Jeff Minter is revisiting Tempest later this year in Tempest 4000, the creature wearing the skin of Atari announced today. This is mighty surprising, considering Minter has said the creature tried to kill his TxK, the Tempest-ish shooter he released in 2014. Their apparent reconciliation is definitely welcome news, mind. No one does loud, colourful, intense, and silly arcade action just like Minter. He was behind Tempest 2000, the widely-admired Tempest remake first released on Atari Jaguar, and has only grown more Minterly across the years through games including Space Giraffe and Polybius. Read the rest of this entry »

The creature wearing the skin of Atari has announced astonishing plans to launch RollerCoaster Tycoon World [official site] next Wednesday, November 16th. It’s been on Steam early Access for seven months. The surprising part is: Frontier’s theme park sim Planet Coaster comes out the very next day, Thursday the 17th. Given that Planet Coaster looks the better game by far, it’s a bit silly. Perhaps the eyeholes on the creature’s skinsuit have slipped and it’s stumbling blind, groping in the dark, accidentally typing up announcements. We’ve all been there. Read the rest of this entry »

Rollercoaster Tycoon World [official site] will have players create their own parks and rides in-game, of course, but it’ll also let people make brand new things outside the game. The theme park-building game will have simple tools to create new scenery objects and people and doodahs through a Unity plugin then share them over the Steam Workshop, a new trailer explains. Come see how that works below:

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It’s been a ride full of… (if I say “ups and downs” will you continuing reading, dear reader?) turbulence for Rollercoaster Tycoon World [official site]. Since it was first announced in 2014, it’s already been through three different developers and has long passed its original “early 2015” release window. It was then scheduled for a December 10th launch, however has now been pushed back to “early 2016”.

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Alone in the Dark: Illumination [official site] is a curious name for a game that’ll have you neither alone nor really in the dark, but strange things happen when games carry papers plucked from the corpses of fallen franchises frozen on the battlefield of the industry. The shooter named after ye olde survival horror series launched last night with class-based shooty action and support for co-op with up to four players.

I suppose you are in the dark mostly, but there are lots of convenient fires and your guns do have flashlights.

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“This ain’t your grandpa’s Asteroids,” I wish the creature wrapped in the flesh of Atari would hiss. Sadly not. That’s the kind of line I’d like when a classic game becomes something so very, very modern. And what way to reinterpret the vintage space shoot ’em up could be any more modern than a multiplayer sandbox survival game? That’s Asteroids: Outpost [official site], you guys, and it has launched in that thoroughly modern manner: onto Steam Early Access.

“Welcome to the new gold rush” is its wholly unironic slogan. Oh, go on, that’ll do. Atari are only getting started with weird takes on old games too.

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Jeff Minter has been making tip-top arcade shooters for a good thirty years now, including classics like Space Giraffe, Gridrunner, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Tempest 2000. That last one is coming back to bite him in the bottom.

TxK [official site] is his latest loud and colourful and silly and exciting shooter, and I’ve been waiting patiently for the PC port since its Vita debut last year. That port is now scrapped, thanks to the terrible creature wearing the skin of Atari. Minter says the publishers of Tempest 2000 claim that TxK is ripping it off, and he can’t afford a legal battle to defend it.

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I don’t enjoy being cynical or tearing into things, so news that the shambling husk of Atari is slapping the Asteroids name on a multiplayer craft-o-build-a-surviver only leaves me tired. It’s named Asteroids: Outpost [official site]. Words like “We’re paying homage to the original Asteroids by incorporating classic features such as asteroid blasting capabilities, while introducing a completely new premise and gameplay” from Atari CEO Fred Chesnais make me tired. And yes, these pictures are all concept art. I’m so tired.

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Whoever’s currently wearing the withered Atari skinsuit plans to release a new Alone In The Dark game before year’s end, and whether the fact they’re only putting out the first trailer now is a sign of confidence or otherwise is for looser tongues than mine to speculate about. I’m too preoccupied with the distinct absence of alone time in Alone In the Dark: Illumination, given it’s a four player co-op monster shooter. I guess Together In The Dark sounded too spicy? I’d have gone for Foursome In The Dark myself.

Other naming crimes include that Illumination is being developed by a studio named Pure FPS. I can clearly see the player characters’ shoulders, so that’s a damned dirty lie.
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Atari today is not the company behind the Atari 2600 and Atari ST of The Good Old Days. The name and the brands it owns have been passed around for years in oh so many buyouts and licensing deals. Atari today is a tiny company subsisting on marrow sucked from the corpses of its faded brands; in March it employed only ten people. However, they do still have some big (or once-big) names to sling around.

This week Atari announced new Alone in the Dark and Rollercoaster Tycoon games. And, sure, a new Haunted House too, I guess, whatever.

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Last week’s announcement of Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 for mobile devices caused a great deal of despair in my private headspace. I have fond memories of the first two entries in the series (none at all of the third for some reason) and the trailer for the fourth, which you can see below, didn’t inspire confidence. Speaking to Digital Spy, Atari’s Anthony Chien confirmed that a new PC Roller Coaster Tycoon is also due by the end of the year: “We can’t share that much, but [PC] will definitely be a completely different game…There’s a lot of diehard RC fans that want a PC experience, they want all different sorts of things.” That’s the good news. The (potentially) bad news comes later. The PC version will be an “online multiplayer experience”.

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Monolith founder Jace Hall has been attempting to organise the release of an updated version of the company’s gloriously gory Build engine FPS Blood for some time, as we mentioned last August. At that time, confidence was high: “I certainly will be able to and will get all the support I need from all/any parties that may have legal interest in the game.” Unfortunately, one of the parties involved is Atari and, as you may recall, the gaming world’s own Lazarus recently perished yet again and in its state of pending rebirth has contacted Hall with bad news: “I just got an unusually short, one sentence e-mail from Atari, letting me know that given the current set of circumstances, they are choosing to decline to proceed.”

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