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Cube World looks more interesting every time I see it and we’re well past the point now where it’s necessary to mention Minecraft in the first sentence of every post about the game. Of course, I’ve gone and done it anyway in a gesture of shooing impatience and that probably makes me part of the problem. The solution is the latest trailer, which shows the ‘improved combat’ but also gives more glimpses of environments that cuboid characters will be chopping their way through. Looting and levelling seem far more important than carving and crafting, and the use of destructible scenery in the troll fight at the end seems a fantastic way to mark the aftermath of an epic clash.

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So I’ve not had a chance to play this yet, but there’s a good chance that the recently-release Star Prospector demo might be up the space-lane of a few of you. It’s a sort of RTS/RPG mix that developers Cryptstone describe like this: “The player takes on the role of a prospector, a one-person mining, salvage, and construction unit, taking on missions on remote planets across the galaxy in search of resources, technology, and adventure… The 100 missions in Star Prospector are randomly generated (including story centric missions). A random seed is used to create a unique galaxy every time the player creates a new profile.” I’ve posted the trailer below, so you can glimpse a bit of the world-exploring activity that the game entails, and if that intrigues you can download the demo here.(more…)

It seems nonsensical to propose that a bingo-based game could be copied, but in the case of Buffalo Studios' Bingo Blitz and Zynga's Zynga Bingo, the evidence is rather clear. "We wanted to alert you to the striking similarities between Zynga's recently announced game, to our game Bingo Blitz," Buffalo Studios VP of product marketing and operations Salim Mith told Venture Beat. Mith also offered a cheeky visual letter addressed to the Facebook game publishing giant, comparing images of Bingo Blitz to those of Zynga Bingo to highlight the similarities (seen in full after the break).

The letter comes just five days after Tiny Tower dev NimbleBit created a similar visualization to address what it perceived as a copy of its building management sim in Zynga's Dream Heights. Zynga has yet to respond to copycat allegations from either NimbleBit or Buffalo Studios, but it's also possible that the publisher simply can't hear the complaints over the din of its coffers being filled.

Instructions: “be a cat.” This is all you need to know about VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh’s free and cannily-named mini-MMO, ChatChat. Go on, be a cat. Do what cats do (bum-licking not included, mercifully). Hang around with other cats in the way that cats do, i.e. doing your best to ignore them with barely-concealed hostility. Catch mice. Leave dead mice as gruesome offerings to your owner. Be completely unmoved by the discovery of treasure, because if treasure doesn’t run away, scream and bleed, what possible use is it to you?(more…)

Okay, let me say up front that RPS is running a Perpetuum corporation. If you want to try out some sandbox MMO robo-action you should grab the 15-day trial from here and join the chat channel “RPS” in-game. With that over, let’s talk about what’s happened in our first month in this peculiar little MMO, the trials and tribulations of brutal PvP, and our first significant victory.

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Deep trailer voice: “In a world where the choice between life and death is as thin as a blade of grass balanced on the edge of a knife seen through a pair of binoculars held the wrong way, a king can be dethroned in the blink of a hummingbird’s eye when it gets a bit grit stuck in there. RPS presents the new intro to The Witcher II Enhanced Edition…”(more…)

Here’s a clever wee indie FPS we somehow missed last year, but now it comes accompanied with the news that a full-blown remake is on the way. I’m going to say a few words to you. Let’s see how you feel about them.

World War 1. Dinosaurs.(more…)

Renegade-X is a reworking of the original, awful Command & Conquer: Renegade, Westwood’s ambitious FPS with RTS acne. I’m downloading the just released short single-player preview, “Operation Black Dawn”, from the official torrent, and we’ll make brain thinks into words about its UDK-based goodness another day. In the meantime, here’s the download link and video, strategically placed below.(more…)

Next up in our series of chats with this year’s Independent Games Festival finalists is Mike Treanor and Josh McCoy from the UC Santa Cruz team behind ambitious high school-based social simulation/strategy game Prom Week – which is in the running for the Technical Excellence gong at IGF 2012. Here, they talk flirting, ‘social physics’, bathrooms and their answer to the most important question of all.(more…)

Guttenberg! Yes, it's the IGN AU Pubcast - the world's leading podcast on all things Police Academy... and gaming, movies, dolphin love... you know the drill by now! This episode, we continue our 'Police Academy Watch' with a live update from the Police Academy stunt show at Warner Bros. Movie Wo...

Warning: This is only for gamers that have finished the first two Mass Effect games and all the Dragon Age content released to date. Major spoilers ahead! BioWare wants you to choose. Throughout the course of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, your Commander Shepard has no doubt made some pretty hairy ...

Sundays are for waking up the heart of ancient Oxford, having sucked the knowledge out of thirty PhD students the night before, and leaving them useless husks as you grow only more powerful. Also, it is for compiling internet lists of useful reading material on the important topic of computer games! Hooray!

• Over on Eurogamer Mr Cobbett asks why the games industry is afraid of failure: “It says something about modern games that BioShock Infinite has been able to make headlines by adding a special “1999 Mode” where your in-game decisions will actually matter…. Where normally you’ll be able to jack-of-all-trades your way through most situations, here – supposedly – everything will be a trade-off. n short, it’s being set up as a mode that’s not afraid to let you fail – and that’s practically unheard of these days.”

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If you love games of chance and stamping cards but hate being around the elderly, know that Zynga is working on a solution for your extremely specific and worryingly ageist dilema. Zynga Bingo has begun beta testing and will be made available to the general public "very soon," according to Shacknews.

The app will join Zynga Poker as part of the Zynga Casino suite and will allow players to score on up to six cards, as well as fill in spots on friends' cards. There will also be power-ups of some kind, which is where we expect to find Zynga's trademark monetization, although that's purely speculation on our part. We also expect Zynga Bingo to post "BINGO!" on your friends' walls every time you win, but we desperately hope we're wrong about that.

The Internet’s Leigh Alexander gave us her take on visual novel, Katawa Shoujo.

It’s with a mix of amusement and chagrin I admit my career as a game journalist might well have never taken off if it weren’t for the erotic visual novel genre. Some of my earliest writing explored the “weirdest” games I could find – bunny girl dating sims, teenage girl “training/raising” games, brutally sexual supernatural murder mysteries, and stuff like that, and I think my work was recognized fairly early on in my development as a writer just because I was pouring so many words onto stuff no one else would touch.

I put “weird” in quotes, by the way, because I actually tasked myself with understanding and explicating them. And when you do that, these games don’t actually seem all that weird. What else would a niche, shut-in audience of otaku want but a gameplay experience that blends anime porn tropes with emotional simulations of human drama – without any possibility of becoming stuck or frustrated, since visual novels are indeed more “story” than “game”?(more…)

Whilst we were down in the RPS dungeon, thrashing kobolds for copper pieces, we stumbled upon a group of MMO developers coming the other way through the Underdark. Sitting down by the light of our magic auras, we made a nice cup of elf-leaf and talked to Fernando Paiz, Executive Producer on Dungeons & Dragons Online (married to Kate Paiz, the executive producer on Lord Of The Rings Online) and Adam Mersky, Communications Director of Turbine. These bold adventurers in online gaming had much to report about about DDO’s history, the first DDO expansion, and the mysterious emanations coming from upcoming releases. (more…)

If only you could talk to the monsters. Now that would be something. So, why not ask our resident agony aunt-monster Ian Cacodemon for advice and tips on anything you need help with? Ian awaits your queries on Twitter here or via email here, and will post selected replies on RPS on a semi-regular basis.

This week, Ian offers guidance on chainsaws tidying, magazines, imp-cacodemon relations and dodgy Nigerian investment deals.(more…)

Here’s your cheap games for this fine weekend. We’ve got games about shooting things, games about telling little men to shoot things, and even games not about shooting things. All bases covered then. For cut priced games pumped into your browser windows around the clock, SavyGamer.co.uk is the website you’re looking for. Bucket go!(more…)

Blue notes that Firebase’s exquisite scrolling shooter Orbitron: Revolution is making its way to the PC system for explosions and fun times. There’s no date yet, but the devs boasts that they have the PC version running at 60fps at 1920×1080. That is moderately fast! Like an elite frame-rate making game thing, or something. What? It is early on Saturday. Look: Orbitron: Revolution, which has already appeared on the console boxes for some reason, is a very pretty curved Defender/Uridium sort of thing going on. Those are things we like.

Ludocraft send word that they have opened the shop for Air Buccaneers HD, allowing you to get permanent access to the alpha and all the builds beyond that. They are also following a “benefactor” (ie Kickstarter) model which allows you to contribute more for some additional bonuses and early adopted stuff that won’t be obtainable later on by anyone.

There’s a new version of the alpha up, too. We’ll get an RPS server set up for this next week. Trailer belowdecks!(more…)

Here is where you find download links and a video for a brilliant game that took me just over five minutes to complete. It’s a two-button scenery-dodger in which the scenery is a succession of angry shapes and forward motion is impossible to halt. It’s called The Cat That Got The Milk and I feel like it contains colours I’ve not seen on my monitor for ages. It’s an interactive art gallery of sorts, in the least masturbatory way. If you enjoy the nifty soundtrack, it’s available for free here. The game is free as well. Download for Windows here or for Mac here.

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Here at Joystiq, we pride ourselves on being inside your mind, knowing what it wants, knowing what it thinks. We're like a somewhat creepier, less linguistic Babel Fish. The one thing your brain has been demanding is an updated version of 2002's Command & Conquer: Renegade.

We'd like to bring to your attention Renengade X: Black Dawn, a "spiritual successor" created by fans at Totem Arts. Tomorrow, the group will release the full single-player "mini-campaign," which was built in the Unreal Development Kit, and later Totem Arts plans to release a new multiplayer installment using the UDK.

In its current form, Renegade X is an updated version of the original game's multiplayer, made in Unreal Tournament 3, and has been playable for some time. If you want to partake, you'll need to own a copy of Unreal Tournament 3 with the latest updates.

Or, you know, just wait a day.

[Thanks, ssjChris!]C&C: Renegade remake Renegade X: Black Dawn deploys tomorrow

Yesterday morning, Juho Salila went to work as usual, expecting to streamline the graphics and build a few monsters for Legend of Grimrock, Almost Human's imminent dungeon crawler. He sat down, booted up his computer, and noticed the Grimlock site had crashed multiple times throughout the night due to traffic overload, and his inbox was inundated with new emails.

Hours earlier, Reddit user meandertal had posted this screencap from the Almost Human blog, highlighting a fan's question about the inclusion of on-screen arrows in Grimlock. That wasn't currently an option, programmer Petri Häkkinen said, asking the fan why he wanted to know. "I'm disabled and use a mouth stick for typing," he responded, saying he'd adapt to the existing controls and couldn't wait to play the game.

Two and a half hours later, Häkkinen posted this:

The fan was blown away -- and so were the Redditors who read meandertal's post.

"When we got our inbox open, we almost couldn't believe our eyes; it was just pouring with encouraging emails," Salila told Joystiq. "All these people writing in saying thanks and wishing us good luck, just like in the mountain of comments on Reddit.

"For us it was a rather simple thing to implement, but we couldn't imagine that it could mean so much to somebody else. It kind of gives you perspective on life itself."

Have you ever met a person? EW! People are hairy, covered in limbs, and sometimes they try to talk to you about taxes. Dreadful. But fortunately, thanks to the latest technology created by RPS Laboratories Incorporated, we’ve invented the perfect way to meet actual real people who never talk to you about taxes! (The are still hairy and limby – we’re working on that.) It’s the RPS Social Club, and it’s meeting tomorrow! To be a part of this, it’s happening in London, at The Blue Posts, from 6pm to midnight. You can find out more details on the forum.

You may remember Pineapple Smash Crew as the game that reminded us of Alien Breed, Cannon Fodder and other fun things. It was our pick of the indie games at the Eurogamer Expo last year and today Rich Edwards sends news that all the explodey jollity is coming to Steam on February 2nd, with a Desura release also in the works. For more of our thoughts on the game and an interview with Rich click here, or watch the trailer below and bop along merrily to the music within.(more…)

If only Monaco Is Mine was being developed at the pace this video demonstrated. We’d all be heisting together, instead of picking at every little crumb of development info the haughty team tosses our way. What you’re about to watch is a time-lapse in which a single-player level built, and therefore is totally spoiled for educational purposes. Dare you click the link? I think you’re chicken. Buckaww!(more…)

Today in our series profiling (almost) all the PC/Mac-based finalists at this year’s Independent Games Festival, we turn to wondrous freeform exploration game Proteus. Here, developer Ed Key and composer David Kanaga talk about the game’s origins, the role of music in games, quitting work to go full time on Proteus, wandering hobos and their answers to the most important question of all. (more…)

Dave Perry is the sometime creator of MDK and now CEO of Gaikai, the streaming game provider. He thinks his tech is going to take over PC Gaming; because he’s got his hands on one of those Molyneux Inc. Reality Distortion Fields, he’s VERY persuasive. We caught up with him at the superbly-stimulating Cloud Gaming Summit in London to talk about Gaikai, inspiration in game design, why Battlefield games are awesome, and a few other topics that might interest you.(more…)

Filed under: PC, Retro, Adventure, First Person Shooters, Online, RPGsThis is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
Hey there. Whatcha playing? No, actually, don't tell me. You're playing Ultima. You don't know you're playing Ultima, but you are. If you're playing an open-world game, you're dealing with Ultima. If you're playing a massively-multiplayer game, you're dealing with Ultima. If you'replaying a game with a morality system, Ultima. Even something as simple as three-dimensional graphics - either in perspective or overall representation - have ties to Ultima. How?

Open-world gaming: From the beginning, the Ultima games took place in worlds which were as big as possible given the tech constraints. You traveled across swamps, oceans, and hills, discovering what the world had to offer. The world was rarely "gated", letting exploration proceed in a non-linear fashion. What's more, the developments of open-world gameplay throughout the course of the series presaged the open-world games to come.

Ultima VI (1990) may be the most important open-world game of all time. Previous games in the series had switched perspective based on your context - dungeons were first-person, combat was top-down, and exploration on the world map had a completely different scale than exploration of towns. In Ultima VI, perspective was consistent. Your party walked into a town in the same way that it walks through a dungeon. It was a seamless, consistent world, that felt lived-in, and that open-world games from Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim owe a huge debt to.

The deeper into the series you go, the more complex the world. Want to quit adventuring for a while and bake bread? You could do that. Want to explore dungeons that are totally irrelevant to the plot? That was an option. Grab a cannon and start slaughtering guards so you can steal everything in the town? Well, you could do that, but there were consequences.

Astonishing! RPS is hiring again. We’re looking for a committed and energetic news writer. This is a full-time, paid position. We pay reasonably well, too, although the exact salary will depend on your experience and ability. As RPS news writer you will be responsible for news-posting aspects of RPS five days a week, under the supervision of the existing team. You will be expected to communicate directly with developers and publishers about their news-making games. If you can’t pick up the phone and use Jedi mind-tricks on a PR, then this job is not for you. To put yourself forward for this position please email us here with a CV and a 200-word example of your ability to a write a concise, moderately amusing article on a current gaming news topic. Other links to previous news-length work will also bolster your application.

Applications must arrive in our inbox by the 20th of February 2012.

It’s quite warm here this morning for the first time in days and I was dangerously close to enjoying the sun’s gentle caress, which would be a terrible betrayal of mistress moon. Thankfully I keep a stock of chilly and chilling games behind glass for just such an eventuality and today I’ve broken out The Snowfield, from brainy chaps at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, whose output we’ve covered previously. This third-person adventure runs in browsers through the magic of Unity and it’s quite conventional to play in some ways, though shot through with atmospheric and narrative weirdness. Best to play it rather than listen to me, or read a little more in the icy depths below.

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