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Ah, conventions. While a reason for giddy exuberance among gamers big and small, they’re not unlike games journalism’s answer to The Labors of Hercules. Seriously, these stop being fun after the fifteenth interview of the day. Trust me on this. Brr. Anyway. With everyone else on the floor and alit with excitement about upcoming games, this is probably the perfect time to talk about discounted games. Old games, new games, games you’ve probably never heard about. They might lack the razzle and dazzle of upcoming games but at least you can play them now. Either way, the Bargain Bucket is rattling with cheap bargains for you. Today’s plushie is brought to you by Angel Tear and the number 12.

… [visit site to read more]

I would like more games to recognise that they have absolute control over their environment, and I want them to use that to mess with me. I also want them to recognise that my agency isn’t an issue in this as well. That’s what SightLine does: it was initially developed as an Oculus Rift, but it can be played without the headcase. It’s first-person puzzle game about what happens to the world when you’re not looking, warping the world as you gaze elsewhere. There’s a short demo on the Indiegogo campaign, and it’s definitely worth playing.

… [visit site to read more]

Puzzle-platformers cause enough trouble for my weak wits even with only two dimensions, let alone three, so I’m still a bit baffled by Miegakure moving into four. It’s not 3D with some Braid-y time-twisty shenanigans on top, oh no, but four-dimensional space, a theoretical realm of existence that our meagre meatbags are too stupid to experience. Look, have a gander at a new trailer and see what you make of it.

… [visit site to read more]

There Came An Echo has geek credentials coming out of it’s face hole–Wil Wheaton and Ashly Burch are on board as voice actors–but I’m not all that bothered by the cast. Not when my voice is the real star. It’s a voice controlled squad strategy game where you’re shouting down orders to your team. Initially controlling a single player unused to the violence that’s being asked of him, you’ll talk him through each step required to turn a cryptographer into a corpse-maker. Follow my voice to the trailer…

… [visit site to read more]

Double Fine’s Hack ‘N’ Slash piqued my curiosity when I saw (and video-ed) its ultra-clever hacking antics last month, and soon it will give you the keys to its sparkling kingdom of 1s and 0s. Since it’s a videogame, that of course means a trailer is in order, lest people just stand in place, slack-jawed, like racers who’ve yet to hear a starting gun. In the modern gaming world, we are lost without trailers. They tell us where to go, what to buy, how to live. It’s a chilling thought, but look! A funny video on the Internet and huh what was I even talking about again?

… [visit site to read more]

Ever wonder what $41 million looks like? It's a lot more blue than we would have thought.

This is the first public demonstration of Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' interstellar crowdfunded project. It's 14 minutes of pretty planes and space battles in a very early build. The yelling isn't part of the game - that's the crowd at PAX East. Chances are, a lot of those people are cheering because they're finally seeing their money in digital, playable form.

Star Citizen has raised more than $41 million in crowdfunding. [Image: Roberts Space Industries]

IGN Comics Editor Joshua Yehl weighs in on how digital comics are a carefree way to enjoy comics. Check out his column!

Blizzard announced its upcoming Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft single-player Adventure Mode at PAX East today, detailing the challenges players will face as they progress through the new Curse of Naxxramas campaign.

Curse of Naxxramas features a series of unique enemy encounters and boss battles that take place on a new Adventure Mode-exclusive game board with interactive corners. The mode adds 30 new cards to the Hearthstone deck, including bonus cards awarded for completing nine unique Class Challenges.

The Curse of Naxxramas will gradually roll out new Hearthstone content in the five weeks after its simultaneous launch for Windows, Mac and iPad this year. A release date has not been announced. [Image: Blizzard]

No, not the beloved Homestar Runner animation, this fortnight it’s a celebration of teenage girls and their sexual agency being front and centre of the narrative! “Hey Cara,” I might hear you say, “I have never heard of a game that even gave the tiniest crap about teenage girls’ libidos!” Well, I’d say, you’ve clearly never been near the Otome genre, or a copy of Duel Love, but that’s okay. We’ll leave Otome to another day, because I found two perfectly free games that give women a good sense of bodily autonomy without having to relate their self-worth to what a dude thinks of them. How healthy!

… [visit site to read more]

The stable of heroes in Blizzard's new MOBA continues to expand at PAX East.

Aerial arena shooter Strike Vector, which launched earlier this year, intends to continue adding more free content into the foreseeable future. "Each month we are making new maps, new modes ... for free. We decided to make all our DLC for free," Ragequit Corporation co-founder Jeremy Chaïeb told us today at PAX East.

The team is showing off the game's new map today at PAX East, but the next mode scheduled for the game is a co-op experience with teams of six against AI. This is a significant expansion from the current game, which currently focuses on player-vs-player deathmatch modes. To ease new players into checking out the game, Strike Vector is currently discounted on Steam for the next week at 50 percent off for $12.49. If you're attending PAX East, the game can be found in the Indie Megabooth. [Image: Ragequit Corporation]

I am in my car and I am slowly learning how to drive. I’ve put my seatbelt on, started my engine, turned on the lights, set the wipers wiping, slipped into first gear and pulled smoothly into traffic. Naturally, my instructor dryly points out that I’ve forgotten to indicate.

Pulling up at the first set of traffic lights, I lean forward and peer into the night beyond the rain-streaked windscreen. The traffic is bad tonight. I use the spare moment to take a drink of beer. My instructor – Russian simulator City Car Driving – says nothing, but drinking while driving still feels wrong. I put the beer back down on my desk, push down on the parking brake and continue my journey into the night.

… [visit site to read more]

New single-player bosses, new cards, and even a new game board all coming soon.

In the aftermath of global annihilation, Mushroom 11 gives rise to a bioluminescent blob that looks like someone made radioactive jello in a murky swimming pool. It expands, contracts, squeezes and climbs through dilapidated nooks and crannies, never losing its total mass while the player prods it into motion. It's easy to play and hard to look away.

The quirky growth must use its weight and mass in clever ways to advance, be it creeping through the windows of a skyscraper about to crumble, splitting itself to trigger simultaneous mechanisms, or to roll past the attacking arms of a mutated plant. The trick is to realize that your touch (or mouse-click) removes adjacent pieces of the blob, which then immediately regrow, attached elsewhere. Closer observation shows it to be a living lattice of gelatinous material, moving and shifting its weight as it grows in response to your prodding. This makes Mushroom 11 a slower, methodical game, and different from fluid manipulation games like Pixeljunk Shooter.

The other trick to Mushroom 11, according to designer Itay Keren, is to teach players how to handle their blobs without resorting to text and obvious tutorials. The game is striving for subtlety, both in its story of how the earth came to ruin, and in its teaching phase.

How awfully productive Take Your Child To Work Day must have been for Hazard Ops. I imagine the developers’ children left in a conference room with a big pile of coloured pens, kept occupied by being told they had the important and helpful job of deciding which enemies would be in the game. “Monsters!” they wrote. “Robots! Mutants! Mummies! Demons! Zombies! Zombie dogs! Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs with rocket launchers! Ghost bitches in high heels!” (One had guessed the child lock code for Adult Swim, it was later discovered.) One terrible filing mixup later, the free-to-play multiplayer shooters has all these and more.

Hazard Ops is coming to Europe, publisher Infernum has announced, some time from July to September. It’s developed by Yingpei Games, the gang formerly known as Epic Games China, and surely their children too.

… [visit site to read more]

Last Life is the second game in Double Fine's new indie publishing program, and it has a bit of a different vibe than the first game, Escape Goat 2. Last Life is a dark, sci-fi noir adventure inspired by Kentucky Route Zero and Telltale's The Walking Dead. One difference from both of those games: It takes place on Mars.

In Last Life, you investigate your own death - you're Jack Parker, private investigator, and you're dead. You're 3D-printed back into the living world for four hours to hunt down your killer by shaking down a lineup of shady characters, using "charm, bribes or something less pleasant." Developer Sam Farmer sets up the premise as follows:

"Eleven years before our story opens, all life on Earth was ended. Now, only a few million humans still exist, scattered throughout the remaining civilized colonies of the solar system - forever exiled.

"P.I. Jack Parker was one of the lucky few to have escaped Earth's tragedy.

"On that infamous day, he just happened to be working a case on MarsTopia, the crown jewel among these colonies on the red planet. He survived on that destination resort development, but half-wished he hadn't. The echoes of the life he left behind on Earth ... a life lost forever ... grew louder every hour. Until, that is, the day 11 years later when he was gunned down and killed."

Last Life is looking for $75,000 on Kickstarter. With 28 days to go, it's raised $19,000. It's in development for PC, Mac and Linux.

Virtuix's Omni treadmill, a virtual reality platform that allows users to run and walk in any direction in games using their real-life legs, will begin shipping in July for those that already pre-ordered one. The $500 package includes the treadmill unit, a pair of shoes, a support harness, mini-game and tracking software and hardware. The cost doesn't include shipping, but it does come with a one-year warranty. Those that decide to pre-order a unit now will receive it in September, according to Eurogamer.

Virtuix began taking pre-orders for the omnidirectional treadmill in August 2013 following a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign that ended in July. The VR hardware developer raised $1.1 million on the crowdfunding platform, and pushed well past its $150,000 goal in its first day. We've seen videos of early demos of the Omni in action, including one accompanied by the Oculus Rift and Team Fortress 2. [Image: Virtuix]

The Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world MMO racer, is built around some…

I come and go on old franchises and old ideas being resurrected by rich old men for rather less rich and old men and women. Sometimes it seems like a roadblock to fresh invention, other times it seems like returning to roads that games were forcibly and unfairly turned away from as forces of marketing and demographic-chasing decided they weren’t suitably commercially viable. For example: space sims didn’t all but die out because the possibilities were exhausted. They all but died out because they required huge budgets to pull off well, but could not command the sort of easily advertised-at mainstream audience required to earn their keep. What remained turned inwards, servicing the very particular demands of a passionate few, and making themselves all the more inaccessible to those who were interested but not quite so fervent about it.

The comeback, thanks to the removal of almost all middlemen and the ability to engage directly with an audience large enough but spread far and wide, is something I find incredibly exciting. After having barely touched space games for years, I now find myself owning a £120 joystick and obsessed with Elite 4. … [visit site to read more]

Here at Flare Path we take flight simulation extremely seriously. When a company like Eagle Dynamics goes to the trouble of releasing a free aerodyne as lifelike and lively as the ‘new’ DCS World Mustang, we believe it’s important that machine is flown responsibly and realistically. If you know yourself to be a hellraiser, a tearaway, a speed merchant, a rowdy, a clown, a daisy botherer or a beret shredder, be sure to read the following Enjoyment Guide before clambering into the cockpit of the weaponless TF-51D.

… [visit site to read more]

I wouldn’t be writing about Below on RPS if it weren’t coming to the PC, because in spite of the many, many, oh-so-very-many emails from marketers and PRs about iOS hidden object games (and the occasional moment of writer’s prerogative), this is mostly a PC site. So we haven’t mentioned Capy’s Below until now, because it was tied up in Xbox Xclusivity. That’s changed, as was revealed in a very elegant fashion in the trailer I’ve embedded yonder. I’m not going to spoil how they did it, because I think what they did was lovely and speaks to the game’s core adventurousness, and I want you to smile like I did.

And just what is Below? Well I’ve attempted to find out for you bel-, er, beneath. It’s not entirely clear.

… [visit site to read more]

Chin up, little buddy. Maybe you fell off the monkey bars, weren’t selected as the Presidential candidate, got turned down by that sapient life you deem attractive, or perhaps your Kickstarter fell short of its goal, but that doesn’t mean you give up. Two of those apply to Eden Industries and by Jove, if they weren’t crushed by disappointment then you shouldn’t be either.

The Canadian developers last year fell short in their Kickstarter for Citizens of Earth, an Earthbound-inspired RPG where the US Vice President engages in gang violence. They picked themselves up, dusted their clothes down, found a publisher in the RPG-adoring Atlus, and plan to launch the game later this year. And you’ll make the hover-hockey team one day, I know it.

… [visit site to read more]

I won’t be celebrating the unholy union of the letters ‘a’ and ‘e’ in Secrets of Rætikon. Ugh. Look at it, flaunting alphabetical law. There’s a full three letters between you two in the alphabet, and you’d do well to remember your place! I’ve been reminded of this horrendous vowel mixing because Secrets of Rætikon has felt the warmth of Spring, and is emerging from its Early Access nest next week. The odd and lovely (and immoral) physics puzzler charmed the pants off that John Walker, and I enjoyed my time with it as well. It’s worth adding to your Steam Wishlist if you’re in the mood for an atmospheric Alpen avian action thing. Trailer is beneath.

… [visit site to read more]

On Tuesday I began my second pen-and-paper roleplaying experience, joining three friends for our first trip into Numenera. I’m amazed at how much time and energy the DMs I play with – my other game is D&D – are pouring into the worlds and stories they’re creating. I have that impetus, but not the follow-through.

Arma 3′s new Zeus DLC is tempting, though. It allows you to act as a GM on multiplayer servers, shaping military maneuvers around players in real-time. Less lore-building, more tank-spawning? A button that causes lightning to strike? My laziness could probably stretch that far. It’s out now, and there’s an old developer playthrough below.

… [visit site to read more]

If it wasn’t already plainly obvious, survival games are all the rage these day(z), and zombies – thanks to DayZ’s ever-looming influence – come part and parcel with that. The War Z/Infestation: Survivor Stories hit a little too close to home on that front, and Nether, with its possibly dubious ties to the former, also deals in apocalyptic baddie bashing, but with a slant toward the occult. Rust, meanwhile, frolicked through the gray-green fields with the shambling undead only for as long as it had to. And now it seems EverQuest and PlanetSide developer SOE has come down with a case of the Z diseaze as well, with its “soon” to be available H1Z1 promising DayZ-style antics on a much larger scale.

When Smedley promised a game “dedicated” to longtime Star Wars Galaxies fans, I’m not sure if this is what they had in mind.

… [visit site to read more]

Indie developer Fresh3D recently launched a Kickstarter project to fund a high-definition remake of Outcast, the 1999 Infogrames-published PC adventure game. The open-world game will feature re-designed objects, textures, environments and characters, each made from scratch to run in 1080p HD at 60 frames per second. The developer is targeting $600,000 by Wednesday, May 7, to fund the game. So far it's achieved more than $140,000.

Fresh3D includes three designers from Appeal, the developer of the original cult classic adventure game: Yann Robert, Franck Sauer and Yves Grolet. Grolet is involved in the project as a gameplay advisor, while Robert and Sauer are technical and creative directors, respectively. The three designers purchased the rights to Outcast in July 2013. [Image: Fresh3D]

Orcs Must Die! is back, but this time the tower-defense action series is a lot more League of Legends. Orcs Must Die Unchained! is a free-to-play, team-based, 5v5 multiplayer game like the MOBAs flooding the market, with elements known to the series, and adding a card collecting element.

"We've been calling it a fortress siege game," said Robot Entertainment CEO Patrick Hudson to IGN. Now players will not only compete against each other, but will be able to lead AI allies into battle.

The first Orcs Must Die! was strictly a single-player experience, with the sequel adding two-player co-op. Now developer Robot Entertainment seems ready to throw in the kitchen sink with Unchained!. The game is expected to launch later this year, with pre-orders already available. Heck, you can play the game now if you pay $150, but there's also a $20 option if you want to wait until beta. Waiting for beta is sooo 2012. Premium buy in-pre-alpha is the new hotness.

If you're attending PAX East, you can try before you charge into battle. The game will be playable on the show floor. [Image: Robot Entertainment]

Formerly only for Xbox One, the mysterious rogue-like game is releasing on PC via Steam.

Double Fine chief operating officer Justin Bailey expressed a desire to maintain premium status for indie-developed games in a recent interview with USgamer, explaining that a continued "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing could prove disastrous for the developing marketplace.

"I think what indies really need to watch out for is not becoming the new casual games," Bailey said, referencing a looming indie bubble and casual gaming's free-to-play shift. "I don't think that's a problem from the development side. Indies are approaching it as an artform and they're trying to be innovative, but what's happening in the marketplace is indies are being pushed more and more to have a lower price or have a bunch of games bundled together."

In an effort to stave off marketplace dilution, Bailey says that Double Fine will encourage its publishing partners to maintain consistent pricing without spurring sales through bundles or deep discounts.

"Double Fine wants to keep indies premium," Bailey stated. "You see that in our own games and how we're positioning them. We fight the urge to just completely drop the price. That's one of the things we want to encourage in this program. Getting people to stick to a premium price point and to the platforms that allow you to do that."

Double Fine recently kicked off its indie publishing initiative with Escape Goat 2, providing creator Ian Stocker with "promotional assistance and distribution" at launch.

"Our biggest interest is to have a vibrant indie ecosystem," Bailey said. "Our thought is the best people to provide that are going to be the indies. We'd like to help make other indies successful, keep them independent, and have a place where they can go and in turn, help out other indies. That makes the ecosystem stronger."

[Image: Double Fine]

If you're a fan of Final Fantasy 14 then we want to show you off in an IGN feature!