Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A surprise Christmas present from GSC, at which there appears to remain some life despite the awful news that they (and with them Stalker 2) had apparently been shut down earlier this month:

“Dear Stalkers: We will not be releasing any official news until around mid January. However there is cause for hope! Good hunting!”

That is all. But that is something. And it’s the second claim that all might not yet be lost in as many weeks, meaning the rescue operation is hopefully bearing fruit. Good luck, brave Ukrainians.

Not everyone inhabiting Risen 2′s archipelago will be a pirate, although all players will start that way. But what is a pirate without an authoritarian regime to cock a snook at? The Inquisition, now in a world without magic, are “organised very strictly”, which is why they have short haircuts and “walk around in goosestep”. Crikey. They’re just asking for a carefree buccaneer to rob their precious things. Then there are “the natives”, with their shaman, warriors and hunters. Many of them have been enslaved and forced to work on plantations. As for the pirates? They’re “drunk most of the time”.

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What I presume will be the final 2011 “insider” video for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning focuses on its action-RPGness, which means talking about the combat and the stuff that articulates the combat, the art and animation. It’s quite an interesting angle to take, actually, looking at how the animators have to try and portray the fight ‘em up mechanics that the designers are trying to put into it. And it looks good. There’s no doubt that Kingdoms will be quite a light Swords & Conversation sort of a game, and I’m certainly interested to see exactly where they take it, particular in terms of how open their open world actually is.
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It’s Christmas eve’s eve, which is cause for some excitement, surely? What better way to celebrate the imminence of gift-exchange than to accept this freebie from me? More accurately, it’s from Jeremy Jurksztowicz, the chap who made it. Going by the name Mysterious Castle, Jeremy’s game is a graphical blend of roguelike and turn-based tactical combat. There are loads of exciting plans for the future, including random quests and defined lair-like areas, but it’s already a fine piece of work, with a simple and convenient party system and plenty of monsters to biff. Download it for free, right here.

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Here’s a 2011 trend I’d hoped had wound down by now: the hacking of games, game services and game websites. Seems Trion Worlds, makers of Rift, suffered an incursion lately, with hackers finding their way into a database containing “user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards.” Aieee!

However, Trion have declared that “There is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way.” Phew?
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I don’t have the foggiest how many game-making tools litter the internet these days so forgive me if it seems bewildering to highlight this one specifically. Oh My Game is a browser-based application aimed at people who can’t program but do want to make videogames, so it focuses on stuff like level design, importing art assets and using something called ‘logic blocks’ to achieve the effects of coding without the coding itself.
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