Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Gosh, we’re seldom angered by a developer’s words, but I Am Alive‘s creative director Stanislas Mettra is going some to tempt it out of us. With frankly astonishing arrogance, he declared that his team is not bothering to create a port of the game for PC because “no one will buy it”, even though people are demanding a version. Of course he aimlessly blames piracy, even though being with Ubisoft he has the option to stick so much DRM up its arse no one will be able to play it without his personally coming around their house to type in his password. But then, in a moment of just remarkable hubris, Mettra declares that the “no one” means fewer than 50,000.

Read the rest of this entry »

You may remember Cadenza Interactive from Sol Survivor, the tower defense game that captured Jim’s attention last year. They’ve recently announced their second game, Retrovirus. It is, they say, “a modern take on the classic six degrees of freedom shooter”, made only on PC. Ooh, like Descent? we asked when Jim spotted it last week. The moving pictures below help to explain.

Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but one night last week I awoke drenched in cold sweat, my hands gripping the bedclothes as if they were the only viable scraps of flotsam to emerge from the splintered wreck of the good ship Sleep, which had been torn asunder by the crashing waves of doubt and the Kraken of existential angst. The question which plagued me was one which every man, woman and child has asked themselves, often in the hours just before a winter’s dawn when the streets outside are indistinct and all existence seems poised to crumble like a biscuit in a blender. Has there ever been a PC game that captures the noble and exotic art of Capoeira?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want a single reason why the free-to-play market seems to so attractive to the people interested in making money from games, then take a look at this craziness: Gamesbrief have run a story claiming that Bigpoint’s DarkOrbit game has sold two thousand €1,000 “drones”, which are virtual items that help players in combat. The article explains: “There are different levels of drone ranking up to the 10th Drone. The 10th Drone – also called the Zeus Drone – is very rare – you need to have all 9 previous drones and collect blueprints to make it in the game. Earlier this month, on a total of four separate days, Bigpoint made it possible to buy a 10th Drone for €1,000.” And such is the popularity of the game, that quite a large number of people were willing to buy it. Or at least that’s what publishers Bigpoint claim. Are you one of those people who spent that much? Speak up! And also lend us a fiver.

(Unrelated, does anyone want to buy our mysterious The Tenth Blog Post? We’ll make it available next week for £79,000? Anyone? You won’t even have had to read previous RPS posts!)

In episode 51 of the RPS Electronic Wireless Show, Jim and John catch up on the events that have taken place in the week since we last recorded. Events like the release of some games, and some games we have played. Those are the events we experience in our lives.

There’s chat about how great Tim Stone is, Jim’s racism against cat people, and we ponder why RPS readers like RPGs so much. John explains why he hates Modern Warfare 3 so much, while Jim moans about BF3′s doors. There’s thoughts on how open we really want our worlds to be, and then, perhaps not surprisingly, we turn to Skyrim. We talk Skyrim’s structure, exploration, quests and peculiarities.

Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t PC gaming news so much as general internet nerding, but it’s a lovely thing nonetheless. I have to admit that I haven’t seen the Google homepage in months, so I wouldn’t have realised that the current logo is an extraordinary interactive Google doodle game thing, had John not alerted me. How did he know? Well, there are a lot of tubes from all round the world leading to his office. He was probably peering down them. [Actually my wife told me - John] Anyway, the new doodle is the tale of a meeting of robots, and has been put up in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first publication by brilliant sci-fi author, Stanislaw Lem. Lem is best know for Solaris, which was made into movies by Tarkovsky and Soderburgh, but his influence on sf generally has been enormous, thanks to his prolific and insightful writing and amazing short stories. You should definitely have a read of some of his stuff, if you haven’t already. (The art in the logo is inspired by Lem illustrator, Daniel Mrózh, who illustrated a version of The Cyberiad. Which now, I learn, was even turned into an opera!)

Oh sigh, as soon as we report some balanced coverage of the effects of gaming, of course Keith Vaz appears once more to make everyone feel stupid again. He’s tabled an Early Day Motion to condemn Modern Warfare 3, presumably after some careful analysis to make sure such a thing would bring him maximum attention. Well, actually he’s condemning “Call Of Duty 3″, which is perhaps a bit late. But heck, why know the name of the game you’re wasting Parliament time over? Where he finds time to play all these games between chairing so many parliamentary committees I cannot imagine. Because of course he’s played the game he describes as having “gratuitous acts of violence”, right? More than that, he’s even finding the time to do his own scientific research, because his (as yet unpublished, I presume) study has found that “there is increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users.” Which is a remarkable finding!

Read the rest of this entry »

Miner Wars 2081 is an astonishing thing, really. It’s a freeform mining, trading, and building game, based around the mining of vast voxel asteroids – and that can be accessed now at a sort of tech-demo level by preordering, with the full game due in the Spring – but it’s also going to be an MMO, which will apparently arrive in the Winter of next year. Yes, I can hardly believe it either, but that’s the plan. I’ve had a few glances at the steadily updated alpha client over the past year, and the work is certainly continuing apace, and you can see some of that in the awesomely narrated trailer, below. There’s apparently going to be a public demo before long, too, so we’ll keep an eye out for that. I suspect that this could be one of those games that really rewards a community getting involved, or at least it will be when that multiplayer aspect of it opens up. The satisfaction of chomping up asteroids and fighting off privateers as a group could be quite something.
Read the rest of this entry »

A little more of the new Bioware game was shown last night, giving us a glimpse of APCs. Meanwhile the various nodes of the internet were at work, speculating that the new game could be either Command & Conquer or even a Mercenaries game. Or even Army Of Two. It won’t be that. (I hope.) The best lead is the clue that was in this LinkedIn profile, which stated at the artist worked for Victory Games, which was formed from EA LA to make C&C games. Combine this with the apparent disappearance of Visceral, another LA-based EA studio, and you have a bunch of devs who could have formed into this new studio. This could, it is speculated, be a new Los Angeles-based Bioware studio working on the old faithful.

Sounds like a jenga tower of theorising to me. And I think it’s time for a new IP, anyway… We’ll find out soon enough.