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There are loads of games that I’ve continued to revisit over the years. I used to keep old PCs around the place, like time machines, always ready to conjure up a command line prompt, and autoexec.bat and config.sys files in need of tinkering. I never play Populous anymore though, neither it nor its first sequel, so indie homage Reprisal is the closest I’ve been to those deilightful days of my youth for many years. It’s great. The worst thing about it was its insistence on living in a browser and not allowing a right click to lower land. Sounds like a small thing but, damn, it’s annoying. Well, a desktop version fixes that, although only the demo of this new version is free.

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How Amplitude Studios invited a world of gamers to build a galaxy of experience.

You, sir or madam, the one with the face; do you like to engage in social activity at but a moment’s notice? Perhaps you are pleased by the idea of meeting with readers of this fine periodical in an establishment well-suited to the enjoyment of light conversation and dark beverages? Or maybe you prefer your conversation dark and your beverage light. All can be arranged. Tomorrow, the RPS Social Club meet in London at their habitual haunt, The Blue Posts. All is discussed on the forums. The week after Rezzed occurs for more social interactions, and if those are both a bit too South, I may arrange a gathering in Manchester this summer provided there is demand for such shindiggery.

WARNING: SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION POST AHEAD. LOVE YOU GUYS!

So for the past two years I’ve been multi-classing with game dev studio Big Robot, and we’ve been doing some stuff, which we’ve talked about before on RPS. The thing we’re most excited about, though, is what we’re working on right now, which is called Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It is a procedurally-generated first-person, open world game, with some sneaking, some shooting, some tweedpunk adversaries, and plenty of fleeing in terror. We’re now making excellent progress towards something playable, and have a few images to show for it.

More on this below.

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Gosh! I’ve just read the small-print in my RPS contract. It seems Flare Path’s remit includes sports simulations. Strictly speaking, for the last 45 weeks I should have spent as much time in dugouts and bunkers as dugouts and bunkers. My weekly screenshot selection really should have featured as many wingmen, props, and Tigers, as wingmen, props, and Tigers. Thank God the Hivemind usually naps on Friday afternoons. All the same, a change of tack would seem sage. In today’s column not one but two games with cast-iron connections to current sporting events. (more…)

Super-ambitious sandbox MMO The Repopulation has raised a bit of cash on Kickstarter, and that’s helping to propel them forward into their alpha test. The game is intent on doing things a little differently, allowing players to mess about crafting and building bases, and not just questing and all that usual MMO fare. Being set on an alien planet where human forces are struggling against both the locals and each other, it’s looking disturbingly like doomed sci-fi MMOs Earthrise and Tabula Rasa, but perhaps these chaps can get it right. They’re only a small team, and taking on something vast, so they could do with your help – assuming, that is, that an open-ended space MMO with both PvE and PvP possibilities actually grabs your interest. Sign up for the alpha test just here.

Trailer south of here.(more…)

You may recall Cute Things Dying Violently being part of last year's Indie Games Summer Uprising event. It's debuting on the PC on July 17, in a new and improved "remastered" version available through digital distribution platforms Desura, Indievania and IndieCity.

Usually we'd judge you for taking interesting in this kind of bittersweet depravity, but it just so happens Cute Things Dying Violently is a delightful puzzle game. We'll let you off the hook this time.

I’m a sucker for games that use my music to procedurally generate things. I could, for instance, go on about how great Audiosurf is for days, but that might be a better fit for my soon-to-be-launched video side project, Nathan Goes On About How Great Audiosurf Is For Days. Dot Biz. Symphony, though, takes a similar philosophy and makes it march to the drum of old-school (read: non-bullet-hell) shmupery, spitting out all manner of different enemies that react and attack to your music’s beat. The short version? It looks like something I could lose hundreds of idle hours to. And the long version – well, minus a couple hundred hours or so – is after the break.

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The first expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim sucks big time -- in a literal, neck-biting, vampire-y way.

Join IGN Prime and enter the (offensive) madness of this browser-based shooter. Get in early; destroy your friends.

Patch 1.0.3a for Diablo 3 fixes an issue that restricted unverified digital purchasers to playing only up to level 13 and only in Act 1. Blizzard previously listed the restriction as a feature of patch 1.0.3, and later said it was an "unintended consequence" that players were unable to progress past level 13 and the Skeleton King in Act 1.

Updating to the most recent patch will eliminate the Act 1 restrictions, but other limitations remain for digital purchasers, "in place to deter credit card fraud," Blizzard writes. These restrictions can last for up to 72 hours and remain as follows:

• No public game access for unverified digital purchasers
• No auction house access (real-money or gold) for unverified digital purchasers
• Unverified digital purchasers cannot trade items or drop items for other players to receive
• Unverified digital purchasers are not able to chat in any public or game channels
• Unverified digital purchasers cannot attach a custom message to friend requests, but they can send/accept friend requests, and play with their friends
• Global Play is not available for unverified digital purchasers

Thomas Was Alone and he was also a Flash game but now he’s grown up and it’s time for him to meet some new friends and set off on a journey that will change them all forever. It’s a tale of friendship, co-operation, sentience and rivalry, but is it possible to care about a gang of abstract shapes and the puzzling environments they traverse? Here’s wot I think.

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The Secret World developer will focus on creating "maximum accessibility" in the title.

The team of students at DigiPen who made spike-dodging, gravity-switching charmer A Flipping Good Time have another game on the way. Man VS The World places you in the muscular shoes of Man Lee Gunns, who then places himself into the metallic muscles of a fighter plane and shoots at everything else that exists. The world has declared war on him, you see, so he’s left with no choice. It looks like the sort of game that fills the screen with bullets and my stomach with knots of tension, but then Mr Gunns starts leaping from one plane to another even as they arrive on screen in formation, and then he starts clambering about as if he’s in a platform game, in the sky, surrounded by bullets. Trailed below.

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True to its word, ArenaNet will release its MMO before the year is out.

I’m sure that many of the people reading this have pledged their hard-earned to at least one Kickstarter project and it may be of interest to see where that money has gone. Not into an actual game in most cases, not yet, but what happens when a project reaches its goals, the timer ticks down and the money rolls in? Stoic, the ex-Bioware staff working on turn-based beauty The Banner Saga, have released a video showing precisely what happens. Not only is the continuing transparency wonderful, with details of where the money is being spent, the video itself is fantastic. This is what the brave new world looks like. So many boxes.

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The Secret World will be ready to reveal all of its enigmas soon enough but Funcom are already looking to the future, announcing that they are to begin work on another MMO.

…the company has signed a license agreement with the LEGO Group, one of the world’s most successful manufacturers of play materials, to develop a massively multiplayer online game based on the hugely popular LEGO® Minifigures franchise.

Of all the things I expected to read today, that sentence ranks as slightly more unexpected than ‘moon is actually an egg’ but slightly less unexpected than ‘Dreamfall Chapters to release tomorrow; Kinect exlusive’. More on the announcement below.

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A recent notable Kickstarter success was Nekro, which is an action-strategy hybrid sort of thing in the classic vein of playing as the badguy. Referencing the likes of Dungeon Keeper and Myth, the Nekro team seem to have sparked a great deal of interest in their randomly generated game of necromancy and summoning. We spoke to excellently-named lead designer Scott Thunelius about the project.(more…)

The writer of Shrek Forever After and Jack the Giant Killer will script the live-action Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? movie for producer-star Jennifer Lopez.

Funcom’s new MMO is one of the most fascinating games of the year. Why aren’t more people talking about it?

From new quests to more ore types and biomes, here are a few inspired user-creations that might just make your Minecraft experience a bit more exciting.

Is the Extended Cut the ending you wanted all along? Let's discuss.

Take Back Your Music's Soul

One of the year's best shooters comes to the PC's biggest marketplace.

Oh my goodness, this is bursting with potential. Lying somewhere between Scrabble and Minecraft, cross-bred with Scribblenauts, is Quest Of The Wordsmith. A terrible name for a really interesting game. A spell your own survival sim.

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Valve has finally completed its Meet the Team video series for Team Fortress 2 with the launch of Meet the Pyro.

It’s been a long time coming, but finally…(more…)

Endless Space is set to launch (har har) next week on July 4. Created by Amplitude Games - a Paris studio made up of ex Ubisoft and EA vets - Endless Space is a 4X strategy title. In other words, players expand their outer space empire, building relationships with the game's eight civilizations (or just conquering them outright).

Endless Space will be available on PC digital distribution platforms with an asking price of $30.

My plan is to release a 7X game. eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate, eXasperation, eXboyfriend, eXit ab urso actus. But until my great day reaches us, you’ll have to put up with just the four Xs, and as soon as the 4th July. That’s the date that’s just been put on Endless Space, Amplitude’s scifi strategy that’s looking rather good.

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If ever today gets turned into a television special, it will be called A Very Zynga News Day. The social Godzilla with the real social skills of an actual Godzilla went announcement mad during its Zynga Unleashed briefing – which sounds like it was named for a Godzilla movie. So, let’s see, blah blah blah Sims Social clone blah blah blah ChefVille for some reason blah blah blah… oh! Here’s something: Zynga’s very own social network, called Zynga With Friends. Also they announced Farmville 2 or whatever.

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