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For now, The Secret World's a wonderfully promising foundation that's positively riddled with cracks.

Mercy Hospital is now available on Steam, set in a familiar locale and including special zombie masks for Left 4 Dead players.

Nexon has announced that it will be showcasing two new games at Gamescom next month. First up is Shadow Company from Doobic Game Studios, the company behind Combat Arms (and the PC version of Devil's Third). Shadow Company is slated for 2013, runs on Unreal Engine 3 and, like Combat Arms, is a free-to-play military shooter. It promises "highly intense multiplayer gameplay" including the "Blackmoney" mode, which has four teams of four players going at it. Honestly, it's hard to imagine Doobic topping the innovation of the "nut shot."

Nexon will also be showing an unannounced, free-to-play naval RTS game. Check out a gallery of Shadow Company shots below (which doesn't feature any shots below, if you get our drift).

A good understanding of the logic of logic seems like something that should be taught in schools. Along with tax returns, how to fight a bear, and English punctuation. As discovered by Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson this week, ir/rational is a game that broaches the thought through topic of logic in a – strange way.

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THQ has registered multiple new websites related to upcoming projects, including the next Saints Row and the mysterious 1666.

The fourth expansion for World of Warcraft has a release date, and a special Collector's Edition.

Oh my goodness, this had better not be a tease. Chris Avellone has told GamesIndustry International that he’s “very tempted” to start a Kickstarter for a sequel to Planescape: Torment. Oh God, oh God, you have to do this, please, please, please. Cough, decorum. PlaneScape: Torment has of course been scientifically proven to be the best RPG of all time, with experts demonstrating that anyone who doesn’t like it is a giant idiot. The thought of more of this fantastic story, from the brain who wrote it, is like concentrated Christmas. Although… he adds, “I don’t know if I’d want to do it as a Planescape game.”

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Even after Radical Entertainment’s recent layoffs, the Windows version of its open-world action game is live.

The increasingly incongrously-named Penny Arcade are to continue their Zeboyd-developed series of roleplaying adventures, both with a fourth game and a pair of free expansions for the well-received third. The second DLC for On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness Episode 3 will apparently detail the fate of the character you/we/I/he/she/they/it/your mum played as in the first two episodes of the abandoned Hothouse-developed trilogy. Closure of a sort, then.(more…)

This independent PC game about friendship and jumping rectangles shows how great writing can take a game from entertaining to truly memorable.

And by that, I of course mean that it kinda vaguely reminds me of Mirror’s Edge – which is the highest praise I can give to just about anything with a running component, upward motion, or legs. Cloudbuilt is, however, also quite fond of the good old days before 3D graphics and gravity were invented, so double-jumping, air-dashing, and wall-running add some 16-bit flair to your fancy modern hop ‘n’ boppery. Basically, though, even a brief glimpse – which you’ll be able to glimpse briefly if you head southward of the break – has the part of my brain that’s faultily wired to salivate in relation to games instead of food doing its horrendously counterproductive thing.

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What ASCIIvania lacks in vampires, whips, and lovably horrendous dialogue, it more than makes up for with letters. You collect letters. You solve puzzles involving letters. You are letters. All of them, even. It’s a pretty simple premise, actually: Half-formed words act as barriers, and you have to complete them to make them disappear back into the great alphabetically organized beyond. The rest – despite looking like a command prompt combined with the frenzied scrawlings of a mad man – is pretty traditional Metroidvania. You run, you jump, you collect powers (double jump!), and, er, backtrack. There is definitely a lot of backtracking. I molded letters into thoughts after the break. They will provide you with the greatest incremental puzzle-solving power of all: knowledge.

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Hey, remember that one game with all those snazzy guns and that Gordon Freeman guy? You know, Shoot Many Robots? Well, it’s headed in a rather unexpected new direction. After beginning life as a (relatively cheap) purchasable product, it’s now launching a fully standalone free-to-play PVP extension. Titled “Arena Kings,” it comes with the most uncharacteristically no-frills description ever: “Arena Kings is a PvP shooter set in the same world as Shoot Many Robots.” In truth, though, it sounds like Demiurge is dedicated to making this far more than a many-robot-shooting shot in the dark.

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Now that former Activision creative strategist Robert Bowling is free from the corporate machine, he's jumping into the independent innovation scene full-force. Bowling recently donated $10,000 to the Ouya and announced a prequel to his studio's first game, Human Element, as the console's first confirmed, exclusive title.

"Could I have made this decision a year ago working on Call of Duty? Possibly not," Bowling tells Venture Beat. "But this is what being independent, being small, and being nimble is all about. We're able to make commitments like these and take bigger risks. And what I like about Ouya and what encouraged me to commit to it was the fact that Ouya is different."

Bowling formed Robotoki as an answer to the mainstream, public studios, and Human Element will be able to play with more formats in more creative ways than, say, popular military shooters generally do.

"What's important, what we're showing with Ouya, what we're doing on mobile, and what we're planning for 2015 is an experience that will adapt and change based on the device you're engaging with," Bowling says. "So what we're doing on mobile is very different from what we're planning on doing with the at-home experience in 2015, and it will be very different from the episodic content that we're bringing exclusively to Ouya."

The at-home iteration of Human Element will be a first-person survival title with heavy RPG elements. On a tablet, Human Element will focus more on strategy and resource management, sharing supplies and stats with the home game but playing as an independent experience. Human Element is episodic, and Robotoki would like to launch an installment every six months leading up to the full game's 2015 release window, but "right now, things are very early."

Bowling draws influence for Human Element from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a cancelled BBC series called Survivors and a novel that Bowling himself started writing, The Parents' Guide to a Zombie Apocalypse. "It's rather heavy," Bowling says. That must be the hardcover version.

In a new interview, Curt Schilling has revealed that Take-Two Interactive nearly financed a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

We check out player versus player combat in the last round of beta testing for ArenaNet’s upcoming MMO.

Ultima Forever's announcement came as a surprise earlier this month: Bioware has apparently been working with Richard Garriott's old Ultima 4 property to create a new entry in EA's growing collection of free-to-play titles. But despite the big announcement, Ultima Forever has been steeped in mystery, leading to plenty of guessing and speculation about what it's going to be like.

So we cornered the game's lead designer, Kate Flack, to try and get some answers. She couldn't tell Joystiq everything yet ("We're in alpha at the moment," she said, "and we'll be leading towards closed beta soon"), but read on for a few more insights on what Ultima Forever is ultimately going to be.

Get yourself a spare day or two and spend it burrowing into this huge, excellent series of video interviews with some of the most renowned/revered/contentious figures in the game industry, all discussing what games mean to them and to the human experience. Ultimately Critical Path promises to become “a transmedia project exploring the art, philosophy, politics and psychology of video games”, which could mean an awful lot of things, but it’s off to a great start with bite-size talking heads including Meier, Spector, Blezinski, Hocking, Kojima, Humble, Rohrer, Wright, Carmack, Levine, Garriot, Koster, Howard, Mechner, Bushnell, Muzyka & Zeschuck, Schafer, Chen, Molyneux and loads more talking thoughtfully, fascinatingly and with clear enthusiasm about many different facets of what they do, why they do it and what it might mean. Also, what games might need to do next.(more…)

The alpha version of Recruits, a Cannon Foddery squad shooter, is available to play through Desura for people pre-ordering the full game. It’s a UDK-powered game, with simple objectives, tight maps and a sometimes infuriating fixed viewpoint. Enemy soldiers have a habit of being obscured by trees, meaning I’ve often been finding by following my squadmates’ lead. I shoot where they shoot, knowing that something must be there. It’s early days though and there’s promise in the explodey barrels, destructible scenery, and the simple joy of shooting guns and lobbing grenades. Enemy soldiers are vulnerable, spurting blood as they crumple after a single shot, while the player’s own squad are a little more robust. Less tension, more gung-ho charges. Trailer and more details below.

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Imagine playing a game with a friend next to you on the couch perched on the arm of your office chair and saying to that friend: “You thought this was a movie, didn’t you, but it’s actually a fighting game with 150 different techniques distributed in 5 stages.” Of course, you’d only say that if you weren’t a person at all but were, instead, the press release for BRUCEfilm’s Stay Dead. “Forget about the old interactive movies from the 80′s” you’d go on to say, “Stay Dead is a fast action arcade game with total freedom of action, combined with a cinematographic direction.” Perhaps you’d add that it’s out now and then re-enact the utterly brilliant trailer. Watch.

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Anna, with its single location, reactive horror elements and folklore-based story, seemed like it could be the game to scratch a lot of my itches. After playing through twice, to see how different the scares and the conclusions might be, I’m ready to share wot I think. Am I itch-free or have I got sixteen layers of my own skin sloughed up under my fingernails?

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Ooh, what’s this in my wheezing inbox? Why, it’s a free first-person platformer from Sweden, made in the Unreal Development Kit, promising fun with a grappling hook within a dramatic, otherwordly landscape. I like it already. I liked A Story About My Uncle even more once I’d played it.(more…)

A few hours ago, the Kickstarter for free-roaming space extravaganza, Skyjacker, failed to reach its funding target, falling short by just over $70,000. Rather than throwing up their hands and heading for the nearest watering hole to drown their sorrows, Digitilus have vowed to continue development. Having gained so many backers and communicating their ideas for the game to the wider world, they believe this is one of those failures that makes people stronger, so not at all like the many times I’ve ‘failed’ to recognise my low tolerance for gin. So development will continue, provided the community of of pledgers continue to spread the word and pass their money direct to Digitilus. Kickstarter might still have a role as well.

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CEO Yves Guillemot believes the lack of new consoles has damaged creativity and led to a sequel epidemic.

If you've avoided playing the spell-slinging sorcerer class so far, a new bug may make you think again.

Sundays are for sun! Hooray. I am going right out to bask in the electromagnetic wash as soon as I’ve finished these words. Man, I like a good dose of solar radiation. Nothing else like it.

• The handsome artist and writer Marsh Davies has looked back at Valve’s unfinished episodic experiment with Half-Life Episodes 1 & 2: “The point of all this isn’t that Episode One is a poor game (few games do hold up to Valve’s standards) but that its apparent flaws are so diligently addressed in its sequel. The strictures of antlion combat are inverted. Your venture into their burrows sees you encounter the flighty, cautious antlion workers, whose ranged bombardment and aggressive repositioning makes for a thrilling tactical contrast with the direct attacks of the hive’s soldiers. More importantly, your companion here, a vortigaunt, takes on the role you had in the previous episode, stunning and upturning attackers – so gifting you the primary role of finishing them off. He also has a hilarious line in bathetic overstatement.”

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Hello youse,

The Robot Special I’ve written can wait until next week. It is full of recommendations of great games, and I can’t do that right now. Today I want to talk about something I can’t shake. I cannot shake the feeling that we have too many toys. Read on.(more…)

Miss out on Comic-Con this year? Then join Naomi as she tracks down the coolest stuff from the showfloor, and enter to win our Scott Snyder-signed books!

The only thing that better than getting a new game to play is getting a new game to play and still having a pocket full of cash-money to spend on sweeties and maybe even a balloon. Here’s a bountiful selection of brilliant gaming experiences that can be had for not very much money, leaving the rest of your funds to spend on things far more frivolous than digital entertainment software. I curate a whole host of good value gaming deals across all platforms, around the clock, over at the SavyGamer.co.uk internet website. You should totally hit it up. Here’s this week’s Bargain Bucket: (more…)

Lots more projects in the loser column this week, although the real plump projects are still in the midst of their runs. Hopefully we’ll be seeing a packed winner column in coming weeks. As ever, if there’s a fund raiser for a game you’ve spotted, or you indeed are hoping to make, let me know via my name above. One thing – unless someone changes my mind, I’ve decided to no longer include any “flexible funding” projects, as offered by Indiegogo. They aren’t in the spirit of the whole endeavour, and are essentially temporary tipjars, with too much risk that donated money will reach developers who fall far short of reaching any useful amount. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a metric ton of projects to peruse below.

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