PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

When someone wakes up with a hangover, you'd expect them to hydrate, take aspirin or rest up to get through the day, right? We don't consider selling a friend's engagement ring par for the Regretting Booze course, but apparently Randal does. In Randal's Monday, this choice results in his friend Matt killing himself, leaving Randal cursed to live through the same Monday until he finds a way to fix his mistake.

Randal's Monday is a point-and-click adventure game from Daedalic Games and Nexus Game Studios, layered with geek and pop culture references from the past two decades. More than 50 characters will cross paths with Randal in his quest for decency, which is scheduled for a digital release on PCs in Q3 of 2014. [Image: Randal's Monday YouTube channel]

Play a new episode, earn a new ship and party with Q.

Beyond the Sideline Football is a management simulation game like the ever-popular Football Manager series, due out in 2015 for PC, Mac and Linux. Unlike Football Manager, the game is centered on a different sport: American football. Coming from Out of the Park Developments, the creators of the excellent Out of the Park Baseball management series as well as Title Bout Championship Boxing 2013, the game will include all 32 NFL teams and their current roster of players.

Like other management sims, the game has players managing their team's depth chart, simulate matches for decades and call every play in individual games. Additionally, players can bring their favorite teams to fortune (or run them into the ground) by negotiating contracts, participating in the annual player draft and make trades to better their franchise's future. OOTP Developments is boasting "nearly 50 tracked stats" for the game's virtual athletes as well as "complete histories" and automatically-generated news and stories to build the game's sporty universe.

Beyond the Sideline has another connection to Football Manager, as former Sports Interactive developer Francis Cole is the lead developer on the project. [Image: Out of the Park Developments]

The LHS Bikeshed is a project that has transformed a battered old caravan into a space shuttle simulator. Players enter the caravan, take a seat at one of the three stations and prepare for launch. We sent Brendan and some old friends along to see how well they would fare in the dark reaches of space.(more…)

We’ve played EverQuest Next Landmark and spoken with SOE about their mad (yet not entirely impossible) ambitions for the game/world creation Photoshop thing as it grows and evolves, but now it’s your turn. Well, maybe. If you’re willing to pay and also not talk about it for a while (hip-hip-hurrNDA, etc). EQNL’s roughly 60 percent complete paid alpha will launch later today, but it won’t be without its bumps in the road. We spoke with SOE about how it’ll handle progression, character wipes, and other growing pains typically associated with bouncing baby entire universes. Tunnel to the chewy, nougaty center of this post for everything you’ll need to know.

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I love the purity of the fast-paced deathmatch shooter, and I’ll drunkenly slam my fists down on any pub table in the country while shouting about the beauty of Quake 3: Arena. I’m a little sad though that so few games are trying to move that style of game in new directions.

I’m consequently excited by Telos, an in-development fast-paced first-person shooter about two-storey tall spidermechs with grappling hooks fighting in partially zero-g levels built out of abstract, purple shapes. Video below.

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Quakecon, North America's LAN party extraordinaire, is taking place a couple of weeks earlier than usual in 2014. Organizers announced the Bring-Your-Own-Computer event will be held from July 17 to July 20 at the regular venue of the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas.

It'll be the first Quakecon since John Carmack left id Software, the company he co-founded, to work full-time at Oculus VR. That doesn't mean Carmack's traditional keynote address is a write-off, as the veteran programmer tweeted he's offered to give the talk - it's now up to organizers to accept his offer.

Carmack or no, because the event's happening a wee bit earlier there's no time to dawdle over booking a hotel room - a $160 per night special rate is available now. Admission to the event itself remains free.

Okay, okay. God. OK. I will finally consider upgrading my processor after five years of this Core i7 920 being just fine. Between Steam Home Streaming needing to encode video eversoquickly and now Oxide/Stardock’s Star Swarm offering me the awesome sight of several thousand on-screne spaceships, I am ready to accept that my PC’s futureproofed days might at last be behind it. Fasterfasterfaster.

Star Swarm isn’t a game. It’s a benchmark for a game I want, a space RTS on a massive scale. We saw the video earlier this month, but the actual demo/bench is out now, and it wants to make your PC have a little cry.(more…)

This is a fun toy. Seaquence is one of many browser tools/games which allow you to create patterns of beats, by putting squares within a looping grid, twisting the pitch and seeing what happens. It’s the only such game/tool that turns each of your loops into fish, your waveforms forming their body and each note tapping along their antennae.

It’s free, runs in your browser, and I’m sure you can do better than me.(more…)

Randal’s Monday is a point and click adventure starring a man doomed to repeat the same dreadful Monday over and over again. John first spotted it in December 2012 and I theorise that development has been stuck in a loop similar to the fictional one in the game’s plot since then. Now, a press release informs me that Daedalic have picked the game up for distribution and it’ll be out in the third quarter of this year. Packed with game, TV and movie references, Randal’s Monday is a “homage to geek culture”. However, I reckon it grabbed the attention of the Deponia developers by including a main character who is described as “a kleptomaniac with sociopathic tendencies who above all is a terrible friend”. Rufus and Randal need some kind of support group.

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Scary Mostro and Section Studios released a playable demo for their side-scrolling action game.

More bad news for Funcom as The Secret World reporter suffers a raid.

Rockstar has yet to announce a PC version, but that isn't stopping one retailer from offering pre-orders.

But who will give the keynote now that Carmack is gone?

According to a new report, Microsoft is on the verge of naming its new CEO and is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman.

Octodad revels in its brand of absurdist physical comedy, but also tells a touching tale.

Combofiend delivers all the details about the version that will be used in the Taipei location test.

Except for its muddled progression system, this tactical RPG gets a lot of things right.

A co-founder of the studio that created Guild Wars is joining the team behind State of Decay.

Oh hell, it’s happened again. But this time it’s induced not only frustration but a sudden pang of guilt. Another of my SSDs has gone titsup.com and my borderline breathless fanboyism for SSDs is flashing before my eyes. What have I done? Have I been wrong all along? Are SSDs still not fit for public consumption? At the very least, it’s reason enough to re-examine just how reliable the latest solid staters are and whether the reward is worth the risk. (more…)

A second pack of gear is being introduced to Payday 2 in February, courtesy of Gage the weapons dealer. Following up on his first premium offering, Gage's second weapons drop introduces some new light machine guns, knives and the Cloaker - a new enemy police unit.

There isn't much information on Cloakers, but you'll hear "a faint hissing whine" when they're in proximity. These light machine guns, while having a large magazine size, take a long time to reload and slow you down by 20%. Knives, on the other hand, introduce a new charge attack that can knock down enemies, so the longer you hold down the melee button, the stronger the attack. Finally, the new Gage weapons pack adds four new masks into the mix, along with new patterns and materials to customize them.

The Gage weapon pack 2 DLC will be available on Steam in February for $5. Along with the new gear, the DLC also adds a handful of new achievements, which you can review over on Overkill's site. Image: Overkill Software

My first glance at Crackdown 2 dev Ruffian’s attempt to Go Indie had me muttering ‘oh great an Angry Birds clone, just what this wretched planet needs.’ Then I looked closer and instead rubbed my chin while muttering “huh, World of Good as an RTS. They could be onto something with that.”

I didn’t mutter either of those things. I stared dumbly at the pitch video for Game of Glens for a couple of minutes, then silently opened a CMS window and began writing a complete fabrication of how I’d spent the preceding moments. I don’t know why I lie.(more…)

I don’t have the answer to my capslock question, I’m afraid. Telltale can’t quite be accused of being late with episode 2 of their rather good Fables adaptation Wolf Among Us as I don’t believe they ever gave a concrete release date. But they are late, let’s be honest. The first episode was four months ago. During that time, my baby has learned to a) sit b) crawl c) eat solids d) perform a frightening, wobbly standing up while feverishly gripping the edge of a table e) enthusiastically rip an entire newspaper to shreds in under two minutes, plus innumerable new ways to make my life both heaven and hell. SO I WOULD THINK IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE TO CREATE A SUB-TWO HOUR ADVENTURE GAME USING EXISTING TECH AND MANY ASSETS DURING THAT TIME.(more…)

Octodad: Dadliest Catch reminds me of "Chicken Boo," an old series of short cartoons that used to air during Warner Bros' Animaniacs. The premise was ridiculous: Boo was a giant chicken that pretended to be human. He disguised himself as everything from a superhero to a respected Civil War general, and the punchline was always the same: Everyone around him, even his close friends, finally discovered he was a chicken.

Octodad employs a similar (though funnier) gag, telling the story of a typical suburban father determined to live his typical suburban life while hiding his greatest secret: He's an octopus. Like an episode of Chicken Boo, Octodad is brief and, for the same reasons as the cartoon, that's probably for the best, because you can only rely on the same gag for so long before it ceases to be funny.

And Octodad is funny. The very sight of a yellow octopus, its tentacles stuffed into a sky blue suit, is worth a chuckle on its own, and the humor is only compounded as the boneless curiosity wobbles across the ground, attempting to perform everyday tasks like mowing the lawn or shopping for groceries. It's at these moments when Octodad is at its greatest, as your desperate, flailing attempt to make a cup of coffee results in the near destruction of your kitchen.

But Octodad isn't a cartoon, and it's only when more traditional game elements are injected - boss fights, failure - that it starts to drag.

Sometimes a browser game comes along that just seems to swallow me and everyone I know. Quick to play, a challenge which measures some gaming-unrelated skill, the kind of thing you want to brag about and don’t feel bad about recommending. The last one was GeoGuessr, the game of geographic trivia. The new one is Color, the game of ffs-am-I-blind-or-something. It’s only a colour matching game, but it consumed my evening.(more…)

Phoenix Online Studios was, until very recently, a group of dedicated hobbyists scattered around the world, working on their fan tribute to the King’s Quest games. The Silver Lining was developed over many years, and faced much turmoil, before eventually seeing four of its chapters released in 2010 and 2011. Now, in just three years, they’re a major player in the resurgence of adventure gaming, developing games with industry hero Jane Jensen. It’s an impressive story, and one that’s looking like it’s still got places to go. Phoenix have just announced the appointment of Techsavvy and Game Theory’s Scott Steinberg as their general manager. We’ve chatted with him to find out why he’s joining, and more about the tale of Phoenix Online.

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American McGee’s Spicy Horse studio has spent a touch more on Akaneiro: Demon Hunter than it raised on Kickstarter. Gathering $204,000 back in February last year, it seems they’ve spent $2 million on the game. I’m not an accountant, but I’m pretty sure that £2m is more than $205,000. McGee has posted on the game’s Kickstarter page that it means they’ll have to “radically alter” the future of the game.

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Warhorse pitched an ambitious project. Kingdom Come: Deliverance wants to be Skyrim meets The Witcher, but without all the pretend stuff like dragons. NO DRAGONS?! you cry in fear and rage. No, but it’s okay, because there are just so many swords. This ultro-historical epic comes from a Czech team of super-developers, they behind things like Mafia and ARMA, and they say things like, “Combat is calculated entirely with inverse kinematics, so it’s not even animated.”

It’s working. So far Deliverance has made well over half a million pounds, and they only asked for £300,000. What are people doing?! They’ve gone mad! But give give give we all are, and there’s now a new video explaining more about the game’s world.

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If you’re trying to find a link between them, let me put your mind at rest. The two games could hardly have less in common, but as both came out around November last year, and both have just turned up on Steam in the last few days, it seemed oddly compelling to put them incongruously together in the same post.

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Gnah is a "game about exploring and escaping giant heads." That's how Montreal-based indie developer Ko-Op Mode describes its latest project in addition to the phrase "the only way out is through" in the game's teaser trailer.

Gnah is a collaboration between the Ko-Op Mode collective and designer Samuel Boucher, whose Tumblr blog is filled with attractive designs related to the game. Boucher took to an indie gaming forum to discuss the project in December, calling Gnah a "puzzle game about a little guy trapped in some weird heads called Gnahs." Gnah has players controlling the character in the heads as well as manipulating the heads themselves to help the character escape. The game is in development for PC, Mac, Linux and Ouya.