By Alec Meer on November 7th, 2011.
Taking up my trusty, weatherbeaten pickaxe’o'electronic delights, I chip another gleaming nugget from the mountain of indie games lurking in the RPS inbox. What new gem will I mine this time? It has a fine name indeed. That name is Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole. It has a core philosophy, and that philosophy is “why does stealth need to be so slow?” Turns out, it doesn’t.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on November 7th, 2011.
While waiting impatiently for something else to download over the weekend, I booted up BioShock 1 for the first time in years, curious to see how it held up a half-decade on. I’d forgotten how remarkable and how magnetic its first few minutes are: whatever else you want to accuse the game of, the work it does in so quickly and so assuredly building a world and a mountain of intrigue around it is something we see all too little of. The vast majority of mainstream games open with enough dry exposition to choke a rhino, but this grabs your total attention with a bare minimum of talk, a steady flow of unpredictable spectacle and a spinetingling cocktail of awe and anxiety. Irrational are, I think, right to leave Rapture behind – but, for no particular reason other than ‘why not?’, let’s remember just why they built it in the first place.
Read the rest of this entry »
By John Walker on November 7th, 2011.
If you know me, you’ll know I’m an adrenalin junkie. I can’t just sit still at a desk all day. I have to get up, leave the house, and do something death-defying, something all-out crazy. Like parallel park. But now perhaps I can combine both sitting at a desk and the raw octane thrill of neatly putting a car into an empty parking space, via Offroad Parking. A game I am absolutely delighted to report, is only but one of a series of parking games from Car Titans.
By John Walker on November 7th, 2011.
Oh FFS. Despite the game’s own site saying it was announced yesterday, Jim somehow knew about this in August.
I don’t know about you, but I like shiny colours. The way they’re all shiny. And all colourful. And when they move! My goodness me, it’s all I can do to stare vacantly as the saliva wettens my bottom lip. So it is that I instantly decided I liked Nitronic Rush, a new game emerging from the electronic folds of DigiPen. It’s described as “an experimental survival driving game”, citing the 1990s (in which there is no apostrophe, planet Earth) as its inspiration. But my oh my, the 1990s never offered shining colours like these.
By Adam Smith on November 7th, 2011.
Apparently it’s a Monday, which means Garfield is probably absolutely hating his coddled life somewhere, the comical ingrate. I’ll never get tired of his feline japes. To alleviate the start of another working week I bring you a browser game that is far more intense than it first appears. It goes by the name of Focus and is a Flash version of a downloadable game made by Jesse Venbrux, creator of the Karoshi series. Although it rapidly becomes rather difficult, death is a minor inconvenience, if you can abide the textual mockery that follows. Play here now.
By Craig Pearson on November 7th, 2011.
I’ve spent the last ten minutes trying and failing to make the Battlefield 3 noise with my mouth, but it has too many digital effects over it and my mouth, as I’ve just discovered, is analogue. Such mimicry is my usual reaction to squelchy electronica, and I just watched the trailer for Back to Karkand, the first expansion to EA’s five-million and counting selling lawnmower simulator. Join me below in watching it.
By Craig Pearson on November 7th, 2011.
“Kinect. KIN-ECT! Write this down… no, don’t open the DVD drive. Close it. C-L-O-S-E it! Don’t make me come over there: you’ve seen what I do to a mouse during games of Team Fortress 2. Yeah, I thought that would scare you. I knew you things talked to each other. Right, so I’m speaking these words into my Kinect. It’s hooked up to my PC, thanks to Microsoft releasing it for the PC. Also, I’m from the future.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Modding with the pros: part 3 of 7
By Robert Yang on November 7th, 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 3 of 7.
Of everyone I spoke to, Magnar Jenssen is the only one still actively working in the game industry as a level designer at Avalanche Studios. Before, he also worked on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) and Bionic Commando at GRIN, up until the studio’s demise. When he isn’t raking in all that sweet map-stamp money from arena_offblast for Team Fortress 2, he tinkers with some less profitable but absurdly polished single player Half-Life 2 mods.
By Alec Meer on November 7th, 2011.
Every single damn week, I can’t remember if it’s called ‘Byte vs Brick’ or ‘Brick vs Byte.’ My failing memory terrifies me. Though my girlfriend is vaguely appreciative of it, as it allows her to tell me the same anecdotes repeatedly with me having no clue I’ve heard them before. At least, she claims she’s my girlfriend; I can’t rightly recall if that’s the case or not. There’s just this person in my house who tells me to do the washing up and feed the cat, and it seems to prudent to play along and hope my memory kicks in at some point. And why are all these words tattooed on my torso?
Anyway: Brick vs Byte, our weekly, unscientific look at how the top 10 best-selling games on Steam compare to the top 10 at UK retail. What mysteries will be revealed? Will Battlefield 3 still be king of the hill? And who the hell are you people? What’s going on? Where are my trousers?
Read the rest of this entry »
By Adam Smith on November 7th, 2011.
The announcement of the distant Clancy-fever-dream that is Rainbow Six: (Angry) Patriots brought back memories of playing the first game in the series, or at least I’m going to pretend it did for the purpose of what I say next. Careful planning, exchanging tactical tips with school chums, watching my elite squad fail to navigate the complex architectural geometry of a door. The memories quite literally did not come flooding back. But when I saw the ‘Vision Video’ for the new game, which serves as a warning of a dire future that can hopefully be averted, I did find myself retreating into memories of better times.
Meet Heavy Rainbow Six: Queasy Terrorism Emotivator.
By Craig Pearson on November 7th, 2011.
New up-and-coming games writing wannabe Craig Pearson is with us this week. Say hello to the young Scottish chancer!
Croteam’s Serious Sam 3: BFE, which I hope stands for ‘Best Friends forEver’, has an exciting new trailer out where the guns are relegated to second place. In place of well-oiled gun barrels and polished, throbbing rockets it’s the grim melee assaults that strut confidently around in their chaps. It’s like the Queensbury Rules: 2nd edition, where “That no shoes or boots with spikes or sprigs be allowed”, has been replaced with “If your heart is ripped out and squeezed into a paste, you have till the count of ten to get back on your feet.”
The uncouth violence is below.
Read the rest of this entry »
