Football with rocketcars, sure, that makes sense to me – it’s the natural evolution of ballsports, to come in our own future following an intermediate step of sports combining rollerskaters and motorbikers. But making the ball cubic? Making cars murder each other on contact? Now that is unlikely! But you can virtually indulge in this wild dream, as Rocket League [official site] developers Psyonix have added those and more as optional oddities through ‘mutators’ in an update last night.

These are small options that can change the game in silly ways, from low-gravity Moonball (which, again, seems inevitable) to carhockey (preposterous!).

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Car-wot-plays-football smash hit Rocket League [official site] is the gift that keeps on giving. And I don’t mean simply that the next downloadable content is free, but also that it continues to ramp up the game’s signature ridiculousness. Next month sees the addition of Mutators, a loving nod to the Unreal Tournament feature of the same name, with which you can remix RL matches into something a little stranger. Make the ball gigantic, for instance, or square. Make it into a giant ice hockey puck, or a low-gravity Moonball. Make it faster, make it explode. It’s the obvious add-on for Rocket League in a way, and it costs no-pennies.

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In 1981, the DeLorean Motor Company starting producing its first – and only – car, the DeLorean DMC-12. It was a flop, and the company shut down a few years later. The DMC-12 was expensive, heavy, and slow, so for a good long while many simply sat and rusted quietly in garages, car yards, and barns – too much work to fix up.

The car’s spaceship-y stainless steel panelling and gull-wing doors have found a few fans amongst collectors in recent years but, even so, this is a curious development: a DMC-12 arrived in Rocket League [official site] today as DLC.

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For a few years now, internauts have enjoyed editing stills from Back to the Future Part II> to pretend today’s the date young Marty McFly travels forward to – the time when we should all ride hoverboards and feed our cars garbage. Well, that date is really for really reals almost here – October 21st, 2015 – and it’s being marked in a fine way by Rocket League [official site].

Cry “Great Scott!” and (in excited confusion) “Wubba lubba dub-dub!” as Psyonix are only flipping putting Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine into their footie-with-cars game. It will not travel through time. It will cost you $2.

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Oh man, I’d be so good> at Rocket League [official site] by now, if only MGSV hadn’t been released and stolen all my time just after I started playing it in earnest. I can sprint-punch a donkey and fire it into the air in a heartbeat, but no way I could car-kick a ball into a goal on random servers now, I suspect. Graham, can I take a week off to practice? I need to so I can write about the excellently-named upcoming second DLC, Revenge of the Battle-Cars. Yes? Great, see you in a week.

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The 1.05 Rocket League [official site] patch has hit meaning the first season of ranked play has officially begun AND you PC players can now eliminate PS4 players (Rocketeers?) from your matches.

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Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was a moderate success but the phrases niche genre and cult classic don’t exactly whet the appetites of people wanting to make money, Jared Cone tells me. The lead gameplay programmer has agreed to talk about the making of Rocket League [official site] – its physics, its multiplayer, its tremendous success – but the difficulties start before the coding began, with the 2008 release of predecessor SARBC and its middling reviews and sales.

There wasn’t an inkling of interest coming from anybody. That’s why Rocket League, like its predecessor, is completely self-funded,” says Cone. “We would do work-fire-hire jobs to pay the bills while working on Rocket League in our free time and between contracts. It was difficult and the game had a low probability of ever releasing, but in the end it was probably for the better because we got to make the game we wanted to without having to cater to outside interests.

Psyonix were free to chase the fun. Seven years and five million Rocket League downloads later, it looks like they caught it.

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August was a busy month for the RPS community, with action seen in Dirt Rally [official site], Rocket League [official site], Terraria [official site] and others – including Awesomenauts [official site], Natural Selection 2 [official site] and Killing Floor [official site].

Click on for information about each, along with how you can get involved.

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I’ve just finished catching up on the grand final of MLG’s first North American Rocket League [official site] tournament and it was a doozy of a best-of-three!

The MLG eSports organisation have been dipping their toes in the Rocket League waters. It’s mostly because their resident FPS expert and exec producer Chris Puckett is (like the rest of the internet) in love with the game and wants to explore its eSports potential – he thinks it has loads and I’m in agreement. After all, it’s a really easy game to explain to anyone – football/soccer with cars – and has the capacity for really exciting, highly gif-able plays throughout the five minute matches.

You can watch the match after the jump! [Spoilers if you’re working through the whole tournament and don’t want to know who reached the final yet.]

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Rocket League [official site] is our game of the month for August. Why? Because it’s ace and it’s about to get even more so with patch 1.04 and the upcoming DLC, Supersonic Fury. The DLC is on the way later this month, but the patch is laying groundwork for it and out now. It’s pretty hefty by itself, adding much-needed features such as spectator mode along with a new arena called “Utopia Coliseum” and some apology items for the downtime many users experienced when the game launched. Downtime that happened because it’s ace. Details below.

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