Hello youse!

We’re off the back of a string of five reviews, so it’s time for a NEWS UPDATE. Let’s call this the NEWS UPDATE OF MAY, or the MAY NEWS UPDATE. Of board games, obviously. And you might be thinking – Well, Rab, you just did a news update last month, called the April News Update or something. Is there even more news about daft board games already? And I’m all like that – Well, yes.

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Gathering together the best shooters is no easy task, but if you’re looking for a new PC FPS to play, look no further.

Your favourite game is at number 51.

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There’s an open stretch of grass between me and the thin exterior wall of a small island village. The place is crawling with enemy troops, who move along the dirt roads and populate the ramshackle buildings in groups of two or three. Defensive turrets would already be firing at me if I my nanosuit wasn’t keeping me invisible, the energy bar barely moving for as long as I remain still.

So I start to run.>

You want Advanced Warfare? Crysis did that seven years ago.

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In June this year, rumours began to circulate that developer and publisher Crytek were in trouble. Anonymous sources told Kotaku and GameStar [article behind paywall] stories of wages being late, staff going two months without pay, and a lack of communication from the company’s management. Crytek initially denied everything. Then last week Crytek made staff redundant at their Austin office, and sold their UK office and the Homefront IP to Koch Media.

Which brings us to today, upon which Eurogamer have run an interview with Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli. The interview is long and wide-ranging, and covers the current financial situation at the company, why wage payments got “delayed”, and where the company is now headed.

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I’m not sure how a Homefront sequel that I didn’t really care about became a Crysis game that I really want to play, but that’s what I saw the other day. Homefront: The Revolution is Crysis. Hilariously Crysis. So very very Crysis. And yet it’s a Crysis game that Crytek haven’t even managed to make, despite having all the component parts.

Now they are, and it’s a Homefront game. I am confused. >

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GameSpy giveth, and – years later – it shutteth down due to the cruleth realities of modern busineth practices and, in doing so, taketh away. The list of games affected by said untimely (but also kinda timely) demise is long and prone to billowing ominously in the wind, and we still don’t know what exactly will happen to a number of those trapped in its server purgatory. Sometimes, though, no news is good news. Case in point: it turns out that Crysis and Crysis 2 won’t be coming back online after GameSpy goes dark.

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GameSpy, a relic from times long before the modern Internet – or indeed, games and spies – existed is closing down. This on its own is not surprising as the multiplayer service is, by modern standards, buggy and kind of a joke, but it leaves a startling number of games with their e-wings clipped and their online-heaving hams strung> in its wake. How many, you ask? Well, Reddit’s /r/Games board compiled a massive list, and the results aren’t pretty.

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This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.>

Games move pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss them. The pretties this week come courtesy not of a particular game, nor indeed me, but of the Dead End Thrills Flickr group, a caravan of some 500+ ‘players’ who spend more time stopping games and looking around than they do actually playing. The times we live in.

With some 11,000 images in there, I wasn’t sure how best to approach this. (Drunk, obviously, but how badly?) I’ve gone for the easy option: a round-up of games and/or users that stood out over the last few weeks. What you’ll often find is that wrangling games into ‘screenshot mode’ has knock-on benefits for any PC gamer, so let’s see if that holds true. (more…)

OK, OK, I admit, I want an Oculus Rift and I will do unspeakable things to any human being of your choice in order to get one. (Er, better not hold me to that.) Stereoscopic 3D in games has left me either unmoved or with a headache to date, but these VR goggles are so much more than that. They mean videogames BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO MY BRAIN, or thereabouts and, as this video of an OR modification for Crysis demonstrates, they also allow the use of natural head movement to look around game environments. (more…)

Crysis 3: a first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, alien-invaded New York, in which you wear a Nanosuit which enables you to temporarily become invisible, damage-resistant or able to leap moderately-sized walls in a single bound. It has a lot of graphics. It’s out now in the US, and tomorrow in the UK. Here is an opinion.> (more…)