Latest Articles (Page 1982)

A large chunk of the PC gaming world seems positively frothy in anticipation of Diablo III, but there are other dungeon crawlers on the horizon too, including the splendid-looking Torchlight, from Runic Studios. It's by some of the same chaps who worked on Fate, so it's easy to get an idea of what to expect: randomly generated levels, lovely design, and lots of goblins. It should be super-playable, too, and allow us to create our own levels and scenarios. I've posted the trailer below, and blimey, it's looking good. Check out that troll!

The game is out on the 27th of October and will be a $20 download.

This morning we behold the multiplayer footage of Bioshock 2, in which people are augmented splicers in the submerged environs of Rapture. These splicers get cracking killing each other with physics and deployable turrets, which all looks rather entertaining. But... what's that? There's a use for the research camera? And someone gets to be the Big Daddy? A Tank round for genetically-spliced deathmatch? Intriguing. We'll have more on Bioshock 2 rather soon.

"Experience the chaos of Alma’s aftermath from an entirely new point of view: that of Replica Soldier 813," says the Monolith press release. The FEAR 2 DLC contains four new single-player levels, with lots more supernatural happenings. The DLC coincides with a free multiplayer patch for the game which will introduce some new game modes for folks who like their slowed-down manshoot. The Steam version of the DLC is here, for £6/$10 and, er, it doesn't appear to be available anywhere else yet, but I guess it will be at some point...

A new Assassin's Creed 2 trailer, once it gets past its, "Look, a bit like The Da Vinci Code which is a book and film you know!" tedium, shows off some of the melee combat in the game. Which looks mighty meaty. Of course, mighty meaty melee combat is going to be all rather put in the shade as a result of Batman. It's going to be interesting to see if the Dark Broody Knight's amazingly visceral fisticuffs will have the same effect on action games as the Persian Prince's introduction of reversing time: make everything else feel like it's missing something important.

Oh, I am so very clever and funny. Worry not, the reborn EGP, playground of folks behind indie AAAs such as World of Goo and Crayon Physics, remains very much alive and well. It has, however, just announced the theme of its latest monthly rapid development competition - Failure. Oooh, iiiiiinteresting. Clearly, there are no games made for this compo as yet, but thought I'd see if I could encourage any enterprising RPS readers to pull something together while the deadline is still far-off. And if not, let's all have a good old chin-scratch below about what kind of games could be made involving this concept. Me, I'd like to see one about a giant robot with no hands or guns that transforms into something entirely useless.

Seems RPS' noble attempts to stage a cross-continental conquest of the galaxy in the utterly splendid indie 4X game AI War is now threatened by more than our innate inability to organise ourselves. The lovely thing has just enjoyed a substantial new patch, which improves the game (and its graphics) in all kinds of ways, but likely means our savegames are now redundant. Back to the cosmic drawing board!

It's werewolf o'clock. Reader Ian Hetherington says he sent us a link to Kongregate game Vox Populi Vox Dei (a werewolf thriller) "because a combination of platforming and punching werewolves to death seems like RPS' sort of thing." Hrm. Well Ian, we can't say we disagree with you. The game itself is a mixture of subtle pixel art, punching werewolves to death, tricky timing, and mild annoyance. Some of the werewolf-passing puzzles vexed me mightily, but overall I give it some stars out of an arbitrary total. Good job.

This broke yesterday, but I thought was worth giving a nod towards. Showing some kind of developmental superspeed, Cryptic have announced the first update for Champions, which is due for late October. And being that period... well, Halloween. It's actually thematically right on in terms of the superhero zeitgeist, with both Marvel and DC having stories around zombie superheroes. Some people call this Superhero Decadence, and - oh - I'm going to have words with them sooner or later. Anyway - there's lots of battling fallen heroes, becoming infected as a zombie in PvP, Werewolves and a new powerset based around Celestial power. More details here. At the least, already giving players something to look forward to strikes me as good marketing.

In this, the final part of my look back on five years of the Eve Online corporation, Statecorp, we see our plucky heroes wander Eve, struggle for survival, and ultimately burn out in the long search for a home. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Yesterday, in between discussing how much better my Champions build was than his, Rob Hale mentioned the Unreal Mod Prometheus.. He suggested - in the wake of Time Donkey - an RPS theme day of time-travel. What a wonderful thing that would have been. If we could actually have time-travel, I'd have gone back in time to do it. Alas, I can't. Instead, watch the fine video that follows and consider going to play Prometheus: Neat stuff.

This is splendid news. Rogue-like-platformer Spelunky has inched out of Beta status and gained that shiny Gold. You can go get it here. If you need a reason to do so - well, I direct you at the long feature Quinns wrote on its joys, in which he took time to insult me in passing. You remember Quinns. Nice guy. Doesn't have much iron. Anyway, well done, Derek, maker of Spelunky. Also, the news that he's bringing another version to XBox Live means we can all look forward to when it's released in a year's time, and all the console journalists finally realise it's awesome, and it really gets on my fucking wick because I've been telling them to play the bastard thing for the last two years (Cross-ref: Trials HD).

And to give a taste of what you'll be doing a lot in Spelunky, here are some death montage vids.

While on the surface this is act of love... it's rather peculiar. It's a Fallout 3 mod created for a single purpose, and a single person: to ask a Fallout 3 player player to marry the girl who - with the help of the Fallout 3 modding community - made it. The full story begins here on the Bethesda forums, and continues here. To cut a very long story short: a video of the marriage proposal mod being played is below. And he said yes.

Oh, the humanity. More seriously, this is quite a fun experiment which Master Denby lobbed at me. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab have made a pair of games. In terms of actual mechanics, they're identical. But one - Woosh - uses purely abstract art and the other - Waker - uses a narrative story, with cut-scenes, voice-overs and an art style which supports its theme. From examining how the responses to the games differ "Researchers will study whether either the narrative or abstract form of the game is more effective in promoting student engagement with, and understanding of, the physics topics". Which, as far as high concepts go, is a fun one - and it helps that both games are neat little platform puzzlers, and worth playing. Of course it also got me thinking...

Turn-based strategy RPG (think King's Bounty without the Warcraftian cartoonishness) Disciples III: Renaissance has the a splendid website. You even "turn" the pages of an ancient book to read about the game features. In fact, the entire game's art-direction is exquisite, apart from the hex-based battle maps, which seem peculiarly deserted. Impossibly gothic cathedral cities, endlessly knotted and gnarled forests, warped supernatural creatures aplenty: it's got the dark fantasy thing down. And the game looks suitably epic from a player's point of view too, demanding a RPGTBS mentality for long-term fantasy adventuring. A developer walkthrough from GamesCom explains some of the game mechanics below, but I'd go take a look at their site (English switch top right) to leaf through some more of the game assets, it really does go overboard.

We're going to be taking a closer look at Bruce Wayne's secret identity on PC soon, but until we do there's a rather shiny "showcase" trailer showing off how implementation of physics engine tech looks on nVidia-powered PCs. Stuff swirls and swishes and dudes get kicked. It's quite impressive. It's still the same gloomy, doomy Arkham Asylum, but there's quite a lot more detail. And, my, it is good lookin'.

For those that missed it: there's a demo out.

TF2 has recently suffered a plague of some of cheating. Rather than cheating to win matches, players have been cheating to gain in-game items, using "external idling applications". The drops came at random, so people hung around on specifically designed servers until they'd collected what they were after. (I think.) Valve have announced this Will Not Do, and anyone who has accrued items this way will find they have vanished from their inventory. And this is the their gentle, generous response.

IO's surprisingly cute third-person action game, Mini Ninjas, appears on the 8th for US types, and the 11th for those in Europe. Not perhaps the inevitable follow-up to Hitman and Kane & Lynch, the ker-choppy silliness seems like it could be pretty fun. You can play the demo for yourself to test your prelikings. Meanwhile, somewhat prematurely, there's a 'launch trailer' that's just appeared.

Scanning the hardy Blues News, I initially mistook the headline 'Peregrine Glove' to be a most peculiarly-named videogame. Instead, it's one of those totally, gloriously, ridiculous batshit controllers that occasionally make an inevitably doomed play to replace or augment the venerable keyboard. This experimental hand-wrapping has the autocue-based blessing of one of the world's top DoTA players, so perhaps this time PC gaming controls really will be revolutionised...

(Er. I didn't Photoshop that slogan onto the image, lest you're worrying.)

A while back, I got together with Jerome Gastaldi - Monte Cristo CEO and lead on Cities XL - to talk about Cities XL. By "a while back" I mean, January. RPS has been busy with not doing anything. Since the demo has just been released, I thought it time to go back to the recording of Mr Gastaldi's splendid Gallic accent and forthrightness - I've avoided about half the swearing - to talk about Cities XL, the construction genre, and the future of the PC. It's worth noting that the interview is six months old - I've concentrated on discussion of concepts to avoid any details being out of date. And here we go!

More online manshoot movie has emerged from the fertile innards of Infinity Ward, this time showing off some flag grabbing in Modern Warfare 2. I don't know if it's just me, but I find the idea of dudes running around with riot shields when there are rocket launchers and assault rifles on the field rather amusing. "My shield of reinforced plastic will save me!"

Modern Warfare 2 is scheduled for worldwide release on November 10th, and apparently has the most pre-orders of any game in Activision's history.

Christ, 2Boy have knocked this out quickly, you may think. But no, it's nothing to do with World of Goo. It just rhymes with it. THQ have a forthcoming World of Zoo game, and to introduce us to its land of animal fun, have released this animal creator demo where you get to create and distribute your own cuddly, furry friends. By which I mean, animals, not John Walker. You can get it from here. Alternatively, here's some I made earlier...

In this, the third part of my retrospective on five years of an Eve Online corporation, I discuss our guerrilla war, a heroic evacuation mission, and the few weeks of play that will, I fear, diminish all game experiences to follow. For the story so far: Part 1, Part 2.

The latest Blurst game has been released, which is always a pleasure to say. Time Donkey, the Cursor*10-meets-platformer thing of extraordinariness is now available to play on their site, along with classics like Off-road Velociraptor Safari and Jetpack Brontosaurus, completely free. And in a new move, developers Flashbang have also created pay-for versions of Time Donkey and their previous game, Crane Wars, which can be downloaded, played fullscreen, and have extra modes, for $12 each.

From one-button action games to one-button mind games. Ergon/Logos is a surrealist text adventure in which you dictate your character's fate by clicking on sentence fragments as the on-screen words shuffle rapidly across the screen. Each click leads you down a different path, one you'll rarely be able to predict because it all happens so quickly. Read faster! Click faster! Otherwise you'll find yourself lost to despair....

We already knew that uber-indie adventure series Ben & Dan/Time Gentlemen, Please was due for an episodic sequel, but we didn't have a title. And without a title then, why, we are all as dumb as chickens. Now we have a title, which means we are as smart as astrophysicists. More important, there are details on how Zombie-Cow's marvellously funny but, let's be honest, a little traditional, games are evolving a little.

Something that makes me a bit sad is the knowledge that I'll never be someone who sits in a spaceship, strapped to a seat, and then gets deployed onto a planet's surface from the upper atmosphere. I know, I should keep my hopes up and never say never, but I remain fairly convinced this is unlikely to happen. Clearly I've no desire to then be involved in the ensuing war. As soon as I landed I'd scarper off and hide until it was all over. But that exciting deployment moment looks awesome. Oh, and the getting to go into space part. I raise this vital discussion in light of the trailer to celebrate the launch of Section 8, which features such a moment.

The Battlefield series is a bit patchy (HA! DO YOU SEE!) Heroes is a little too "lite" for my tastes, and the rather more realistic-looking 1943 has been delayed into after Christmas. We're due Bad Company too, but I wonder if the focus on environmental destruction will dilute the multiplayer manshoot. Personally Battlefield 2 was always my favourite, but I must admit I've not picked it up in a while. Nevertheless I suppose there must still be some kind of community playing, because DICE have just released a patch for it. A patch first promised in June last year. The words from Battlefield blog:

As part of Update 1.50 we are glad to announce that not only is Highway Tampa now a required install included in the update but Euro Forces (Great Wall, Taraba Quarry and Operation Smoke Screen) and Armored Fury (Midnight Sun, Operation Harvest and Operation Road Rage) is now FREE for all Battlefield 2 players. Including the brand new map, Operation Blue Pearl this brings EIGHT new maps that everyone can play and will be added to ranked Battlefield 2 servers world wide. The Booster Pack content is included in the update and has made the file just over 2Gb in size.

2Gb. Oof. Here's a list of mirrors.

Huzzah! The Cities XL demo is here, 1gb in breadth, for you to download, play, and then weigh on the platinum scales of consumer judgment. The new city-builder with an online dimension seems like it's been in beta for about 47 years, but it's actually only a few weeks. Nevertheless there's been a marked improvement since the early wobbles, and this limited demo gives you a taste of that improved game with a city restricted to 22,000 inhabitants, built in a choice of three of the twenty five landscapes across the three teeming planets of the game.

I do believe we have a Cities XL interview in the pipeline, so keep an eye out for that, should you be buildingly inclined. Full demo info here.

Heroes of Newerth has been in Open Beta for a while now and the opinion-blocking NDA has now been dropped at last. As such, a perfect time for Beta-Boy Phill Cameron to SHARE BRAIN THOUGHTS via WORDS.

Man, I'm really impressively bad at Heroes of Newerth.

I was just browsing some email, having just been booted off my gaming PC by the Mrs so that she could play FarmVille on Facebook, when I noticed that the PC actually does have a contemporary full-blown farming game: Farming Simulator 2009. From last month's press release: "Become a farmer and experience the thrill of driving heavy modern farm equipment as you try and feed the world! Choose from a variety of vehicles and implements, and explore the huge, over 4 km², island." Phwoar. More informatively: "The German version of this product shifted a massive 100,000 units within its first five weeks debuting at number one on the Media Control GfK chart." Now that's some credentials. I was just about to pick up a copy and start singing appropriate songs when I discovered: there is a demo.