PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

We heard last month that the folks behind 1996's The Neverhood were at work on a new clay-motion adventure game, and the name has now been revealed: It's called Armikrog. The title has also earned a website, a Twitter profile, and a Facebook page. There's also a very (very) short video clip available, but all it shows is a confusingly full whiteboard, the scrabblings on which may or may not have much to do with the final product.

We do know that it's all being put together by Neverhood creator Doug TenNapel, with help from Mike Dietz and Ed Schofield (a.k.a. Pencil Test Studios) and Neverhood composer Terry Taylor.

Antichamber is half off on Steam through April 18 at 4 p.m. PT, bringing the price of completely blowing your mind to $10. What a steal. Antichamber has already "absolutely, exponentially" made back its production costs for developer Alexander Bruce, but a Steam sale never hurt anyone.

In more psychological Steam news, IGF nominee Starseed Pilgrim is out now to teach you how to tend the seeds of the universe. You little gardener, you. Starseed Pilgrim is $6, now and forever, for PC and Mac.

We're working on our review of the first expansion for The Old Republic. See what we think so far...

Kachina is a game by Ben Esposito, who did level design on The Unfinished Swan with Giant Sparrow, in which you control a hole in the ground that moves around, swallows up animals and deposits them elsewhere. It's a game about a hole, and a game "exploring the relationship between modern American and indigenous Pueblo cultures through themes of erasure & discovery."

That seems like a wide-ranging set of goals for a small game, and Esposito is getting help in realizing those goals from the Indie Fund, which revealed Kachina as its next project. Originally a Molyjam creation, the "whimsical physics toy" is planned for commercial release on PC, OSX, and iOS.

Pre-orders for Big Robot's tweedpunk, first-person survival game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, are live now, for $20 via the Humble store. Well go on, grab a pre-order - we're not sure if you heard, but you're being hunted. Time isn't exactly on your side.

Pre-ordering Sir, You Are Being Hunted nabs early access to the second round of testing before release, which is about a month after eligible Kickstarter backers start their early access rounds this summer. A pre-order picks up the game across PC, Mac and Linux, all DRM free.

Big Robot's Kickstarter campaign for Sir, You Are Being Hunted concluded in December, raising £92,551 of a requested £40,000. The extra cash unlocked a multiplayer component, scheduled to launch sometime after the full, single-player game. At £100,000, Big Robot would have locked in a character creation and customization mechanic - since the total fell short but close, the team will add some aspects of customization to the game.

Big Robot will bring a playable version of Sir, You Are Being Hunted to Rezzed 2013 in Birmingham, UK from June 22 - 23, for those in the area willing to break cover.

The low-cost motion controller will be inside new PC models soon.

Anodyne’s blend of surreal images and retro graphics appealed to me when I saw the first trailer but I only managed to find time to play through the game this weekend. I’m glad I did. It’s an amusing, confusing, disturbing, perturbing action adventure that owes as much to Earthbound as to the Legend of Zelda, and almost as much to Silent Hill and Luis Buñuel. Here’s wot I think.

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Urgh, this is no good. The announcement of tax breaks (as explained here) for the UK games industry, bruised and battered as it was by a torrent of studio closures in recent years, was an all too rare instance of George Osborne doing something to stimulate rather than malnourish the UK economy. And there was much rejoicing – until the European Commission decided it wanted to shoot the plans down.(more…)

Yes, a document thriller. Papers, Please is a compelling, edge-of-your-seat game about carefully scrutinizing forms. And it’s so clever that I don’t even know where to begin. But I suppose you’ll need to know what it is first, won’t you? Papers heralds from Lucas Pope, creator of the similarly socially conscious Republica Times, but this time you’re in charge of your maybe kinda probably definitely fictionalized Soviet homeland’s border. Or rather, you’re the person who makes sure everyone else has their paperwork in order. If you mess up, you get fined, and that means your family withers to chalky bone under the weight of starvation and sickness. Also, there are some very sinister sorts looking to slip past your iron stamping hand of ultimate justice, so perhaps more hangs in the balance than your benefactors are letting on. Read on for my impressions of the beta demo, and then – if you’re feeling so inclined or swollen with fictional nationalistic pride – give it a try yourself here.

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Hidden in the title of this post are the names of three games making appearances at this year’s Rezzed. Can you solve my riddle? That’s right, the 2013 PC and indie games show will feature exclusive first looks at the much-anticipated Your, Or and For An. Less excitingly, there’ll also be sessions from the likes of Total War: Rome 2, Obsidian’s Project Eternity and Mode 7′s Frozen Endzone.(more…)

To complete Mayhem Triple, you will have to kill hundreds and hundreds of rabbits but rather than being an exercise in plentiful poaching, Dustin Gunn’s game concerns an alien invasion. The aliens just happen to look like bipedal rabbits, who wander back and forth quite nonchalantly. They’re not particularly bright but it would appear that they’ve been breeding very much in the manner of their Earth counterparts. There are loads of them, which means you’ll need all to make use of all the Max Payne/John Woo style diving, dodging and shooting at your disposal. Mayhem Triple is The Specialists mod, but single player and in 2d. It’s also completely free.

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We delve inside Valve's incredible virtual economy in Dota 2 and meet the fans who make a living from it.

Ask me anything about shmups, go on. Er, no, I don’t really know what doujin means. Um, no idea who Kenta Cho is. No, I don’t own a copy of Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun. (Is the silvergun the ship or its gun?). I’ve never played a Llamasoft game. I can’t last more than about two seconds in a proper bullet hell game. Other than that, ask me anything. Actually, you’d better not: my awesome knowledge would only make you feel inferior, perhaps even sub-human. Why don’t you go and play Mok Force instead, a lovely-lookin’, procedurally-generated, Unity-powered shmup that’s quite accessible despite doing the whole ‘screen covered in death-rays’ thing?(more…)

Interceptor Entertainment's remake of Apogee's Rise of the Triad will be out sometime soon - no specifics announced yet - for $14.99. In the meantime, we can share 18 minutes of the game's old-school multiplayer action.

Just as the grass grows and the ocean gently laps against the shore, triads will rise. It is simply nature’s way. For eons, however, top scientists have pondered what role rhythmic triad undulations play in the greater order of our universe. Do they hold up the planet in much the same fashion as long-dead Greek titans before them? Are they responsible for the complex set of physics interactions that make ice cream flavors that don’t taste like ice cream possible? Do they allow jokes that should’ve ended a long time ago to just keep going and going? We may never know. But I just had a crazy thought: maybe Rise of the Triad‘s purpose is shooting dudes really, really fast. Sometimes with a baseball bat that’s also the devil. No, that’s impossible. It’s probably the ice cream thing. See for yourself in the form of an appreciably meaty video after the break.

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Worlds of Magic could be as authentic a successor to Master of Magic as any game released in the last couple of decades. That’s a sobering reminder that the Microprose’s classic strategy game is almost twenty years old. I wanted to know how close Wastelands’ game will be to the game that chiefly inspired it, and how the D20 combat system and seven planes of reality might change the experience, so I spoke to lead designer Aaron Ethridge and producer Leszek Lisowski and secured some answers. We also discussed the addition of artist George Edward Purdy, who worked on Master of Magic, and agreed that recreating the second world war isn’t quite the same as making randomised worlds full of skeletons and wyrms.

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The War Z publisher OP Productions has released the preliminary findings of its investigation into a recent hacking attack on its forums and databases. The publisher has revealed that the hackers gained access to several of the administrator accounts on the War Z forums, which also gave them passwords for the administrators' game accounts. This resulted in deletion of the forums database, as well as "several dozens" of players being banned from the game (and subsequently reinstated).

The forum databases do not contain payment information and are hosted separately from the game's servers. They do, however, contain the email addresses and passwords of forum users. The passwords are encrypted, though OP notes that many members "use weak passwords that could be guessed using brute force."

The company was unable to find "definitive proof" that game accounts were accessed in any way. In other words, it appears that payment information was not compromised. Any players who use the same password for both the game and the forums are advised to change them, along with any unrelated accounts or services that use the same email address and password.

OP has installed new security measures on both its forums database and The War Z's game servers.

A multiplatform classification in Australia for The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which was the first entry in the role-playing series, was merely a clerical mix-up, according to publisher Bethesda Softworks.

"It apparently was never formally in their system because the release of Arena pre-dated [the Australian Classification Board's] existence," Bethesda VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines tells Joystiq. "This is simply an error on [the classification board's] part. It should just say PC, not multiplatform. We've notified them and they're going to fix. There is no new version of the game coming. Just a clerical mix-up."

A completely free and legal copy of Elder Scrolls: Arena is available directly from the Bethesda site.

Beginning life as a LudumDare #24 winner, Evoland is now a complete, released game, that sets you on a journey through RPG history. Literally. As you play, the genre evolves around you. Mixing together elements from Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Diablo, is the result the sum of its parts, or falling through the cracks between? Here’s wot I think.

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Hello youse.

It’s difficult to explain why board gaming is so great. You can talk about clever mechanics and pretty pictures all you want, but the magic of board gaming is always held within the experience of play. The challenge we face when trying to encourage new people to play board games is in how we relate those experiences.

Today, we visit the Fairgrounds.(more…)

Sometimes, when Countryfile is on the telly and I’m lamenting the concrete meadows to which I am bound, I think of the wolves that once roamed Albion’s forests and I weep. None of that’s true, of course – I’m too busy watching Bogart-wrinkled noir to let Countryfile invade my screen. I do miss Wolf though. Not enough games show an interest in animal behaviour, and the reds and greens of nature. Three cheers for Shelter, then, which casts the player as a badger with a family to care for: “As the mother of a litter of cubs you are forced out from familiar and safe surroundings to find new shelter in a beautiful, but dangerous world. The harsh reality of nature plays a pivotal role in the game whilst at the same time Shelter aims to pay a homage to the great outdoors and all its imposing beauty.” Trailer in the den, below..

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UndeadLabs have announced that their zombie-apocalypse survival game, cleverly named State Of Decay, will appear in June. It’s an open-world survival game that sees the player recruiting other survivors and building bases so as to live in a world where most people are mindless drones bent on devouring whatever wanders into their path. A familiar theme, then. There is one reason to pay a lot of attention to this game, however, which is that UndeadLabs are the new project from Jeff Strain, who was one of the main minds behind Guild Wars, and who worked as lead programmer on World Of Warcraft. Mr Strain knows what he is doing. Which makes June sound all the more exciting. State Of Decay is a single player game, but there’s an MMO on the horizon if this works out.

A new trailer lies below.(more…)

It sure is a life-affirming thing when folks supply Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of a demo to promote their Kickstarter. There it is! You can play 2D ARPG Chasm before you choose to pledge. It’s also pretty great when the game contains “procedurally generated Metroid-like dungeons”, which is the claim for Chasm. It’s ringing the retro bell pretty loudly, as they explain: “Chasm was heavily influenced by games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Diablo.”

For elucidation, check out their pitch video and trailer below, or just swoop by their page and pick up one of the flavours of demo.(more…)

Blue spotted this first-person puzzler over the weekend. Attractio reminds me of… something. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps take a look at the trailer below and see if you can help me out with the association. Also, as Blue noticed, you can get at a demo if you fill in a survey. So that might be even more help.(more…)

SimCity Social, The Sims Social, and Pet Society are going offline on June 14, EA announced this morning. The three Playfish Facebook games are being retired after player counts and activity fell off, EA said. Today's news means all of Playfish's Facebook games, according to the EA subsidiary's website, have either shut down or are scheduled to - with the exception of Madden Social 13, which an EA press release notes as developed by EA Tiburon.

EA bought Playfish for $300 million in 2009 before signing a "strategic" five year deal with Facebook in 2010. However, A number of executives have since left the EA brand, including co-founders Sebastian de Halleux, Sam Lababidi, and Kristian Stregerstale.

The announcement follows EA layoffs last week, with over 160 employees let go from EA Mobile Montreal. In addition, there are reports of closures of a studio in London, where Playfish is based, along with closures at EA Mobile Brazil and BioWare Social. We also have information of support staff being let go in London and then there's a question about the extent of the EA Galway support center layoffs.

We've reached out to EA for comment.

Adam featured Mineral Cities in yesterday’s Katchup. but I wanted to refocus on it, because it deserves a post of its own. Mineral Cities is “A minimalist RTS / city-builder hybrid set in peaceful future space, where rules are simple and minerals are king.” Sounds like magic to me.

The developer wants just £6,000, and I don’t see why this shouldn’t succeed – especially in the light of our unrequited love for city building games. I’ve posted a couple of videos below. Go take a look.(more…)

The Organ Trail: Director’s Cut is a zombie pastiche of the old favourite edugame, The Oregan Trail, where you had to manage a family of settlers as they travelled to Portland, Oregon, past the perils of the unconquered western USA. In the Organ Trail, players must get themselves and up to four friends all the way to Portland Oregon without losing any of their innards to rampaging zombie hordes. Can a group of RPS writers survive the trail and how many of their innards will they leave behind?

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Can this really be the first game called Star Conflict? The ten seconds of research I applied to the question suggests that it is. Amazing. Anyway, this space combat game from Gaijin is looking interesting. It’s a Russian MMO heading to the west, and it sits roughly along the lines of World Of Tanks or Mechwarrior Online, only this time you’re a space pilot with a big old spaceship full of lasers. So it’s team-based rounds of fighting, with resource-spending and tinkering in the intermissions. The pace of it (at least judging by the gameplay footage I’ve found, some of which you can see below) seems fairly sedate compared to the whizzy zero-G kung fun we’re used to from space games. I understand it’s more of a game of positioning and loadout tactics than reaction time and flight skill, but I can see why that would appeal to a few players. #oldmen(more…)

Chris Park has revealed that the next game from Arcen (AI War, A Valley Without Wind) will be called Skyward Collapse. So what is it? Well, “it’s a turn-based 4x simulation god-game.” He explains: “Set high in the sky atop a floating landmass that you are actively constructing as the game progresses, you oversee two warring factions (Greeks and Norse). Via solo play or co-op, you play as “The Creator,” helping both sides of the conflict — granting each side buildings, resources, and even new citizens.” It’s a game about balancing conflict, as Park writes: “your goal is to balance this conflict as best you can so that neither side gets wiped out. You win by having the most points generated (read: most carnage) without either side committing genocide.”

There’s a bunch more information through the link. They’re aiming for a beta this month, with the first version of the game appearing in May.

Few games have had quite as much emotional impact on the RPS (or indeed PC Gamer) team as the original Neptune’s Pride. You can read the complete, epic account of our intrigue and anguish in this real-time browser-based strategy here. It was so affecting that it took over our lives for several weeks. And now it is BACK. Neptune’s Pride II: Triton has quietly launched and I can hear the sound of inevitability ringing in my ears.

Tutorial overview video explains the new game, below.(more…)