Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Every time a new indie bundle is released, anguished cries echo around the Great Hall of Comments that is carved in the dark obsidian which forms the foundations of Castle RPS. The reason? The inhabitants of that grand place are often the proud owners of every game included in the bundle due to their uncanny ability to be ahead of the curve. Therefore, it is with some trepidation that I bring the news that Cave Story is only now available on Steam, seven years after its original release, albeit in a ‘plus’ form. It’s a lovely game, taking a Metroidvania template, then adding oddness and pretty pixels. I think it was probably partly responsible for that particular graphical trend in yon indies.

Who hasn’t played it yet? Trailer with delightful music below.

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Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I’m pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he’d be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn’t know if it would be more difficult, but he was “almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships.”

So, with Rage safely released, it’s finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.

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The next instalment of boundlessly popular indie pay-what-you-will project, The Humble Indie Bundle, has announced its new bundle, which is dominated by the Introversions, and even contains some prototype things from them, like Subversion’s city generator. Yes, I thought that might interest you. The other games are: Aquaria, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia, and Multiwinia.

Trailer thing below!
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Because why not? It’s Tuesday, after all. And I am not even going to make a bet with myself this time.

DON’T hit vote til you’ve ticked all the boxes, because it bugs out. But actually if you refresh you can still vote on missed ones. So it’s okay. Sort of.
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So. I lost a bet with myself. Now I owe myself fifty quid. Thanks a bunch, Internet. I was certain, absolutely certain, that the majority of you would have pursued mostly wizardly activities in Skyrim, what with all the magic and the magic college and everything. But not so. The majority of the twenty thousand people who polled in our Skyrim survey played as warriors, with mages (21%) coming in second. Amazingly, assassins and thieves were neck and neck for third place with 14% each. There’s a 13% bunch of hangars on who couldn’t actually figure out what they’d spent most of their time doing of course, but then this is an Elder Scrolls game, so perhaps we’ll forgive the ambiguity.

Ooh, I can feel another poll coming on. Any suggestions?

You might well have noticed that Craig had a look at Spec Ops for us, and wrote about it. 2K have now also released a trailer, which contains a large quotient of noise and fury, ending on what appears to be a supernatural (?) note. It’s a bit weird. Go take a look.
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The third Serious Sam game is released on Steam at 6pm today. TODAY! That’s so soon it’s almost right now. I guess we are working on a review of it. Are we? I am imagining that the other members of RPS are sort of shrugging non-committally in response to this question, but actually I have no idea, because I am sat in an annex of my kitchen typing this gibberish into the internet, and they are off being heroes in various corners of post-industrial England. Perhaps they actually are shrugging, but have no idea why, such is their psychic connection to the PC gaming blog… So spooky. Anyway, there’s a launch trailer below, and a hands-on from John over here. Read, watch, think, judge, decide.
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As noted in this post (via here), Skyrim contains much of the rest of the continent of Tamriel in rudimentary form outside its mountains. bBorderRegionsEnabled=0 in Skyrim.ini and no-clip on does the trick. Thanks, commenters. There’s a huge heightmap out there, well beyond view distance, down into Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfall. It’s a bit buggy, mind and seems unstable once you’re out of skyrim. Looks like it’s just a chunk of the world rendered around Skyrim for view-distance authenticity, rather than any possible expansion.

Update: Confirmed as Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk, but for iOS and Android only. Bah!

Dizzy: a smiling egg-man controlled in assorted platform-puzzle-adventures by old European men such as I back in the late 80s and early 90s. For some reason (perhaps because he wasn’t the figurehead of a console company; perhaps because the key devs left to start their own company; perhaps because he was, well, an egg), Codemasters’ one-time flagship character didn’t really survive into the 21st Century. But now the delicate wee fellow is apparently due for a return. What kind of return is a mystery: all we have to go on is this none-too-cryptic image at the brow-rasingly-named eggcitingnews.com. Are you willing to shell out for the yolkfolks’ return?
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