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Religion and espionage return to the Civilization series when the fifth installment receives the "Gods & Kings" expansion before the summer solstice.

The expansion includes 27 new units, 13 new buildings and nine new Wonders. There's also nine new civilizations, including Carthage, the Netherlands and the Celts. Along with two new types of city-states: mercantile and religious.

Scenarios include the medieval period, the fall of the Rome and the (very cool sounding) Empires of the Smoky Skies, "a Victorian science-fiction scenario."Oooh!

Most importantly, however, is the return of religion and the salvation or subjugation of the populace through its means. As players enter the Renaissance, spies can be unlocked to change the course of history through surveillance, theft and the always good fun of a coup. Sounds like a missed opportunity for an Assassin's Creed crossover if you ask us.

I just got Chloe a date with Doug, and now I’m manipulating the emotions of a high-school Prom judge. This is sick. Prom Week’s plots are raging, emotional torrents of cruelty, humiliation and, if you’re inclined, affection. If you’re old enough to look back on youth as a learning experience, making a teenager insult someone so their enemy becomes your friend has that horrible air of familiarity to it, but one that you can eventually (hopefully) look back on as an ugly fact of life. I like Prom Week, but there are times when its social strategy just made me feel bad about myself.(more…)

Good day, children. Did you do your homework like I asked? You didn’t!? You urinated on your homework and then pinned it to the door of a church in a send-up of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses? How very punk. A gold star for you! Oh, look. You’ve eaten your gold star as an angry criticism of society’s hackneyed educational system of reward and punishment. Excellent! Have another gold star. You’ve eaten it again. I see. Right. No, I get it.

Regardless of whether you disobeyed my instructions (MAKE A GAME) many commenters left a lot of valuable feedback for me to ponder. We’ll be talking about some of those issues as we go but first here’s one from JackShandy that was particularly prophetic:(more…)

At this rate, everybody will soon see their favourite developer starting some kicks or kicking some starters. Brian Fargo, creator of Wasteland, the game that launched a thousand Fallouts, has espied the queue of well-regarded figures approaching their adoring audience cap in hand and is now seeking a cap of his own. It’ll be a comically large bit of headwear as he wants to cram at least a million dollars into it, which is the estimated cost of funding a Wasteland sequel. The game would be a PC release, with, according to the man’s own Twittertalk, a “complete old school vibe and made with input from gamers. Made the gamers way.” The gamers way often involves eating Wotsits until dawn but perhaps there are other ways and other gamers?

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Posting on the Capcom-Unity blog, producer Derek Neal revealed that development on the PC version of the SSFIV Arcade Edition Ver. 2012 update is currently coming to a close. Capcom hopes to have the update out on February 28, though nothing is set in stone.

The Arcade Edition Ver. 2012 update has been available on consoles since December, and implements balance tweaks across a multitude of characters. The changes have been well documented, so study up if you're looking for immortality in the streets.

The first of the promised updates from inside the Fortress of Double Fine, regarding their Kickstarter funded adventure game, has arrived. True to to his word, Tim Shafer waves his sausage, warts and all, in your face with the lumpen, verruca vulgaris covered information there will be additional platforms like Mac, Linux, and handhelds, the game will have English voice-acting, and the text will be in English, French, Italian, and Swedish Spanish. These are all because of the overwhelming generosity of me, because I just donated the minimum amount possible. And it’ll be DRM-free. I’m sat with my fingers laced together under my chin, staring dreamily at my monitor. Join me?(more…)

Calling for the internet to stop hyping his offer to fund the imaginary sequel, Notch said: ““The budget for doing a Psychonauts 2 is three times higher than my initial impression.” He went to insist that while emails had been exchanged and meeting at GDC was happening, “I have no idea if this is actually going to happen.” He also explained that he would be looking at the project purely as a monetary adventure: “I wouldn’t want to have any creative input in the game. It would be purely a high risk investment in a project I believe in.”

Does this mean that Pat’s trousers really aren’t on the menu? Only time will tell.

‘Twas just a few days past that I had a chat with Robin Florin of Zeal Game Studio, the folks behind Paradox’s forthcoming game about dwarves, A Game Of Dwarves. The game seems to be a mixture of the old Bullfrog games and, well, a rather more recent experiment in dwarf simulation, and certainly warrants deeper investigation. I asked Mr Florin about what he was actually trying to do in a game where dwarves dig deep, and build shiny things.(more…)

One week is all the Mojang crew are taking to crank out an all-new game. What will it be? Your guess is as good as ours...

Apparently all gaming news must now be released at 5.03pm, when I’m trying to make my tea. One of 900 emails that just arrived in the same minute includes news of ShootMania Storm, the new game from Nadeo, they of TrackMania fame. As the title somewhat suggests, it’s an FPS, and as it doesn’t, it’s an online multiplayer that will apparently be made with the same ethos as their arcade racers. And it seems it’s one of two new games from the team, the other being Questmania, their approach to an RPG. Blimey.

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Shine the Tim Stone light onto the clouds! (It’s the shape of a tank with wings.) The sequel to 2009′s Combat Wings: Battle Of Britain, this time expanding to Combat Wings: The Great Battles Of World War II (maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think the battles were that great) has a fancy new trailer, and ten completely gorgeous screenshots. It’s out in March, and it appeals to my eyes.

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This could only be better if it was a secret game from Valve and Bioware, but there’s very little proof that either of them have anything to do with Hatoful Boyfriend, a game about the complex relationships of pigeons in a boarding school. Haughty doves sneer at lowly sky-rats at St. Pigeonation Institute in this Japanese interactive novel. About pigeons. You might have tried the demo that Alec gesticulated towards a few months ago, but now the the full, official English translation is out, for $5.35.(more…)

Have you ever played a third-person shooter and thought, “Well, this is all well and good, but why isn’t it underwater?!” before screaming and throwing your property out the window? Put down that hatstand, because there’s a demo for Deep Black: Reloaded. And it features jet packs and harpoons.

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Today in our series of interviews with (almost) all the finalists in this year’s Independent Games Festival, it’s the turn of DIY narrative-building game Storyteller, from the creator of lovely curios Today I Die and I Wish I Were The Moon. Storyteller is nominated for the Nuovo award. Here, Ludomancy’s Daniel Benmergui talks Argentine game dev, how Storyteller creates a unique comic based upon your in-game decisions, and answers the most important question of all. (more…)

So. You might recall that I asked what the hell was going on in the last Air Buccaneers HD trailer. Ludocraft have taken some time to explain: “The Last Song of Väinämöinen is the most devastating weapon of mass destruction ever seen in video gaming history. The player can summon the Old God, Väinämöinen, to the battlefield. Once summoned Väinämöinen ascends onto the battlefield and starts to play the Last Song with his Kantele (Traditional Finnish instrument.) made from the jawbone of giant pike. As Väinämöinen plays his song, the crust of the earth shatters, trees burst into flames, rivers boil away and ultimately the whole universe collapses on itself. And then there’s only silence.”

Okay then!

Zynga's 2011 financial report is chock full of unexciting numbers (we'll get to them in a moment, if that's your kind of thing), but it does contain a few interesting morsels. For instance, Zynga completely owned the top five most played games on Facebook -- according to daily active user numbers -- refuting a report from Facebook late last year which fudged the numbers to bizarre effect.

The company dominated Facebook's annual game charts with 54 million of the approximately 800 million users playing Zynga games every single day in Q4 (roughly 4.25 million fewer than Zynga's annual average DAUs). And those users were buying up enough microtransacted goods to earn Zynga $1.07 billion solely online for the entirety of 2011, with a total of $1.14 billion earned in revenue for the year.

Now here's the bad news: despite earning over $1 billion in 2011, the company ended up with a net loss for the year of $404.3 million. According to the quarterly financials press release, Zynga paid out $510 million for "stock-based compensation expense for restricted stock units issued to employees" -- compensation it didn't have to pay until the company went public. The company's stock is currently trading $4.35 north of its introductory $10 price per share.

Happy Romantic Obligation Day! What a great feeling to wake up knowing that if I don’t behave in an out of the ordinary fashion, I won’t care for that special someone as much as I appeared to yesterday. To put everyone in the mood, here’s Forget Me Not Annie, a game in which a young girl hallucinates horribly, clutches to an imaginary friend for dear life and is the victim of assaults by the cracked porcelain dolls of a thousand nightmares. It’s free, built in the Unreal engine and has a teleportation device in the form of a sinister, mumbling teddy bear. What’s not to love? Apart from Enforced Affection day, of course. That’s not to love at all. Trailer below.

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As RPS is apparently having a bit of an Indie Tuesday, we’re short on big, sensationalist, hit-grabbing headlines today – so in desperation I thought I’d pen a load of them to see if we can reach 40 billion unique users a second. If one of these don’t immediately have you seeing a particularly bloody shade of red and penning a torrent of invective on your forum of choice, then you are… a well-balanced human being. Well done.(more…)

Terry ‘VVVVVV’ Cavanagh’s ultra-minimalist, abstract first-person co-op puzzler At A Distance is nominated for the Nuovo award at this year’s Independent Games Festival. As part of our seemingly infinite series in which we chat to (almost) all the finalists, Terry talks about the concept behind the game, what he’d like to see win at the IGF this year, his disappointment that the Pirate Kart didn’t get a nod, and his answer to the most important question of all.(more…)

I’m not sure where indie developers are getting their temerity from, but 2Dawn’s Ravaged is slotting into the space that Hawken occupies: ridiculously attractive online shooters that look like they’ve been made on a massive budget. Ravaged has touches of a post-apocalyptic Battlefield to it: vehicular combat across really big maps. From the ground to the sky, there’s a lot to admire: the vehicle handling looks fun and complex, and I want to fire those guns right now. I also like a developer willing to keep a Steam Friends notification in their video. It’s a moment that speaks to the gamer in all of us.(more…)

A massive update for alternate world simulator Dwarf Fortress just landed and, by the Sacred Caverns That Bristle With Features, it’s a big ‘un that has been eleven months in the making. I’ll list more below but for starters, it looks like Adventure mode has been guzzling down its vitamins, with cities now having more variety, tombs to explore, and better traps and abilities. As for Dwarf mode, let’s just say vampiric and lycanthropic infections and leave it at that, shall we? Oh, but there’s so much more. The temptation to begin a new chronicle is strong.

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Zynga is being sued again, but not for any of the reasons you're probably thinking of. Personalized Media Communications, an intellectual properties company that makes its living by licensing its plethora of patents to various technology companies, has filed suit against the social mogul, alleging that Zynga's headlining titles infringe upon four of its patents.

The patents in question cover a wide range of exceedingly vague situations, from "controlled access of media content" to "personalized content based on individual attributes" and "the use of control and information signals embedded in electronic media content to generate output for display that is personalized and relevant to a user."

If you're thinking "Well gosh, those sound like they could potentially apply to literally everything on the whole Internet," that's the whole point. After countless billable hours and several appeals, this will either end with Zynga signing a licensing agreement with PMC and paying a potentially substantial amount of back license fees determined by the court, or PMC's patents will be deemed as either inapplicable or too vague, at which point everyone goes home. Either way, some lawyers are getting paid.

The Game: Minotaur China Shop Genre: Insurance Scamming Mythical Animal Sim Platform: Browser (Unity) The Scoop: In Minotaur China Shop, gamers play as a minotaur that owns a china shop, naturally. The catch is that bumping into a piece of china triggers MINOTAUR RAGE. This happens a lot,...

In a somewhat fatalistic move, Blizzard has announced that you – you personally – will die. At some point, by accident or dreadful confluence of events, your body will cease to function, collapse, or possibly be run over by a train in a moment best described by taking a tube of toothpaste and squeezing it with the cap still on. Your friends and family will, hopefully, mourn you, as the carcass that was your vehicle through this cynical world is lowered into the ground, burned to ashes, or eaten by Welsh cannibals. Truly, we should take a moment to-

Oh, wait, they’re talking about Diablo 3′s difficulty modes.

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Chromophobic and filled with spikes, Here Comes Launchman looks like a cousin of VVVVVV, but now that developers The Layabouts have made an alpha demo available, it’s possible to defy that comparison by actually playing the game. It’s true that in the afternoon I’ve spent with it, more time than I care to remember has involved evaporating upon contact with tapering points of instant murder and I have at times been taken aback by a sudden shift of the entire colour palette, but where VVVVVV demanded precision and had controls tuned for such, Launchman has a more bouncy and loose approach to life (and death). See for yourself with the demo, or follow me to more words across the inconveniently placed gap below.

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A record of RPS’ ongoing adventures in robot-MMO, Perpetuum. To find us in-game grab the trial, and then find chat channel RPS.

So, we captured an outpost.(more…)

If there’s one thing better than tanks fighting it out, it’s tanks fighting it out for no reason other than because they are tanks. Let Tanks Be Tanks should be the subtitle of Cliffski‘s RTS, Gratuitous Tank Battles. Followed by three exclamation, because nothing says gratuitous than ‘!!!’. Even the sound in this video is gratuitous: Cliffski has recorded 7 minutes of the game playing, showing off his development tools that he’s choreographing the tank violence with. Unfortunately, the tanks are so loud that he had to set his mic up to compensate. This set off a tit-for-tat response with the game that ended up with his mic being declared a war crime. It’s loud, people.(more…)

The only bad thing about the newly released ICEnhancer 2.0 for GTA IV is the sense of sadness that a setting as beautiful as its recreation of New York will never be used again. Imagine the stories these streets could still have to tell, if not for our constant thirst for new worlds to conquer. Sigh. Anyway. As much as GTA IV was a system killer at release, you’ll need a system-killer-killer system to run this as nature intended – but it’ll give you one of the most beautiful games on PC if you can. If not, at least you can enjoy the vicarious thrills of this video. A new version is out soon that tones down some of the extra shiny in favour of a slightly more realistic look.

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Say a big, cheerful hello to Hookshot Inc, a new games journalism project from a UK journo supergroup. Will Porter (occasionally of this parish), world’s nicest man Christian Donlan (never of this parish, despite repeated requests to be so), the Guardian’s Keith Stuart and expert gaming curio-/story-finder Simon Parkin have ganged together to do what RPS has always hoped more of our peers would: found their own site, free from the agendas and interferences of any corporate overlords.

Hookshot Inc, which is unfortunately named after something from Zelda games but don’t hold that against it, aims to cover games that cost $15 or less, on any and all formats – phone, XBLA, those two-screened Nintendo thingies, PSN and, of course, PC. Wait a minute…

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Back when I was a whippersnapper, I wrote about a charming puzzler called A Virus Named TOM, which seemed a bit like a more excited Pipemania. I continue to be particularly excited by the multiplayer modes, which offer both competition and cooperation, and the possibility of combining the two by ruining a teammate’s day. The game is due out in March and pre-orders are now open, with a 50% discount off the final price of $10, access to the beta and, if the order is before Valentine’s Day (hurry!), an extra copy of the game. It’s not a gift, more of an infection. Isn’t that what Valentine’s Day is for? Or is that New Year’s Eve? I forget.

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