Tag Archive

New Star Soccer 4.07: Can You Click It?

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 29, 2009.

Sometimes I’ve amazed what we haven’t written about. A recent update to 4.07 reminded me that we’ve never even given the slightest plug to New Star Soccer 4, unarguably the most critically acclaimed Indie football game existent. The updates include a general boost to AI – both players and goalkeepers – but it’s really notable for just being its own take on the genre. You play a single player, following him through his career. I admit, I haven’t had a chance to really delve it into much, but the worth of being independent is clear when there’s obvious options to do illegal drugs to boost your performance at the risk if you’re found out. Plus, going gambling, drinking and getting a girlfriend. In other words, all the stuff which you’ll never see in a game with an official licence. You can get the demo here or watch some footage beneath the cut…
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Harry Potter And The Free Demonstration Program

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 25, 2009.

We’re not exactly the biggest fans of Harry Potter here at RPS, because we’re grown-ups so prefer to spend our time on grown up pass-times like videogames, painting Skaven and marching around chanting that we are playing army, asking people to join us until a girl tries to join us, at which point we inform them loudly that no girls are allowed. But EA have released a demo of their latest videogame incarnation of the bespectacled mage. It’s about 600Mb or so, and you can get it here. Scanning its press release, I find the following line: “Players may even get sidetracked by Ron’s romantic entanglements as they journey towards a dramatic climax and discover the identity of the Half-Blood Prince” which makes me think that Ron is going to blow his load messily before discovering who the half-blood prince is. Lucky old Ron, I say. Anyway – trailer beneath the cut. Woo!
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Earth, Wind & Firepower: Kingdom Elemental Demo

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 24, 2009.

Chronic Logic dropped me a line, mentioning they’d just released a major update for their strategy game, Kingdom Elemental: Tactics, improving the interface, revamping skirmish, new challenge levels, user-created stuff and lots of exciting sounding improvements. Or rather, they would be, if we knew anything about the game, but we’ve never played it. There’s only two ways to solve that. One: find a player, excise their brain with scalpels and merge it with your own with brain-glue. Two: play the demo. I went with the latter. It’s basically a real-time-with-pause skirmish game, with a tiny touch of tower-defence in its design. Oh, I’ll explain it a bit better below…
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French Revolution: Enter the Story: Les Miserables

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 22, 2009.

This caught my eye over on TigSource, for a load of reasons. It’s an adventure game (kinda) version of Les Miserables. You buy the game for 15 dollars, and you get the next two games in the series free (Which are based on the Divine Comedy and Roman poet Lucretius’ “The Nature of things. Apparently). Even more-so, the profits are being put towards his research into popularising Georgist ideas of Land-rent. Oh – and he’s got plans for the next five years. Ideas aren’t in short supply.

Clearly, I had to give a demo a shot…
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Desert Island Discoveries: Anno 1404 Demo

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 17, 2009.

So, I’ve been sitting and reviewing Anno all day on the Wii, where I found myself unfeasibly amused by being repeatedly told to pay the herb tribute to the king, which sounds like some fascinating kind of drug-dealing slang. I come upstairs and find that the big-boy pants version of Anno 1404 (aka Dawn of Discovery in the US) has just released its demo. It’s time limited, allowing you an hour of play in each of the demo’s two modes, which still leaves a lot of time for city building, trading and herb-tributing. Jim did a mass post with all the videos on recently, but I think you’ll find one beneath the cut which he didn’t include. Or I could be wrong. You tell me, Anno 1404 fans.
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The All Aspect War Demo: A Veritable Saga

Written by Alec Meer on June 16, 2009.

Here’s a tale to warm the cockles of your dark, bitter heart. Lest you’ve not been following the remarkable fallout to Jim’s quickie post concerning the recent demo of Derek Smart’s latest indie opus, its sprawling comments thread has become something of a biblical epic of hate, love, redemption and disagreements about where people’s arms appear when they swim. Initially, the thread was as miserably expected: a few of our local Grumpymen took an immediate pop at Derek and his games, labouring under the delusion that his… ah, spotty reputation as a gentleman of the internet gave them free reign to insult him here. He responded in kind, as he is known to do. We sighed, and deleted most of the shouting, because we like to keep a happy house here. We also stocked our desks with caffeinated beverages and salted snacks, in preparation for a long night of troll castration. And then, a remarkable thing happened….
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Imp-ortant News: Overlord II Demoified

Written by Alec Meer on June 12, 2009.

I downloaded the demo of this cruelty ‘em up sequel yesterday, and was intending on posting about it only once I’d played it. Sadly, it sternly refuses to install on my system (I’m running Windows 7, so have no-one to blame except myself. And the hair thieves who come in the night and steal my eyebrows, obviously), so instead all I can say is this: there is a demo, which is just under a gig in size. And you should play it, because this game of imp-herding and people-murdering looks very promising. Right, I’m going to go see if I’ve still got a hard drive with poxy Vista installed somewhere…

Edit – turns out my download was borked. A new’un has installed fine – whee!

Hexyback: Conquest! Medieval Realms Demo

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 11, 2009.

The Hexmaster Tim Stone has already written that Illustrious have released Conquest! Medieval Realms. But he complained there isn’t a demo! But in the time between then and now, that’s changed in one, very important way. That there’s a demo. There’s totally a demo. And you can get it from here. It’s a considerably cut down version of the full game, containing two missions instead of the kertrillions of randomly generated ones, multiple campaigns, map editor and all that good strategy malarkey. On a score of “genre” it rates “turn based strategy”. I had a little play of the demo…
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Phasers To Stun: Ancient Galaxy

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 9, 2009.

Being away means that I’m enormously behind on the indie game situation. There’s about half a dozen open tabs plus e-mails marked as IMPORTANT for me to investigate. I’ll be catching up as well as I can, but the first thing I took a look at was Ancient Galaxy. And it’s… interesting. My mental note-pad is covered with scrawlings like “Outcast”, “Early Tomb Raider”, “Quasi-Star Trek”, “System Shock” and lots of other similarly intriguing things. It’s basically an oddly late-90s feeling action/adventure – in that it swaps elegance for piling on ideas and mechanisms. It’s a very PC action/adventure, in other words. The shareware version can be got here, and there’s some more thoughts from my quick play beneath the cut…
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Are You Listening Carefully? The Path Demo Out

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 6, 2009.

Not sure how we missed this. The ever-controversial and much previously discussed The Path have finally released a demo of the game. In fact, it’s more than a demo – iit’s actually a prologue to the game proper, especially created to give a sample of the atmosphere. In other words, almost certainly worth downloading for fans of the the full game as well as those intrigued by all the net-chat.

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