By John Walker on November 15th, 2011.
Remember Adam’s time with Afterfall: Insanity? Well, you can see for yourself if he was right to struggle to get along with its peculiar ways. How? By what means is such a thing possible, you ask, leaning over your spectacles in utter astonishment. By the means of a demo!
By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
I suppose we’ll need to come up with some sort of battleplan about how we cover Skyrim mods, given about fifty more of them crop up every time I blink. A round-up a little later down the line would only be sensible, but in the meantime this particular one is just too fine to pass up. Skyrim’s map – one of several sources of interface-based ire for Jim – presents the game’s world as one grand vista, but what it can’t do is show you much in the way of what’s actually at the place you’re thinking of visting. The Map In Full 3D mod is the Google Street View-aping answer: enabling that curious scrollwheel finger of yours to zoom right down to the ground and pan across the main open-world part of the game. It’s NPC-free, but it’s a spectacular way to have a bird’s eye view of a splendid world that’s almost as chilly as Southern England is today. I CAN’T FEEL MY TOES.
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By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
If there’s one feature that Steam really, really needs – other than an offline mode that actually works – it’s the ability to install games to someone other than the drive and folder Steam is plonked in. Perhaps there are complicated security justifications for not offering it, or perhaps everyone at Valve just has 48 terabyte hard drives. In either case, the trickle-down result for us everyday humans (I elevate myself to that category just for the sake of argument here) is that we can too often run out of space on our main drives and have to delete something existent in order to install something new. If you’ve been wise enough to invest in an SSD, your joy at rapid load times will be marred by your misery about its puny capacity limiting your Steamability. Salvation is at hand.
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By John Walker on November 15th, 2011.
It’s looking like Call Of Duty ELITE may never arrive on PC at all, according to Eurogamer. After it was announced earlier this month that the multiplayer-embellishing feature would be absent from the PC release, along with lots of promises that this was to ensure it was tip-top quality and completely safe, it’s now looking possible we’ll never get to use it.
"not just brutal, but deadly"
By Jim Rossignol on November 15th, 2011.
4A’s sequel to Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, seems to have been slipping beneath our radar a bit. The post-apocalyptic original was so close to being proper good that it’s definitely worth keep an eye on what they’re up to next. With that in mind, we caught up with THQ’s Huw Beynon to find a bit more about what’s happening with the game, which is set for release in mid 2012.
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By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
If there’s one downside of having an SSD as your main hard drive, it’s that you find yourself aggressively removing any and all games you’re not convinced you’ll play any time soon. And so it is that I have no Source-powered games on my PC right now, and need to sit through a 5GB SDK download just to play this 200MB mod. While I wait, I’ll show you what it is I’m waiting for – Water is a mini HL2 mod about a singing Mermaid with magic powers who isn’t wearing a shirt. No Jamaican lobsters and crying here though: this puzzle-blessed action-adventure makes fish-people all grimdark, by the look of things.
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By Jim Rossignol on November 15th, 2011.
Two demos in one day! Different genres though, so we’ll let them off. Nemesys Games send word that their new 3D racer, Ignite, has been released, and also has a demo out. You can get hold of the demo here, in exchange for just 414 of your megabytes. The game seems to be a low-budget riff on the Burnout series (with boost earned via drifting, destruction and so on), which demands that you manage your “nitro” to get more points from a race. The less you rely on this boost power, the higher you score. Doesn’t look super-promising, but the demo might be worth a look.
By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
I’m sorry our weekly comparison of the top-ten best-selling games on Steam with the top ten best-selling PC games at UK retail is a day late. I was busy standing by the side of a motorway waiting for a tow-truck yesterday. If only I’d stayed indoors and played more Skyrim – a lesson we can all take something from, I think.
So, what will prove to be the best-selling PC game of last week? Can you guess? Of course you can.
By John Walker on November 15th, 2011.
Oh, this spate of live action trailers the world is currently suffering from will surely end soon? Beyond giving the message, “we don’t think our in-game graphics are impressive”, I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to convey. But fortunately, this latest for APB Reloaded does occasionally switch to in-game footage. Which, of course, ends up looking (slightly) unfairly lame having just been watching its real-world equivalent shot on high-def film.
Everything in the middle was made-up
By Robert Yang on November 15th, 2011.
“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 4 of 7.
Months before releasing Atom Zombie Smasher to acclaim, Brendon Chung exploded onto the indie scene with the stylish FPS sketch Gravity Bone – but before then, us loyal followers (“Chungers”) had already been enjoying his short-form forays into FPS-dom for years. His Barista series, especially Barista 2, is proof that Brendon was doing this “indie FPS” silliness long before any of us. Damn.
(Be advised, there are substantial *SPOILERS* for Barista 2 and Gravity Bone, which are both freeware, so you should play them.)
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