Shakespeare’s Helena once said ‘Love don’t cost a thing’… Hang on, that wasn’t it.

She said, ‘Love in an elevator, living it up when you’re going down…’ No, that can’t be right. That is somewhat anachronistic.

No, it was ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.’

But what about desire? What about lust? Isn’t lust directed by sight? By the act of looking? Can looking be… dangerous? When someone looks at you in a certain way, is that your power, or theirs? When you behold something, can it manipulate you? Maybe Cupid can’t tell us about that. But the Tale of Tales game FATALE is going to show you. … [visit site to read more]

Orbital Gear? ORBITAL GEAR?!?!?! If you read that in a Solid Snake voice, you get a cookie. In reality, however, Orbital Gear has nothing at all to do with Metal Gear – except, I suppose, in the sense that both include mechs of some sort. But honestly, Orbital Gear has more in common with Mario Galaxy or Gravity Ghost than it does with Hideo Kojima’s quietly creeping fever dream. It’s a sidescrolling multiplayer shooter with an anti-grav twist. You and your opponents bounce around – right-side-up and otherwise – between planetoids while blasting away until smoking craters are all that remain. It’s still a bit early, but it already looks like high-flying, head-spinning fun. Trailer below. Or maybe above. I’m not really sure how it works anymore.

… [visit site to read more]

Update: Aaaaand the keys are all gone. That didn’t take long. Sorry to those who missed out, and we hope those of you quick enough to get a key have a pleasant weekend. Come back and tell the rest of us what you think of the game in the comments.

Earlier this week we linked to a communal pool of 40,000 Wildstar beta keys. They vanished in an instant, swallowed whole by the swelling masses who want to play NCSoft’s new scifi MMO. Now we have 700 more keys to give away which are just for us and, if you’re fast enough, just for you>. If you fancy playing the game this weekend, head below. … [visit site to read more]

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the mere existence of Renegade-X. It’s a fan-made re-make and successor to Command & Conquer: Renegade, the short-lived first-person spin-off from Westwood’s real-time strategy series. It was released first as an Unreal Tournament 3 mod in 2009, and on Wednesday it was re-born as a free, standalone, open beta, made with the blessing of Electronic Arts. I’ve spent a few hours fighting for the GDI and Nod, and it’s crazy how much game is here. It’s a delightful thing that it was all made by a group of volunteers, as an expression of love for a nearly forgotten game from twelve years ago.

Right. Moment over. Now let’s talk about why I haven’t had any fun with it in those hours I’ve spent playing.

… [visit site to read more]

The second I finished watching Gravity and firing the contents of my stomach out of my mouth’s airlock, I knew someone would turn that experience into a game. The movie, I mean. Not the projectile vomiting. I did not, however, think base-building strategy would be the first to make me think, “Hey, that reminds me of the part where it felt like my heart took a jackhammer to the inside of my chest!”

But here we are. Habitat is a space city builder about hurriedly constructing a near-orbit home from floating garbage. It melds Gravity’s “Gee, I sure could fall into the atmosphere at any given moment” tension with physics-based disasters and… oh jeez, I’ll just let this description do the talking: “It s kind of like SimCity, if the cities were in space and you could crash them into one another and blow them up!”

Alright, you have my attention.

… [visit site to read more]

In a year potentially chock full of amazing classic-style RPGs (Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, the beginnings of Torment, etc), it’s easy to overlook Divinity: Original Sin. That, however, would be a tremendous mistake given that the Ultima-VII-inspired Kickstarter darling looks to have depth and personality in spades.

I corralled Larian in my very own (adoptive) hometown of San Francisco, and we played the opus-in-the-making’s latest build. I had to pre-record this one sans a camera, unfortunately, but Larian head Swen Vincke showed me nearly two hours of late-game (read: not in the alpha) gameplay and discussed how players can kill every NPC and still progress, non-violent approaches, how Larian *wants* us to break its systems, how it plans to avoid another disastrous Divinity II: Ego Draconis-style launch (despite some rather pressing bugs in the current version), comedy in a normally self-serious genre, talking to animals, and gobs more. This one is now near the top of my most-anticipated list. Tune in below.

… [visit site to read more]

Nowhere, as Jim noted, is conceptually staggering. It’s a life sim with a cast of procedurally generated abstract organisms, which grown to 800 metres in diameter. They can contain other creatures within their cavities and hollows. Indeed, they can contain entire societies>. The latest alpha release contains the first iteration of the creature generation software, allowing players to explore three entities, which represent the same lifeform at different stages of its existence.

If all that sounds distractingly odd, let it also be known that you explore the gargantuan creatures by means of a grappling hook. Video below.

… [visit site to read more]

The Yawhg is a one-to-four player adventure game, by Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll, in which you try to direct the fate of characters plucked straight from a fairy tale that never was. It’s been out for almost a year, and also arrived on Steam yesterday. >

In six weeks, something terrible is going to happen. The characters you play as don’t know this, but you do. And so you guide their lives, and their destinies, with that knowledge, trying to build them into people who can make the most of what’s left after the disaster. All of this has happened before, and will happen again. But hey, maybe you’ll be a doctor rather than the town drunk this time around. … [visit site to read more]

I haven’t played a skating game since the last Tony Hawk that was actually a skating game rather than a modern American soap opera. The plot synopsis for a skating game should never be more than a thousand words long and it certainly shouldn’t contain sentences like this: “Gaining their approval, he is let into the ranch, and meets the leader of the group, Iggy VanZant, a very rough type guy who isn’t fond of outsiders. He agrees to let him crash at the ranch if he obtains some wood for a half-pipe he is building.”

Thank the skate lords for OlliOlli then, a side-scrolling burst of speed and trickery that pleased owners of Playstation Vital Systems when it was released on the handheld last month. The trailer below is rather spiffy and the PC version will be playable at EGX Rezzed, where developers Roll7 will also unveil their next game.

… [visit site to read more]

While, clinically speaking, everyone has at least one wargame in them, not everyone has the patience, skill and obstetrical forceps (don’t Google) necessary to extract that wargame. My Monmouth Rebellion TBS? It breaks my heart to admit it, but I suspect it will never see the light of day. Then again, South African strategy-smith Johan Nagel has been gestating Vietnam ’65 for nigh-on 30 years, so perhaps it’s a bit early for defeatism. … [visit site to read more]