Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Batman: Arkham City arrived on PC crazily late, and launched with a pretty much borked DirectX 11 mode. Which didn’t make a lot of sense, given what a song and dance NVIDIA and Warner were making about its graphics, and if forum-hounds’ apparent discovery that the release build was compiled back in September is to be believed. Finally, though, a patch has arrived which purports to fix it, for the price of 190MB. Unless you’re running 32-bit Vista or 7, in which case it makes DX11 performance even worse. To the point that you’re advised to only run the game in DX9 mode. Sigh. Another patch is apparently due, though.

A few other wotsits have been rejiggered too – full details below. No, they haven’t removed any of the preposterous levels of DRM, sadly enough.
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That scene in Brazil where Robert De Niro gets crushed by paperwork? That’s me right now, except with press releases about pay-what-you-want indie game bundles. I can see why, as it’s a way of getting gamers’ attention without having to go anywhere near a publisher, but I worry about buyer fatigue (and blogger fatigue too). Anyway! That’s probably my hangover and resultant grumpiness talking. I shall instead attempt to celebrate the latest bundle, The Indie Gala.

Included: the lovely InMomentum, the agreeably stupid Zombie Shooter 2, puzzle platformer Saira, scribbly puzzler Your Doodles Are Bugged and the Uplinky Hacker Evolution: Duality.
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I think you might be too, if you watch the trailer below. Pid‘s a forthcoming platform game that seems to borrow from everything ever, in a really rather impressive way. Anti-gravity beams, homing missiles, backpacks full of equipment, and a really gorgeous art style. Take a look:

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Not only will it be four-player co-op, but The Darkness II‘s co-op will be “interwoven” with the main story (although that story itself is NOT playable co-op). The co-operative missions apparently branch off from the single player plot and allow the players to explore other environments that are connected to the story of the core game. And there was me think it’d be a mode where we got to control one Darkness tentacle each! Tsk. You can check out the full co-op reveal trailer below.
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As I believe Jim wryly observed the other day, increasingly blogging about non-mainstream games entails blogging about non-mainstream games’ business strategies. It’s bundles, sales and more bundles as far as the eye can see at the moment, and latest to join the ranks of those appealing to the light-walleted is retromancery central Good Old Games.

Come Thursday, they’re knocking 40% off the price of The Witcher 2 (thus dropping it to £14.99/$23.99) and lobbing in a free copy of the Witcher 1:EE to boot. I believe this is about the best price there’s been for Witcher 2 so far right, at least for digital versions? Then come next Monday (12 Dec), they’re making olden strategy epic Empire Earth Gold Edition free for 48 hours, and slicing 50% off almost all the retro games in their catalogue. So you’ll want to go and lurk like a bargain-crazed pervert on GoG.com round about then. Full details here.

When pestering Amanita for our preview of Botanicula, they also sent over a collection of new hi-res screenshots for the game. And they are far too beautiful not to pass onto you. So below they are, clickonable for growth. Do so, because their reduced forms don’t do them justice. I apologise for the forthcoming angst over which ones should be your desktop backgrounds.

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Cos Frozenbyte’s proper-lovely tri-person puzzle-platformer finally has a concrete release date, after a few months of to-ing and fro-ing in beta. And it’s tomorrow! Oh dear, has this become one of those announcement of an announcement posts? People get cross about those, you know.

No, I think it’s OK – as it’s pretty unusual form to announce the release date of your game two days before it happens.
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