PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Streaming service Gaikai has finalized a deal to bring hardcore PC game demos to Facebook, following previous deals made with YouTube, Wal Mart and others. Gaikai said it has been working with Facebook for some time, and it sees this as a golden opportunity for both parties.

"Facebook already owns the category of casual gaming; we're going to help them own core games," founder David Perry said at Cloud Gaming Europe, GamesIndustry reports. "A click and boom, you're playing World of Warcraft."

Perry demoed World of Warcraft on Facebook, but later clarified to GameSpot that Gaikai "is NOT bringing WoW to Facebook (at least not in the foreseeable future)." Gaikai's approach to streaming games sees it in more of a marketing role than a game-provider, but introducing the Facebook audience to more hardcore opportunities shouldn't be a bad thing. Unless your mom starts sending you invites to join her guild page, "Massive Mamacitas."

Wikipedia and a few other sites around the Internet will be going under a blackout on Wednesday to protest SOPA, PIPA, and any other legislation that threatens to shut down parts of the Internet for the interests of a few in power. But shutting down for the day is a less creative way to go about it, so Ludum Dare has a better idea: Why not make some indie games instead?

The famous indie game competition is hosting a virtual game jam throughout the day, asking indie game developers (or anyone off from usual work) to make games inspired by the fight against SOPA. There are already a few submitted, and you can make and add your own, or see what other developers have done throughout the day. It's just a freeform jam, so there aren't any real prizes to be had, except that we all get some fun (or crazy, or hastily designed) indie games to play afterwards.

The #sopajam hashtag is being used to follow the conversation on Twitter, and at least one major indie developer has taken up the cause himself. Last time Notch jammed on a game it turned into a real Mojang release, so who knows what we'll get this time?

From 9am tomorrow morning, Rock, Paper, Shotgun will be blacked out in protest against SOPA and PIPA. The site will be gone, but for a single black page explaining why we’re doing this. And then Thursday morning we’ll be back. If you want to know why SOPA and PIPA are a problem serious enough for us to make a move like this (not a decision that tends to do wonders for your ratings, advertising, etc), read on, and watch the video below.

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It’s pretty exciting to already know one of your games of 2012, midway through January. And it’s always exciting to have a game that compels you to play the same levels over and over and over and over and over, despite the fact that it’s over two hours since you needed to go to bed, and your hands hurt from thumping your desk, because you have to get a bloody “S” on this level because… because you just do! That would be Dustforce.

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I dare someone to make a game not out of cubes. Not taking me up on that dare is Infernum, who have just announced their online buildy-shooter Brick-Force is taking sign-ups for its closed beta. Just what in Horace’s shiny toenails is Brick-Force? A trailer below will reveal.

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Next up in our series of chats with this year’s Independent Games Festival is Alexander Bruce, creator of ‘psychological exploration puzzle mind*crag*’ Antichamber, which is up for the Technical Excellence award. Here, he talks about competitions and conferences, being tired of alphas and unfinished games, and answers the most important question of all.(more…)

2012 is shaping up to be another strong year for gamers, with plenty of high and low profile titles to be excited about. We all know, however, that not every one of those games is going to fulfil its potential, or be the masterclass in game design we'd like it to be. In fact, a few of the games we...

Razer's Project Fiona looks just like you'd expect a prototype to look. Despite a thick but standard tablet-style body and 10.1 inch touchscreen, it has some unfinished aluminum struts sticking out of either side, with not-quite-perfect joysticks and buttons placed unceremoniously on the top. In short, it's a manufactured idea and not a real product just yet. And Razer's purpose at CES last week was to judge, reps told me, just how good that idea actually was.

Playing with the Project Fiona tablet doesn't feel quite right, but not because the games don't work. The Intel Core i7 processor powers a full Windows 7 installation (though it will eventually run Windows 8, says Razer), and the two prototypes at the show had full PC games on them, including the excellent Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. It ran quite well, but it was still difficult to play -- those joysticks and buttons just aren't fully in the right places. My thumbs did find and learn to use them after a few minutes of play, but it's unclear why, when Razer is already borrowing the "console controller" setup, the buttons are so strangely placed.

After about twenty minutes of handling and playing with Project Fiona, I came to the biggest question about the prototype: Why?

Last week there were a couple of games that brought up the question of what actually counts as a game. One of them shouldn’t have, because it turned out to be a passing ice-cream truck. The other was Katawa Shoujo, which occasionally teetered on the edge of that which people were willing to tolerate – that a reviewer could be bored by a slightly creepy visual novel about dating definitely-not-underage-at-all disabled girls without being some kind of illiterate, word-hating dunce. Which obviously John is, but that’s not the point. Luckily, you can now enjoy that experience in a brand new form – one in which you occasionally get to press some buttons.

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Elevators, or as we Brits call them, dangleboxes, get a fair showing in gaming. Very few FPS titles will let you reach their final bossmonster without having had at least one go on the world’s slowest ride, giving you a moment’s pause, before they inevitably shudder to a halt as you’re ripped out of the side of the building by something with more tentacles than manners. But until now (to my knowledge at least, inevitable person who knows of a game on the Amiga) they’ve yet to receive a game dedicated just to them. And that’s what we have in the Half-Life 2 mod, Elevator: Source. YES.

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Around a year after the fascinating, sinister but divisive saga of schooling, sex, duplicity and privacy infringement that was Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, Christine Love is to release a fully-fledged sequel to her breakthrough game Digital: A Love Story. It’s called Analogue: A Hate Story but despite the inverted title aesthetically it has more in common with Don’t Take It Personally. It’s a semi-non-linear visual novel concerning mystery, transhumanism, traditional marriage, loneliness, and cosplay. Building on the Chan-fuelled ideas that informed her earlier work, then, plus, from its description, there’s a vague air of System Shock to it…(more…)

Any drivers willing to put their hands in their pockets as well as pedals to the metal can now get hold of the rFactor 2 beta. It’s been out for a few days, so you can check the forums to see how series fans think it’s shaking out and if it’s worth taking an early punt on.

But how advanced a simulation can you expect? Sexy rubber-on-road action follows…

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A flicker of good news. The White House has come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act, recognising that it significantly threatens the freedoms of Americans (and indeed the rest of the world, but they haven’t heard about us yet). This means it’s temporarily shelved, while the discussion continues. Unfortunately, it’s sister act, PIPA, hasn’t gone anywhere. There is still much work to be done. Cheers, PC Gamer.

And frankly, I’m disgusted by the number of publishers who couldn’t be bothered to get back to us or Joystiq regarding their position.

Want to help market a company’s game server scaling technology set a world record for the simple fun of it? Man vs Machine kicks off on January 29th, with the goal of bringing 1000 players and a hell of a lot of spider monsters into one epic 24 hour battle.

Trailer and more information about what to expect follows, just as long as our server hasn’t already joined the Machine side and decided to make this the first strike against humanity, in which case death, destruction and a lifetime of mining ore in the slave mines await.

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“The PC giants have stopped innovating” claimed Razer boss Min-Liang Tan to Kotaku recently. What he meant, of course, was that Razer’s own projects such as tablet PC/wrestling machine Project Fiona offer the experimental design the Dells and HPs of this world should be pursuing. Fiona’s unveiling seemed to result in a planet-wide raised eyebrow, but I love that it’s happening even if I think it’s doomed, and I certainly don’t disagree that there’s an awful lot more that could be done with the humble PC.(more…)

Last week we celebrated CD Projekt RED’s decision to back down from the practice of demanding cash settlements from alleged pirates. The gambit, that subverts the legal process of innocent until proven guilty, and is based on threatening people with spurious lawsuits with only flimsy, unreliable IP evidence, has been condemned on many occasions, and when tried in the UK led to some rapid backtracking. Many have viewed it as extortion, frightening people into paying fees in the region of €800 in order not to have to go to court to prove their innocence or argue against the notion of piracy equating to lost sales. And as TorrentFreak revealed yesterday, it’s something being done by a huge proportion of the publishing industry.

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Next in our series of chats with this year’s impressive roster of Independent Games Festival finalists is Tom Francis, lead brain behind future-noir stealth game Gunpoint, which is up for the Excellence In Design gong. Here, he’s quizzed about what, why, when, who and the most important question of all.

Important conflict of interest disclosure: I used to play badminton with Tom.(more…)

Rumours wildly frothed out of the internet this weekend regarding the financial peril of THQ. This chap, an IGDA fellow, said that Vigil’s Warhammer 40k MMO had been cancelled. He went to explain that the cost would be beyond the current wallet of the troubled company, and that it had also returned its Disney licence. GamesIndustry also has anonymous sources claiming that the in-development MMO is for sale. Newschums VG247 have picked up a contradictory statement from THQ Australia, which states: “THQ has not cancelled its 2014 line-up, and has not made any decisions regarding the planned MMO.”

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It's the first IGN AU Pubcast for 2012 - the triumphant return of our distinctly Aussie take on the traditional podcast, blending our love of gaming with beer and toilet humour, plus a liberal dose of intelligent debate...

Alex Horton, an ex-Rockstar animator and designer whose resume includes Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Red Dead Revolver, is now Chief Creative Officer at Jagex, the Cambridge developer most known for its free-to-play MMO RuneScape. Horton's position allows him oversight on the creative direction of every project in development at Jagex, and it's his responsibility to "ensure all of our games achieve their true mass market potential," according to CEO Mark Gerhard.

We give it three months before Horton's mental facilities are questioned due to his propensity towards conversing with dust-specks. What's that? Different Horton? Oh, this guy should be fine then.

Sundays! Sundays are for grand victory on the field of battle! The smell of smoke and blood in your nostrils, the knowledge of having trampled the bones of your nemesis. Yes, Sundays are for the champions who write their own history. But are these some of those? Let’s find out…

• This piece by MMO designer Raph Koster fascinated me. It asks “Is immersion a core game virtue?” and then decides that “Immersion is not a core game virtue.” Regardless of how nebulous a concept “immersion” actually is, I find it totally unconvincing, as it seems to be a piece of writing about Raph’s perception of where games are as a medium, and I am not sure that I agree. “Immersion does not make a lot of sense in a mobile, interruptible world. It comes from spending hours at something. An the fact is that as games go mainstream, they are played in small bites far more often than they are played in long solo sessions. The market adapts — this reaches more people, so the budgets divert, the publishers’ attention diverts, the developers’ creative attention diverts.” But personally I only see what Raph is talking about here as diversification, not an overall change. The kind of games (and resulting imaginative engagements) Raph is talking about are not gone, there’s just a lot of other noise, too. I think he’s making a mistake of following trends in the market and seeing that as the whole picture.

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Hello youse,

Welcome to my first column of the year, and in time-honoured games website tradition I’ll be using it to write a list of some sort. It will be a list, and it will be a list detailing my favourite games of 2011. I will even list them in order of preference, culminating in one itemised entry that I will declare the “winner”, in a sense. Indeed, I will call this column THE CARDBOARD CHILDREN GAME OF THE YEAR 2011, and invite you all read it.

I will invite you all to read it below.(more…)

Yeah, so, at about 1pm a couple of people sent me a link to Kingdom Rush, a polished and artfully constructed browser-based tower defence game, and I’ve only just managed to tear away my mesmerised eyes from the screen to scribble something about it. I don’t know what it is about the TD formula, but I find it unspeakably compelling. That’s got to be wrong. Right? Anyway.

Okay, looks like RPS is Top-Down RPG News today, because I’m just going to point you at indie RPG Wanderlust, which is a neat little game in the spirit of early Zelda/Secret Of Mana and so on. It can be played single player or co-operatively online, which is a hell of a feature set for a little game like this, and it seems to be a remarkable labour love overall. There’s a free trial version with the first few chapters of the game for you to play which you can download here. Definitely worth a look if you are inclined towards such tremendous pixel-art cuteness.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything from charming-looking top-down Indie RPG Driftmoon (made by the Notrium team), but now there’s stuff happening. The gang send word that they’ve blogged about what’s going on with their latest bit of development, and have released a trailer, which you can see below. There’s going to be a demo soon, they report, and you can of course already get access to the game with a pre-order. And I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few people don’t do that, at least if they had some of the brain written over by a certain era of 16-bit home computing, anyway. Go take a look!(more…)

Lewie’s gone. He’s gone, and he’s left us behind. We’re the SavyGamer B Team of Will and Tony, and we cover for him whenever he’s off somewhere, too busy. Now, he’s too busy for his friends. He’s gone down south and left us behind, and we have to clear up his mess. Oh, sure, he’ll be back next week with his checked shirts and his Lambrini, having gone full native. But we’re still here. The last hope from outside the M25, the last voice of sense. You’d have thought his bargain bone would have kept him away from the higher cost of living. But no, he’s gone, and he’ll forget about us. All about us. Us back home.(more…)

We've got the final list of IGF Student Showcase finalists:

• The Bridge (Case Western Reserve University)
• Dust (Art Institute of Phoenix)
• The Floor Is Jelly (Kansas City Art Institute)
• Nous (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
• One and One Story (Liceo Scientifico G.B. Morgagni)
• Pixi (DigiPen Institute of Technology - Singapore)
• The Snowfield (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
• Way (Carnegie Mellon University, Entertainment Technology Center)

Of the nearly 300 entrants, these eight were selected to move on to the final stage of the Independent Games Festival. Each receive a cash prize of $500, simply for being selected as finalists. They'll be playable on the show floor at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, where one will win the top prize of $3,000.

The Ver. 2012 balance update for Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition has been available on consoles and in arcades since early December. PC fighters have had to make due with vanilla SSF4AE and all of the problems that came with it. Thankfully, it looks like a solution is right around the corner. Better late than never, right?

Capcom hopes to have the Ver. 2012 update ready for the PC version of SSF4AE by the end of February, according to an announcement made on Capcom Unity by a dog in a wig. Further information will be announced "in the coming weeks," so we'll just have to wait; something PC fighting game fans have become quite accustomed to over the years.

A Top 10 PC Games of 2012 list was recently published on IGN, and I noticed quite a few comments complaining that most of the games were multiplatform. So here you go, a list of games that will only be available on PC. The list below is very far from comprehensive, but includes many games currently expected to be released in 2012. Some titles, like Diablo III, might show up on other platforms, but for now are PC exclusives...

This multiplayer video for Dustforce showcases the game's local King of the Hill mode, in which a janitor battles a leaf man for control of platforms. How anyone ever managed to make a game about sweeping seem so interesting is beyond us, but there you go.