PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

I know, I know – ‘pop cultural thing painstakingly recreated in sandbox indie game’ is so 2010. But I have a great weakness despite my built-up resistance to covering Del Boy’s Robin Reliant in Minecraft or a Terraria screenshot that looks like Michael Bolton’s hair. Monkey see Transformers, monkey post about Transformers. In this case, it’s duplicitous Decepticon seeker Starscream- or, at least, a robot that can transform into a jet and which is openly inspired by him – recreated in Kerbal Space Program. This is not bad comedy: it actually transforms! It actually flies! Er, briefly.

Sadly it lacks Starscream’s traditional white, red and blue colouring. And also hands. In fact it looks more like Machine Wars Thundercracker than any version of Starscream, but I’m trying to fight my nerd-rage here cos… snurk no no noaaaaargh WHY DID THEY GIVE GRIMLOCK HORNS IN THE TRANSFORMERS 4 TRAILER NNNNG aaargh breathebreathebreathe. Breathe. Cos the point is it’s an actual, transforming transformer, and just look at it:

Sadly it’s apparently about as aerodynamic as a teachest and crashes to the ground a few seconds after take-off, but like the appearance that’s not really the point, is it? More of this sort of thing, please. By which I mean we need Astrotrain, as a fully-functioning triple-changer.

Via PCGamesN.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance contains the opposite of ‘infinite dragons’, which is to say that it contains ‘no dragons’. Not one. Instead, the Kickstarter project from the super-group made up of Mafia and ARMA developers contains lots and lots of people, all fighting, living and exploring in a believable fashion. Nathan has shared his impressions of an early demo and the latest development video shows that Warhorse don’t need a world full of orcs and elves to give their characters variety. Customisation is the key, and clothing, body types, faces and hair will all be constructed and altered using what the developers claim is the greatest character customisation tool ever invented. It certainly looks impressive, as can be seen in the video below, and I admire any game that allows me to wash the blood out of my clothes.

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Hey kids, remember April 2008? Remember You Have To Burn The Rope? Remember how we laughed? Well, You Must Build A Boat has absolutely nothing to do with that. A new game with an imperative in title just sent me all nostalgic. Look at the stuff we were banging on about back then. Blueberry Garden! Demigod! Jetpack Brontosaurus! Possible Deus Ex 3 concept art!

Man. Man. No, no, I’m fine, I’m just… sniff. I SAID I’M FINE. It’s just been raining on my face.

You Must Build A Boat is the sequel to wonderful RPG/match-3/endless runner mash-up 10000000. It’ll also be free to existing 10000000 owners.(more…)

Sometimes a game comes along that looks like a dark future robot rag to the Rock, Paper, Shotgun bull. Today that’s Matador: an isometric shooter in which you pick a mech, a driver, your weapons and defences, and then rumble around a city with the intention of killing everything that lives there.

Almost for the art style alone, it reminds me of Syndicate. Trailer below.

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Unsung Story will launch episodically, with four to six stages per episode, designer Yasumi Matsuno says in a Kickstarter update. Each episode will revolve around a different character, but all of them are warriors in a great, fantastical uprising. Matsuno plans to launch with five episodes, making for roughly 25 playable stages in total.

"The story of each of these heroes is what we're calling an episode," Matsuno says. "By joining them in their battles that span the course of the war, players will see for themselves if these heroes are truly worthy of the glory history has accorded them. While there are five episodes, each revolving around a separate hero, planned for launch, while the game is live, we intend to continue expanding various game systems and bringing out additional episodes that showcase these systems."

There are three character classes in Unsung Story: warrior, mage and monster. On top of that, the game has five class types, each with its own leveling system: attackers, defenders, mages, healers and tamers. The game is turn-based and values speed, and it will play similarly to Final Fantasy Tactics, Matsuno says.

Unsung Story has until Valentine's Day to raise $140,000 on Kickstarter and reach its $600,000 goal. That's 11 days away, for those interested in the campaign and those who need a reminder to buy flowers. [Image: Playdek]

So very often people will ask me, “But what will RPS do as PC game sales decline?” And I tend to look confused at them, and shrug. Um, what will you do when your feet explode, I want to ask, feeling that might be as realistic a worry just now. According to DFC Intelligence whispering their secrets to Games Industry, the PC gaming market should exceed $25 billion this year. That’s a raised forecast from $22bn, and an improvement over 2013, which was an improvement over 2012.

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Tom Francis, the developer behind Gunpoint, has announced one of his new projects, Heat Signature. It's a stealth game, set in space, in which you stalk randomly generated ships and board them.

Stealth isn't so much about the enemy ship's line-of-sight as it is about your ship's temperature. Each randomly spawned vessel has heat sensors that can pick up on warmth within their proximity, so it's paramount you float up to ships while using your thrusters sparingly. Of course, relative size of your target also affects the difficulty of this maneuver.

Once you've docked, you can walk around inside the unsuspecting space barge, avoiding or killing its guards. As Francis points out in the video, this build is still early and missing a lot of the final systems he has planned for Heat Signature.

At first you'll spawn into the world as a random class of character, with a certain goal or objective that requires you to board ships and hack terminals for more information. One play session of Heat Signature may ask you to kill a target, while another may challenge you to track down and steal a rare ship.

Francis doesn't say when to expect Heat Signature, but he's set up a mailing list for all those interested in being notified of important development updates (like this one).

[Image: Suspicious Developments]

The entire planet is your open-world playground.

Tom “Who Made Gunpoint” Francis is making a new game! In fact, Tom “who I worked with for eight years” Francis is making two new games simultaneously and making videos about both as development progresses. One of those games is about a grappling hook and that’s all we know. The other, called Heat Signature, is a space game about sneaking up on spaceships and that’s all we knew.

Knew, because Tom “I still do a podcast with him every week and we’re good friends” Francis just released a video in which he reveals ship-boarding and explains the objective of the game more fully.(more…)

I love it when developers talk about their user interfaces. Not their personal buttons, which I’d rather not push, but the systems that they build as a means of communication between players and games. A good UI, like strong visual design, creates a sort of language all of its own, and Limit Theory’s node-based interface has an elegant grammar. In the latest dev diary, Josh Parnell covers the spiffy customisable HUD and the most attractive scanner since Michael Ironside.

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Before Sam Fisher's series became the hit it is today, Ubisoft had a troubled game called The Drift in desperate need of a spy hero.

I never learned how to play chess. Every time I remind my dad of this fact, he's surprised - he adores chess and swears he taught me how to play, at least once, and he probably did. That doesn't mean I learned anything. Chess involves a lineup of pieces with individual rules, boundaries and strengths, and learning each of their moves and how they all dance together is still a daunting task to me. I like simplicity in my strategy. Checkers is nice.

I still don't fully understand The Banner Saga, much in the way I don't fully understand chess. The turn-based strategy aspect of The Banner Saga runs deep, starring warriors with complex abilities, and it's paired with a different lineup of comrades for each battle, if you wish. The story that threads through these battles is similarly complicated, layered with alliances, deaths, epic backstories and fantasy, and the rigorous task of leading groups of half-giants and men across the vast, wintry landscape of ancient Viking legend.

I know that I'm missing the finer details that comprise The Banner Saga. There are story elements I've glossed over in pursuit of battles, and battles I've passed by while chasing the intricate story, but still I'm swept up in the icy, epic fantasy of developer Stoic's universe. Just as I respect chess for its complexity, I admire The Banner Saga for everything that I do - and don't - see in it.

It’s been a little while since I’ve seriously played Introversion’s incarceration sim Prison Architect, but I’ve come to enjoy reading and watching their monthly updates just as much as playing it myself. Alpha 17 is now live and the video below details the various additions. The big one: you can now build an armoury in your prison and deck it out like one of those rooms that used to come before a boss fight in first-person shooters. The kind of room full of shotguns, ammo and bulletproof vests.

The kind of room prisoners might want to break into in case of a riot.(more…)

Your body is the window to another world in this Game Jam winner.

Hunting Anubis is something special, though I can’t work out how special because I’m bad at it and it quickly begins to feel a little too Hunting A-noob-ish. It’s a combat flight sim about dogfighting multiplayer and bot opponents above an artfully glitchy monochrome wrongscape, in which shimmering oceans bleed into polygonal mountain ranges.

It’s beautiful, there’s a trailer below, and there’s a free beta build you can play right now.(more…)

Old facts: Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D action RPG with i) beautifully drawn and animated pixel art ii) a Kickstarter campaign that asked for $27,000 and received $645,158 iii) the best videogame name around. New facts: i) Hyper Light Drifter won’t come out in June as originally planned ii) a closed beta will arrive near June instead iii) the development team are targeting an end-of-year date for the release of the final game.

Hows, whys and new images below.(more…)

Here’s one of the many routes to becoming a game journalist: 1) Follow a bunch of game developers on Twitter, Tumblr, or anywhere else you find developers in the wild. 2) When they release a game or announce a game, tell people. Here’s apparently the only route left to being a game developer: 1) Make a procedurally-generated game set in space.

Thankfully there’s lots of different kinds of space games. StarCrawlers is “an endless first-person RPG adventure with procedurally generated levels, enemies, events, and loot.” StarCrawlers has “deep character customization and a tactical time-unit based combat system to create an endless dungeon crawling experience.” StarCrawlers “looks a bit Legend of Grimrock but set inside derelict spaceships instead of underground dungeons.”

That last quote was from me. Trailer below.(more…)

A few days ago I inadvertently caused a bit of a fuss. In writing about GOG’s Time Machine sale, I expressed my two minds about the joy of older games being rescued from obscurity, and my desire that they be in the public domain. This led to some really superb discussion about the subject in the comments below, and indeed to a major developer on Twitter to call for me to be fired.

I wanted to expand on my thoughts, rather than leave them as a throwaway musing on a post about a website’s sale. But I also want to stress that these are my thoughts-in-process, and not those of RPS’s hivemind. This isn’t a petition – it’s an exploration of my thoughts on the subject. Let’s keep that in mind as we decide whether I should indeed fire myself.

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Development on a new Need for Speed title has reportedly halted, following a series of layoffs at developer Ghost Games.

Flashing lights, bleeps and bloops, and the miasma of teenagers with nothing better to do. For many of us, this is the essence of the 1980s that indie game Arcadecraft captures, and if you're PC owner who likes the sound of an arcade creation and management sim - think Theme Hospital but with dingy arcades - developer Firebase has good news for you.

After shifting 65,000 copies on Xbox Live Indie Games, Arcadecraft now has a PC port that's "almost done" and will be available to Windows 7 users soon. It's now on the Humble Store for pre-order, and Firebase has a Steam Greenlight page up too. The PC port features the same arcade-building play of the XBLIG original, but with some visual touch-ups like higher resolution textures and new character models and animations.

Minecraft sales have smashed through the 14 million mark on PC, bringing conservative estimates of the franchise to at least 35 million.

If the NeoGAF community’s swift data extraction is to be believed, Interceptor, the team that rebooted Rise of the Triad, are due to announce a new Duke Nukem game. They have history with the man who stole a thousand catchphrases, having initially attracted Apogee’s attention while working on a remake of Duke Nukem 3D. Mass Destruction does not sound a continuation of that remake. Instead, if the briefly operative website is to be believed, it’s “a top-down action role-playing game…including experience points and tech trees”. Earlier comments by Interceptor’s CEO Frederik Schreiber suggest a possible return to the square-jawed intergalactic heroics of the original side-scrolling Duke, in place of the failure of a parody of a satire of a spoof that haunted Forever. The website is currently undergoing maintenance but reportedly contained a 24 hour countdown timer. You can follow NeoGAF’s detective work here, or cast your eyes down the page for quoted details.

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I know that headline sounds unlikely, but it really does. Or at least appears to, in its Kickstarter pitch. This is the work of Canadian indies Pixels And Poutine, looking for just $10,000 CAD, emphasising its arcadey ways and splitscreen multiplayer.

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I spend a great deal of time and energy trying to convince British friends to give American sports a chance, which makes it extremely annoying when only one team shows up for the year’s biggest NFL game. To be fair to the Denver Broncos, they did join the Seahawks in New Jersey last night but had shot themselves in the foot within 12 seconds and spent the remainder of the Super Bowl rolling around on the floor clutching the wound. No matter though – unless you’re a Broncos fan, in which case ‘ouch’ – because something of potentially great significance is happening in the world of American Football. The peerless OOTP Developments are working on Beyond the Sideline, a sim of the cowhide-kickin’ sport, and it sounds marvellous.

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Developer "Dan FitzGerald" has had it with this mother#$@&ing snow during this mother#$@&ing winter. Or maybe he really enjoys it - after all, where would his new mobile game, Dawn of the Plow, be without snow?

Available now on iTunes, Google Play, PC, Mac and Linux for $1.99, Dawn of the Plow gives players the most important and appreciated of assignments: clearing the streets for other drivers. The controls are deliberately difficult to handle however, so don't be surprised if instead of plowing snow, you wind up plowing into a hapless citizen.

Your work really ought to speak for itself, but if you need a jingle to help persuade customers into paying for your expert snowplowing business, you're in luck! We know just the one. [Image: Dan FitzGerald]

Legend of Grimrock 2 will not be a direct sequel to the original dungeon crawler RPG, according to a post from developer Almost Human. It will, however, feature a new character class, playable race, skill system and interface, among other improvements that were recently detailed.

Grimrock 2 will take place on the island of Nex; why an island? According to the developers, "the island is the perfect microcosm, where the party may explore dark woods, misty swamps, underground tunnels and ancient ruins without need to travel great distances. For us, an island is the perfect 'dungeon.'"

The inhabitants of Nex won't take kindly to your presence there, and Almost Human has completely re-written monster AI for the game. Monster behavior will depend on intelligence, so a smart enemy may call in reinforcements and use group tactics while a stupid brute may charge forward.

If it sounds like facing down monsters will be harder, the good news is that the game itself should be less of an obstacle, as the user interface has been reworked to be smoother and more convenient, requiring fewer clicks from the player. Potions, for example, no longer need to be crafted in the inventory - they can be mixed out-of-hand. Spellcasting is activated by holding down the mouse button while swiping across runes to create specific gestures.

Lastly, the developer revealed several new screenshots for the game, two of which show off the island's surface - it's quite a shift from the dark, dungeon corridors of the first game. Oh the times, they are a-changin'. [Image: Almost Human]

Watched over by machines of loving paleness. The childhood pastime of making your toys *crag*.

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Sundays are for heroic dwarfs entering the gold-filled lair of the sleeping malevolent dragon of games journalism, and awaking it, saying it’s the 300th anniversary of the Sunday Papers, and whether it would deign to rise up one last time and scour the earth with its fiery prose and/or compiling a list of the finest recent writing (mostly) about games. And the Dragon did rise up, and its wings blotted out the sun, and it said “Okay – as long as I can get it done before I finally get around to going to see the Hobbit this afternoon.” And the Dwarfs said “Sure.” And the Dragon said “Great, let’s do that then.”

• I was in Venice last weekend, and rather reading Mann’s Death In Venice as I planned to on the journey, I couldn’t turn away from Leigh Alexander’s Breathing Machine: A Memoir of Computers. Well, I could, but only when the turbulence got a bit crazy and I had to have a little cry. It’s a short e-book, which you can buy in all the usual places. Gamasutra ran an excerpt if you need a taste, but if you’re reading the Sunday Papers, I suspect you’re already clicking buy and I’m speaking to thin air. Come back, you *crag*ers. It’s Leigh writing precisely and beautifully of the coming of age of herself and the consumer information age. Also, lots of text adventure chat.

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Octodad: Dadliest Catch has been a long time in coming. We first spent a whopping zero (s)quid on the original  freeware version back in 2010, And Octodad 2, as it was known back in ye olde pre-Double-Fine-Adventure days, took Kickstarter by (relative) storm in 2011. So here we are in 2014, and the second coming of the heart-stealing, identity-thieving octo-man/myth/legend is upon us. But is his flailing, frequently failing return worth the wait? Can what basically amounts to a single joke sustain an entire game for hours? Or does this version of Octodad slip on a banana peel, ruin its immaculate suit, and disappoint not only its own adorable children, but also all the adorable children in the world? Here’s wot I think. (more…)

HULK LIKE ENDLESS RUNNER GAMES. HULK STAR IN NEW ENDLESS RUNNER GAME. IT CALLED MARVEL RUN JUMP SMASH, THOUGH GAME NAME IS NOT IN ALL CAPITALS. THAT JUST HOW HULK TALK TYPE. GAME IS AVAILABLE NOW ON ITUNES AND GOOGLE PLAY FOR $0.99, AND ON WINDOWS MARKETPLACE FOR $1.49.

HUMANS CAN ALSO PLAY AS (PUNY) THOR, (PUNY) IRON MAN, (PUNY) HAWKEYE, (PUNY) SPIDER-MAN, (PUNY) CAPTAIN AMERICA, (PUNY) CAPTAIN MARVEL AND (PUNY) BLACK WIDOW. NONE RUN AS GOOD AS HULK! HULK SMASH ANYONE WHO SAY OTHERWISE!