After two hours of tense waiting, the op was launched. The four of us, all policemen wearing night-vision goggles, slithered from our vehicles, spread out silently, and sprinted around the darkened buildings in the middle of the night. We converged on the civilian helicopter pilot who had landed nearby a moment ago, surrounding him, our weapons drawn and ready. Then we politely asked him to produce his pilot's license. He promptly did. We thanked him, dispersed, and met back at the vehicles. No illegal activity had transpired. Mission accomplished.

Altis Life, the police and civilian role-playing server mod for Arma 3, reminds me a bit of the time the very little time I spent on a few Garry's Mod role-playing servers. Rather than engage in multiplayer warfare, players engage in, well, virtual life. If you're playing a civilian, you buy a car, get a job, and collect a paycheck. If you're a cop, you police the civilians and enforce the law. The laws that include the requirement to have a proper license to operate vehicles such as helicopters, boats, and cars, hence the covert nighttime op.

Cool goggles! And they only cost $2 billion.

Speaking of cars, after the exciting conclusion of Operation: Does That Guy Have The Proper Paperwork To Fly A Helicopter, we drive off and stop at a street corner where our vehicles can be hidden behind bushes. My commanding officer (technically he's a private, but he's got better gear than I do, plus, he orders me around a lot) shows me how to use my pistol as a radar gun. Any cars going over 100 kph counts as a speeding violation, so we can stop anyone we record speeding. In the hour spent on the side of that road, we detect no cars going over 100. We see no cars at all, in fact. We just sort of stand there for an hour.

I feel the NEED. The NEED for SPEED. Detection. And apprehension of civilian motorists.

Why so much time spent watching for speeders and interrogating helicopter pilots? Well, one of the jobs civilians can undertake in Altis Life is that of a drug mule. They can collect drugs from dealers (helpfully marked on the map!) and transport them around the world. That's why we stopped the chopper pilot and why we've been standing here for ages waiting for cars to pass by.

It's hard to look casual while hovering, but this NPC drug dealer pulls it off.

Eventually, we go straight to the source: a dealer of drugs. This is an NPC quest-giver that we can interrogate. We surround this ne'er-do-well, who is somehow hovering several feet off the ground (probably high on dope!) but no one has had dealings with him lately, so it's expenditure of of time with no crooks jailed or shot or even detected.

Growing a little tired of spending hours waiting for crime to show up so I can fight it, I run off on my own for a bit. That's right, I've gone rogue. For all I know, my partners are all dirty, trying to distract the one good cop (me) from the real criminal activity. I head to an NPC turtle dealer on the map poaching turtles is illegal and pounce on him. He spills no info either, and no one tries to sell him turtle meat while I'm standing there with my gun drawn. I guess it's good that the crime rate on this server is zero, but it doesn't really make for thrilling action. But then, this is a life simulator, so it's to be expected.

Serpico? I'm more like DERPico. Or SerpiCAN'T. Or, oh, I just stink.

As a cop, I'm a complete bust, so to speak. I decide to join a new server and try on the civilian lifestyle instead. For civvies, there are a few basic tasks to get started. First, head to an ATM and withdraw some money. From there, head to a DMV to acquire a driver's license. Finally, visit a car shop to purchase some wheels: Altis is a massive map, and you won't be going far on foot. Then, if you're me, the next step is to run yourself over with your own car.

Like Ralphie from Christmas Story, that which I yearned for hath become my undoing.

I'm not sure how I fell in front of my own moving car thirty seconds after purchasing it, but chalk it up to not being particularly familiar with all of Arma's 6,439 control keys. Anyway, I'm fine. The only thing hurt is my pride, and my spine, and probably my car's tyre. It doesn't matter much: a few minutes later, I crash my car while trying to read the map while driving, so I have to downgrade to an ATV.

The server I'm on seems to have a lot more illegal activity than the other one. For instance, I drive back to the ATM to take out some more cash so I can buy a pickaxe I want to do some salt mining but all my money is gone. This is because the Federal Reserve has been robbed by outlaws. In fact, it seems to be getting robbed more or less all the time.

What. I'm just driving to the bank wearing night-vision goggles. Is that suspicious or something?

I head to the bank to take a look at it myself, and perhaps have some stern words with the robbers. Do they know the real victims are civilians? Do they know I just want to buy a pickaxe and mine salt and earn an honest living? On my way there, an SUV rams me, and then a cop jumps out and shoots me to death. Sheesh! The criminals are awful and the cops are trigger happy. Is there no room in this world for an honest salt-miner?

In my next life, I respawn and run to the police station to complain, both about the police force's inability to protect the bank and the fact that a policeman just bullet-murdered me without so much as a verbal warning. I'm stopped at the station by another officer, who cuffs me, points a gun at my virtual junk, and tells me he'll put me in jail if I don't leave the premises.

Please don't shoot me in the penis. I can't afford to buy a new one.

It seems no matter which side I'm on, cops or civvies, my Altis Life is a challenging one. Fun, though. If you're looking to do a little roleplaying as a drug trafficker, bank robber, jerk cop, or innocent civilian, I recommend checking it out. The official site is here.

Installation: You don't need to install anything. Just start Arma 3 and look (or filter) for an Altis Life RPG server. When you join you'll be able to choose if you want to be police or civilian. A lot of servers appear to save your progress as well and will keep track of your collected stuff and cash. Much like DayZ, most servers restart every couple of hours.

Sad Update: I've been informed that Moebius' secretive organisation is no longer called F.I.S.T. It is now called F.I.T.A. I don't know how to process this information.

Jane Jensen's Moebius is out soon, and to coincide with the occasion there is now a Jane Jensen's demo to keep us Jane Jensen's occupied in the meantime. The demo gives us the opportunity to step into the sharp-suited, beanpole body of one Malachi Rector (not pictured above), who just might be the best-named game character this side of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker's intemperate villain 'Hot Coldman'. Expect to click on things, talk to people, and save a handsome man from hanging in order recruit him to your globe-hopping mystery squad - it's all in a day's work at the following link.

Moebius is an apparently quite deliciously campy science fiction adventure game featuring murder, intrigue, ninjas, and a secretive organisation labouring under the not-entirely-subtle acronym F.I.S.T. FIST! FIST. The latest trailer, below, suggests that it isn't taking itself entirely seriously.

Moebius is out April 15th. (Ta, RPS.)

Big Robot's Britishness simulator has added the final piece of the puzzle - castles - to its procedurally generated landscape of drizzle, rural environments, snacks and murderous robots, which we all face every time we step out the door. The new castle biome, included in the latest update, adds the ruined tourist attractions to the established rural, fens, industrial and mountains biomes, along with the quaint signposts that herd sightseers to their next gawping point. It's an important update for other reasons too: an ambient soundtrack has been added to the game, giving us something to listen to while we're crouching behind a bush waiting to get the upper hand on our AI overlords. And. In. The. Game. More details, and a video, after the break.



This will be the last major content update for the Sir, You Are Being Hunted alpha, although there is another patch in the works to "rejig some biome elements and add an end sequence". Multiplayer appears to be some way off yet, though Big Robot's Jim Rossignol mentions in the comments that a multiplayer prototype is up and running - so that's an encouraging sign.

Here's the full list of changes and fixes:

Changes

NEW - The Castle Biome (New island option in world creation.)
NEW - Soundtrack (Related audio slider in game options.)
NEW - Menu scenes including the world's greatest menu pheasant.
Scarecrow pathing reworked.
Landowner collider altered to improve pathing.
Squire audio altered to reflect movement.

Fixes

Z-fighting on buildings and rock formations. (OMG!)
Slagheaps no longer have paths over them in Industrial biomes.
Fixed mesh combination at World Generation.
Fixed information window and V/O playing on fire use.
Pub sign taller to avoid collision with landscape and scenery.
FOV pop on binocular equipping.
Controller reworked in all menu situations.
Fixed erroneous mouse inputs during menu use.
Seabeast particle effect errors fixed.
No more crashes on rider death.
Fixed map use with controller (Marker placing still unsupported)

In a startling break with standard practice, it seems Sega has taken to announcing the release dates of AAA games on a Saturday. This way lies madness, friends. What next, Half-Life 3 confirmed on Christmas Eve. Anyway. Alien: Isolation. October 7th.

"It s the Alien game that we ve always wanted to play and we can t wait to let everyone get their hands on it this fall," says Alistair Hope, creative lead at Creative Assembly. But don't take his word for it, check out our hands-on from GDC last week. You can also find Chris Thursten's extended preview here.

This week we sample the highlights of the 7-Day Roguelike and Procedural Death jams, which ran simultaneously a week or so ago. (They presumably did this in an effort to get the whole procedural generation thing over and done with in one fell swoop, so we can get back to the business of painstakingly handcrafting levels instead.) Stick around for vamps, lamps, goats and sliding, plus two bonus games with no random bits at all (well, unless you count the fairly random penis door). Enjoy!

Astrovoid by lokijki Play it online here



Astrovoid is a twin-stickish shooter with a great feel to the controls, a whole lot of screen shake, and a soundtrack that does that neat dampened-sound/am-I-in-a-nightclub-bathroom thing when you die. Another neat thing that happens when you die is that your little jetpack hero drops a giant ball bearing (or something), which will bounce around killing enemies in your wake. Your score that giant number in the centre of the screen isn't finalised until the ball stops moving, adding an element of Breakout to the tail-end of each heart-racing run. (Via NeoGAF)

Lamp and Vamp by GlobZ Play it online here



A vamp meets their arch-nemesis the lamp in this intricate supernatural roguelike, and winner of the Procedural Death Jam. These lamps are carried by priests and vampire hunters, and will debilitate your undead hero if you happen to step within an illuminated square. Reaching your coffin and the next stage involves sticking to the shadows, using your Bat and Phantom powers to pass through solid objects, or to hide in plain sight respectively. Land on a square adjacent to a human, but not engulfed in light, and you can suck their blood to regain some of your health. A tactical, innovative and above all darn cute approach to the genre, whatever name it's going by these days.

KRAXLN by Thomas Wellmann, Leon Purviance, Tinytouchtales Play it online here



Sorry for all the roguelikes this week, but we are living in the aftermath of not one but two game jams dedicated to the genre. We have the more established 7DRL to thank for KRAXLN and Variablo (scroll down), the first of which applies turn-based movement, procedural generation and resource management to the treacherous world of mountain-climbing. I'm the reminded of the climbing system in the underrated I Am Alive, which used a stamina gauge and pitons to make clambering up/down buildings an appropriately tense experience (and which undermined the whole thing by allowing you munch on food and energy drinks to refill your stamina bar at any time). KRAXLN is thankfully a bit stingier in this regard, letting you rest at specific locations only (the ones with '0' written on them), and plying the mountainside with rampaging, murderous goats. How high can you go before you run out of stamina and the star of Goat Simulator 2014 kicks you to your doom?

Variablo by Friedrich Hanisch, Ludeus Eden Play it online here



The gimmick in Variablo is a fun one, as is the delicious pun in the title. In addition to exploring a series of procedurally generated stages, beating enemies and collecting power-ups in the traditional roguelike stylee, you're also able to slide each level's constituent parts around, as in one of those rubbish puzzle things sometimes found in Christmas crackers. Here it works, because each slide contains monsters or a stat-up or (if you're very lucky) the exit to the next stage the challenge lies in lining them up correctly. Variablo could use a bit of tweaking when it comes to the monster balancing not to mention the sheer difficulty of finding the stairs down but it's still worth a play if you enjoy shifting things around or wailing on slimes. Which, I'm sure, we all do.

The Sun does not Exist by Da Neel Download it here



Silent Hill and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas collide in Da Neel's creepy, nicely illustrated adventure that's part road movie, part horror, part runs-terribly-in-my-browser-and-is-worth-downloading-instead, and part mystery the prime mystery being 'what lies behind the penis door?' I can't tell you what lies behind the penis door, but I can tell you that I got to the shooting bit and couldn't find a way to proceed. Until then, I was having a wonderfully unhinged old time. (Via Free Indie Games)

Stronghold Crusader 2 - Firefly Studios' Holy Land-set castle-building, castle-maintaining and castle-sploding RTS sequel - is due out this summer, and will hopefully arrive in a better state than the shambolic Stronghold 3. This new trailer offers a flaming, besieged look at the game's Skirmish mode, which will let you play co-operatively or in rival teams online. Providing you can breach our defences, make sure you have a watch of it after the break.



The accompanying blog post reveals that Skirmish mode "includes eight AI characters and the ability to take your castle siege online, which extends to eight players and the option to play in teams or co-op."

The mode "will be included in the game at launch alongside two single player campaigns, one from each side of the conflict between the invading Crusader hordes and Arabic freedom fighters. While the single player campaigns are very much designed to teach players the basics before taking their fight online, the Crusader 1 style skirmish trails will also make a return. These trails contain some of the most difficult missions in the game, putting the skills of even the most hardened Stronghold Crusader veterans to the test."

Thanks, Blue's News.

We never asked for this reportedly shoddy PC port of the Deus Ex mobile game The Fall. We never asked for this impressive Human Revolution short fan film, but we're glad it got made anyway. We also never asked for this Deus Ex expanded universe thingy, but we'll be glad if it results in another PC game as good as HR. That day may be sooner than we thought, if a recent filed trademark is anything to go by. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is its name, and there is a modicum of evidence to suggest it may be a proper HR sequel, rather than another mobile game. We never asked you to join us after the break.

The trademark details have been collected here by NeoGAF user R sti, and suggest that it relates to "Computer game software", "Printed matter" and "Entertainment services", ie the sort of things that tend to encompass your average Square Enix release. That admittedly sketchy evidence involves the following quote from Eidos Montreal head David Anfossi, taken from an old blog post regarding a future Deus Ex game.

"I want to leave you with a piece of concept art from our next-gen Deus Ex game that shows trans-humanism segregation, which is a backdrop to our vision for the next Deus Ex. It represents a "ghetto-city' voluntarily built in order to separate the classes. The people in this segregated class have reshaped their environment, nostalgic for their ideal of Cyber Renaissance. This dark and dystopian vision sets the tone for things to come in Deus Ex." Trans-human segregation, eh? Sounds a bit like Mankind is Divided.

Let's not get our hopes too far up about this trademark, seeing how the last one resulted in a mobile game, but still: I'd say we're long overdue a proper Human Revolution sequel. And with E3 around the corner, the timing seems about right too.

Thanks, NeoGAF.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, it's time to start the music, it's time to light the lights. It's time to meet the Muppets, in this Muppet game tonight... or from about 18 years ago. One of the two.

What's great about Muppets Inside is that it all goes wrong. Immediately. It starts up with a CD-ROM version of the classic theme - "It's time to boot the disc up. It's time to turn stuff on..." and then it crashes. Loudly. Full on speaker-crashing, back-to-desktop crashing. Well, poo. What a waste of money that was!

Except. "Well, that worked out great, didn't it?" mutters Kermit, as Fozzie Bear pushes open the desktop itself to apologise. "Oh no, not the bear!" shout Statler and Waldorf. "I thought computers were meant to make things better, not worse!" Because what could be more appropriate for a Muppets game than the whole thing to be based on technical difficulties, and a trip backstage to your computer system to put things right so that they can put on a show? The answer: Nothing. Nothing at all.



Just look at the majesty of that opening. The details are perfect, from Beaker getting slammed into the screen to the cracks appearing near the end. Bad jokes, great puppets and the familiar voices... clearly, this must be the greatest Muppets game ever! Well, yes. Admittedly, it helps that the other ones have been completely forgettable. That said, this being a multimedia CD from 1996, it shouldn't be a huge shock that the actual game behind all of this stuff isn't all that great or particularly deep. It's your classic collection of mini-games and quick movie clips thrown together, those games not being great and the movie clips being extremely short. Everything is wonderfully wrapped though, mostly with puns. How do you travel through a computer? On a Databus! How do you find your way around? Silly! With a Bitmap!

Come on, Beaker, don't be such a Muppet Baby...

Two of the games are basic clip-rearrange jobs. Beaker's Brain has you put them in order, while Statler and Waldorf have a few scrambled up in picture form that they'd rather you didn't put back together because then everyone has to watch them. They deserved a better game, because they are the greatest Muppets ever. But at least they do get to bring their delicious snark to the game, with introductions like "Welcome to the Best of the Muppet Show. Well, that's about it for the Best Of The Muppet Show!" They are cultural heroes in felt and bile whose every word should be written in stone and then used to crush a bad vaudeville performer flatter than their jokes. All hail you, ye gods amongst Muppets.

The actual games are more fun, at least once or twice. Simple, but again, well wrapped. Mostly. For the time. By the standards of a genre that are, admittedly, so low that Charon occasionally sails past on his boat and waves hello. For instance:

Replace the bananas with nukes and you've got a hell of a start for a "The Aristocrats!" joke.

It's Wokka On The Wild Side. Or "Missile Command" as it's otherwise known. An epileptic Fozzie has to jerk across stage as if having a seizure, while the audience throws bananas for some reason that I'm sure makes sense. You have to shoot them down with explosions, because the same person who didn't realise it should be tomatoes also couldn't think of anything funny to throw. Like, say, custard pies.

Still, it's at least a little more complex than...

And then the Great Gonzo was arrested on terrorism charges.

Death Defying Acts Of Culture! Imagine Angry Birds without the birds or the pigs or the landscape or the castles or the scenery or the anger and you've got a rough idea of this one, in which you launch Gonzo out of a cannon into a wall and occasionally a target while he plays royalty-free... ahem, 'classical' music. Not much to say about it, though it is cute that as soon as he smacks into the wall, he's picked up and carried right back into the cannon by paramedics for another go. Later levels complicate things by making you fire him through a ring of flame and so on, but not by much.

Never ask the middle square a question. He's a bit Fozzie on everything.

Trivial But True! Now, this is just lazy. Over here it was known as Celebrity Squares, in the US, I think it was Hollywood Squares. Either way, the lack of a pun is deeply, deeply shameful. Still, it's endearingly Muppet heavy, as they try to answer trivia questions with occasional interruptions and you have to pick whether or not they're correct to make a line of Xs. "It's like basketball, except you're trying to get three Xs in a row, you don't sweat and you don't talk trash. Hmm. Maybe it's more like Tic-Tac-Toe." It's no You Don't Know Jack and it only has a handful of questions per round. But as a one-off, it could be worse.

But goodness, here's a question more dated than a septuagenarian escort...

I dunno, I think I'll use GOPHER to check it out on USENET. Anyone got a Fidonet password?

Yowch. Next game?

I'll name that tune in one! I call it Brian Fitzherbert.

Yeah, it's Name That Tune, only the tune is played on fish or small animals. Cute, but is there really anything to say about it? Not really. It's Name That Tune with some Muppet characters around the side and Miss Piggy complaining about being roped into helping to host.

But oh, does the last game make up for all of that. It's...

...wait for it...

...wait for it...

...wait a little longer for it...



YES.



Does it matter that this is probably the worst Doom style game ever made? Does it matter that it's technically more Wolfenstein 3D than Doom in its technology? Does it matter that the difficulty wouldn't challenge a fruit-fly who's never seen a computer before? Does it matter that it's terrible in every way? NO. Because it's The Swedish Chef in a Doom parody, and the laws of the universe will not allow that to be a bad thing. Actual physical laws. If you travel to the great Law Center on Proxima Centauri, and speak Blodranian, you can see for yourself. I highly recommend it. They serve great nerve-squid.

Getting around a computer on wheels is tough. It's a real hard drive.

The problem with all of these games is that once seen, well, they've been seen, and Muppets Inside doesn't have a lot more meat to offer. You play the games to unlock the main map, from which you play the games again and again and again and again until finally you're done. It does at least throw in lots of clips and extra gags between them though, with props being added to the data bus, bad puns like a melon described as "This meloncholy guy was ripe for love - he fell for a banana that had a peel but then was told he cantaloupe." And completely random stuff, like Rizzo the Rat popping up to sing a trademark song that starts "Jim Henson's Muppets... And all of the their names. Are trademarked of course. And highly enforced..." As the game goes on there are also regular cut-aways to the Muppets doing their best to fix things, from Sam Eagle making a stand against pirates to Gonzo demanding his right to pain and Animal beating the drums in the Sound Card club ("We believe in Designated Device Drivers.") Once everything is done and reconnected, Rizzo is finally able to beam everyone out... give or take a sandwich... and it's finally time to start the game properly. Start the music! Light the lights! It's time to meet the Muppets-

And then Lew Zealand blows everything up. Because how else could it possibly have ended?

"Several hours sooner would have been nice! Ho ho ho ho ho!"

As with a lot of these things, the basic game also shipped with a load of icons and other gubbins to "Muppetize" your PC, which translated as 'make a bloody mess of it'. But never mind!

For its flaws, mostly in the games and the lack of variety, this was a pretty damn good multimedia disc. Actual effort went into it, making lots of new footage rather than just recycling as cheaply as possible, the gags are either funny or appropriately painful, and younger Muppet fans especially were going to get a lot out of the hours and hours it would take to unlock everything. It of course helped that their parents likely weren't going to buy them a new game for the next few months and the Internet cost about a billion squillion monies per second back then. They were dark, dark times. But these? These are lighter ones, not least because you can see the whole thing right here, and fast-forward the dull bits.



Ah, the nostalgia. The heart-felt innocence of those felt puppets. The dizzy days when FMV was cool even when it didn't have Tex Murphy in it. How long ago they seem now. How many summers have passed. On the plus side, at least shellsuits will never be in fashion ever again.

So, swings and roundabouts. Ahem.

Go bye-bye!

Update: Bohemia have been in touch to provide the following clarification: they have acquired Cauldron's facilities, technology and staff for their new Slovakian studio, but not the Cauldron brand itself.

It looks like the DayZ Standalone will be getting a few new helping hands. Creator Dean "Rocket" Hall has announced the purchase of Slovakian game developer Cauldron by Bohemia Interactive, with 25 of that studio's staff set to work on the zombie survival sim, according to a report at Eurogamer.

Hall announced the purchase during an appearance at EGX Rezzed 2014, where he also revealed the DayZ SA alpha had sold more than 1.7 million copies since its December launch. Cauldron is to be re-named Bohemia Interactive Slovakia, according to the Eurogamer story. The Bratislava-based studio has worked on a range of different titles over the years, including several in the Cabela's hunting series. The studio purchase is likely what Hall was referring to when he wrote in a blog update a month ago that the development team was "effectively doubling."

Other details revealed in Hall's presentation include some new in-game items and mechanics planned for the next update to the alpha. These include upgradable fireplaces and a crossbow which should be introduced when the update goes live sometime in April. The loot spawning system will also see some changes after the update, with doors resetting and gear reappearing in different areas of the game map at different times.

Even in its alpha state, DayZ still offers one of the most unique gaming experiences around. To get more people on the project, plus designers who have some experience recreating the great outdoors in gaming, sounds like a welcome development for the game's future. For a refresher on what DayZ is all about, be sure to check out the excellent DayZ Diaries.

 

Image via Reddit user chipay.

Planetside 2 s latest update riled up members of the player community when it appeared that pop-up ads had been introduced to the game. In reality, a pop-up message notification was sending out offers for SOE s premium membership, and a server error was causing the offers to be sent out several times every hour. Now, SOE has disabled the message notifications and membership offers completely while it sorts out the problem.

Players first reported the issue in forum threads like this one, where a Redditor reported that pop-up message notifications were arriving in the in-game inbox every few minutes. "It's understandable that you want people to spend money on the game, and perhaps if you're sitting in the warpgate a pop-up ad isn't quite so bad," user Nighthawk043 wrote. "But when I'm flying a liberator, in the middle of a dog-fight, I don't want to have to close these ads." Worse, other players wrote that the pop-ups take control of the Y and N keyboard keys so they can no longer be used for in-game actions and instead only respond to the membership requests.

"This system has been in the game for a while, sending offers for discounts on and Membership to specific players who qualified," creative director Matthew Higby wrote to the SOE forums this afternoon. "What we've recently added is the ability to call out specific in-game events as they occur in order to bring further awareness Yesterday, we also had an issue with the servers restarting for several hours after the Game Update, which was resetting who should receive notifications, and subsequently causing players to receive them FAR more often than we'd ever want."

The frequency of the pop-ups aside, it s unfortunate that SOE approved an advertising strategy that so blatantly interferes with the game. While it s good to see that the developers are responding to the issue so quickly, the team should have been more careful with any changes to how they pitch premium services to players. Pop-up ads like these hurt the player experience and give free-to-play games even games as good as Planetside 2 a sour reputation.