PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

It’s been a fantastic year for Roguelikes, with continued development of the stalwarts and plenty of releases that have toyed with the formula, sometimes reshaping it until it’s almost unrecognisable. I’ve even managed to have great roiling arguments with people about whether certain games should be called Roguelikes or not. That led to Roguelikelikes, which I am simple enough of mind to be pleased about. I also love that people care so much about these permutations of a thirty one year old game that they are willing to bicker about them with strangers. The dungeons and wildernesses are more populated than ever. So, scrolls and potions at the ready? Down into the depths we go.

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Christmas is a time for giving. A time for giving every spare second of your time to a doomed quest for meaningless glory that no-one else will ever care about.

(Christmas is also a time for party-sized tubs of delicious savoury treats such as Mini Cheddars, Cheeselets and dry-roasted peanuts, but that’s another story).(more…)

After I posted about the very splendid Void last week, another group from DigiPen Singapore, also finalists in the IGF China Student Prize, got in touch with a link to their entry, Terra: The Legend Of The Geochine. It’s a 3D third-person puzzle game, with the rather splendid feature of being able to tilt the world on a central pivot, as well as run around inside it.

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Snipers are like normal soldiers, but much further away. Except when they are behind you! Yikes. All these sniper-things are illustrated in a new non-gameplay trailer from the men at Rebellion, who are currently remaking Sniper Elite to be even more man-shot-in-head-from-half-a-mile-away than ever before. The game itself is out next year, so hopefully we’ll actually get to see some in-game footage between now and then. Anyway, go take a look at the exciting sniper adventures!(more…)

As we all know, Telltale are busy bees. They’re currently juggling nine or ten announced projects, despite not being that enormous a team, to varying degrees of success. And yet there’s still no announcement of Strong Bad season 2 to let me smile once more. Their most recent, Jurassic Park, was something of a T-Rex-sized disappointment, with its Metacritic score of 56 being somewhat buoyed by a rather peculiar 90 at the top. (But then, a 70 has the quote, “These poorly implemented QTE sections cripple the intent of presenting an interactive storytelling experience”, and calls the gameplay (whatever that is) “empty and stale”, so, well, scores eh?) Point being, they’re doing a lot. But what about what they don’t mention on their website? Well, that would be the TV tie-in stuff. The latest being Law & Order: Legacies.

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Skyrim was the highlight, but the role-playing scene in 2011 was about a lot more than dragon shouts and bucket-based thievery. Role-playing games offer up vast, detailed and complicated worlds, meant to be explored for tens, sometimes hundreds of hours. The emphasis on story and dialogue allows for...

Blitz Games have decided to do something quite ambitious in their foray into the wider sphere of indie game publishing/distribution/production, and that thing is called IndieCity. It aims to be a “one stop shop” for indie gaming, and boasts features such as a downloader client that will both recommend things you might like, and automatically download free games and demos that you might like. It opened for general usage today. More on this below.(more…)

UK charity GamesAid has launched LittleBIGbunch, a bundle of 5 indie games available on a pay-what-you-like basis...

This Christmas you can get your hands on something really special. It’s the RPS Bundle! Get all four editors of Rock, Paper, Shotgun for the price you want. They’ll come and live in your house, shed, kennel, etc, and write poorly proofed posts about forthcoming and recently released indie bundle deals at your demand! Pay what you want for all four writers, bundled together for the very first time.

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Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the… Oh, everyone is dead. Well, more Christmas presents for me, then! And they won’t be needing these mince pies, either, which is a bit of luck, because I am strangely hungry.(more…)

[Bites tongue to prevent another 'too many bundles' whinge] There is another bundle! But this is one entirely free if you wish it to be (you can lob the devs a donation if you want to show your appreciation), and it’s full of mad little stuff as opposed to big-ish indie games you’ve perhaps already heard of. The 99 Percent Bundle is arranged by the fine folk at Indievania, and contains 13 unknown freeware pleasures from assorted devs. Most of them have excellent names: – Super Bogus World, Lone Boss and Cub, Pixel Slaughter, Next Time I Won’t Trust The Man In The White Van…

I’m downloading it now (their servers are slooooooow) and will present capsule thoughts on each game as I play them. So this is a holding post: repeat, this is a holding post. I don’t know why I felt the need to say that twice. Meantime, complete contents are listed below the cut.(more…)

First there was an indie game development conference event called World Of Love and now there is one called A Bit Of Alright. Secretly, they are the same thing! So that means talks by indies, for indies, about the art, business, and overall satisfaction (or lack thereof) in making indie games for a living. A Bit Of Alright is taking place on 3rd February in London. Tickets cost £20 for the early birds, which is here. Fragments of the Hivemind will be there, so do say hello if you come along.

Moderately-entertaining free multiplayer-only browser-based Diablo ‘em up Drakensang Online is going to expand before Christmas. Bigpoint have told us that “The NORLANDE expansion update is bringing several new quests, more than a dozen new levels, numerous monsters and champions, new bosses, and new character items and equipment to the game.” More importantly, there’s now some additional class variety with Rangers. These chaps are “agile archers, but also pack a punch.” According to the info “The Rangers will be accompanied by a whole new skill system that makes skills easier and better to use”. This is, apparently, part of increasing the currently limited skill sets for all characters, and making the game’s customisation have a bit more depth. So that’s good!

As previously leaked, the latest Humble Indie Bundle‘s pay what you wantness contains: Super Meat Boy, Shank, Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, and NightSky. For people who pay over the average there’s also Cave Story and Gratuitous Space Battles. The cash split has changed a bit this time, because the EFF is no longer one of the charities, and you can choose how your donation gets split between the developers, Child’s Play, and the American Red Cross.

Trailer thing belowwww.(more…)

When we saw the protagonist walk into an old stone building in this Dustforce trailer, we felt a thrill. "This place looks like it could be really dusty," we thought. "This is going to be awesome." And then the broom-wielding character walked into a room full of flying books and scrolls, trailing dust like exhaust. And then it was awesome.

We'll get really hyped about cleaning again in January -- that's the new release window, according to a YouTube comment from developer Hitbox Team.

It's already no problem to watch Law & Order 24 hours a day -- you basically just have to turn your TV on -- and now you'll be able to play Law & Order simultaneously. Doink-doink!

Adventure game specialists Telltale Games will release the first case in its new "Law & Order: Legacies" episodic series this month on iPad and iPhone, with PC and Mac versions coming early next year (and more episodes on the way for all of them). The games will feature likenesses of investigators and attorneys from throughout the 800,000 seasons of Law & Order and its spinoffs, including Lennie Briscoe, Rey Curtis, Olivia Benson, and eyebrows guy.

Gameplay involves both investigation of cases and prosecution. "As in every episode of the Law & Order series, choice and morality are key factors and every decision made throughout Law & Order: Legacies will affect the outcome and can lead to multiple endings for each case." In other words, you can totally lose. Doink-doink!

Several new job listings on EA's official job recruitment site suggest that the company is currently developing a few high profile projects...

I’ve been playing The Wreckless on and off throughout the day, and during that time there have been moments when I’ve thought – “holy crap, this is the answer to my TIE Fighter cravings”. Hopefully that’s enough to send plenty of people scurrying off to download the demo immediately. I’ll move onto my reservations later but I’ll leave them to one side for now because this is an honest-to-goodness space combat simulator, with simple controls, physics that allow for drifty dogfights and lasers that light up the dark void with their scorching fury. YES.

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Did you know that when he’s not delivering presents or selling Coca-Cola, Father Christmas actually spends his days in cocktail bars enjoying the good life, the old rapscallion? Why, he’s even been known to frequent the racetracks and beaches of Monaco in the company of young starlets. That’s his reward for picking a job where he only has to pull on the costume once a year. But not everyone has it so easy. Let’s take a peek inside door number thirteen.

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Walk to the right and talk to dying women. That’s my hastily written but accurate tutorial for Increpare and Starfruit Games’ collaboration, Pirouette. The animation and backgrounds are rather beautiful and the dialogue is chucklesome in its deliberate formality, with a staged quality that seems to laugh in the face of accusations of pretension. These are people, or ideas of people, who speak like exaggerated versions of the expected types. The end seems to have serious intent, or perhaps pretends to, but I was smiling throughout the 10 or 15 minutes it took to play. Pirouette is free and is also available on iPad, which led to Apple categorising it as a book rather than a game. Perhaps that’s a punchline of sorts.

Having garnered some attention on its mobile release, These Robot Hearts Of Mine has found its way to PC via Newgrounds. A puzzle game combined with a story of young lovers and robots, Alan Hazelden’s game aims to create an emotional tone to a more traditional puzzling idea. Does it work?

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PC gaming is mega expensive. It's one of the most steadfast assumptions amongst gamers, an argument that crops up in almost every forum thread when the letters "P" and "C" are placed alongside one another. Few people stop to question whether PC gaming actually is more expensive than console gaming, and why would they? When you can buy an Xbox for 200, and a top-end graphics card can cost twice that, the question barely seems worth asking...

Dirt! I’ve always thought it was an odd name for a series of racing games no matter how you choose to muck up its capital letter placement, although I quite like the idea of a snooker game called Chalk. Here is the newly announced Dirt Showdown, a spin-off from the main series that has more of the destruction and less of the speedy driving. It’s the kind of game that the press release informs me will be ‘uncaged’ in May 2012 rather than just released. That should tell you something about how off the hook Showdown is going to be. Cars spin around for your pleasure in the trailer below and I’ve also included some easily digestible details.

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Almost everything is procedurally generated these days. When I look in the mirror every morning, the non-Euclidean angles to which my hair terrifyingly conforms are different every time but always unhelpful, being a clear result of sloppy and overambitious coding. Bust-n-Rush’s levels are also variable but they look a lot better than the mess atop my head and they make more sense as well. It works like this: you are a large man running along a series of tunnels/tracks, dodging certain obstacles and smashing through others. If you can jump, sidestep and hold down a ‘rush’ button, you’ll be fine. Try the demo here (or on Mac), or watch a trailer below. Maybe even do both!

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Last week, we told you about GOG's upcoming Holiday Sale, forcing you to inhabit a dream of the future when you can buy old games cheaply. Now you can escape that reverie and feel the joy of $3 Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition in the real world, as the Holiday Sale has begun!

You'll find games like The Witcher, Beyond Good & Evil, Psychonauts, and the Incredible Machine Mega Pack for $5 each; Freespace 2, Master of Orion 1 + 2, and Fallout for $3 each; or, if you feel like playing something from this year, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for $23.99.

When you're browsing the deals page, be sure to hit the "show more deals" button at the bottom because, you see, there are so many more deals. In fact, almost everything in the catalog is half off until January 2. Activision games go back to regular price on December 26, and Codemasters and Piranha Bytes are skipping the sale.

What's the deal with podcasts? They don't cast any pods... They should call them audio casts! Err... Hello there! 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...

Someone over at NeoGAF apparently got hold of the South Park edition of Game Informer and has posted up relevant details. These include:

- You play as a silent protagonist. A new kid in town who must work to fit in. - It’s the first South Park game Stone and Parker have actively participated in and written the script for. - Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine, there will be five classes (wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unannounced class). - Apparently “elements of the combat system are like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games”. So it’s an RPG map with turn-based encounters.

Sounds like a peculiar blend! But that could be for the best. Plenty more spoilery details through the link.

Playing games on a PC doesn't have to be expensive. If you avoid the top-of-the-line hardware, you can still get a great experience. However, if you do have the spare cash and decide to pay for the most cutting edge hardware, you can get an incredible experience...

If you are enthralled by the addictive world of high-stakes gambling and the even-more-addictive world of social games, Namco Bandai has a soul-crushingly-addictive announcement for you. According to Siliconera, the publisher's Tales series of role-playing games is making the jump to the free-to-play browser-based realm with Tales of the World: Dice Adventure.

The game, which will hit Japanese browsers next Spring, will let players team up with characters from the prolific Tales series, assumedly entering into games of chance using numbered cubes. (Or numbered Icosahedrons, if they go the Dungeons and Dragons route.) Little else is known about the title -- until Namco reveals more information, the whole thing is going to be a crapshoot.

Aha! Sensible Sophie Houlden, of Sarah’s Run, BoxGame and The Linear RPG fame, has sensibly done the sensible thing for her new, vector-y maze navigation game Swift*Stitch and sensibly released a free demo. It runs in a browser, and you should absolutely play it – it’s loosely in the vein of Snake, but all controlled with two mouse buttons. One makes your right-angular character immediately move downwards, the other temporarily slows it down so you’ve got time to move downwards before you smash into a wall. And then it builds quick-thinking puzzle-complexity from there.

It’s very clever, a little bit fiendish, I’m really quite fond of it and you can buy the full thing for $7 if the demo rings your bell. There’s also a video below if you can’t/won’t run the Unity plugin for the demo.(more…)