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I’m pretty sure McPixel is a point-and-click adventure. Kind of? I mean, there’s definitely pointing, and clicking typically follows – as is its tradition – but events from level-to-level make almost no coherent sense. As a result, it seems less like an adventure and more like a series of incredibly silly, largely unrelated events. Oh, also, you have 20 seconds to finish each level before it, well, explodes. Currently, there’s only a demo, but it spans more locations – from abandoned World War II trenches to prehistoric times to the Death Star – than most full games. And while this demo packs a scant six levels, the final version’s bringing more than 100 on June 6. There’s also a secret ending, but, uh, you probably want to avoid it. Fair warning. Fortunately, the rest stays on the fun side of “dumb fun.” If you’re still on the fence, you have 20 seconds to watch the trailer after the break before this post explodes.

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According to the latest update on the Blizzard forums, the Diablo 3 servers for North America are up and running. The servers went down for maintenance earlier today - the launch has suffered some hiccups - but now you should be able to log in and take a hit of that sweet, sweet Diablo 3, no problem. Happy looting!

The hits keep coming for ex-baseballer Curt Schillings' 38 Studios. The company reportedly missed its latest loan payment of $1.125 million to the state of Rhode Island on May 1, effectively defaulting its $75 million loan. WPRI spoke with Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox who confirmed the news.

The loan's facilitator, Rhode Island's Economic Development Corporation, called an "emergency meeting" for tomorrow morning, wherein it will discuss "an unexpected occurrence that requires immediate action to protect the public regarding the 38 Studios financing." As reported earlier, if 38 Studios were to fully default on its loan obligations to investors supplying the loan via the Rhode Island government, the responsibility would fall to Rhode Island's taxpayers - to the tune of $112.6 million.

Of the $75 million borrowed by 38 Studios from the state of Rhode Island, $49.8 million was received by the studio as of March 15, WPRI reports. Given that, it seems worrisome at best that 38 Studios was unable to fulfill its recent payment of $1.125 million. 38 Studios is working on the Kingdoms of Amalur MMO - the game was originally promised for a launch ahead of 2013, when 38 Studios is set to begin paying back bondholders on its $75 million loan. It's unclear what stage its MMO is at, and 38 Studios hasn't made a public statement regarding its recent issues.

[Image credit: 38 Studios]

Some of you may have experienced this first hand, but if you've yet to suddenly go offline while playing Diablo 3, here's what happens. First, your game will lock up for a minute or so, then you'll be sent back to the character selection screen.

According to Eurogamer, at this point you'll log back in and find that you've retained all gold, experience and items - no penalties there. Once you get back into the game, you'll start from your last checkpoint.

The decision to require a constant internet connection initially received some blowback from the community, but it would seem it's not as bad as initially thought, at least in one regard. Eurogamer even notes that being booted back to the character selection screen didn't happen every time - occasionally the game would resume as if no disconnect even occurred.

Mercenary Ops is something of a rarity. While there are quite a few Western-developed games being published in Asia by Chinese and Korean companies, there aren't a lot of Chinese-developed online titles being published by Western companies.

Developed in China by Yingpei Games, which used to be called Epic Games China, the shooter is being distributed by the San Francisco-based outfit Kalends, a group of developers who've decided to try their hand at publishing on their own.

As for the game itself, Kalends has announced that Mercenary Ops will be released as a free-to-play, microtransaction-based title - a business plan that has deep roots in China, but is only just breaking ground stateside.

We wonder - when someone finishes an epic, sprawling title such as Diablo 3 in a matter of hours, does he experience the years of excitement, adrenaline and joy had by unrushed players as a super-compressed ball of electric hype? And if so, how does his heart not explode?

Diablo 3 player Yoshichan would know the answers to these questions, as he posted final stats from Diablo 3 showing that he finished the entire game in 12 hours and 29 minutes. Yoshichan played as a Barbarian on Normal difficulty, reached level 32, had 8,368 Lifetime Kills, 412 Elite Kills and collected 168,481 gold during his run. He obviously didn't run into many Templar followers.

We suggest Yoshichan pop an aspirin and give Diablo 3 another, heartier go, but only if he promises to stop and smell the brimstone along the way.

Since we last caught up with it, the extraordinary-looking (and sounding) Fract OSC has released a bundle of new screenshots, and they’re a bit pretty. Described as Myst meets Rez meets Tron, a first-person puzzle adventure in an abstract world, designed around electronic music. The game, they say, is inspired by synthesisers, in a world that “literally runs on sound”. Previous footage has been remarkably interesting, but arguably not that pretty. However, that’s beginning to change, thanks to some new atmospheric art, and some extremely effective lighting. Take a look.

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Sitting alone in a silent room can be a lonely experience, but you know that there’s always the magic of videogames to brighten things up. Sometimes people can get in your videogames, too, and they make it even more interesting with their ideas and their creative swearing. But for the most interesting ideas and the politest swears, look no further than the the RPS Community. Look, right here there are threads on the forum organising Diablo III play, battles in Wargame: European Escalation, and even some survivalism in Day Z. There are lots more sub-communities in there, too. Take some time to introduce yourself, and get involved. I’m involved right now. The experience has made me especially healthy, and even more handsome. It’s true.

For people with no interest in adventures, this Kickstarter revolution must be increasingly frustrating. Certainly there’s a decent smattering of RPGs in there too, but I always like to think of those as adventures with combat. For those who grew up playing adventures in the late 80s, early 90s however, this is like a mad dream. The latest beloved franchise to attempt a comeback is the Tex Murphy series, reincarnating the sardonic private eye in, well, just about exactly the same way he appeared nearly two decades ago.

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I’ve never been a fan of designating things “games” and “not games” – primarily because that paints the uniquely minimal Proteuses of the world as somehow inferior to the rootin’-tootin’ shoot ‘em ups, high-flying hop ‘n’ bops, and other more traditional genres that have so characterized this medium’s past decade. Kyoto, in my mind, occupies a similar space.

Part tech demo, part experimental homage to the Japanese city of the same name, it’s positively languid – but more like a peaceful, moonlit river and less like a half-salted snail. Basically, you interact with a neon-lit tree and the celestial landscape around it, poking and prodding to figure out how/if things function. Resulting sights range from barely noticeable to glorious rainbow eruptions worthy of the end segment from Peggle. However, a word of warning: Kyoto definitely requires patience. I really wasn’t feeling it at first, but I’m also terrible at relaxing. So consume it slowly – like a warm glass of milk. Maybe even consume it with a warm glass of milk. But don’t literally consume Kyoto. The game or the city, I mean. I should stop talking now.

No, seriously. This may be the most tree-rich game I’ve ever come across. And yet, while Starbound‘s latest trailer runs through woodlands of all shapes, sizes, and colors, Chucklefish chuckles in its oh-so-recognizably fish-like fashion at my pitiful notions of impressiveness. It’s designated this bouquet of majestic foliage as a “small selection of the art that will be present in the finished game” from just one of many possible biomes. “Terraria in space,” I’d say, is a misnomer. This strikes me more as Super Terraria Galaxy – yes, planetary exploration is the focus, but it’s lightyears beyond its spiritual predecessor in terms of sheer ambition. I mean, we’re talking entire randomly generated galaxies of randomly generated planets with randomly generated foliage and creatures. It sounds insane. It probably is insane. But I’m excited about a game’s trees. That has to mean something, right? Venture past the break for the full trailer.

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As individuals whose chief export is words on the page, we know full well the power of a looming deadline - oh, wait, it's Dreadline? Well, that ruins our analogy.

Dreadline is a hybrid RPG, real-time strategy title from Eerie Canal, a new studio formed by individuals who have worked at Irrational Games, Harmonix and Iron Lore. In Dreadline, players control a group of monsters who travel back through time to human disasters and kill the humans who are doomed to die in the disaster - one level centers around the Titanic, for example.

Dreadline has been in the works for six months now and is slated for launch in the first half of 2013 on PC.

Diablo 3's Starter Edition gives hesitant players a free trial of the game, available for 30 days following its launch tomorrow. The Starter Edition is accessible with a Guest Pass key, which can be found in all boxed versions of Diablo 3, and includes the same contents as the beta: Play up to the Skeleton King in Act 1, and to character level 13. Starter Edition players won't be able to access the real-money auction house and will be able to use Matchmaking only with other Starter Edition players.

The Starter Edition was leaked during the beta in April, but the hole was patched before we discovered if it was a demo, trial or nuclear launch code.

Blizzard has also detailed the Character Profiles feature, which will populate the official Diablo 3 website and allow players to read character stats and track their progress.

John passed me the link to forthcoming Realm Explorer earlier today (through a special hole in the wall) and I studied it. I too, wasn’t convinced. Like Mr Walker, I wasn’t certain that this one had the right stuff. The idea was interesting – no doubt interesting enough for its own RPS post – and Realm Explorer looks like the kind of thing a nerd, introspective man like can get behind: sandbox, procedurally generated worlds, with RPG-like structure, multiplayer, mining, exploration, and all that good stuff. But there’s something about the mandatory Kickstarter pitch that underwhelms me. Sorry guys, but this unchallenging pastoral mix of Wurm, Minecraft, and old-fashioned RPG fantasy doesn’t quite get me on the hook. This could be one of the next wave of builder worlds, but something tells me it won’t be the next breakout success. Ultimately, though, you will decide, InternetBrain. It is in your hands.

The situation around the potential console release of Diablo 3 has been strangely half-secret. Blizzard has openly hired for console development, and company representatives have said that they are "investigating" and "exploring" console Diablo projects. They've talked about console controllers and their advantages. But it never got to the point of actually announcing anything.

"Yeah. We haven't officially announced it, because we're not 'experimenting,'" Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson told Gamasutra. "We tell people that basically we're experimenting, because it helps us hire people. The better people we hire, the better chance we have to actually make it."

In other words, there's no concrete plan, but Blizzard is bringing in people to try things to see if they will work - which, yes, sounds a lot like experimenting. "That's why we haven't kept it super secret, but we also haven't confirmed it, because we're not sure yet whether we think it will work, and whether we think we have the resources to do it," Wilson said.

This bit comes at the end of a lengthy interview, during which Wilson also provides a lot of background on the development process - like how a PowerPoint presentation substituted for a design document.

Ah, good old internet. Always vigilant to other people’s business. This time it has spotted that CD Projekt – those Polish clever-clogs who made The Witcher and its sequel – are now hiring for two RPG projects. One is “RPG In A Dark Fantasy World”, which will clearly be the next part of The Witcher, but other is – shock! – “RPG In A Brand New Setting”. There’s even a little gun symbol next to the name to get us speculating that it isn’t going to be another fantasy world, but in fact one with guns in. And not rayguns, but normal automatic pistols. The Projektors say that it is “a vast RPG for which we want to assemble the best possible staff. It represents an opportunity for you to create a grand new project from the ground up!”

Crikey! I’m hoping it will be a Noir RPG in which the gangsters are secretly supernatural lizard-men. Failing that, I’d quite like an RPG set aboard a haunted runaway train. Anyone else want to make impossible requests? Speak now!

On the surface, GameStop providing Steam Wallet cards would seem like a white flag, a sign of surrender by the old brick-and-mortar giant to the king of digital distribution. Business is never so simple. Frenemies they may be, both sides will profit greatly from this deal. Valve's Steam service just obtained access to thousands of GameStop stores (and its army of associates) across North America, and GameStop gets a cut of Steam, particularly from Steam users without credit cards or access to electronic payment methods.

"We are currently the only retailer with it," Steve Nix, manager of PC digital distribution for GameStop told us today. He explained there's no specific exclusivity window for the company, but that GameStop's proprietary tech for selling DLC, which allows the company to go directly to digital distribution holders instead of going through a third-party vendor, helped make the deal possible.

Nix explains that he went to Valve with the deal a few months ago, with factoids like 84 percent of GameStop customers claim to play PC games, and made his case for this deal to occur. Nix's background probably helped grease the wheels. The executive was formerly an early supporter of Steam as the CEO of Ritual Entertainment (SiN Episodes) and director of business development and digital platforms at id Software, adding the company's catalog to Steam in 2007.

Nix also told us the Steam deal will not alter the company's plans for its own digital distribution service, Impulse. He also mentioned the company already sells Origin points and is open to doing something similar with GoG.

"Really, this doesn't affect anything we're doing with Impulse," Nix said. "We doubled the PC download business with the Impulse technology we acquired. We're happy with that. We're now online over 1600 SKUs, we'll continue to grow that and continue to invest in that."

"We're just offering options for customers. This in no way changes our investment or what we're doing with that business."

Oh thank goodness – I was just getting all cross about something entirely unrelated to games, and then games made everything better! There’s a team made up of developers formerly of Irrational, Harmonix, and Iron Lore, wonderfully called Eerie Canal Entertainment. And they’re making a game about monsters who travel through history to kill people. Where you play as the monsters. It’s called Dreadline, and it’s PC only. I want it. There’s a teaser and more details about it below.

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There aren’t enough games about the First World War and even if there were several thousand released a month, I’d probably rave about the scarcity of Lovecraftian entities shambling around on my hard drive. I’d say there’s a lack of turn-based tactical games as well but this year may be the best for a long time in that regard. Still, to deliver a game of cosmic horror set in the trenches and ruins of the Great War, with squad-based combat and action points to spend…that’s just spoiling me. But can Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land make the transition from touchscreen to your screen? Here’s wot I think.

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Sundays are for sleeping it off. Later, you realise you didn’t manage to round up a collection of excellent game-related links and writing from the previous week. Gods no! What can be done about it? Well, you can publish it the next day. Phew!

• Brainy Gamer talk about the “wholesome cacophony” of the ongoing “dumbness” debate within games commentary: “If Theater is high art in an echo chamber, and video games are low art in a cacophony, I’ll take the cacophony. The great video game conversation is happening 24/7 worldwide – rants, fanboys, and flamewars included. It’s a wholesome cacophony and an irrepressible sign of life.” And that’s pretty much my take, too. Thanks, Internet. Keep making lots of noise. Related, here’s their list of smart games.

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A large part of the internet is telling Day Z stories. People feel compelled to communicate what they’ve experienced in there. There’s a good reason for that. This unfinished modification is more interesting than 90% of games that will land in the same year. It is a game that – for many people – represents this kind of experienced we were promised. An open-world, persistent, zombie game, where survival is the goal, and where each encounter with another real human being is a moment of terrible tension. What’s astonishing about this unassuming zombie mod is that it manages to take what is most interesting about MMOs – persistence, co-operation, risk of genuine loss in PvP – and add them to a multi-server FPS. Not just any FPS, either, but the monstrously deep simulation provided by master soldier sim, Arma 2. It’s unflinchingly bleak. It offers freedom, while threatening destruction. The stories that result from it are enthralling.(more…)

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 believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Kyle Pulver's Offspring Fling is the best PC and Mac game you could ask for in the week approaching Mother's Day. Or any other day, really.

Pre-pitch-post-gray-intro note: Offspring Fling launched on Steam today for PC and Mac, and it's 20 percent off through May 18. It includes the Mother's Day Update, which has a level editor, replay and sharing features. Go make momma proud!

What's your game called and what's it about?

It's called Offspring Fling, and it's a game about a poor forest creature that has misplaced her children in a mostly happy but sometimes spooky forest. She'll have to make her way through more than 100 levels of baby throwing, puzzle solving, button pressing, bee-avoiding action if she wants to get them all home by dinner.

What inspired you to make Offspring Fling?

May 2011: I went to a local game jam in the Phoenix area. The theme: Motherhood. After an hour or so I had an idea of a puzzle-platformer game where you have to get a bunch of babies safely to an exit, and you could use them in all sorts of ways to solve puzzles and platforming challenges. Forty-eight hours later I had a pretty solid prototype of the game with 15 playable levels, and I ran with it from there.

In its continuing efforts to secure unwavering dominion over the suffix "ville," Zynga has filed suit against French publisher Kojobo over the name of its strikingly familiar-looking Facebook game PyramidVille.

As you'd imagine, the complaint has a hell of a lot to do with Kojobo's usage of "ville," with Zynga arguing that "Facebook users are likely to believe, erroneously, that PyramidVille is a member of Zynga's 'ville Family of Games," according to the complaint. Zynga hopes that its aggressive promotion of Farmville and Castleville will outweigh the fact that it doesn't actually own a trademark on the suffix.

"Given Kojobo's refusal to change their game name, legal action was necessary to defend our famous marks and prevent player confusion," Zynga said in a statement to Reuters. The San Francisco-based publisher seeks damages totaling three times the amount of profit accrued by PyramidVille since its release in 2011.

With a mere five hours left before cruel fate snuffed out Hope’s chances of a bright (read: horrific, downcast, and hopelessly dystopian) future, Kickstarter finally kicked into high gear. Republique has officially met its funding goal – and then some, in fact. The final tally stands at $555,662, which is pretty damn astounding, given that nearly $300,000 of it came surging in this week. In fact, the stealth-action Metroidavania camera hacking thing managed almost a complete reversal of the other major Kickstarter success stories; its biggest day was its last – not its first. Messages from both the Republique team and Mr Purrington await you after the break.

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Long ago – probably before my people had even colonized this strange, star-spangled landmass I call home – Kieron posted about a clever little puzzle platformer called This Is The Only Level. Achievement Unlocked creator John Cooney, however, has since gone on to become a dirty rotten liar, because there are now two more “only” levels. So, here’s how it works: you’re a tiny blue elephant. You have to traverse a spike-and-platform-laden room to reach a Mario-style pipe. But then the level starts again – only with some zany permutation that completely alters the rules of the world or even the whole game. This Is The Only Level 3 also boasts a slightly more versatile Flash-based look over its predecessors and the ability to excrete pastries for some reason. Even so, solutions are brilliantly meta, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and may well be this series’ (or is it a single, incredibly long game?) best yet. Also, if the tiny, pipe-blocking door that is life prevented you previously, here’s This Is The Only Level Too as well. Thanks, Free Indie Games.

Let’s play some computer games. Better than that, lets play some cheap computer games. Computer games that cost less than you might expect them to are my favourite type of computer games. In fact, finding a games that cost not very much money is more fun than actually playing the games for me. That’s because I’m an fiscally obsessed weirdo though, so if you want you can leave the deal hunting to me, and you take responsibility of the purchasing and the playing of the games. Observe my ongoing decent into price-watching insanity over at SavyGamer.co.uk, and read on for your weekly download round-up. (more…)

When I first saw the words “vampire” and “RPG” appear in DARK‘s elevator pitch, my brain immediately made a mad dash down the portion of memory lane marked “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.” But then my incredibly rare T-Rex-like vision disorder cleared up, and I saw other words skitter out – for instance, “stealth-action” and “RPG elements.” So no, this probably isn’t the long-awaited successor to Bloodlines’ bloodline, but the RealmForge-developed, Kalypso-published vampire, er, chokeslam sim could be interesting.

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My Age of Decadence was my early twenties. I travelled slowly down the Mekong river longing for the horizon, drank copious amounts of bourbon in all-night jazz bars and dusty, dilapidated dives, all the while studying the world through an eyeglass of glamour and sleaze. Perhaps not coincidentally I also spent a lot of time in Manchester cafes reading Graham Greene and Paul Theroux. The game Age of Decadence aims to provide players with freedom of choice although I doubt it’s possible to recreate my own youthful exuberance. The trailer below draws attention to a host of other features that can best be described as ‘old-school’, words which I can write but should never say aloud.

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The folks at nascent studio Camouflaj must be pretty excited right now, with their first ever project - a Kickstarted game named "Répubique" - meeting (and exceeding) it's $500,000 goal with just six hours left until the Kickstarter expires. The Kickstarter nearly met an untimely end when funders plateaued across the past few weeks, but the drive was bolstered by the addition of David Hayter (voice of Solid Snake, among others) and Jennifer Hale (voice of Cortana, among others) to the game's cast.

As of right now, the Kickstarter is sitting at just over $500K, but we expect it'll continue rising until time runs out at 6PM ET.

Anticipation for Diablo 3 is at its peak right now, with fans feverishly wringing their hands as they wait until launch on May 15. Just look at this one guy's computer - no joke! That anticipation translates into a lot of pre-orders; however, not all of those pre-orders are through Blizzard's Battle.net service. Amazon is apparently another popular pre-purchase destination.

A representative for Amazon told Joystiq that Diablo 3 is Amazon's most pre-ordered PC title ever. "Today, it became the most pre-ordered PC game of all-time on Amazon.com - even exceeding pre-orders for Blizzard's own StarCraft II and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm," the Amazon rep told Joystiq.

It's been a pretty good month for pre-orders on Amazon. Earlier this month, day-one pre-orders for Black Ops 2 managed to top pre-orders for the first Black Ops and even last year's Modern Warfare 3.