PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

I wonder whether I’d like I Saw Her Standing There more if I’d played it a few years ago. I worry that the sparse puzzle platform game with the bittersweet story has had its turn, and there needs to be more substance, or something new. Although I’ve a feeling it might also come down to ISHST falling short on the puzzle side of things. And yet, despite that, I still want to point you toward it, because dammit – it’s cute. You’re a stickman, and you’re in love with a zombie. The aim is to get her into a cage to stop her from killing you. Lovingly.

How many of ye scurvy dogs are ready for a new adventure? Today, KingsIsle Entertainment has officially revealed Pirate101, a new family-friendly MMO that builds on the immensely popular Wizard 101 universe. Set in the same world as Wizard101, the new game brings swashbuckling excitement as players take the helm of their very own pirate ships and pursue a storyline of epic adventure filled with intrigue and mystery...

Vlambeer’s trailer for Space Murder (below) suggests that the name is “still temp title” and I hope that’s not true, because the world needs a game called Space Murder. For now, at least, it has one, with Vlambeer releasing a flash prototype of their (previously abandoned) lo-fi space exploration game just here. Nothing all that special – a mixture of space exploration strategies and arena shooting – but it’s vaguely awesome to see the Super Crate Box team taking on the space game genre. I hope they choose to take it further. Go take a look. Some more info here.

Vlambeer’s next proper release for PC will be Luftrausers.(more…)

We mentioned just yesterday that Arcen’s open-world side-scroller had appeared on the digital distributions, but since then they’ve also put out a hefty demo. It’s a big old chunk of the game for you to try, with these limitations: “You cannot craft spells higher than tier 2, and you cannot leave the first continent.” I’d definitely recommend trying this – from my time with the beta I’d say that this is both an acquired taste, and also impossible to judge by appearances. Or even, perhaps, from people writing about it. But then I should not be saying that, should I? Send your eyes south of here for the launch trailer.(more…)

If it looks like Minecraft and builds (kind of) like Minecraft and – though I haven’t chewed it (yet) – presumably tastes a bit like Minecraft. So is it Minecraft? If we’re talking about “alleged lovechild of Minecraft and Fallout” RPG shooter 3079, then the answer’s a resounding “hardly.” Originally catapulted into the public eye via Indie Royale’s Alpha Bundle, the unabashedly lo-fi indie curiosity recently shed its beta tag and, in its place, donned a slightly heftier price tag. So, is 3079 worth your 2012 time and money? Depends on what you want out of a game purchase, really. Here’s wot I think.

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The Game: When Pigs Fly Genre: Incredibly Difficult (In a Good Way) Platformer Platform: Browser (Flash) The Scoop: When Pigs Fly developer Anna Anthropy was making super-hard frustration platformers way before games like Super Meat Boy made them cool. When Pigs Fly will kill you. A lot. ...

Fetch a clean change of underwear, possibly trousers too. Because I am about to announce to you the existence of a trailer for a game so thrilling, so world-changingly-exciting, that… oh wait, you already read the headline. It’s too late for you, and for your pants. You’re likely barely finished scrubbing after Craig informed you of Agricultural Simulator – Historical Farming’s existence last month. Get ready for more washing.

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How to describe what Salvation Prophecy might turn out to be? It’s tempting to invoke Space Rangers 2, with its simulated space sectors and changeable game world, as well as its clunky third person planetary assaults. Salvation Prophecy has four factions, space combat, planetside exploration and warfare, and what appears to be strategic fleet control. I’m not sure how freeform it is, the alien investigations in particular look like they are part of a rigid plot rather than an open galaxy strategy-RPG. Perhaps you’ll be able to discern more from the trailer below, which I thought was going to be artwork with stilted voiceover for a little while. And then the gameplay footage kicked in.

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I’m playing as many of the Ludum Dare games as I can before I do a full roundup of my favourites. There are more than a thousand though, which is a strong indicator of the spirit of the global indie community but a terrible thing for me because I can’t possibly play them all or I’ll wear my fingers down to nubs of bone. The theme was ‘Tiny World’, rich for invention, and I have to declare my love for one entry immediately. Memento, by Sébastien ‘deepnight’ Bénard is a beautiful miniature point and click adventure about memory. Visually, it’s like peering into the rooms of a lovingly crafted dollhouse. If you’ve seen any spectacular entries let me know in case I miss it and I’ll take a look.

Diablo 3's weekend beta went about as smoothly as a hamster in a ball rolling down an erupting volcano - which is to say it was completely normal for a high-profile beta test. Saturday saw a peak of 300,000 concurrent players, Blizzard community manager Micah Whipple (Bashiok) tweeted, reporting the full number of testers for the weekend was "a lot."

Testers reported login and server errors as early as Friday, and a few complaints centered on the skill UI and other tweakable usability issues. The beta hit its main points, allowing people to play the full demo, leveling their characters to 13 and fighting the Skeleton King. All testing data will be wiped and players will start fresh when Diablo 3 launches on May 15.

Were you looking the other way when the Diablo 3 open beta launched last weekend? I’m sorry. If reports are to be believed, the servers wobbled like a gyroscope at the end of a good spin, so you if you missed out you probably saved yourself from being teased by the title screen. There is some comfort to be had in the Witch Doctor overview video Blizzard have just released: it’s his life story and shows how he’ll turn NPCs against each other and launch flame-engulfed bats into the faces of those that cross him. Judging by the video beneath, that seems to be everyone.(more…)

Alan Wake's American Nightmare will soon manifest on PC, if you believe the notes written down in the Steam registry. Discovered by DSOGaming, the registry information reveals that Mr. Wake's latest adventure is on the path to a Steam launch - unless it's just the devious Mr. Scratch messing with PC gamers.

It's worth pointing out that the Steam registry is exactly how the first indications of the original Alan Wake making its way to PC came to light. The plot thickens.

Every so often – let’s say twice a day – somebody calmly reminds me that I wrote about a game at some point in the past and have failed to revisit in order to see how things have changed. Guilty as charged. Oddly that hasn’t happened in regards to Running With Rifles, the rather excellent indie squad shooter. It has more in common with Cannon Fodder than Call of Duty, but with a two-way battle that sways back and forth, the factions attempting to defend their own bases and launch attacks against their opponents’. It looks more pleasant now, with colours other than brown so that the fields of conflict don’t resemble the forlorn stains that indecorously decorate a broken man’s bedsit. Oh yeah, and there’s multiplayer too.

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Konami today has officially announced PES 2013, heralding it as a "whole new ball game"...

Uh-huh. Yep. Right, yeah. That. OK, OK, I’ll get to it in a second. Five more minutes, alright? Oh, sorry! I’m just practicing ignoring friends and loved ones, you see, because Vlambeer – they of everything from masterfully addictive Super Crate Box to spookily minimalist Yeti Hunter - have announced that they’re dusting off flash project Luftrauser for a full, completely pluralized release in the form of Luftrausers. Go ahead, try the browser-based bite of dogfighting bliss. I’ll wait. OK, now imagine that with full plane customization including “futuristic lasers” and… yep, you’re already ignoring me. Seems about right.

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What's three typos away from being a Pubecastle? The Pubcast! And much like a castle made out of pubes, this episode of the Pubcast is completely nonsensical and pretty feeble structurally. Also you might not be able to get through to the end of it without gagging...

After years of working on casual games, Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen is using Kickstarter to help launch her own studio – Pinkerton Road – which recently held a vote amongst contributors to decide its first project. That’s now going to be an adventure called Moebius, which you can read about here and add your pledge to to the pot. I caught up with her to talk about adventures, story, crazy fans, casual gaming and definitely not That Puzzle. (Much.)

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As it is only appropriate for the entire internet to point out, the ZX Spectrum is 30th years old today. (If you don’t count the ZX81, which apparently we don’t.) And so it further seems only appropriate to write a nostalgic piece remembering that rubber-keyed lovely. Except, well, I was four. And my memories of being four are mostly about Mr Men books. I remember one being in our house, I remember the rubber keys, but honestly, after that, I’ve no way to know if I’m just invented memories based on my far more acute recollections of the 128K that came out four years later. (Honestly, this is brilliant. I’m the oldest on RPS, and for once I get to feel too young.) So instead I’ve asked around. Asked old people.

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A hefty chunk of free-to-play or "freemium" gamers have spent real dinero on their hobby of choice, according to a new report from the NPD Group. An online survey conducted by the group determined that four out of ten free-to-play gamers have made an in-game payment of some kind. Males are more likely to make such purchases, though females are more likely to have played free-to-play titles.

The report contains a few other interesting tidbits. For one, those who make an in-game payment tend to do so within the first month of playing, and those who try free-to-play titles tend to keep playing them, with 84 percent continuing to play after first trying them. Among those who abandon free-to-play titles, men aged 13 to 34 are most likely, while women in general are more likely to stay.

Perhaps the most interesting (horrifying?) statistic: data for the survey was gathered from 6,416 respondents aged two and older. Please, keep your two-year-olds away from the smurfberries.

Be it Kickstarter, be it IndieGoGo, be it whatever new flavour of eBusking comes to pass, crowdsourced funding of indie games’ development is a remarkable and wonderful addition to this ever-changing industry. It will lead to great things, I am quite sure. But it does present a number of issues for the media – or at least for this particular site, whose loose remit is ‘post about what we’re personally interested in.’ Lately, that comes with an additional responsibility.

1) If we post about a Kickstarter project, we’re essentially implying our readers should donate to it.

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Upon a gentle breeze I hear the celebratory cheer of a multitude of beta testers, for it is they who have helped Arcen Games to bring A Valley Without Wind to the verge of release. The procedurally generated sidescrolling explorathon with graphics more divisive than an actual valley, or even a yawning chasm, has been updated and altered a huge amount since Jim ventured into an early beta. Today, it’s all grown up and ready to launch on Steam and “all [Arcen's] existing partners for the game”. To prove it, there’s an actual launch trailer below.

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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, Australian development team Kumobius adds a little Latin flavor to its gaming experience with Bean's Quest.
What's your game called and what's it about?

Bean's Quest: It's a retro platformer for iPhone, iPad, Mac and PC. In the game you play a man who's been cursed and transformed into a magical jumping bean.

So in the game you're constantly jumping and you just control the left and right movement. This allows for some surprisingly tricky level designs when you need to dodge enemies, spikes and other stuff. The controls also mean it's easy to pick up and learn, but it has some really hardcore achievements layered into it.

Graphically it is reminiscent of 16-bit platform games. Imagine SNES mixed with Sega Master System but with a modern physics engine. Lastly, it has a killer soundtrack by Flashygoodness.

Were you wary of the possible racial repercussions of making a game about a latino man being turned into a bean? Has anyone felt offense or hesitancy to play Bean's Quest because of that?

South American culture was just a point of positive inspiration for us and we genuinely meant no offense with it. This concern was only recently brought to our attention.

We've found the majority of customers don't interpret anything beyond the concept of the Mexican jumping bean. They see it as a light-hearted story and fun game, which is what we were going for - Emilio is without a doubt the hero of the story!

Diablo 3 Pre-orders from Canadian games distributor Future Shop will snag a pretty pretty steelbook for free. The steelbook features character art and the standard Diablo 3 emblem. Future Shop warns there are "limited quantities," so if steel or books are your thing, you may want to jump on this one soon.

In related news, Diablo 3 has 131 review votes on Future Shop for a score of 4.5/5, and we assume these are all based on the beta -- which is open for all this weekend -- and the box art. Unless the idea of a steelbook alone is really that cool.

[Thanks, Zack!]

Sundays are for packing away nerd paraphernalia into boxes, and wondering if you will ever see it again, or if it will one day be unearthed from a forgotten loft by your grandchildren. They are also for sitting with the quiet hum of a computer and leafing through the internet pages from the past week. What have we read? What will we read?

• I’m sure most of you have browsed The Valve Handbook For New Employees, but if not, you probably should.

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Rambo is known for a lot of things. The grand majority of them, however, are “being a half-man, half-gorilla, half-mountain, half-American-pick-up-truck (he is large enough to fit many halves) with no shirt, all of the ammo, and nothing to lose.” The short version? He kills people. And beyond the first movie, it doesn’t actually get much longer than that. So, naturally, Rambo: Last Blood is a puzzle game about hugging. To say precisely why would spoil a couple choice jokes, but the game’s basically a giant, aching 15-minute-long grin, so you’ll find out soon enough. Unsurprisingly, this one’s a Molyjam product, but creator Peter Javidpour’s keeping the Sylvester Stall-aaaaw-ne dream alive with at least one more update that’ll add two, er, existent endings. So go play it, and giggle knowingly. You’ve earned this.

There’s nothing I like more waking up on a Saturday morning, consuming a bacon sandwich, arming myself with a massive mug of tea, scouring the internet for the best deals on digital entertainment software for computer boxes, and then sharing the results of my research with you, the good readers of RPS. Are you ready for a figurative bucketful of cheap games? I hope so, because that’s what you’re about to get. You can rely on SavyGamer.co.uk for more of this sort of thing throughout the week. Here’s this week’s bargain bucket: (more…)

The seemingly infinite font of generosity that is Kickstarter has given rise to yet another rags-to-riches-to-restoration-of-faith-in-humanity tale – this time for the ex-BioWare trio at Stoic. If your only chance at survival after being crushed under a massive stack of cash was a bank-breaking, spine-saving donation to The Banner Saga, well, I don’t know what to tell you, seeing as the drive has now officially closed out at over $700,000. But, dear hilariously unfortunate reader, there is one upside: extra features! Tons of them! Though, admittedly, Banner Saga’s only been announced for platforms on this mortal plane so far.

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From now until April 23 at 11:59pm ET, digital distributor of vintage PC titles GOG.com is offering discounts across the entire Nordic catalog. Games like Painkiller, Spellforce, Dark Fall and the Gothic series are all half-off until next week.

On top of the Nordic discounts, GOG.com is offering the original The Witcher for a paltry $5. Of course, if you're in a rush to get to The Witcher 2 you could just go for the wrap-up video. But that's not really the same, is it?

The PC has always been the place where super-niche games thrive. With relatively cheaper development costs, the PC has allowed tiny teams of indie devs to craft the craziest ideas they can think of...

This is my second time with a pre-release version of Prison Architect. You can read my first impressions right here. This time I’ve played a slightly more advanced version, albeit one that is not tuned for IGF judges. Fresh thoughts stockaded below.(more…)