Last week’s launch of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad was a troubled one. With a seemingly overwhelming number of players reporting bugs and performance issues, it stumbled into commercial release still reeling from the flashbangs of development. Can Tripwire’s brutal shooter sequel get past this quagmire of problems and snatch victory from the jaws of crashbugs? Here’s Wot I Think.> (more…)

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is now a game you can play. If you buy it. Which you now can. This is the standard of journalism you get from me after 1am. Far better to ignore me and watch the launch trailer below.

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Do you want to have a crack at Killing Floor‘s frightening-looking Summer Thing but are too poor/miserly to buy the game? Well then no problem> – at least for fifteen of you – because Tripwire have sent us some keys to give away. Hooray! What you need to do is email us at this address with the reason why you are the best candidate for entering a nightmare freakshow armed with dangerous firearms. Enter by Midday UK time on Friday or LOSE OUT.

Please make sure to read this, it’s the competition rules thing. Oh and I am just setting up an RPS Killing Floor server. Details to follow.

Killing Floor server: 85.236.101.3:7757, password: rumpus

The guys at Tripwire have sent word that they’re going to be doing another Killing Floor novelty map event, like they did for last Christmas, only this time it’s a “Summer Sideshow”. What that means is they’ve poured their mapping talents into creating a grotesque freakshow, complete with ‘orrible circus variants of Killing Floor’s hideous mutants, and new unlockables and achievements. You can check them out in the trailer below. More details on the site.

It’ll be arriving on Steam, and the event will from June 30th to July 22nd. (Also I recall Killing Floor being a popular option for an RPS server. Any +1s to that?)
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Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad – first it had a name, then it had some screenshots, then it had some videos and now it has a release date. And so the cosmic ballet continues. Tripwire’s next commercial take on the masterfully dour World War 2 mod-gone-pro has been in the offing for a good few years, but now? Now it’s only months away. To war, gentlemen. Well, nearly.
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You know Red Orchestra, the supremely bleak multiplayer FPS set on the Eastern front of WW2? Darkest Hour is a similarly dark and moody mod for it which hefts out RO’s black, oily heart and transplants it into the Western Front. As well as adding new maps, new weapons and vehicles, its features include “Airborne drops… bullet suppression and supersonic cracks”. The horror.

This weekend Darkest Hour hit version 5.0, adding even more maps, vehicles and weapons (including mortars and mortar teams), as well as plenty of uplifting new features like “Players now drop their weapon when they suffer falling damage,” “Players now fall over when shot in the legs,” and “Players can catch fire from nearby exploding vehicles and world fires”. THE HORROR. Trailer and mammoth changelog after the jump.
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Tripwire’s lo-fi mining game, Dwarfs!?, has arrived on Steam. It has a demo, and harkens backs to games like Diggers and other 2D tunnelers. It might not look like much from that screenshot there, but it seems to escalate pretty spectacularly, and also to have its heart in the right place. It manges to reference both Dwarf Fortress and> Lemmings in a single promotional blurb. If it really is the arcade version of Dwarf Fortress then I suspect the internet is beginning to eat itself, but that’s probably inevitable anyway. Eventually we’ll just end up with some much reciprocity that the internet will turn inside out and vanish in a puff of meme.

Also, I don’t trust anyone who says they don’t like digging. Or mining. We all like it>. Or else. Trailer below.
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Portal 2, which appears next Tuesday (how did that sneak up on us so fast?!), continues sneaking its way into other games. I imagine using portals. There must have been a more imaginative way of my phrasing that. Almost every member of the Potato Sack has gained content relating to the cryptic influence of GlaDOS, including Killing Floor, The Ball, RUSH, Super Meat Boy, Toki Tori and even Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which has got some new, free and somewhat cryptic DLC.
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What are you doing right now? Working? Smiling? Breathing? Well, stop with that nonsense and go straight over to the Steam page for The Potato Sack, a new bundle of indie games offering £108′s worth of great indie games, including Amnesia, Super Meat Boy, Toki Tori (which you can read Kieron shouting about here), The Ball (which Jim and John talk about here) and Defense Grid: The Awakening, for a paltry £27. I’d eagerly pay £30 for those five games alone, and there are another eight in the pack.

While if you already own two or three of these games you might have a tricky decision ahead of you, if you don’t own a single one of them then this is an absolute no-brainer. Buy! Buy it now! There’s even a Team Fortress 2 hat in it for you. And just in case only one or two of the participating games catch your eye, each of them is currently enjoying a 50% off sale. Amazing.

Last night I got an exclusive sneak preview of the Christmas update to Killing Floor, in which the familiar range of nightmarish mutants are replaced with an even more disturbing group of gingerbread men, murderous elves, fiery snowmen, and super-powered death Santas. It’s an impressive piece of work, and also a little strange, and comes with free stuff for TF2 players. More on these things, to the slightly off-key tune of Jingle Bells, below. (Also, a seasonal trailer.) (more…)