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Can the Western teams make a last stand against the Koreans?

A trailer has emerged from Project Copernicus, the MMO that was in development from now-defunct Amalur developer 38 Studios.

Do you have a spare $1.2 million lying around? Then you could have purchased what could be the biggest gaming collection ever sold.

Resident Evil 6 is going to have a whole lot of story if a recent rating is any indication. But is that too much?

Randy Pitchford doesn't want to talk about Brothers in Arms ahead of Borderlands 2's release, but he speaks out about its change anyway.

A man is trapped in a room with a machine playing a browser game about a man trapped in a room with a machine. The first man, the one who actually exists, then notices that another man wrote about the same game, ir/rational, nearly three years ago. He continues to write about it anyway because it contains nifty logic puzzles, darkly amusing writing from Penumbra scribe Tom Jubert and has been reduxed so hard it looks and sounds brand new. Go try it.

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Check out the announcement trailer for the free-to-play MMO, which will be released on PC early next year in the West.

X-Men and Prometheus actor has been cast as "the franchise's iconic hooded hero" in the forthcoming adaptation.

It’s looked a little touch and go as to whether Neal Stephenson’s crowd-sourced swordfighting game Clang was going to make it. But it has, which means there’s one more game added to the list of titles which we hope and pray can ultimately prove those whole Kickstarter thing is a valid model for independent development. At the time of writing, Clang has $520,000 of an intended $500,000, and $90,000 of that was nine people opting for the $10k tier that gets them a replica weapon and a dev visit. A few hours are left go on the kick-clock, in case you’ve been dithering about how much you want stuff.

So, well done Mr Stephenson and crew. You can now make digital swordfighting dreams real. As long as you have a Razer Hydra motion controller, anyway.(more…)

We've spent some time playing Paradox Interactive's latest title, and can safely say it captures the brutality of a real Medieval war.

A new developer diary for Survarium, which is not STALKER 1.5, STALKER 2 or STALKER Online, fails to dispel such notions entirely by referring to anomalies and artifacts at the first possible opportunity. A finely edited montage of horrors explains how the world died this time around and creeping botanical nightmares make even the talking head sections quite unnerving. Then there’s explanation of levels, purchases and perks, and the two game modes: team combat and co-op. Then, right at the end, a man with a magnificent beard appears to talk about One More Mode (cue: Daft Punk’s One More Time).

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I am tiny and weak, which contributes to my being terrible at basketball, but I’m hoping to be quite good at BasketBelle. From the creator of tear-yanking But That Was [Yesterday], its trippy visuals and shimmering soundtrack are precisely my sort of thing. Taking place over seven chapters, each of which uses the basic concept of ball-to-basket in a different way, including monster battles in Paris and journeys through the clouds, it’s available now and there’s some new video below.

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Vostok Games, composed of developers from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, elaborates on its coming free-to-play MMOFPS Survarium in a new developer diary video. The game is set in the near future, after a "mass-scale ecological catastrophe" leaves Earth a wasteland.

As seen above, the video details the five skills that players level up by completing faction missions. Survarium will require a constant connection to the Internet and will not include a single player mode. The game is expected to launch on PC at the end of 2013, just a few years before the world goes to hell (according to Survarium, of course).

Hello youse.

Our planned photo special must be bumped to next Sunday, because this week a great new game came into my life. Of all the columns I write, these ones are my favourite – I get to recommend something great, and it’s easily available. You can read these words and then order it instantly. And that’s exactly what you should do. It’s a game called “Infiltration” and after the jump I’ll tell you all about it. It’s brilliant.

Will you Advance?(more…)

Sunday mornings are for waking up back at Rossignol HQ and being pleased that Rezzed was a success. Wish you had been there, etc. But anyway, let’s get back to the usual way of things and examine the evidence for people know what they are talking about when it comes to games.

• This is great: Fun Is Boring on Gamasutra. “Fun is a lazy word. A bit like “game”. On first blush anyone can grin, nod their head, and think they understand what you’re talking about — but there are breathtaking gulfs between Today I Die and World of Warcraft, between Monopoly and Foursquare (both social networking or playground variants). Pete Garcin wrote a good piece last year about the problems of broad language, though he wasn’t looking to, “pick on ‘fun’ specifically.” Let’s pick on fun, specifically.”

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My weekend project. Hooray for transcription!

Lots of losses this week, demonstrating that 55% failure rate that gaming Kickstarters experience. Some aren’t surprises, others really are. But there are winners too, and an awful lot of new games appearing in the list this week.

Usual disclaimer: Featuring a game here doesn’t mean we endorse giving it your money. If there’s something you’d like to see appear, email me via my name above, but that doesn’t guarantee inclusion. And finally, be warned about “flexible funding” on some Indiegogo projects – it means they’ll get your money even if they come nowhere near their target.

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All the cool kids are at Rezzed today so it has fallen to me – professional uncool kid Tony Heugh – to be your bargain guide. Don’t focus on the fun they must be having without us, grab your bindle and come with me on a discounted adventure across the very best digital distributor bargains. For more deals you can find us at SavyGamer.co.uk.

This week there’s still no sign of the Steam Summer Sale but we have bundles aplenty, a Double Fine triple and even a chance to break out MS Paint. (more…)

A simple, devastatingly effective game of harrowing escape.

Curiosity has a secret. Here's what it totally isn't.

Two classic DOTA heroes have officially made it over to Valve's Dota 2.

If I’m being honest, neither of The Trench‘s trailers – both of which you’ll find after the break – look too terribly different standard World War Whichever fare. But, reading more about the WWI “50 percent FPS, 50 percent RPG” from Gallica Game Studio, it sounds like its most interesting bits wouldn’t trailer well anyway. Basically, though, The Trench puts you in the meticulously laced combat boots of a French soldier on the Verdun front three days before the German assault on February 21st, 1916. So, for the most part, you’ll spend those precious few moments preparing - which, among other things, includes positioning soldiers and weaponry, exploring your trench, customizing equipment, and taking sidequests from NPCs.

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I’m free! Using a straightened coathanger, a blob of chewing gum, and an old Broken Sword walkthrough, I’ve managed to escape the fetid dungeon that is The Flare Path. God, the air out here sure is sweet. And the views – wow! – that must be Mount Manshoot over there, and that can only be the Temple of Fairly Tiresome MMOs. A man could totally reinvent himself in a land like this… he could ditch decades’ worth of baggage and inhibitions.

Alternatively, he could have a panic attack, and decide to calm himself by talking to the nice people* at Battlefront about their staggeringly bold Combat Mission roadmap.

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Gone Home is to be the first game from The Fullbright Company, a new indie studio whose formerly mainstream members were previously the prime creators of the excellent BioShock 2 add-on Minerva’s Den, as well as working on assorted other 2K projects. I had a chat with Mr Fullbright himself, Steve Gaynor, about their highly intriguing but equally mysterious non-combat first-person game. Why ditch the guns? Why leave cushty industry jobs to do this? How abstract will it be? How much can the physics be abused? I also made some sweeping generalisations about Columbo.(more…)

On this week's Podcast: Dark Knight, Roy Walker, Gaikai, South Korean golfing accessories.

Why we - and publishers - should be managing our expectations rather than building hype.

People like to divide people into two groups: those who can multitask, and those who cannot. Nearly everyone includes themselves in the former group, and then they put everyone else in the latter. Most people are lying. But there’s another group: those who needto multitask. I’d put myself in that group – the sort who can’t concentrate on one thing unless he or she is doing at least one other thing at the same time. You may call it ADHD. I call it efficient. I wrote about it last year, and it turns out it’s more common than I’d ever realised. So below are my suggestions for the best ways to play while you’re doing something else.

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At the very least, I have to give 3AM Games credit for fearlessly dumping all their favorite things into a blender and hoping for the best. Last time I did that, I got a runny soup of pumpkin pie, ice cream, and the collected works of Robert Heinlein. 3AM, though, is calling its thematic Frankenstein monster Magrunner, describing it as “a first-person action puzzle game set in a cyberpunk reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.” There’s an eerily Portal-2-esque trailer after the break. I hope the final version is rife with snarky narrations from the squid-shaped End of Days himself.

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A cool mod allows you to put various elements of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim into Minecraft.

Diablo 3's current endgame, a supposedly endless item-hunt and enemy-slaughtering system, isn't as infinite as Blizzard first hoped it would be, and players are quickly running out of things to do, community manager Bashiok writes in the Battle.net forums. Blizzard is aware of this problem and is considering options for a more succinct endgame solution.

"Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks," Bashiok writes. "But honestly Diablo 3 is not World of Warcraft. We aren't going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it's not there right now."

Blizzard is working on version 1.0.4, which will have "as many fixes and changes" as it can pack into one update, and 1.1, which will introduce PvP arenas. These updates will help, as will the progression systems Blizzard is considering, but they aren't the solution in the long run - and since 1.1 is still "a ways out," it is the long run.

"I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they're not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game," Bashiok says.

Blizzard didn't release an unfinished game; it truly believed the item hunt would be a sustainable system, Bashiok writes.

"Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but we believed pre-release that the item hunt would be far more sustainable, and would work to be a proper end-game for quite a while," he says. "That didn't turn out to be true, and we recognize that."