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When I first discovered Dojo of Death, I played it once and deemed it a nice distraction but ultimately not worth writing about. But then I made a mistake: I left its tab open in my browser. The arcade-y slasher, incredibly simplistic though it might be, provides just the right amount of deliciously squishy slicing and dicing in small doses. So I’d do some work, finish a task, and then click over to that browser tab. There it was waiting for me, each of its mechanics tuned to make my id giggle with glee. Dashing forward cutting down multiple enemies in the blink of an eye, charging so hard that arrows flying right at me split in two on impact. There is very, very little to Dojo of Death, but that is enough.

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It’s dangerous being an international master of espionage. In between all the hideously interesting intrigue, early exposure to crazy cool tech, and bottomless piles of hot, filthy sex that just happen wherever you are, there’s all sorts of horrible stuff. You could, for instance, get captured and have your memories wiped, your entire identity brainwashed away as though merely gum on an old tennis shoe. I assume that’s exactly what happened to Klei’s espionage XCOM Incognita, which is now going by new alias Invisible, Inc for mysteeeeeeeeeerious reasons. I have inquired for further information, but for now we’ll just have to make do with a new trailer and information on the Early Access alpha‘s latest major update.

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Blizzard has changed its plans and will instantly offer a max-level character for pre-ordering the next WoW expansion.

Daniël Haazen won the Ludum Dare 28 compo challenge - the 48-hour, solo competition - with his game, One Take. It turns players into camera operators on a series of movie sets, with the director's cues on one side and a limited amount of time to zoom in, move the camera and get the perfect shot. A player's performance is reviewed in the paper once filming is complete. Ludum Dare 28's theme was "You Only Get One."

"I repeatedly told myself 'One ... one ...' and scrolled through the possibilities in my mind," Haazen told Nico Saraintaris, an indie developer from Faif studio, Beavl. "'One enemy, one bullet, one life, one ... one ....' Then suddenly One Take appeared. I don't know where it came from, it just happens like that. I must say that I had been thinking for three hours until I came up with One Take, so it took a while. I wasn't sure if I was going to use it, as at first it looked at too much work for 48 hours. But after another 15 minutes I decided to go with it. And I'm glad I did."

Haazen said he's now working to make One Take a full PC game, and possibly iOS and Android versions down the line. Other top games in the compo challenge were blomster, Protogun, Super Sneaky Sample Stealer and A Precious Arrow. The Jam competition - the "relaxed," 72-hour challenge - gave top nods to Titan Souls, Match Girl, Javel-ein, Only One Chance and Yogo Rocketfist. All games are available to browse and play here.

Congrats to the winners, but also to anyone who can make a game in just a few days. That's still impressive.

Xbox One outsold PS4 in the US in November, but “PS4’s two-month total makes it the best selling console during the two-month launch window.”

While some of the hardware configurations and prices of Steam Machines are up in the air, here's an early look at performance.

Kaveri. Heterogeneous computing. Mantle. What? I just want a decent CPU and graphics card, please. Don’t know about you, but feels to me like you need a masters in integrated circuit design to keep up with PC processor and graphics tech at the moment. AMD has just outed Kaveri, its latest APU or CPU-GPU thingie. What with all this heterogeneous computing stuff, the promise of Mantle and an integrated graphics core that’s not far off next-gen-console performance parity, Kaveri pulls together the tangled web that is AMD’s current strategy in a single chip and puts a different spin on what’s important in PC processors. It’s also bloody confusing. Is Kaveri any good, what does it all mean, should you care, can you even keep up? Answers of sorts I shall provide. Meanwhile, a quick note on Dell and its alleged 30Hz 4K clanger. (more…)

Hidden within Double Fine's new adventure game Broken Age is a special aesthetic option that coats the game's colorful graphics in a heavy sheen of thick pixels.

Though Double Fine hasn't publicized this feature, YouTube user "The Phawx" provides a simple, step by step guide to activating the mode in the above clip. Simply enter the game's options menu, crank its resolution down to 640x480, assign a button to the new icon you'll find in the game's "Controls" menu, and voila, that button now enables retro mode. Even better, once you've activated the hidden feature you're free to return the game to a higher resolution, but will still be able to toggle retro mode on and off with whichever button you've selected.

This isn't a true aesthetic makeover, as much as a video filter overlaid on top of the game's default graphics, but at the very least it does give players an excuse to use the game's 640x480 resolution setting - an otherwise largely pointless holdover from the days when computers were all beige rectangles and the Intel Pentium 2 was considered amazing technology.

Klei Entertainment changes its new game's title and releases a new trailer.

Jenito Games, Daniel Hall's one-man indie studio, has a new PC game called Super Mega Bob in the works and it's a deceptively intense experience. Super Mega Bob is a difficult 2D shooter harkening back to the 16-bit era of old, with simple shooting mechanics married to a modern upgrade system for player progression.

A beta version of the game is available for download.

Super Mega Bob is quite the quintessential indie story. Hall is handling everything himself, from programming to art to sound and anything else you could imagine is a part of making a game in your basement. Hall, who hails from Fort Oglethorpe, GA, has been toiling away for five years to make this game happen and describes Super Mega Bob as "truly a reflection of my dreams, my love for games, and my early childhood exposure to gaming classics."

Armories allow players to easily and quickly change their characters' skill points, loadout, and look.

The time is upon us. The golden moment when we stare backward across the years and wonder if it has really been so long since we last pointed, clicked, and frolicked in the comedic fields of a Tim Schafer adventure game. Were we ever so young? So foolish? So accustomed to looking through our inventory and wondering just what the heck we're supposed to do with a "cold wet hamster"?

No more looking back, though! Today, Joystiq Streams is captained by Ludwig Kietzmann as he dives into Broken Age, the brand new Tim Schafer-directed Double Fine adventure game. For those who may not have backed the game on Kickstarter and want a taste, join us at 4p.m. EST on the Joystiq Twitch channel. Anthony John Agnello will be hanging in the chat, relaying your questions to Ludwig as we go.

Loadout and its 44 billion possible weapon types will soon be out of early access.

The first act of Double Fine's Kickstarter reminds me why I fell in love with adventure games in the first place.

Modders rejoice: SEGA has release a new set of tools on Steam that'll make getting creative with Rome 2 that much easier.

Mutant Football League will make a return to Kickstarter in late spring following an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign last year, project creator Michael Mendheim told Joystiq. The project's first pass at Kickstarter ended in October without reaching its $750,000 goal, raising $141,821 in support.

According to data gathered in our own Crowdfund Bookie, successful gaming projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo earn roughly $25,000 on average. Often, those successful campaigns are targeted at a few particular platforms, whereas Mutant Football League's scope spanned from mobile platforms to home consoles at the outset.

Mendheim initially gathered input from other developers and industry veterans that had experience running Kickstarter campaigns. Their suggestion was for Mendheim to focus on mobile platforms, which didn't fare well at Kickstarter. "So I led my Kickstarter campaign with mobile, and the backlash to that was just unbelievable," Mendheim said. "We were sunk that first day."

The logic follows that Mendheim's first attempt at raising funds for the project might have been a success with more moderate goals, which he plans to rectify this spring by lowering his ambitions. Not only will the upcoming crowdfunding campaign's monetary goal be significantly lowered, but the developer will continue Mutant Football League's development on PC for the time being, with other platforms to eventually follow.

Square Enix has revealed the first details about the Hitman game in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC.

The first screenshots from the upcoming action-RPG due out later this year on PS4, Xbox One and PC have been released.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch has a release date on PC plus an update of when it'll hit PS4. Oh, and a new launch trailer, too.

Well this is some very splendid news. You very likely have noticed that Mr Graham Smith has been writing all over RPS for the last few months. You may well have been squeegeeing your eyes and asking, “What? THE Graham Smith?! From off of PC Gamer?!” Yes indeed, THE Graham Smith. We’re very excited to announce today that he has been appointed as RPS’s Managing Editor. Say hello to Graham!

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IO-Interactive have released an open letter about the future of their foremost franchise onto the wilds of the internet. It’s addressed to ‘all Hitman fans’ but even if you’re not included in that group, you can read it by clicking on this link. Don’t worry about mail fraud, just take a big whiff of the page and remember the words of Billy Shakesticks – “A press release by any other name would smell as sweet.” The wording of the statement acknowledges some of Absolution’s sins, promising “an open, non-linear level design approach to the game, ensuring the game will play out across huge, checkpoint-free, sandbox levels”. Contracts Mode will return and if the missions live up to the wording here, it could be applied extremely well.

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Having so recently written about the first hour of Broken Age, it doesn’t make too much sense to overly repeat myself here. So it’s well worth reading that first half of this review first. This one continues on from there. So here’s the rest of wot i think:

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Stardock’s shiny new 64-bit Nitrous Engine was the talk of the shininess-obsessed town during CES – well, when everyone wasn’t yammering endlessly about Steam Machines and Oculus Rift, anyway. The engine is being created by a small company called Oxide, and it’s focused on strategy games, which aren’t dead despite being the new adventure games in terms of how often everyone tries to shove them into grasping graves. In its current state, it can display nearly 10,000 ships at once, each with its own individual AI, firing solutions, enemy tracking, physics – everything. The end result? Pretty darn impressive, even at this early stage.

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Pre-alpha version of Bugbear’s carnage-packed FlatOut successor available now.

Spate is a drunken, emotional platformer due out for PC, Mac and Linux on March 19, via Steam and the game's website. Spate has evolved since we first saw it in March: The new screenshots show off a colorful, twisted world, while previously it looked plain twisted. The story remains dark, following a father as he deals with the death of his daughter by drinking the pain away - the more he drinks, the better he runs and jumps, but the world becomes more grotesque with each sip.

"The deeper into the journey he gets, the more surreal things become," Spate creator Eric Provan says. "Will he be able to ditch his drinking habit and finally face the emotions haunting him since his daughter's death? Or will he allow the drink to completely engulf him?"

Spate is in beta now, available in a pre-order bundle for $25. Pre-order the final game alone for $10. Provan migrated from the film industry, starting as an artist for Walt Disney Animation Studios, Sony Pictures Animation and the Jim Henson Creature Shop. In March, he told us how these skills translate to game development, and that his favorite aspect of Spate was the rain:

"I began thinking of all the movies that I love and what they have in common: Stalker, Dark City, Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China. It was rain! I began thinking of the feeling that I get when I sit at my window watching and listening to the rain come down. It's a special feeling, and it's one that I am determined to achieve with Spate."

Valve to roll out local currency support for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and more.

Imagine stepping into a warm, inviting hot tub. As you relax in the water, an attendant pours in some bath salts. You register a rise in the temperature, but think nothing of it. The attendant returns, this time sprinkling fragrant herbs into the water. It's getting hot in here. The attendant is back, pouring some concoction into the bubbling water. No, not bubbling. Boiling.

That's when the lid comes down, and you realize that you're not being cleansed. You're being cooked. Welcome to Risk of Rain.

Valve has redesigned its gamepad to offer more functionality for older games.

Cloudbuilt allows players to freerun-and-gun in a futuristic sky world, and it's coming to PC this year from publisher Rising Star Games. We got a first look at Cloudbuilt in October 2012, when developer Coilworks described it as "a challenging, high-speed action-platformer in 3D with its roots in 16-bit jump-and-shoot games." Since then, Cloudbuilt has been Greenlit and is on its way to Steam.

"Steam's Greenlight is a great indicator of what people want to play and Cloudbuilt breezed through this process due to its refreshing take on the platform genre," Martin Defries, COO of Rising Star Games, says in a press release. "As a community-driven publisher we are delighted to release a title with such great feedback and we're confident that Cloudbuilt will further enhance our growing Steam library. The hardworking team at Coilworks has produced a fantastic game and we can't wait to see which routes players take for the fastest times."

The final PC version of Cloudbuilt will include more than 20 levels, four endings, branching level selection and a "retro-inspired soundtrack," Coilworks says. Listening to the game's most recent trailer, we'd call the soundtrack 80s techno-punk with a modern twist.

In addition to user base numbers, Valve has shared some regional sales data.