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Sundays are for wondering if you will ever sleep again, while cradling a steaming cup of hot drugs. Perhaps, in those grey autumn hours before the sun has managed to struggle out of its own slumberings, you will start going through the week’s writings about games. It’s been a good week for that, at least.

• Chris Dahlen’s piece on imaginary games journalist Rachael Webster is quite the thing: “This was the one big hiccup in the project: nowhere on the site did we advertise that Rachael wasn’t a live girl. Alternate reality games are a special illusion that only works if the audience discovers the trick. The worlds they build aren’t stuck in a television screen, or cheap and obvious like the backdrops at a miniature golf course. They’re pervasive, delivering their fiction straight to your everyday world—to your email, your phone, even to spaces in the real world. They’re fiction without borders, and they can make the player feel as if, to use the most common expression, they’ve “fallen down the rabbit hole.””

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As serious racing-simulator enthusiasts out there know, the allure of the racing wheel is almost inescapable. When your fancy is tickled by buttons, levers and switches, the only thing better than a full racing setup is the original Steel Battalion controller which, sadly, cannot be used for racing games of any kind.

Ignoring the generous amounts of space and money required to utilize a racing setup, most racing wheels are also fairly unportable, which can make showing off your new toy rather difficult when invited round to a friend's place. Enter the $120 SteelSeries Simraceway SRW-S1, a motion-based simulation-centric peripheral which abandons foot pedals in favor of gear-shift-style flappy-paddles mounted to the backside of device.

Motion controls seem like an odd choice for a peripheral aimed at accuracy obsessed simulator aficionados, but maybe 19 buttons and 3 dials affixed to the face of the wheel will be tempting enough to risk the cost of entry.

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, CEO and lead programmer for Arcen Games, Chris Park, talks innovation, ghosts and game creation in A Valley Without Wind.
What's your game called and what's it about?

A Valley Without Wind is a Metroidvania-style adventure game set in a procedurally-generated post-apocalyptic world. There are also some strategic and city-building elements layered on top of this core game -- you can literally help your settlements to rebuild, expand and reclaim the world from the forces of evil that now oppress it. The game focuses on magic and crafting, which leads to a pretty interesting take on action-adventure combat.

Helklo youse.

It’s four in the morning and I am reallky really drunk. I will try to fix the typos as I go, but I think it would be dishonest of me to entirely clean this page up. Some of the stuff should re4main intact to speak truly of my condition as I bring you this column.

It’s a columhn about my list abou the best games you can be deciding to play when tou are drunbk.(more…)

I hope you’re all after some cheap games for your computer boxes, because that’s exactly what I’ve got. Here’s your weekly record of the best value gaming offers from across the world of PC gaming, it can only be the RPS Bargain Bucket. There’s tonnes of variety in this week’s selection, I reckon must be something for everyone here, but if you don’t spy anything that grabs your attention, you can always head over to SavyGamer.co.uk for a constantly updated digest of gaming deals across all platforms. Read on for this week’s selection. (more…)

Three former Cryptic Studios employees have founded an independent, open and honest game-development studio titled Mob Rules Games -- and they have no idea what they're doing. Literally. Rick Dakan (Cryptic Studios founder, original lead designer for City of Heroes and former Joystiq freelancer), programmer Jonathan Wills and artiste Austin McKinley have three game ideas that are all apparently so awesome that they can't decide which one to make first, so they're having the players choose for them, via the trusty old fundraising platform, Kickstarter.

The three games up for development are Guerilla Gorilla, Haunts and The Last Second, all of which are detailed in the above video. For every $1 you pledge on Kickstarter, you get 10 votes that are good for the life of the company, meaning you can provide input to Mob Rules for more than just this one round. Mob Rules plans to make all of its content open under Creative Commons, and will release the source codes for every game after its release.

But don't trust us -- hear more about the philosophy behind Mob Rules from Dakan himself in the brief interview below:

I haven’t been adding to the well of words about Skyrim, mostly because I haven’t actually managed to play it yet. Every day I think that I’ll put aside part of my evening for it but what I really need is a 48 hour period with no commitments so that my exploration can properly begin. Being a contrary entity, I have been thinking about Daggerfall this week though and talking with friends about the excitement of stepping onto that immense continent for the first time led me to check on its current status.

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Most people can't tell the difference between Call of Duty and Battlefield. While gamers endlessly debate and argue the finer points of each game and franchise, the vast majority of people see each as much of a muchness...

The free to play world, if one can call it a world, has a bunch of success stories, some of them tall, some of them short. The tale that seems to cause them all to pale, however, is the success of League Of Legends. The hero-based multiplayer battle arena game’s developers, Riot Games, have just announced a doubling of their active player based in just four months. That’s up to eleven million active players, with total registrants at thirty two million, which is getting up to Steam sort of numbers. You have to consider that when things get this popular, and are free, a number of people are going to be dipping in to see what all the fuss is about, deciding it’s not for them, and leaving again. Nevertheless these figures are not to be sneezed at, especially when League Of Legends is fairly hardcore in the scheme of things.

Anyway, Riot did a lovely infographic so that you can see what 32 million registered players means. What it means is that the prize money for season two of the game is five million dollars. And I should imagine that’s a drop in the ocean against what Riot are bringing home. Mmm, cashy.

It seems like a long while since the announcement of Three Rings’ Doctor Who: Worlds In Time but perhaps not. Perhaps it will actually be announced yestermorrow and I’m writing this from a place between moments, stuck in the gaps between seasons, trapped in the trembling alcove between the tick and the tock. What I have been able to discern from this aching voidspace, which echoes with the shrieks of collapsing realities, is that on 18th November 2011 it will be vital for me to inform you that Sega have acquired the erstwhile Puzzle Pirates developers and will be helping to bring the Doctor Who MMO to fruition.

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Stephen “Increpare” Lavelle has sent over a version of his spatial puzzle game, English Country Tune, and I’ve been playing it. Atmospheric, compelling, and acutely encouraging of the thinking they call lateral, English Country Tune mixes some of the kind of 3D puzzles you might have seen before over the years with some you won’t have seen, and then adds in extra layers of impossible videogame physics and Increpare experimental cleverness. I am currently gnawing on early puzzles that include faked “camouflage” gravity… Yes, it’s that kind of thing. And it’s awesome. That said, despite the name, there are no jaunty folk songs to be found. Not so far, anyway. For gist of the sort of 3D puzzling you’ll be expected to face head below to see the trailer. The game itself will be out via the website a week today, apparently.(more…)

In a remarkable feat of reversed expectations, it was revealed that the new XIII game would not be a first person shooter. This is at a time when there’s a real chance that Peggle 2 will involve unicorn terrorists, a cover system and a screen-swallowing rainbow-themed HUD. Headshots = Ode To Joy and the rabbit is a wand-waving medic. So, an FPS becoming a puzzle game shouldn’t necessarily be reason to despair, right? It could allow narrative to dominate and make the world really stand out. And then a trailer occurs.

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Team RPS continues to warily circle Facebook gaming in the manner of coyotes sniffing at a crashed stagecoach, convinced there are delicious, meaty treats somewhere inside the wreckage but anxious they’re defended by something that will cause them harm. While the master thief that is Farmville, and its many derivatives, remain a gruesome prospect indeed, a few games are endeavouring to be, well, games. One of those is the agreeably stupidly-named Gunshine, a sort of shooty-Diablolike which I found to be not-horrible in my brief encounter with its open beta a few months back.

Supercell’s F2P light roleplayer has now reached full-release status, in case you’ve been holding off because you think ‘beta’ means ‘diseased’, so you can take a look for free now. If you prefer to steer clear of the Book of Faces, it is also available in standalone Flash-form (though does, being a sorta-MMO, require registration). There’s a trailer demonstrating Gunshine in its current form below, as I believe is the done thing when a videogame launches these days.(more…)

Torchlight 2 has been officially delayed until some point in the near future. Runic Games president Travis Baldree made the announcement today on the game's site, noting that the amount of development time the studio needs is "relatively small," but that it still wants to perform a small beta test before launch to ensure everything runs smoothly.

"We feel pretty safe in saying that if you enjoyed Torchlight at all, this sequel is superior in every respect," Baldree wrote. "Right now our job is to ensure that the quality level is consistent all the way to the end."

And then, as a brilliant distraction to stop us from crying, Baldree reminded us of the glut of goodness out there at the moment.

"Besides, you're all playing Skyrim right now anyway, aren't you? Or Battlefield 3? Or Uncharted 3? Or Saints Row 3? Or Arkham City? Or Skyward Sword? Or Minecraft? Or Modern Warfare 3? Or Dark Souls? Or Assassin's Creed Revelations?"

You're right, Travis! No rush. It'll take us until this time next year to make our way through everything you just mentioned anyway.

I don’t know what kind of Thursday you’re having, but I’m having one that sounds like the sigh an old armchair makes when you sit in it, like exasperation is too much effort, and instead deflating despondency is all that can be enunciated. And then I found this.

Bach makes everything better, as I think we can all agree (no matter what the World Health Organisation keeps telling my clients), so Baroque.me‘s distraction in a website form soothes all ailments. It’s a remarkable little thing in which white circles pluck at ever-changing-in-length strings to produce baroque heavenliness. Why am I mentioning it on a so-called gaming site? Well, you can interact with those white balls, messing with their pathways, to influence the music. And interaction means game, and game means post.

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So far today we’ve had news from a better world, investigative journalism and egg-robbing retro action. It’s probably time for an RPGmaker game that combines Gameboy stylings with a FOREBODING JOURNEY INTO THE DARK HEART OF MAN (my caps – my entire phrase in fact). I don’t want to give too much away and you can play through the entire thing in less than an hour, so if you fancy a go at the strangest fetch quest you’ll play today, grab Wither here and meet me below the break afterwards. I’ll be waiting. If you get frustrated at any point, heed this advice: no need to run around clicking on everything, there’s always a clue.

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I worked on a PC hardware magazine for years, and found myself as caught up in the bitter CPU and GPU wars that characterise that industry as much as the next man who cares a little bit too much about expensive circuitry, but even so I’ve never really fancied a multi-card system via NVIDIA SLI or ATI Crossfire. The noise, the expense, the technical potholes…

However, between Rage, Battlefield 3 and Skyrim (particularly the latter, wanting to try out all of the settings tweaks and mods to max it out), for the first time I’m thinking about doing it. I’ve got a GeForce 560 (non-Ti) which more than holds its own, but there are usually a few bells and whistles I need to turn off if I want a solid frame-rate at 1920200. The expense of higher-end cards is extreme, but for around £120-50 I could pick up another 560. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But have you ever dabbled in the dark art of multi-card systems? And was it worth it?(more…)

It’s Thursday, there’s nothing particular going on, so let’s all play Chuckie Egg. Yep, I’m so impressionable that I even accidentally convince myself to do things – irrelevantly mentioning the old BBC Micro/Acorn Electron/Spectrum platformer in an earlier post fixed it firmly in my mind, and with crushing inevitability, I found myself Googling for and then playing the strange, difficult tale of a farmer stealing eggs from murderous, ladder-climbing geese. Or ducks. Or chickens. Or whatever they are. In any case, they shouldn’t be able to climb ladders.(more…)

Some days, there isn’t much news to report. Today is one of those days. The sensible thing would be to go play a few delightful indie games, pen a few more Skyrim misadventures or open my very veins to hold forth about how Chuckie Egg made me, but the sensible thing feels far too involved when I’ve only poisoned my body and mind with one cup of hot, brown caffeinated liquid so far today. So instead, here’s the entirely fabricated news I wish I was writing.

Skyrim patch incoming

Following news that, at 280,000 concurrent players at its peak, Skyrim has broken player count records on Steam (that bit is actually true), Bethesda decide to take the PC entirely seriously again and will release a patch containing a slew of new graphics settings that everyone’s worked out how to do in ini files already. “Sorry,” said a man, “it’s a mystery to us that we didn’t put those options in in the first place too. Yeah, it’s pretty embarrassing that people can make the game look orders of magnitude better with a few quick tweaks in Notepad, isn’t it? I think we were distracted by a cute dog or something. Oh, there’s another one! Look at its floppy ears!”(more…)

South Korean-operated MMO M2 has been closed following a server error. In late October, the game went down for "emergency maintenance" to restore damaged servers. The issue couldn't be repaired, and the game is now closed. Publisher Sankando and South Korean operator Hangame say that despite the...

Not all dungeons require a cross-country trek or a cheeky spot of fast-travel to access. Dungeons of Dredmor was a light but appropriately vicious roguelike which charmed both John and I earlier this year, and creators Gaslamp Games have not left it to fester away on a darkened corner of Steam. As well as a steady trickle of patches, they’ve announced some real-money DLC is incoming, as well as a new patch which, among other things, doubles the number of avatar genders on offer. I did some pretty impressive maths to arrive at that conclusion, let me tell you.(more…)

Will Wright has told VentureBeat that he, in conjunction with a new California-based social gaming startup named Hivemind, is working on a new genre of "personal gaming" -- the first installment of which shares the name of his new company. The "personal" aspect of Hivemind will be derived from the game's capacity for learning about "you and your routines." Wright added, "If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life."

Of course, since we spend a majority of our time writing about games, we're worried about the potentially infinite feedback loop Wright's title would create. Don't get us wrong, we're just egotistical enough to enjoy such an experience, but it would pretty much be a game about writing about a game about writing about a game about writing about a game, and so on, forever and ever, ad infinitum.

Ask anyone in the street which sport is sorely underrepresented in PC gaming, and they reply, “Handball”. And then you’ll both stare at each other for a beat, and then burst out giggling. Because, see, “hand” and “ball” are both words used for common human anatomical parts, and when you put a “hand” near a “ball”, it can have a sexual connotation, and thus when the two words are closely situated there’s a degree of innuendo* that is inherently amusing. Handball. Snnnnnnnnorrrrrrrt.

Fortunately, that’s come to an end. Both the previous paragraph, and the lack of handball (snigger) games on PC. Because we have IHF Handball Challenge 12.

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Yesterday, Activision cast doubt on the Call of Duty Elite service coming to PC...

I’ve been meaning to write about Towns for a while and since it fits neatly with my thoughts about ‘living’ game worlds, this seems as good a time as any. In its isometric countryside, the player takes the role of a town mayor, building up from a patch of wilderness and attracting newcomers with housing and entertainment. However, your settlement sits atop an ‘orrible dungeon so among the folks you’ll need to attract are heroes, who will need incentives to quest into the depths and fancy equipment if they are to delve deep. Majesty meets Dwarf Fortress? Play now or journey downtown for more details.

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UDK-powered twin-stick shooter Waves is now available for purchase. I played it at the Eurogamer Expo and had a grand old time even though I clearly need plenty of practice to even scrape the bottom of any kind of leaderboards. There are a variety of game modes, one of which you can try in the demo, and the colourful chaos is somehow balanced while unpredictable. It’s also quite spectacular to behold. Buy DRM-free direct from the developer for £5.94, or for £6.95 from Gamersgate. Should be on Steam soon but I don’t see it yet.

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Apparently Jennifer Lopez (J Lo, as you may call her) is going to produce a film version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. We know nothing about the film, but it gave NMA.tv an excuse to drum up a mock trailer (complete with Rockapella reference), and that's all that matters.

In an interview with Edge, Square Enix Producer Yoshinori Kitase recognizes the trend in RPGs moving away from classic turn-based systems...

Speaking a few days before the launch of Modern Warfare 3, developer Beachhead Studios had already confirmed that PC gamers would have to wait a little longer for Call of Duty Elite, but earlier today a Tweet from the Call of Duty Elite Twitter account account cast doubt on whether the service will ever launch on the platform...

The Indie Royale bundle started last week has hit over 25,000 sales so far. That means two more games and a music and DLC bundle have been added to the mix of things you get for a very cheap price. In addition to NightSky, Fate of the World, Scoregasm, and the Ben and Dan titles, you can now pick up shooters Irukandji and Bullet Candy Perfect as part of the deal, and the full DLC and soundtrack for Fate of the World is given to buyers as well. That's a whole lot of amazing indie gaming, no question.

And while we were worried the price might go up (it rises over time, and drops as people purchase the bundle for more than the average), it hasn't: You can still get all of this stuff for the price of $3.49. Black Friday hasn't hit us yet, but it's probably a safe bet that this is one of the best deals you'll see in gaming this holiday season. Ball's in your court, bundle buyer.