PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Are artillery games much-maligned? I feel like they are but that may just be because Angry Birds has become a weird cultural phenomenon, with plush toys sold in Next and all sorts of other madness. I almost accidentally won an Angry Bird toy at a fair. All of that means it’s definitely popular enough that it must be sneered at. The sheer number of artillery games out there does make it hard to see what makes each one different, but Catapult For Hire doesn’t have that problem. It’s in 3d, with lovely art design, has a full campaign mode, side missions, fishing, loads of ammo types and objects that break apart in fancy physics-based ways, based on impact and projectile type. There’s a trailer below and more videos and information at the site.

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Introversion’s Chris delay sends word that their new project, Prison Architect, is a game in which you “Build and manage a maximum security prison”. Crikey! Unexpected. But then it was unexpected. That’s the first image up there, too. This is the title the pioneering indie dev are working on now that their procedural heist game, Subversion, has been put on hold.

We’ll be speaking to Chris soon to get some more details.

Either this was unheralded or I’ve been listening to the wrong heralds, but Carcassonne is now available from Gamersgate in a rather spiffy looking PC conversion. There has already been a version for your personal computing device, but it was only distributed in Germany and has since been discontinued so it can carry a relatively hefty price tag. This downloadable version is £7.95, or £23.97 for a four-pack. It certainly looks the part and several expansions are included: rivers, inns and cathedrals, dealers and builders, and king and scout. Multiplayer works over internet and networks, as well as in hotseat mode, which is proper and good.

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One of Starcraft II’s big boasts was how awesome its editor was going to be for making your own games. One group of modders took Blizzard up on that and got on with creating a Starcraft MMO. After some initial legal wobbles, the mod is now approved by Blizzard, and it’s PvP mode is now undergoing a beta test. You can find some more details here, and I’ve posted the developer diary video for it below.(more…)

Adam’s planning a longer post on the IGF Pirate Kart‘s multifarious and hopefully delightful content, but the download was taking ages and he had to go drinking with Lewie P (thus, the Northern England contingent of RPS represents). Mr Smith will hopefully be your more expansive guide tomorrow, but in the meantime it seems only right and just to at least advise you of this wondrous (and free!) indie compilation’s existence so that you might investigate its 300-game contents for yourself.

Every game in it was made in 48 hours or less, with involvement open to anyone, and as part of a noble attempt to restore some of the wildness that perhaps has been lost from the most excellent annual event that is the Independent Game Festival in the wake of indie’s growing mainstream awareness and acceptance.(more…)

Adventurers take note, Good Old Games is currently offering the first three Broken Sword titles at half price. That's three retro adventures for a paltry $9, or $3 each if you're feeling choosy (and you should have the first one anyway). Choose quickly, because the deal is over on Friday.

GOG has also added the fourth game in the series, Broken Sword: Angel of Death, to its catalogue, though we've heard rumors that the $10 title isn't worth your precious time.

Joystiq has sent one of its reporters on assignment to talk with the public to find out more. Join him on the scene after the break.

If you were to ask me what two of my favourite things were, and I’m going to assume you just did, I’d have to say exploration and atmosphere, because I like discovering things and I like those things to be redolent of ancient myths, or failing that just to hum ominously. Kairo, which John covered in some detail back in the summer months. News now reaches us that Richard Perrin has entered the game into the IGF 2012 and to herald the occasion, here’s a new trailer.

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Something that most games tend to have in common is images. I’m the best at being egalitarian. There have been a few exceptions of course, and Blindside, due out January next year, is the latest. Created by indie devs Michael T. Astolfi and Aaron Rasmussen, the plan is to make an survival horror with no graphics at all. Take a look listen of the trailer below.

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And in the game! Ahaha! Ah. My little joke about determinism there. What this is really about is how I feel after playing Rage, which is a feeling not uncommon to gaming throughout the ages: the feeling that the options a game presents are actually an illusion. Read on for ramblings…(more…)

The conspicuous failure of CitiesXL’s attempt to be an MMO does not seem to have put a dent in the progress of the series, with CitiesXL 2012 returning to the topic of fashioning spectacular modern conurbations on October 20th. It’s more of an update than a wholly new game, adding hundreds of new structures, new maps and landscapes, and new difficulties to challenge your countryside-flattening ambitions.

The new trailer, below, has about a minute of footage to show off the shiny, shiny cities. Mmm, that concrete dream.(more…)

Note my romantic idealisation. You see, it’s actually Keyboard Drumset *crag*ing Werewolf and it’s like Ice Climbers but with a deliciously engaging maniac singing a catchy song. But then, no, it’s suddenly like falling to a horrible demise while the same maniac becomes irate and uses ‘gay’ in a fashion that will surely offend some people. Argh, but no, it’s not that either, it’s a button mashing, vomit-strewn lycanthropic transformation sequence, and now there’s chasing and slicing and killing while the song becomes ever stranger.

What it is, as well as all those things and more, is a new downloadable game from Cactus. I suspect the song will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day, for it is a malicious and worrying ear-worm. Probably with teeth. There’s a new trailer for the madcap developer’s entry into the IGF as well.

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“BLUE…. The colour of serenity and healing.” This is the greatest thing ever (as linked in this comment thread). Nature Treks is “a non competitive, interactive experience aimed as an aid for relaxation and healing”. It’s built in Unity using pretty much stock assets, with swishy nu-age music. Basically it’s about having a wander about in an alarmingly bloomy meadow/pond area while collecting particle effects. “VIOLET…. the colour of transformation. It can help with sleep and stress.” That’s good stuff. And no enemies of any kind have to be dispatched with a shotgun blast or physics violence. It’ll help with that problem you have with your soul. You know, with the inky discharge of evil.

Anyway: relaxing and informative! Turquoise is the colour of intuition, apparently. Gotta get me some turquoise for good times. Also: purest green. (For a less trite experience with wandering around in a musical woodland, try Proteus.)

The internet has been full of happy things to say about Braindead lately, and having just played it, I can see why it caused so many whoops and coos. This free micro-download is a retro-esque indie platformer, but wait, come back! This is not yet more tiresome retromancy of the kind that regularly floods indiedom, but instead a smart, one-button inversion of the genre. Rather than control the character, you control his world.(more…)

I love Cortex Command. It’s one of my favourite indies ever. The current build of this brain-defending, bunker-building, robot-deploying, side-scrolling tactical digging and shooting game means that it has a tonne of interesting scenarios you can set up and play, but currently the campaign (which I’d jumped into to take a look at) is a bit completely broken. Cortex Command has been out in “work in progress” beta form for about 47 years, but there’s been a bit of progress of late, and so I’m hoping we’ll see that campaign built upon soon. Nevertheless, for those of you who’ve not played this yet – and you really should have done by now – there’s a free (and sadly harshly limited) demo on the site.(more…)

We’ve recently been asked a few times why we haven’t posted anything about comedy RPG Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. The answer is simple: that game is humanity’s last defence against a dark conspiracy, RPS is at the heart of which, of unimaginable corruption and malevolence. Our excuse that we’re just four men against forty-eight thousand billion PC games is just that: an excuse. Were we to break our unholy covenant and post about Rampant Games’ excitable indie turn-based roleplayer Frayed Knights, our plan to consume the miserable souls of every teenager in Basingstoke could never come to pass.

Curses! Now I shall never know supreme power.(more…)

Considering Blizzard did not and will not release a new product in 2011, it seems like this year's BlizzCon could be an especially interesting one. Blizzard has used its annual convention in the past to announce everything from Diablo III classes to World of Warcraft expansions. With the second iteration of StarCraft II on the horizon, Diablo III's release a few months away, and World of Warcraft's official subscriber numbers in a state of decline, Blizzard has a lot to talk about...

I began today posting a spoof video of the SNES’s Mega Man, with a Portal gun. It made me smile. I end today posting a genuine video of a game where two people are remaking the original Super Mario Bros, with a Portal gun: Mari0. It made me smile much bigger. I got hold of an early version. It made me do that weird mix of smiling and frowning that Mario Bros games do, except with the bigger grins for clever portal application. They’re going to get sued into space by about fifteen different companies at once, but fortunately they don’t seem to mind.

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It has been five years since Introversion last entered the Independent Games Festival, with Darwinia, and the studio have just announced that they have entered their latest game into IGF 2012. However, the submitted game is not Subversion, the stylish, procedurally generated urban heist sim that the team have been working on, which is now on indefinite hiatus. Instead, there is to be an entirely new game, of which we know nothing, apart from the fact that it isn’t a sequel to a previous game. Chris Delay was candid as ever in explaining the decision and his words and more of mine are here to enlighten you.

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Cripes – how would you like the complete Grand Theft Auto series for under £9? There are two ways to do this. You can get yourself a balaclava and steal them from a shop, but it’s high-risk, and some would argue morally questionable. Or you could hand over that much money to Gamers Gate, where they’re selling GTA 1, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA Episodes From Liberty City, for actually 1p less than that balaclava at £8.74. Bear in mind that GTAs 1 and 2 are already free, but that’s still one heck of a lot of automobile crime without the broken glass and prison sentence. (Thanks to Michael Rose for the tweeted tip.)

I spend a lot of time playing strategy games, but sometimes it feels like I spend more time learning how to play strategy games. It says something about the complexity of the games and a frightening amount about the lack of complexity of my brain that by the point I’ve figured out how to balance my economy and marshall my troops, I’m often ready to move onto the next thing. Therefore, I can be pleasantly surprised by a strategic offering that only takes minutes to learn and Blue Libra is just such a game. The line-drawing controls and simplicity betray its app store roots, but nonetheless I found something oddly compelling about its single screen systems and brief scenarios. There’s a demo here and more thoughts below.

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On Friday, when I was off having better things to do that pick apart another misleading and harmful series of half-truths and outright nonsense about the horrors of videogaming, Jim put things rather more succinctly. Baroness Von Greenfield continued her sad descent from being respected by anyone, and once more proved that a lot of knowledge combined with absolutely no knowledge at all is a dangerous and embarrassingly biased thing. Rather splendidly, the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers sought the expert opinion of a real expert, one Dr Dean Burnett of Cardiff University, who has written a statement-by-statement riposte to the obfuscated scaremongering Greenback offered. It’s well worth a read, not just because it offers balanced, educated views on the effects of gaming on the brain, but also because it’s a darned good, educational read in its own right.

Wow, games are great. Take for instance A Tale By Alex. The game by new indie team Digital Dreams, it’s a side-scrolling platformer played on three separated levels… simultaneously. Because each is a version of a kid, Alex’s, imagination.

It’s an amazingly cute idea, the two higher strips showing a reimagining of the real-world interior Alex is playing in. Jump over a table at the bottom, and it’s a grassy mound. Run past your pet tortoise and it’s a giant, biting monster that must be attacked. An elastic band flung in your front room is a range weapon for Alex the Knight.

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Fisher Diver is a Flash game about fishing. Fisher Diver is a game about shooting writhing wireframe abominations in the spine with a harpoon, waiting for them to bleed out and then collecting their lifeless fish-fles to sell for a few dollars. Fisher Diver has an upgrade system. Fisher Diver encourages you to buy licenses so that you can dive ever deeper and confront increasingly dangerous creatures that thrash idiotically and blasphemously in the deepest trenches. Fisher Diver tells a story through diaries and dreams. Fisher Diver contains terrible nightmares and sinister diaries that are found drifting beneath the waves, or slowly digesting in the guts of the hungering horrors that lurk beneath. Play it here.

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A demo approaches! It’s a rather hefty 1.4 gigabyte download containing the majority of the second chapter of The Book Of Unwritten Tales, the comedic fantasy adventure that John is anticipating with some excitement. The version we’re awaiting is an English translation, which seems to be strong, and the original German release received a great deal of praise. The narrative follows three controllable characters, switching between their stories, so having the demo plunge into chapter 2 is no doubt more sensible than it may at first appear. I haven’t had chance to give it a try yet but as a fan of both pointing and clicking, I certainly will be. The full game is out October 28th, the demo is here and there’s a trailer below.

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EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it! It's time for another episode of the IGN AU Pubcast! - our distinctly Aussie take on the traditional podcast, blending our love of gaming with beer and toilet humour - and a liberal dose of intelligent debate. We're a couple men down this episode, but luckily the...

Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Michael Lubker shows us how sweet old-school indie gaming can be when it's transferred to the modern age with Steel Storm: Burning Retribution.
What's your game called and what's it about?

Our game's title is Steel Storm: Burning Retribution and it's about an extraterrestrial invasion and the struggle you find yourself drawn into, between staying alive and emancipating the area from the conquest.

Sundays are for writing cryptic introductory paragraphs that lead into a list of videogame writings collected from across the internet. What could it possibly mean? Let’s see if we can decode the cypher.

• There’s a lot been said about Rage this week, here’s Dead End Thrills’ take on it. It’s interesting to see what megatextures mean for taking someone intent on taking screenshots – yes, there are some spectacular vistas, but just don’t look too closely: “It’s an old-school faker. The abrupt colour-grading that simulates HDR; the tiny flocks of birds against a flat and frozen sky; the vast shadowmaps imposing the stage’s authority on the actors: these aren’t ugly, just conspicuous. Then there’s sparse virtual texturing (aka the MegaTexture), an illusion so data-intensive that it would, some suggest, take something in the region of 80-130gb more data to give it the consistent detail you’d expect.”

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Hello youse.

Today I would like to step away from normal business and talk a bit about game books. Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Sorcery! You remember those, right? I want to reminisce. Please join me.

If you would like to continue reading this column, scroll to paragraph 2.

If you’re a bit tired of me, your adventure ends here.

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Here’s the Bargain Bucket: The Bargain Bucket is here. Filled with tonnes of heavily discounted PC games, ready for you to play as soon as you can download them. This week’s selection highlights how much digital distribution has created a lucrative opportunity for PC developers to have an extended long tail on their earnings, by discounting games to impulse-buy prices after the initial full price boom. For always up to date intel on what games are cheap, you can count on SavyGamer.co.uk. (more…)

Originally released on Xbox LIVE Arcade and PlayStation Network, Costume Quest was a fun mini-RPG that took a fun costuming mechanic and a great sense of humor and quickly became one of the best downloadable games around. Now, Double Fine is spreading the love to the PC. Being distributed on Steam later this year, Costume Quest will offer all of the great features of Costume Quest, with the added pack-in bonus of the game's DLC pack, Grubbins on Ice, for free...