By John Walker on May 2nd, 2013.
The latest footage of Rawbots impresses even more than previously. The game in which you design, build and program your own robots, and indeed the world you play in. A sandbox sandbox. It looks a combination of daunting and remarkable – and check out the hand at the end of the video below.
By Craig Pearson on May 1st, 2013.
Hnnng. HNNNNNNNNG! HNNNNNNNNNN… Gah! It’s no good. I can’t move the clementine on my desk using the power of my mind. All I succeeded in doing was bursting a blood vessel and accidentally predicting the next 100 years of winning Lottery numbers. Stupid brain. I want floating citrussy goodness, not creepy eyes and untold wealth. I guess I’ll have to instead turn to Son Of Nor, the third-person RPG where you reshape the world with your mental powers. The promising third-person action game of world telekinesis and terraforming has just popped up on the crowd-funding site. The pitch is below.
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By Alec Meer on May 1st, 2013.
What will we be describing promising games like in the post-post-Minecraft age? What will be zeiting the geist of 2016? I think it’ll be something to do with pigeons and cheese: you heard it here first. Meantime, we’re still in the post-Minecraft age, and that means attractive and inventive games based around cubist construction/destruction. Latest of those is Stonehearth, currently on the Kickstarters and immediately looking gosh-wow-yes-please. It’s a sandbox RTS with at least partially freeform building, and gigantic elder gods.
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World of Magic, Sea of Stars
By Adam Smith on April 28th, 2013.
Jagged Alliance: Flashback arrives in the Katchup this week. I’ve expected (and hoped for) a Jagged Alliance crowdfunding attempt for some time now. As soon as it became obvious that Kickstarter was a place where old franchises could revive themselves, every week that the mercenaries didn’t appear was slightly more unsettling than the last. Would I rather have a direct sequel without a crowdfunding campaign? Perhaps. The transparency that Full Control promise, listening and learning as they go, is appealing and it’s hard to imagine fans of the series pledging for a sequel, like Back in Action, without the core of the original games’ features in place. Elsewhere, Worlds of Magic and Infinite Space: Sea of Stars are two major successes.
By John Walker on April 23rd, 2013.
Metroidvania meets Gradius sounds like the sort of thing you could only wish for, chin leant your your interlocked fingers, elbows on the windowsill looking out into a rainy day. But by crikey, that’s what Gamesbymo are up to with A.N.N.E. A 2D pixel art hybrid of ship-flying shoot-em-up and physics puzzles, and on-foot platforming that promises Metroid-like progression. Wants.
By Alec Meer on April 23rd, 2013.
As prophesied by the saintly words of the Very Reverend Adam Smith last week, Jagged Alliance is about to make its eighty millionth comeback, this time in the charge of Full Control, they of the new Space Hulk game, and via the medium of Crowdsourcing. I can only advise you to read that interview in the pursuit of fulsome details on the turn-based strategy remakequel, but today the actual Kickstarter goes live. This means more details, and also a video which affords me the opportunity to see the face of a man I have only ever spoken to on the phone before. It’s quite a nice face, really.
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By Alec Meer on April 23rd, 2013.
Turns out Bethesda have done the smart thing, and announced a crossover between the Elder Scrolls and Dishonored. Redwall will bring the Redguard to the city of Dunwall, as the warriors of Hammerfell use roof-based exploration to uncover a slightly incoherent conspiracy. Pre-order now for the exclusive Pinky Demon character skin.
Just wishful thinking, alas. No fantastical universe crossovers for you, young fellow-me-lady! Perhaps, though, it’s no less preposterous a concept than making a game based on Brian Jacques’ long-running series of children’s books about mice vs rats (and other talking beasts too) in an abbey-based war. Soma games, an Oregon-based Christian developer, have the license, third-person action is the apparent genre, and Kickstarter will provide the funding.
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By Nathan Grayson on April 23rd, 2013.
I quite like the sound of Grimlands. By its creator’s own admission, it’s basically a grit-and-oil-thick smoothie of Fallout, Borderlands, and Ultima Online, and the only way that could sound more appealing to me is if it included a kitten on a unicycle who could also assuage my fears about an increasingly superficial, transient modern society. So with its rise, so too came my hopes. And then it fell, and I was sad. But then it resurfaced on Kickstarter, and my intestinal butterflies were all aflutter once more. And now? Now I’m not entirely sure what to think.
Happiest mask and ukulele
By Adam Smith on April 21st, 2013.
Two $100,000 winners this week and a few other projects close to the finish line. While I was compiling the column this week, I realised I was keeping track of the number of projects that apparently ‘contained roguelike elements’. It’s about 90%, although to be fair I stopped keeping track almost as soon as I’d started so that figure is entirely made up. Perhaps my memory fails me, but I don’t recall the term being anything like as popular 12 months ago. Of course, some would argue that the meaning has been lost and that anything with procedural generation or a modicum of difficulty is now wearing the roguelike hat, but that in itself surely tells us something. Games want to be like rogue, which is far more agreeable than the days when every other one wanted to be like a soldier or a space marine.
By Craig Pearson on April 19th, 2013.
Baby-troubling Among The Sleep is the only survival horror I’m interested in. The cute game of controlling a waddling baby through a scary house reminds me of the time when I was two and lost my teddy bear. It was pretty harrowing, but my dad found it about three feet away from where I was sitting. I survived, but the scars run deep. I could ply my therapist with more and more cash, and I could keep buying those expensive adult nappies, but I think I need to confront the horror head on. Among The Sleep will eventually help me out with that, but not before others help it out first on Kickstarter.
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By Craig Pearson on April 18th, 2013.
What would happen if you popped a party popper in space? That is the question that Interdimensional Games will have to tweet at Commander Hadfield, because their impressive space RPG Consortium has just achieved warp speed (was funded) on Kickstarter. The Source Engine game of space intrigue on a fully-realised space ship should be arriving in July of this year, ahead of all the other space games that are coming out. In celebration, they’ve released a video showing the visual history of the game, and I have placed it on the other side of this event horizon.
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