PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Two demos in one day! Different genres though, so we’ll let them off. Nemesys Games send word that their new 3D racer, Ignite, has been released, and also has a demo out. You can get hold of the demo here, in exchange for just 414 of your megabytes. The game seems to be a low-budget riff on the Burnout series (with boost earned via drifting, destruction and so on), which demands that you manage your “nitro” to get more points from a race. The less you rely on this boost power, the higher you score. Doesn’t look super-promising, but the demo might be worth a look.

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 4 of 7.

Months before releasing Atom Zombie Smasher to acclaim, Brendon Chung exploded onto the indie scene with the stylish FPS sketch Gravity Bone – but before then, us loyal followers (“Chungers”) had already been enjoying his short-form forays into FPS-dom for years. His Barista series, especially Barista 2, is proof that Brendon was doing this “indie FPS” silliness long before any of us. Damn.

(Be advised, there are substantial *SPOILERS* for Barista 2 and Gravity Bone, which are both freeware, so you should play them.)(more…)

Is this a bad time to be an FPS fan? If you take the recent merciless public Metacritic mauling of Modern Warfare 3 as any kind of reliable barometer of the current public feeling, then the answer would appear to be a resounding yes...

The chaps at Cadenza Interactive – they of tower defence fancypants, Sol Survivor – have announced they are working on a “six-degrees of freedom” shooter (aka a Descent-alike) called Retrovirus. Apparently it’s all going a bit Tron, because you are sent “into the depths a computer on a search and destroy mission against an invasive virus”. You’ll have a customisable shootercraft, “focusing on strength, speed or cunning, with weapons and utilities to suit a variety of play styles,” and “two-layers of story”. I guess like the two layers of a cake, only narrativer. Sounds intriguing! The game is an early stage of development at the moment, however, so there’s no word on release just yet.

I was only young when I played Ultima VII but I had already ventured to the depths of dungeons that dripped with dread, partaken in interstellar war and defended my home planet from invaders. Like Roy Batty and all people who grew up with games, I had seen and done so much. Between adventures in space, I’d rezone my commercial districts or build a new bus route, leaving room in the schedules for occasional postal service functions. Yes, I had lived a full life already, but I had never watched a man clad in the finest clothes in Britain eat an egg and then belch in the face of a barmaid, so who can say I had experienced anything worthwhile at all?

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Just when you thought full price may be an option, here’s another gathering of discounted titles over at Show Me The Games. It’s called Show Me The Sales and includes well-known games such as Frozen Synapse but also some that I’ve never heard of, such as the delightfully titled Magical Diary: Horse Hall. It’s not a bundle, instead offering discounts on single titles and it lasts for almost two weeks. All money goes direct to the developers so if you feel ambivalence or blind rage toward middlemen and charities, these are the discounts for you.

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Hi everybody! It's 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...

Sunday mornings are for realising that it’s going to be a slow week of typing because you bought a new keyboard and it’s just ever so slightly different to the old one, which means one extra bad key hit per sentence. Sigh. At least it glows in the dark.

• Brandon Sheffield’s Game Changers article appears to be a sort of predictably zeitgeisty filler material in the subjects that he picks, but having read it I think it’s actually a genuinely important overview of where we are right now, looking who is changing the industry, and why. On the Humble bundle project: “One of the project’s additional successes comes from its ability to retain that indie feeling while growing massively. As the bundles have gotten more successful, they attracted the attention of investors. Sequoia Capital provided venture funding of $4.7 million to the bundle’s future growth, which is a decidedly un-humble amount of money.” These are the companies worth paying attention to. Humble alone is interesting enough because it is generating significant wealth for indies who might otherwise have struggled to break even. That alone is indicative of where the “indie” revolution has got to, now: people have worked out exactly how to get the games to the players, and the money to their bank accounts.

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Hello youse.

It’s time.

It’s time for me to sit you down and tell you about the game that I’ve played more than any other this year. I think it is the very best game where you have little men on a map and you try to beat all your opponents’ little men into submission. I just love this game. And this is no knee-jerk thing. I have played and played this game. I have won and won and lost and lost. I have laughed, whined, roared, sighed and I have loved. I have loved this game for a long time, and now I ask you to love it too. I will use capital letters to make my passion clear.

It is a classic straight out of the Classics. It’s Cyclades.(more…)

Some games are so different, deep and beautiful that they just won't die -- Tale of Tales' The Graveyard is one of those games, as it has just been ported to Android, available for download right now through the Android Market. It's nigh impossible to think about the finite nature of human existence too much -- it's been pondered for millions of years and no one's yet come up with a better answer than "42" -- and now you can guide an old European woman through such questions in a gorgeous graveyard whenever you'd like.

The Graveyard comes in two flavors, the free trial version, or the full game for $1.99. There's only one difference between the two types: You can't die in the trial, while every time you play the full game, there's a distinct possibility you will die. Much like life, which makes the trial more like the great-great grandmother to Limbo. Literally.

Many of our favorite geek heroes have been in situations where they were almost -- and we mean almost -- squashed to a juicy, pancake-y death. Luke, Han, Leia and Chewy were half-recycled, Indiana Jones has been inches away from rolling-pinnings and de-limbings on numerous occasions, and Bilbo was just about squished into troll jelly that one time. And now it's our turn!

Claustrophilia, the second, less artsy-fartsy title from iCarus dev, Sir Realism, dares you to dodge sliding blocks of death in a game that looks as fun as it is frustrating. Claustrophilia offers 7 different game modes, local two-player matches and confetti. Snag it now for $5, if you're quick enough.

Get a move on. The first deal listed in this week’s bucket has less than an hour and a half left on it, so you probably want to just skim read this intro, barely pay any attention to my weekly plug of my web site about cheap games, SavyGamer.co.uk, don’t even pause to exchange pleasantries with me (have you had a nice week?). Get straight into the meat of the post, this week’s discount download round-up is here: (more…)

We're pretty sure you've never experienced a game about high-speed platform tidying, but you will soon. Dustforce, an indie game developed by Cincinnati's Hitbox Studios, will bring sweeping action to Mac and PC in early 2012. Be sure to watch the video -- it's a lot more exciting than it sounds.

Dustforce puts players in the role of an "acrobatic cleaner" who wall-runs and jumps to sweep leaves, dust, and other detritus off of every available surface, while also defending himself with broom-based martial arts.

Along with the new video (above) and screens (below), Hitbox Team released an audio sample, by composer Terence Lee. Listen to it while you clean your house!

There’s a moment in this video of a new Gmod feature where I start to feel sorry for Breen. He looks at the camera, just as Garry starts to pluck at his very bones, with such sad resignation. His dignity gone, debased for our entertainment.(more…)

Any game that starts out like Duke Nukem Forever, with the player in a toilet, makes me wary. SickBrick does that. But then two minutes later I’m in a Portal-ish test chamber, albeit a simple one where I’m just blasting clunky robots, and everything feels just that little bit better.(more…)

Lord British, aka Richard Garriott, aka the creator of clasic RPG series Ultima: he’s been to space, which makes me instantly worry about him being some sort of replicant. It seems that since he’s been back on Earth he’s been pondering his next game. In a lenghty post on Facebook, he’s announced his intention to make the “Ultimate RPG”, distilling everything he’s learned in 36 years of game design into the new project, his New Britannia.(more…)

Gabe Newell announced today that Steam's database and forums have been hacked. According to Newell, Steam's forums were defaced earlier this week, and further investigation led to evidence that the hackers had obtained access to the Steam database...

We’ve once again been dragged into our bitter feud with the game package the Humble Indie Bundle. We’ve already posted about the addition of The Binding Of Isaac and Blocks That Matter to the Voxatron package, and they’ve responded by adding Gish and Lexaloffle minigames to it in a futile attempt to make us look out-of-date. This is like the Cold War all over again. Consider this post RPS’s Cuban Missile Crisis. Your move, Bundle.(more…)

How’s your Game Of Thrones game coming along? Everyone’s making one at the moment. Mine’s doing nicely – it’s a sort of driving game/match-3 hybrid, set north of the Wall. It should be ready some time in 2013. Game Of Thrones: Genesis is already out (and a bit poop), and then there’s the somewhat trademark infringing Khan Wars: Game Of Thrones, which just happens to show up on Google searches for the licensed versions. Anyhowever, the news is that Cynanide’s other GoT game, the RPG, has a North American publisher in the form of Atlus, and with that have come some more details and a couple of screens.

(Oh good grief, as I’m writing this, we find there’s to be a Game Of Thrones MMO from Bigpoint, and a Game Of Thrones social networking game too, hideously described as “FarmVille comes to Westeros.”)

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Welcome to G-Star 2011, a breeding ground for MMOs, beautiful art, and even more MMOs. As the "Korean E3," G-Star draws a tremendous crowd of gamers from around the world to witness the efforts of the country's most prominent developers. Today, NCsoft revealed its latest MMO RPG: Lineage Eternal. Th...

You know what the world is missing? A new Barbarian game.

So there is one. Pointless teaser below.

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I still can’t remember why I wanted it so much. I hadn’t played the original Elite, and didn’t even really think about picking it up when that want started. I wasn’t even a space game fan. But I can remember asking my mum for it, and after a long, long wait it landed in my hands.(more…)

As you may have noticed, we love To The Moon – a genuinely wonderful adventure game about memory, love and relational disorder. John’s going on about it caused Adam to play, and so we’ve sat down to have a chat about how it hit us. The discussion below contains spoilers right to the very end of the game, so we strongly encourage you to play it first. Which you should anyway.

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To borrow a John-ism: oh my goodness! You’re either about to hate me forever, or laugh and offer to buy me a cupcake. Whatever the hell Nyan cat is, it’s clearly a meme of terrifying scope. The original video’s been viewed 46 million times, and now it’s been snuck into Unreal 3 as a mod for the Redeemer. Just look.(more…)

As Adam and I lay out boxes of tissues (for crying, you disgusting pig) in order to discuss To The Moon for a Verdict this afternoon, it makes us wonder: what games have made you cry? Yes, yes, Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness. We’ve all done that joke. But really, bravado aside, when did you get moved to weeples?

I’ve written about the two previous games that saw me shed a tear a couple of years ago, and I talked to Charles Cecil about the process four years ago (wow, our site’s really old). (I mention these to stave off complaints from those claiming we always go on about this – twice in four years, whingebags.)

So go on – defy convention and name the game that made your eyes all dribbly.

Much has changed in the world of crafty space sim Blockade Runner since I last took a look so it seems only correct to don my fishbowl and head once more into the void. The game receives a lot of updates, many of which are only truly appreciable from within, and the free version now reflects the latest additions in stripped-back form so if you have the slightest interest in building and crewing a cuboid starship, it is advisable to download the trial immediately. Or perhaps read on to learn more.

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Okay, here’s the new angle. If you’ve not yet made your MMO (as indeed everyone must have made one by the end of 2012, according to international law) there’s an approach you may not have thought of. Base it on an old movie. Astonishingly, there is to be a free-to-play incarnation of Total Recall.

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If you've just finished Dark Souls and are looking for an entirely new method of torturing yourself through video games, this new project from QWOP developer Bennet Foddy should suit your needs quite well. It's called Poleriders, and it's a competitive, two-player pole vaulting game. Only, instead of trying to use a pole to clear a raised bar, you're trying to either kick a ball through your opponent's goal, or kick your opponent's head, which is also tantalizingly ball-shaped.

Truth be told, we didn't find it nearly as difficult as QWOP -- though, we suppose difficulty will change based on the relative pole vaulting skill of your adversary. Vaulting against your roommate? No problem. Vaulting against four-time US Nation Outdoor Champion vaulter Jeff Hartwig? Well then, buster, you're in for a world of hurt.

Splendid pirates-em-up The Wager has now officially released its version 1.2, that I somewhat prematurely wrote about on Monday. So you should definitely get it. Because it’s brills. And free. And I’ve some hints on their next game, The Archive. It will apparently “draw on roguelike” with randomly generated elements that are reminiscent of games like Spelunky and The Binding Of Isaac. “Except in space! With lasers!” There are more details on Surprised Man’s podcast. That’s still a year off, but in the meantime, for goodness sakes play the very enjoyable The Wager. Because I said so.

L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition, so named due to the PC version of Rockstar’s vintage crime opus containing all the DLC from the get-go, launched on Steam not minutes ago. I’ve been playing it over the last few days, so here is An Opinion.

There’s a slight element of redundancy to writing this, isn’t there? If you have even the slightest interest in Rockstar’s detective-’em-up, you’ll surely have read some kind of review of it in the long months since its May release on console. Whatever I’m about to tell you, you probably already know. Like that’s going to stop me from droning on about, of course.

L.A. Noire is two distinct games. One is a much more limited take on the traditional Rockstar open urban world/ third person driving/shooting game, but set in the 20s, with angry policemen removed (you are the angry policeman here) and cars that struggle to top 60 miles an hour. Early 20th century LA is a beautiful, richly-detailed place – everything from newsstand vendors to smokey divebars recreated with painstaking detail.(more…)