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Italy's Winter Wolves strikes me almost as out of time in terms of how devoted they seem to an old school idea of what an indie game is. But what shame is there in that? I thought, seeing that Celso Riva has managed to follow the Shareware model of gaming - finding niches and filling them with games like The Goalkeeper, Magic Stones, Supernova 2 and six currently available others - it'd be worth seeing talking about where he came from, how he managed it and where he plans on taking it yet. And how even the indiest of the indie have their own anti-piracy solutions...

I'm off to America on my holidays!

But I'll leave you with Open Doors. All the best of luck there. You'll not be getting any more work done today.

Mucho thanks to Sam for usual excellent tippage.

Work, or at least mysterious "pre-production" has begun on the sixth Introversion game, "Chronometer." Google tells me that chronometer means "clock', so perhaps some kind of clever time-travel game? Chris Delay isn't giving much away, but I'm going to post that image of a big gold pocketwatch anyway.

We didn't talk much about RPGs last year, but they keep on cropping up recently. Elf-cravings are biennial, presumably. Due soon is a new Neverwinter Nights 2 premium module/expansion, Mysteries of Westgate. Scoundrel port Westgate is of course one of the Forgotten Realms' most notorious cities, and also the name of an air conditioning-bereft open-plan office I spent two sweaty years of my life in. My Mysteries of Westgate were more along the lines of which bastard drank all the coffee or left urine-sodden toilet paper all over the bathroom floor.

Er... Anyway! New video beneath the cut.

I recently had a bit of a chinwag with Flagship COO Max Schaefer for Eurogamer. Primarily it's about free MMO Mythos, a game they sound supremely confident about: "Can we take down the big boys? I think we can take down some of them. And I'd like to put a dent in the others." He's also remarkably honest about its similarities to Diablo and WoW, adamant that being so is in their audience's best interests.

There's also some interesting light-shining on the Hellgate: London balls-up. Of course he doesn't actually say it's a balls-up, but it certainly sounds as though Flagship are no longer pretending all is sweetness and light in Hellgateland: "When you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much." Read the full interview here. It was a long old chat - there's another 3000 words on the cutting room floor, which I may lob up here later on.

So I wonder: when people like Bit-Tech post comprehensive instructions on how to build incredibly lavish case mods, does anyone actually go ahead and do it? Have you ever gone and modded up your case or monitor to look like something it isn't? I've got some nice stickers on mine... but that's about it.

Anyway, go take a look, the next project from arch-modder Ton Khowdee is How To make the make a full-on TF2 sentry gun case. The crazy fool.

It scares me how suggestible I can be. I worry that one day I’ll walk past a sign saying “heroin makes you big and strong!” and that’ll be it. Most recently, I saw all the Diablo III stuff and duly thought “durrrr I wud like 2 play dat”.

So I load up Diablo 1 (now almost unplayable in this day and age. While it was scarcely inventive as sequels go, the improvements Diablo II made to the formula can't be overstated). I play some Mythos. Most of all, I play Titan Quest. Amusingly, my Steam friends list revealed that several people I know have also been playing Titan Quest lately. My, what a coinkydink.

Wii-based Sims spin-off, MySims, is to appear on the PC this October, along with a new 8-player online mode. The game - a sort of cross between Lego and Animal Crossing - is a cutesified, deliberately Japanese-styled game of building a town and filling it with happy, bobble-headed people. The excellent Keza assures me it's very girly indeed.

So now it's coming out on the PC, with online features. That's the PC. The PC. MySims, with online features, on PC, for the PC, on PCs this October, for the PC, online. Below is EA's press release. With the clues provided here, and in the details below, see if you can guess which format it's for, and what the new features might involve.

We don't know much about Bioware's next RPG, reportedly in development for five years now. But we probably think we know a lot about it as, well, their last three games were a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle bit similar.

Reassuringly, it's the Edmonton lot closing the circle. They've already shed their Star Wars handcuffs by following up KOTOR with Mass Effect, set in their own Roddenberryesque sci-fi universe, and Dragon Age will see 'em finally step out of Dungeons & Dragons' shadow and into their own medieval fantasy world. And about time too - a developer with that much clout shouldn't have to suckle from another man's elf.

You may remember when Codemasters put out their press release for the Damnation announcement, we felt inclined to mock it everso slightly. Codies responded in generous good humour, leading to this madness. Well now some more screenshots have appeared, and as excellent fun as this game looks like it could be, there's some more mocking to come.

Specifically about the above.

It's a big day for fans of the bat-to-ball game. The ever-amusingly named Xplosiv have made available a demo of their International Cricket Captain 2008 for download. It appears to be a fully functional version of this management game, but time-limited to two days, after which you have to pay to continue. Which seems terribly cricket of them. It features fully-animated versions of the match highlights and - er - management options.

I actually attempted to play the thing to give some impressions, but it didn't make a lick of sense.

In an effort to find out a bit more about our vast, seething readership we're running a series of informal polls in the comments, like the one about games. This one is about your PC. What do you play on? Is it a clockwork steam-powered Pentium from the last century? Is it a mercury-cooled hyper-computer from 2009? Is it a ponce-sculpted Macintosh? Do you have a laptop too? We want to know what your gaming machines are like. And one other question: Do you own a gamepad for your PC?

This one appeared in PC Gamer UK around the time of Armed Assault's arrival. 

Sunday hits, accompanied by the Papers, as compiled by the good-ship RPS. The idea is that we publish a list of things we consider worth sitting back and reading, while avoiding linking to classic early noughties summer-pop-glories. No, really.

• Lara Crigger over at 1UP writes about videogame story - and specifically related to the - er - somewhat novel choices for the WGA best writing of 2008 awards. Why (and, indeed, what?) Dead Head Fred and no Portal or Bioshock? Apparently you have to be part of the WGA new media caucus. Relevant quote from Ken Levine. "I'd never even heard of it...I don't even know where to start to get involved."
• Leigh Alexander takes the "It's only a game!" argument to task over at Kotaku. Leigh does show it's a particularly hypocritic stance from anyone who has ever expressed any indignation about how games are perceived in pop culture. And talking about outright hypocrisy...

Pertri Purho, the creator of the IGF-winning Crayon Physics, has knocked out another minigame. This time it's a puzzle-platformer called Jimmy’s Lost His Toilet Paper. You can get it here. I found it a little frustrating to control, and banged Jimmy's ever-grinning bonce on the platforms a little too often. Nevertheless it makes up for the frustrations in charm and excellent music.

Okay. This is me suspecting I know what interests our readers more than traditional wisdom would dictate. You see, if you look beneath the cut, you'll find lots of screenshots of men with guns blowing stuff up in the Jungle. However, I actually think people will be far more excited in seeing this overhead tacticsmap, because it shows that we're not just in the realms of the standard Honour Call of Crysis Duty game, but something a little more singular.

Or we hope so, anyway. Don't let us down, Raven Squad. We're being nice here.

Did we use that pun before? Oh nevermind. I do so enjoy it when a random theme emerges from the internet, and today's theme is: tanks of World War II. The tank you see above is from Men of War, which I shall talk about in a moment. Firstly, the secondary purpose of this post is to pimp out the latest issue of PC Gamer UK, which I implore all who are able to purchase immediately. The reason? Lots of Jim Rossignol words, obviously, but more specifically my feature on the Russian games industry. I went to Moscow and came back laden with delicious information. It's the the best thing I've written for a magazine since my trip to Korea. Anyway... Men Of War - or why a fiddly wargame was one of the best things I saw in Moscow.

A new trailer has turned up for Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway. This time it shows some vehicular action, with our favourite armoured tractors doing death to the Nazis with spectacular effect. You can see that the Unreal 3 engine can render more than just muscular space murderers: Hell's Highway is looking rather beautiful.

He clearly doesn't, and that's just the sort of reactionary nonsense he's clearly hoping to avoid. But a recent post on his blog, regarding EA's decision to stop making their Sports franchises for PC, isn't quite as heartwarming as he might wish. It seems the reaction to EA Sports' games becoming console only has been pretty vocal, so Moore has responded by laying out exactly why the PC is to be abandoned. So let's take a look at his argument.

RPS likes robots. Of course, saying "RPS likes Robots" when introing a game like PreVA is guaranteed to prick the temper of at least one mecha fan in the comments thread in a, "They're not robots! They're enormous exoskeletons," way. Which is exactly why we'd say "We like Robots" in the first place. You will learn, mecha-fan, you will learn.

Anyway - PreVa's an indie giant Mecha game with a splash of Terra Nova which has just released a demo. About 200Mb, which you can get from here. And being a PC mecha game, it's something of a novelty. Some impressions beneath the cut.

Via PC Gamer UK.

Pandemic Studios' latest ludo-spawn, Mercenaries 2, is looking mighty explody. They've just released some new game footage with detailed developer-commentary over the top, which you can see beyond the click. The most sensible thing in there is also one of the more minor features, "vehicle disguise", which makes so much sense, and yet breaks the logic of most action games ever. I'm sure the idea of using a stolen enemy vehicle as a disguise has been used in plenty of other games, but somehow I just can't think of any.

GSC have released another trailer showing off some of the environmental details for Stalker prequel Clear Sky. We've seen some of the tech-demo stuff before, but the glimpses of the new regions are rather tantalising.

The second part of Will Wright's interview with Gametrailers is up, and indeed for you to watch below. This time he talks about what's next for games, how he enjoyed Grand Theft Auto 4, and Raid On Bungeling Bay (which bizarrely both GT and Wright name incorrectly). Toward the end GT's questions descend into silliness, but Wright's answers remain erudite and intelligent. Which is fun.

Again, watch the screen behind him for more Spore hints, including a screen tantalisingly titled, "Choose an Economic Land Vehicle", and the very lovely bed-with-teddy-bear spaceship.

Blimey. The games industry is being kind to us right now - just go ahead and announce Thief IV already. Following Colonization and Beyond Good & Evil, a sequel to the terrain-deforming gloriously weirdo-RTS has been announced. In a you-can-write-for-RPS-punning way, It's called Perimeter II: New Earth (Due to the game's powers you can make new... oh, geddit?). Bluesnews points us at KD Lab's press release making the big announcement. And not just a big announcement - a big announcement in charmingly broken English. Loads more info on the site, and a couple of videos beneath the cut.

This week we were brave enough to extract a few words of Homeric wisdom from Charley Price, the lead designer on Codemasters' new action RPG, Rise Of The Argonauts. Needless to say, the Liquid Entertainment man was keen to talk up how RotA is rather different from previous videogame interpretations of classical Greek mythology, and tell us how the game was "akin to Mass Effect". Head clickwards for the words, and a bunch of brand new Argonauty screenshots.

There's a new video of Will Wright explaining Spore in a bit more depth on GT today. It's below, so click away to have a look. Make sure to keep an eye on the screen behind Wright, which shows quite a lot of footage of the spaceship creator. It is one of eight creating tools in the game, along with the Creature Creator.

2009 is Superhero MMO year, it seems. Which, after the unending plague of fantasy MMOs over the last couple of years, is something to look forward to. We'll hopefully be talking more about Champions Online, the sequel of sorts to City of Heroes (and, if rumour is to be believed, is new life spawned from Marvel Universe Online's corpse) pretty soon, but also rearing its cowled head is DC Universe Online.

I have only the foggiest knowledge of who's who's in the DCU outside of the Justice League folks, and my attempts to decipher the Wikipedia page about the current big crossover storyline, Final Crisis, almost hospitalised me, but presumably DCUO is a terribly exciting idea.

This has me grinning like a loon at eight in the morning: 250 Trackmania players racing round the same track.

God, I love Trackmania.

You can now Meet The Sniper in either French or German, should either of those languages suit you. And you thought the Australian accent was dodgy in English...

French: