Latest Articles (Page 1980)

You can now download the Dragon Age character creator, letting you find out the range of races and looks available for your potential avatar. You can get it in English directly from clicking here, or if you're after another language head to the official Dragon Age site, in the column on the right. There's also a new and rather excellent CGI trailer, which you can see below.

An apparently rejuvenated LucasArt's first foray into non-mainstream gaming arrived last week. Surrealistic puzzle-platformer Lucidity hints at a bright new age of invention for the venerable, unpredictable developer - has the nightmare of endless Star Wars biff-based games finally ended? Here is An Opinion.

Quite a few of my fellow space-warriors have mailed us links to Naumachia: Space Warfare in the past few days. I've only just got around to watching the video, and crikey. You can check it out below. Anyway, it turns out that this indie space 'em up was properly unveiled at the Italian Videogame Developers Conference, which took place in Milan last week. It's looking like some seriously pacey first-person space combat, and the visuals are bang on: fast, colourful, with the kind of vibrancy space combat seems to have been missing of late. Anyway, we'll get in touch with the four man development team at AureaSection and see what they have to say for themselves. In the meantime, go see things explode.

How much would you pay for World Of Goo? Is the question 2D BOY are asking to celebrate its first birthday. For the next six days you can choose how much you want to pay for one of our favourite games of last year, whether it's 1p or a million billion pounds. It's also a chance, they point out, for those who previously acquired a copy without paying to return and offer something for their entertainment. Head here to get a truly stupendous game for whatever you wish to pay. It will be fascinating to see how this works out.

Darkwind is an indie-MMO thing I've been meaning to look at which I'm just going to post (Jim tried, but the login system was failing then - seems to be okay now). Hail Shaun, who's been pretty insistent in shouting about it. It's basically a turn-based vehicular game. Think Car Wars or - if you're terminally games-workshoppy - Dark Future. Or, if you're Shaun: "Think of the tabletop game Car Wars having sex with EVE Online, then doing a threesome with Autoduel and Auto Assault, and finally making out with Football Manager". Crikey, Shaun. Why don't you just make out with it with tongues and everything? I'll investigate when my schedule opens up a little, but until then, here's some footage...

Mr de Quidt found Papermint interesting. I find it has a cute graphic style, and reminded me that I meant to have a closer look at it since it picked up a mention at the recent Indiecade. I went to have a look at it, and it's all in foreign and I can't work out how to change that. Oh noes! I link, because I always like seeing this sort of visual style explored, in what's a social MMO. In Foreign! Footage follows...

This week we've had a chance to play through the beginning of Borderlands, courtesy of 2K Games. What follows are some preview impressions of that co-op experience. We expect to unleash a full RPS Verdict on the game later this month.

Everything changed when I made it to the first city.

Not as in "Whatever happened to those Left 4 Dead 2 chaps?" but "Where else will they be offing people?". As reported by Kotaku reported by EvilAvatar reported by the Steam Forums as reported by a Taiwanese website who stuck up five L4D2 posters. Which seems to have revealed the last two. Or it could be a hoax. Oh, they look credible enough to me. See them below...

NoOOoo. I'm going to sit here and play this one through to completion too, aren't I? Hey, there's even a level editor this time, putting me at risk of user-made levels. Demolition City 2 also throws in some kind of money system, new dynamite types, a map to chart your progression through various historical demolition zones, and features also has the same peculiarly hypnotic music. Sadly it lacks the EXPLOSION! graphic of the original game, and can therefore been seen as an over-ambitious sequel that forgot its roots. Or something.

As mentioned in the Sunday Papers yesterday, there has been some controversy sparked after remarks made by Gearbox's Randy Pitchford to Maximum PC regarding Steam, where he stated that the digital distribution service from Valve was "exploiting a lot of small guys." This was later countered by an article on Gamasutra where Tripwire's John Gibson retorted, "Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam."

Interested to see if there were other positions we spoke to 2D BOY and Zombie Cow, who have sold their games on Steam, to find out about their experiences.

While my heart wants to play Borderlands, my poorly head makes me play Atomic Super Boss. It's actually a webgame port of the freeware Bullet Hell, but with a high score table. You with a boss, who moves through different attack patterns, randomly. You shoot him. The closer you are, the more points you get. Maximise score before he inevitably kills you. Videogame!

A free truck racing game! Wow!

Zero Point Software have released a clever new preview asset of their game, using the Unity plugin. It's a kind of "3D screenshot" that they're calling The Vault. You can go in and have a look around, and see some of the titular marines in 3D, frozen in time fighting some manner of shark monsters. It's pretty neat, and the dates on the vault walls suggest that more of these 3D vignettes will be revealed in the coming months. The sci-fi co-op shooter has been in development for quite some time now, so we're hoping this indicates the start of a more concerted reveal of just what's going on with the title the studio are calling a "AAA Indie" project.

Folks who can't be bothered installing Unity (and given the amount of cool stuff it's throwing up now, you probably should be bothered) can get a taste of the vault via a new teaser trailer which I've posted below.

Only watching just this now, and finding it a lot of fun. Micro Men is a broadly comic semi-fictionalized drama about the early 80s computer war between Sir Clive Sinclair and Ex-employee Chris Curry (i.e. Acorn Electron, BBC). Alexander Armstrong's portrait of Sir Clive is agreeably arrogantly monstrous. It's still on iPlayer if you want to go watch. It's a bit of a shame that it's both technically awkward and probably illegal to watch iPlayer outside the UK, because the whole early 80s British computer boom is such a part of RPS' gaming history - and influencing a lot of the wider gaming world in what it allowed - that I think it'd be interesting to the colonials. Trailer follows...

We've mentioned Roburky's Alice And Kev before, in the Sunday Papers. In fact, since it went fully meme-active, you probably saw it... ooh, almost anywhere. However, it's actually drawn to a close with a final entry, which is a moment I think worth bringing to your attention. If you haven't been following, it's the often touching story of Roburky trying to play a homeless parent and child in the Sims. Kev is the worst dad in the world. Alice is the sweet hearted innocent who is defecated upon at every turn. And if there's a finer piece of extended games writing this year... well, we'll have been very lucky. Go.

Over at Eurogamer today I've a retro piece about the completely brilliant Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Or Jedi Knight to its friends. It includes words such as:

"And by crikey, it's good. It's very, very good. It's so good that you can only look down at the ground, shake your head in confusion, and slowly pen a letter to LucasArts asking them what the hell they were thinking when they abandoned FPS development and handed the reins over to Raven. With this, Dark Forces, and indeed the enormous Mysteries of the Sith expansion, LucasArts demonstrated a rare and brilliant skill with a genre that's so often so mediocre."

Read the rest here.

Sundays are about crawling out of a sleeping bag to find a friend's two children determinedly trying to attach themselves to your legs and forcing you to march around the front room pretending to be a RoboGodzilla powered by tea, going for a walk and acting as a human umbrella, and compiling a list of fine (mainly games) reading from across the week, while trying not to include something I've been playing all week and/or howling in the car on the way home. Go!

A typical Sunday morning in the Stone household: get up, shake fist at sky, consume breakfast of tea, toast and marmalade, go out and destroy a church. Thanks to the Spreng- Und Abriss- Sim demo, I can now undertake that last activity without leaving the house!

Mr McRussell pointed Prop Hunt at me yesterday, and thinks it's in agreeably spirit of the mother game. I have to concur. One team spawns as a variety of bits of scenery. The other spawn as pyros. The latter hunt the former. Hilarity ensues. I found the Steam Thread including a list of handy servers playing it courtesy of Shacknews. And you'll find videos of barrels running desperately around below...

The time when I get really envious of game developers is usually when they get down to the full sweep of world building. In this latest video Bioware talk about the making of the city-planet of Coruscant in The Old Republic, and explain how they've had to build a planet entirely without terrain - a purely urban setting, miles deep - while also getting across a spectrum of political power and corruption via the gradation of environments through layers of the capital of the Republic. Ooh, there's also some boasting! This is an unprecedented city environment, they claim, with the kind of infrastructure that would be required for a sort of endless Manhattan, which dwarfs any city environments in other games. From the shiny surface mega-structures of the senate and the spaceport, down to the endless dereliction of the lower levels. It's a kind of architectural encyclopedia of Star Warsian styles all on its own. And what is going on with Robert Chestney's t-shirt? Ah, the many mysteries of Star Wars...

Sipping morning tea, I find myself looking at the newly announced game due in 2010 (via Steam) from Alientrap Software, who you may know as the developer of the free open-source shooter Nexuiz. In first few seconds I'm thinking "Metroid" or "Turrican", and kinda shrugging. A few later, I think "Exile". And then I notice its name. It's totally someone trying to do a modern take on the ancient Physics-lead exploration game Exile. From ambition alone, I suspect this bears close watching. I suspect many of American readers won't be aware of Exile. It's... well, in Edge's retro reviews, writing about old games as if Edge would have if they were around then (with the benefit of hindsight) they gave their precious ten to three only: Elite, Super Mario Bros and Exile. That's the sort of company it keeps. Footage follows.

I would like to take this opportunity to talk to you about Miami Shark. Miami Shark is a game in which you play a shark. Who pulls planes into the sea. Thank you for your time, and have a good day.

Our inbox runneth over with much-appreciated links to this free, indie BBC Micro-esque platformer. A game of minimal controls and beyond minimal graphics, it pulls off the remarkable feat of evoking a grim invasion - you as one of a Spaceman army invading a Wizard's fortress, occasionally encountering doomed comrades, but always pushing on, against the endless tide of bright red monsters. Ah, even names like 'spaceman' and 'wizard' are so warmingly reminiscent of an age when a character required only a title, not a complicated backstory, love interest, long-lost son, eight different kinds of amnesia and the forename Jack. But that's not the whole of Star Guard's cleverness.

In their attempt to write a developer diary for Torchlight, Runic games managed this:

"Dear Diary, I think I will make a kick-ass game. Yes! That’s all for now. Lootfully yours, Runic Games."

Fortunately they instead chose to elaborate further in video form, and you can see it below.

This probably-genuine video of a poor, dead thing caught my eye today. Reportedly, it's footage of a recently-cancelled videogame based on DC Superhero The Flash. His powers: he can run fast and has tiny wings on his ears. Which, I would have thought, can complicate coming up with interesting new story ideas for him, but does make him ideally suited to a videogame. Especially that current superhero videogame vogue: the open-world city. The idea of traversing blocks in a split-second, or using momentum to create extreme Parkour, is enormously tantalising. Here's what we could have been in for...

The Gamasutra postmortem on previous RPS-fave Zeno Clash caught my eye. They're almost always a good read, but from a game coming from a very different place than most of the industry (both literally and figuratively), there's much to learn. Choice details include how it emerged from a previous failed project - the Lithtech-2 based Zenozoik - and how the experience of that made them focus as tightly as they did: "Many years after this failed attempt we gathered around our original concept and re-thought the game in a manner that would focus on few but solid elements, those that we would be able to produce as a small team". With a team of seven, you have to or risk disaster. Lots more in the full piece.

I was thinking about blogging about this weekend in City of Heroes being one of those double-XP-and-reactivate-all-old-accounts weekends that MMOs like to throw... but the news breaking on another interesting initiative pushed possible into definite. You're aware that the Cities games have a level designer function, allowing players to design their own arcs? Well, since this is flexible and accessible enough, Paragon have started a Guest Writer program where they bring published authors to do a mission. The first four - from Bill Willingham (FABLES), Rooster Teeth (RED vs. BLUE) and Scott Kurtz (PvP) - debut on Tuesday, and you'll find the details below...

The best thing about racing games is the Vrooming. Now that's sorted out: There's a Race On demo available. What is it? More than 600Mb yet less than 700Mb. More specifically, it includes the Racing Event (A weekend of training, qualifying and the all important racing) and Time Attack (Where the nature of temporal existence is undermined by a big old vroom-car). It's the latest game by SimBin, and it looks like...

This is intriguing. We just received a link to a new site, AAN World News, which seems to blend actual headlines with news from the world of Arma II. Today it's sporting the Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize stuff alongside headlines about the US invading Arma II's fictional "green sea" nation of Chernarussia. Presumably this is a prelude to actually revealing some stuff about previously confirmed expansion Operation Arrowhead? Or is it the work of a crazed Arma II fan?