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Not really safe for work: A Second Life Herald reporter looks into how to procure cute baby unicorns/nightmares:

After much digging and several dead leads, I came upon Marcelle DeCuir, famed originator of this cult by way of Snapzilla. "I was hanging out with Polyester (Partridge) one day and she had the baby [unicorn], so I asked her where she got it. She pointed me towards Sensual Stoneworks, and I was shamelessly raped by a unicorn. I don't mind".

You get hold of baby unicorns by having your avatar bummed by an adult unicorn, or flame-hoofed horsey. I'd add more detail, but I'm not sure it would be appropriate. Other non-consensual fantasy couplings lie beyond the link.

So I was just telling a cynical chum to buy Peggle, or be damned, and he asked if viewing the ad-funded version browser version counted against his descent to hell. Of course, being the RPS daily dunce, I had no idea there was one, or that it was a free as (advert-ridden) sunshine. It isn't as good as the full retail version, by virtue of being trapped in a browser, but you can now get to Peggle without having to part with seven British pounds , or fifteen Yanqui dollars. See the "Also Available Online" bit at the bottom of that page for the link. You need to install a browser plugin, then all the Peggle is your oyster, or something.

Peggle, in case you've been entombed in a rock for past year, is the best puzzle thing since sliced Tetris.

There's a new (perhaps relaunched) alternative/indie gaming blog on the block, and it's being run by those folks from the indie games portal, Manifesto Games. It's called Play This Thing, and it promises to link and discuss a work of independent gaming every day. We'll be reading it (and no doubt linking to its content on occasion) so perhaps you should too.

Our roving, investigative, and surprisingly tall reporter Quintin Smith has reviewed Medal of Honor: Airborne for PC Gamer, and it's gone up on their site.

I link it because, well, it's one of the best written reviews I've read in ages. And the game's rather fun too.

"I responded by throwing all my grenades in random directions and leaping behind a piece of cover that turned out to have a Nazi behind it. A rifle-butt duel followed that had all the grace of a ladies' slap fight, but when the Nazi did the polite thing and died I realised I had a perfect view of a fuel tank. Bemused, I proceeded to detonate the thing with a few shots from my rifle."

So I was a little indifferent to the Far Cry 2 announcements, and then I saw this shakycam footage from Leipzig:

Thanks, Game Trailers.

All that, and no mutants.

[When thinking about which post-mortem to lob up when I was away, this one struck me as most appropriate. Since I'll actually be at Gas Powered games during my awayness, Dungeon Siege seems like a good idea. I give a little of the context in the piece itself, but it was wayyyy into the evening and the booze was getting to both Chris and myself, crouched around the Dictaphone and both saying things we really shouldn't (very few of which had anything to do with videogames). Chris Taylor is an effusive bloke, to say the least. Worth noting that this was done prior to DS2's launch, and before Supreme Commander was even vaguely revealed.]

We find ourselves at a glamorous Microsoft press-event in San Francisco. “Glamorous” being code-words for “There is alcohol here”. They’ve gathered their sharpest minds to introduce their typically polished portfolio for the next twelve months, so are presented to the gregarious and effusive Chris Taylor. We start getting nervous, with images of epic mechanical destruction clouding our otherwise purely objective minds.

We try to leave before we start gushing about how much we loved Total Annihilation, only to see Brian “Rise of Nations” Reynolds in the opposite direction. Oh no. Pincered by two genuinely great RTS developers. There’s only one thing for it: start asking questions about how Dungeon Siege came to be and what he learned from it. Because while it’s an undeniably splendid game, it’s also a game that which we’re slightly more capable of keeping a little journalistic distance. An interview about how CUTE the Commander is won't be of much use to anyone.

Here's one of the best free games we've seen in a long while.

Launched yesterday, Drift City is a game from the madly named ijji (which is an awful lot of fun to say out loud, and also free). It's a driving MMO-alike, very much like Test Drive Unlimited, except with cel-shaded graphics, and it runs via your browser.

It comes from the homeland of the free MMO, South Korea, with a mostly decent English translation, and lets you lark around in a really bright, cheerful city, driving nicely balanced arcade cars. To get started, you'll need to visit the game's site and click the Play Live button. This will get you to create an account (that asks for some completely unnecessary personal information, including, oddly, your race, but can all be bluffed through with made up info, other than your email address), which once verified, will let you log into the site. Hit the Play Now button again, and it will ask you to download a small app that modifies your browser (and it worked perfectly in Firefox, so no need to dig around and find your dusty copy of IE). Relaunch the browser and... guess what? Press the Play Now button once more, and it boots the programme up into a full-screen window, limited to a pretty low resolution. And then you need only create a "license" and you're in, with a quick and practical tutorial showing you the ropes.

More details after the checkpoint.

Sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa will go live on the 19th of October, and the 16th for pre-order people. (What an interesting way to spread the server load). Like John, I was unable to figure out quite what the Tabula Rasa Beta NDA would actually allow us to say, but I'll have a crack at summing it up here (in a legal way) for those of you who might be interested.

"Zap!" Etc.

You shoot aliens. That might not sound particularly unusual, but the fact is that this is an MMO, like ye Olde World Of Warcraft, with all those levels and stuff, and you still get to shoot all kinds of guns. Sure, there's some kind of auto-aim nonsense going on, but you really do get to point and blast the evil carapaced ones. There's loads of aliens to shoot at too, since they arrive from the sky by dropship in seemingly endless waves. You shoot them on a backdrop of war-torn alien worlds, some of which are quite inspiring with their weird fauna and unlikely topographies.

[Quintin Smith is Rock, Paper, Shotgun's roving reporter. He's famously easy to talk into fun stuff. Once I talked him into hitting on girls at a hyper-elitist indie-rock festival in the style of Oblivion's conversation sequences, heavily cribbing from Consolevania's review of Bethesda's game. And he got worryingly far. He's easy to talk into fun stuff because he believes in fun stuff. Hence he's the ideal man to send to investigate the enormous house of gaming fun that is Birmingham's Omega Sektor. Or so it says here, anyway. Take it away, Mr Smith...]

And now for a bit of investigative journalism. Come with me as I take you on a journey through the world of the truth. Be warned, for the path we’ll walk is paved with jagged, cutting interviews and broken hearts. If at any point you find yourself overwhelmed with emotion, I think it was Machiavelli who once said that ‘you can cry, ain’t no shame in it.’ But you should always remember that I never cried during the making of this piece. Not once. Because I am a grizzled journalist.

Let’s begin.

Here in the UK there’s been some chatter about the recently opened Omega Sektor in Birmingham, or to use it’s full, nauseating name, Omega Sektor: The Play Place. The Omega Sektor in Birmingham is planned to be the first of many and is advertised as a kind of gamer’s Mecca. The website offers hundreds of super-advanced PCs as well as games consoles, sponsorship from major game publishers, special events and tournaments, ‘guest appearances’, a chillout lounge, a VIP room, and above all- acceptance.

Everything I read about Omega Sektor made it seem an electronic milk and honey wonderland, where young and old gamers of all walks of life can come together and hold hands before blowing each other’s virtual kneecaps off. To quote from the site, “When gran challenges the twins to a game, you know you’re having a good day out.” But it all sounded bogus to me. I’m pretty sure when gran challenges anybody to anything all you know is that it’s time to help look for her medication.

All this chatter made me curious and the whole project clearly had massive financial backing, so I decided to travel up to Birmingham in the name of providing a thorough report on Omega Sektor for Rock Paper Shotgun. I also decided to pack a lunch and make a day of it, but then I remembered how horrible it is when companies try and make gaming cool and I got hit by a wave of apathy that led to my packed lunch being a bagel and a bottle of Famous Grouse.

This is probably the oddest free thing to emerge from EA for the last few months: Tiberium Earth, which turns Google Earth into a kind of Tiberium-based fan mod. You get to imagine what it might be like if Earth really was infested with the crystalline super-resource from the games... Albeit using Google Sketchup, so not exactly click 'n spray.

I can cover your house in alien mess.

Which sort of begs the question of why anyone would want to? I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little surprised that anyone is investing much time in the C&C fiction. I mean - does anyone consider themselves a fan of the green stuff? (I'm imagining a conversation somewhere deep within EA where a dev playing with Google Earth explains what he's doing to his boss: "Sure, the kids love this stuff!")

Seeing this lying on the desk in the PC Gamer office was something of a surprise. They've only gone and brought back oddball games-and-girls US magazine PC Accelerator! Who'd have thunk it.

Well, not back-back. One issue back, presumably to either test the waters for some manner of relaunch or to because there was a load of interesting ad stuff outside of PC Gamer, or some other reason. Who cares? All that matters is that one of the most casually sexist videogame magazines the world has ever seen is back for another crack.

I'm quite glad to see it.

Here's a rather excellent thing you probably didn't see yet.

We heart Consolevania. And sometimes they even mention PC games, which makes anything they do completely relevant to this blog. Phew, eh?

As a part of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, evil PR man Brian Baglow (he's lovely, but it's very important we maintain that everyone in PR is evil) was asked to do "something" about the games industry in Scotland. His idea - to make a film about the business. Using his cunning, he roped in the Consolevania guys to create a 45 minute documentary, filmed over three days, visiting some of Scotland's games developers. And asking them questions like, "What's the longest word you know?"

The unfortunately named Bloxorz is loads of fun. Clearly it should have been called "Blockotron" or "Slabflip 2000", but I guess it's too late for that now. The idea is to get your block slotted into the hole (and in the game!) without tumbling to your death. I know how you hate Flash games, but believe me when I say you'll like this one: there's something slightly misleading about its perfect geometry, and the odd pulsating noise in the background makes me uneasy... Also I'm not sure what's going on with the orange squares, so it might be best to read the instructions instead of shouting "yeah, yeah" and throwing your arms in the air, like I did.

Found at the peerless TIGSource, of course.

Okay. Am I the only person to find this advert for Timeshift rather peculiar?

Thanks, Game Trailers. Thanks.

They've chosen to make an advert for a videogame mostly in live action. Sure there's some CGI in there but... whatwhat? Exactly how can that be said to advertise a videogame in any way? Isn't it just a little creepy? Perhaps it's not an advert at all, and they've accidentally broadcast an ultra-violent power-rangers fan movie.

Casual games? Forget that silly old name - we've found a new one!

OMNI-GAMES!

Coined by a new Scottish site - cobimobi - it's the work of Cobra Mobile, a company that previously only released games for your telephone. Now they are creating games that work on formats from the PC to the iPod, hence the grand name.

I've been working in PC Gamer's office for the last couple of days, and with half an hour free at the end of the day, Tim told me to hammer out a blog post for them based around the game of World in Conflict we played at Lunch. Which Tim won. Frustratingly.

Here's a bit which stands alone out of context...

One of my favourite wins in World in Conflict was on a server where I was on the USA team, and the USSR were on a long winning run. It was close, but they just had a slightly better team. But I suspected they weren't *that* good, and decided to try something suicidal. They used their artilery well, so - playing Armour - I ignored the capture points and rushed for the backline to harass their support units. Two helicopter units chase me around the backlines as I annoy the couple of support players. I'm killed relatively quickly, but I've opened up enough space for my side to just sweep the map. By the time I've respawned my army, we're claiming the final command point. A crushing defeat after a string of such close-victories had the USA scratching their head. I left, grinning enigmatically to find clan requests in my account next time I logged in. Result!

I'm not sure what I was trying to do with that title.

In the big ol' interview with Ken Levine which we launched the site with, I mentioned that other bits of the transcript found homes elsewhere. The biggest chunk of it has emerged, as PC Gamer republishes online my interview with Levine which is in their current print edition. It deals with controversy, developers reflecting culture, the price of a legacy and a splash of Randian philosophy. And here's a quote.

"If you look at the '60s, you'll see Vietnam movies like John Wayne's Green Beret being made. And you go to the '70s, you have Apocalypse Now. From this ultra-patriotic unquestioning thing, we're moving to a stage where games are getting mature enough to reflect the zeitgeist a little. BioShock is reflecting the confusion I have."

Exciting news for every reader! Browsing Ragnar Tørnquist's blog, I spied in the comments links to something I'd never thought might exist:

The Longest Journey Cosplay.

First there's alvane's April Ryan:

Valve's Orange Box will be released on 12th October (and apparently the 10th in the US) and it gives us a number of reasons to be cheerful. It's a bundle of games – and that's something we don't often see these days, especially when all three games are brand new. We can look forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all at once: which one will you play first? You can barely imagine another developer being able to do this: to deliver three different games, each with its own palette of potent ideas, for release on the same day. Valve are beginning to scare me.

After the clickhop: some rambling thoughts on the Valve box of goodies. (Because I am a thought-rambler.)

RPS-roving reporter Quinns has been crying over this, so I have to share. It's the first footage for THEY (Whose name doesn't appear to actually have capital letters in any of the press we can find, but seems to demand it), being developed by Metropolis Software who you may know from the incredibly lovely, no really, honest, Aurora Rising.

Here's the trailer. To avoid spoiling it for you, the (er) critique is beneath the cut.

Thanks, Game Trailers.

I don't speak French, so that joke probably doesn't work, but I thought it worth a try.

Our link-chums at Kotaku found this. It is, quite literally, like nothing you've ever seen before (at least hopefully). Footage is Not Safe For Work. With Capitals. I mean, it's not Warren-Ellis-Don't-Look-link bad or anything, but it's about as out there as (say) Battle Raper. Probably worse, in fact. I'm not sure if there's actually a scale for these things. Maybe we should make one, on which this would score a nine, as we're famously hard-markers on weird-shit perversion.

So instead of finishing off the work I was supposed to do this afternoon I spent an hour attempt to make any kind of headway in Gridblaster. For some reason Gridblaster breaks the videogame-processing parts of my tiny brain. It seems no more complicated than your average retro-shooter, but for some reason there's just too much going on for me to cope with.

It looks innocuous enough - it's the Bomberman map with added shooty stuff - but it's hurting me.

And I can't deal with it. I have to stop. Perhaps it'll be okay for you.

We understand that some of our readers are fond of a sport called Foot-to-Ball, played by young men with fashionable haircuts and uncomplicated wives. Part of its underground popularity has been fueled by the long-running rendition of the sport in videogamingvision by a small, independent company know as Electronic Arts.

Rumour has it that there is to be a new iteration of the game this year, which with forward thinking is titled "Fifa 08". It will once more recreate the simple rules of this Sunday afternoon activity, even going so far as to find out the names of those who have signed up as members of the various teams, and including them as a kind nod to the dedicated.

If this is all too much of a muddle, perhaps you might like to have a brief sample of it all in the form of a Demonstration Download, available from Electronic Arts' website here.

Disclaimer: Only "Americans" can get free stuff.

Ubisoft have decided to release three of their older games for free, albeit with a few adverts tacked on for good monetary measure. Get them via these games via these Gamershell links: Far Cry, Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time, and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. You also need a free Ubi.com account to get the buggers working. RPS recommends both Far Cry and Sands Of Time, but we're a little less enthusiastic about the mouse-spasming mini-games of the Rabbids.

A freed game, yesterday.

When my lottery numbers finally come-up and I start assembling the dev team for Total Transport Simulator (a combo plane/train/automobile/ship sim) Pierre-Michel Ricordel is going to be the first person I call.

He's the bloke responsible for extraordinary freeware truck sim Rigs of Rods. Imagine a hybrid of 18 Wheels of Steel, Bridge Construction Set, and Garry's Mod, and you'll probably just strain your brain. Far better to download the thing, together with a few choice add-ons, and experience the amazing vehicular physics first-hand.

Don't quit before you've driven a Tatra lorry into the belly of an Antonov cargo plane then taken off, messed around with at least three types of truck-mounted crane, and tried a spot of rock climbing in one of the big-booted, insanely flexible, crawlers.

Until you read this anyway.

(That was cheap - Subconscious Ed)

Shuddup. Anyway - Guild Wars: Eye of the North went live this weekend. I'm playing through for a review at the moment, and I had to - due to an Hilarious Internal Communication Error - actually go and buy a copy. This made me pay a little more attention to a Special Offer thing that Guild Wars has been waving in my direction every time I've booted it up recently. It's a free mission pack, set around four sections of the Guild Wars Mythos (We get a Gwen: The College Years mission, basically). You get it when you spend more than Seventeen quid (or twenty-six dollars for our not-getting-abused-due-to-exchange-rate colonial friends) either in the Guild Wars in-game store or the PlayNC store. In other words, buy the expansion pack direct from them and you get extra content the chump in the street doesn't have. Laugh at the chump in the street! Laugh at him with his sweaty features and charmless, extra-contentless demeanor.

We already wrote about the annoucement of this sequel to the never-hit-it-big GTA-like. Now we offer almost as few words about the first trailer for it.

One of Team RPS loves Mafia, the other three float between 'meh' and 's'alright', depending on whether they remembered to have breakfast that day, so we're expecting some arguments about this. Given both Mafia games are stablemates of Bioshock, whose lead developer Ken Levine recently took a vicious swipe at games that use extended cut-scenes, it'll be interesting to see whether this sequel takes the 'stand here and listen for ages' approach of its precedessor or not.

Of course, it's also set in close to the same time period as Bioshock, so if 2K could get Mafia's developer Illusion Softworks and Bioshock's developer Irrational talking, perhaps there'd be some Andrew Ryan easter eggs in there. There won't, of course. But someone might say 'mook', just like Frank "What accent was I supposed to be doing again?" Fontaine does.

It's the 12th birthday of Command & Conquer today - which means you only have to wait another four years until you can sleep with your copy of the first game (according to UK law, in case you're a shocked US reader. Although I'm not rightly sure if any country actually has laws about physical intimacy with plastic discs).

But what if you don't own a copy of the first game? Well, then you'll be wanting to download it for free from here. Somewhat uncharacteristically, EA is now offering the entire game (both GDI and NOD campaigns) for non-bucks, to anyone. It's like Satan offering to give Sisyphus a lift up that hill in his Satanmobile.

So, go for it. Just don't come moaning to us about the archaic interface.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is now available on Steam. It was one of the most interesting and atmospheric PC games of this year, and you really should play it - if just to have an opinion on it. It's up there for just $30, so give it up to the Ukrainians. Needless to say, I'll be talking more about Stalker later in the year.

In the meantime: what do you want to see from the Stalker expansion pack?

[Another of my Making Of's from the vault. I was pleased that I got a chance to do this too - it's much easier to get a developer to talk about their previous game when it's one in a series which they've making a sequel to. It just ties into the whole PR cycle. Trying to get an interview just about something outside of that is a little trickier, and Eric Flannum was enormously gracious with his time. This is a slightly expanded version from PC Format's original, with some extra material. I replayed it last year actually, and lobbed my piece on Sacrifice's merits over on my blog a while back. If you like this, you may like that too.]

Sacrifice is one of the most distant landmarks in the PC gaming atlas, in an area marked “Here Be Dragons”. While spectacular, few people went there, and those who did came back reciting fantastical tales of strange vistas, genre-blending RTS/Action mechanics and a frankly wicked sense of humour. To game historians looking back from the far future, it’s going to prove as mystifying as Stonehenge is to archaeologists. How on earth did they build this?

Well, like everything, it started with an idea. “The inspiration was originally from our lead programmer, Martin Brownlow,” Eric Flannum, now at Arenanet tells, us, “He got the opportunity to start a team at Shiny, and basically able to make any game he wanted to. He’d also had the idea for the Sacrifice terrain engine”. The game he wanted was, essentially, a radical update of ancient Julian-Gollop spectrum classic Chaos, but in 3D.