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It’s been eight years since Thief: Deadly Shadows was released. And if that doesn’t make you want to start slaughtering the young and drinking their blood in a desperate attempt to find some sort of means to stop the passing of time and your constant, constant ageing, then you must already have discovered the secrets of immortality. EIGHT YEARS. Eight years since Kieron and I were let into a nightclub for free because we’d both given the game scores over 90% (Kieron in Gamer, me in PC Format) and the doorman was a big fan. Eight years since I sat in PC Format’s weirdly anonymous office space, trying to do something to the screenshots so they weren’t just big black squares all over the magazine. Eight years since I task-switched out of The Cradle to calm the hell down, while Kieron mocked me via IM. And now you can play it all over again for ten bucks, via the regurgitating pipe of GOG.com.

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Death is inevitable. Even the universe in all its grandeur will decay and fall apart bit-by-bit with a cold, quantum death rattle. Yes, I know. It’s very sad. There’ll be no more stars. There’ll be no more Italian food. No more rediscovered fivers in old coat pockets. It’s very sad.(more…)

Which is an ongoing diary of the RPS robo-corporation’s exploits in sandbox robot-war MMO, Perpetuum.

Last month we captured an island. And this month we lost it again.(more…)

[Sound of a doorbell ringing.] “Hello there! Yes, I have a delivery for you, Mr, um, Hugh Mann.” “What? That can’t be right. I never ordered anything.” “No, no, I’m pretty sure you did. I couldn’t help but notice you’re having a parade out back. It’s very nice. Wouldn’t want anything unfortunate to happen to it.” “Er, yeah. Anyway, I guess I’ll sign for this so you can go.” [Gigantic rain cloud emerges from box and ravages parade.] “NOOOOOOOO.” [Gabe Newell throws down his delivery cap and flees into a nearby alleyway, cackling maniacally.]

E3, ladies and gentlemen.

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You could either work hard and make sacrifices as you try to achieve your dreams ... or you could let Balki Bartokomous guide you on a brilliant, literal translation of the Perfect Strangers theme song. Do that right now because it's the best thing.

Now, for those of you too young to remember what Perfect Strangers is, let us sum it up for you: Balki, cousin to Larry, moves to Chicago from his native land of Meatbos, a real place that exists so don't bother looking it up on a map. Hijinks ensue, laughs are had and the two achieve personal growth as they search for love in the big city and try their best not to be ridiculous all the time. Maybe it doesn't help that this game is absolutely ridiculous.

At this year's E3, you can officially leave any Valve Software product announcements firmly off your pre-show bingo cards. Valve rep Doug Lombardi told Joystiq this morning, "We have no product announcements planned for this year's show," confirming a reported email exchange between a ValveTime.net forum member and Valve Software head Gabe Newell.

In the purported exchange, which Valve declined to confirm, Newell told the forum member, "We are not announcing anything at E3. Really." The email goes further than that, adding, "We are not announcing Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. We are going to be showing stuff everyone already knows about (CS:Go [Counterstrike: Global Offensive], Dota 2, 10' UI [Steam 'Big Picture Mode'])."

So, while it looks like Valve is attending E3, don't get your hopes too high for any software or hardware announcements. The other possibility, of course, is that we're being lied to (it wouldn't be the first such instance before E3). We're giving Valve the benefit of the doubt.

At this year's E3, you can officially leave any Valve Software product announcements firmly off your pre-show bingo cards. Valve rep Doug Lombardi told Joystiq this morning, "We have no product announcements planned for this year's show," confirming a reported email exchange between a ValveTime.net forum member and Valve Software head Gabe Newell.

In the purported exchange, which Valve declined to confirm, Newell told the forum member, "We are not announcing anything at E3. Really." The email goes further than that, adding, "We are not announcing Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. We are going to be showing stuff everyone already knows about (CS:Go [Counterstrike: Global Offensive], Dota 2, 10' UI [Steam 'Big Picture Mode'])."

So, while it looks like Valve is attending E3, don't get your hopes too high for any software or hardware announcements. The other possibility, of course, is that we're being lied to (it wouldn't be the first such instance before E3). We're giving Valve the benefit of the doubt.

REALMS OF ANCIENT WAR! It’s a title that should be shouted, I believe. It’s also a title that needs some tidying up, since we’re apparently supposed to call it “R.A.W. – Realms of Ancient War“. No. No I absolutely won’t do that. Your title doesn’t get to be an acronym and the expansion of that acronym. That’s not how titles work. And you certainly don’t get all those full stops and then a hyphen. Goodness me, no. Your game is now called Realms Of Ancient War, and it’s to be shouted. It is decided. Please redesign your website/game materials. Thank you. Oh, and also your game looks super-pretty.

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This week, Blizzard is highlighting the Wizard class in Diablo 3. A new trailer features her (or his) skills with a stunning display of magical pyrotechnics. For more wizardy goodness, check out her complete overview and a short story detailed background. Try not to get singed.

Every now and then I look at what’s new on Steam, give things a play to see if they’re worth covering. One of their number was MacGuffin’s Curse – a 2D top-down game with echoes of any number of late 80s puzzlers. But quickly realising it was a block-pushing doodah I figured, nah, no more of those. And then carried on playing. And carried on. And then played it over the weekend a bit. And have started playing it again on Monday… Which means, at a certain point, I have to admit I’ve room for another block-pushing puzzler. So, here’s Wot I Think.

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I am a Mage, Ex-PC Zone writer and current Continue magazine editor Paul Presley is a Warrior, and Paul Dean of Sit Down & Shut Up is another Mage. He should have selected the Rogue: despite Dungeonland‘s cute set-up, a theme-park set, co-operative action RPG, it’s a harsh game that needs the three corners of the set-up to work, but an errant button press launched our ill-formed group before he could rectify it. We stand shoulder to shoulder, a group of brave standy adventurers until a PR lady comes along and organises seating, and then we sit down to face the giant worms, the not so menacing but explosive frogs, and rest of the dungeon master’s menagerie. It doesn’t go well. (more…)

In reality, fire is a mysterious force that takes what it pleases and threatens to devour us whole in our sleep. Within the confines of a video game, however, the flaming beast can be controlled.

The Internet itself isn't an inherently evil or benign device; what gives it morality is the intention of its users, such as Seth Westfall. Westfall (or so he calls himself) began a Kickstarter for Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men, an RPG from Little Monster Productions to rival World of Warcraft and Skyrim, built by a team of former Activision Blizzard developers. The project asked for $80,000 and it had raised $5,000 until, three days ago, it was canceled. Little Monster didn't say why it was canned, but backers accused the whole thing of being fake.

Potential donors did some research before forking over their money to Mythic, and they declared that most of the artwork was stolen, Little Monster Productions didn't exist outside of Kickstarter's universe, pictures of its offices belonged to another company, and that even the rewards were word-for-word copied from The Banner Saga's Kickstarter. By the time the apparent scam spread to Reddit, Mythic was doomed.

Little Monster Productions responded to scam claims on the Mythic comments page: "It seems we have been subjected to false claims of ownership right to our concepts. The game itself is well in progress and is NOT a scam of any kind. Thank you for understanding. If you have any furthur questions please feel free to ask." The Little Monster Productions Kickstarter account has since been deleted.

As the $80,000 funding goal wasn't reached, those who contributed to the $5,000 donation pool won't lose any money, but we hope they did gain a bit of caution.

A Valley Without Wind fascinates me. Not all the reasons for this fascination are good. But from that (long) moment where I read through our huge two-part interview about Arcen’s intentions for their procedurally-generated open-world exploration-based action adventure, I knew it was something I was going to follow closely. I spent some time dabbling with early versions of the game, and in the past few days I’ve finally been getting stuck into the release version of this strange, 2D post-apocalypse.

Finally, here’s Wot I Think.

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Diablo 3 players will be able to fight the legions of Hell worldwide, Blizzard has announced. When the game launches later this month, it will include Global Play, which will allow players from all regions to play with one another. Servers are divided into three regions, the Americas, Europe and Asia. Each player will be assigned a home region based on location, but will also have the option of playing on another server if desired.

All characters, items and friends lists will be exclusive to a single region. In other words, players will have a different set of each depending on which region they choose to join. The same rule applies to the in-game auction houses.

The Diablo 3 website has also been updated with a new guide to the auction house feature. Said guide explains the process of buying or selling items step-by-step. It also answers some questions regarding the transaction fees associated with auctions. All in-game gold auctions include a 15 percent transaction fee, while real-money auctions vary somewhat.

In North America, a $1.00 fee applies to all equipment auctions (weapons, armor, etc.), while a 15 percent fee applies to commodities auctions (gems, etc.). According to the auction house FAQ, the reasoning behind the percentage-based fee on commodities is that, unlike equipment, such items can be listed in bulk quantities.

The proceeds of real-money auctions can be transferred to a player's Battle.net Balance or to an approved third-party service such as PayPal. For everyone out there with dreams of Scrooge McDuck-level riches, be warned that transfers to third-party services are also subject to a 15 percent transfer fee. If you're still confused, check out the FAQ for yourself.

While this last month or so has littered the digital ground with the beautiful blossom of Kickstarter triumphs (and not just in games; dunno about you, but I am in MAXIMUM NERDJOY mode about a Pebble watch winging its way to me later this year) this week has shown the potentially seedy underbelly of rampant crowdsourcing. The strange, faintly disturbing tale of Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men was uncovered by Something Awful, picked up by our very own forum and from there sent on to Reddit, which in turn led to the project in question’s shutting down.(more…)

Randomly generated action title Nekro has managed to randomly generate $100,000 from Kickstarter donations, thus reaching its goal. In fact, developer darkForge has raised $12,000 beyond its goal, with around 60 hours to go as of this writing. The developer hopes to use the extra funds to add more modes and options to Nekro, specifically character customization and an online co-op mode.

Should darkForge raise $120,000, it will include character customization, notably the ability to create either a male or female necromancer, while the co-op mode goal is currently $150,000. A versus multiplayer mode, unfortunately, is not in the cards, as "the amount of work required to balance spells, items and units is just too great," and darkForge would rather concentrate on the single-player experience.

Delayed by a few weeks due to, I dunno, terrorists, Adam, Jim and Alec return to their low-quality mics to discuss best SEO practices, Legend of Grimrock, Dishonored, Warlock, Carrier Command, the demise of STALKER 2, XCOM vs Xenonauts, Diablo III and, surprise surfrickingprise, how John was a bad healer in City of Heroes. Plus ce change.

Please listen to or be shown assorted places to download it below. Please. Please.(more…)

Hello, you. This is part news, part disclaimer. The disclaimer part is that this is a game I can’t be impartial about, because I helped make it. In my spare time I help run a little indie dev outfit called Big Robot. At the end of 2010 we were commissioned by Channel 4 Education to make a game about cities, which we have done. This post is about that game. It’s called Fallen City and you can play it for free, right here for Mac and Windows. The game is intended to inspire school-age Britons think about cities, and as such the game is perhaps not quite intended for the very mature and serious RPS audience. That said, it’s full, free game, so perhaps you might want to take a look. In more familiar terms, it’s a puzzle game with an RTS interface. We talked about it in a bit more detail over here.

Apart from singing the ‘gold’ song, pondering each other’s gender, and quaffing, digging is what dwarves do. (Do you mean Gold? Because that is definitely what dwarves should sing – Ed) A Game Of Dwarves focuses on the digging. You dig your digs, starting from the throne of the head Dwarf and spreading out in all directions, expanding your underground empire, adding rooms in the increasingly unwelcoming nethers. It’s a slick little strategy management game, welcoming to those who look at such things and wonder where the crosshair is. Me, basically. The man from Paradox wiped away my tears and showed me the easy way it works, and after pointing and clapping I got to it. (more…)

Call of Duty 9: Black Ops 2: Modern Warfare 4 was rumoured to exist but if you’re anything like me, you’ll be flabbergasted to hear that the series is indeed continuing and the website for the game is now live, although the trailer that takes centre stage doesn’t work just yet. It’s apparently due to be premiered (red carpet?) this evening during the NBA Playoffs. The website does reveal that the game takes place in the near future, during a 21st century cold war. I bet it’s a cold war that involves surfing on top of a stealth fighter while shooting down a space shuttle full of nukes. November 13th is when the CoD blops once more. One more pic below.

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There’s one surefire way of getting around my wariness about when and if to cover Kickstarter projects here, and that’s when Kickstarter projects have already reached their funding goals. As well as being glad tidings in and of themselves, it means I don’t risk inadvertently wielding RPS as a flaming sword of financial justice in the event I post about them. Instead I can just say ‘oh hey cool, here’s a neato-sounding videogame that’ll be coming out at some point soon-ish.’

Oh hey cool, here’s a neato-sounding videogame that’ll be coming out as some point soon-ish. It’s called Nekro, it’s from devs who have formerly worked at the likes of Blizzard, Sony and Microsoft, and it claims to be a more free-form take on Dungeon Keeper with meaty chunks of Myth: The Fallen Lords and Giants: Citizen Kabuto thrown in.(more…)

This is a thing to be treasured. Plink teams you up with strangers from an internet and demands that you make sweet music together. You can make discordant, ear-troubling ditties as well, that’s your choice, but the results tend toward the funky, perhaps even verging on groovy at times. It’s cheered me up no end this morning, moving a cursor up and down, clicking a button, even bopping my head in time to the beat at one point. If you find yourself playing with a plinker who seems hellbent on recreating the best of The Human League, you may well be sharing the decks with my good self. Chrome only, it seems.

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Nebulous Hero is one of the Molyjam games I actually had the pleasure of sharing a building with. Granted, this building also contained hundreds of other developers grinding their bones and brains to make bread for the collective Molyjam table, so I sadly never had the chance to take it for a test drive. During the end-of-show presentation, though, it may very well have been the coolest thing I saw. In short, the tutorial comes after the credits. So you start off by playing a traditional hop ‘n’ bop platformer, and then… well, let’s just say it’s not. It’s really, really not. I don’t want to spoil it, but – for those of you without the time or means to experience this bite-sized piece of brilliance – I’ve posted a screenshot that sums it up after the break.

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Yep, kart racing’s still a thing. And on PC too, which is a mild surprise. Admittedly, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed – an unwieldy, tongue-slicing mouthful of a name if ever there was one – sounds kind of interesting, if only because vehicles can go all Optimus Prime mid-race. And by that, I of course mean that you’ll (automatically) morph into a boat or plane during certain portions of each implausibly geographically varied map – not an exploding special effects robot. Also, the original was apparently a solid, if somewhat derivative spin on the candy coated roadrage formula, and since Mario’s probably not bringing his multi-sport playboy conga line through these parts any time soon, we’ll just have to settle for his blue nemesis/Olympic figure skating partner. Morph this post into whatever your heart desires after the break – assuming, of course, that your heart desires a Sonic trailer, the greatest of all human needs.

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If your high school English teacher had assigned you to play the game Walden instead of reading Thoreau's writings on living deliberately with nature, Spark Notes may not have evolved into such a booming business. USC's plan to put abridged study guides out of business, a video game based on Thoreau's Walden, has just received $40,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (which is like Kickstarter but older, more official and possibly not as lucrative).

USC has been crafting Walden for roughly two years, and this funding may be the final step to its completion, lead game designer and USC associate professor Tracy Fullerton told TIME. "Having this support will allow the time we need to really bring the world of Walden to life," Fullterton said. "We anticipate a rich simulation of the woods, filled with the kind of detail that Thoreau so carefully noted in his writings."

Hang on. Thoreau's point with Walden was to point out the intrinsic benefits of separation from technology in modern society, to slow down and live as one with nature as part of a larger, living world. Putting this experience inside of a video game, running on people's computers in an air-conditioned office, cafe or mother's basement misses the point entirely. However, it may offer a fine lesson in hypocrisy.

"Of course everyone should spend time in nature, but not all of us are able to set aside our lives for the time it would take to conduct an experiment like Thoreau's," Fullerton said. "The game is not a replacement for direct experience, just as the book is not."

Fair enough. Perhaps if you want to stop Thoreau rolling in his grave, play Walden on a tablet in the middle of the forest without an immediate charging station. Or plant some beans or something.

Everyone let me down. I can’t even bring myself to look at you. Not only did the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Adventure Mysteries Kickstarter fail to reach its goal, but it failed to reach less than a third of its measly $55,000 target. It’s like you actively didn’t want to pay so I could replay some games that I remember thinking I enjoyed about twenty years ago. You gits.

Fortunately, developer David Marsh says they’ll get made anyway. SO THERE.

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With my last instalment deftly punting the dreary but essential matter of motherboards into touch, it’s time to get back to something sexy. That’s right, RPSers, solid state storage gives me trouser tentage. I love SSDs, and I’m here to tell you which three drives are the ones you should be pointing your wallet at.(more…)

Shadowrun Returns finished its Kickstarter funding round with a total of $1,895,772 in donations to the cause. Announced earlier this month, the project was hoping to raise $400,000 to bring a Shadowrun sequel to PC, iOS and Android as a "graphically rich 2D turn-based single player game."

After hitting some funding milestones, developer Harebrained Schemes and Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman will include Mac and Linux support, and dole out some physical rewards for contributions. Next, Harebrained Schemes has to make the game and meet some high expectations.

Sunny yet sinister adventure Anna takes place in and around one of the most impressively realised houses I’ve ever seen in a game and, as I’ve previously noted, it also has at least one exquisite rock in it. A new video shows that bags of cement are rendered with equal care. This footage isn’t about the visuals though, it’s about mood, atmosphere and music. Horror doesn’t necessarily mean angry industrial scrapings and clankings, it can also be the child of melancholy and soundtracked as such.

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