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Hurrah! You know Eurogamer do their expo on October 1st-3rd, in London-town? Well, it's also got an internal expo of an indie-arcade where people get to show off their new games. Last year, it was a chance to play things like Joe Danger, Plain Sight and VVVVVV before release. Right now, however, it's time for developers who may have something coming out to submit to Pixel-Lab. The full press release is beneath the cut, but there's some more pointers over on the Indie Games Arcade site. There is one change from last year though - we're involved, and will give the "Rock, Paper, Shotgun Indie Game of the Show" award to whoever we think is tops. It's already being coveted, apparently, which is a good thing to do towards awards, but a bad thing to do towards your neighbour's ox.

Blendo Games latest project has just been released. The makers of micro-indie FPS-joy Gravity Bone and turn-based space-fleet-battle game Flotilla have let Air Forte out into the world. It's - to quote the site - a "high-altitude game of math, vocabulary, and geography". In other words, an educational game where you zip your plane around to select the answers. Features co-op, adventure modes and... oh, you can play the demo or see the trailer below. And it's available on PC, Haircut-PC, Beardy-PC and Console-Toy.

Curran twittered this yesterday and... well, I had to call the ever-literary delightful girlfriend in from the next room to gawp at the video. Yes, it's a casual game based around that classic of the Jazz Age and favourite of American English Teachers (OR SO MY TELEVISUAL SHOWS TELL ME). You can get the demo from here and then buy it for a mere seven dollars or so. Barg! Video follows. I especially approve of the section entitled RECREATE FITZGERALD'S CLASSIC PROSE...

By striking wallet-scouring operational wargame Command Ops: Battles From The Bulge repeatedly with sledgehammers, Matrix Games have managed to chip off a small scenario-sized piece. Eight tutorial vids make up the lion's share of the 525MB fragment. If you're new to the unique Airborne Assault/Command Ops approach, you'll definitely want to watch these before attempting to dislodge the regiment of doughty Volksgrenadiers defending St Vith.

Sundays are for sleeping. And then awakening, to compile a list of the fine (mostly (Well, less mostly than normal)) games-related reading I found this week, while trying to resist linking to some piece of pop music. Go!

• Andrew Vanden Bossche writes about how the visual novel Fate/StayNight goes beyond binary choices - focusing in how its three-endings are three endings, with the idea that you're meant to process them all in parallel. There's a point. That we talk about games with "Good" and "Bad" endings is arguably a real problem.
• Ed Stern points us all at this New York Times writing on the Theatre Of The Arcade. In short: "What if the characters and stories of classic video games were reimagined and reinterpreted as live theater in front of you?". Go reads.

More fruits from the fulsome Develop 2010 tree now, this time based on the talk by Popcap's Dave Bishop. He basically turned up and proudly thumped the company chest (albeit in a likeably unassuming way), but based on some of this stuff he's entirely justified in doing so...

• They tried - and failed - to sell Bejewelled to publishers for just $60,000 when they first made it.
• They're now selling another copy of Bejewelled every 4.3 seconds.
• 25 million people played Bejewelled Blitz in its first year live.

Right. This is a funny one. Releasing today is the new game from Arcen Games, who you remember from the splendid expansive and original space-strategy game AI War: Fleet Command which you may remember from our long-running diary series which you may remember from Quinn's constant and chronic lack of Iron. Anyway, his new game is totally nothing like that. I actually have used the logo as the header, as if I just show a screenshot you'd go "Casual square-matching game! No!" and click away. But this is a lot niftier than that - it really seems like exactly how you'd imagine the creator of AI War would make a square-matching game, in terms of quietly adding depth. I've only had a quick twenty minutes of it, but it has a mass of content and highlights its rotate-square-create-chains dynamic perfectly. Give it a shot, on PC or Mac. You can buy it from ten dollars direct from the developer, or on any of the usual direct-download places. Well, at least when they appear later today. Launch trailer follows...

So, well, Valve just rather nonchalantly announced a game. Yeah, exactly.

Remember Alien Swarm? A total conversion mod for UT 2004, with four-player co-op top-down action. The team behind it, we've just learned, were hired by Valve two years ago, and have since been working on L4D and now Portal 2. Except at the same time they've been making Alien Swarm all over again in Source. And it's coming out on Monday. And it will be free. And it looks great.

It really was the Develop for it. After Schafer's lobbing of the prick-stick at Kotick, Cliff Harris returns from there to write a furious blog post arguing that Epic's Mark Rein is "a jerk". Which is a lot milder than prick, but Cliff keeps-on-keeping-on climaxing with him telling that Triple-A bosses should "Fuck off". The cause for his concertation? Well, it's the microdeveloper panel at Develop where Harris - on the panel - took umbrage with Rein - in the front row - interrupting the discussion to give him a piece of his marketing wisdom. Go read Cliff's takes on the event - though I was actually at the event, so will hopefully write it up soon. It's worth noting that Rein's interruption came when Cliff was talking about his time with Lionhead and getting into trouble with PRs for speaking to the forumites. However, it quickly continued into the wider area, with Rein basically acting like a fifth panelist for the closing section.

I'm hoping this erupts into a full-scale war between the American Mainstream and British Independents by next Develop, and look forward to Terry Cavanagh saying that Valve are a big bunch of tossers or similar.

Yet more reasons why Dejobaan are one of my favourite Indie developers. Firstly, they've started their own Indie Games blog - Indie Superstar - where they interview Indie folks and header articles with pictures like the above - plus using the RPS favoured Designer-annoying Impact Condensed font. The one at the top of the interview with Cliffski is quite the thing. Secondly, they've got a fan club. Basically, sign up for their mailing list and they send you free mini games. The current one? Dejobaan’s Easiest Video Game Ever where you have to get chains of kisses, and showcases the algorithmic content generation stuff they're playing around with right now. Just sign up, and they'll send you the link. Here's some footage of what Dejobaan say will be their 14th game, currently called ooo! ooO! oOO! OOO!

What are you doing this weekend? Well, if you're less busy than me, you can play Ruse, the forthcoming Ubisoft strategy game. It actually quite impressed me at a recent press event, so diving into this Machiavellian game of bluff is something that I'd quite like to spend the weekend doing. Alas! But maybe your life is more pleasurable - yet empty - than mine, in which case I direct you to Steam. Download the client and you can play until Sunday. A chunky 20-minute video where the team talk about the improvements for the free weekend follows if you want a bit of hot developer goss...

Alex from the Eufloria team sends word that the new version of the game, 2.05, includes a big old community map pack. The game now supports customs maps in the interface, and there's apparently now some scope for truly inventive modding, with moving asteroids and other cleverness. The update is out on the site for non Steam users, and the Steam version will be updated shortly. I had a bit of a wordthink about the game last year, and most of what I said still stands.

So, while the Bond movie languishes in limbo, Activision have confirmed that the other new Bond game is called James Bond 007: Blood Stone. It's being developed by Bizarre Creations, and will feature fancy cover-based shooting, hand-to-hand fisticuffs, chatting to sexy ladies, automotive racing sequences, and the voices of Daniel Craig, Joss Stone, and Judi Dench. There's a reveal video up, which I've posted below. No release date yet.

I think I mocked this Source-engined oddity when it was announced, because it had a silly name. It still has a silly name: E.Y.E. but it now also has some fairly interesting game footage. Christophe from Streum On Studio got in touch to say that: "Our game takes place in a dark and futuristic universe and the video shows several ways to solve a situation." That situation, given that this is an FPS with RPG elements, is killing several men, but you see that done with guns, hacked turrets, conjured soldiers, little hoverbots, and some - er - menus. Surprising, promising. There's some more info on the main site, and some terrible screenshots. Oh dear.

DICE says: "The article published by PC-Gamer is not accurate. We are currently researching if Onslaught will be available for PC. No release date."

Bummer. But don't blame the messenger, eh? EA/DICE need to get their wires straight.

Listen up, near-forgotten supporting character fans: Half-Life: Opposing Force's Adrian Shepherd is back! Just, y'know, unofficially. I suspect it's the only way we'll ever see anything else of the Gearbox-developed add-on's soldiery hero-mute - and it's also a snazzy way to see real life human beans interacting with Striders, Combine police et al. Beyond Black Mesa is set during the Combine occupation of Earth, and was made by a bunch of HL2-lovin' film-makers with $1,200 made from their day jobs. Shoestring, then, but going on the trailer they've not done badly considering... Strider!

"Grand strategy" game Storm Over The Pacific came out, rather quietly, in June. But a demo for it has just appeared in the last 24 hours. The game by Wastelands Interactive, which perhaps not surprisingly follows the Ultra Mega War 2 battles taking place over Asia and the Pacific ocean, can be bought from Impulse for a really rather incredibly expensive £39, or from GamersGate for a still rather AAA price of £35. And that's just the digital download. However, perhaps this is exactly where you want to spend your money, and you can find out playing the demo. It offers you 15 turns of the Pacific campaign, but without the ability to save.

I zombie-walk into the back of the hall, to have Doublefine's industry-legendtm Tim Schafer on stage saying something along the lines of “You always have something to learn about hard drinking from the British”. As a pallid spirit powered solely by the ghost of spirits, I fear he has nothing to learn from me – bar, don't do it. However, we do learn from him – not least, the first information of the four (count 'em!) games Doublefine are working on.

Speaking of MMOs, there's one that we haven't been able to take our collective eye off, which is this one: Guild Wars 2. The chaps over at ArenaNet have been revealing a bit more about their fantastical sequel this week, mostly in the form of the ranger class details. GameTrailers, that bandwidth-providing broadcast monster of the internet, has compiled the various videos into a single item, which you can watch below. It reveals that the ranger employs arrows. Yeah, you could probably have predicted that. But there is also a bear, a giant bird, angry seagulls, "whirling defence", a giant ogre thing and some lovely scenery. Well, it's looking pretty impressive, anyway, so go take a peek.

Will Porter was editor of PC Zone in 2008, having worked on the mag for many years previously and since. Below he writes his eulogy for the first PC gaming magazine, that will be closing down after the next issue.

Hi! My name is Will Porter, and I'm here to deliver a stilted eulogy on the imminent demise of a magazine that shaped my love of PC gaming, my love of writing and much of what could laughably be called my career. I can’t help but feel that a lot of RPS readers will have, perhaps in older times, shared my love for PC Zone. As such I asked the RPS hive-mind for a platform on which to stand to address whoever present that wishes to celebrate its life. Or, indeed, tell us all how it was never as good as it used to be. I am aware that this site is to some degree the spawn of the auld enemy, those hateful bastards at PC Gamer, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

During the sermon there will also be a reading from Paul Presley, a surviving veteran of the PC Zone ‘Ninja’ Age, who wrote something lovely about the mag for its Issue 200 celebrations a year and a half ago. There will be coffee and tea in the foyer after the service. A minibus will then be provided for those wishing to head out and start burning shit down.

There are a bunch of MMOs on the horizon that we've pretty much neglected in the past few months, and one of those is Final Fantasy XIV, with its bunny-ear girls, ludicrous hyperbolic fantasy and science-fiction architecture. There was a trailer at E3 (which I've slung below) but also a bunch of details about the game which arrives on September 30th. Interestingly, the game does away with classic level-based experience point progressing, and instead opts for a skill-based system which will, as I understand it, allow a single player to take on different roles depending on the skills they've gathered and the equipment they employ. The character will still become more powerful in terms of hit points and mana, however.

The closed beta started last weekend, and it seems that North American applicants can sign up here, and Euros and Japanese here, so you could potentially get a look at it if you were interested.

It should be amusing, I suppose, that Haunted House could be considered a licence worth digging up and remaking. A classic status for this game means it is, by the rules of the games industry, destined to be brought back with physics and 3D graphics. That's what Atari are working on, of course, and the game is due to arrive at some point in the autumn. There's a video below, which neatly contrasts the past with the present. (Also I love that the original box art had "Ghosts, Bats, Tarantulas" written on the cover as a mini feature list. Innocent times.)

It turns out that Jagex's planned MechScape MMO wasn't the follow up to RuneScape after all - in fact it got scrapped - and instead they are planning a sci-fi MMO called Stella Dawn. Not much in the way of details yet, but there's some art and a beta sign up form over on the site. Eurogamer report that a "sizeable chunk" of the game will be free, and that it is Jagex's most ambitious game ever. I guess we'll get to see a lot more of that in the coming months. I'd like to see someone do a genuinely playable sci-fi MMO that wasn't just spaceships, at least.

And Bohemia Interactive have released a video which shows off some of the stuff that means Arma 2 - and its Operation Arrowhead expansion which arrived on the 28th, last month (sorry, I missed that entirely) - definitely isn't just a first-person shooter. This High Command tutorial (which is below, and spotted via Mr Blue) shows off all the means by which the game allows you to direct a battle, rather than just fighting it yourself. Reminds me that we need to have a crack at doing a bit more Arma 2 coverage on RPS, and get some multiplayer going. Yep.

Hot news from the develop free delegate lunch. Of the two varieties of cake provided, the micro-chocolate cakes disappeared with unseemly haste into the ravenous maws of sugar-depleted developers. Their attention turned to micro-Pavlova, which were in turn devoured. At the time of writing, it's impossible to ascertain whether this famine of micro-chocolate cakes is due to a difference in the supply of the two cakes, or whether there has been a fatal overestimation of the micro-Pavlovas amongst the games industry community on the part of the Develop Caterers.

Unknown Worlds appear to be creeping towards the final stages of the epic development of their RTS-FPS multiplayer hybrid sequel, Natural Selection 2. The $20 pre-order is going to give folks access to an alpha test from the 26th of this month. Apparently 12,000 people have already pre-ordered, so you should have no shortage of people to "test" things with. Pre-ordering also unlocks the SDK, tools, and fancy armour (pictured). This one has been so long in the making that, at times, I thought it was never going to happen. It is happening, and it's looking like an extremely interesting example of a what a seven-man independent team can achieve when they really want to make the game in question. (Old) teaser, trailer plus more recent footage, below.

The day's first Keynote is from Bioware, with Dr Greg Zeschuk is flying solo, as Ray is up to day 5 in the world series poker. I've just arrived in Brighton to find myself staring at the title: “Creative Game Development: How We Do It At Bioware”. And I'm sniggering to myself like an nine-year old, because I'm wondering whether it's going to be a guide of how they “do it” at Bioware. Tell me about the romance options, Dr Greg!

Alas, the reality is a little more prosaic.

Sad news, chums. Olden UK PC games mag PC Zone has closed, apparently. It's finished and they've all read it.

The next issue will be the last, RPS has been told by a whole bunch of people. And seen, on a company webpage and stuff. Honestly, we're not just spreading muck here. Farewell, then, to the UK's first PC games mag. Trails were blazed. It Was Important. And now it's gone.

Best of luck to everyone on the mag. You will do well.

Ed Vaizey has appeared at the Develop conference in Brighton to confirm that not only does he play console games, but he confirms that Miyamoto's designs are suitable for casual incompetents. “I play Super Mario Wii," said the UK Culture Minister, "That's all I'm capable of”. We tried to reach Nintendo for comment, but failed, because we didn't try very hard. He also faced stiff questioning from TIGA on the issue of tax-breaks for games development, but argued that the general breaks for business were competitive adding that he didn't rule out the possibility that the situation could change if the Games Industry managed to rally more convincing argument and "his door was open". But I wasn't really paying very much attention.

Riot Games send word that their "Season One" event for League Of Legends is getting under way. That means a content update for everyone, but also a big old championship. Here's the bit where it gets interesting for serious players:

Players who finish the season at the top of the League of Legends ladder will have the opportunity to participate in the Season One finals tournament which boasts a total prize purse of $100,000.

Riot are also celebrating this event with a cinematic trailer, which I've posted below. Watch for more information over on the official site.