Last week I was at Rezzed instead of looking at Kickstarter pages but I’ve made up for it by spending most of today browsing through projects. Thoughts of Kickstarter’s purpose have been hanging in the air (on twitter and in chatrooms that I frequent) and I have been pondering how I see the site. I have backed projects knowing that I’m essentially pre-ordering something that I assume will be released and will be as expected, based on the team’s previous work and a comfortable place in a familiar genre. But I mostly back smaller projects that I want to support and to play because they are different, risky and challenging. There’s a great deal of innovation among the nostalgia.>

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Professional asteroid blower-upper. “contemporary folk art tools”. Obscene numbers of not-games.>

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Sundays are for taking the time to do something properly. You’ve been rushing about all week, not taking any time to study or think, so just pause for a moment. Perhaps do some reading.

• US Gamer launched a couple of weeks ago as a companion to our Eurogamer chums, and as such are part of the same network as RPS. It’s been interesting to see them starting this thing up, and in a world where there are so many games sites, they’re going to have make special efforts to stand out. There are signs of that already, with a random article based on Edward R Murrow quotes, and a look at the bad games they actually like. Keep an eye on US Gamer, anyway, I think think it could make some waves.

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Oh no! Lewie rode a horse to Glastonbury, and was eaten alive by cannibal mud hippies! We will have to make our own bucket somehow. I’ll start us off with the bargain-pregnant GoG.com front page. Anyone else?

If a trailer starts off with a West Wing inspired walk and talk, and ends with the American President telekinetically throwing a cosplayer through a neon sign, then by any standards it is a good trailer. This ten minute look at Saint’s Row IV has that going for it, though there’s a chunk of it set during an alien invasion at the White House that could probably have been cut. I know, it sets the scene of the giant alien lizard things arrival on Earth, but who cares about story and setting in an open-world game of presidential punk pummeling? I came for the superpowers. (more…)

If gathering friends to play Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is a bit cumbersome, and if you find FTL a bit lonely, then I’ve found the perfect game for you. Final Frontier is the result of a nasty transporter accident between the pair, where the Heisenberg compensators decoupled and they arrived on the SS GMOD screaming and inside out. The sick bay did its best, but all it could do is stabilise the life signs. To be honest, the gristly lump that was spat out looks pretty amazing. (more…)

At Rezzed, I managed to say hello to Full Control’s Thomas Lund, who you’ve met in text form before here, and then talk him into dereliction of duty. And so it was that he abandoned the Space Hulk stand on the show floor to let me have a play with and a natter about this new adaptation of Games Workshop’s timeless humans vs aliens boardgame in relative privacy. I now choose to SHATTER that privacy by sharing a half hour of me stomping down corridors and burning the heretic below. Sadly we’d stopped filming by the point that we persuaded Thomas to show us how well they’d rendered Terminators’ ironclad buttocks, but I did manage to grab a cheeky photo. (more…)

Creative Assembly need to tell you something. The Horsham-based developer has been trying to let the world know how large Total War: Rome II is for ages now, showing off its enormous battlefields, the thousands of men rushing around the place, the naval units that lurk offshore. The elephants. Having played the game myself at Rezzed, I can confirm that the wars do appear to be total, stretching from one exquisitely rendered horizon to the other. To communicate and celebrate the game’s grand proportions, another of those massive screenshots has appeared, showing a ruckus down by the Nile. Oh, and the hefty system specs have been confirmed. 35 GB of HD space is probably around a megabyte per elephant.

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I know it’s not cool to be excited about a new Splinter Cell game, but I think I’ve proven time and time again that being cool isn’t the first thing on my mind. So this post is a judgement free zone: feel free to declare yourself a fan of a series that people get rolly-eyed at. Be proud of your allegiances! So I am >excited about Splinter Cell: Blacklist, because it looks like Splinter Cell’s greatest hits. They’ve taken all the good bits of Splinter Cell and crammed them together in the Conviction engine. One of those bits is the awesome Spies vs Mercs multiplayer. Want to see it? (more…)

I was half way through my first cup of coffee when she> walked in. Face Noir. The kind of dame who makes you want to drop everything, starting with that photo of the little lady back home that leans, nicotine-stained, at a corner of the desk. A sweep of the arm clatters it into the drawer, her face scarred by splintered glass. Face Noir points in my direction, clicks her fingers and begins to speak. For some reason I’d expected a German accent but the lady is Italian. I expect a tale of woe – the souse of a husband with no brains at all, or too many brains in all the wrong places – but she loses me. “Few years had been enough for people to show their real side: false, mean and, above all, open to bribery. But the one thing I would have never imagined is how far corruption had gone; so far that somebody would actually try to bribe God.” Oh.

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