Life On Mars? Yes. Albeit Blue.

While we bitterly watch Jim have adventures at GDC via the medium of excitable text-messages, the rest of RPS sit forlornly and watch the news feeds. We need a holiday. Which is one reason why this caught our eye - Avatar Reality are showing off their Crysis-engine powered Blue Mars over there. It's set in 2177 on a terraformed Mars... and, no, come back. This isn't an UnRed Faction Mars-based FPS. It's actually an online environment ala Second Life where developers can build casual games to amuse everyone else, with Crysis's fancy aesthetics on tap. Unlike Second Life, this is more about actual developers making stuff, but... well, we'll see, eh? They're suggesting a Public Beta before the end of 2008. And until then, some fancy screenshots.

We've added watermarks to this set of ultra-large ones, as last time we put up some large screenshots, since we let people hotlink, some other site with proper advertising actually hotlinked them all and nabbed our bandwidth. The cads!