PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Exploding Rabbit, the development team behind Super Mario Bros. Crossover, recently hopped on the Kickstarter train to seek funding for its next game, Super Retro Squad. The game shares the 2D platforming qualities of the aforementioned crossover game, but uses original art and music this time around.

The game will feature "40+ levels that will be spanned across 8 worlds," and each world will be "based on one of the characters, so there will be plenty of variety found in the environments and enemies." The project also aims to include equipment and character upgrading, as well as hidden items in levels that can only be found with specific characters.

A $15 pledge to the project earns fans a digital copy of the game upon its tentative March 2013 release for Mac, PC, Linux, Android, and iOS. Super Retro Squad will be fully funded if it reaches the $10k mark by July 19.

[Thanks to everyone that sent this in!]

Sundays are for waking from dreams about how international finance is an abstract mess based on superstition. Thanks, unconscious, we already knew that. What do you want me to do about it, exactly? But perhaps we can divine some truths among the entrails of another pseudo-science, that of writing about the strange family of activities we call games.

• What does Quintin Smith do these days? Well, he writes odes to in-game menus: “I love this stuff. And if you do pore over it like some bizarrely specialised future archaeologist, it loves you back. The range and depth of talent packed into Arkham City’s menu, where characters are caught mid-fight, in the rain, as the camera pans past them, got me more excited than anything in the game’s marketing. There was no risk of disappointment anymore. The game would be a tour de force from start to finish.”

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Hello youse.

I missed Fortress America first time round. It was originally released as one of the MB Gamesmaster series, alongside games like Axis & Allies and the brilliant Shogun. For years, I’ve heard it called one of the purest examples of the “Ameritrash” style. It’s a game that features a map of America, lots of little plastic units, and a handful of dice. It’s one of those games I’d always hoped to find in a charity shop one sunny day, on a shelf alongside the Aliens board game and a working Dark Tower.

Fantasy Flight Games has spoiled that dream by releasing a new edition of the game and making it available in shops all over the place. And not a penny goes to charity. There’s no charity in Fortress America. Only ruthlessness. Let’s rock.(more…)

Have you been good boys and girls this week? Do you think you deserve a treat? Why not use your pocket money to purchase some of the many varied and delightful cheap bits of digital entertainment software that have been put on sale across the internet’s digital distribution retail outlets this fine weekend? As usual, in addition to my regular duties charting the best prices for games across all formats over at SavyGamer.co.uk, I’ve been sorting through the special offers on PC games to see which offers are the specialist, and thus deserve your attention. And look, here they are now: (more…)

Oh dear, this is getting out of control. With 28 tabs open on one screen, and a blank page on this one, Kickstarter Katchup is getting busy. Do keep sending in suggestions to the email linked in my name above. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll be featured, of course. And being featured here doesn’t mean we endorse the projects. It’s your call what you choose to fund. Lots of new games added this week, with just one previous mention finishing unfunded, and three success stories.

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Filed under: Features, PC, Retro, RhythmThis is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. One of the defining characteristics of the role-playing genre is its class systems. Although not every RPG has classes - Fallout or The Witcher, for example - some tend to be notable for their lack of classes. In some games, class is a single, permanent decision at the beginning of your adventure, and in others it's something that can be manipulated throughout. In most cases, though, it is the single most important aspect in determining how your characters interact with the game world. Thieves sneak and back stab, fighters charge in and absorb damage, snipers shoot from a distance.

The most impressive class system I've seen in an RPG is in 1992's Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (as well as its less well-known predecessor, Bane Of The Cosmic Forge). What initially appears to be a straightforward, rigid D&D-style system is given massive depth by two things: the importance of racial base stats in determining class, and a dynamic system that allows for both massive improvement and possible disaster. It's possibly the most in-depth system I've seen in any RPG, and one that I wish was more well-known.

Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics is working on a “cutting edge original IP," and it may be for next-gen consoles.

A delightful and endearing indie game with an eye-catching gameplay hook.

Welcome back to Game Scoop!, IGN's weekly news show that attacks your funny bone for massive damage. This week: The Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut.

Blizzard's patch 1.0.3 for Diablo 3 restricts anyone who buys a digital copy of the game to play the Starter Edition for up to 72 hours, limiting them to play only Act 1 to the Skeleton King, and only to level 13. While the restrictions themselves aren't a bug, the limitation to Act 1 and level 13 is an "unintended consequence" and will be corrected in another update "as soon as possible," Blizzard tells Eurogamer.

Access to the complete game will remain limited for digital purchasers, a move that Blizzard says is "to help ensure the integrity of the game and auction house service." Blizzard uses the wait time to verify payment on digital-game purchases, and most transactions are verified and the restrictions lifted within a day, but this process can take up to 72 hours.

"Similar to World of Warcraft, these restrictions were put in place to deter credit card fraud, which in turn helps reduce gold spam and other harmful activities that can have a negative impact on the game experience for everyone," Blizzard says.

Below find the complete, intended list of initially restricted actions for digital purchases:

Something “you’ll probably enjoy" will be announced soon.

Or, to give the new game its full title, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. This was its own project until fairly recently – simply Nexus Conflict – but now this game of online capital ships has become a multiplayer RTS spin-off from F2P space MMO, Black Prophecy. Hence, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. Got all that? Right, good, because the beta for this RTS is taking sign ups. In it you’ll pilot a gigantic battleship and duke it out with other players in heavyweight star-sluggery. There’s also a conquest meta-game, with player teams fighting over 22 conquerable regions of the galactic map.

Possibly unrepresentative trailer with long sequences of capital ships pounding each other, below.(more…)

It turns out the level 13 cap and progress limit midway through Act I were not intentional.

First-person puzzle game tends to mean something Portal-like these days, though I find genre definitions a lot like clouds – any recognisable shape is often in the eye rather than the form itself, and they’re hard to grasp and occasionally dampen my spirits. Xing is a first-person puzzle game that reminded me of Myst when I first saw the trailer, although in the sense that it has a beautiful make-believe land laden with puzzles and weird technology rather than because I didn’t want to play it ever. Maybe it would like to be called a first-person adventure game? It doesn’t really matter, but perhaps the game will. Let’s take a look.

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If I’ve played just enough of the ingenious Gateways to know one thing; if I play much more my brain will end being the shape of a pretzel. It’s the game that John raved about while describing time travel conundrums so defiantly opposed to the natural flow of reality that even reading about them made me feel less like a professor of puzzles and more like a hobo of the brainsphere. A cerebum, if you will. As of today, the game is available to buy at the official website for $9.99 (there’s also a demo). I’m going to step back in because it’s the first puzzle game since SpaceChem that I’ve felt justifies the mind-knots that I’ll spend the morning after unpicking.

Rift may have its shortcomings, but goodness, it can do the big beasties well, can’t it? Unsurprisingly, then, the first gameplay trailer of the upcoming Storm Legion expansion follows a typical day in the life of a colossus stomping around on somebody else’s stomping grounds. And that’s pretty much all it shows. It’s kind of eerie, actually. There’s no music or fancy film editing razzmatazz – just a colossus shrugging off spark-sized fireballs, doing his best Godzilla impression, and awkwardly bellyflop-leaping onto a bridge. He’s pretty clearly destroying the city, though, so this ought to make for quite the world event.

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Join the IGN UK team as they take on the Juggernaut in this week's podcast.

Skyjacker has been a regular appearance in the Kickstarter Katchup – the new regular post that’s taken the nation by storm. The free-roaming space combat game has had one aborted attempt to raise its cash, but is back with a far more concerted and concentrated effort, and a much more realistic chance of reaching its goal. And I think that’ll be an even more realistic chance once you’ve watched the videos below. Crikey.

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This edition of Flare Path is dedicated to Gerda Hampson, the SOE agent known as ‘Hawk Moth’ who on June 22nd 1942, charmed her way into The Berghof posing as a Swiss entomologist, and surreptitiously changed Hitler’s personal difficulty setting from ‘easy’ to ‘ironman’. The sly switch wasn’t discovered for two and a half years by which time, of course, there was no way back for the red-faced Führer. (more…)

1C and Men Of War men Best Way are making a post-apocalyptic RPG called Nuclear Union. This is basically party-based STALKER/Metro in the Men Of War engine.

Uh huh.

It’s as if they sat down in a meeting and said “What would really make Jim Rossignol’s head explode on a Friday afternoon?” Well, they came pretty damned close. A bit more on this, including the first trailer, below.(more…)

If you’ve got a really decent looking indie arcade flight game, a great way not to promote it would be to, say, have the first have of your trailer feature a cartoon cow pratting around for no damn reason. That would be an especially strange idea when your game is about flying small aircraft between slalom poles in a gorgeous engine, because that’s what you’d want to show up from so people got excited. Not a poorly rendered cow making stupid noises for 40 seconds. That’s a useful tip for any indies out there planning such a thing. Including Gugila, creators of the genuinely impressive looking Altitude0.

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So this is interesting. Kickstarter’s new stats page reveals that, despite Kickstarter being the focus of so much attention right now, only 33% of projects actually get funded. If you really want to get something funded, by contrast, you should be operating in the medium of dance, where 69% of projects have found funding. I’m not surprised about the figures for gaming, however, because many gaming kickstarters have been both highly speculative, and for relatively large amounts of cash.(more…)

Peter Von Buskirk has been trying to change the way gamers aim at stuff since 2005 with his trackball controller concept, the latest version of which is currently attempting to raise $125,000 on Kickstarter.

The device's core concept of taking a PlayStation-esque controller and replacing the right analog stick with a trackball has remained unchanged over the years. In a previous life, the controller was a PlayStation 2 peripheral known as the Reflex Control, but despite a strong presence at several E3s a 2007 pre-order initiative was unable to secure enough orders for the controller to be put into production.

"I have always speculated that it was due to limited public awareness or a skeptical attitude toward a then-unusual pre-sale site," Von Buskirk told Joystiq. "Maybe if Kickstarter has existed then, it would have succeeded. You never know."

Nowadays, the patent-pending prototype is a PC-only controller. Raised funds will be spent on engineering upgrades, creating a tool required for the controller's molded plastic bits, component acquisition and manufacturing, assembly and shipping costs. Check out the pitch above, as well as a video of the controller being used to play Diablo 3 after the break.

[Thanks, T.J!]

If nothing else, I have to say that Run – a self-described “series of interlinking segments twisting text into action into strategy” – is admirably eclectic. It begins as a platformer – except with stages made of unabashedly cryptic prose. But then, after you’ve unfolded a few chunks of the sci-fi-tinged tribal tale, Run enters “dream” segments that take the form of – oddly enough – old-school videogames. Impressively, each stage builds these throwbacks on top of each other – so first, it’s just Snake, but before long, you’ll encounter dreams that begin as Scorched Earth, morph into Space Invaders using debris left over from your tank battle, transition into Snake using the remains of both previous games – with Snake’s trail then forming the pathway for a pixelated platformer. Oh, and there’s also a recurring farming level, because why not? So that’s the cool part. Problem is, none of those thing fit particularly well together.

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DDO's first expansion aims to bring fans to lands they've been asking about for years: The Forgotten Realms.

David Perry's cloud-based gaming middleware company Gaikai could soon be courting buyers, according to a report at Fortune. The company has supposedly hired bankers in order to prepare for the transaction and purportedly anticipates that its market value will ring up somewhere around $500 million or higher, according to Fortune's sources.

Unlike OnLive, Gaikai provides no consumer-facing gaming service itself, but instead provides the technology required for other companies like Samsung, LG and Facebook. Gaikai's official stance on the situation is that it does not comment on rumors; a statement likely prepared by a super-cluster of servers before it was streamed to our inboxes.

By mid-summer, you’ll again be able to crush, slice apart and scorch hordes of orcs on your way to victory.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP just made the trip to Japan, with a version localized by 8-4 released on the App Store this week. You can actually try it yourself by downloading the latest update and setting your phone's language to Japanese, if you'd like to hear Suda 51 as Logfella or have less of an idea what's going on.

Concurrent with the localized game, Superbrothers released a remix album of Jim Guthrie's Sworcery soundtrack called "The Scythian Steppes," featuring remixes of the music by prominent Japanese composers like Akira Yamaoka, Michiru Yamane, and Baiyon.

The team at Almost Human provides an update on what’s next.

Nothing makes a night of gaming better than straight up stealin' from a bank. Join IGN Prime and get it done.