Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The last Kickstarter project Tom Hall was involved with did not go so well. Old-School RPG (nee SHAKER) neither shook nor stirred up much interest, and both Hall and Brenda Romero decided it was best to go back to the drawing board. It seems, however, that they beelined for different drawing boards, because now Hall’s launching a Commander Keen spiritual successor all by his lonesome. It’s both a game design tool and a game rolled into one. So says Worlds of Wander’s Kickstarter, via the universal language of needlessly gratuitous caps: “It starts with a COMPLETE GAME for you to mess with – the spiritual successor to Commander Keen – SECRET SPACESHIP CLUB!” Somehow, I doubt it will remain a secret for too terribly long.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a simple enough demand, I think. Yes, id, we’ve been increasingly impressed with the constant trickle of promotional trailers you’ve put out for Rage over recent months, and you’ve proven that Mr. Carmack is fully capable of talking the talk. But are you big enough to take on outside feedback? Will you listen to our plea? We think it’s about time for the Commander to return to our screens, and some form of DLC for Rage seems like the perfect opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

Two dimensions good! Three dimensions bad! It’s retro-pixel-time day on RPS, entirely by mistake. If you’ve had enough absurdist time travel and Jesusosity, perhaps now you’d like to turn your 256-colour attention to id’s ancient history. Woah there, hoss – you’re totally about to comment that olden PC platformer Commander Keen was only 16 colours, aren’t you? I know the way your type thinks. Recently-released fan project Commander Genius does a whole bunch of things to first three episodes of the old jumpy-shooty series, but one option is to add a VGA tileset to it. Better still, this new engine allows nice enough upscaling and edge-smoothing that your gigantic modern monitor no longer makes the game look like it’s made out of sticklebricks. I had it running at 1920×1200, and while it didn’t quite fill the screen, it looked crisp and native-res rather than blurrily stretched to fill all those pixels.
Read the rest of this entry »