PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Insurgency is smartly camped on a spawn point between Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra.

Classes start for action RPG Our Darker Purpose on Steam tomorrow at 9AM PT - and then they're immediately canceled because all of the teachers have disappeared and the school is overrun with terrifying monsters. Indie studio Avidly Wild Games Kickstarted Our Darker Purpose to the tune of $40,000 in June and pushed it through the dark, convoluted passages of Steam Greenlight in October.

Our Darker Purpose has a cartoonish, Tim Burton art style and is inspired by The Binding of Isaac, A Link to the Past and Diablo - it's a roguelike with permanent twists.

"Each playthrough features a unique set of procedurally generated levels," Avidly Wild says. "Death is permanent, but your accomplishments earn you resources to buy lessons and upgrades in the afterlife ... and your education lasts forever. Every game teaches you more about the Edgewood Home for Lost Children, the disappearance of the adults, and the darker purpose of the Administrators."

We always knew there was something up with our school administrators.

Uncy Dave is back, floating in space. A new Elite: Dangerous dev diary usually gives me a giddy thrill, but ever since I had that brief taste of the alpha, all I can see is a game that I touched and now don’t have. It’s torture. Watching the new video has only made it worse: there’s a small look at the next alpha update, and when it lands it’ll bring the first moments of multiplayer. Playing Elite with friends… I have never been closed to spending £200 on a game in all my life.(more…)

The original Legend of Grimrock‘s setting was pretty, you know, grim and also predominately made of rocks. But Legend of Grimrock 2? It’s a terrible, terrible lie. The isle of Nex looks like a glorious vacation getaway. With monsters. And traps. And ancient ruins. So the greatest vacation getaway ever, basically. I see a few rocks here and there, but I’m not convinced. Grimness and rocks were the core pillars of the first game – definitely not wicked yet rewarding difficulty, puzzles, character building, and blender-mouthed snail monsters, all of which will be returning in spades in the second. Developer Almost Human has clearly lost its marbles. A Grimrock match-three Facebook casino game can’t be far off.

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I adored Puzzle Quest. But I’ve yet to truly adore anything else that’s followed in its wake (including Puzzle Quest 2), with the exception of 10,000,000. There is something spellbinding about 10m’s distillation of the concept, simplifying the combination of match-3 with RPG, down to this fast-paced compulsive madness. (Having finished it twice, I’d like to remind creator Luca Redwood to RELEASE THE NEW CONTENT SOON.)

And then out of Ludum Dare comes Faif. Yes, Faif. It’s the idea minimalised even further. It’s in development now, but playable as that process goes along. New elements are being regularly added, or tweaked, and it’s free to follow along.

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Just to get this out of the way: the Glyph headset is currently not a VR headset. It’s a head-mounted display aimed at allowing people to watch movies as if on a large display, though they are looking at the potential for head-tracking with games. But it’s worth knowing about: it’s portable headset completely encased in a set of earphones, so with the band twisted up you can use it to listen to music. Twisted down, however, and it becomes something more akin to a theatre, blasting an image directly into you eyes. That’s the kicker: instead of spreading the image over a blurry screen, the Glyph fires it right into your retinas via two million micro-mirrors. There is no screen. The Kickstarter has already reached its target, so you can read about it without any obligation to make it happen.(more…)

Xbox One and PC beta inbound, as we learn who's working on the Xbox 360 version of Respawn's debut shooter.

Finally, Kerbal Space Program is getting the expansion we've all been wondering about. The NASA add-on brings an asteroid mission.

The new mode lets characters share their skills with other heroes.

The crowdfunding platform asks gamers which projects they would pledge money to.

DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival sim which, though buggy and incomplete, produces anecdotes of drama, desperation and clown mask-wearing weirdos. Emily Richardson has been playing it with a question: can you be a good person in the videogame post-apocalypse? Start with part one.

We’re a team of four heading straight for the city of Cherno. We have another survivor to pick up and we want to help some people around the town if we can. Yes, by now we realise how dangerous this is. Cherno is not a friendly place and we know that bandits go to find a more challenging kind of prey there, but we’ll be a pack of five soon, and we’re up for the fight.(more…)

King has been criticized for its actions after securing a trademark on the word "candy."

King has pulled Pac-Avoid, the game indie developer Stolen Goose recently accused the Candy Crush Saga developer of cloning. Stolen Goose alleged that Epic Shadow-developed Pac-Avoid was a direct clone of its own 2009 game, Scamperghost, which the developer pitched to King before backing out of the deal to bring the game to rival online game portal Max Games.

"The details of the situation are complex, but the bottom line is that we should never have published Pac-Avoid," King CEO and Co-Founder Riccardo Zacconi wrote on the company's website. "We have taken the game down from our site, and we apologise for having published it in the first place."

Zacconi added that this "unfortunate situation is an exception to the rule," stressing that the developer "does not clone games, and we do not want anyone cloning our games." He noted that King performs "a thorough search" of existing games and reviews trademark filings to avoid infringement. Former Epic Shadow developer Matt Porter responded to King's retraction of the game, calling King's claimed thorough search of games in the marketplace "an obvious lie."

"Our only additional term to the deal, was that the Epic Shadow branding not be placed in the game, as we found the entire project to be sketchy and we wanted nothing to do with it post-release," Porter wrote.

This is the latest in King's controversial saga, in which it trademarked the word "candy" in order to deny mobile clones of Candy Crush Saga. King also set its sights on The Banner Saga developer Stoic Studio, opposing its application for "Banner Saga." Zacconi said King will not enforce the use of its trademarked word "saga" on Stoic Studios, but opposed the application to "preserve our own ability to protect our own games."

I’ve yet to put on some Oculus Rift goggles, which rather annoys me. I imagine March’s GDC will see that cherry popped for me, but I suspect not in a way as innovative or intriguing as is offered by Gender Swap. As part of The Machine To Be Another, an ongoing experimental art project, this uses the virtual reality headset to give users the experience of being someone else – and in this case, someone of a different sex.

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After losing a trademark infringement case last year, Microsoft has rebranded its cloud storage service.

"SimCity will never be playable offline." Check out this plus more of the most blatant video game flip-flops.

If I had the time (and I actually plan on making the time), I’d go to as many Early Access developers as I could manage and ask from them what impact releasing the game to the public has had on their plans for the game? What changes they’ve made as a direct response from the way the players took up their tools? Paradox North has just admitted to taking the advice of the Magicka: Wizard Wars community, but in an awesome way. Their multiplayer game of wizards warring has a new Duel Mode that’s come from fan feedback: a one vs one game mode where you can tussle with an elemental enemy without worrying about a team-mate accidentally flambéing you. There’s a trailer for it below.(more…)

The newest DOTA 2 event brings new rewards, items and enemies.

A couple of weeks ago I said that Nidhogg was to swordfighting as Sensible Soccer was to football. Can I repeat myself, and say that Cook, Serve, Delicious! is to the service industry as Typing of the Dead is to zombie-killing? It’s Typing of the Chef. A game concerned not with simulating its actions accurately, but in capturing the core idea of those actions cleanly. In this case, running a restaurant, from preparing the food to purchasing the equipment.(more…)

A French retailer has put up posters that claim Titanfall will be getting a beta next month.

As the second coolest person at RPS, I’ve spent many hours in Europa Universalis IV, attempting to conquer Venice as that lovable nation state, Austria. If you’re only as cool as the third or fourth coolest person at RPS, you might not know that Venice is valuable because it’s a centre of trade.

If you’re not as cool as me, you might also not know why Europa Universalis IV’s new expansion pack, Weath of Nations, is exciting. It’s because it expands the games trading mechanics to include privateers, trade companies and conflicts.(more…)

There's something unsettling about a VR game set in a someone else's digitized mind, the kind of unsettling that makes us question who we are and go looking for the holes in our neck. That said, Untold Games' concept of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Monkey Island in virtual reality" has our interest piqued in Loading Human.

The Eternal Sunshine drop - great movie - derives from the plot. You play as André Gibson, a writer suffering from the degenerative memory disease Alzheimer's. Your wife, seemingly unbeknownst to you, transfers your mind into a digital program called Loading Human. There you have to relive your life to complete the procedure and preserve your memories. It sounds very philosophical, if a little confusing - why does she die if the transfer fails?

The Monkey Island side comes from point-and-click gameplay made pseudo-tactile by combining the Oculus Rift with motion controllers like the Sixense Stem or Razer Hydra. According to Untold, each object in the game has an interactive script, such as a ringing phone that you can answer, and put to your ear to hear louder.

Loading Human is due on Windows PC and Mac this year. If you're interested but Rift-less, it'll also be playable on monitors, but you'll need a "supported motion-based controller."

Having a boss is a lot like having a real-life Dungeon Master. This morning in the Forbidden Chatroom of Mystery 2.0, I posted about Dungeonforge, and said it looked neat. John shouted “Postify”, and here I am. Dungeonforge is an online action RPG that gives the players the tools to DM the world. You can build towns and dungeons in the world, leaving them there for people to stumble across and fight through, and you can even host live DM sessions in what you’ve made. They’ve just launched a Kickstarter, and…

Craig, I am DMing your post: a pants eating dragon has eaten your pants. You now have no pants. Take off your pants. It also eats winkies.

Sigh. Just don’t play it with John.(more…)

KAMI, the puzzle game from Lume creators State Of Play Games, is now out on Steam. And as is rather often the case, the PC port of the mobile game is definitely the superior version. There are still some silly issues, though.

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UPDATE: The developer responsible for Planetside 2 and EverQuest Next will offer one subscription to cover all its titles.

As regular readers of my “Craig is far too excited about Limit Theory” posts are aware, I hang on the Limit Theory developer updates like Sylvester Stallone hangs on to ropes. Josh Parnell’s open-world space game is plodding along in development, and each month he releases a new video that completely floors me. If I am in a position to share it with thousands of pairs of eyes, I shall. That means you get two updates in this post, as the RPS CMS has been hidden from me for a few months, and I’ll be gone again come Tuesday. Watch these, and also demand that I am brought back at least once a month to share them with you*.(more…)

One of my favorite elements of Dishonored was its plague-infested whalepunk world. By videogame standards, I thought it was a refreshingly weird place, a rot-tinged breath of fresh air burning in my nostrils. But man, it looks downright tame in comparison to Windforge, in which there are flying whales and you mine them hollow and turn them into desecrated flesh vessels to pilot on your journeys. Well, that’s if you’re a jerk, anyway. These sky whales are on the brink of extinction, so technically you’re trying to find an alternate fuel source. Also, there is crazy Bionic-Commando-style swinging action, shooting ripped straight from Contra’s cold, dead hands, and tons of crafting. It looks like total madness, and it’ll be out in March.

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I first encountered comedy spy ‘em up Jazzpunk at about 2am. I was on a merry jaunt through the IGF entries, and fell into it without knowing what I was about to encounter. I was spat out the other side, grinning and desperate to talk about it. I immediately informed John that he needed to play it and that I wanted to write about it, and he immediately retorted that Nathan had already covered it, and that I should read RPS more. He’ll do anything for clicks. Well now it’s my time to usurp that Nathan, who has the misfortune of being American and asleep. The trailer is below, and it is totally live-action.(more…)

I like a good game of artful dodging, but I haven’t played anything in the genre in years. Maybe not since Messhof left it behind after releasing Flywrench. That makes Hyphen an appealing prospect: a neon game about a slowly spinning line moving through a maze without touching the walls. The spinning makes it feel like an abstracted, slow-motion version of that scene in a movie where the super-spy/ninja-thief backflips through a room full of moving lasers, and there’s a trailer and a demo below.

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Would you climb a multimile-high tower for a chance at wealth and learning your own origin story? Yeah? Alright, how about if it was filled with puzzles and tons of guards ready to grind your bones into the spaces of the stone floor? That's the peril the goblin Styx will face in Styx: Master of Shadows, a PC game with RPG elements from Cyanide Studios due sometime this year.

In the world of Styx, a sprawling tower protects the Tree, a source of a mysterious, powerful substance called Amber. Players will face humans, orcs and magic-savvy elves as they try to clear levels and various objectives. The press release notes "murder, information recovery" and "thefts of precious artifacts" among the hurdles awaiting Styx. Levels will also be open to multiple methods of completion, leaving it up to players to sneak by stealthily or charge into all battles without reservation.

As players ascend the tower, the experience they earn can be used to unlock skills, moves and weapons spread across six talent trees. That Amber substance won't be entirely useless in its mystery, either - players will gain power from the Amber, which can "help you out of a tight spot, make you invisible to the eyes of your enemies and ... generate 'disposable' clones of yourself!"

We wonder if "disposable" is meant in the same way that Pikmin are "disposable," where you feel like the world's worst person as they're killed off.