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You can keep your Easters and your St George’s Days; the only festival I observe is Swallowtide. This year it fell on May 8. We were shenning in Wide Acre when Aldwyn suddenly threw down his hook, and, pointing southward, bellowed the traditional “HOME SAFE! HOME ALL?”. Dancing above our heads like leaves in a mill plunge, the swallows seemed as happy to see us as we were to see them. As usual, not everyone had made it back. Later we learnt that 4600136 had been snatched by a hobby over Gibraltar, and 4651011 had fallen to a sandstorm near Timbuktu. Perhaps the saddest story was that of 4690870. Crossing the Cornwall coast, a mere 50 miles left to travel, she was downed by a stoat-launched SAM missile. (more…)

For the longest time, Double Fine’s been hinting at a “secret project” heralding from the gleefully demented brain of Monkey Island veteran Ron Gilbert. But what could it be? A truly next-gen oven mitt? Bread that butters other bread, which in turn butters it back? A bluetooth headset that doesn’t make you look like you deserve to be crushed by a phone factory? Turns out, it’s definitely better than all of those things put together, even though I have no earthly idea what it is yet. I mean, look at that image. Apparently, Game Informer had to assemble it from separate, smaller images. This, I am certain, could revolutionize gaming – provided, of course, Double Fine includes a 37-step tutorial explaining that the small pieces aren’t for eating. I always mess that part up.

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Truth be told, I never really liked Republique‘s chances on Kique, er, Kickstarter. Don’t get me wrong: it’s pretty much the only Kickstarter I’m personally pulling for, but a mere two weeks ago, it still needed to coax $400,000 out of an army of unwilling wallets. On top of that, we’re talking about an unproven concept from a freshly born franchise. And, perhaps most damningly, everyone at Camouflaj clearly can’t spell. The past couple days, then, have been nothing short of astounding. Passionate fans have piped up via every form of social networking short of the ancient Roman Forum, and Republique’s rocketed to more than $430,000 of its $500,000 goal. Now, less than a day remains. Disembodied surveillance camera protagonists will speak of this photo finish for years to come. Well, if it succeeds anyway. But honestly, why should you care? Well, there’s the whole respecting PC gamers thing, for one. And now, there’s also a trailer of Republique in action.

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Oh my, this is a pleasant surprise. I’m not sure I could describe the sensation I felt while playing a surprisingly substantial prototype of Passengers as fun, but I was oddly mesmerized by its tale of trains and, er, what appear to be Feudal-Japan-era samurai ghosts – among many other things. Basically, the entire game consists of learning the stories of rather eclectic train passengers and then applying that knowledge to incredibly broad philosophical quandaries. Apparently, creator “jarnik” was inspired by the odd bits of socialization (including guitar playing, apparently) that occur on his train rides home, and he’s planning to expand out to 140+ passengers and an atmosphere that shifts “from an ordinary night train ride into a surreal trip where future, past and fiction are one.” As is, though, it’s a surprisingly contemplative, occasionally heavy handed way to spend a few minutes. It’s pleasant. Hop aboard here.

If you have an affection for adventure games, you may want to sit down. Since you're on the internet, you may be doing that already, so feel free to stand up and subsequently sit down again. Ready? Good. It's been a long, long road, but Sierra's classic Quest for Glory series is finally available on Good Old Games.

You can snag all five Quest for Glory games in a single package for just ten bucks. Best of all, the pack seems to be based on the CD-ROM collection, meaning you'll get both the original and VGA enhanced versions of Quest for Glory 1, and the sweet, velvety voice of John Rhys-Davies all up in your Quest for Glory 4.

After seeing success, both Leisure Suit Larry and his creator Al Lowe fell upon dark times. Lowe and his polyester-clad protagonist have lived through the rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, multiple intellectual property changes, and two very poor attempts at bringing Larry to a new generation of gamers.

"It was like seeing a video from your son's kidnappers!" Lowe told Joystiq. "On one hand he's still alive but it's like, 'Oh God, what are they doing to him!' And it just pained me to watch it happen. You know I put ten years of my life into that guy and he was very good to me."

Leisure Suit Larry starred in seven titles under the Sierra banner, turning it into a billion dollar business for founders Ken and Roberta Williams. But success would be bittersweet for both Lowe and the Williams family, as Sierra On-Line found itself ensnared in the middle of a hostile takeover that would evolve into one of most infamous scams in video game business history.

Day Z is the best thing I’ve played so far this year.

On my first go, I bled to death in the dark, alone on a forest trail.(more…)

The handsome knights of Neocore – they of the strategy-with-RPG-bits King Arthur games – have announced that they are creating an action RPG called The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. The game will be “loosely based on Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula” and tells a tale in which Van Helsing find himself enlisted by former supernatural foes “to defeat a new scourge terrorizing the ravaged Eastern European city”. No details on the action side of things yet, but if Neocore’s take on the strategy genre is anything to go by, this could be an interesting proposition. It’s slated for release in Q4 2012.

Reversion is a freeware adventure game set in a collapsing Buenos Aires, with civil war and other excitement going on in the background. I know that all sorts of exciting things have happened in the recent past because a doctor told me. He had to tell me because I’ve woken up in a hospital bed with a severe case of amnesia. Whenever I find myself in control of an amnesiac I smash the emergency glass that covers my Hat Of Exposition Deflection immediately. That once robust garment is now in tatters and every time I breathe, I regurgitate a fragment of the couple of decades’ worth of fictional Argentinian future-history that’s been inflicted on me.

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Twas only yesterday I was letting everyone down by wishing for more Space Quest instead of more Quest For Glory. But as if the mighty Horace felt the need to restore balance to the universe, GOG.com have just announced they’ve released all five of the classic Sierra adventure/RPGs for ten bucks, via GOG.com. Sure, it’s not a new one, but you try getting the original versions working.

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Well, they’re calling it “Outernauts,” but it’s a game in which you “master a wild, untamed universe of 30-plus planets and arenas” by “capturing, training and evolving exotic alien beasts.” So basically, space Pokemon. And it’s a Facebook game. OK, admittedly, for some of you that’s an introductory first impression on level with walking up, kicking someone in the shin, spitting in their face, and then saying, “Oh yeah, the divorce? It was your fault.” But – in spite of every fiber of your being screaming in protest like a choir of howling cats – this is one to watch. It is, after all, the first PC game from Ratchet & Clank, Spyro The Dragon, and Resistance: Fall of Man creator Insomniac. And apparently, it’s being targeted at 20-something core gamers – and, whether it ends up being horribly off-the-mark or not, that’ll definitely set a precedent for these things.

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Everyone, I think I’ve accidentally stumbled onto a terrible truth. Sure, Pippin Barr‘s latest savory sip of Flash cleverness, Hot Coffee, seems innocuous enough. I mean, there’s drink preparation and pleasant conversation – that’s it. But then, I got to thinking: who – aside from deadline-drowned games writers in a bleary-eyed state of perma-frazzle – drinks coffee at night? And the rabbit hole runs deeper. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a bubbling cup of energy tar as much as anyone, but who actually loves the stuff this much? Guys, they say… they say some things. Scandalous things. I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but this is probably the end of the gaming industry as we know it.

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We can't imagine how many clicks it takes to get to the center of a Diablo 3 open beta, but Activision has told us how many men and women have braved the potential carpal tunnel syndrome. Blizzard president Michael Morhaime revealed in Activision's annual earnings call today that a total of two million players took Diablo 3 for a spin.

"We recently conducted an open beta stress test for Diablo 3, where anyone could download and try out the game. The response we got was huge, with more than two million people worldwide participating in the open beta." A lot of the testing, Morhaime said on the call, was beneficial to Diablo 3's development - particularly to the Auction House feature.

Of course, the beta suffered its fair share of hiccups, and 300,000 concurrent users marked the high point of the weekend open beta event. We just hope Blizzard is prepared for more than that, because we feel a touch of the flu coming on.

Experimental FPS game Souvenir is, well, a bit broken. It’s a work in progress, though – part of a Design and Technology MFA – and not certainly broken enough to obscure the fact that there’s a tremendous idea in here: a gravity-plane-changing mechanic that pushes into the territory of Psychonaut’s Milmkan level, while playing with spatial relations in impossible Escher-like surroundings. The glitchiness of the main mechanic was a little frustrating, but only because I was tantalised by this work in progress. If they can get the bumps in the road sorted out, make the play as polished as the dreamlike visuals, and bolt an end on, then it could be a fascinating experience. You can try it for free on PC and Mac just here.

It’s not often that anyone gets to ask “What would Thoreau’s Walden look like as a game?” without it being a rambling speculative conversation in a pub. Indeed, you have to be in a certain sort of position – say a group of academics at a Californian University – for anyone to take that seriously, much less provide a $40,000 grant to make it happen. Fortunately, that’s precisely what has come to pass, via a National Endowment For The Arts project. And so we are to get Philosophical Writer Living In the Woods Simulator or Walden, A Game. One of the speculative few, USC Associate Professor Tracy Fullerton, has been quoted as saying: “We anticipate a rich simulation of the woods, filled with the kind of detail that Thoreau so carefully noted in his writings.” So we look forward to that. We can also check out the trailer, which is below.

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in with a note saying “Jim, this seems like your sort of thing”, and made me worry I am becoming a caricature of myself…)(more…)

There are plenty of horror-themed video games out there, but not many can claim to be a turn-based haunted house. Enter Haunts: The Manse Macabre, the first game from Mob Rules Games, a studio founded by Cryptic Studios vets. Voted by fans to be the studio's first project, Haunts has one team investigating a haunted mansion, while the other team tries to put an end to those who would invade their home.

Haunts features a single-player campaign and online multiplayer for Mac, PC and Linux. The visuals are inspired by the work of Harry Clark and Edward Gorey, artists known for their iconic, creepy illustrations. The intruders choose a goal - recovering a specific artifact from the mansion, for example - which is unknown to the opposing team. Each team also selects its units in secret, making every game different.

Having raised over $40,000 from other sources, Mob Rules Games is running a Kickstarter for an additional $25,000 to finish the project. As expected, there are various rewards for different donation levels, but perhaps the most interesting is that every $5 donated nets donors an additional copy of the game, which they are free to keep, sell, give to a friend or just hoard.

Good heavens, Saturday was the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D. That makes us all older than the oldest oak tree. The classic robo-Nazi-shooting FPS is credited with having made the first-person shooter a thing that people knew existed, and if you’ve played it recently, you’ll know it’s still brilliant. You haven’t played it recently? Oh, well now you can.

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It's been almost a year since NBA Jam creator Mark Turmell left Electronic Arts to join social gaming powerhouse Zynga. Now, the company is finally ready to reveal his first project, Bubble Safari. Zynga's first arcade title, Bubble Safari tasks a former space program monkey named Bubbles (not that Bubbles, presumably) with saving his jungle friends. Bubbles does so in the only logical way: A match-three bubble-popping puzzle game.

Bubble Safari will launch tomorrow on both Facebook and Zynga.com, with a mobile version under consideration.

It might seem strange for Turmell to move from the likes of Smash TV, NBA Jam and NFL Blitz to a puzzle game, but he sees them all as fundamentally arcade experiences. "Match-three games have been around for 20-plus years," he says, "even the original Bust-A-Move in the arcade was one of my favorite games - that was in the same era as NBA Jam."

We were excited about The Fullbright Company because it was founded by three ex-BioShock developers, but now we have another, more tangible reason to eagerly anticipate such a glorious union: the games. The Fullbright Company has announced its first project, Gone Home, a mysterious exploration game set in a "modern, residential locale" and shown as a pre-alpha build in the above video.

Fullbright hopes to make Gone Home a rich simulation title with an emphasis on interaction, where players are able to open every drawer and examine the smallest details of their environment to unravel what happened there. The video teases these elements, as well as an audio diary system that plays at its end.

Gone Home is native to PC but will support gamepad, and Fullbright will not have a Kickstarter for this title. In related news, "Are you planning to do a Kickstarter?" is now a question that developers consider a standard FAQ.

When the "Two Guys from Andromeda," designers of the Space Quest series, announced their plans to reunite for a new sci-fi adventure game, we noted the surprising lack of a Kickstarter drive. Well, surprise! There's a Kickstarter drive now.

The Guys (Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy) are seeking the increasingly industry-standard $500,000 for their PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, and Android Tablet game. They've already gathered an impressive array of voice actors they'd like to be able to pay, including narrator Gary Owens, Rob Paulsen ("NARF!") and Ellen "GLaDOS" McLain.

Rewards for the drive include phyical "special edition" boxes, your name in the credits, t-shirts, collectible Buckazoid coins, and, in the highest tiers, your likeness in alien form on the box and/or in the game. You can even vote on hilarious death sequences.

[Thanks, Jess]

RPS isn’t shy, which is fortunate because it had over 2.1 million unique browsers staring at it in March. That’s you guys. There’s so many of you! But don’t just take our word for it. We had the site independently audited by ABC, and you can see our shiny certificate of traffic enormity right here. Yes, we’re very proud. But not too proud to admit that the real reason that RPS has been a success is because you lot love PC games as much as we do. So thanks for sharing our enthusiasms, and thanks for reading the site.

We love all of you.

Except that guy. Sheesh.

Hmm. I was under the impression that Stainless’ forthcoming Carmageddon reboot was in a safe place already in terms of funding, but nonetheless they’ve added their game of pedestrian slaughter and hyper-aggressive future-racing to the infinite ranks of Kickstarted development. The internet’s been enormously happy about the news today, which puzzles me slightly as it’s not like the game wasn’t going to happen without crowdsourcing.

So, yeah. Carmageddon Reincarnation is happening. Again. And this time you can pay for it before rather than after development is completed! It’s up to $40k of its desired $400,000 at the time of writing, though $10k of that comes from just one backer who’ll be flown to the UK and have their likeness applied to an in-game character. $10k! Christ. Mere mortals, meanwhile, will receive a copy of the game for pledges starting at $15. And, y’know, other rewards for larger payments. Don’t make me explain this again.(more…)

Zynga has announced Bubble Safari, its first project headed up by Mark Turmell, who joined the company last year after leaving EA. A match-three puzzle game, Bubble Safari has players bursting bubbles, earning power-ups, and saving woodland creatures from poachers (and generally reminiscing about Bust-A-Move).

Bubble Safari is free-to-play and will be released tomorrow on Zynga.com and Facebook, Zynga tells Joystiq. Check out the first trailer above.

That was unexpected. I saw a link over at IndieGamesMagazine and half an hour later I sit here barefooted, the socks charmed off me by the demo version of Lilly Looking Through which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever pointed at and clicked on. There’s a short trailer below in which you’ll be able to see that the heroine might just be one of the most delightfully and attentively animated characters to ever grace a game. It’s more Amanita than Lucasarts, with hotspots to click and activate rather than the freedom of the environment, although the short demo ends with a magnificent introduction to a wider world.

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A Hitman spin-off, Sniper Challenge, has been announced in a US magazine...

Hmm, maybe we need to somehow add a live Kickstarter ticker feed to the site to save ourselves a trinity of blogging. The ritual seems to be: 1) news of returning dev/series via crowdsourcing 2) interview with said dev 3) news that funding targets have been reached. Reaching step 3 today is Jane ‘Gabriel Knight’ Jensen, whose new studio Pinkerton Road is working on GK-inspired supernatural pointer-clickerer Moebius.

Pinkerton’s Kickstarter has reached $312,000 of its $300,000 target, with 11 days left on the clock. Obviously, they’d like more, so they’ve added assorted new tiers and rewards including ebook version of the old Gabriel Knight novels, design bibles and all sorts. Also revealed is that Pinkerton is working on another, more conventionally-funded adventure game, which copies of are available to Moebius funders who lob $50 into that hat (to get both) or $16 (to choose one or the other game). Vidja-based details below.(more…)

Tyler Glaiel, creator of Closure, likes to stay busy, apparently. The developer banged out a game in 48 hours for the 23rd Ludum Dare 48 competition, which went down from April 20-23. Entitled Fracuum, the game tasks players with navigating a cube through a maze of traps and hazards. Graphically, it's not terribly different from early efforts on the Atari 2600, though it comes packing a twist.

Taking on the Ludum Dare 23 theme of "Tiny World," each level of Fracuum has another level embedded inside of it, creating a loop of levels within levels and a mild case of tunnel vision. It's easier to play than it is to explain, so just head over to Glaiel's website and try it out. Ludum Dare 48 voting closes in just under a week.

[Thanks, Cal]

EA announced today that it's made over 1.2 billion dollars in "digital revenue" during its fourth fiscal quarter. That is a massive 47 percent year-over-year growth. Full game downloads were also up 76 percent year-over-year, pushed by Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3. This comes ri...

Luftrausers, Vlambeer's sequel to the singular Luftrauser, is all about ambiance -- and creating your very own form of airborne, rhythmic death with extensive plane customization options. Mostly it's about that second part.

There are three customizable parts for each rauser: weapons, bodies and engines. On the development side, Vlambeer is trying out some of these lethal combinations, and shares its experience with three parts on its dev blog. The cannon is "insanely hard to use at the start," Vlambeer concedes, but if you do manage to hit something it explodes into shrapnel that blows up whatever it hits; it's particularly effective on boats.

The melee body part offers "something like" negative 80 percent health, but you don't take damage from colliding with enemies. This is doubly helpful as it's possible to melee boats in Luftrausers. The "gungine" is a machine gun mounted on a standard jet-propulsion engine, and that's all the description we need.

Each combination of parts will have its own name, and there will be at least five different parts for each section, meaning a minimum of 125 different combinations. For example, the aquatic propulsion engine and heavy armor body on a standard rauser may be called the "Blastoise," Vlambeer suggests. The soundtrack will change with each altered spec as well, meaning "Different weapon? Different bassline. Something like that. Hell yeah. Kozilek is gonna be busy."

The studio developing the licensed remake of Battle Chess has begun a Kickstarter to fund a full featured multiplayer system for the title before its launch later this year. Expected to launch last year, Subdued Software, which received no funding from Battle Chess rights holder Interplay, has been working on the project between contracts.

"The Kickstarter will allow us to focus and finish the game," Subdued Software President Mike Terlecki told Joystiq. "If we get the funding we're looking at a September launch window."

The company's Kickstarter is seeking $100,000 for an online experience that'll include "skilled based matchmaking, statistics, leaderboards, achievements and in-game chat." The company also learned a lessen from the Star Command Kickstarter, factoring the cost of fulfilling rewards and running this campaign.

"We have carefully planned out the costs of staffing the programmers, artists and testers necessary to complete online multiplayer feature and arrived at this amount."