PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Can you remember as far back as October 2010? No, nor me, but fortunately all my acts and deeds are collated in an almanac, so it is that I can recall my enthusiasm for the prototype of Pirates Of The New Horizon. A third-person action game, that evokes memories of Ratchet & Clank, featuring a double-jumping, pickpocketing, grapple-hooking pirate, on a flying pirate ship in a world inhabited by robots. Those are the ingredients for all of gaming. And now you can play a demo chunk of it in your browser, via Unity, with the hope that you’ll pre-order at the end.

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If a game doesn’t have a connection to my favourite dark matter infused vacuum, I’ll usually take the time to write a letter to the publishers, developers, neighbours, suggesting a rethink. Sometimes it works, sometimes I get my door kicked in by a SWAT team and taken to a ‘facility’ for a rest and a cup of tea. Take Gamigo’s Nexus Conflict: It was originally a fighting game about two phones, a classic in the making you might think? But upon hearing about the burgeoning international movement known as SPACE!, they reworked the game according to my themes: it’s now a strategic MMO in the Black Prophecy universe. You know, in SPACE! Beta details and trailer are below.(more…)

Welcome aboard Microsoft Flight gfwlivesetup_4d5308d2e0000001_DIR.exe. Our free-to-play sim set in the skies of Hawaii, but we’ve been redirected to land on a strip near Tim Stone’s house. He’ll be trimming the review rudder for us sometime this week. We offer complimentary Big Island, planes and missions. Drinks and light refreshments, such as additional landscapes, planes and missions, can be purchased from our Marketplace. If you’ll look out your window to the left, you’ll see the launch trailer. And on the right, that black mountain spitting blood-red lava into the air, engulfing the ‘Limping Kitten Cattery’ in choking, sulfurous, acid rain is GFWL Mountain. There’s no way to avoid it. The stick has locked. We’re going innnnnnnnn!(more…)

A new Baldur’s Gate game? Wuh? That’s the news that greets my eyes when I look at Eurogamer. This is, apparently, coming from former BioWare developer Trent Oster, who worked on the original BG, as well as the first Neverwinter Nights. His new company, Beamdog, is a digital distribution platform, brought to wider attention recently via the release of MDK 2 HD, and this, GameBanshee claims, will be the source of new Forgotten Realms chat-n-chopping. And how do we know any of this is happening? A Baldur’s Gate website.

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Hooray! A sequel to Blendo Games’ delightfully inventive cubist spy mini-opus Gravity Bone. Thirty Flights Of Loving appears to be dripping with the same visual and sonic style as its most excellent predecessor.

Double-hooray! It’s being made in conjunction with the good folk behind the newly-resurrected and much-missed Idle Thumbs podcast! Lob ‘em $30 via Kickstarter to help them get their show back on the road (though at $105,000 raised to date they’re in a pretty happy place already) and you get Thirty Flights before anyone else does. If you don’t want to do that (admittedly, it’s a high price if you’re not primarily there for the podcast), the game will be released separately later.

Triple-hooray! The first-ever trailer for it is below.

Quadruple-hooray! Includes pseudo-Jeff Goldblum-based action.

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J.U.L.I.A. is an adventure game set in a distant solar system, as well as the name of an AI in that game. There’s a giant bipedal machine in it called Mobot, which is probably my favourite thing about the demo that I just played. The plot is about humankind’s search for extra terrestrial life, for which purpose a crew have been dispatched to the backend of nowhere and, wouldn’t you know it, when they arrived things went terribly wrong. As the last survivor of the mission, astrobiologist Rachel Manners must travel to various planets to discover the (probably) awful truth. She’ll also have to play a lot of minigames.

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First-person puzzle ‘em up Antichamber took one look at physics, shook its head, sucked on its teeth and then set to work rejigging the whole sorry show. And why shouldn’t it? Aren’t you tired of the space contained between four walls having to match up, size-wise, with the area as viewed by an outside observer? If a man chooses to enter a maze and turn left at every junction, why shouldn’t the maze be nonchalantly rerouting itself behind his back and then turning into a psychedelic lightshow? Yes, Antichamber, your approach to physics is erratic and haphazard, and that is why you continue to be of interest. Trailer below.

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As the poor chaps behind moody triangle-noir game Flatland: Fallen Angle observe, getting dicked over by an online payment firm seems to be something of a rite of passage for indie games these days. Still, perhaps finding yourself mentioned in the same breath as Minecraft, Project Zomboid and Xenonauts makes up for it to some degree. Flatland devs SeeThrough Studios had a day in the sun yesterday due to a fair bit of coverage across the web (including from some miserable Limey buggers who run a PC gaming site), and then a night in the cold darkness when their chosen online purchase service, Paymate, decided to cancel and refund all existing purchases of their $1 ‘Appreciation Edition.’ Which is even worse than the usual story of the goons at Paypal deciding to lockdown indies’ earnings for months.

Why did Paymate do this? Because it’s a game.(more…)

Sega has confirmed that an "upgraded HD version" of Jet Set Radio (known as Jet Grind Radio in North America) will be coming to PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, and Windows PC digital download this summer...

Jet Set Radio continues to be an astonishingly good looking game, over there on the last of the Segaboxes and wherever else it may have popped up over the years. It’ll be looking even better on PC soon enough, with announcement that a high definition digital download version of the game is due on XBLA, PSN and my computer this summer. Maybe it will be on your computer as well, or maybe you’re not yet convinced that its scratchy audio treats and cel shaded visuals are for you. Look at this trailer, which is still lovely today several graphical and musical trends after release. This was before all game promotional material legally required use of dubstep or that BWAARRRRR Inception noise.

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Every fantasy you’ve ever had to reroute power to the shields exists in FTL. I know because I just pulled power from the sick-bay to boost my shields while I attempted to flee a hostile enemy scout. If you don’t have those fantasies yet, then soon it’ll be all you can think about. FTL’s random, rogue-like space-faring nastiness just got me into an unwinnable fight against an unmanned scout ship: if I destroyed it, it would automatically send out a distress signal to inform the rest fleet that I’d just Captain Mal-led him. So instead of going for a death blow, I had to stoke the shields and retaliate by hitting their weapons, keeping us both alive while my FTL drives powered up. No-one was hurt so far; the sick-bay was expendable. Recuperation would have to happen post-battle.(more…)

Antichamber is a nightmare to describe on paper, but the opportunity for some hands-on time with the first-person exploration puzzler set in an Escher-like world exists at next week's GDC and at April's PAX East. Antichamber will be at the IGF Pavilion during GDC and at the Indie Mega Booth at PAX East.

Shacknews conducted an interview late last year at IndieCade with developer Alexander Bruce about testing the puzzles and his years-long observations of how people played the game. We've placed that video after the break. Antichamber should be ready for full exploration "mid year" on Steam.

Like a beautifully illustrated children’s storybook, The Old Tree is an interactive adventure following the first steps, or lurches, of an odd creature that hatches in the base of the titular timber. Think Samorost but with insect bellboys and an excellent mammal cameo. Interaction is simple, with the player enabling the tentacled apple-bulb to progress by clicking on parts of the environment to create a path. It’s oddly sinister too, although nothing horrific happens so don’t worry too much. Maybe it’s just because I don’t like grubs and insects. It’ll only take about twenty minutes to play through and strange scenes like the one pictured above make that time well spent, I reckon.

Jumping, falling, kicking through walls, RUNNING AWAY. It’s how I’ve spent my morning and some of last night, as I made my way through the alpha release of Lemma, an indie game set to be released as a charity fundraiser. The most obvious point of comparison is Mirror’s Edge and since I’ve not woken up enough to make a more obtuse comparison, let’s go with Mirror’s Edge because in Lemma you perform parkour from a first-person perspective. There’s a story, told through exploration of the island on which you inexplicably awaken as well as through convincingly written text messages exchanged with someone in need of assistance. Stumble from your precarious foothold and join me below for a trailer and more.

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Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy the television series, is looking to become Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy the video game. Sutter teased a possible Sons of Anarchy video game from a "major gaming company" in a tweet today, writing that he is "soon to be taking meetings" for the project to "figure out costs, platform and timing."

Sutter clarified his realistic expectations a few minutes after the initial tweet, saying, "to do a quality platform-based game costs tens of millions and takes years. We're toying with the idea of a high-end browser-based game." We're not complaining one way or the other, as long as video game Jax looks exactly like Charlie Hunnam.

Something felt wrong when I glanced over the announcement of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark. I dismissed it as just another expansion pack for a free-to-play MMO, but that felt wrong. Digging around uncovered what was troubling me: DDO has never had an expansion pack. It was released in 2006 and went free-to-play three years later, but even then it’s been a low priority thanks to server sizes and Turbine’s Lord Of The Rings Online Tolkien all the people. Because of that, the list of additional content is rather chunky. It’ll be out on June 25th, but you can pre-order now.(more…)

I feel a weight of the pointlessness of trying to convince a hardcore gaming audience to give their money and time to a casual game. Clearly there’s a lot of prejudice, a lot of it earned by the crappy nature of so much of the casual market, the rest I’d argue pure snobbishness on the part of gamers. Obvious breakthrough exceptions, invariably published by PopCap, can crossover, but otherwise words like “hidden object” tend to have people click straight past. I think it’s a shame, because I just had a lot of fun playing Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers.

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If I were asked to list the things that I most enjoy, pointing, clicking and playing with words would probably all be in the top ten, along with ‘almost any pizza’ and ‘a good book that makes me feel clever without actually being too challenging on the old skull-mush’. Therefore, I’ve developed an immediate interest in Spellirium, which claims to combine Boggle and LOOM, being an adventure game in which combat and puzzles are solved through wordplay. Hopefully, it’ll be compulsive in the same way that Puzzle Quest is but with more developed story parts. There are a few work in progress videos, with no sound, two of which I’ve inserted below. Did I mention it’s from (one of) the creators of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure?

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I have no idea if triangular noir-adventure Flatland: Fallen Angle was specifically inspired by 2011′s meme-tastic Bastion, but I do suspect we’re likely to see quite a few games that borrow its narrate-as-you-play mechanic over the next year or so. Flatland has that, albeit with a narrator who doesn’t exactly offer the same gravitas as Bastion’s Ruck, but it also has a guilt-wracked triangle on the run through a top-down, two-dimensional city, pursued by similarly pointy guards and in search of dark justice.

I tip every hat I have ever owned and ever will own to its title pun, too.(more…)

Brian Fargo has been talking about the past and future of the Wasteland sequel that he hopes to fund through a Kickstarter campaign, and as many suspected he hasn’t suddenly decided to put forward the idea because his eyes sprang out of his head and turned into dollar signs after seeing this action. Nothing of the sort. In an interview with No Mutants Allowed, Fallout’s co-creator explains that the design was already coming together but “publishers just had no interest in a party-based RPG and they felt like they would need to go up against the production costs of BioWare which are in the tens of millions of dollars.”

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I must confess that I’m immune to whatever charms Blizzard’s games possess. If I am a waterdrop then Blizzard are a water lily pad, scattering me across their surface – I just want to be absorbed by the gaming nymphaeaceae, but I can’t. But while my fingers don’t quite click with their games, my eyes do. So I got excited when they decided now was the time to release a load of skills videos for Diablo 3. The 20 skills on show are mostly new, so if you have the beta you won’t have encountered most of them. They’re unencumbered by the alteration runes, so this is raw rarr! I love the dancing voodoo doll that distracts enemies enough for the players to mash their face, and if I played it I’d use that all the time.(more…)

Monday morning is my time for calming soundscapes and otherworldly experience. The other world in this case is The Moon, the one you’ve been casting longing glances at for much of your life, thinking ‘one day I will build a robot factory upon you, the moon, one day.’ Today is not that day but Lunar Flight, which I’ve enthusiastically enthused about before, has since been released on Desura and Gamers Gate for £6.99. It’s a lander simulation that seems simple at first but quickly becomes complex as you spin moon-ward, the last of your fuel burning away in an attempt to correct a course that ends in a crater of your own making. There’s a launch trailer below.

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John spent this weekend glowing after interviewing Tim Schafer on Friday evening. He’s listening to it right now, so he can make text zaps for your eye goo. But that’s this afternoon-ish. In the here and now I have an interview, the first in a series it seems, by Double Fine’s Tim talking to Double Fine’s Grumpy Gilbert about a genre of game called “Adventure”. It was filmed before the Kickstarter madness propelled their old-school 2D adventure game upwards, so it’s rather humble and nice. I expect the next video to be shot in 3D on a beach, with Tim reclined in a sun lounger while George Clooney reads out the questions and instructs the interviewee to not look directly at Tim. Until that day, here’s everyday Tim and Ron talking about adventure games, in the Double Fine offices.(more…)

It’s a very sleepy Monday morning here in the strange, forever hungry country of Newsland today, but fortunately Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has elected to show off an experimental TF2 RTS demake he’s been playing around with making for his own edification, currently under the placeholder (and certainly not final) name of HERP DERP HERP FORTRESS. He’s been live-streaming his development/noodling over here and it’s going on right now. You can watch it below, or with the excited chatter of onlookers here. He’s shared the above image too, which you can peer at and dissect for hints by clicking on it for the full version. The bad news is that he says this game ‘may never be released’ – which means your job is, of course, to go nag him.

The good news is that he’s presumably too busy developing the game to read this post, so I could say anything about him here and he’ll never know. Did you know that he’s afraid of cheese?(more…)

I feel a little twinge of guilt. Alright, a big twinge of guilt. I popped into to visit Red Bedlam, developers of promising free indie MMO/building game The Missing Ink, just before Christmas. Then Christmas happened. Then a thousand other things happened once I went back to work. So my write-up of it yet remains on the Angry Post-It Note Of Things I Must Do stuck to the bottom of my monitor. I do my level best not to look at that Post-It note. But I will. And I will write that feature.

In the meantime, I can bring you news that The Missing Ink, which features a rather charming paper cut-out art style and offers the twin pleasures of monster-bashing across multiple time periods with a private sandbox construction mode, is now in open alpha. If you head over here, you can sign up and start playing more or less right away. Some in-game footage is below, which shows adventuring, building, and jetpacks.(more…)

Accidental audio creation and island exploration are the tasks at hand in Proteus, although everything in the game is less of a ‘task’ and more of a possibility. Wandering around randomly generated landscapes, which are like storybook dreams from yesteryear, the player discovers visual features that trigger audio effects, from the plinky-plonky strum of rainfall to the jolly synth-speak of peculiar lifeforms. I think they’re lifeforms anyway. They may just be forms because that’s the kind of stroll this is; a perambulation through a world of beautiful, gentle wonder. The beta is now available to preorder customers, who’ll be paying $7.50 and receiving all future updates and an EP.

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Cowabunga! Yes, it's the IGN AU Pubcast - the best damn pubcast on the internet. Suck it, Beer Brewing Bros of Wellington! Your "Best beer talk from Yeast to West" tagline was just straight up ill-conceived! This episode we've placed some shiny new PS Vitas between our otherwise twiddling thumbs,...

Sundays are for sunshine pouring in through the window. I am so looking forward to summer this year. To pass the time I’ve been reading the internet. Here’s some of the stuff I found.

• Here’s an article about games that are not just for computers, but by computers: “Angelina uses computational evolution techniques to search design spaces for playable games. Using a fairly simple design language, Cook specifies certain parameters such as layout constraints and rule-set variations – effectively defining a genre. Angelina iterates through a vast number of semi-random permutations of these, where each permutation is a potential new game. The evolutionary aspect of the process comes in when the system selects the better candidates of each iteration – or generation – and combines them to form the seeds of the next. But in Angelina’s case, there are two phases to the process. First, selecting the component game-parts – layout, mechanics – and secondly; picking a playable integration of these. Cook refers to this as ‘cooperative co-evolution’.”

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I’m a shit Nazi, me.(more…)

I’ve spent this lovely sunny morning scavenging around, deep down in the cheap video game mines, trying to find some gaming gems that sparkle and shine enough to be worth the attention of you, the erudite and beautiful RPS readers. And believe it or not, I’ve only gone and pulled it off. Read on to see the games that you should consider buying this weekend, and you can always hit up SavyGamer.co.uk for more. Here they are: (more…)