At the very least, I have to give 3AM Games credit for fearlessly dumping all their favorite things into a blender and hoping for the best. Last time I did that, I got a runny soup of pumpkin pie, ice cream, and the collected works of Robert Heinlein. 3AM, though, is calling its thematic Frankenstein monster Magrunner, describing it as “a first-person action puzzle game set in a cyberpunk reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.” There’s an eerily Portal-2-esque trailer after the break. I hope the final version is rife with snarky narrations from the squid-shaped End of Days himself.

(more…)

Scrolls just hit playable Alpha, and Notch is off programming computers inside of other computers (inside of other computers still, if life as we know it is in fact a nightmarish artificial construct), but Minecraft keeps on plugging away. LAN support – an art thought to be lost to the ravages of time and overbearing game services – was already a known quantity, but Mojang’s detailed gobs of other stuff that’ll be included as well. Sadly, an official modding API didn’t make the cut, but Adventure Mode sounds interesting. And hey, there’s also an NPC trading system, readable/writable books, and updated cookies!

(more…)

When you think of Sega classics, it’s rather easy to forget Nights. The blue-spikey one gets most of that attention. But the Saturn-based a-bit-like-Sonic-thing is to return in an HD remake. Rather sickeningly keeping the awful “Nights into dreams…” moniker, and maintaining the lack of upper-case letters, it wouldn’t have been my first guess if someone had asked which Sega franchised would next be revived. But it was awfully popular in the 90s, and perhaps has fallen out of people’s memories in the decade since, despite already receiving a remake for the PS2 in 2008 – er, despite being two years into the PS3′s lifetime, and only in Japan. But clearly there’s more confidence this time. You can grab a quick glance of it in the trailer below.

(more…)

Mojang’s card combat game, Scrolls, enters its alpha state today, with a random selection of those who signed up due to receive email invites. Alpha accounts supply a full set of scrolls, access to the deck builder, a basic single player mode, multiplayer and a tutorial. That sounds like a decent amount of things to be getting on with. I’m hoping the single player campaign planned for the final release will be decent. I can’t be the only person who enjoyed the slightly wonky MicroProse Magic: The Gathering, with its huge, random maps.

Resurrect all roguelikes, goes out the cry, even the ones that have not died. Fundraising for further ADOM development is already under way and Indie Games Magazine notice that Elona is now back as ElonaPlus. The team working on the game are new and they’re mostly fixing bugs, although there are apparently several new features. It’s hard to tell what’s new since Elona already contained pretty much everything, including Big Daddies, alien bodily infestation and the ability to have children. Glorious madness. The new version is here and there’s a useful Wiki too.

Boasting a Quake/Unreal sort of pace, Grim, by MorePolygons, is looking like my sort of thing>. Much of the FPS stuff is familiarly run-and-frag, but it also allows crazy jumping, as they explain: “One of our unique mechanics (as seen in the video) is Leap, allowing you to quickly move around the level and escape enemy fire, or jump right into the action.” You can see some of that going on in the video below, and it’s mighty fine. They’ve also got an interesting assault-variant game mode, which you can read about over on their site.

I’ve not had a chance to play this yet – just off to Rezzed! – but you can download the beta from here. Trailer ‘neath click. (more…)

We have indeed posted lots about Rezzed. (It’s actually been 13 posts out of the 920 since it was first announced – Passive-Aggressive Ed.)> But here is a generous reminder to encourage you to join us at the inaugural PC and Indie Games show, taking place in Brighton Friday and Saturday this week. Because it’s actually going to be really great!

Not only will a bunch of hotly anticipated unreleased games be playable on the show floor, but there’s also a bunch of super-famous gaming types giving presentations, and perhaps most excitingly of all, the opportunity to meet Eurogamer’s Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell, along with the RPS hivemind and Eurogamer collective. And I’m guaranteeing a free hug for everyone who buys a ticket.

(more…)

Where are all the blocks? Planet Explorers, available in alpha right now, is a terraforming, building, crafting sort of a thing, but when the player starts digging the earth isn’t shifted in discrete cubes. Unnatural and off-putting as that is, it does at least give the game a distinctive appearance, as do the giant creatures trundling about. Construction is of the fort and tower variety, given that the planet is hostile in the extreme, and it could turn out to be quite the thing, as demonstrated by the trailer below.

(more…)

There’s a great post over at Indiegames.com with a list of “games like Spelunky for people to play, in celebration of its XBLA release”. Weirdly, the original version of Spelunky isn’t on the list. Go play it though because it’s brilliant and free. What jumped out at me was a link to a browser version of my most hated nemesis, Rick Dangerous. My parents bought me the original and its sci-fi sequel when I was but a boy, and because I couldn’t afford any more games I had to watch Rick die over and over again, and pretend to enjoy it. Despicable. And yet I just spent twenty minutes playing. Some startling observations below.

(more…)

Endless Space, the 4X spacy strategy is now out on Steam, and has a launch trailer with lots of pretty explosions. It also explains that in the end, it’s a game about dust. I am bemused by the role that dust appears to play in fiction. From Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, to CCP’s EVE spin-off, it’s hard to think of a more innocuous object to take such an important role. Where are the stories about fluff? And lint? Where are my games about loose bits of thread? I have been sidetracked. You can see the launch trailer below.

(more…)