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Jonatan "Cactus" Söderström, rapid-fire game designer, is working with bus-driving publisher Devolver Digital to bring players to a nightmare alternate-universe retro Miami.

Developed by Dennaton Games, a new collaborative label by Cactus and Dennis Wedin, Hotline Miami is a brutally violent top-down action game set in a pixelated and neon-colored version of Miami, in which the player can collect "25 game-altering masks." It's due for PC and Mac, with unspecified plans for console adaptations.

In case you were wondering, yes, Devolver has set up a real hotline, and it's at 786-519-3708. You will be asked to leave a message. You will probably also be creeped out.

Gamesplanet Lab allows devs to crowdfund & distribute their own games, plus gives prompt reward delivery and a good DRM experience to backers.

When you think of Sega classics, it’s rather easy to forget Nights. The blue-spikey one gets most of that attention. But the Saturn-based a-bit-like-Sonic-thing is to return in an HD remake. Rather sickeningly keeping the awful “Nights into dreams…” moniker, and maintaining the lack of upper-case letters, it wouldn’t have been my first guess if someone had asked which Sega franchised would next be revived. But it was awfully popular in the 90s, and perhaps has fallen out of people’s memories in the decade since, despite already receiving a remake for the PS2 in 2008 – er, despite being two years into the PS3′s lifetime, and only in Japan. But clearly there’s more confidence this time. You can grab a quick glance of it in the trailer below.

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Latest update includes lots of new features, including emerald ore, cauldrons and the addition of trip wire.

Resurrect all roguelikes, goes out the cry, even the ones that have not died. Fundraising for further ADOM development is already under way and Indie Games Magazine notice that Elona is now back as ElonaPlus. The team working on the game are new and they’re mostly fixing bugs, although there are apparently several new features. It’s hard to tell what’s new since Elona already contained pretty much everything, including Big Daddies, alien bodily infestation and the ability to have children. Glorious madness. The new version is here and there’s a useful Wiki too.

Boasting a Quake/Unreal sort of pace, Grim, by MorePolygons, is looking like my sort of thing. Much of the FPS stuff is familiarly run-and-frag, but it also allows crazy jumping, as they explain: “One of our unique mechanics (as seen in the video) is Leap, allowing you to quickly move around the level and escape enemy fire, or jump right into the action.” You can see some of that going on in the video below, and it’s mighty fine. They’ve also got an interesting assault-variant game mode, which you can read about over on their site.

I’ve not had a chance to play this yet – just off to Rezzed! – but you can download the beta from here. Trailer ‘neath click.(more…)

We have indeed posted lots about Rezzed. (It’s actually been 13 posts out of the 920 since it was first announced – Passive-Aggressive Ed.) But here is a generous reminder to encourage you to join us at the inaugural PC and Indie Games show, taking place in Brighton Friday and Saturday this week. Because it’s actually going to be really great!

Not only will a bunch of hotly anticipated unreleased games be playable on the show floor, but there’s also a bunch of super-famous gaming types giving presentations, and perhaps most excitingly of all, the opportunity to meet Eurogamer’s Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell, along with the RPS hivemind and Eurogamer collective. And I’m guaranteeing a free hug for everyone who buys a ticket.

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Where are all the blocks? Planet Explorers, available in alpha right now, is a terraforming, building, crafting sort of a thing, but when the player starts digging the earth isn’t shifted in discrete cubes. Unnatural and off-putting as that is, it does at least give the game a distinctive appearance, as do the giant creatures trundling about. Construction is of the fort and tower variety, given that the planet is hostile in the extreme, and it could turn out to be quite the thing, as demonstrated by the trailer below.

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Community manager Bashiok reveals, "We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game."

There’s a great post over at Indiegames.com with a list of “games like Spelunky for people to play, in celebration of its XBLA release”. Weirdly, the original version of Spelunky isn’t on the list. Go play it though because it’s brilliant and free. What jumped out at me was a link to a browser version of my most hated nemesis, Rick Dangerous. My parents bought me the original and its sci-fi sequel when I was but a boy, and because I couldn’t afford any more games I had to watch Rick die over and over again, and pretend to enjoy it. Despicable. And yet I just spent twenty minutes playing. Some startling observations below.

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Endless Space, the 4X spacy strategy is now out on Steam, and has a launch trailer with lots of pretty explosions. It also explains that in the end, it’s a game about dust. I am bemused by the role that dust appears to play in fiction. From Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, to CCP’s EVE spin-off, it’s hard to think of a more innocuous object to take such an important role. Where are the stories about fluff? And lint? Where are my games about loose bits of thread? I have been sidetracked. You can see the launch trailer below.

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Sure, you roll your eyes when you hear about yet another zombie game. But you still play them, don’t you? One you can play for free in its alpha form is I Shall Remain, a top-down squad-based zombie shooter, in which you shoot at zombies and survive. Me describe games good.

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My penis just exploded, killing me instantly. That’s the fate that awaits players of Nicolau ‘Beautiful Escape‘ Chaud’s RPG Maker freebie Polymorphous Perversity if they don’t have sex with enough frequency. The game takes place in a world where sexual encounters are like greetings. “Hello,” you might start saying to a young lady, but before you even get to the ‘o’ you’re likely to be rutting away. Not only are the social barriers between genitals much flimsier than in Britain, there are very few physical barriers. People don’t care much for clothes here. Mostly the nudity is of the tiny RPG-person variety, all pixellated and distant, but character portraits are not faces. They are bums, breasts, penises and vaginas. What would a prude like me make of all this?

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So, Platformines. It has many, many things going for it: loot and levels that are entirely randomly generated, art that’s inspired by retro chic but not reliant on it, a construction-based metagame, plenty of charm, and of course, a just-launched free beta. So I watched a trailer and thought to myself, “Gee, I can’t wait to rigorously put the beta through its paces side-by-side with this cup containing the blended remains of Borderlands, Diablo, Terraria, Minecraft, and Cave Story.” To be sure, it’s a promising place to start, but I’m not sure Platformines has entirely figured out where to take it.

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Featuring achievements and online features.

Divekick started out as a joke. It was meant to be a commentary on fighting games and the community surrounding it, but has escalated into much more since people discovered it was ... actually fun.

Now creator Adam "Keits" Heart is holding a Kickstarter campaign to finance a PC release. Divekick only uses two buttons: jump and kick. The first hit scored wins the round, and the first to win five rounds takes the match. A Kick-Meter fills during the match and activates Kick-Factor, speeding up your diving and kicks.

Divekick has 28 days to go at the time of publishing, and has earned $9000 toward its $30,000 goal.

Games do rather have a habit of removing subtlety. I’m not claiming that Van Helsing has a great history of cultural appearances, but I’m fairly sure that none of his depictions have previously taken place in a world where there are more werewolves than rats. (I’m not an expert, but was it really the 2004 Hugh Jackman film that saw Van Helsing switch from hunting just vampires to every other kind of monster?) Anyhoo, that’s the rather splendid nature of action RPG The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing, which has now shown some in-game footage. And it looks rather nice.

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When going about my day-to-day business, I like to maintain a healthy level of heart-rate-skyrocketing paranoia. So naturally, I find myself glancing over my shoulder a fair bit when I’m out and about, and it’s quiet - too quiet. Slender, I think, is a pretty good validation of all my greatest fears. It’s based on Something Awful’s Slender Man myth (which I confess to having known nothing about until now), but ends up feeling a bit like Amnesia – dread-inducing use of complete darkness and all – but in an open forest with one hyper-spooky thing constantly Right Behind You.

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The proprietors of fighting game fan site Shoryuken posed an interesting question to its community recently: Can you design a functional fight stick for playing StarCraft 2? It appears you can.

The winning design - as demonstrated by "Mauricio" in the video above - sports a modded Ultrastik joystick as the mouse, and about a billion Sanwa buttons in LED housing for illumination. It may look odd, but it apparently does everything a keyboard and mouse can, using one USB input.

As it's a fan mod, you can't actually purchase this device. Learning how to make one yourself, though, sounds like a great resumé booster, right below "Proficient strategist in StarCraft 2."

Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert discusses the future of the franchise, plus why he loves adventure games.

A handful of players using Wine, a program that allows Linux users to run Windows, recently reported being suddenly and unreasonably banned from Diablo 3. These players have sent in support tickets and one in particular notes his account remains banned, posting the following response from Blizzard:

"An additional review of the action taken against the Diablo 3 account has been completed. We have confirmed our initial findings, and the account action will not be reversed or changed."

These players assert that they have not cheated. Blizzard community manager Bashiok has responded to these claims, saying that players are banned for cheating, not for running benevolent software. "We've extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly," he writes. "We've not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.

"Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned - cheating will."

A Reddit post (now complete with a "[Misleading Title]" preface) saw more Wine players speak up, saying that they can play with no problems. It appears the bans themselves may be more isolated than the initial thread made them appear, and they may be less scandalous, at least on Blizzard's end. The moral of the story is, as always: Don't cheat, whiners Winers.

If Drive, the ultra-stylish Ryan Gosling biopic, had been set in Vice City and starred a psychopath, it might well have looked like Hotline Miami. Cactus, creator of many weird and wonderful things, is working on the game with graphic artist Dennis Wedin and it looks brilliantly deranged. Devolver Digital clearly think so as well as they’re publishing the top-down carnage simulator.

Hotline Miami is a gritty homage to the 80s, with a storyline as bizarre as it is emotional.

The debut trailer is gritty, 80s and bizarre. Perhaps curiosity and mild discomfort are emotions? Let’s see.

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The EU Court of Justice has put down a preliminary ruling that says people should legally be able to sell software they acquire digitally.

With great power... comes some awesome stuff! Stuff like webshooters…

The free-to-play, browser-based Game of Thrones MMO from Bigpoint has finally picked up a title. The Unity-powered MMO will now be known as Game of Thrones: Seven Kingdoms.

The game is set take place right at the beginning of the series, as King Robert Baratheon is killed and the entire kingdom of Westeros falls into chaos. Bigpoint is working to craft the game with Norwegian studio Artplant, which also helped create Bigpoint's Battlestar Galactica Online.

Few gameplay details have been revealed, apart from that fact that "players are challenged to form alliances through Player vs. Player (PvP), Siege combat and politics to control Westeros." More details should become clear at the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, where the first gameplay trailer will debut.

Yesterday, you first endured me waffling on about what I’d seen of Total War: Rome 2, and then harkened to a cleverererererer man than I shedding further light on his studio’s intentions for their next epic historical strategy game. In this second and final part of my long chat with Total War series lead designer James Russell, we cover the geographic scope and scale of the game, why it’s not Supreme Commander BC, the importance of multiplayer and – here we go – whether and how the AI has improved. (more…)

Have the folks at The Creative Assembly been studying up on Spartacus?

ADOM is one of my favourite games, mostly because when people talk about how brilliant it is I sometimes think they’re talking about me. Then they say something like, “ADOM’s insistence on killing me with savage beasts is quite distressing”, and I’ve never killed anyone so it’s at that point I realise they’re talking about another more more murderous Adam, or Ancient Domains of Mystery. The latter is a glorious roguelike that I’ve been playing since I was fifteen. Development ceased in 2002, as creator Thomas Biskup presumably couldn’t devote his entire life to the game but, if he can Indiegoget enough money, he’ll return to development with a small team to help improve the game. Obligatory video below.

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OK, we have been somewhat keen-o in telling you what’s going on at the Rezzed PC gaming show in Brighton this weekend, but as something of a moveable feast the announcements have usually been as fresh to us as they are to the people we bellow them at. There’s not much left to announce now, but there are a few important, hitherto undisclosed treats which bear your attention. Specifically, the Leftfield Collection of smart, inventive, atmospheric indie games, the boardgames area and a hyper-speed live gamejam.(more…)

You'll be shocked to hear this, we know, but Activision and Tencent's just announced free-to-play Call of Duty title, Call of Duty Online, looks an awful lot like a Call of Duty multiplayer game. Take a peek for yourself above.