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The unblinking internet eye of Engadget has spotted a new job placement ad at Valve, appealing for an electronics engineer. It reads: “For years, Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we’re developing hardware to enhance those experiences, and you can be a key part of making that happen. Join our highly motivated team that’s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms. We’re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here – help us invent whole new gaming experiences.” Valve previously denied a “Steam Box” gaming platform, and the wording of this new ad suggests this might be something else entirely. But what? To the Speculatotron! See below for some video-clues.(more…)

Generally, it’s pretty cringe-inducing to watch publishers get ahead of themselves. “Annual sequels, comic book tie-ins, and a movie deal that will pass across the desk of at least one noteworthy director before getting indefinitely shelved,” they excitedly proclaim. Then things inevitably don’t go as planned, and everyone has a good, long sob. I want to believe Beamdog when it says Baldur’s Gate 3 is more than just a Kickstarter-fueled delusion of grandeur, though. And what’s this about Icewind Dale?  I mean, what’s even left to be looted from Black Isle’s naked corpse? Planescape? Lionheart? OK, maybe we can just not take Lionheart.

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The Game: Nanaca Crash Genre: Bicycle Crashing Action Platform: Browser (Flash) The Scoop: Nanaca Crash is one of those arcade-style flash games that seems like a shallow time-waster at first, but the more you play, the more layers of depth you uncover. Eventually you discover you've just spent the last 2+ hours playing...

For some reason I was sure this was already in the venerable GoG archive, but evidently not: Bullfrog’s timeless hospital management sim Theme Hospital is now available to be played on your modern machines. I can see how my evening is going to run now: Water those plants! Turn up the radiators! Hire more nurses! Buy more chairs! Oh, no, Earthquake! Fix the Slack Tongue machine! Build more windows! Shoot all the rats! Overprice the Kit Kat drinks machine! 24328 Shift+C! Completed level objectives, Shift-Y, Shift-Y!

Fair warning: if you click this link, you’ll have no choice but to buy it.

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"It's definitely something that's a work in progress," Elastic Games lead game designer James Wearing admits. He's talking about the name of the product his newly formed team is pitching to Kickstarter users, a first-person shooter called 'Police Warfare.' The name is more descriptive than it is memorable.

"There were definitely a lot of comments where people said it was the worst name they ever heard." But the name of the product on a shortlist of post-development things to take care of.

Right now, the focus at Elastic Games is to use the goodwill built up by Police Warfare's original pitch, which was labeled as a fan-made concept for the future of Call of Duty in February, and turn it into funding for an actual product via the crowd-powered community of Kickstarter.

It was originally labeled as a pitch for the future of Call of Duty, with no plan to create a finished product. "The intent was to create a sweet game pitch and see what people thought of it," Police Warfare producer Shawn Wallace tells Joystiq.

After the video exploded on YouTube, the team behind it realized they had hit on something. "There was such a strong response on YouTube from people who are clearly gamers who want this, which sort of validated our feelings for how strong the concept is," Wallace adds.

Today, Police Warfare becomes the next in a long line of indie projects looking for funding via Kickstarter.

A lengthy narrated walkthrough of the delightful looking Torchlight 2 narrated by Max Schaefer, CEO of Runic Games, has made its way out of the procedurally generated dungeon that is the Penny Arcade Expo. It’s below, and it looks charming enough: seven minutes of low-level creature stomping in one of the opening areas. It’s all the information that comes tumbling out of his lips that is the interesting part. Oh. That wasn’t a pleasant sentence. Quickly, let’s move on to multiplayer lan support and more than three times the content before all of us need to have a shower together.

Oh no I’ve done it again

The best thing about space is that it’s real. It may or may not be filled with aliens and warring spaceships, but the setting, the background, is actually there! All those galaxies – that’s not pretend from out of a book. As much as you may doubt me, they’re really all up there (and down, and some on the left too. We are of course on the far right of space). Space is the setting chosen for Stellar Impact, the intergalactic strategalatic DOTA-ish multiplayer, and despite our reviewing it in January, it’s out today.

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With the recent announcement of a Mac port, the Linux community has come out asking whether Shadowrun Returns will support Linux. Harebrained has said it doesn't want to overreach, so that version has been off the table until now.

"As we said over the weekend, we're being very careful not to over-commit to ideas and features (especially just to get more funding)," the Kickstarter post update reads. But with $1 million, the developer is confident it can outsource the port to a trusted studio and offer a Linux version shortly after launch. Zipline Games has already built Linux support into Moai, the development environment used by Harebrained Schemes to create Shadowrun Returns.

If the $1 million goal is met, all $15 backers will have access to the Linux port of Shadowrun Returns when it's ready.

The Game: Merry Gear Solid 2: Ghosts of Christmas Past Genre: Holiday Espionage Action Platform: PC The Scoop: Last month this column highlighted Merry Gear Solid, a fantastically quirky, funny, and well-designed holiday stealth action game. Creator Arthur Lee thankfully had more plans for...

I think Pippin Barr may be in the running for developer of the year – and also Time Magazine’s person of the year and a Nobel Peace Prize. After the deceptively incredible Epic Sax Game debuted a couple weeks ago, Barr’s back with Pongs. No, not Pong. Someone else sort of already made that 40 years ago. Barr’s delightful spin on the tennis-played-in-a-void-of-infinite-darkness sim is made up of 36 variations - most of them absolutely hilarious, and some of them legitimately excellent.(more…)

I suppose there’s always a catch. On the upside, Namco Bandai’s officially given in to our appropriately tough-as-nails, stubble-faced Internet petition, and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has been pegged with an August 24 release date. By and large, it’s a port about as straightforward as a monster whose single, child-like aspiration in life is to brutally maul you, but it’ll have two new treats in tow. Well, OK, one of them – new bosses – is a treat. The other is GFWL. I’m hoping, of course, that it’s an in-game manifestation of Microsoft’s much-maligned “service” that’ll supplant the current final boss. It’ll hurl login errors, connection drops, and convoluted menus at us, and we’ll stab it to death – just like I’ve always fantasized. I suppose, though, that it wouldn’t be Dark Souls without some hair-pulling punishment. Take an all-too-brief glimpse at some of the new content in a trailer after the break.

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The trademark infringement is strong with this one. Still, the Lucas Empire has been relatively forgiving of fan projects based upon its galaxy far, far over-monetised, so perhaps this here Han Solo Adventures will avoid a Carboniting so long as it remains a not-for-profit endeavour.

Not only does this star Star Wars’ most criminally (but also mercifully, as he retains mystique for it) under-served character, Mr Han Solo, but it places him in a recreation of the old Lucasarts SCUMM-engine point and click adventures.(more…)

Following on from this story earlier in the week, here’s the full text of our wide-ranging and detailed interview with the people from GoG.com The questions were answered jointly by managing director Guillaume Rambourg and marketing/PR head Trevor Longino. How should we credit them here? Guillevor Rambogino? (We just went for “GoG”.)(more…)

We’ve seen inside the strange head of Jay “Zeebarf” Ziebarth before, with The Visitor, and its follow-up, Massacre At Camp Happy. Along with Steve “EntropicOrder” Castro (who needs a nickname when you’ve got “Castro”?), they are ClickShake Games, and they’ve just put out the first commercial episode of their Reemus series, The Ballads Of Reemus: When The Bed Bites. It’s rather good. Here’s Wot I Think.

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THQ’s seen better days. The gaming world has all but left it in a gutter inches away from death’s door, bleeding worrisome amounts of money. Worse still, the struggling publisher took another set of brass knuckles to the teeth in the form of a radical downsizing of its great MMO hope: Dark Millennium Online. The Warhammer-40K-themed behemoth has been stripped of its two-ton subscription-fueled MMO supersuit, leaving its single-player and multi-player bits flapping freely in the air. How, though, does that work? Will I explore a desolate world, spamming an empty trade channel for [friendship] x 1?

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Puzzle-platformer Against the Wall has certainly impressed us. The brainchild of Michael Consoli, Against the Wall tasks players with exploring an infinite vertical surface. Their only tool is a wand that allows them to interact with the massive wall, pulling out blocks so they can scale ever-upwards.

At PAX East, a playable build was available to attendees and now everyone can sample it. Windows and Mac users can snag the demo over on the official site and get to scalin' now.

R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet is the single greatest cultural artifact of the 21st Century to date. And at last, mere mortals like you and I can be involved in this incredible hip-hopera, thanks to Jeremy Penner’s Lasertube project (found via FreeIndieGam.es). Your role is simple – click on Mr Kelly’s face whenever he sings ‘oh shit’ or assorted other foul language, otherwise the game will end.

Ssh, ssh, ssh you don’t need to understand why. You just have to do it. The show must go on. It’s just a terrible shame that, so far, it only covers the recap, not the full 22 part saga of Kelly’s rap Wheel of Time.

If you are somehow unware of Trapped In The Closet, then oh boy am I about to improve the quality of your life a thousandfold.(more…)

After all the madness Alice could muster, it look's like American McGee's Spicy Horse studio is ready to move on to its next project. Entitled Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, the action role-playing game retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood with a feudal Japanese twist, reports Kotaku. As part of the Order of Akane, players are charged with putting an end to a Hokkaido village's demon problem. Akaneiro uses mid-19th century Japan as a backdrop, as tensions arose and the country reluctantly opened itself to western trade.

The game will be free-to-play and will be playable on PC, tablets and via the web. Early screenshots suggest gameplay similar to Diablo, Torchlight and other dungeon crawlers. A beta is planned for later this year.

At this time of resurrection and rebirth, it seems apt to look at yet another Kickstarter project that aims to roll back both a stone and the years in order to bring glories from the past to walk our digital hallways once more. Bionite: Origins, already two years in the making, is an attempt to revive the play style of Battlezone ’98, a hybrid of first person hovercrafting and strategic base building. I’m sure there are other much-loved properties in need of a successor, spiritual or otherwise, but I reckon by summer, Kickstarter will have them all covered. What makes Bionite a little different to many projects is that funding isn’t being sought to begin development, but to continue it. A working alpha of the game already exists and the beta testing phase is imminent. Video evidence of the team’s work is nestled below.

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The Game: Rebuild 2 Genre: Undead Strategy Platform: Browser (Flash) The Scoop: A few weeks ago this column covered Rebuild, a different kind of zombie game. Instead of focusing on action and zombie headshots, the title instead focused on the strategic side of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Allocating resources, expanding territory, and making strategic decisions to keep everyone alive...

The Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter glided past another milestone recently, adding some new features - for one, the game is now coming to the Mac. All backers at the $15 level will be able to snag a copy for their OS X-powered box of choice. Additionally, Shadowrun Returns now has Spanish, German and French language support.

Apparently the game is set in Seattle - the setting of the original game - and will include Riggers, the drone-controlling tech wizards of this fictional future. Shadowrun Returns met its goal in a single day, and with 20 days left to go we're sure we'll be writing more about this revival-in-progress soon.

Now that we know Torchlight 2 is still a thing we will eventually play, we're inclined to believe this trailer showcasing the Berserker's talents is direct gameplay and not an elaborate hoax. Punches of power!

The Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter reaches another milestone today, adding some new features -- for one, the game is now coming to the Mac. All backers at the $15 level will be able to snag a Mac copy. Additionally, Shadowrun Returns now has Spanish, German and French language support, wil be set in Seattle -- the setting of the original game -- and will include Riggers, the drone-controlling tech wizards of this fictional future.

Shadowrun Returns met its goal in a day, and with 20 days left to go we're sure we'll be writing more about this revival-in-progress soon.

Antichamber mastermind Alexander Bruce enjoys screwing with people's perceptions of reality, on the screen and on the show floor of PAX East. As part of the Indie Megabooth, Bruce had full reign to make attendees perform a mystery challenge as part of the Megabooth's signature rally. Bruce gave every hopeful participant that approached Antichamber a simple command: "I need you to stand on your hands."

A few people removed jackets and dropped their bags in preparation for the inevitable fall they'd suffer trying to perform a handstand in the middle of a crowded Indie Megabooth; one young man guessed he would probably kill someone with his gymnastics. Before anyone attempted the actual handstand though, it hit them -- this was Alex Bruce, and he wanted them to stand on their hands. So they stepped on their fingers and Bruce signed their punch cards, grinning the entire time, every time.

Oh dear, it turns out I was just too busy with eating eggs for the Rabbit God yesterday. How about we try the compilation of links and game-related reading today? I know it’s radical, but it might just work.

• A proposal for Lego X-Com: “The basic idea was to have two teams of LEGO figures pitted against each other, and it’s around here that I started seeing an analogue, LEGO version of XCom for my inner eye (in the turn based squad game with destructible environment sense). We built a scene using a regular LEGO baseplate and put together a squad of three LEGO figures each, where each one could choose one ‘weapon’ (only variants non-lethal sleep lasers allowed I’m afraid) and one special ability that we agreed upon before hand.”

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When Maxis recently announced that a reboot of its beloved SimCity was in development, I'm not ashamed to say that I wept...

The first game I played, with some semblance of story, was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. My friend Tony had it on his Olivetti M24 with a little CRT monitor that rendered everything in shades of green, and provided aural accompaniment in the form of ear-wrenching bleeps. It w...

It's a good time to be a classic adventure game fan, in case you hadn't noticed. Between Double Fine's recent success story and this week's announcement of a brand new adventure studio from Gabriel Knight writer Jane Jensen, the next few years are gonna be rife with pun-laden puzzles.

Jensen's new studio, Pinkerton Road, is being co-opened with composer Robert Holmes (also of Gabriel Knight fame) and will focus on "third-person adventure games for PC and tablet with rich stories, gorgeous art, and seamlessly fun play." Rather than following the traditional developer model of seeking funding via publishers, Pinkerton Road will be using a model based on community supported agriculture. Yes, really.

Jensen's calling it "Community Supported Gaming," and says fans will essentially pay for year-long seasons of access to the studio's games (a la CSAs). A smattering of ideas are already in the works for the studio's first year, and Kickstarter is facilitating the funding. If you'd like to support the project, there are still 42 days to go on the funding goal.

Gears of War and Fortnite dev Epic Games is getting back to its roots with a PC-exclusive project, creative lead Cliff Bleszinski and president Mike Capps announced today during a PAX East panel. "We might be working on a PC-only title," Capps teased, before Bleszinski picked up where he left off: "Let me say that again: we are working on a PC game."

The panel is still going on, but we'll be sure to chat to the Epic folks as soon as it's over.

Update: Epic Games prez Mike Capps told us after the panel that the unannounced PC project is currently underway, and that the current plans are to keep the game exclusive to the PC platform. Unsurprisingly, he wouldn't tell us anything else.