PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

It perhaps goes without saying that I was fairly excited about Planetary Annihilation at the point at which the Kickstarter appeared, but than that excitement was cubed by an interview I did with Jon Mavor. It was with some trepidation, then, that I watched the first in-game footage reveal, presented by Mavor and Steve Thompson. You can see it too, below.(more…)

An update to the Homeworld Touch and Homeworld 3 Kickstarter announces that the teamPixel bid to obtain the Homeworld IP has failed. They explain: “The auction for the Homeworld license ended April 15, 2013, and while we reached qualified bidder status for the bankruptcy auction, we were unable to raise the necessary funds to remain competitive against the other parties at the auction.” teamPixel will be offering refunds, and starting their own space game. We don’t know who got the license. It wasn’t Paradox or Stardock, although they were both bidding.

Word on the street internet is that we might find out later today, or alternatively not until mid-May. We’ll update when we know something. (Presumably it wasn’t RPS-chum Robert Yang.)

The former-PS3 exclusive tunnel shooter is heading to Steam and GOG in the not-too-distant future.

Old School Games’ retro-FPS God Mode, which was announced last year, has suddenly appeared on the short-range radar of release. The game is on Steam, where it asks: “Do you like running? How about gunning?” Well, okay. But actually I like sitting and drinking tea quite a lot more.

There’s a gameplay trailer below, so you can raise your eyebrows, make some kind of judgement. It does look pretty exciting. It’s got power ups and everything. Oh I dunno, I am so full of mucus. And so old.(more…)

Two $100,000 winners this week and a few other projects close to the finish line. While I was compiling the column this week, I realised I was keeping track of the number of projects that apparently ‘contained roguelike elements’. It’s about 90%, although to be fair I stopped keeping track almost as soon as I’d started so that figure is entirely made up. Perhaps my memory fails me, but I don’t recall the term being anything like as popular 12 months ago. Of course, some would argue that the meaning has been lost and that anything with procedural generation or a modicum of difficulty is now wearing the roguelike hat, but that in itself surely tells us something. Games want to be like rogue, which is far more agreeable than the days when every other one wanted to be like a soldier or a space marine.

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Hutt Cartel is an action-packed journey to an impressive new world – but is there enough of it?

THIS WEEK: Fridge magnet story engine. 2012 so .exe, 2013 so .ppt. Dinosaur dating sim. “The ONLY LGBT-friendly anglerfish dating sim!”

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Sundays are for waking up from a night of fever dreams and ohgod. So. Weak. Lung plague for real, and I am dying. This is how it ends.

• Digital Foundry looks at what the next generation of consoles will mean for PC specs: “PlayStation 4 in particular offers a substantial challenge to the PC as the top-end gaming platform – a state of affairs that may surprise many. Sony’s new console has often been described as a mid-range gaming PC in terms of its overall technological make-up. Rip apart the various components and the claims have some merit, but with the benefits of a closed box design and a unified memory set-up, the new console has certain qualities that could even give high-end PC rigs a run for their money.”

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I’ve got something for you. It’s bucket full to the brim of cut price games! The bucket may be metaphorical, but the discounts are very much real. If you just can’t get enough of buying games for slightly less than you might have expected to pay for them, I recommend you visit SavyGamer.co.uk for a constantly updated record of gaming savings for all platforms. (more…)

The Organ Trail: Director’s Cut is a zombie pastiche of the old favourite edugame, The Oregan Trail, where you had to get a family of settlers 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. They’re both mainly asset management games, with bastard-hard minigames included. Read chapter one here and two here.

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Continuing its tradition of following a theme for its bundles, the next Indie Royale gathers six up-and-coming Steam Greenlight games for consumption.

Croixleur is a hack-and-slash affair from Japanese indie studio Souvenir Circ where players must battle through floors of progressively more difficult enemies; Goodhustle Studios Inc.'s Beast Boxing Turbo has you infiltrating a monster boxing league and punching lots of animals in first-person fashion; Dawnstar is a free-roaming space combat game from Wraith Entertainment where you're charged with bringing order to a sector ravaged by The Future Mob - or becoming the next big crime kingpin yourself; Battlepaths is Key17Games' loot-driven 2D-RPG; Out There Somewhere from Miniboss is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer; and Diehard Dungeon is a top-down roguelike from Tricktale thrusting players into randomly generated dungeons.

Both Beast Boxing Turbo and Out There Somewhere are tossing in their soundtracks for this latest bundle, and naturally each of these games includes a Steam code. All games in the Debut 2 bundle are for Windows PC, though Beast Boxing Turbo and Dawnstar are also Mac-compatible.

EA will issue a patch for SimCity on Monday, April 22 at 4pm ET. SimCity v2.0 will be the game's first substantial update, adding mansions for mayors, fixing issues with Colorblind mode and squashing some of the bugs scurrying around in the game code. EA Maxis says players should expect server outages "for a few hours" while the update rolls out.

Some of the issues surrounding city processing will be resolved, as will problems with spontaneous fluctuations of tourists, school buses getting stuck, sudden air pollution creeping in, and more. The full list of changes is published on the EA Maxis forums.

Meanwhile, SimCity for Mac is still set to arrive in June.

GOG's Telltale collection is as good a way as any to while away the coming weekend, so it's handy the distributor has a Telltale sale to dive into. Each of the six games, namely Sam & Max Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3, Back to the Future, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, and Tales of Monkey Island, is going at 85 percent off.

You can buy the games separately, or all for a total of $26.19. That's nearly $9 less than they went for in GOG's last Telltale sale. The offer's good until Monday, April 22 at 9PM PT (midnight ET).

Battle Worlds: Kronos, under development at German studio KING Art, has received the green light from the Steam community, meaning the game will be available on the service when it launches later this year. The Kronos Kickstarter is still in process, with the Bremen-based studio up to $206,000 in pledges, with eight days to go.

"When our backers started asking us about the size of maps that could be generated, we decided to experiment ourselves and pay tribute to their generosity. We created a screenshot that can show how big it's possible to go in turn-based strategy - let this be a tribute to all our backers and excellent friends at Steam," said Jan Theysen, project lead at KING Art. The company posted a map 200,000 hex-fields large representing the money it's raised, with 5,800 units in the image for the 5,800 backers. The company posted a higher resolution version of the image above on its Kickstarter page.

This is a Snapshot, a quick, un-scored review of a game we think you should know about. Pixelated horror seems to be all the rage these days. Lone Survivor, Home and now The Last Door - none of them need high tech visuals to give you goosebumps. I spent yesterday morning playing the first chapter of The Last Door, a recently Kickstarted browser-based adventure game, and I experienced a handful of genuine chills. That's especially impressive given just how pixelated the game really is.

Characters look like they strolled right out of the first King's Quest, so blocky that basic human features are barely discernible. Head, hair, body, arms and legs. Environments are just detailed enough to make out the important parts. Spooky mansion, fireplace, sofa, foreboding murder of crows. The fact that the crows are only vaguely crow-shaped does nothing to diminish their presence.

As most horror fans will tell you, fear is often about what you can't see. For The Last Door, a little obfuscation goes a long way.

SimCity will update to version 2.0 next week, adding Mayors driving fancy cars, changes to casinos and much more.

I didn’t know a great deal about Starseed Pilgrim until its Steam release a couple of days ago. I thought it was a puzzle game. I knew it had bemused John. I was vaguely aware that clever people were urging others to play it and to talk about it. For the last seventy two hours it has dominated my waking thoughts and infiltrated my dreams. It’s a challenging, perplexing game set in a strange space that is illuminated by frequent sparks of genius.

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We've discovered secrets, saved lives, and laughed harder than we have at a video game in a long, long time.

The upcoming 4X action-strategy game takes a lot of inspiration from the legendary Master of Orion. Oh, NOW we have your attention, don't we?

A valid coupon code for the gaming hardware maker's online store goes viral.

Baby-troubling Among The Sleep is the only survival horror I’m interested in. The cute game of controlling a waddling baby through a scary house reminds me of the time when I was two and lost my teddy bear. It was pretty harrowing, but my dad found it about three feet away from where I was sitting. I survived, but the scars run deep. I could ply my therapist with more and more cash, and I could keep buying those expensive adult nappies, but I think I need to confront the horror head on. Among The Sleep will eventually help me out with that, but not before others help it out first on Kickstarter.(more…)

As a games blogger, the question I am most often asked is: “When are you going to go back to school so that you can get a real job, like an accountant or a doctor?” To which I reply: “Look, Mum, Dad, writing about videogames is a real job now. I’ve paid my rent unaided for at least several years.” Then I show them games like Surgeon Simulator 2013 and ask why I would want to be a real anything, when I can be a simulated everything?

Yeah, that’s my philosophy degree talking. Paying for itself, right there.

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The "Edge" trademark belonging to Edge Games founder Tim Langdell has been canceled by a court order, stripping Langdell of the ability to file suit against every other game developer and publisher who used the word "Edge" in any context.

Following a petition by DICE and EA (Mirror's Edge), the US Patent and Trademark Office officially issued notice of the cancelled registration on April 17, a process that has been ongoing since 2010. Two Tribes, publisher of Mobigame's Edge (pictured), celebrated by discounting all versions of the puzzle game 50%. Edge was taken down from the App Store repeatedly due to issues with the "Edge" trademark.

What do you keep your evil in, readers? Do you have demonic tupperware? Perhaps an armoire of awfulness? I have a drawer of despair that I open every now and then, just to make sure my pants are not being burned up next to my socks of suffering. Bethesda keep their new survival horror, The Evil Within, within the most evil box of all: IGN [Lightning, sound of booth babes screaming]. They have the ‘exclusive’ first look coming up next week, so all we’re left with is a live-action trailer that shows us nothing of the game. Enjoy!(more…)

Scandinavia really is becoming a hotbed of fascinating indie projects. Yet another studio has spawned in Sweden, this time emerging from the likes of Grin, Gameloft and Media Molecule, called That Brain. And this team of just two has already got a long way into an impressive looking single-player airship game, 20,000 Leagues Above The Clouds. You can see the first footage of the mission-led trading/exploring below, and indeed find out how to join their team – they’re hiring.

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER THING: As well as working on RPS, I run a three-man game-dev outfit called Big Robot. Our current project is Sir, You Are Being Hunted, which did fairly well on the Kickstarters. Rather than pretend RPS can be objective about this I am making a policy of declaring this interest and letting you decide for yourselves.

Without further ado, I’ve posted the latest videos below, so you can take a look. Love you!(more…)

In the summer of 2001 I bought a copy of This Blessed Plot at a village fête for 20p, never suspecting that the hefty tome was destined to sit unfinished on my bookshelf for the next twelve years. My failure to get any further than chapter 3 – ‘Russell Bretherton’ – I’ve always blamed on Hugo Young, Russell Bretherton, or Tim Stone (Perhaps I’m not as interested in Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe as I thought I was). A recent forum comment from the boss of the World’s busiest computer wargame publisher suggests another possible cause. Perhaps the book was simply too cheap.

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Redshirt is a game about being the person who is doomed from the very moment they put their uniform on. Taking place on a space station with a crew who spend a great deal of their lives on the social network, Spacebook, it asks the player to navigate a possible quagmire of relationships and workload while trying to earn the promotions that might keep them alive. Earlier this week, I spoke to the game’s lone developer, Mitu Khandaker, and discussed dynamic personality generation, incorporating social issues into games and ranting at GDC.

Then I threatened to burn games to the ground.

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“Whatever happened to Infinity?” is a question that regularly pops up in the comment threads and forums posts about adventurous space games. A few years ago, Infinity teased audiences with the promise of the next generation’s Elite. The grand plan was seamless space travel: solar systems, space stations, all the way down to the planet’s surface were going to be rendered, viewable from your cockpit as you flew by. Way back in 2006, they released a combat prototype, and in 2010 there was a pair of videos showing off the engine’s capabilities that still take my breath away. Most people suggested the game was too ambitious, that populating the game’s planets with flora and fauna and cities with missions, was too much. As it turns out, they were right, but it doesn’t mean Infinity isn’t coming out. The team have a plan, and it involves Kickstarter and a combat game called Infinity: Battlescape.(more…)

Just look how great PC platform gaming is right now! We’re just inundated by lovely, interesting games. Yesterday I was being charmed by Ecotone, then hankering after some Rogue Legacy, and now I’m being challenged by the mad difficulty of the gorgeous RunRabbitRun. A completely free, entirely mad running-and-jumping game that is making me invent new swear words.

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