All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Nowhere, as Jim noted, is conceptually staggering. It’s a life sim with a cast of procedurally generated abstract organisms, which grown to 800 metres in diameter. They can contain other creatures within their cavities and hollows. Indeed, they can contain entire societies. The latest alpha release contains the first iteration of the creature generation software, allowing players to explore three entities, which represent the same lifeform at different stages of its existence.

If all that sounds distractingly odd, let it also be known that you explore the gargantuan creatures by means of a grappling hook. Video below.

… [visit site to read more]

Deadspin Aaron Hernandez Moved To Isolation After Fighting Handcuffed Inmate | Gizmodo This Abandoned NYC Prison Is Being Turned Into a Huge Film Lot | io9 Game of Thrones' most brutal deaths remade as 8-bit animated GIFs | Lifehacker How to Deal with Grief When You Still Have to WorkRead more...

What would The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling cult classic horror TV series be like in the modern age? Here are some fresh plot ideas from Modern Twilight Zone's Twitter.Read more...

Microsoft has responded to claims published in The Guardian that GCHQ considered using Kinect for surveillance.

Carmageddon: Reincarnation will arrive on Steam's Early Access service on March 27, Stainless Games announced. The UK developer also offered a pre-alpha trailer for the vehicular destruction game, which focuses on damage tech for the reboot.

Carmageddon: Reincarnation is the result of a successful Kickstarter project in June 2012 during which the indie developer earned $625,143. The developer earned a total of $3.5 million in funding for the game as of March 2013 thanks to the investment of Bullfrog co-founder Les Edgar, bringing the game to Xbox One and PS4 in addition to PC, Mac and Linux.

Since the developer first unveiled its plans for an alpha-level launch on Steam in September, it stressed that all of its Kickstarter and PayPal backers who pledged at least $15 for a copy of the game will also get every piece of Stainless Games' DLC "for the rest of time." [Image: Stainless Games]

Stop reading now and head here if you haven’t completed The Last of Us: Left Behind or The Last of Us.

To be crystal clear, so you’re not tempted to read on…

Spoilers Ahead — Turn Back Now

Okay, if you HAVE played the new story chapter and learned about Ellie’s adventures and relationship with Riley, we’re happy to show you our addendum to Grounded, our feature-length documentary on the development of The Last of Us. Our new video is called From Dreams — The Making of The Last of Us: Left Behind. Watch it now:

Maybe you’ve caught Grounded: The Making of The Last of Us on Amazon Instant Video or via the Season Pass on PlayStation Store. Perhaps you prefer to watch videos on YouTube. We made that possible as the full feature is now up on the PlayStation YouTube channel:

We’re exploring additional ways to make these videos available to watch in your region of the world. These are the stories of development on The Last of Us we have so far. There’s more to come. Our final drop in the Season Pass is coming. It’s chock full of multiplayer goodness with new maps, new weapons, new skills, and also a brand new difficulty mode for the single-player campaign. We’ll have more information on it as in-game elements near completion.

The more television technology advances, the harder it is to keep our classic consoles hooked up. Modder Marshall over at Retroactive is working on a device to bring the last cartridge-based Nintendo console into the HDMI age. Anyone know how to solder? Read more...

Hi PlayStation.Blog! Italian indie studio MixedBag here again. Last Tuesday, we announced our crazy shoot ‘em up Futuridium EP Deluxe, coming exclusively to PS Vita. Today, we’re here to bring you more PlayStation love.

Our big project – the one we opened MixedBag for – is a game we always wanted to make. We’re immensely proud (drumroll) to announce forma.8, coming to PS4 and PS Vita.

forma.8 is an action adventure game and our own personal take on the classic Metroidvania formula. We started working on forma.8 more than two years ago, beginning with a little gameplay concept centered on an experimental control system for touch devices. It evolved into an adventure of epic proportions.

In the distant future, a small exploration probe, forma.8, is stranded alone on the surface of an alien planet. It was parted from its companions by chance, and has a life or death mission to accomplish: it must find and recover a powerful energy source deep under the surface before it’s too late. Ancient civilizations, great perils, and dystopian visions await it, and not everything is as it seems.

Floating gracefully in mid air, with a control system that aims to give players a true sense of flying, forma.8 starts with no powers, no weapons, and no hints of what to do and where to go; it’s up to the player to explore the planet, deal with its often hostile inhabitants, and slowly uncover the story. There’s no verbal communication in the game — everything is conveyed to the player with images, sounds, and the gameplay itself.

Physics is a big part of forma.8, too; everything in the world is physics based, with plants, ropes, liquids, enemies, rocks, and all the moving elements interacting and reacting in a realistic way, offering unexpected twists to the game.

As you can see for forma.8, we opted to use a peculiar visual style. We used hand-drawn vector graphics mixed with 3D elements, and we rendered everything at the highest resolution possible, with a massive amount of antialiasing to get a very clean and crisp look. The results? You don’t see pixels, only smooth lines, and the game looks gorgeous on the PS Vita screen as well as on a big TV rendered in 1080p. And it runs at 60 frames per second, obviously.

The soundtrack and all the sound effects of forma.8 are in the skillful hands of Qubit, AKA Omar Ferrero, who is also working on some music tracks for Futuridium EP Deluxe. If you like the audio vibes from the trailer, he’s the one to thank.

So a little recap:

• an expansive world
• everything is physics based
• exploration
• puzzles
• secrets to uncover
• an intriguing and mysterious story
• lots of enemies
• lots of BIG enemies
• some even BIGGER enemies
• …and all the power-ups you need to take care of them and to avoid all the nasty stuff you’ll face on a remote, alien planet
• 60 frames per second of superfluid action

A big thank you from Mauro Fanelli and Andrea Gellato, the two co-founders and members of MixedBag. We’ll share more information about forma.8 and Futuridium EP Deluxe soon. As always, I’m here to reply to your questions, so don’t be shy!

For more updates, please follow MixedBag on Twitter and Facebook.

The Yawhg is a one-to-four player adventure game, by Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll, in which you try to direct the fate of characters plucked straight from a fairy tale that never was. It’s been out for almost a year, and also arrived on Steam yesterday.

In six weeks, something terrible is going to happen. The characters you play as don’t know this, but you do. And so you guide their lives, and their destinies, with that knowledge, trying to build them into people who can make the most of what’s left after the disaster. All of this has happened before, and will happen again. But hey, maybe you’ll be a doctor rather than the town drunk this time around. … [visit site to read more]

Jazzpunk occupies a crossbreed universe of 1950s Americana and modern convenience. It's an alternate-history exploration of the Cold War era: The world is occupied and run by machines in a society that appears to be equal parts Russian, Japanese and American. The construction workers are robots. The sushi chefs are robots. The police force is made up of robots. Pretty much everyone is a robot - except for you.

In this PC, Mac and Linux adventure, you are a crooked-fingered, human detective who accepts secret missions by popping psychedelic pills. You're a spy in the oddest interpretation of the most romanticized espionage era ever. Buried in Jazzpunk's dissonant settings and puerile puzzles lies a bucket of laughs at the expense of Russians, Americans, islanders, Japanese, Scots, robots and humans - everyone.

Nothing is off-limits in Jazzpunk, and everything is funny.

IGN has teamed up with Sony to give 10 lucky winners the chance to play Infamous: Second Son ahead of launch, and meet the devs.

It's come to this. Apparently. Adult toys brand Vorze is releasing what it is calling the world's first "sexual home appliance."Read more...

If you had any doubt that the cult of Helix fossil , one of the "religions" formed around Twitch Plays Pokémon, is a serious thing, here's proof. Someone sprayed this masterpiece recetnly on a seemingly useless cement block, in front of a school. This must be one of those moments when graffiti becomes art instead of vandalism.Read more...

I haven’t played a skating game since the last Tony Hawk that was actually a skating game rather than a modern American soap opera. The plot synopsis for a skating game should never be more than a thousand words long and it certainly shouldn’t contain sentences like this: “Gaining their approval, he is let into the ranch, and meets the leader of the group, Iggy VanZant, a very rough type guy who isn’t fond of outsiders. He agrees to let him crash at the ranch if he obtains some wood for a half-pipe he is building.”

Thank the skate lords for OlliOlli then, a side-scrolling burst of speed and trickery that pleased owners of Playstation Vital Systems when it was released on the handheld last month. The trailer below is rather spiffy and the PC version will be playable at EGX Rezzed, where developers Roll7 will also unveil their next game.

… [visit site to read more]

These days, glitches are trendy.

During Tokyo Game Show last year, we (Henrik and Rickard), together with Sony Japan, announced that Pavilion would be coming to PS4 and PS Vita in 2014. Still, most people might not have heard that much about Pavilion, so we felt it was time to shed some light on the game.

“Pavilion, the fourth-person puzzling adventure from Visiontrick Media, throws you directly into its mysterious world without any text tutorials or beginning explanations. It is a puzzle game portrayed through exploration and audio-visual imagery. By interacting and observing you gradually, bit by bit, learn things about both the puzzling gameplay and the world itself.”

Let’s talk a little bit about the term “fourth-person,” which is something we’ve used over the past year to describe the way you interact with the main character. Basically, the character is not your avatar and you are not in control of him. Instead, you have to find different ways — mostly through environmental interaction — to guide, influence or even force him to explore and fulfill the purpose of the world. This indirect control is what we refer to when we say fourth-person.

This method of control has resulted in some interesting reactions. Some people feel it’s just a buzzword, while others are rather intrigued by it. In the end, we’re happy to see people giving it a thought and talking about it.

Like many other games, Pavilion will be an experience best played without knowing too much about what lies ahead — so we’re not going to give away too much. However, we’ll be posting more details about the game here on PlayStation.Blog in the coming months. Until then, you can follow our Twitter feed or Facebook page for more daily updates. Thanks for your time, and see you on PS4 and PS Vita later this year!

P.S. From Friday, March 7th to Sunday, March 9th, Pavilion will be playable at the Kyoto Indie Games Festival — BitSummit. If you happen to be in Japan at that time, come by and check out all the games, listen to some speakers, and just hang around with all the cool developers and gamers for a couple of days.

We hope to see you there!

While, clinically speaking, everyone has at least one wargame in them, not everyone has the patience, skill and obstetrical forceps (don’t Google) necessary to extract that wargame. My Monmouth Rebellion TBS? It breaks my heart to admit it, but I suspect it will never see the light of day. Then again, South African strategy-smith Johan Nagel has been gestating Vietnam ’65 for nigh-on 30 years, so perhaps it’s a bit early for defeatism. … [visit site to read more]

The Xbox One price cut and new Godzilla trailer are the hot topics on this week's UK podcast.

In a country with numerous Kit Kat flavors and a Kit Kat specialty store, this should not come as a surprise. It should come as an utter delight. Read more...

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare was already silly enough with those slings and it's online gameplay. But it just wasn't enough for modders. Here's Crustacean Soup's Giant Slayer mod that adds overpowered giant knights to the game.Read more...

To mark the release of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Konami and Puma are teaming up for some licensed Ground Zeroes gear.Read more...

Games have become a mainstream thing. Nearly everyone plays them, talks about them, and interacts with them in some way on a semi-regular basis. But here at RPS, we have this violence in games tag that occasionally gets use, and not usually for good reasons. While I’m a strong advocate for examination of how exactly we’re affected by cultures that glorify violence, I absolutely do not believe that throwing a singular “bad” blanket over a very nuanced issue helps anyone. And yet, despite gaming’s slow ascent out of the cultural gutters, people still blame it for all of society’s ills from time-to-time. John quite frequently holds people accountable for that fear-mongering mentality, and I personally think that’s important given what can happen when people let it warp their worldview.

Case in point: the US Government’s Republican party is suggesting a tax reform that would give sizable tax breaks to companies who create new technologies and practices in their respective fields. Unless they are creators of “violent videogames.”

… [visit site to read more]

There's a new Snickers ad with Godzilla in it just in time for the new movie. Did I say Godzilla? Because the whole thing looks just like an imaginary Denver, the Last Dinosaur movie. You can watch the clip below:Read more...

Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army is coming to consoles, according to developer Rebellion.

We did it – we finally did it.

141 years! 20,001 posts! It’s all been leading up to this moment. You have no idea how long and how hard we’ve been planning for this, the 20,001st Rock, Paper, Shotgun post. You won’t believe what we’ve got in store for it – and for you.

This changes everything. … [visit site to read more]

When most people think of anime, they think of intense action or perhaps a moé love story. But anime, just like books, TV, and movies, can be about anything—even about the everyday lives of four normal girls in the Japanese countryside.Read more...

New puzzle game Puyo Puyo Tetris doesn't only turn Tetris blocks into anime characters. It also turns them into gummies.Read more...

Shozo Kato, a master kendo sensei, discusses Japanese concepts of beauty (such as wabi-sabi or わびさび) and the "immovable mind" (fudoushin or 不動心) as well as demonstrates kendo and laido. The result is both poetic and fascinating.Read more...

It's pronounced "may-jus," apparently. Magus, the first game developed by mainly Japanese-RPG publisher Aksys, launched on PSN on February 25. It's co-developed by Japanese company Black Tower Studios, and President Richie Casper says it's fantasy with a focus on humans, not orcs or trolls. [Image: Aksys]

You know how some apartment come with furniture or kitchen appliances? These Tokyo apartments come with cats. Yes, cats!Read more...