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Surgeon Simulator 2013 will be available for download on Steam tomorrow, April 19. It started out as a cheeky (and wince-inducing) game jam project by four developers made in just two days, and was later approved as a full release by Steam's Greenlight program.

You can still play the original jam result online for free, but the full release includes more surgery scenarios, including an operation in the back of a moving ambulance. The physics have been improved, too, and the developers say it'll work on Windows, Mac or Linux on day one.

Upon its launch on Steam, the game will cost $9.99 - way cheaper and less grueling than years of medical school.

God of Blades, the auto-running fantasy swordfighting game with its own book, moves from mobile to PC, Mac, and Linux today. It's available now from White Whale Games' website for $5.

The computer version loses the "Loreseeker" functionality - so don't feel the need to lug your desktop PC to the library - but packs in the multiplayer "Slayers" mode, as well as a weird new "Chaos Storm" mode in which, White Whale informs us, "the player is pitted against a mountain of slayers, all running towards the player at once."

God of Blades is also available on iOS and Android.

Did you dig Impire? Are you still delving deep into Paradox’s dungeon management game? Then this story is for you. Paradox are releasing an ore-ful lot of DLC for free, and they demond you play it. There’s a vein of new single-player, multiplayer, and customisation content being released for Impire. Please don’t take it for granite.(more…)

Papo & Yo is, at first glance, a puzzle platformer about a young boy and his best pal, a multi-ton, bulbous bellied pink gum wad rhino dog. Same old, same old, right? But beneath its sunny, wildly imaginative exterior is the bleak tale of creator Vander Caballero, whose alcoholic father physically abused him and his family when he was a child. And so, when Monster eats a frog (read: METAPHOR), he stops helping you solve puzzles and starts lobbing fiery punches at your tiny cranium. That relationship, then, lies at the heart of Papo & Yo, weaving an extremely personal thread through both story and gameplay mechanics. But does it bind them together or leave them straining at the seams? Here’s wot I think.

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With PC ports come better textures, bug fixes, and more, but is Papo & Yo all that much better now than it was?

Capcom and Tencent are working on a new Monster Hunter for the Chinese market - which means that it's a free-to-play MMO for PC. The new Monster Hunter Online also diverges from the rest of the series in that it uses CryEngine 3 instead of one of Capcom's own engines. You can ... really tell.

Monster Hunter Online brings new monsters, weapons, and locations to the series, with the familiar quest-oriented gameplay and giant boss battles. Tencent will begin testing the game in June. And just like that, Capcom is saved!

[Thanks, Szczesny and Mike!]

The Kickstarter for Among the Sleep has officially launched. Lest you've forgotten, Among the Sleep is a survival horror game played through the eyes of a two-year-old. The game runs with its unique premise, leaving the player to question whether the horrors are real or just the result of a child's imagination. We played it earlier this year and were very impressed.

Developer Krillbite Studio is seeking $200,000 to fully fund the game on PC, Mac and Linux, with a planned release in Q4 this year. Backer rewards range from a downloadable soundtrack to alpha test access, art books, a spot in the credits and, of course, copies of the game itself. Our favorite - and the second most expensive at $5,000 - is a plush Teddy.

In Among the Sleep, your stuffed bear, Teddy, serves as your loyal companion in the search for your parents. Unlike most teddy bears, Teddy can talk and, as we mentioned in our preview, we instantly fell in love with him.

The only Angry Video Game Nerd clip I’ve ever seen was a trailer for the movie. I don’t remember anyof it because after four seconds my brain assumed the whole thing was an in-joke and switched itself off. I recovered twenty hours later and now there’s a hole in my memory where that day should be. Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures is a platformer that mimics the appearance of many of the games that The Nerd throws swearwords at, with references to classics thrown in as well. In the trailer, I saw a deer doing a poo, which made me think of Castle Crashers, and the horrific moon from Majora’s Mask. What else is in there?

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My arrival to Rogue-likes was a late and timid one. I’m a wimp, and fear the ASCII. But games like Spelunky and Dungeons Of Dredmor are my happy place, so the sight of Rogue Legacy has me biting at the screen to get to play. A 2D procedurally generated platformer, packed with dangers of death, but this time should you die, you pass on your knowledge to your children. Children who are… unique.

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I played a beta of Monaco about, ooh, two years ago. Back then, I was already impressed with the top-down steal(th) game’s interesting take on co-op thievery. It was one of those games that already felt complete, and I expected a few months more polish was all it needed. Craig of two years ago was such an optimist! Well, we all know the truth, and the game did not make my launch window. I was made to look a fool! But I can’t stay mad at Monaco. It will finally be out on April 24th, and there’s a trailer showing of where all that time was spent.(more…)

The route to a successful indie platformer these days is to come up with a unique gimmick, or a unique twist on an old gimmick, and do an incredibly good job of applying it to your world. Sundae Factory’s Ecotone is a touch braver than that. It’s taking every platforming gimmick, and using one per level. And from the demo version that’s playable on their site, they’re doing a damned good job of it.

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The company has revised down sales figures of Resident Evil 6 and DmC, blaming "excessive outsourcing".

What would happen if you popped a party popper in space? That is the question that Interdimensional Games will have to tweet at Commander Hadfield, because their impressive space RPG Consortium has just achieved warp speed (was funded) on Kickstarter. The Source Engine game of space intrigue on a fully-realised space ship should be arriving in July of this year, ahead of all the other space games that are coming out. In celebration, they’ve released a video showing the visual history of the game, and I have placed it on the other side of this event horizon.(more…)

Every single person who has ever complained about ARPGs being pinata-popping clickfests should play Drox Operative, or indeed any of Soldak’s previous explorations of the genre. A dynamic world, diplomacy, warfare and randomised quests all combine to make a game that avoids the tedium of gathering loot for loot’s sake. A few days ago, Soldak released an SDK for the game, containing documentation, examples and tools to assist modders, which means the universe should become even more interesting in the coming months. If you haven’t played Drox yet, consider this post a timely reminder to try the demo, at the very least.

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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We’ve not posted about Legends Of Aethereus before, because THERE ARE TOO MANY GAMES. But coo, the RPG looks like it’s trying to do something interesting with its combat. Physics-based, no auto-lock-on, real-time choppy-chop action. And where improving attributes actually affects the fights you experience.

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Red 5 has provided new details on Firefall, including the open beta date, when you can expect major updates and more.

Development reportedly halted on L.A. Noire creator Brendan McNamara’s latest.

An important lesson about background music can be learned from the most recent Mars: War Logs (yes, they’re sticking with “War Logs”) trailer. What should have been an overview of the promising-looking RPG turns into an ear-straining confusion as you try to pick out the voice from the strumming music and shouty game noise. Which is a bit silly of them, because it’s looking rather interesting.

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UnderCurrent is an Unreal-powered deep sea exploration game designed for Oculus Rift from a group of university students over in the UK. The group became fascinated with VR technology and has already put together three different levels, though the collective notes that some of the core mechanics of UnderCurrent are still undetermined.

These students are also maintaining a work blog chronicling each step of the design process, covering everything from music to artwork and team bios. The developers promise more videos and updates as work continues over the coming summer.

[Thanks, Rasmus]

A new crop of games have been rescued from the Steam Greenlight tarpit. Bigger names in there are City Of Steam, Frozen Endzone, Dreamfall: Chapters, and other games you look at the name of and say, “Huh? Why on EARTH was that having to fight it out to get on a shop?” The full list is below.

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From the ridiculous to the sublime of the strange, strange world of videogame trailers. This is how you make a strategy game about boats look like the most appealing thing to everyone, ever, everywhere. Jazz, a honeyed voiceover, and at least thirteen RPS comments threads’ worth of puns. Very well played, Paradox’s Leviathan: Warships.

Ship just got real, indeed.(more…)

One of the most heartfelt talks I saw at GDC this year was the Fract session, which basically underlined how much time, effort, and ARGH OH GOD can go into making a commercial version of a game that had already won an award at the IGF. The prototype might have captured the imagination of judges, but the concept for the full game was still very much up for grabs, and the Fract team ending up causing themselves all kinds of heartache by building, scrapping, and rebuilding the game they wanted it to be. Now though the synthesizing world of light and music is on the final straight, and they’re expecting to release in 2013. The music the following trailer was composed in-game, by playing with the game’s tools. Marvelous stuff.(more…)

You need a new puzzle platformer to fill four hours of your life. I have one. This is synergy. High fives in an orderly queue. Plazma Being is the terrible name for a deceptively tricky little puzzler from first-time dev, Felix Wunderlich. (Also, coincidentally, winner of Today’s Best Name.) You, as you may have guessed, play a blob of plasma. What you might not have intuited is that you’re captured by aliens, cast on a planet with an unfamiliar force called “gravity”, and trying to find your way out of there.

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Yes, that is a picture of a maniacal star with planets for hands socking a majestic flock of space dolphins. To be fair, they started it. That image pretty much sums up Planet Punch in a nutshell, though: you go through the universe systematically wiping out all life with nothing but a vast cosmic array of apocalyptically powerful planet hands. At heart, it’s a relatively simple premise (PUNCH EVERYTHING YEAH), but different enemy types and planet combos keep things compulsively fresh. Also, each hit prompts a rainbow volcano of satisfying sights and sounds, even as tiny combo multipliers ask you “Why?” and bellow “Unnecessary!”

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I’ve spent most of my adult life waiting for a worthy successor to Jagged Alliance 2 so when Full Control announced that they had secured the rights to the license, I was eager to find out how true the new game would be to the original two. Heading to Kickstarter next week, where it will have a target of $350,000, Jagged Alliance: Flashback is a prequel that will explore the forming of mercenary organisation A.I.M. and cold war tensions. I spoke to CEO Thomas Hentschel Lund and team-mate Andreas to find out if old mercenary favourites will be back, why Kickstarter and the community matter, and the difficulties involved in resuscitating a franchise.

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EA has announced FIFA 14 as well as offered details about some of the biggest changes you'll encounter.

I’m still not entirely sure how Sacred Citadel emerged from a creative cauldron in the vicinity of semi-esteemed Diablo-alikes Sacred 1 and 2, but I can’t knock a series for having a go at a new genre. And so, while Sacred 3 grows large and strong under lock and key, we get a sidescrolling beat-’em-up with fantastical trappings and a God-of-War-style eye for scale. I do not, however, believe we’ll be tearing that eye from its stringy stalk with our bare hands – aka, Kratos’ version of handshake – as Citadel seems a bit less, er, psychopathic. At any rate, there’s a launch trailer after the break, heralding the off-the-beaten path beat-’em-up’s release. Weird, right? A launch trailer on launch day? Who does that anymore?

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Are games art? Solved. The formalist/zinester war of games definition? Solved. Where is the Citizen Kane of games? Solved. What happens when the uncanny valley is no longer uncanny? Solved. When will the singularity occur? Solved.

Whoever would have thought that a teaser trailer for a game about England and Australia’s biennial cricket grudge match could so deftly resolve the many dilemmas which have for so long haunted videogames and technology? (more…)

Airship MMO Guns Of Icarus is to receive an adventure mode. The original game, Kickstarted in February 2012 (before it was cool), was released in October with the promised skirmish play. Over a year later, Muse Games returned to the crowd-funding beg-me-up to fun an expansion of the project, fleshing out the world the game takes place in, and adding an Adventure path. This second Kickstarter has just dinged its $100k, so that should now be a thing that happens.

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