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The masterful Mr Stone is currently tackling the full-fat Wot I Think for Neocore and Paradox’s ‘roleplaying wargame’ King Arthur II, but curiosity and the desire for a quick break from pretending to be a football manager guided me to have a very quick nose at it myself today.

I knew almost nothing of it going in, so I wasn’t expecting the roleplaying element to be in the form of a choose your own adventure book. Between Total Waresque battles, you’ll explore plague-ridden villages and demon-infested dungeons and make consequence-fatted decisions about how to handle the situations you encounter, leaving a trail of human triumph or tragedy in the wake of your attempts to best aid the land as a whole. If Commander Shepherd was the son of a King, was tailed at all times by a huge army and never left the British isles, (s)he’d be this guy. Except you see none of these grand tales of monster-troubling and (optional) peasant genocide.(more…)

"You should be careful not to throw stones when you live in glass towers," Zynga head Mark Pincus said in a recent VentureBeat interview, firing back at recent criticisms of his company's games for being copycat versions of already released games. His cheeky comment is specifically targeted at indie dev NimbleBit, creator of Tiny Tower, who recently wrote an open letter to Zynga addressing similarities between its game and Zynga's upcoming Facebook title Dream Heights.

"When you pull the lens back, you saw that their tower game looked similar to five other tower games going all the way back to SimTower in the early 1990s," he added. But Pincus' argument goes beyond cheeky jabs -- he also makes the point that Zynga isn't a copycat developer as much as it is an iteration developer. Pincus also defends against Buffalo Studios' recent accusations, citing his company's own game (Poker Blitz) as inspiration -- at least visually -- for Bingo Blitz, as seen above.

As Pincus says in an internal memo, "Google didn't create the first search engine. Apple didn't create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn't create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways. They are all internet treasures because they all have specific and broad missions to change the world."

NimbleBit, unsurprisingly, doesn't agree. Company co-founder Ian Marsh told Touch Arcade that while "It was a smart idea for Mark Pincus and Zynga to try and lump all games with the name 'Tower' together as an actual genre whose games borrow from each other," he added, "sharing a name or setting does not a genre make." And now that we've devolved into genre definitions, we can official declare this story over. Like, forever.

Y U NO MENTION THAT [GAME X] IS OUT RPS?

COS WE HAV LIKE A MILLION TINGS 2 PLAY N POST ABOUT RAEDER K?

But: it is well worth observing Fortune Summoners – the latest release from Recettear and Chantelise Westernisers Carpe Fulgur – and Analogue: A Hate Story – the latest from Digital: A Love Story and Don’t Take It Personally dev Christine Love – both went on sale this week. Both are games that at least part of the Hivemind is very interested in, and we will be presenting some manner of opinion about them as soon as we can. We have not forgotten them. It’s just that we’ve been paid $3 million each by Eactisoft to only ever write about their releases and ignore all that indie stuff.

Hello person who is a gamer! As a gamer, you’re different from ordinary people, and have specific needs and desires. As a gamer myself, I know this too, so I understand the nuances of what makes a gamer such a very special person. And so it is that I’ve developed a new special blend of water especially designed for gamers like you. Freshly bottled from the taps in my kitchen, Gamzerz Wa73R is guaranteed* to have been sat in front of a game of Quake II for at least an hour before being sent out to you. Only £39.99 a bottle!

Also, there’s now coffee for gamers, from Cornish gaming cafe, Loading.

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You may remember that a few months back we told you about Cell: emergence, the extremely peculiar-looking game from Deus Ex writer Sheldon Pacotti’s indie team, New Life Interactive. The fantastic voyage is a pixelly exploration of cellular defense, that looks equal parts fascinating and bemusing. Referencing classic games like Defender and Missile Command, and alluding to RTS themes, the experimental project asks you to protect a membrane via manipulation of the medicinal voxels. I’d suggest that watching the video below might explain things better, but I’m fairly sure I know less about the game having watched it. It’s something we need to play to get our heads around, and the good news is it’s out on the 9th Feb, via GamersGate, Impulse, Green Man Gaming, Playism and Desura. And there will be a demo on Tuesday.

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In this interview with Game Informer, legendary developer Sid Meier says even he has succumbed to the lure of modern graphics. "I used to love to try and challenge the players' imagination," he says, "to show them a few pixels in 16 colors and try and convince them that they're ruling an empire to stand the test of time. But I think today's player is not really willing to make that investment, so we're able to bring the worlds to life in 3D."

But he also believes that beefing up the graphics has brought in a much bigger audience than games could have picked up 20 years ago. "You had to kind of suspend your disbelief and be willing to step into that world," says Meier. "Today we make it a lot easier," and as a result, players who want more than a few pixels on screen can also get their fix.

Meier's currently the creative director of game development at Firaxis, and though he's not participating directly on XCOM it doesn't mean he's not working. Every morning, he says, he comes out of the shower with "about 10 ideas," and is constantly iterating with his team on different prototypes. "Most of them," he says, "just go back into the trash heap." In other words, anyone who wants to make an awesome game should probably go root around in the garbage cans near Sparks Glencoe, Maryland.

As we predicted, the introduction of Square Enix titles on Good Old Games has led to another Eidos classic appearing on the service. Here we are, only a week since the publisher's induction and Thief Gold, an expanded version of the original Thief: The Dark Project, has been added to the GOG catalogue. You can sneak up on the granddaddy of modern stealth games for a mere $10.

*The above headline is a joke. Please don't steal Thief, even though it's DRM-free.

Impulse, Gamestop's digital distribution service, is now selling Valve games. With the exception of Counter-Strike, anyone can go out right now and pick up Valve's entire library of PC games from Gamestop's website. But Valve isn't exactly putting out their games on a competitor's platform, eith...

I’m going to design a Door Gun. It looks a bit like a normal gun but with some glowing science parts, ut when you shoot it at a wall a door appears. There’s a dial on the barrel that can change the type and size of the door, so if you want a dark wooden veneer, that’s fine, but if you’d rather have some sort of horrible formica-like slab it can handle that too. It’ll mostly be used by architects and joiners. Not like a Gateway Gun, which is a bit like a Portal Gun, and is for the exclusive use of scientists and test subjects. That brings me to Gateways, an upcoming side-scrolling platform-puzzler. The trailer made my brain hurt.

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We’ll have a very big chat with the XCOM: Enemy Unknown devs at Firaxis up for you at some point in the next few days, but in the meantime an American magazine has released a few more screenshots of the strategy reimagining of darling old X-COM. The magazine’s post also shows off some of the tactics you’ll be using, how a battle might play out, a little on the (inevitably) contentious new movement/action system and perks and – you’ll like this – the destructible environents. Plus a close-up peek at the new-look, slighty Stroggy Mutons. I’ve snuck a couple of shots below and hope it won’t result in a threat, but there are many more, plus vital descriptions over here and over here.(more…)

‘Dodge-em-up’ Exeunt, from a chap who’s previously worked with Introversion and Beatnik, looks to be doing something fairly expansive with the autorunning genre. It claims to be promoting reflection upon what humanity is doing to its beleaguered planet, but that’s not really why it made my slightly sticky-out ears prick up. Not because I don’t care about the environment – listen, some of my best friends are environments – but because the central mechanic is that much more scintillating to an animal nerd such as I. While you’re doing your jumpy-dodgy thing through a collapsing and reforming industrial horrorscape, you must switch rapidly from beast to beast to better manouvre around the deadly environment. I can make out rhino, big cat and deer forms so far, while the screenshots reveal a naked man’s in the mix too. I’m holding out for an Iron Man mode in which you can only play as a hamster.

Take a look below; it’s still early doors for Exeunt so don’t expect too much shiny-shiny, but it gets across the appealing concept.(more…)

The lovely Hypotoad and his friends at the equally lovely J-Server Super Hyper Rocket Go Luxury Awesome Team (usually tragically shortened to J-Server) took part in the weekend’s world-record breaking attempt at having 1000 people in an online shooter. If you missed out on Much Different’s Man Vs Machine event, they braved the unbalanced sides, the usual torrent of sexualised slurs, to grab a few minutes of footage of the world-record: 999 people shooting each other on a single online server.(more…)

Cube World looks more interesting every time I see it and we’re well past the point now where it’s necessary to mention Minecraft in the first sentence of every post about the game. Of course, I’ve gone and done it anyway in a gesture of shooing impatience and that probably makes me part of the problem. The solution is the latest trailer, which shows the ‘improved combat’ but also gives more glimpses of environments that cuboid characters will be chopping their way through. Looting and levelling seem far more important than carving and crafting, and the use of destructible scenery in the troll fight at the end seems a fantastic way to mark the aftermath of an epic clash.

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So I’ve not had a chance to play this yet, but there’s a good chance that the recently-release Star Prospector demo might be up the space-lane of a few of you. It’s a sort of RTS/RPG mix that developers Cryptstone describe like this: “The player takes on the role of a prospector, a one-person mining, salvage, and construction unit, taking on missions on remote planets across the galaxy in search of resources, technology, and adventure… The 100 missions in Star Prospector are randomly generated (including story centric missions). A random seed is used to create a unique galaxy every time the player creates a new profile.” I’ve posted the trailer below, so you can glimpse a bit of the world-exploring activity that the game entails, and if that intrigues you can download the demo here.(more…)

It seems nonsensical to propose that a bingo-based game could be copied, but in the case of Buffalo Studios' Bingo Blitz and Zynga's Zynga Bingo, the evidence is rather clear. "We wanted to alert you to the striking similarities between Zynga's recently announced game, to our game Bingo Blitz," Buffalo Studios VP of product marketing and operations Salim Mith told Venture Beat. Mith also offered a cheeky visual letter addressed to the Facebook game publishing giant, comparing images of Bingo Blitz to those of Zynga Bingo to highlight the similarities (seen in full after the break).

The letter comes just five days after Tiny Tower dev NimbleBit created a similar visualization to address what it perceived as a copy of its building management sim in Zynga's Dream Heights. Zynga has yet to respond to copycat allegations from either NimbleBit or Buffalo Studios, but it's also possible that the publisher simply can't hear the complaints over the din of its coffers being filled.

Instructions: “be a cat.” This is all you need to know about VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh’s free and cannily-named mini-MMO, ChatChat. Go on, be a cat. Do what cats do (bum-licking not included, mercifully). Hang around with other cats in the way that cats do, i.e. doing your best to ignore them with barely-concealed hostility. Catch mice. Leave dead mice as gruesome offerings to your owner. Be completely unmoved by the discovery of treasure, because if treasure doesn’t run away, scream and bleed, what possible use is it to you?(more…)

Okay, let me say up front that RPS is running a Perpetuum corporation. If you want to try out some sandbox MMO robo-action you should grab the 15-day trial from here and join the chat channel “RPS” in-game. With that over, let’s talk about what’s happened in our first month in this peculiar little MMO, the trials and tribulations of brutal PvP, and our first significant victory.

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Deep trailer voice: “In a world where the choice between life and death is as thin as a blade of grass balanced on the edge of a knife seen through a pair of binoculars held the wrong way, a king can be dethroned in the blink of a hummingbird’s eye when it gets a bit grit stuck in there. RPS presents the new intro to The Witcher II Enhanced Edition…”(more…)

Here’s a clever wee indie FPS we somehow missed last year, but now it comes accompanied with the news that a full-blown remake is on the way. I’m going to say a few words to you. Let’s see how you feel about them.

World War 1. Dinosaurs.(more…)

Renegade-X is a reworking of the original, awful Command & Conquer: Renegade, Westwood’s ambitious FPS with RTS acne. I’m downloading the just released short single-player preview, “Operation Black Dawn”, from the official torrent, and we’ll make brain thinks into words about its UDK-based goodness another day. In the meantime, here’s the download link and video, strategically placed below.(more…)

Next up in our series of chats with this year’s Independent Games Festival finalists is Mike Treanor and Josh McCoy from the UC Santa Cruz team behind ambitious high school-based social simulation/strategy game Prom Week – which is in the running for the Technical Excellence gong at IGF 2012. Here, they talk flirting, ‘social physics’, bathrooms and their answer to the most important question of all.(more…)

Guttenberg! Yes, it's the IGN AU Pubcast - the world's leading podcast on all things Police Academy... and gaming, movies, dolphin love... you know the drill by now! This episode, we continue our 'Police Academy Watch' with a live update from the Police Academy stunt show at Warner Bros. Movie Wo...

Warning: This is only for gamers that have finished the first two Mass Effect games and all the Dragon Age content released to date. Major spoilers ahead! BioWare wants you to choose. Throughout the course of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, your Commander Shepard has no doubt made some pretty hairy ...

Sundays are for waking up the heart of ancient Oxford, having sucked the knowledge out of thirty PhD students the night before, and leaving them useless husks as you grow only more powerful. Also, it is for compiling internet lists of useful reading material on the important topic of computer games! Hooray!

• Over on Eurogamer Mr Cobbett asks why the games industry is afraid of failure: “It says something about modern games that BioShock Infinite has been able to make headlines by adding a special “1999 Mode” where your in-game decisions will actually matter…. Where normally you’ll be able to jack-of-all-trades your way through most situations, here – supposedly – everything will be a trade-off. n short, it’s being set up as a mode that’s not afraid to let you fail – and that’s practically unheard of these days.”

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If you love games of chance and stamping cards but hate being around the elderly, know that Zynga is working on a solution for your extremely specific and worryingly ageist dilema. Zynga Bingo has begun beta testing and will be made available to the general public "very soon," according to Shacknews.

The app will join Zynga Poker as part of the Zynga Casino suite and will allow players to score on up to six cards, as well as fill in spots on friends' cards. There will also be power-ups of some kind, which is where we expect to find Zynga's trademark monetization, although that's purely speculation on our part. We also expect Zynga Bingo to post "BINGO!" on your friends' walls every time you win, but we desperately hope we're wrong about that.

The Internet’s Leigh Alexander gave us her take on visual novel, Katawa Shoujo.

It’s with a mix of amusement and chagrin I admit my career as a game journalist might well have never taken off if it weren’t for the erotic visual novel genre. Some of my earliest writing explored the “weirdest” games I could find – bunny girl dating sims, teenage girl “training/raising” games, brutally sexual supernatural murder mysteries, and stuff like that, and I think my work was recognized fairly early on in my development as a writer just because I was pouring so many words onto stuff no one else would touch.

I put “weird” in quotes, by the way, because I actually tasked myself with understanding and explicating them. And when you do that, these games don’t actually seem all that weird. What else would a niche, shut-in audience of otaku want but a gameplay experience that blends anime porn tropes with emotional simulations of human drama – without any possibility of becoming stuck or frustrated, since visual novels are indeed more “story” than “game”?(more…)

Whilst we were down in the RPS dungeon, thrashing kobolds for copper pieces, we stumbled upon a group of MMO developers coming the other way through the Underdark. Sitting down by the light of our magic auras, we made a nice cup of elf-leaf and talked to Fernando Paiz, Executive Producer on Dungeons & Dragons Online (married to Kate Paiz, the executive producer on Lord Of The Rings Online) and Adam Mersky, Communications Director of Turbine. These bold adventurers in online gaming had much to report about about DDO’s history, the first DDO expansion, and the mysterious emanations coming from upcoming releases. (more…)

If only you could talk to the monsters. Now that would be something. So, why not ask our resident agony aunt-monster Ian Cacodemon for advice and tips on anything you need help with? Ian awaits your queries on Twitter here or via email here, and will post selected replies on RPS on a semi-regular basis.

This week, Ian offers guidance on chainsaws tidying, magazines, imp-cacodemon relations and dodgy Nigerian investment deals.(more…)

Here’s your cheap games for this fine weekend. We’ve got games about shooting things, games about telling little men to shoot things, and even games not about shooting things. All bases covered then. For cut priced games pumped into your browser windows around the clock, SavyGamer.co.uk is the website you’re looking for. Bucket go!(more…)

Blue notes that Firebase’s exquisite scrolling shooter Orbitron: Revolution is making its way to the PC system for explosions and fun times. There’s no date yet, but the devs boasts that they have the PC version running at 60fps at 1920×1080. That is moderately fast! Like an elite frame-rate making game thing, or something. What? It is early on Saturday. Look: Orbitron: Revolution, which has already appeared on the console boxes for some reason, is a very pretty curved Defender/Uridium sort of thing going on. Those are things we like.