Latest Articles (Page 2120)

Fun Motion spot this enticing looking physics game. A jelly-based physics game in fact, featuring wobbly cars made of jelly:

Vid 1: (quite short)

Longer, more detailed version if only you would click.

We at RPS like the PC because it gives us a big mess of stuff. There's more things to play out there than you can fit into a lifetime, and it's growing, non-stop, like a formidable fungus. We must therefore applaud those people who want us to make even more stuff. Well done you.

Some fun, yesterday. One such gentleman is bearded theorist (and occasional practitioner) of fun, Raph Koster. He's the man who directed the development of Jedi-vending system, Star Wars Galaxies (the first time around), and then wrote a book. Koster has decided that all this virtual world stuff needs to be centralised and exploded at the same time. It doesn't need Second Life, instead it needs a "virtual place" on the web. We don't want a single, all-encompassing world, says Koster, we just need an appropriate, networked toolkit. We needs something like a Blogspot for virtuality.

And so mr Koster's company has announced Metaplace - a net-based virtual world toolkit for making mini virtual worlds. You won't need the equivalent of Second Life or World Of Warcraft clients installed on your machine if this takes off, you'll just need Metaplace. Anyone will be able to make an online world in five minutes, and dropping in and out of different online spaces will be as easy as surfing web pages. It's Internet II: The Revengening taken to its logical extreme.

Koster announced this today, the internet went wild, the Metaplace website stopped working, and we all agreed that it's exciting stuff. Too exciting.

The hats weren't actually the first RPS-mail. I returned from my trip to Relic and Gas Powered Games to find a parcel addressed to Rock Paper Shotgun from Koch Media. Inside it was a copy of Obscure II, which I thought appropriate as I'd never heard of it. The developers had fallen for that basic mistake of giving the game a name which can easily be turned into a joke for a bitchy review, but - no - really, I hadn't heard of it. That fearlessness deserves some kind of respect. Also, I chatted to Walker, who had played and actually 79%-liked the original, saying it "rewards innovation over frenzy, and it seems only fair to do the same in return" (Or at least that's what professional parasites Metacritic claim, anyway, as John couldn't really remember anything other than he'd played it). Like its prequel, Obscure II is a Survival Horror game but rather than feeding the Romero/Tartan-Extreme-Import duopoly, takes the American teen horror film as its basis. Oh - and it's got co-op too. I decided I'd better play it.

That "playing it" happened when I was somewhat inelegantly wasted on Saturday night at about 4am. The morning after, between bacon sandwiches, I talked Jim into joining me in some Survival Horror Co-op with reviewing consequences and actually took notes and stuff.

JOIN US FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS.

What should you be playing today? Well, it's Knytt Stories, obviously. But let's say you've finished that, what next? Easy:

(Shurely TF2? - Ed)

Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!, downloadalised from here.

Made by Alasdair Beckett, it's a completely free point and click adventure, created for his girlfriend. Awww. She's a lucky person, as there's clearly a vast amount of love gone into the couple of hours here, and certainly a significant amount more than goes into the majority of commercial adventure games.

To avoid scurvy and other cliches, click below.

Greetings, people who should be playing Team Fortress 2 but are for some reason reading websites instead. Below is the first instalment in a nine-part series of semi-reviews in which we critique (or at least babble enthusiastically about) the various classes of TF2. Don’t worry, they won’t all be by me – other members of RPS will be along to say something far cleverer than I very soon.

Currently, we’re arguing amongst ourselves about who gets to write-up what, but I managed to sneak my stand-out favourite out of the pack while the others were distracted by all the hair-pulling and face-scratching. I’m still pretty much stricken with the sheer joy of playing him, so the following is perhaps not the most objective discussion of him. Still, that’s love for you. Rearrange the words 'more' and 'read' into the correct order to continue.

Yes, we know. You'll all playing a certain game. We understand; we are too. But there's other games you should be keeping your eye on, so tear your vision away from the Heavy cackling as he opens fire and failing to understand when the medic uses the charged up invulnerability thing on you you are invulnerable, so you should act like it rather than sitting in cover. Psch!

Since Jim and my reviews won't be online for a while, we thought it worth directing you towards Dan Whitehead's Eurogamer review of World in Conflict. Jim and I, while we'd have probably leaned heavier on Frankie Goes to Hollywood gags, mostly concur - though I'd argue its more than just Ground Control III, as Dan tends to argue. Multi-player excels, single-player just about gets away with it. Talking personally, it's probably my favourite RTS of the year so far and this was before I even got to wear the hat. Out Friday in the UK.

Oh, okay. You can go now. We've kept you from TF2 for long enough. And to satisfy your urges in that direction, here's a link to Tom Bramwell's Eurogamer review of said Valve-online shooter to keep you amused until we've finalized exactly what we're going to do about the assorted Orange Box games (Clue: A stupidly large amount).

It's taken me far too long to get around to writing about this, but reading a post on TIGsource about a possible new game by Nifflas reminded me to talk about the beautiful Knytt Stories.

You may know Nifflas (Swedish indie dev Nicklas Nygren) from his lovely Within A Deep Forest, which should be incentive enough to check out his latest, Knytt Stories, still only a couple of weeks out. If not, then let the below be your incentive.

You can tell RPS has arrived, because we've started to receive glorious tat from publishers. And, being spendthrift grasshoppers instead of tedious ants, we're clearly going to give it away. What have we to give you? Well, Vivendi have lobbed us two (count 'em!) World in Conflict Cossack hats, which add a suitably soviet ambiance to whatever look you choose to rock. For example, here's our model showing a Rasputin the Mad Games Journalist look, which is almost certain to be terribly popular this season.

I just picked up the latest version of this Tempest clone via Retro Remakes. Every time I play one of these it reminds me just how perfect the original Tempest was, and this time Typhoon actually works, thanks to new Vista compatibility.

Tempest, for the Martians in the audience, was the classic 3D space invaders (only different) by David Theurer. The game was apparently inspired by a dream in which Theurer witnessed monsters crawling out of the ground - a pulsing, neon ground, presumably. Tempest has been remade constantly since 1980 and just doesn't seem to get old. Anyway, here's the direct link to Typhoon 2001. Go play.

While most Brits staying up for the beta launch will have given up by now and gone to bed (I was finishing a review, honest), when it does finally go live tonight, it will be with all six maps. i.e. the whole game.

That's a Rock, Paper, Shotgun world exclusive right there. For the next hour or so. When everyone's in bed, not reading.

About a year and a half ago, the idea struck me that RPGs had a particularly odd phenomenon that required investigation. Now, I don't pretend to be the first person who thought it strange that in the majority of role-playing games, strangers will march up to you and ask you to do their chores/rescue their daughters. But I do pretend to be the first person to dress up as a wizard, go into the streets of Bath, and find out if it was realistic. Below is the story of my adventure, originally published on The Escapist, and now in its full glory for you, today.

Quest For Glory

There are conventions in media we become perfectly used to, despite their having no place in reality. If we watch a movie, and someone is given CPR in the street, on the beach or dangling on a rope from a hot air balloon, we know they’ll come back to life. Nevermind that CPR merely sustains things until proper medical equipment arrives – we know, and accept, that with a couple of compressions and a few puffs in the mouth, they’ll be up and about and back to shooting zombies in a couple of minutes.

All romantic comedies will end in life-lasting true love, and all soap operas will have a 100% relationship failure rate. All cops will announce, “There’s no time for back up!” when they arrive at the scene of a crime, before being asked to hand in their gun and badge to the furious captain (what with the mayor being in town) on a weekly basis. All aliens are bipedal, and of all the languages spoken on Earth, choose English. Shopping bags always contain a long stick of French bread. And if you bump into someone of the opposite sex carrying a large stack of files, you will fall in love while picking them up. These are truths.

Conventions require time. Videogames have finally reached an age where such imaginary stalwarts are becoming firmly established, most especially within roleplaying games.

Prithy sir, clicketh upon mine linkth?

...We shall shoot you. Although possibly not until around 1 AM.

Yes, today is Team Fortress 2 Beta Day, or TFTBD as almost no-one is certainly calling it. Annoyingly, we've still no word on exactly when the 2.41Gb (equal to roughly 160 copies of Peggle) of preload will be unlocked, though this forum posting from a Valveman puts it as, simply, 'late in the day'.

Some lazy maths: if Valve's idea of late in the day is, say, 6pm, and they're based as they are in Seattle, in UK time that'd mean one in the morning. 1 AM. This is horribly, horribly unfair for those of us with partners who, for some inexplicable reason, feel that our staying up until silly o'clock to loudly shoot men in the face is insensitive behaviour.

Possibly of use to one in a hundred of our readers, but we're all about supporting persecuted minorities.

Robin Clarke writes a little about the attempts of the community to make non-Windows 2000 supported games actually work on Windows 2000. He includes links to getting games as varied as Quake Wars: ("Enemy" - Ed) Territory, Bioshock, Command & Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander to work on the old System. He also wanders off on a little conspiracy theory and a little over developed sense of privilege about Relic's lack of desire to talk to the community - never actually assign to conspiracy which can be satisfactorily explained by either laziness or corporate bureaucracy - but he's got a really cute picture of Spec-chum hero Magic Knight as his website's icon so we'll forgive him.

(Only after all these years, do I realise that it's possible Magic Knight's David Jones may be the same David Jones of Lemmings/GTA/Crackdown fame. Anyone confirm or deny? Because that'd be awesome. I suspect it's not, but still...)

Yesterday was Battle of Britain Day here in the UK. If you are British and didn't spend at least five minutes contemplating the extraordinary courage, tenacity and self-sacrifice of 'The Few' then go stand in the RPS Corner of Shame.

Only those that rush outside on hearing the sound of a Merlin engine, and instinctively reach for their wallet on encountering an old gent with a Wings Appeal collection box have permission to read My Artfully Annotated List Of Battle Of Britain Games That Don't Require Joysticks Or The Reflexes Of A Cobra...

I'm terribly sorry, but I'm going to be a bit of a bitch now.

If I was Monolith and, as a result of a shouting match with my publisher, I now had to make my F.E.A.R. sequel under an entirely different name, I'd have been very, very glad of the opportunity to ditch the childish F.U.L.L.S.T.O.P.S. and come up with something that didn't sound like the latest Nickleodeon action cartoon for prepubescent boys with successful spin-off toyline, featuring real kung-fu action.

Monolith have been running the 'Name Your Fear' competition for a few months now, asking fans of the "any setting you want, so long as it's grey corridors" FPS to come up with a title for the next game in the F.E.A.R. universe. It could have worked out really rather well, so I was interested to hear that the results are in. It is....

I've been sitting this on a while, but figure that with Sunday being RPS' slow day, today's the day. If you're part of the pan-format gaming internet, you'll aware that last month there was a bit of a furore over the Resident Evil 5 trailer with some wondering whether a video filled with sinister black folk being gunned down by a square-jawed white fella might be a little - y'know - racist. Without going it to deeply - while Res4 turned up on the PC, in a gutted state, it's not exactly our territory - the basic schism is between gamers who think that when viewed in the context of the Resident Evil games, the trailer is clearly fine and anyone who thinks otherwise is dumb, and those who are looking at the trailer as a cultural object in and of itself. Resident Evil's history simply doesn't matter, really.

But that's not what I'm posting about. Following the debates, I wandered into the more activist portions of the gaming blogosphere for the first time in ages and found this critical dissection of Fahrenheit (aka The Indigo Prophecy) from the end of the last year, which I hadn't seen linked anywhere else. In two parts, the first about the eventual lead and the second about the eventual supporting cast.

"Playing through bad video games is hardly a novel experience for me. In this respect, Indigo Prophecy shined; it’s the first time I’ve played a game that is so badly written that it ends up being a tale of white male supremacy. While all of the characters were no doubt written the way they were to try and tell a story of real people doing amazing things, it ended up being a story of a lone straight white man singlehandedly saving the world pretty much by virtue of the fact that he’s a straight white man."

Saturday nights are alright for sitting alone in your pants browsing indy game blogs. Yes, I found bizarre semi-scrolling blaster Iwanaga over on Independent Gaming (which is an absolute corker of a blog run by "Tim W", incidentally). Having figured out that the game doesn't work on Vista, I'm now hunched in front of my XP machine, and have descended into a kind of shmup-trance. I'm blasting stuff over and over via Iwanaga's strangely disconnected cursor/character method. You hold down Z to shoot, and can't really move as you do it, and instead control a cursor independent of your 2D character. Stop firing and you can move and jump your weird troll thing to avoid incoming hazards. Mmm, weird pixel-death...

I pinched this image from TIGSource because my grabs were all corrupted. I am a pro, yes.

The main Iwanaga website is all in foreign, so here's a direct link to the game files. The game is beautifully drawn in retro-pixelated fashion, and has the most peculiar flat Japanese horror atmosphere. There's also my favourite intro sequence in years. Brief, and to the point. I think you should take a look for yourself.

I the Grow games. I really, really them , even though I'm the kind of guy who'd rather gouge his eyes out with his Big Daddy figurine than ever see, say, a Hello Kitty image again. These, though, are genuine, not contrived, Japanese cute.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, they're Flash puzzle games based around increasing visual reward. You select which one of a handful of icons to push, and a minor or major change will duly occur in the impossibly endearing cartoon landscape above. Push them in the right order and the world will gradually grow into an increasingly complex and charming animated scene, your latest action interacting with previous ones to grow them into new, usually very silly, forms. Push them in the wrong order and it'll all be over fairly quickly - and tiny bubble men may even die, causing everyone you know to brand you some sort of inhuman monster.

A new installment, Grow Island, has just been released. The theme here is technology - should environmentalism come before aviation, or mechanics before electricity? There are only eight buttons, but an incredible number of combinations - you'll lose a good half an hour to this single screen. Finding the right order is a matter mostly of luck and memory; there is a vague internal logic behind it, but you'll only really get your head around it after a lot of unsuccessful experimentation.

You'll probably be aware of Super Columbine Massacre, RPG! and have an opinion on it. I certainly do, and have expanded it at length over at the Escapist a way back. That article is more in its defense, and I lobbed some of my - many - problems with it over at my personal blog at the same time. Its creator, Danny Ledonne, trying to make sense of the whole thing has been working on a documentary called Playing Columbine for a while now, and has lobbed a rough cut of a 13 minute section online.

It's worth watching.

The Stranglehold PC demo has finally struggled its way onto the internet. It's a big old beast, weighing in at a portly 2gb. You can get it from here.

Right, so Stranglehold is the game of John Woo's style of movie making. It's a kind of gaming sequel to Woo's Hard-Boiled, delivered in a third-person action sort of way. It's not exactly Max Payne, but you can see the connections - especially since Max Payne was pretty much an open homage to Woo's slow-mo-diving-through-stuff manner of filming shooty sequences. Woo even has a cameo in the game, just as he does in a bunch of his films. The show off.

Bullet time comes on pretty much every time you dive or leap over something - and you leap over things automatically, often in unintentionally comedic fashion. For some reason this is called 'Tequila Time' and it's a rather different Tequila time to the one you might be familiar with.

Gman loves Peggle.

And RPS loves Dartt. Good Work.

[Since we've been right in the mainstream of the industry for the last few, thought it would be worthwhlie moving towards the periphery. A Tale In the Desert is the Kingdom-of-Egypt-'em-up MMO which people who don't really understand describe as a co-operative game. It's only a co-operative game in the same way the House of Commons is a co-operative game to run Britain as well as possible. With such an interesting game to talk about, Andrew Tepper gave a great interview, which I often mention bits of when interviewing other developers. This interview was done just at the close of the First Telling incarnation of the game, when they were about to launch its second. It's now on its third.]

From the first second you logged onto A Tale In the Desert, it was clear that it wasn’t just another massively-multiplayer game. For a start, it did the unimaginable in the videogame world and entirely removed direct combat. However, it wasn’t the Sims Online’s glorified chat-room. In this ancient Egypt challenges awaited for you to overcome. While initially it seemed to be about constructing in a grand co-operative venture – kind of a game of Settlers where you played one of the eponymous characters – players soon discovered that it was a far more political game than a world of simple, happy worker ants. Social puzzles abound, which had to be overcome, with personal gain faced off against group success. It’s a game that challenged its player base in a way that no other game was even attempting. “A tale in the desert was the game I always wanted to play – and it’s kind of ironic that it’s the one game that I can’t play,” ruefully notes Andrew Tepper, President of eGenesis, “Obviously, that wouldn’t be fair.”

So, Valve have announced that anyone who preorders the Orange Box will get into the Team Fortress 2 beta which starts on the 17th. That's Monday. Now, great and all, but that does leave a weekend. If only there was some kind of new Team Fortress style game you can play in the meantime.

Why - what's this? It's old PC Gamer running joke Infofly. What's that, infofly? Little Betsy's stuck down the well? Oh, who cares about Little Betsy. We're amoral PC gamers, desensitized to horror. Tell us something about games, my insectoid chum. What? Fortress Forever's been released? That sounds like a cue for a screenshot.

Fortress Forever is a Source-based mod, basically, and is more heavily indebted to Team Fortress Classic than its true successor. I haven't actually had a chance to play it yet, so I've turned to what will surely be the new exciting shortcut when pitiful journalistic laziness strikes: the RPS chatroom on Steam. "I'd imagine it's like taking methadone the weekend before you start a serious heroin addiction," noted Dartt, who hadn't actually played the game, but came up with the best metaphor. Luckily, giving weight to the quote, was the ominous figure of SteveTheBlack who has both played it and agrees with Dartt. "It's pretty much the same as TFC but with new maps and slight tweaks," he notes, before expressing mild annoyance with an auto-reload feature if you don't fire your gun for a few seconds. Then conversation turned to who wants to play a rousing game of Defcon.

Steam's new Community feature leapt out of beta yesterday, and is now fully integrated into the system. Which means that we rather thought we should have a Community Group of our very own.

Currently it's completely empty, so join us, whydoncha? Either click on this to get at it via the electronic internet, or plop this into your Steam address bar:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/rps

...the penguins were hardest hit by global warming and pollution. The ice had melted, the fish were gone.

Then, at the darkest hour, the ancient Penguin Goddess Sedna appeared before the starving masses. Gathering the survivors around her, she uttered these fateful words:

"My penguin children, here me well. Starvation and chaos are upon you. There is room for but one tribe. The others must perish less ye all perish. That is the price of survival."

The Penguns stood in stunned silence. Only one tribe could remain, but which one? How would they decide? As darkness descended, the answer became apparent...

That's right - PENGUIN DEATHMATCH.

Penguins Arena (for the sake of grammar, let's assume this is pronounced, "Penguins: Arena") is the mad conclusion of this worrying tale. From French indie developers, Frogames, it's an extremely cute and daft deathmatch game born of the confused relationship between Quake 3 and that punching with boxing gloves on springs minigame in Monkey Ball.

Sad and good news at once - kind of like a puppy being born then immediately exploding.

Penumbra: Overture, the creepy indie physics-based adventure game spun out of an impressive tech demo, is to get a sequel, one that ties off its story's various loose ends. Trouble is, it was supposed to be a trilogy. Now it's a mere duology, like the Kill Bill films or albums by the UK band behind the best-ever number one single that's probably about something to do with ejaculation but no-one's really entirely sure, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

After the jump: no more unnecessary pop-culture references, promise.

Fans of large metal things stepping on smaller things will be disappointed to hear that FASA Studios have shut their doors. Reportedly half of the team are being moved into the rest of Microsoft Studios. The other half move to the pub, nursing pints and considering what they plan to do next. We wish them luck with whatever it is. FASA, even in their modern post-MS buyout form of Studios, rather than their older Interactive, made some pretty neat games.

While best known for the Mechwarrior games, their swansong was the future-trivia-answer Shadowrun (the question being: Which was the first game which allowed the PC to play against XBox 360 owners?" Tricky people will phrase the question "console owners" instead, where the answer will shift to Quake 3 on the Dreamcast and you'll lose). I reviewed it for Eurogamer on release and gave it 6/10. It's also one of my favourite multiplayer games of the year so far. There's no contradiction there. As appealing as it often was, the mark reflects the ridiculous price attached to the game. If you see it cheap, and fancy raising a digital glass to the folk of FASA, you won't regret it.

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but CCP's full time economist, Dr. Eyjo "DrEyoG" Gudmundsson, has published Eve Online's first financial report. In it he examines the mineral trade, which is the backbone of all Eve's production and manufacturing stuff. The Doc explains:

This first Econ Dev Blog (EDB) has given a descriptive overview of the major trends for the market of minerals in EVE. Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology. The price formation has also improved showing that price difference between regions is becoming minimal in Empire space and reflects only the time value of moving minerals in low sec. However, smaller population and the risk of piracy in zero-zero space results in less efficient markets with low volumes and great fluctuations in prices given an arbitrage trade opportunity for the brave entrepreneur.

Needless to say, money means graphs:

I've been traveling for the last week, and between playing Puzzle Quest, reviewing games which I'm NDA-ed up to the journo gills about, drinking heavily, and and getting crushing existential dread with Alec when walking across a bridge in Vancouver, I picked up some comics. And one of them is relevant to the blog, so I'll write something about it. Yes.

It features this bloke. And since there's two incarnations of it out, it's a bloody PC Game.

It's Halo: Uprising, it's by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and it has a review hidden around here, somewhere. See if you can find it.

Being one of those gamers who regularly reacts to games by saying "Wouldn't It be Cool If..." I responded to Grin's last original game, Bandits, by saying "Wouldn't it be cool if there were some more ambitious sci-fi MadMax vehicular action games out there". (My mum would be so proud, okay.) Bandits, you see, wasn't particularly good, but it was good enough for me to want more racing across scorched alien desert and blasting other vehicles into tumbling shreds of wreckage. There was the potent kernel of an idea in there, and a pretty solid mouse/keyboard control method for speeding death-buggies too. And so I dreamed of high-speed action games. Then, all of a sudden there there was Rage, and Borderlands. Now, assuming that Rage is a very long way off, and doesn't quite fit the Bandits template that inspired my gleeful pipe-dreaming (we'll see why in a bit), then that leaves me with one focus of interest: Borderlands.

It's a science fiction desert-world FPS with vehicles, randomised missions and ubiquitous co-op. It also features bizarre alien fauna - possibly a bad thing, given Auto Aborto Assault's mutant debacle - and lots of motorised fighting with desperate bandits. What it does do is try to create a thriving world, with lots of unexpected encounters - a little like that other open ended shooter I can't stop talking about: Stalker.