Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I barely scratched the surface of the Age of Decadence demo when it was released so when I received word from Iron Tower that a new version was available, with all kinds of additions and fixes, I thought it might be a perfect opportunity to revisit. And so I did, only to realise that even the surface is the sort of thing I’d have to scratch at until my fingers were blood-encrusted nubs of bone to form a proper opinion. I’ve played the opening sections with two different character classes and there’s a staggering variety in dialogue, choices and skills. This is shaping up to be the sort of RPG people often complain ‘they don’t make anymore’, or Kickstart with wild abandon. I urge you to try it.

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My Age of Decadence was my early twenties. I travelled slowly down the Mekong river longing for the horizon, drank copious amounts of bourbon in all-night jazz bars and dusty, dilapidated dives, all the while studying the world through an eyeglass of glamour and sleaze. Perhaps not coincidentally I also spent a lot of time in Manchester cafes reading Graham Greene and Paul Theroux. The game Age of Decadence aims to provide players with freedom of choice although I doubt it’s possible to recreate my own youthful exuberance. The trailer below draws attention to a host of other features that can best be described as ‘old-school’, words which I can write but should never say aloud.

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Well well well. After writing about Dead State earlier today, I now discover that the public beta demo for long-awaited Age of Decadence has been released. It would appear that everybody in the world is trying to download it at the moment and I’m probably not going to help matters by doing this but here’s the only working link I’ve found over on RapidShare. Because it’s downloading quite slowly I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but here’s hoping it’s as good as it looked when Kieron spoke about it in olden times.

From Love to Lovecraft… ‘Scott’, mysteriously surnameless lead developer at the newly-formed ‘Team Omega’ over at Iron Tower Studio, kindly drops us a line to let us know he’s working on a turn-based cRPG based on the works of HP Lovecraft. Cthulhu and chums are forever a source of excitement for Men Like Us, so interest = piqued.
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