For the past couple of days I’ve been filling idle moments by dabbling in the Drakensang Online beta. Let me just state, for those of you who have been attracted to this article by the Drakensang name in the header, that this has little to do with the original Germanically twee-ruggedness of the Drakensang RPGs. It captures a little of their art-style, perhaps, but this is a very light Diablo-like MMO with seriously low specs. It’s a beast whacker, a loot gatherer, a quest-runner, an inventory… inventorer? You know the sort of thing>. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, especially for free, which it will be. It’s also rather clever with its browser-based tech, with one of the best web-players I’ve seen outside of Unity. Some more thoughts (and a trailer) on all this below.

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Lead & Gold developer FatShark have their next game coming out on Steam in about three hours. Called Hamilton’s Great Adventure, it couldn’t have any less to do with their previous output. It’s a sort of single-player co-op/local co-op, in which you control adventurer Ernest Hamilton and his parrot friend Sasha, in a series of tile-based puzzles. Although the “tile-based” is nicely presented, giving the impression of a much more lustrous, 3D world. It’s a fairly simple affair to control both characters on your own, and with one wholly on the keyboard and the other on the mouse, you can easily share the effort with anyone you keep trapped in your lair. We’ll have some proper impressions of the game soon. You’ll be able to play it at 8pm tonight (oddly there’s no declared price yet), and in the meantime you can read our interview with the developers about the game. And there’s the new trailer below.

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We knew that Metro: Last Light was happening back in April, after THQ registered the related URL. However, the official reveal of the Metro 2033 sequel has taken place today, along with a whole one screenshot (click on it to see it full size) and a teaser trailer. It’s off to post-apocalyptic Moscow once more.

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In October 2009 I very rightly was enormously excited by the lunatic joy of RunMan. Its infectious brightness and unhinged glee were a big part of that. Developer Tom Sennett has picked up on the same vibe in his latest game, the brilliantly named Deepak Fights Robots (if you do nothing else, click on that link). It’s a puzzle platform game, heavily inspired by Bubble Bobble, but, well, brighter.

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It was always going to happen, and now it has. The nature of a corporation is never to sit still and be content with its lot – it’s to forever look to ways to make more money from what it has. (If RPS had a scrap of sense, we’d have launched a couple of spin-offs by now, but a corporation we are not). Activision was never going to let the world’s biggest gaming franchise stay the same size – its duty to its shareholders, and to a far less extent to its employees, is to make its IP as profitable as possible. With several of its divisions and titles recently axed and even WoW subscriptions in decline (by an apparently tiny 5%, but the difference between revenues increasing and revenues decreasing is a fundamental one for shareholder confidence), the publisher is almost required to milk a little more out of its remaining cashcows. On the one hand, you can’t blame them for introducing Call of Duty: Elite, a premium subscription service (though its basic features are free) which adds various community and content goodies to its shooter series’ frighteningly popular multiplayer mode.

On the other hand, it’s hard to not to feel a little dirty about Elite, isn’t it?
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So after waiting a few hours to scowl at the Wall Street Journal for breaking the embargo, Activision have now officially taken the lid off Call of Duty: Elite, which means its actual features, rather than a pithy, video-based glossing-over of them, can be listed. Here’s the horse’s mouth breakdown of what the service actually entails.
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(I was going to title the post Gordon ‘The Body’ Freeman, but I figured people would just think it was porny fanfic). james Benson, the chap behind the splendid Dance Fortress video has gone for a rather different tack for his next project. He’s cut a new trailer for the original Half-Life, demonstrating how the game might look if Freeman was a real physical presence rather than just a hand with a gun. The first-person perspective remains, but it’s now augmented with believable arms. Arms that open doors, climb ladders, prise open vents, raise to protect the face from leaping Head-Crabs and even pick up and don a certain pair of spectacles that have fallen to the floor. I would like to play this non-existent videogame.
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My dream has come true! A mod that brings proper survival in Minecraft. Back in September 2010 I wrote about the game I wished Minecraft could be. As much as I’ve spent a worrying number of blissful hours with the game, a part of me still wishes that it could let me live out that lone survivor fantasy that I must have had embedded in my brain by too many adventure stories as a kid. What I wanted, I said, was a gentle, careful introduction of thirst, hunger, and the need for sleep. It had to be precisely right – not a constant, unrealistic need for unrelenting intake of food and drink, as most games alluding to this theme seem to demand. It had to be something I needed to always be planning around, but still able to spend a pleasant time digging a massive mine. As of yesterday, Nick Stevens might just have gone and created the mod – Survivalism – that makes every one of my wishes come true.

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Oh, old man Company of Heroes, so good to see you again. Pull a comfy chair up to the fire and tell us another war story. It must hurt, having seen your younger, free to pay brother pass away so unexpectedly last year, but at least we’ve still got you. And what’s that? You’re not ready to go gently into that good night yourself yet? You have a healthy new patch laden with six extra maps and a bewildering array of balance changes? Excellent.
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The extraordinary labour of love that is the Source-powered Eve Online fan movie Clear Skies has now reached its third episode. You can download that in full here. This work of machinima is one of the most extensive and dedicated I’ve seen, and it’s awesome to see that it’s still going. The incongruity of the Half-Life 2 characters in space hasn’t really lessened, however… I’ve posted a stream of the original first episode below, so those who are unfamiliar with it can get a taste. Go take a look.
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