PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Hello youse.

We haven’t talked about Blood Bowl properly yet, have we? Let’s correct that shit right now. What kind of board game column is this if we haven’t even talked about Blood Bowl?

You want to talk about all things Blood Bowl? Cool. Me too.(more…)

The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing may or maybe not actually be incredible, and they are ARPG quests rather than conventional adventures, but there’s one thing that we can say for sure: he’s going to have a handsome lady-ghost companion named Katarina. What does she want? She wants to make monsters pop into the constituent loots, as you can see in a new video, below.(more…)

Knights of Pen and Paper +1 is the Paradox-published PC version of a handheld meta-RPG. At a recent preview event, I created a party led by a hipster paladin and headed into the lands of clichés and catacombs. This is what I discovered.

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In Iceland, CCP showed the first footage of World of Darkness MMO to fans – but the game’s still a long way off.

Yesterday, as I was picking through piles of retro Kickstarter projects, I commented that some series, such as Mega Man and Zelda, hadn’t been part of my childhood and therefore didn’t tug at the sepia strings of nostalgia. I do have a soft spot as wide as Totoro’s belly for River City Ransom though. There simply aren’t enough open world beat ‘em ups with basic RPG features. There have been rumours of a sequel for some time but the latest confirmation, from Combit Studios, pitches the licensed successor as a PC game, launching in August 2014, with a crowdfunding campaign to begin this summer.

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Game Dev Tycoon developer Greenheart Games released its first game yesterday - with an incredibly smart anti-piracy measure thrown in.

I have to admit that it had passed me by entirely that there was a DC Universe MOBA going on. But there is! It’s being made by Turbine and is called Infinite Crisis, and there’s a whole beta application thing going on over here. Seems like things are pretty quiet on this front, though, since the only reason I realised it existed at all was the appearance of two new videos on my video-detector, one showing Gaslight Batman, and one showing the lovely Doomsday. Sure looks MOBA-y.(more…)

Creative Assembly has a good thing going with its Total War franchise. For seven games now, it's been remarkable successful at combining real-time tactics and turn-based strategy, making money and consistently expanding its studio. Their next game, Rome 2: Total War, a sequel to the most beloved game in the franchise, is as close to a sure thing as exists in the game industry. But the game after that? That's Total War: Arena, announced at the Game Developers Conference, and it's a major risk, one with even greater potential reward.

Create Assembly has enough confidence in its games and its audience that the reveal wasn't a movie or demo of the game. Instead, it used a set of abstract illustrations to demonstrate its ideas for Arena. A few of these examples used Rome 2 assets, and that game will provide the initial base for Arena, but it wasn't graphics that were announced.

Total War: Arena will be an online battle between teams of a maximum of ten players apiece, with the individual players controlling up to three units. It will be free-to-play, with in-game experience and currency used to upgrade your units or purchase new ones. The monetization scheme will be based on purchasing "accelerators" which will help you gain experience and/or currency quicker, as opposed to pay-to-win or gated content.

The Boston Festival of Indie Games will return to MIT's campus in September, and organizers hope to make this year's show bigger, better, and less sweltering than last year's event with help from Kickstarter backers.

Showcasing tabletop games, interactive art, and video games developed by local studios like Owlchemy Labs (Snuggle Truck) and Wadjet Eye Games (Resonance), the inaugural Boston Festival of Indie Games was a bigger success than its creators anticipated, attracting an estimated 2,000 attendees.

"[Last year's] festival was a lot of fun, but it was cramped and hot," the Kickstarter pitch notes. "MIT's Stratton Student Center and Johnson Athletic Center will better accommodate the crowds, exhibitors and game developers at Boston Festival of Indie Games. Our goal is to have plenty of room for all the great features that come with the festival, like the game developer showcase, tabletop game play, art gallery, game jam, keynote speakers, films and much more."

Backers who pledge $25 or more will receive an advance pass to 2013's event, along with the "Figgie Bundle," a downloadable PC game compilation that includes Subatomic Studios' Fieldrunners, Fire Hose Games' Go Home Dinosaurs, Popcannibal's Fish Listening to the Radio, and Binary Takeover's Lost Marbles. More titles will be added to the bundle as money continues to roll in.

Hidden Path Entertainment has announced development of Defense Grid 2 is currently underway, with a targeted launch on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux in the first half of 2014.

When the Defense Grid 2 Kickstarter campaign launched, the team at Hidden Path Entertainment didn't know exactly if they'd be able to produce a sequel. The campaign had a goal of $250,000, which was met, but the team was really looking for $1 million to fund a full sequel. Hidden Path fell short of that goal but thanks to an angel investor, the sequel is now under way.

The $250,000 goal of the Defense Grid 2 Kickstarter campaign was to fund Defense Grid: Containment, an expansion pack to the original Defense Grid: The Awakening. Hidden Path shipped the expansion earlier this year, which caught the eye of the unknown investor who secured funding for Defense Grid 2.

"You guys supported us, an investor saw your support, saw us make promises to you, saw us keep those promises to you and, after Containment shipped, they decided to partner with us and invest in Defense Grid 2 so that we have enough money to make the game," CEO Jeff Pobst says. COO Jim Garbarini added that Defense Grid 2 is "fully funded and moving forward." Kickstarter backers will receive a free copy of Defense Grid 2 when it ships, the duo confirmed.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower-defense game that made its debut in 2008 on the PC and was ported to the Xbox 360 the following year. In the game, players must defend military bases from waves of encroaching alien enemies through strategic placement of defense towers.

The Battle of the Teutoberg Forest is an epic historical Roman defeat against Germanic tribes, in which about 20,000 Romans died, including suicidal officers tormented by their failure and soldiers who had their remains desecrated by the barbarians. And now you can play it as a game!

Discord Games has released a new demo version of its side-scrolling action-RPG Chasm as the game's Kickstarter project enters its third week with over $100,000 in pledges.

Playing like a mashup of Symphony of the Night and Wanderers from Ys, Chasm challenges players to plumb a procedurally generated mineshaft for stat-boosting equipment and other valuable artifacts. The demo version includes the game's first village and a handful of dungeon floors, and gives a good idea of the kind of hack-and-slash action that will be featured in the final release. Watch out for those bats, by the way - they're total jerks.

Discord Games seeks $150,000 to fully fund the project, and notes that Chasm currently ranks at #17 in the Steam Greenlight charts.

Indie development house Combit Studios has announced that it will be partnering with River City Ransom EX developer Million to create "an official, worldwide follow-up to River City Ransom." The game will be available for Windows in August of 2014, according to Combit's official blog.

Further information will be released at a later date, leading up to an eventual crowd-funding drive scheduled for sometime this summer. In the meantime, an official placeholder website will gladly add your email address to its mailing list.

Combit Studios' project appears to be completely unrelated to that other official sequel to River City Ransom that was announced back in 2011. Developed by Miracle Kidz and originally slated to launch on WiiWare sometime last year, River City Ransom 2 was shelved in favor of original projects.

While the Oculus Rift is currently the world's great hope for a future lived inside digital spaces, it's not the first stereoscopic box developers have asked us to cram our faces into. For most of us, that honor goes to Nintendo's Virtual Boy, herald of vectorized headaches (in 3D!) to 700,000 or so hopeful people with $180.

If you're one of the lucky people with an Oculus Rift development kit, however, you can now recreate that ol' black-and-red magic with VBjin-ovr, a freeware Virtual Boy emulator for the Oculus Rift. As seen in this video from YouTuber Cymatic Bruce, wherein VBjin-ovr is used to play the obscure first-person survival horror game Insane Mouse Mansion, the Rift primarily functions as a head-mounted display, as Virtual Boy games have no use for the device's various bells and head-tracking whistles.

Still, the experience seems about as accurate as one could hope for without the real deal. Is there an Excedrin emulator out there?

If you've forgotten about Super Mario Bros. Crossover, allow us to refresh your memories. Developed by Exploding Rabbit, Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a browser-based game that allows players to run and jump their way through Super Mario Bros. using a variety of characters from other game properties. In celebration of the crossover game's third anniversary, Exploding Rabbit decided it's time to unveil version 3.0 of the game in a new trailer.

Of the newer updates to Super Mario Bros. Crossover, the game's new levels stand out. Taken from one of Mario's more obscure appearances, Super Mario Bros. Special, the landscape of the levels changes with the game's difficulty settings. The game also received new skins, including ones inspired by the Castlevania series and Super Mario Bros. 2.

Exploding Rabbit raised $53,509 on Kickstarter in June 2012 to fund the development of its original platformer, Super Retro Squad.

[Thanks, Jay!]

EVE Online developer CCP’s space-fighting demo is the game that Oculus Rift could have been made for.

Jagged Alliance: Flashback arrives in the Katchup this week. I’ve expected (and hoped for) a Jagged Alliance crowdfunding attempt for some time now. As soon as it became obvious that Kickstarter was a place where old franchises could revive themselves, every week that the mercenaries didn’t appear was slightly more unsettling than the last. Would I rather have a direct sequel without a crowdfunding campaign? Perhaps. The transparency that Full Control promise, listening and learning as they go, is appealing and it’s hard to imagine fans of the series pledging for a sequel, like Back in Action, without the core of the original games’ features in place. Elsewhere, Worlds of Magic and Infinite Space: Sea of Stars are two major successes.

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Heterosexual narc. More than a few games about the demise of balls. CANDY ANT PRINCESS.

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Sundays are for retreating to your fortress of solitude as the heroic armies of light make a mess of your empire of darkness. Ah, well, there’s always next week, Lord Evil.

• Polygon’s profile of the handsome Norwegian adventure-game tsar, Ragnar Tornquist, is worth a read: “It’s about really coming into yourself. About growing up and settling down and becoming who you are meant to be and accepting that. It’s about turning the page and realizing you’re not where you thought you’d be, but be okay with that or to fight against it, make a conscious decision to say, ‘This is not where I’m meant to be.’ It’s about characters who are at a point in their lives where things are changing and they need to change and they need to accept that change.”

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Yes, that’s an attempt at a David Bowie reference couched in, like, five other references. Because Mars War Logs comes from a company called Spiders, you see, and Bowie’s band was called… and then I switched around the stuff to mean… and anyway. My job is really hard sometimes, everyone. But yes, Mars from the videogame studio Spiders (which I can neither confirm nor deny is from Mars) is out! It looks kinda like Mass Effect meets RAGE meets Chronicles of Riddick, which is quite a seductively sandy cocktail, if you ask me. But, at the same time, Cyanide and Spiders (truly, a winning combination) haven’t had the strongest track record in the past. Hmmm. Perhaps the launch trailer after the break will knock some of the cobwebs off my purchasing finger?

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As I do every weekend, I’ve been searching far and wide for the best deals on digitally distributed games for your PCs, and there seems to be some great deals around right now. Avoid missing any of the best deals this weekend by reading on for my highlights of which discounts are most worth your attention, and head to SavyGamer.co.uk for an always updated record of the best deals on all platforms. (more…)

Once upon a time, CD Projekt studio manager Adam Badowski announced that he was strongly mulling the possibility of giving Geralt’s one-man show a multiplayer makeover. That was, of course, met with the gnashing of teeth and braying of donkeys, as very few people have picked up The Witcher and said, “Gee, I sure would love to see this sprawling story chopped up into a series of generic deathmatch modes.” And even fewer donkeys. Fortunately, when I spoke with CDP during GDC, it sounded like they were having some very strong second thoughts. And now, sure enough, The Witcher 3‘s proposed multiplayer mode is no more.

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Ever wanted to play poker with Claptrap, Sam & Max, Brock from The Venture Bros. and Ash from The Evil Dead, with GLaDOS as your dealer? It’s at the least an interesting prospect. But how does it pan out as a game? Telltale found out with Poker Night 2. Here’s wot I think:

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Development continues on CCP's next MMO and the studios shows off an experimental title that utilizes the Oculus Rift.

This is the first ship Star Citizen players will own, and it comes in a number of different space flavors.

Googoo gaga blurble snort gaaaaaaaaaa goooooooo Among The Sleep mama baba kitty gwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa survival-horror where you play as a two-year-old goooooooogaaaaaaaa eeeeeeeeeeeee burp now on Kickstarter waaaaaaaaaa hungry screamcry blurrrrrrbwail but is the game actually any good ooooo bottle gagagoogoo ga naptime I played an alpha demo to find out.

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The MMO hasn’t found itself with too much help from Kickstarter, but that could be set to change with the impressive crowd-flexing of Camelot Unchained, which has raised $1.4m, with a week left on the clock. I’ve been browsing over their updates and picked out a few things that they’ve revealed about the spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot’s game and world. Check them out below.

Inconveniently, I couldn’t embed the most interesting video, which is at the bottom of this post. It shows the tech demo for a thousand-player battle. Go take a look!(more…)

Don’t Starve is an isometric 2D survival-roleplaying game, set in a randomly-generated fantasy world of threats and food shortages, and from the studio behind Mark of the Ninja. You have to not starve.(more…)

Named in what appears to be a bid to play with search engine terms, Wargame Airland Battle is now available to those who pre-order. The sequel to the simply excellent European Escalation will appear on the 22nd of the marvelous month of May, and until then there’s a beta going on. Eugen explain: “The early access Beta gives an exclusive and immediate access to the ‘Destruction’ multiplayer mode, with the first 4 playable maps and pre-made army decks for all 12 nations of the game. Enough to plunge happily into the battle before everyone else, and participate in the last online tweaks before the official start of the conflict next month!”

Recent battle-zooming trailer below. It’s fancy.(more…)

Ah yes, and while we’re talking about Bohemia stuff that reminds me to post the most recent Arma 3 guide video thing. This is the one that really gets at the heart of what Arma is about: multiplayer things! If you are not chatting with chums as you co-ordinate to not get shot, then you are doing it wrong. Doing that right, of course, requires quite a bit more insight, and who better to point you in the direction of not cocking it up, than Arma superfan Andrew “Dslyecxi Gluck?(more…)