Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The news horn of Game Informer sounds a clear, pure note of announcement: The Elder Scrolls Online, that secret so poorly kept, has been confirmed by Zenimax. How’s this for interesting: the GI article will apparently reveal the “player-driven PvP conflict that pits the three player factions against each other in open-world warfare over the province of Cyrodiil.” Cor!

The key dev quoted by the article – and the lead in the project – is former Dark Age Of Camelot man Matt Firor, who said his team is “committed” to making the MMO into a Best Thing Ever. Lucky they’re not feeling indifferent about the whole affair. That would have been awful. Teaser type trailer will turn up tomorrow, apparently. (The press release even claims that the game will be featured in magazines! Amazing.)

Like John, I can’t claim to be the world’s foremost expert on Skullgirls, as I’ve yet to do that whole thing with the controllers and flashing images on a screen. So yeah, I’m probably closer to third or fourth. And yet, desert dry as my knowledge reservoirs may be, it’s growing into quite the sizable blip on my radar. Granted, while gorgeously animated 2D feats of incredible brutality are an appealing prospect, I’m even more taken with Reverge’s dedication to making us PC folks feel like the unique and intimidatingly attractive people that we are.

(more…)

Fanfiction often has surprising visits from other fictional places, although the fact that I’m here and not writing on that other lovely PC gaming site means it happens in real-life as well. Super Mario Bros Crossover 2.0 is the gaming equivalent of fanfiction, bringing characters from all over the Nintendo universe and having an office party with them in the Mario world.(more…)

So then. I suspect the needle of Minecraft cuteness has swung way too far to the “d’aww” end of the meter with the introduction of tameable, breedable ocelots (which you can see emitting clouds of love-hearts in the video below.) This is a game with zombies and suicide-explosion beasts in! I demand more sinister threat. And I believe that it is only sensible, because horrors lurking outside our castles only make the cute, homely stuff cuter and more homely. Right, minerfolk?(more…)

We mentioned earlier that Tim Schafer would love to make a Pyschonauts 2, but can’t get the funding. Well, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson spotted our story and suggested to Schafer that they should work together to make it happen. Multimillionaire Persson clearly has the funds to do this, and everyone in the world with their brain in the right place wants to see a sequel to one of the most joyful games of all time, so this is a thing that might actually happen.

Clearly at the moment this is a tweeted offer, not a signed contract, but it’s a massively exciting one. Tim, say yes!

The latest release from Nitrome is one of those games that I wish I’d discovered later in the day, because I’m going to spend the remaining hours until I’m released from the shackles that bind me to the keyboard wishing I was playing it. It’s called Rainbogeddon, which should really be enough to make you click here and play it. If you haven’t, know that it’s Pacman, Bomberman, Dig Dug and loads of other brilliant things all packed together into a browser window. Destructible mazes? Of course. Oodles and oodles of powerups? Definitely. A little too tiny for my dwindling eyesight to fully take in? Regrettably. Go and play it. Do it for me, because I can’t.

(more…)

Someone over at NeoGAF apparently got hold of the South Park edition of Game Informer and has posted up relevant details. These include:

- You play as a silent protagonist. A new kid in town who must work to fit in. - It’s the first South Park game Stone and Parker have actively participated in and written the script for. - Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine, there will be five classes (wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unannounced class). - Apparently “elements of the combat system are like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games”. So it’s an RPG map with turn-based encounters.

Sounds like a peculiar blend! But that could be for the best. Plenty more spoilery details through the link.

The very important #indieVisibilty awards ceremony took place in London last night, organised by SizeFiveGames, officiated by OneLifeLeft, and with awards selected by IndieGames and “Rock, Paper, Shotgun”. You can see the full list of the awards distributed below, including Best Minecraft, Nicest Man, “best attempt to do what mainstream devs will not”, and Notch’s game of the year.

Well done to all those involved!(more…)

This isn’t PC gaming news so much as general internet nerding, but it’s a lovely thing nonetheless. I have to admit that I haven’t seen the Google homepage in months, so I wouldn’t have realised that the current logo is an extraordinary interactive Google doodle game thing, had John not alerted me. How did he know? Well, there are a lot of tubes from all round the world leading to his office. He was probably peering down them. [Actually my wife told me - John] Anyway, the new doodle is the tale of a meeting of robots, and has been put up in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first publication by brilliant sci-fi author, Stanislaw Lem. Lem is best know for Solaris, which was made into movies by Tarkovsky and Soderburgh, but his influence on sf generally has been enormous, thanks to his prolific and insightful writing and amazing short stories. You should definitely have a read of some of his stuff, if you haven’t already. (The art in the logo is inspired by Lem illustrator, Daniel Mrózh, who illustrated a version of The Cyberiad. Which now, I learn, was even turned into an opera!)

I am posting this link almost purely for the benefit of RPS contributor Richard Cobbett, whose aversion to spiders in games is such that he’s forced to play Skyrim while dosed up with a medical team on standby, just in case his heart gives out. Sadly the mod is only a crude fix for now, and replaces spiders with awkward stuffed-looking bears. There’s a crab alternative if the bears look too stupid. (They do.)

If you were brave/lucky enough to attend our Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo then you might have noticed the quietly majestic Stellar Impact, which is a rather accomplished-looking PvP starship combat game. It’s really quite the thing: somewhere between MOBA-style play and classic ship-to-ship naval warfare, with you having out-manoeuvre your opponent, bring a broadside to bear, and so on. What’s more is that it has a sort of infinite demo, whereby you can play the game for free, but can’t level up your stuff without the full version. Neat! I’ve posted the trailer and also Total Biscuit’s blathering about it below. Go take a look!

UPDATE: Sigh, looks like their site broke as I posted this.(more…)

The ‘Humble Bundle’ tag by this point surely guarantees that any indie games blessed with it have the money hose turned on ‘em. Latest is Mode 7 Games’ most excellent tactical strategy affair Frozen Synapse, which has just now gone pay what you want under the trusty Humble banner – but only for the duration of the next 14 days. If you don’t have FZ already, then I thumb my teeth in your general direction. And also suggest you swoop right now.

Beat the average price- currently a genuinely humble $4.17 – and you’ll get last year’s Frozenbyte bundle (comprising Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds Survivor, a preorder for Splot and a prototype of Jack Claw) thrown in for free. Frozen Synapse normally costs $25, so this is a splendid deal from a punter’s point of view. Celebratory announcement video below!(more…)

The new Deus Ex is about many things, but ranking high amongst them is DRM. I’m not even joking.(more…)

I really cannot fathom what’s going on with Cargasm. As we’ve said many times, the way it’s being promoted is foul, with awful allusions toward gathering some sort of harem of scantily clad women and so forth. And we’ve also pointed out that its claims of “photo-realistic graphics” for its iOS version are, well, nonsense. But the biggest issue of all is despite some really impressive-looking screenshots, we’ve still yet to see the game actually show any driving. And that continues in the latest video, with yet more of what I’m pretty certain is an awkward, juddery fly-through in the level creator rather than actual in-game footage, which is clearly trying to look like a driver’s view. However, I don’t post it for Cargasm at all, really. Rather for the extremely interesting tech that’s discussed coming from Near Global. It’s well worth a look.

(more…)

A thread on the Steam forums seems to confirm that rumours about a new Counter-Strike game – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – are true, with commenter “Cliffe” (who is Valve designer chap Jess Cliffe) saying “Global Offensive”. There have been a bunch of other references to it, on Twitter and so forth.

And update on the ESEA Facebook page reads “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive… More info in the morning.” So it looks like we can expect something later today.

Game Informer are doing one of their big, slow reveals for Borderlands 2, and some details have already begun to trickle out. The characters from the first game are apparently now NPCs in this game, and robo-host Claptrap will also be making an appearance. The new game will have a currency and resource system, based on an element called “Eridium”, and there will apparently be a big overhaul of the weapons. These will now be customisable and more visually distinct. There’s also going to be wider range of vehicles.

The biggest improvement, however, seems to be in the NPCs, who will be more dynamic in combat, interacting with each other and so on, and also moving about and interacting with characters in the world, which they entirely failed to do in the first game. It’s looking intriguing.

Okay, Internet! Okay. I’ll play The Stanley Parable. Jeez, I’ll play so you’ll stop hassling me. I’ve got tea to drink and stuff, y’know. I mean so what, yes, it is my kind of thing. And I do like wry and creepy first-person games, and The Stanley Parable is one of those peculiar story-driven, non-linear, thought-provoking, brilliant-constructed, acutely clever, well-writeen mods that we love to post about, but some of us want to sit about watching Chinese action movies at ten o’clock at night, and totally don’t have time to download 450mb of Half-Life 2 mod (which you only actually need Source SDK to play) and then wander through corridors figuring out what the hell is going on, and smiling all the while at that incredible voiceover.

It’s brilliant. Exquisite, even. I can’t spoil it by talking about it, but there’s a trailer below, if you want to take a look. But you shouldn’t look. You should play it.(more…)

The League Of Legends noise machine has been loud this week, with a trailer for the new patch (below) which will nerf some of the more popular heroes, but also a big boasting stats release. Here’s what they said: “As of today, 15 million people have registered to become League of Legends players. Each month, over 4 million people log in to play. And on each day, 1.4 million summoners play League of Legends together.”

Four million! That’s even more people than read RPS each month. My startling powers of logic lead me to reason that this means that some of you lot must also play League Of Legends. You have one comment thread: explain its appeal to me.(more…)

Another mystery is why it just took me five tries to spell ‘mystery’ correctly. A better mystery is why new some rather large new scenery objects have started showing up in a few Team Fortress 2 maps. They look like rocket ships, or possibly just rockets – but what do they mean? I put ‘mean’ in italics there, so it would sound like I was whining like a pitiful child who wants everything nownownow. Did it work?(more…)

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab report that they have boosted the effectiveness of a game-playing AI by enabling it to read the manual: “When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.”

What’s most amazing about this is that despite the trial and error nature of this kind of machine learning, the ability to correlate text instructions with events in the game do seem to have a significant impact on the system’s capacity to learn how to play, as the article explains: “The researchers also tested a more-sophisticated machine-learning algorithm that eschewed textual input but used additional techniques to improve its performance. Even that algorithm won only 62 percent of its games.” So, you know, RTFM is sound advice, even if you are a machine.

The Firaxis team are taking a few pages from Sid Meier’s great gaming history and placing then in the Facebook. The “social” – or maybe “casual”, I don’t really know – version of Civ, named CivWorld, went into an opne beta today, and it actually looks pretty good. I am basing that on having kicked off a game myself after watching the video which I’ve embedded below. If there’s a problem I can report on up front, well, it keeps timing out, and is maddeningly laggy. Still, it is just a beta, and one that is too popular for its own good, I suppose. Anyway, I am sure we’ll be hearing more about this soon.(more…)

Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd. announces Rock, Paper, Shotgun is to go free-to-read, introduces new NanoPayment™ Technology™

BATH, UK, 29 June, 2011 – In a move once more demonstrating that Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd is at the forefront of online PC gaming news development initiatives, the organisation is delighted to announce that as of the 1st July 2011 www.rockpapershotgun.com will be going free-to-read.

“Once again Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd has proven that it’s ahead of the curve, pushing forward new synergic stratagems for dynamic reader integration,” explained RPS representative, Dave Tosser. “We believe that by moving RPS forward in this free-to-read direction, our web enterprise once again advances the scheme for all interactive users on a broad dynamic scale.”

pay just $1.49 to read the rest of this entry

LulzSec, the hacker group who have claimed responsibility for many of the high profile attacks on gaming companies, publishers, and even the CIA, have declared their work is done, their time is up, and they’re off. Apparently it was always intended to be a 50 day voyage aboard their Lulzboat, and it has come to an end. They believe they have revitalised the Antisec Movement, and entertained themselves along the way. Which they claim, albeit in hindsight, was always their goal. But whatever their reasons, their goodbye comes with perhaps their biggest release of data yet. It’s going to be messy. This one contains 550,000 Battlefield Heroes Beta users’ details, and the details of 50,000 users from “random gaming forums”.

(more…)

Valve have just announced, as a few were speculating, that they will now be supporting free-to-play (F2P) games via Steam. The first five that have now arrived on the service are Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. There’s to be “exclusive content” if you try each of them out on one of the following days until this Saturday, depending which is the “F2P game of the day”. The micro-transactions will be handled by the same tech that’s currently selling hats in TF2. So that’s Hi Rez, Atari, Sega, Perfect World and NHN USA Inc. on board already, with surely very many more to follow. F2P is out there, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You’re even – whisper – bound to start playing one soon.

Oh for Heaven’s sakes – Battlefield 3′s not even out yet, and already we’re previewing Battlefield 1942. There are 1938 more Battlefields to come first! Oh, wait. Yes, that’s right. The start of the series. Got it. So: Brendan Caldwell takes us back to where DICE’s war began, and reminisces about being a disgusting coward.

There was a time in first-person-shooter history, believe it or not, when World War II was not The Boring War. Oh, admit it. We all remember it well. “Dubya-dubya-two?” we asked excitedly. “Can’t get enough of it! Gimme some. I said give it to me. I want it.” Then the fatigue set in. Pineapple grenades lost their novelty. German uniforms didn’t give us a rude-on anymore. So we discarded World War II, like a soggy Metro full of old nibs.

Oh, but remember the good times. The French hedgerows, the crumbling grey bunkers. The beaches. The endless, endless beaches. Nothing like a trail of unsaved Private Ryans to soak up the salt, the sea and the atmosphere of intense brutality. Catching some rays by the seaside there, Private? Ah! You cannot be. For it is overcast. Also, you are dead.(more…)

Only seven minutes left on the Valve’s Potato Sack ARG clock! Join me as I pop open a Coke Zero and stare catatonically at the tumbling numbers, won’t you? I could do with the company, I’ll be updating this post LIVE as and when anything happens.

Have I got your attention? Then I’ll begin. Ace of Spades is a freeware, multiplayer Minecraft-alike that takes Minecraft’s cuboid building mechanics and drapes a World War 1 setting on top of it, with the end result being a huge, immersive, dynamic game of capture the flag.

On the one hand, you’ve got two teams of sixteen exchanging rifle fire and grenades, trying to push forward and outflank one another. On the other hand, both teams are trying to improve their position by building bunkers, bridges and tunnels. If you want to give it a shot you’ll find the game here and a guide to playing it here. If not, then I’ve assembled ten reasons why you should reconsider your position after the jump. I want to stand up and high-five RPS reader David Lake for sending this in, but alas, this is the internet. What a shame.(more…)

Yikes! This is the most impressive Unity-powered project I’ve seen to date. BeGone is a butter-smooth, not-at-all-ugly multiplayer FPS you can play right out of your browser. Click on the link, pick a server, wait some seconds and you’re off, engaging in hot manshoots with up to 11 other players. You hear that? That’s the sound of the past crunching under the heavy boot of Tomorrow. Go play, or watch some footage after the jump. News courtesy of the ever-independent Indiegames blog. (more…)

Lancashire therapist Steve Pope is once again making his claim that two hours of gaming is the same as a line of cocaine. A statement he first made in May last year, winning him media attention from the unquestioning writers in his local press, and then the wider press. A statement we investigated, and for which we found he was unable or unwilling to show us any evidence. As MCV reports, on BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday afternoon, Pope was once again comparing gaming’s apples to addiction’s oranges, making unevidenced statements about how videogaming produces a cocaine-like “high” in the brain, and without an example – astonishingly – calling gaming “the silent killer of our generation.” So to celebrate his reappearance, after some more on his latest, I’m republishing our previous article below.

(more…)