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Crazy Taxi was half of a decent game. The driving about at silly speeds in order to pick up a fare and ferry him to his destination had the potential to be extraordinary good fun. What youngster doesn’t dream of being a taxi driver? A crazy taxi driver no less? But despite flirting with perfection and even caressing her cheek, Crazy Taxi had a serious flaw. The people waiting for your services weren’t bleeding, vomiting, broken wretches, shivering and wracked with agony. Thankfully, Emergency Ambulance Simulator has arrived to correct that severe oversight.

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I woke up on Friday morning in shock. My body told me that I must have been in some kind of plane crash and I went immediately scrambling around for the black box recorder. But all my phone could tell me was that I’d been to what they call a Rumpus. Some kind of Wild Rumpus. Pisshead Airlines flight 343 to Cape Hangover had reached its destination after all. But I was only here to get a transfer. So I quickly hopped on the bus to a Bit of Alright.(more…)

Alec’s gone to a quiet place, to wash away the emotional stress of trying to keep up with bundled up charitable independent games. He’s using the sound of the seagulls to drown out the buzzwords of “pay what you want”, and “donation”, while I man up in RPSes montage gym. I just did seven squats and fought a bear to a double-knockout, all cut to Total Eclipse of The Heart. Now I’m ready for you, Indie Gala 2. (more…)

When a developer is bought out by a publisher, it’s usually the case that they then don’t see any ongoing royalties from the games they make for them, or indeed for any existing intellectual property that was swallowed up as part of the studio acquisition. It’s standard practice, part of the dark deal some studios made to ensure immediate financial viability and larger project budgets. But what it does mean is that a great many of the PC games we regularly celebrate around these parts are no longer bringing in any money for their creators, despite still being on sale. Whenever we excitedly see an old classic appear on Steam or GoG (such as Thief last week), chances are very high that whatever we pay for it goes purely to the publisher and the download service. The men and women who toiled over that game’s creation won’t see another penny from it.

Veteran developer Simon Roth – now working with Frozen Synapse creators Mode 7 – has compiled a partial list of some of the games for which this is true. I have selected just a few of the most renowned, including Deus Ex, System Shock, Vampire Bloodlines, Dungeon Keeper et al, but there are many more listed on his site, and many, many more yet to be compiled.(more…)

Atari have affixed a serious face to announce the next Test Drive game. I tried to make them smile as they did it by capering about, but the news was so grave and grim that not even a glimpse of a smile appeared. No Hawaii, no holidays, no career mode where you take a busboy all the way to luxury car owner, no balloons and bouncy castles. Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends has 50 determined classic Ferrari cars and 36 no-nonsense tracks. If it could be represented as a smiley, it would be :-|(more…)

The battle of Uncanny Valley is where CGI finally triumphed over reality: pixels stood proudly over humans showing off their parametrization maps and tone mapping that accurately depicted the imperfection of human skin and declared victory over reality. The first shot in the war fired when researcher Jorge Jimenez released this work on real-time realistic skin rendering, showing off the difference SSSS (Sexy Separable Subsurface Scattering – okay, I added that first ‘S’) makes.(more…)

One of our goals here at Joystiq is to notify you as soon as we possibly can about awesome things. It's something we've been doing for quite some time and now we've got something new and neat to inform you about: The Cat That Got The Milk.

No, we're not talking about that junkyard cat you're certain stole that half gallon of milk from your fridge (how would it carry the container?) but a new indie game that lasts around 10 to 15 minutes. And the best part is it's free -- all you have to do is go over to the website and download it for OSX or Windows.

As you can see in the video above, it's all quite simple: you use the up and down arrows to navigate a beautiful and abstract world that's meant to show us what cats see every day. Also, cats are apparently, like, high all of the damn time. Catnip must be a helluva drug!

RPS’ e-sports correspondent is ESFI World’s Samuel Lingle.

E-sports lacks many of the catalysts that foster rivalry in other professional sports. There are no Manchester Derbies, since teams and players are not regionally associated. There isn’t a Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees clash; there is no division to fight over or playoff spot on the line throughout a season. Instead, rivalries in e-sports must grow more organically, from chance meetings in important matches to drama outside the game. But there’s one thing that players of both electronic and traditional sports are sure to get pumped over – (pride in) their nation of origin.(more…)

No longer content with making incredibly technologically advanced games, Crytek is going after the casual space with a browser-based, social gaming platform called Gface (so that's what that trademark was for!), developed and maintained by an affiliate, also called Gface.

Gface is sort of like a game-focused Facebook: a cross-platform social network designed to facilitate playing casual or hardcore, 2D or 3D games with people, and finding more people to play with. Games are delivered through a plugin based on the "Seed Engine," enabling installation-free, streaming gameplay.

If you're interested in checking out Gface, the company is hosting signups for a closed beta. Maybe if you get in, you can find out what the games are!

Sundays are for recovering. Whatever the week dealt, you can sit back with a cup of hot drugs and have a rest. Ah, that’s the stuff. Time to collect ourselves, and also, perhaps, collect some writings about the state of videogames in the 21st century. That’s the right century, right? Sheesh.

• Eurogamer look back at a game that is fairly regularly reminisced, Grim Fandango: “The story of Manny Calavera – a grim reaper brilliantly reimagined as a travel agent – uncovering a web of corruption in the Land of the Dead is part Mexican folklore and part film noir. Given how well Grim Fandango blends the latter with a traditional adventure game template makes it a wonder why this hasn’t been done more, since both genres are predicated on crafty problem-solving, deception and wry humour.”

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While I normally count myself as a member the family of rigorous implacable impartiality that makes up the ranks of the International Games Press Corps, I will definitely be on the side of fans in the upcoming battle Air Buccaneers Fan vs Dev conflict, which is taking place in the new alpha build of Air Buccaneers HD. Ludocraft report that: “The battle will start at 18:00 o’clock GMT+2 time on next Thursday, February 9th. We will be playing on the Official LudoCraft Server and we’ll be using the latest Pre-Alpha version of the game.”

I’ll bring the hot air. You can carry the cannonballs.

The effort and ambition put into student game projects never fails to surprise me. I was a spectacularly lazy student, and hed I studied game creation I doubt I would have managed to produce anything like Noxious, which is a tribute to Dead Space made by Full Sail students. (Via Indiegames.) It’s a brief shooter (around 15 minutes) which can be downloaded in full, for free, here. Full playthrough video below.

(I feel that with this name it should have been inspired by Nox, but ah well.) (What a lot of parentheses.)(more…)

The bucket’s being delivered slightly later than usual this morning, I accidentally spent an hour or so playing Mirror’s Edge to help soothe my post-Bit of Alright weary head. Those indie developers sure know how to pour alcohol down their mouths and into their bellies. But soothe my head it did, and so I’ve managed to pull it together just long enough to compile a list of cheap games for your digital typewriters this weekend. Now I’m off to find some bacon. Remember to visit my website about cheap videogames when you get a chance. Here’s your bargain bucket: (more…)

Fast, you see, because racing cars are fast… I am good at this, eh? Anyway, Slightly Mad send word that their ongoing community-focused racing game, Project CARS, has a new release version available to everyone who has signed up, and has supplied a fancy gallery of car-images from the game, which you can see here and below. (Clicky for full size.) The new building includes a “brand-new 2011 Formula A car” with “more than 700hp of engine power.” As well as new content “including the Ariel Atom V8, the 250cc Superkart and the Northampton circuit.” Also, somewhat bizarrely, they have announced that the game has new force feedback features which are tuned against the racing skills of the man who used to be The Stig from Top Gear, Ben Collins. So that’s a thing that happened. Fancy racing pics below!(more…)

For the last couple of years Intel have been sponsoring a game design competition called Level Up, and it’s returning in 2012 – although it is branded “2011″ for some reason – with the promise of a $10,000 prize for the winner along with a guaranteed spot on Steam. The idea is simple: submit a game demo, and potentially win big. The basic rule of thumb is: submit Windows executable demo, and you could be a contender for any number of winner categories. The deadline for submitting is March 19, 2012 at 11:59 PM (U.S. Pacific Time). Admittedly, that basically means those of your who are already working on something are probably the only people in with a chance, but it’s worth a punt for your part-finished game. You can check out past winners of the competition here. The main page for the 2012 event is here, and the rules for entering are here.

Blizzard has announced that 100,000 more Diablo 3 beta invites have been sent out in North America, so if you opted in to beta access with your Battle.net account, you should log in and see if you've gotten a notification. Blizzard warns that phishing activity may increase with this new wave of invites, so take care.

If you weren't one of the lucky one hundred thousand, don't fret: Blizzard promises to send out more invites eventually. You can go back to rolling classes now!

More free gaming to set you up for the weekend. Even if you enjoyed the Pacman stylings of the earlier duo, that’s not to say you won’t also enjoy the Advance Wars meets Defcon horrors of Fail-Deadly. It is, at its core, one of the most horrible games I’ve ever played. It’s also remarkably entertaining. Two forces are at war and you are a terrible person at the head of a terrible organisation who wants nothing more than a stalemate between them. Your goal isn’t to bring about a state of everlasting war though; you really are a nasty piece of work and what you want is a conflict so evenly matched and soul-sapping that the participants turn to the last resort. Nuclear destruction. Free to download.

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The latest release from Nitrome is one of those games that I wish I’d discovered later in the day, because I’m going to spend the remaining hours until I’m released from the shackles that bind me to the keyboard wishing I was playing it. It’s called Rainbogeddon, which should really be enough to make you click here and play it. If you haven’t, know that it’s Pacman, Bomberman, Dig Dug and loads of other brilliant things all packed together into a browser window. Destructible mazes? Of course. Oodles and oodles of powerups? Definitely. A little too tiny for my dwindling eyesight to fully take in? Regrettably. Go and play it. Do it for me, because I can’t.

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Depth Hunter‘s a Fisht Piercing Shooter, if you’ll allow me to be so dreadfully mean to the English language: you’re a diver in the not-so-competitive world of spear fishing. That means you take deeeeeeep breath (why not interactively take part in the blog post by holding your breath?) and plunge into the azure waters looking (still holding your breath?) for fish to spike with your harpoon (now find a nearby body of water to dive into, like a lake or a spill in the nearest public lavatory). No air tanks: just you, your mask, your spear and what’s in your lungs.(more…)

Deep in the year 1977, an upstart fanzine called Sideburns printed a drawing of three guitar chords. They were A, E and G, if you really want to know. They were scribbled down the page like one of those desperate reminders in Memento. “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third,” the reminder said. “Now form a band.”(more…)

Retro-game host DotEmu has released, in classic horror-puzzle form, The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, further supporting our theory that both titles were an extensive viral ad campaign for red Slurpees at 7/11. Both titles are $10 each and available for download here and -- look out there's something over there!

Well here’s a thing. You may remember that last January there was a flurry of excitement at the prospect of a new Cannon Fodder game. The 1993 Amiga classic still generates a lot of love, and people especially like arguing about whether Cannon Fodder 2 was an acceptable sequel, and whether Stuart Campbell ruined it with his sticky-up hair. Let’s fight about that now! But a third never happened, until the peculiarity of Codemasters licensing the title for a Russian-only third part developed by GFI. Codies quickly distanced themselves from it, and things fell silent. But now every other site on the internet has reported the spotting of a YouTube video of some footage by Twitterite superannuation. And, well, it looks like Cannon Fodder with improved graphics.

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Valve's ever-popular competitive shooter Counter-Strike has been around for over a decade. The latest iteration of the franchise, Global Offensive, is currently in closed beta testing on PC. Though not all features are currently built into the beta, the classic de_dust and de_dust2 maps are...

NASA is exploring the strange new world of social and mobile gaming, with two new game apps designed to educate about math, flight, and the history of space exploration.

Sector 33 for iOS is an air traffic control simulator, in which players manage the speed and route of up to five planes coming into San Francisco from the east. Instead of the breezy gameplay of Flight Control, you have to deal with actual wind and other real-life complications.

Space Race Blast Off is a virtual game show on Facebook in which players compete to answer space-related trivia for points, in categories including "technology," "astronauts," and "math." Go learn something!

Following the release of The Blackwell Deception, Wadjet Eye are publishing Da New Guys: Day of the Jackass, a comedy wrestling adventure from Icebox, who released an earlier game starring the same characters. What of those characters? They are a trio of wrestlers who live together in a tiny apartment and ply their oily trade in the Wrestle Zone. When Brain, their most egotistical and feeble-bodied member, wins a championship belt, he is kidnapped shortly afterwards. Thus begins a quest so save him from his unknown abductors. The game is due on February 29th and the demo is available now. I donned some tights and played it through. Thoughts and a trailer follow.

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Preloaded, the indie team behind The End and zOMT have teamed up with the Science Museum to create a series of games aimed at school-goers, to ask questions about the role of science in our future. Called Futurecade, it’s a collection of four arcade games, each loosely themed to a direction in which technology is taking us. And one of them is properly great.

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I hope to goodness that I need write nothing more than, “harmonising three-headed dog” to convince you to play Cuboy: Back To The Cubeture Era II. That, or perhaps that one of the cutscenes is a montage sequence made from a series of crayon-drawn pictures accompanied by a song about making something from wood. For me, learning that Zeus wears a Yankees cap and says things like, “Sup ya’ll, I’m Zeus, god of lightnin’, pimpin’ and phat ass beats,” is a special treat. His flow gets all the ladies, and haters can go to Hades. This is the game in which you trim Atlas’s armpit hair. Here’s Wot I Think.

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I think I’ve just won the most literal title of the day award, and it’s my first post of the morning. Hear that, rest of RPS? You might try to defeat me, but I will bland you out the park. I hope I don’t get stuck in a rut. Can someone out there recommend a newly written guide to some sort of writing? What? Bioware‘s Senior Writer David Gaider has just written a blogpost on how to write fanfiction? What I do is essentially fanfiction to the whole of PC gaming. That’ll do!(more…)

Back in 1997, there was a strategy game released that went by the name of Dark Reign. I’m fairly sure I played the demo but I can’t be certain because I just played the demo again and drew a blank. The reason I’m playing the demo is that it’s just been re-released, remade even, to run through Silverlight as Dark Reign Redux. The demo is available now, with a full release on its way at an undetermined price. The XBLArgh version is priced at 400 Microbucks, which is around £3.50 by my reckoning. Perhaps you wish to try the demo? Here it is, with a 120MB install size. Back in ’97, Dark Reign came on 16,521 floppies.

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EA adjusted its earnings for the most recent quarter (its fiscal Q4) in part because of the delay of an "important social game." It just didn't say which one. In an investor conference call, CEO John Riccitiello broke the news that EA is moving the launch to Q1 of fiscal 2013 (January-March of this year).

Later, during the Q&A portion, COO Peter Moore called it "a major title based on a major piece of the EA brand IP." EA recently acquired KlickNation, rebranding it BioWare Social, but that just happened last month -- likely not enough time to even think a game would be ready for this quarter. EA also releases social games through Playfish, EA Play, and EA Sports.