PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

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.

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…)