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You know what your eyes need to see? The inside of the Titanic, recreated in CryEngine 3. That is all.

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A few people have spotted that our video interview with Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam has fallen off the internet. They have asked for it back. Well, I’m very happy to help. Because, well, if you’d met Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, you’d want to bring that up in public every now and then. Have I mentioned that I met Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam? It was in the context of their promoting “their” Facebook game, about which they clearly cared not a jot, so I took the chance to ask them about things I hoped were important to them. Silliness, imagination, conflict, and education. You can see it once again below.

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I have a theory. If you took some babies, raised them isolation – perhaps on the Moon – and gave them no cultural input at all, they’d still eventually develop adventure games. They’re like an inevitability, an unavoidable direction for things to head toward. Don’t believe me? Look what’s happening to the so-called casual market, as every game type starts morphing into proto-adventuring. You can’t get a match-3 these days without it trying to include an inventory. Hell, look at the painfully mediocre L.A. Noire, and its almost sweet attempts to invent the graphic adventure genre as if it had never happened in the 80s/90s, thus making all the same tiresome mistakes as they did in their earlier days. As for the hidden object genre – it’s like a pupa, waiting to emerge. Unfortunately, some of those attempts to convert to a beautiful butterfly are still a little, well, awkward. They’re moths. One such moth is Pahelika Revelations.

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The Business Software Alliance, a trade organization for the IT industry, has changed its tune regarding the controversial and terrible Stop Online Piracy Act. Though it issued a press release in October "commending" House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith for introducing the bill, BSA CEO Robert Holleyman wrote in a blog post this week that the BSA does not support the bill as it is.

SOPA will have to "balance key innovation, privacy and security considerations with the need to thwart the threat rogue websites pose" before the BSA, which counts Microsoft and Apple among its members, will officially endorse it.

Holleyman said that "definitions of who can be the subject of legal actions and what remedies are imposed must be tightened and narrowed. Due process, free speech, and privacy are rights cannot be compromised." Furthermore, "BSA has long stood against filtering or monitoring the Internet," which is a focus of SOPA.

It's nice to see some major software companies take the right stance with regards to widespread censorship -- at least through their trade organization.

Kinect for Windows launches in early 2012 and today Microsoft announced that the Kinect hardware for PC is "specially designed to connect with PC." The list of changes includes "shortening the USB cable to ensure reliability across a broad range of computers" and adding a "small dongle to imp...

You've been patiently awaiting your crack at id Tech 4, the engine powering Doom 3, ever since id Software announced its intention to release the source code. Now, the wait is over! You can download it for yourself from GitHub right now.

And remember, id Tech 4 isn't obsolete just yet. A modified version of it will power Human Head's Prey 2 next year.

It seems like the correct time of day to lift spirits with a free, open source economic simulation game that takes place in a randomly generated archipelago. Thankfully, Unknown Horizons is just such a thing and it’s a damn fine one as well. The project was originally intended to be an Anno clone but it has evolved from those beginnings to become its own master. With economics, diplomacy and combat already handled well, it’s already a tiny slice of delicious isometric cake and regular updates along with its open source nature mean all manner of fancy ingredients should be added. Download here or watch a video showing the latest features below.

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If you want a single reason why the free-to-play market seems to so attractive to the people interested in making money from games, then take a look at this craziness: Gamesbrief have run a story claiming that Bigpoint’s DarkOrbit game has sold two thousand €1,000 “drones”, which are virtual items that help players in combat. The article explains: “There are different levels of drone ranking up to the 10th Drone. The 10th Drone – also called the Zeus Drone – is very rare – you need to have all 9 previous drones and collect blueprints to make it in the game. Earlier this month, on a total of four separate days, Bigpoint made it possible to buy a 10th Drone for €1,000.” And such is the popularity of the game, that quite a large number of people were willing to buy it. Or at least that’s what publishers Bigpoint claim. Are you one of those people who spent that much? Speak up! And also lend us a fiver.

(Unrelated, does anyone want to buy our mysterious The Tenth Blog Post? We’ll make it available next week for £79,000? Anyone? You won’t even have had to read previous RPS posts!)

In episode 51 of the RPS Electronic Wireless Show, Jim and John catch up on the events that have taken place in the week since we last recorded. Events like the release of some games, and some games we have played. Those are the events we experience in our lives.

There’s chat about how great Tim Stone is, Jim’s racism against cat people, and we ponder why RPS readers like RPGs so much. John explains why he hates Modern Warfare 3 so much, while Jim moans about BF3′s doors. There’s thoughts on how open we really want our worlds to be, and then, perhaps not surprisingly, we turn to Skyrim. We talk Skyrim’s structure, exploration, quests and peculiarities.

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This isn’t PC gaming news so much as general internet nerding, but it’s a lovely thing nonetheless. I have to admit that I haven’t seen the Google homepage in months, so I wouldn’t have realised that the current logo is an extraordinary interactive Google doodle game thing, had John not alerted me. How did he know? Well, there are a lot of tubes from all round the world leading to his office. He was probably peering down them. [Actually my wife told me - John] Anyway, the new doodle is the tale of a meeting of robots, and has been put up in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first publication by brilliant sci-fi author, Stanislaw Lem. Lem is best know for Solaris, which was made into movies by Tarkovsky and Soderburgh, but his influence on sf generally has been enormous, thanks to his prolific and insightful writing and amazing short stories. You should definitely have a read of some of his stuff, if you haven’t already. (The art in the logo is inspired by Lem illustrator, Daniel Mrózh, who illustrated a version of The Cyberiad. Which now, I learn, was even turned into an opera!)

Oh sigh, as soon as we report some balanced coverage of the effects of gaming, of course Keith Vaz appears once more to make everyone feel stupid again. He’s tabled an Early Day Motion to condemn Modern Warfare 3, presumably after some careful analysis to make sure such a thing would bring him maximum attention. Well, actually he’s condemning “Call Of Duty 3″, which is perhaps a bit late. But heck, why know the name of the game you’re wasting Parliament time over? Where he finds time to play all these games between chairing so many parliamentary committees I cannot imagine. Because of course he’s played the game he describes as having “gratuitous acts of violence”, right? More than that, he’s even finding the time to do his own scientific research, because his (as yet unpublished, I presume) study has found that “there is increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users.” Which is a remarkable finding!

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Miner Wars 2081 is an astonishing thing, really. It’s a freeform mining, trading, and building game, based around the mining of vast voxel asteroids – and that can be accessed now at a sort of tech-demo level by preordering, with the full game due in the Spring – but it’s also going to be an MMO, which will apparently arrive in the Winter of next year. Yes, I can hardly believe it either, but that’s the plan. I’ve had a few glances at the steadily updated alpha client over the past year, and the work is certainly continuing apace, and you can see some of that in the awesomely narrated trailer, below. There’s apparently going to be a public demo before long, too, so we’ll keep an eye out for that. I suspect that this could be one of those games that really rewards a community getting involved, or at least it will be when that multiplayer aspect of it opens up. The satisfaction of chomping up asteroids and fighting off privateers as a group could be quite something.(more…)

The presence of videogaming matters in scientific papers has, of late, become a somewhat depressing prospect. With both formerly respectable/respected scientists making unsupported claims without evidence, and published papers basing conclusions on woeful errors and contradictions, the one place where you’d think you could look for balanced, reasoned thought on a subject sometimes seems to have abandoned us. But there is light. Nature, surely the most respected and popular scientific journal, has published a “Viewpoint” discussion on the subject of gaming’s effect on the brain in its Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal. Brains On Video Games is a collection of leading experts looking at the published material and discussing the matter with open minds.

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Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I’m pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he’d be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn’t know if it would be more difficult, but he was “almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships.”

So, with Rage safely released, it’s finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.

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The next instalment of boundlessly popular indie pay-what-you-will project, The Humble Indie Bundle, has announced its new bundle, which is dominated by the Introversions, and even contains some prototype things from them, like Subversion’s city generator. Yes, I thought that might interest you. The other games are: Aquaria, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia, and Multiwinia.

Trailer thing below!(more…)

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 5 of 7.

When Davey Wreden made The Stanley Parable, a Source mod about the dissonance between game narrative and free will (among other things), it quickly went viral and surprised a mod community that thought Source mods were already dead. Now, he’s currently collaborating on an extended remake / reboot of The Stanley Parable and other projects.(more…)

Dizzy: a smiling egg-man controlled in assorted platform-puzzle-adventures by old European men such as I back in the late 80s and early 90s. For some reason (perhaps because he wasn’t the figurehead of a console company; perhaps because he was, well, an egg), Codemasters’ one-time flagship character didn’t really survive into the 21st Century. But now the delicate wee fellow is apparently due for a return. What kind of return is a mystery: all we have to go on is this none-too-cryptic image at the brow-rasingly-named eggcitingnews.com. Are you willing to shell out for the yolkfolks’ return?(more…)

Any fool with a copy of AGS can make an adventure game, but only a select few come up with ones that are truly worth your time. Egress is a game about astronauts and disaster (I presume The Dig is in an inspiration, but it also evokes the likes of 2001, Event Horizon, Moon and Defying Gravity), and while it can err a little too much towards trial and error there’s a lot of clever stuff there, intermittently excellent presentation and an appropriately tense atmosphere.

Told from a claustrophobic first-person perspective, as well as delving into open sci-fi-horror and offering multiple endings, it gets across the anxiety and glacial slowness of lumbering around in a big suit in an unknown place really rather well. 50MB, free, from here.

RPS has an issue with Kickstarter projects, as we’ve mentioned before. We are contacted by very many developers who tell us about their wonderful ideas for games, perhaps even with a concept teaser video, and then ask if we can promote their Kickstarter so they can make it. Well, we’re afraid not, because that puts us in the position of asking our readers to give money to a game for which we’ve not even seen a screenshot. And we’re not okay with that. Then there’s the more subtle issue with games that do have some content, and then want Kickstarter promotion, when we’ve no way of knowing that they’ll actually make the game. Such a situation occurs with Molecat Twist, from a four-person multi-national indie team who want a bunch of money to finish their game. Except, well, they’ve a working demo of the game you can play right now. So that’s what I’m posting about.

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Dirigible fans might recall browser game Guns Of Icarus, in which you manned an airship as it took on aerial foes, and they might also be aware that the game is now being rebooted as a full-blown MMO, Guns Of Icarus Online. They’re likely to be unaware, however, that the first in-game footage of the reboot has been released. Until now: here it is. Eugh.

Looking pretty atmospheric! Ahaha. Do you see what I did there? Between this and the Air Buccaneers remake it’s looking like 2012 will be quite the year for lighter-than-air combat.

Gold bullion! Pieces of eight! Booty in unimaginable quantities! All these things and more await in free open world platformer Treasure Adventure Game. It’s a rather self-explanatory title, like if David Cameron went by the name Laminate-Face Eton Man or Richard Branson was simply called Money Beard. TAG, as I’m calling it, is the first release from Robit Studios, which appears to be a fellow by the name of Stephen Orlando. There’s a downloadable beta available now and the finished release should be available next weekend. For free! The simple aesthetic and emphasis on exploration remind me of Knytt but there are plenty of baddies to fight as well. It says so right there in the trailer, which is buried beneath the X below.

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It’s on days like today, when there is NO PC NEWS AT ALL, that I remember to return to Neko Games. The creator of the wonderful Hoshi Saga series has always created a new gem since my last visit, and it’s just as true today. Today there’s Ouka. It’s similar to the star-hunting antics of Hoshi Saga, in that you’re aiming to complete lots of very short Flash-based puzzles, but this time it’s all about clicking on the flower. How you can go about doing that is the unique puzzle for each level, with that unique Neko Games logic. And then, wait, oh my goodness, is that a new Hoshi Saga too?

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Brick vs Byte usually concerns the top ten best-selling games on Steam vs the top ten best-selling games at UK retail over the last week, but as both charts are barely changed from last week and frankly that’s no fun whatsoever to read about, we instead contacted our Future Industry Analyst Dr Ian “Ian” McGuess to provide an accurate look at what he’d expect said charts to look like thirty years hence. Here’s what his spreadsheets came up with.(more…)

Throwaway, highly entertaining but with annoying music tower-ish defence-ish game time! The Engineer is not a TF2 fan-game as such, though I rather suspect there is at least some inspiration in there. It’s most of the way towards tower defence, but errs a little towards the Orcs Must Die take on things – you’re a mobile character with your own weapons, setting up death-gizmos in order to stay alive. But you cannot stop, not for a moment.(more…)

The amount of nostalgic, nigh-shameful glee we have for the Power Rangers series could fill several extended volumes, fully annotated with diagrams and bibliographies and everything. We're even into the obscure pre-Saiban Power Rangers from the 70's, like Battle Fever J (natch) and Himitsu Sentai Gorenger.

We ain't no spring flowers, though, and as the steady march of time takes us ever closer to our graves, so too do the Power Rangers march forward into a new century. Part of that march, it turns out, takes the Mystic Force rangers straight through MMO town: South Korean golfing MMO developer Ntreev Soft is in the process of beta testing Power Rangers Online, a side-scrolling beat-em-up MMO staring our favorite teenagers with attitude.

Much like the SNES Power Rangers games of yore, players start out as normal teens at the beginning of the stage, mightily morphin' into Rangers halfway through each level. Only the Red, Pink and Yellow Mystic Rangers are playable at the moment, however the Mystic Force continuity has at least 7 rangers total to pull from, should more characters be added.

We didn't even have to look that last part up, which should probably worry us beyond all measure. Oh well!

Owen Van Natta has resigned from his position as an Executive Vice President of Business Operations at casual/social gaming megalith Zynga, according to a regulatory filing released Thursday. While Natta maintains his position on the company's board of directors, his involvement in the developer's daily operations has ceased.

Natta served as Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer until joining Myspace in 2009, where his tenure as CEO lasted until being scooped up by Zynga in August of 2010. Natta takes 2.1 million shares of Zynga stock with him, leaving behind 4.6 million of his original 6.8 million shares which had not fully vested to maturity. Despite delaying its IPO earlier this year, Zynga is still expected to go public before long, and depending on how that goes Natta's shares could either extend his resignation indefinitely, or amount to a whole lot of his last name.

The video-game industry is trying to find the balance between casual and hardcore gaming, with freemium, social-networking titles leading the casual sphere. A new development company established by former Activision employees Dusty Welch and Chris Archer, U4ia, plans to bridge the gap and make freemium a staple of hardcore titles, as well. Its first target -- the FPS.

Welch, who launched the Call of Duty franchise as senior vice president at Activision, said U4ia's first game will be an "online-only, hardcore freemium, first-person social" title. "Many studios are making casual games for a core audience," Welch said. "We're making core games for a social audience." This is very different than making core games for the socially hardcore audience or social games for the casually hardcore audience, and it may present an intriguing hybrid for new and old gamers alike.

U4ia plans to launch a beta of its first title in 2012, billed as one of its "free-to-play, AAA, hardcore, browser-based games for the connected generation." As a freemium FPS, we wonder how the weapons will be scaled -- if it will be a matter of pay to win, or if skill will have a greater impact on gameplay than money.

It's safe to say that the first person shooter genre has really come out guns blazing this year, with more spent shell casings than you can shake a sub-machine gun at. Yes, if you're the type of person that likes blowing stuff to smithereens, chances are you got your fill in 2011...

The footage from the event, which is live for another six or so hours, should be found below. There’s been a bunch of furious Starcraft II matches going on, and I believe right now it’s the aftermath of a game between between Huk and NaNiwa which heralds the second slot for the semis.(more…)

By day Sam Redfern is a mild-mannered IT lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Galway. But at night, he creates and maintains his own one-man apocalyptic vehicle MMO. It’s called Darkwind: War on Wheels and consists of a two-tier game, with a web interface for social and economic interaction and a 3D racing/shooting action engine. We caught up with him to find out how he copes with the project on his own. (more…)