RPS is probably the most visited website on the internet, knocking Google and YouTube into an embarrassing runner-up position. I don’t have accurate data, but it was.

Meanwhile, we’ve just received an email letting us know that Techland’s Tomasz Gawlikowski says, “Dead Island is probably the best selling new IP in this year”.

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This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

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Dead Island’s PC launch was a bit of a messy business, which is why we here at Fortress Shotgun gave a solemn, grim-jawed nod upon hearing that devs Techland had decided to prioritise patching it over squeaking out downloadable content. The latter was delayed in favour of the former, and today we get a peek at which of their freeform zombie game’s guts they’ve been performing surgery on.

A few of the major fuel sources for the angry tank have been successfully identified and removed, including but not limited to: weapon duping, offline mode, savegame borking, disabling unwanted voice chat and, rather sadly, floating zombie corpses (well, re-corpses). I’ll miss you, lads. (more…)

When Dead Island’s Bloodbath Arena DLC was announced I jested that it might be delayed ’til 2017. Well, I’m guessing we’ll see it before 2017, but the content has indeed been delayed. Rather than concentrating on finishing up the horde mode and extra equipment that the DLC’s set to offer, Techland are concentrating on squashing the bugs in the core game. Releasing a game with technical issues is no good thing but at least they’re working to fix things, which is far more important than shipping what sounds like a fairly negligible expansion. Using my powers of sarcastic clairvoyancy, my next prediction is that the recently announced Dead Island movie, if it does ever materialise, will not in any way resemble the video below.

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And again! A not entirely industry-representative yet unquestionably fascinating/depressing look at what comprised the top ten PC game sales for Steam compared to UK retail over the last week. Will The Sims’ dominance of retail continue unabated? (Obviously). Will there be any surprise returns to the Steam top ten? (Yeah, actually). Read on to find out the answers to both these questions and more, as long as those questions concern the chart-placing of contemporary PC games. If you want to find out the answer to what the Queen had for breakfast this morning or where Muammar Gaddafi is hiding, I really cannot recommend reading the rest of this post. (more…)

The internet is littered with the rotting corpse-stories of ‘game x optioned for movie’, so many of such headlines failing to come true, Hollywood executives’ frothing plans simply ending up mired in cinematic red tape for years to come or Uwe Boll somehow getting his hands on the license. Perhaps Dead Island is destined for a similar fate, today bringing news that Lionsgate plan to bring its foul-mouthed tale of holidayers versus zombies to the silver screen – but the hullabaloo over that> trailer might sharply increase the odds of something actually happening. (more…)