Does anyone remember Soul Brother, the side-scrolling extravaganza about suicidal animals? It wasn’t as horrid as that description makes it sound but Lone Survivor, the next game from Superflat Games, may well be even more horrible than dead kittens. You will play the last human living human in a city filled with shambling skinless slaughter-men, seemingly safe in your derelict apartment but forced to leave in order to scavenge for dead rats to shove down your gullet in a desperate bid for survival as your fevered brain-thoughts splinter under the strain of living among the dead, and you are forced to digest samplings of unknown and potentially mind-shattering drugs to blot out the clotted claret hallways that now make up your waking life, replacing them with unsettling and unwhimsical hallucinations. Take a look.

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As you are likely already aware, Minecraft-makers Mojang are currently embroiled in the first stage of legal proceedings brought about by The Elder Scrolls-makers Bethesda, in a dispute over whether the name “Scrolls” can be used for the title of the second game. Keen to find out a little more about what it all means, I had a chat with Alex Chapman, an intellectual property lawyer at Sheridans Solicitors in London, who is advising Mojang on the case. Read on below for some elucidation into what’s going on, and what to watch out for when you are naming your own game.>

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More details have emerged about Mass Effect 3′s surprising decision to include multiplayer. This time they’re talking about what Galaxy At War might be, and much more information has arrived from elsewhere.

And it seems that the single player game could well be affected by playing not just the multiplayer, but any number of side-projects BioWare tack on to the release of the game.

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Here are three things you should know about Dave Gilbert, creator of the Blackwell games. He’s not in fact related to Ron Gilbert, writer of Monkey Island. He has indeed been informed how much more awesome this game would have been if it was The Blackwell Decepticon instead. Oh, and he’s one of the best writers working in adventure gaming right now.

Thinking about it, that last one is probably the most important. Need proof? The Blackwell Deception is hands-down his best adventure yet, and one of my favourites in a very long time. Even without a special guest appearance by Megatron and Starscream…

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OIO is an indie platformer with some fun physics puzzles in which the main character, who is made out of wood, wakes up in a world that’s also made out of wood. So that’d be like me rolling out of a flesh-bed this morning, traipsing across the taut skin-floor, with its occasional clumps of hair and beard, and typing this on a keyboard made out of teeth and bones. I’d just close my eyes and weep. Thankfully, the little wooden man in OIO is made of sterner stuff and he uses the world to his advantage, lobbing seeds about the place to grow platforms.

There’s a demo, which shows a high level of polish in the environments but would be much more enjoyable with less clunky jumping. Silly wooden legs. The full version is available to purchase direct for £6.88, or through various digital distributors. Trailer below.

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Cliffhanger (also doing Jagged Alliance Online) have announced that they will be making a Shadowrun game. The fantasy-meet-cyberpunk setting is a splendid one, and Cliffhanger’s effort looks closer to the old RPG than the recent shonky multiplayer take on the game concept. Cliffhanger explain their approach: “it will have a perspective camera in a 3D setting, much like our Jagged Alliance Online game… So, it will be a decent quality, but it won’t be what some call AAA. The reason for that is simple: We are doing a browser based game. This means anyone can access it at any time from their PC… But that also means we need to limit visuals. I hope you agree that gameplay is king, so we think the visuals are decent enough.”

There’s a bit more information over at the announcement, including an explanation of how the game will have two parts – action map and city planning level map. Sounds intriguing.

Dirchie Kart! It’s some kind of cartoon kart-racing game, and there’s a beta going on Dirchie Kart over here. It looks like it’s local split-screen only at the moment, but that’s apparently set to change as the lone dev gets around to working on network stuff. He’s looking for a hand getting it working on PC (having previously appeared on Xbox) and is asking for feedback. Worth a look, anyway.

UPDATE: The info has been removed now, so we must assumed it was posted in error. Whether that means it’s wrong, I don’t know.

We won’t be grinding nobz any time soon… THQ’s Warhamer 40k MMO, Dark Millennium Online has been dated for the distant future of March 13, 2013>. This official website bore the news, with a bit of text about the “Sargos Sector” which will play host to the action.

Gosh that’s a long run up. Original announcement trailer from June last year is below. (more…)

Dead Island’s PC launch was a bit of a messy business, which is why we here at Fortress Shotgun gave a solemn, grim-jawed nod upon hearing that devs Techland had decided to prioritise patching it over squeaking out downloadable content. The latter was delayed in favour of the former, and today we get a peek at which of their freeform zombie game’s guts they’ve been performing surgery on.

A few of the major fuel sources for the angry tank have been successfully identified and removed, including but not limited to: weapon duping, offline mode, savegame borking, disabling unwanted voice chat and, rather sadly, floating zombie corpses (well, re-corpses). I’ll miss you, lads. (more…)

Orcs Must Die is the first game from Robot Entertainment, the studio raised from the ashes of Age of Empires dev Ensemble, and it was released on PC (via Steam) yesterday. It is a tale of many, many, many Orcs, and of their very, very, very regular deaths. And this? This is what I think of it.> (more…)