PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

The 20th day of Advent is of course traditionally marked by tying a t-shirt around your head and screaming in the face of a stranger’s baby. But ever flying in the face of society’s mores, RPS instead simply peels back a door on the festive calendar to reveal another game that’s made our 2011 lovely. By Great Yarmouth’s testes, what could today’s be?

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The gorgeous and utterly charming Windosill, whose gentle and sometimes dream-like interactions play out in what is still some of the best Flashcrafting out there, has just been released on iPad. And why, pray tell, would that be of interest to those of us who choose a mechanical pointing device over the dubious pleasures of poking at things with out fingers? Settle down and I shall explain all. In celebration of the game’s move into the touchy realm, it has been made available at a price of your choosing. You can still play the first part of the game for free but for a limited time the full version can be unlocked, to play online or as a download, for anything from a single cent upwards. There’s a short video below.

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It’s the season of goodwill. Thus there is no better time to play Terry Cavanagh and Increpare’s Flash game about a family who start off swearing at each other and wind up somewhere far, far darker. Unutterably bleak yet strangely moving with it, Oíche Mhaith is an emotionally brutal but deeply compelling and occasionally perversely funny few minutes.(more…)

Lest you missed the live stream, Notch has finished his creation for the Ludum Dare 22 competition. Created in less than 48 hours, Minicraft strikes a familiar, albeit pixelated chord. Kill monsters, collect resources, build stuff. You can check out the browser game for yourself right here.

Lots of free games! I haven’t played everything entered into the latest Ludum Dare because I do not have all the time in the world, but I did want to try out some of the other entries after Alec looked at Minicraft. No doubt I’ve missed the one game that everyone will be talking about 24 hours from now, the one that forms the basis for Valve’s next major franchise and blows the minds of everyone who plays it. I probably skipped past it because it was called ‘Alone’, which is the theme this time around and therefore the title of 78% of entries. For those who don’t know, these are games designed around the set theme and created in 48 hours. Here are some of them.

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GameFly announced this morning that its PC client has entered public beta, with the highlight of the app being the Unlimited PC Play library for GameFly members.

The Unlimited Play section is a nice value-added bonus for members, featuring a lot of dreck to sift through, but there's also good stuff like Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed and World of Goo ... oh, wait, that's World of Zoo. Our bad.

"We are thrilled to finally be able to open up the beta so anyone interested in video games can start using the client, and we are hard at work expanding our catalog of PC titles for our users to play for free in the Unlimited PC Play section," said Sean Spector, GameFly co-founder and SVP of Business Development and Content.

The client will also allow the company to begin selling PC games at GameFly.com (and through its iOS and Android Apps) with over 1,500 Windows and Mac games for sale. The company didn't buy that Direct2Drive infrastructure for nothin'.

As we gather ’round the open fire, roasting our chestnuts if we sit a little too close, it’s not unusual for conversation to turn to Christmases past. Remember the time when that bike-shaped parcel underneath the tree wasn’t for you at all but actually contained Uncle Marty’s new Zimmer frame and a couple of oversized hubcaps for his Robin Reliant? How we laughed! You enjoyed those new socks in the end though, once the crying had stopped. Ah, memories.

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Is Formula 1 still popular, then? I thought it would have gone out of fashion now it’s been followed up with Formula 2 and Formula 3. But then people still play Battlefield 1942 even though Battlefield 3′s out. You hopeless nostalgics!

The sport of driving long, fast cars around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around remains well-liked enough to keep spawning videogames, the most recent of which is Codemaster’s F1 Online. It’s free to play, it’s, uh, online, and it now has a closed beta and the first trailer for you to videowatch.(more…)

Indie developers all over the world participate in an online competition called Ludum Dare several times a year. In just 48 hours they have to take a theme and turn it into a game, with the winners being judged by an array of criteria you can read about on their website...

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, we take the Indie Pitch to the magical world of Kickstarter, to Brandon Smith and Only Human Studios' in-progress space-combat masterpiece, Ensign 1.
What's your game called and what's it about?

The game is called Ensign 1, and it's a multiplayer space-combat game where players won't be limited to piloting just one fighter during the course of a battle. They will have the freedom to dock and pick up another ship, or to join another player and man some turrets while the other pilots. Players will even have the option of commandeering large space frigates and capitol ships.

What's the coolest aspect of Ensign 1?

With Ensign, I really wanted to capture scenarios like being in the midst of a huge battle, and finding a derelict ship hidden behind an asteroid, and then being able to bring it back into the fight. Or perhaps being able to land on a pirate base and take control of some ground turrets while your buddies fight in the sky.

Another week, another round up of e-sporting news from ESFI World‘s senior editor, Samuel Lingle. Read on below for the results of the North American Star League and the trepidations of one particular player, Chris “HuK” Loranger.(more…)

Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho! HO HO HO! Father Christmas’s demands on the sex worker industry are frankly grotesque. He is a bad, bad man. Fortunately, you can distract yourself from his ways by finding out what is behind door number 18 of our 2011 calendar of gaming goodnessment.

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Sundays are, if you so inclined, already Christmas day. And why not have Wintermas a week early? You’re (probably) a grown up? There’s literally nothing stopping you. I’m going to have another Christmas in April, too, just for the hell of it. *crag* calendars, I say. No one tells me when to decorate my house with tinsel!

• Dan throws some water in the well-marketed flames of The Old Republic launch: “Whether SWTOR is any good or not is academic at this stage. It’s a supertanker that can’t turn fast, a holiday resort built in boom times. With its brand and the hype, it’s likely to succeed; but it’s almost certainly the last of its kind.” That will seem true, I think, until a company figure out what we will pay a subscription for again. Could that company be Blizzard? It’ll be interesting to see…

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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, Alistair Doulin of Bane Games talks tactical missions, platform-specific gameplay and the Australian development scene with Battle Group.
What's your game called and what's it about?

Battle Group is a tactical/action modern Navy game for iOS, Android, PC and Mac. Players command multiple warships drawn from the navies of the world and lead them into seaborne combat viewed from a top-down perspective. Simple tap and click mechanics make the game easy to jump into and a range of weapon types, new ship unlocks and a special ability system earned through experience points add depth to the experience.

A pirate corporation has formed, attacking the trade routes of the world and the player must fight off this threat using the combined might of the Allied Nations.

Hello youse.

I promised you a wonderful Christmas board game video. However, editing problems have meant that this will arrive too late. The only thing that a writer can do in a situation like this is pour a drink and write. And today I would like to write about games, and how much we should pay for them.

“What is it worth?” That’s the question, isn’t it?(more…)

What’s for dessert? Probably some kind of pudding that we cobbled together from elements gathered while we were out exploring. It’s lucky people left all this stuff laying about or we’d never satisfy this raging hunger…(more…)

Are you ready? Things are kind of quiet at the moment, aside from the constant distant humming of bundles bundles bundles. Next week is when everything starts going crazy, and the Christmas sales seasons really kicks off. Word on the street is a 20th of December start for the Steam Christmas sale, but you didn’t hear that from me. Read on for the best download deals around this weekend, and you can rely on SavyGamer.co.uk to steer you through the upcoming assault on your gaming budget. (more…)

We got an email from a chap called Bill this morning. He’s making an RPG called Bloodlust: Vampire Shadowhunter and he’s looking for some feedback. He explains: “…it’s a little rough at the moment… just looking for some feedback, suggestions, etc. so I know where to focus my resources on the most.” We can certainly help with that, because there’s a demo available over here. I’ve not had a chance to play it yet, so I can’t attest for the roughness, but Bill’s keen to stress that this is a work in progress and he could do with some constructive feedback. Perhaps you can help him out?(more…)

While this isn’t actually a game announcement as such, the confirmation that next summer is the summer of Lego Lord Of The Rings does rather suggest that there will be a Lego LOTR game. I’ll be looking forward to Lego Ents, Lego Balrog, Lego Orks, Lego Eye Of Mordor, and, of course, Legolas. It also strikes me that the minifigs will need to be extra-mini for Lego Hobbits and dwarves. Hmm.

If you’ve somehow managed to get out of being obligated to buy gifts today then you might be able to spend some of the time we saved by shopping on the internet playing Deity, a free game from an intrepid band of Digipen students. It’s free! In it you play some kind of magical assassin dude, as you can see in the trailer below. The team say the mechanics of the game are inspired by Diablo and Arkham Asylum, and the acrobatics in the trailer seem to confirm that can of Batmanly dynamism in taking down your enemies. Seriously go take a look at this one!(more…)

Strategy games have spread to more platforms than ever. While the genre originally flourished on PC, now we find these games on consoles, handhelds, Facebook and our phones. It's debatable whether 2011 was the best year ever for strategy fans, but looking at what's come out it's definitely an amazing one...

Presumably sucking the life-force from SWG in some way, SOE’s lightweight (and extraordinarily popular) Star Wars MMO for the youth, Clone Wars Adventures, has expanded this week to include open-world PvP, according to Massively. Players will apparently now be able to use the force on each other when they visit the planet Umbara, home of the Shadow People. What do the Shadow People think about all that? No one seems to have bothered to ask. There are a bunch of other new features for the game, too. Like the ability to jump. Heh.

PixelJunk Monsters Online, the first entry in the PixelJunk franchise not to appear on PlayStation devices, is now in open beta on Facebook. Announced over the summer, PixelJunk Monsters Online is based on the PSN tower defense game, which has sold over 500,000 units. Now you can play it while waiting for TPS reports to collate.

PJO features the tower defense gameplay of the original along with a world map, and sees players defending their lands from waves of monsters. The objective is to collect gold and gems to expand territory and defend more tiles -- of course, your friends will be doing the same. That's when the fighting starts, followed by nasty Facebook messages, and eventually it culminates in a peace accord over buffalo wings at T.G.I. Fridays.

The first snow of the year made an appearance today, blanketing the world outside with the ghostly beauty of a whispered veil, as the fire roared, pressing freshly cut logs to the glowing bosom of its warming embrace and casting flickering shadows about the room. Christmas is a time for tortured and twee metaphor, that’s for sure, but it’s about much more than that. Above all else, perhaps, Christmas is a time for family.

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The good gentlemen of DIYGamer were well advised to post a link to Epic Inventor, a free-to-play side scroller with a modicum of similarity to the boundlessly popular Terraria. Inventor, though, is all about – get this – inventions and contraptions, and as such takes on a bent that we could describe as something like side-scrolling strategy. The game is currently a little rough, but it contains plans for you to be able to invent an entire town from the ground up, and gives you a robot to fight for you, and to ride around on. The difficulty curve is also a little off-putting at first, because those beasts just keep coming, and take too long to kill. Nevertheless I expect this to have a bold future. It’s free right now, so there’s certain no cost (other than the precious moments of your life you’ll spend with it) to having a look.

If I was to be run-over and killed by a bus tomorrow, all the sims and wargames on my ‘back end of a bus’ list might never get covered on RPS. That thought keeps me awake at nights (even though recent Hampshire County Council cuts mean my chance of being run down by public transport is now virtually nil). What’s to be done? Well, I suppose I could devote this week’s Flare Path to ugly ducklings. The three titles lurking beyond the jump, might have lovely personalities but, superficial swine that I am, I’m really not sure I can bear to gaze upon them long enough to find out. (more…)

If you contributed to the Kickstarter campaign for Brandon Boyer's upcoming indie game website Venus Patrol, you gained the promise of access to exclusive new games from superstar developers Vlambeer (Super Crate Box), Adam Atomic (Canabalt), Superbrothers (Sword & Sworcery), and Die Gute Fabrik (Where Is My Heart?)

Die Gute Fabrik's screenless Move party game Johann Sebastian Joust went out to contributors November 17. Last weekend, at a party for the website, I got the opportunity to play the new games by Adam Atomic and Vlambeer, and to see work-in-progress footage of Superbrothers'.

It’s all space, space, space with you today, Internet. In fact I thought I’d add to that with a sort of reminder post to point to excellent multiplayer spaceship duelling game, Stellar Impact, which you can play for free up to a point (the point at which you have to pay to unlock the later character-advancement possibilities of the game.) Annoyingly, the site died the last time I linked to it, but the game is so good that I wanted to make sure you guys had a chance to take another look. This is definitely one game that could do with a few more people playing it.

Shiny new trailer below.(more…)

It is a day, in part, for talking about old things made new. Lunar Flight is a modern take on Lunar Lander, which allows aspiring astropilots to undertake a full career, transporting cargo from moonbase to moonbase and gathering beacons scattered across the surface of the moon. Essentially, it’s a game that simulates using thrusters to control a tin-can in unfamiliar gravity, attempting to befriend the laws of physics even as they repeatedly plant your face in the lunar dust. All that would be just peachy if every slight nudge of the thrusters didn’t cause your dwindling fuel supply to…dwindle. Gaze at the trailer below.

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With Q.U.B.E. coming out on Friday and Dear Esther coming out in February, we thought it might be timely to talk to the sinister cabal of successful indies behind the Indie Fund. That’s the name of the non-publisher group that are financing these games, as well as the exciting heist game, Monaco. What are they up to? And what is so special about the indie games they are financing? We found out, below.

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